Late yesterday afternoon I caught Pedro Almodovar‘s Pain and Glory, which has strangely risen to the top of the Screen Daily chart. “Strangely” because this film about a getting-older director (Antonio Banderas more or less playing Almodovar himself) is one that simmers upon a low flame.
A meditation riff about decline, disease, looming death, drugs, old lovers, creative blockage and memories of childhood, it left me with feelings of respect and appreciation more than any sense of excitement or bracing discovery. It all unfolds in a settled, confident way but in a distinctly minor key.
I’ve worshipped Almodovar all my adult moviegoing life. With the exception of I’m So Excited, his films have always made me smile and swoon. This one felt a little more recessive than most. Settled, reflective, gray-haired, even a little morose at times. I can’t say I was turned on, but I felt sated and assured as far as it went.
It’s a film about getting older and dealing with physical maladies and to a lesser extent creative blockage. An old boyfriend, copping street heroin, a third=act discussions with his late mom (PenelopeCruz), memories of her washing clothes in the river…all of it swirling around in Banderas’s mind.
I liked Pain and Glory well enough, but I wasn’t enthralled. Pedro is a superb filmmaker. I just wasn’t knocked out.
I decided to sleep in (an actual seven hours!) and write this morning, and then start on the screenings this afternoon. I’m not a reviewing-machine-gun like Eric Kohn. I’m on the stick as much as anyone else (I’m certainly not lolling around), but at the same time I’m maintaining my standard samurai-jazz-cat mentality while allowing for occasional mood-pocket digressions.
I’m genuinely sorry for missing Mati Diop‘s Atlantique, but it goes like that every so often.
I’m going to politely bypass Bruno Damont‘s Jeanne, a re-telling of Joan of Arc saga, for the simple reason that casting the extremely young Lise Leplat Prudhomme (what is she, nine or ten?) as Jeanne strikes me as overly precious.
HE’s first film of the day (5 pm) is Diao Yinan‘s The Wild Goose Lake, a noir thriller about a gangster (Hu Ge) who crosses paths with a prostitute (Gwei Lun Mei) while seeking redemption on the run.
Next (at 7:45 pm) is Dannielle Lessovitz‘s Port Authority, an urban relationship drama between a straight white guy and a trans guy, has been described by Eric Kohn as “quietly progressive” and “Kids by way of Paris is Burning.”
The day’s third and final film (120 pm0 will be Corneliu Proumboiu‘s The Whistlers (aka La Gomera).
A little while ago I walked over to the Debussy for a 10:45 pm screening The Shining. I wanted to see Stanley Kubrick‘s eerie-vibe classic on a big screen again, and the 4K digital remastering made it look…uhm, as good as it ever has. I was half-hoping for some kind of slight bump, but after 20 or 25 minutes I was admitting to myself “this looks fantastic, but it doesn’t look any better than my Shining Bluray does on my Sony 4K HDR 65-incher.” So I excused myself and went back to the pad. Sleep is more important.
Update / correction: The 4K Shining isn’t a “restoration” but a remastering. It was created from “a new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick’s former personal assistant Leon Vitali worked closely with the team at Warner Bros. during the mastering process.”
Elle Fanning is very animated, very Carole Lombard-ish in this just-up trailer for Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York. A complex demimonde suffused with a fizzy, peppy vibe. The games that eccentric New Yorkers or witty weekend visitors play. Sniffing around for angles and opportunity, sometimes betraying each other romantically, etc. Allen’s famously delayed romantic comedy will almost certainly debut at the Venice Film Festival, after which it’ll open commercially in Italy and other European territories.
At some point during Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Rick Dalton, a TV actor having trouble breaking into features, finds work in a couple of Italian-made cheapies — this thing and a spaghetti western (or so I’ve read).
Once again Tarantino is paying tribute or otherwise wink-winking at Italy’s half-century-old exploitation film industry, which has been one of his key passions since he began working at that Manhattan Beach video store (Video Archives) in the ’80s. The poster is basically saying “wow, those cheesy Italian schlock movies of the late ’60s, right? Great primitive cinema!”
The biggest single plot element in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood involves the brutal slaughter of five people (Sharon Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Steven Parent) in a home just down the street from Dalton’s rental, which he shares with stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). But there hasn’t been the slightest hint of this in the marketing materials this far. Not the slightest little tease.
It’s been amply reported that Game of Thrones star Richard Madden has been offered a chance to succeed Daniel Craig as strong>James Bond, particularly following his performance in Bodyguard. I’m a bit late to the table on this (as in six months late), but after watching Madden in Rocketman, I agree that he’d be an excellent successor. He’s got it — definitely Connery-esque.
The first line of Elton John & Bernie Taupin‘s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” (’74) is “I can’t light no more of your darkness.” I know this song well, but for decades I heard the line as follows: “I can’t line no more awwgey dogness.” And for decades I sang it that way in the shower or whenever the tune played on the car radio. Did I ever ask myself what “awwgey dogness” means? Yes, a few times, but I could never make heads or tails of it.
I went into Rocketman with an attitude, but I felt pleasantly turned around soon enough. I was more taken with the first 30 to 40 minutes (Elton John‘s childhood, taking piano lessons as a teen, teaming with young Bernie Taupin) and less with the remainder, which is basically about Elton becoming more and more of a booze-swigging, coke-sniffing party animal and his life downswirling into addiction and self-destruction.
I respect Dexter Fletcher‘s decision to not tell Elton’s saga Bohemian Rhapsody-style, using a linear “this happened and then that happened” approach. Instead he chose a more creative and dynamic (not to mention more cinematic) scheme by making it into a punched up, inventively choreographed, mad-brush Ken Russell musical.
The framing device is Elton confessing all during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Out of this comes a looking-back-at-my-life, All That Jazz-type deal that uses several John-Taupin songs as emotional backdrops or undercurrents for various biographical moments.
The film isn’t biographically accurate in some respects (i.e., certain songs are played at the wrong time) and there’s a lot more interest in a glitter-and-glam aesthetic than any kind of semi-realistic presentation of how things really went down, but this is the film they chose to make.
It’s “cinematic”, yes, but I’m betting that down the road an ambitious director and a gifted choreographer will transform Rocketman into a Broadway stage musical.
My dissatisfaction with Egerton’s singing voice, which sounds only vaguely like John’s, remains. Now that I’ve seen the whole magillah, I can say definitively that Egerton’s singing moments are only mildly sufficient (they don’t stop the film in its tracks but they don’t quite knock you out either), and that I would have felt a lot more satisfied or soothed if he was capable of delivering a more Elton-like sound.
Egerton seems a little taller and more muscular that the Real McCoy (he’s 5′ 9″ compared to John’s 5′ 7″) but I wouldn’t call that an actual quibble.
Variety‘s Justin Kroll is reporting that Robert Pattinson is in negotiations to play The Batman in Matt Reeves’ forthcoming superhero film, which will open on 6.25.21.
Kroll explains that the RPatz thing isn’t a done deal, but that the former Twilight star is “the top choice and [the deal] is expected to close shortly.” Reeves and Pattinson will start shooting this summer.
RPatz will presumably be visiting Cannes this weekend to take bows for his performance in Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse, which costars Willem Dafoe.
Is Pattinson brawny and muscular enough to play Batman? He’s tall with moderately wide shoulders, but isn’t he a bit on the wirey and willowy side?
It’s ironic that just as Pattinson has solidified his rep as the Intrepid Indie King (Cosmopolis, The Rover, Maps to the Stars, The Lost City of Z, Good Time), he’s been sucked right back into a big-studio franchise. He’s only in it for the money, of course, and who wouldn’t be?
Several top-tier critics attended Thursday night’s gala premiere of Dexter Fletcher‘s Rocketman, the Elton John musical biopic, and their reviews began to pop just before 2 am Cannes time. I’ve read four or five so far, and the general verdict seems to be that it’s less interested in rock biopic realism (i.e., who John actually was and how he found his voice) and more interested in selling the flamboyant glam aspects of John’s early career.
In short, Rocketman sounds (and please stop me if you think I’m overdoing it here) like an Elton John flick for simpletons — for superficial minds, the easily impressed and your none-too-hip iTunes purchasers of one of John’s greatest hits albums.
Before I post a couple of review excerpts, I want HE regular Bobby Peru to consider the following line from Peter Debruge’s Variety review, to wit: “It’s Taron Egerton’s voice doing most of the singing here. He’s solid, but he’s no match for Elton’s pipes.”
TheWrap‘s Steve Pond: “Bohemian Rhapsody acted like a standard biopic with concert and recording scenes thrown in, [but] Rocketman takes a wilder, bolder approach: It’s a full-fledged musical, using dozens of Elton John songs to tell his life story in a way that freely mixes reality and fantasy.
“This is a jukebox musical for the big screen, Mamma Mia! forced into a vaguely biographical form or one of the Broadway shows that use an artist’s music to tell their story, among them Jersey Boys and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.”
“But it’s about Elton John, so that means it’s bigger, wilder, more extravagant and more excessive than those works. Sometimes that means it’s more fun, too, but it can also be a melodramatic slog when it’s not embracing the craziness of its musical numbers. And some of those numbers, to be honest, are far more diverting than others.
“As someone who hated Bohemian Rhapsody‘s factual errors, I can respect a biopic that announces from the start that it’s not to be taken seriously as an account of what actually happened. So while I struggled with a narrative that uses songs years before they were written, I know the rules of this particular game == and if what we see onscreen has a little crazy poetry in it, and it captures a bit of how things might have felt to Elton way back when, that’s all that matters.”
The big gala screening for Rocketman began a half-hour ago, but the first press screening doesn’t happen until 11 am tomorrow, followed by a 1:30 pm press conference. The tweets will start flying around the same time (roughly 4:15 am Pacific, 7:15 am Eastern).
Six or seven years ago Thomas Vinterberg‘s handsomely produced The Command (aka Kursk) would have warranted a stand-alone theatrical opening followed by a Bluray/DVD release three or four months later. Now it’s launching on DirecTV on 5.23 before simultaneously hitting theaters and VOD on 6.21. Screenplay by Robert Rodat; costarring Matthias Schoenaerts, Léa Seydoux as his wife, Artemiy Spiridonov as his son, and Colin Firth as Royal Naval Officer David Russell. 127 minutes.
