I briefly reviewedAnthony Maras‘ Hotel Mumbai (Bleecker Street, 3.22) during last September’s Toronto Film Festival. It’s a decent enough re-capturing of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which were carried out by Islamic Pakistani terrorists.
“Directed by Anthony Maras, it’s fairly realistic and well-ordered as far as it goes, and occasionally suspenseful. But tonally it’s like Irwin Allen and Ronald Neame‘s The Poseidon Adventure or Jack Smight‘s Airport 1975.
“You know the type of film I’m describing — an unsettling if somewhat superficial exercise about wealthy people and devoted staffers trying to escape death but with no underlying attitude or undercurrent on the part of the director. This happens and then that happens, etc. The ’70s disaster film that Hotel Mumbaishould have tried to measure up to is Richard Lester‘s Juggernaut, but that wasn’t in the cards.”
Posted on 3.22.18: “Quentin Tarantino is not a docu-dramatist. He doesn’t do research, realism or history. He’s a creator of alternate Quentinworld fantasies. His last three films have mined the past — Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight — and each time he’s reimagined and re-dialogued history in order to transform it into his own brand of ’70s exploitation cinema. Why should QT play his cards any differently with the saga of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Sharon Tate and the Manson family?”
S. Craig Zahler‘s Dragged Across Concrete (3.22) is a dead fucking brilliant exercise in slow-burn, element-by-element, ultra-violent urban action melodrama. It’s longish (158 minutes) and methodical and about as riveting as this kind of step-by-step ensemble crime film gets. It may be the best rightwing (if morally corrupted) urban action flick since Man on Fire. It takes its time, you bet, but once the disparate characters and plot threads start falling into place and it all starts to pay off like a slot machine, watch out.
It offers the best snarly-tough-guy performance from Mel Gibson in ages, another excellent turn from Vince Vaughn (his best since that True Detective criminal he played during season #2) and a serious pop-through turn by Tory Kittles, who looks like a slightly older Jussie Smollett.
Dragged Across Concrete is like a politically conservative Jackie Brown without the mellow, likably laid-back lead performances from Robert Forster and Pam Grier, although Gibson and Vaughn are kind of brusquely charming in their roguishly rightwing, fuck-all deadpan way. Like Jackie Brown it waits and waits and reflects and reflects and then talks and talks and talks some more, and then finally, around the 100-minute mark, wham.
It’s basically a talkfest thing that waits until Act Three to bring out the hardware and spill the vino. At 154 minutes, Jackie Brown is only four minutes shorter.
On the other hand, Quentin Tarantino never wrote a scene in which bank robbers cut open a dead guy’s stomach cavity and then his actual stomach in search of a swallowed key, especially with one of them saying “don’t cut open the liver…the smell is awful, especially a black guy’s.” What?
If you have any regard for this kind of thing — spare and lean, character-rich, laconic Peckinpah on painkillers, well-crafted dialogue, violent, far from lazily paced but in no particular hurry, flicked with despair and anxiety and every character being either a behind-the-eight-baller or a victim — Dragged Across Concrete is absolutely essential viewing.
The urban action thriller handbook says you always accelerate the pace when the third act arrives. Zahler is one of those “fuck the handbook” types. Just before a climatic bank robbing scene he suddenly shifts our attention to a late 30something bank officer (Jennifer Carpenter) returning to work after maternity leave. And yet she can’t bear the thought of a nine-hour absence from her infant son, and so she returns to her apartment for a final snuggle before heading to work. That’s all I’m going to describe, but I will never forget this character.
Hats off to Summit Entertainment for doing a brilliant job of muffling or minimizing the buzz on this startling film, which I regard as easily the second best of 2019’s first quarter, right behind Kent Jones‘ Diane (IFC Films, 3.29).
To my knowledge Summit has screened Concrete twice (in Lionsgate’s West L.A. screening room) over the last few days. I had to appeal to a fellow journalist to obtain a screening link. Costar Vince Vaughn will do a discussion following a Hollywood Arclight screening this evening. I’d love to drop by and “cover”, but only on my own dime. A Summit rep said they have no journo comps.
The word around the campfire is that Joe Biden is not only about to announce his Presidential candidacy but that he may also preemptively announce that recently defeated Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will be his vice-presidential running mate. The immediate reaction will be, of course, (a) “whoa, bold move”, (b) “instantly establishes his 21st Century progressive credentials” and (c) “We love you, Joe!”
In fact it’s a sign of desperation. Only a 70something, semi-doddering, neck-wattled candidate who’s afraid of being perceived as yesterday’s news and over-the-hill would do such a thing. It would essentially be a kind of Bidenesque, liberal community, higher-brain-cell-count version of what John McCain did when he tapped Sarah Palin to be his running mate back in the summer of ’08.
Plus the fact that Abrams — in HE’s judgment one of the most brilliant and charismatic lightning-rod liberal politicians around today, in the hallowed realm of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg…the notion of Abrams being one heartbeat away from the Presidency (and especially with Uncle Joe nudging 80 if and when he takes office in January 2021) will scare the bejeesus out of your white pot-bellied hinterland bumblefuck voting community. Not to mention the Jenny Craig/weight watchers crowd.
Rob “Rpatz” Pattinson (The King, High Life, Good Time) and overpraised Widows costar Elizabeth Debicki will costar alongside bland BlacKkKlansman star John David Washington in Christopher Nolan’s next big whop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom.
None of these guys have that galvanizing X-factor movie-star chemistry…none of ’em. Debicki was reasonably compelling in Widows as far as it went, but calm down. She’s almost 6′ 3″, but she has the aura of a part-time Bloomingdale’s salesperson. Rpatz is a good hombre and a hard-working indie-realm costar but he’ll never hit a mainstream homer — we all know that by now. And Washington is tepid dish water. The Nolan film in question will pop on 7.17.20.
Jordan Peele‘s Get Out was about a covert and malignant plot on the part of wealthy, Obama-supporting Anglos to turn blackfolk into obedient zombies through hypnosis. The basic message was “whiteys might act friendly and profess to understand and applaud black culture, but they’re actually Satan’s spawn.”
Us (Universal, 3.22), Peele’s soon-to-open followup, is about…well, not exactly another whitey conspiracy but something close to that.
Once again innocent blackfolk (or the vacationing Wilson family, played by Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright and Evan Alex) are being viciously preyed upon, only this time by house-of-horror reflections of themselves — by spooky, raspy-voiced, scissor-wielding dopplegangers dressed in red jumpsuits. Moreover, the red jumpsuits are part of a coordinated nationwide army of predatory fiends. But why? To what end?
In turns out that the inspiration behind all of this feral, howling, over-acted viciousness is another white-person scheme — the up-with-people, let’s-all-hold-hands-and-love-each-other vibe behind Hands Across America, the 1986 nationwide charity organized by the evil Ken Kragen and supported by USA for Africa, a charity org that promoted “We Are The World” (and was prominently allied with the nominally black Michel Jackson).
The message is something along the lines of “corporate whiteys and their allies might talk about love and togetherness and communal giving, but they’re actually killers of the African spirit so, you know, keep them at a distance…in fact, you might want to arm yourself with a pair of extra-large scissors.”
Yes, the doppleganger plague also happens to the Tylers, a white family that’s friendly with the Wilsons (Elisabeth Moss is the mom). This obviously dilutes the racial scheme to some extent. But Usis about the Wilsons and Ken Kragen is the wicked Beelzebub behind it all, so don’t invest too much in the “innocent whiteys are suffering too” aspect. White rabbits are all over this film (particularly in the third act) and…well, you figure it out.
After a half-hour set-up in Santa Cruz with a particular focus on the city’s beachfront amusement park (which I haven’t visited in 30 years), Us turns into Night of the Living Dead Dopplegangers meets Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation. Kusama’s 2015 thriller is a far better film that Peele’s, but they have a similar attitude about abstract cosmic malevolence.
How good is Lupita? She’s excellent — the absolutely valiant hero of this jumbled, lurching, hazy-minded horror pic. How likely is it that she’ll end up as a Best Actress contender, as Variety‘s Marc Malkinrecently suggested? No fucking way. It’s just a Jamie Lee Curtis terrified-victim performance. Update: I’ve just learned that men in freshly laundered white outfits are currently searching for Malkin as we speak.
Is Us boring? No — it’s engaging as far as it goes. It plays its own horror music, dances to its own choreography, snaps and snarls in ways that will make you sit up and say to yourself, “Whoa, that was striking.” But it’s not that clever or brilliant. It’s approvable but calm down.
Time Out‘s Joshua Rothkopf has compared Us to John Carpenter‘s The Fog (’80), the somewhat disappointing follow-up to the hugely successful Halloween. That’s about right.
For the truly hip and attuned, the cosmic levitation and cultural changeover moment that was fanned by the mystical influence of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper lasted for only 18 months or so. As Terry Valentine later noted, “It was ’66 and early ’67…that’s all it was.” But for everyone else the playtime vibe was still happening, especially in the Hollywood realm during the spring-summer of ’69.
Everyone was coasting on be-here-now hedonism — a tingly roach-clip current, a sense of mystical whoa-ness and communal bliss — the last euphoric gasp of Woodstockian, LSD-propelled, Bhagavad Gita-tinged flower power before the bubble was popped by the Manson murders. And then, four months later, by the Altamont music festival killing.
The just-released teaser for Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (Columbia, 7.26), which is set during the first few months of the Nixon administration but after the Mamas and the Papas had more or less split up (which makes the use of “Straight Shooter” on the trailer soundtrack seem odd), is about what the ’60s were like for mostly clueless Los Angeles fringe players. Atmospheric impressions of a dreamy, self-absorbed realm of gently stoned none-too-brights.
There are two versions of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Rick Dalton in the trailer — a lean, traditionally coiffed, tidily dressed TV actor who danced on Hullaballo in ’65 or ’66 vs. a somewhat heavier, longer-haired, unshaven doobie toker of ’69.
The trailer contains an amusing exchange between Brad Pitt‘s Cliff Booth and Mike Moh‘s Bruce Lee.
Like many others I’ve been thinking about a seismic event happening tomorrow, which is basically the end of 20th Century Fox as we’ve known it for so many decades. It’s officially being absorbed (i.e., swallowed whole if being strategically maintained as a separate unit) by Disney on 3.20.19. By any measure a sad end of an era.
But of course, the 20th Century Fox brand had been eroding and diminishing for a long time. Which regime presided over the most bountiful or influential Fox heyday? The Daryl F. Zanuck era (20 years from the mid ’30s to mid ’50s)? The Alan Ladd, Jr. era of the early to late ‘70s? Or Bill Mechanic‘s reign (’94 to ’00)? The standard answer is to point to Zanuck’s as the greatest, but I have a special respect and affection for the Mechanic reign, perhaps because I personally lived through it as a covering journalist.
Mechanic-wise, most people would point to the following highlights: Titanic, Bulworth, Fight Club, Independence Day, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Mrs. Doubtfire, Speed, True Lies, Braveheart (co-production with Paramount), Cast Away, Boys Don’t Cry, There’s Something About Mary, Ice Age, X-Men, The Full Monty, Boys Don’t Cry and Moulin Rouge. Most of these were high concept, yes, but many were masterfully written, high-craft efforts about actual people and real-life capturings, which happened from time to time in those balmy days before the superhero plague.
Laddie highlights include Star Wars (’77) , The Empire Strikes Back (’80), Alien (’79), Julia (’77), The Towering Inferno (’74), The Omen (’76), Young Frankenstein (’74), Breaking Away (’79), Norma Rae, The Boys from Brazil (’78), The Turning Point (’77), An Unmarried Woman (’78), All That Jazz (’79), Silver Streak (’76), The Rose (’79), 9 to 5 (’80) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (’75).
The Zanuck films were primarily regarded as serious, socially reflective takes on the states of American being. Sone of the highlights included The Grapes of Wrath (’40), Song Of Bernadette (’43), The Ox-Bow Incident (’43), Laura (’44), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (’45), Gentleman’s Agreement (’47), A Letter to Three Wives (’49), Twelve O’Clock High (’49), Pinky (’49), All About Eve (’50), Twelve O’Clock High (’49), Viva Zapata (’52), The Robe (’53), Demetrius and the Gladiators (’54). Which others?
Mechanic remarks: “As with any studio, there were peaks and valleys. The Zanuck films were obviously distinctive within their realm. I thought Laddy left behind a good legacy, and felt that we restored some of the luster.
Not sure I have much more to say than what I already have. [Rupert] Murdoch never liked movies, and never cared to build the studio into anything other than a supply line for TV/cable (much like the streamers are doing), and thus dumped all the history unceremoniously and without a tinge of regret.”
Lucy In The Sky was originally called Pale Blue Dot — an even cooler title would have been Marbled Bowling Ball.
After a lengthy space shuttle mission, astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) returns to earth and begins an affair with fellow astronaut Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm). She falls into a vaguely depressive mindset and then a downward spiral as she begins to feel increasingly alienated from her family — a condition that can allegedly afflict those who spend a long time in space. Things take a turn for the worse after Goodwin starts another affair with an astronaut trainee.
Noah Hawley‘s film, due for release later this year through Fox Searchlight, is “loosely based on astronaut Lisa Nowak‘s alleged criminal activities around her romantic involvement with fellow astronaut William Oefelein.”
What is this Once Upon A Time in Hollywood poster showing Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate? Standing in front of the Fox Village in her black turtleneck and go-go boots and blah blah. I’ll tell you what it is — it’s nothing. I’m also informing the Sony guys that the long, drawn-out Hollywood glamour-tease phase of this film’s marketing campaign is over here and now, and that things have to get more substantive from here on. Really. The first trailer (where is it?) has to have aroma, atmosphere and teeth.
We now know that Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is locked for Cannes ’19, and that Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman will almost certainly appear there also.
And now Variety‘s Cannes ’19 prediction piece (written by Peter Debruge and Elsa Keslassy, and co-reported by John Hopewell, Nick Vivarelli, Patrick Frater, Leo Barraclough and Richard Kuipers) assures that Benedict Andrews‘ Against All Enemies, a drama about the FBI’s ghastly persecution of poor Jean Seberg from the late ’60s and into the ’70s, is more or less firmed.
Pic stars Kristen Stewart as Seberg, and costars Jack O’Connell, Anthony Mackie, Vince Vaughn, Margaret Qualley, Zazie Beetz, Stephen Root and Colm Meaney.
A March ’17 draft of Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse‘s script, titled Seberg, ends well before Seberg’s 1978 Paris suicide, when she was 40. The final scene in the script is about Seberg learning from a sympathetic FBI guy (Jack O’Connell) about a fictitious FBI allegation that the father of a baby girl born to Seberg on 8.23.70 (and who died two days later) was Black Panther activist Raymond Hewitt.
Seberg was nonetheless romantically linked with another Black Panther member, Hakim Jamal (played in the film by Anthony Mackie).
From Seberg’s Wikipage: “In 1970 the FBI circulated a false story that the child Seberg was carrying was not fathered by her husband Romain Gary but by Raymond Hewitt, a member of the Black Panther Party. The story was reported by gossip columnist Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times, and was also printed by Newsweek magazine.
“Seberg went into premature labor and, on August 23, 1970, gave birth to a 4 lb (1.8 kg) baby girl. The child died two days later. She held a funeral in her hometown with an open casket that allowed reporters to see the infant’s white skin, which disproved the rumors.
