Bill Maher “New Rules” rant on comic-book culture, aired tonight: “Can we stop pretending that the writing in comic books is so good? Please — every superhero movie is the same thing. A person who doesn’t have powers gets them, has to figure out how they work, and manages to find a glowing thing.
I’m determined to see Andrew Patterson‘s The Vast of Night at the Slamdance Ballroom on Monday, 1.28 at 8pm. A low-budget but allegedly resourceful ’50s sci-fi thriller, it’s about a single night in New Mexico in which a young switchboard operator and a radio DJ uncover a strange frequency (aliens?) that could change their lives, their small town and in fact the planet Earth.
Variety contributor Nick Clement recently saw Patterson’s film, and mentioned his admiration of it while interviewing director Steven Soderbergh, whose High Flying Bird will premiere at Slamdance the day after tomorrow (Sunday, 1.27, 3 pm).
Clement: “The interview was for a curtain-raiser piece about the 25th anniversary of Slamdance. I told Soderbergh how much I love Vast of Night and he asked to see it — and then he messaged me saying how much he loved it and how he’s gotta meet the filmmakers.”
Directed by Patterson and written by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, The Vast of Night stars Sierra McCormick, Jake Horowitz, Gail Cronauer and Bruce Davis.
Just after exiting 2:30 pm MARC screening of Matt Tyrnauer’s Where Is My Roy Cohn?, which is about smart and sturdy and engrossing as a doc about an old-school shithead could be expected to be.
Dinner at Cafe Terigo with director and dp Svetlana Cvetko and editor-producer David Scott Smith.
I asked about trying to snag a ticket to tomorrow night’s screening of Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile at teh Eccles, but so far no luck. I’ve heard that Joe Berlinger‘s film is a little on the flat or so-so side but that Zac Efron is quite good as serial killer Ted Bundy.
For my money we didn’t sufficiently discuss the all-but-total collapse of A Star Is Born and Bradley Cooper enough, but Tom was leading the discussion.
HE quote: “I don’t think there’s stopping Mahershala Ali (Green Book) in the race for Best Supporting Actor,” I said. “He’s been ahead since the get-go. I’d like to see Richard E. Grant win because I loved him in that role more than just about anyone else.”
Musto quote: “It’s time for Glenn Close to get the freakin’ Oscar and everyone knows it! [Plus] Glenn plays a character who deserves the award that someone else gets. And she’s getting it this time. There is no chance for Lady Gaga!”
I was forced to participate from the lobby of the Park Regency because that’s the only spot in that otherwise comfy condo complex which the wifi is half decent. At the last minute I moved a small green palm plant right behind me for color design reasons — the green looked good along with the red glasses.
LeavingNeverland is a talking-heads horror film — an intimate, obviously believable, sometimes sexually explicit story of two boys — WadeRobson and JimmySafechuck, now pushing 40 — who became MichaelJackson’s special “friends” — i.e., lovers, masturbation buddies, fellators — while their more or less oblivious parents went along, thinking that the relationship was more of a kindly innocent bond.
Wakeup: Jackson was a finagling fiend, a smooth predator, the kindest serpent.
You should have seen the faces of the audience members during the ten-minute intermission of LeavingNeverland at the Egyptian. They had that look of hollowed-out nausea, submerged disgust…trying to hide their revulsion.
Michael Jackson, Wade Robson sometime around ’88, when Robson was seven or eight.
The Jackson-guilt denialists are finished. Jig’s up. Once this four-hour doc hits HBO, forget it.
LeavingNeverland is also, of course, a very sad story. Damage and dysfunction are passed on and on. You’re only as healthy or sick as the amount of ugly secrets you’re carrying around. Oh, and the two complicit mothers of the victims are dealt tough cards at the end by their trying-to-heal sons.
From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review: “[Director] Dan Reed forces us to confront the reality that the greatest pop genius since the Beatles was, beneath his talent, a monster. Leaving Neverland is no thriller, but it’s undeniably a kind of true-life horror movie. You walk out of it shaken, but on some level liberated by its dark expose.”
From David Ehrlich’s Indiewire review: “Steel yourself for specifics, as dancing around them would defeat the purpose of this documentary: Jackson was a man who convinced their most innocent relatives to bend over and spread their butt cheeks while he masturbated to the sight; who forced them to suck on his nipples while he serviced himself; who installed an elaborate system of alarm bells at the Neverland Ranch so that he would hear if anyone was going to walk in on an eight-year-old boy with the pop star’s penis inside his mouth.
“Penetration was a more complicated process, but one that got increasingly possible as the boys grew older. There was even a mock wedding ceremony at one point; the kid involved still can’t bear to look at the ring. The mothers chaperoned many of these vile trysts, oblivious to (or in denial about) what Jackson was doing to their sons behind closed doors. A teenage sibling even defended the pop star in court. She didn’t know any better, but will still regret that decision until the day she dies.”
Incidentally: I waited outside (25 degrees) in a ticket-holders line for 40, 45 minutes. Sundance staff & Park City police (checking bags, wanding everyone) didn’t exhibit the slightest interest in allowing the 9 am screening of LeavingNeverland to start on time. It started at 9:28 am — 9:30 am after the Sundance promos.
I loved Alexandre O. Philippe‘s Memory — The Origins of Alien, which I saw last night at 10 pm. It digs down, re-explores and triple-dip examines each and every aspect of Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic…an absolutedelight. It has everything, delivers everything…you leave completely sated, satisfied and well fed.
Please pay no attention to David Ehrlich’s pissy Indiewire review, to wit: “Philippe’s feature-length analysis of the roots and repercussions of RidleyScott‘s horror masterpiece, seems determined to reconcile its two fundamental truths. The first is that every successful movie reveals something profound about the time when it was made. The second is that great art taps into a collectiveunconscious as old as time itself, tracing a direct line from ancient mythologies to modern pop culture.” — correct.
“At the very least, Philippe’s entertaining but frustratingly incomplete documentary confirms that Alien did both of those things, and it did them well. [But it’s] far more interested in exploring where the Xenomorph came from than it is in contextualizing why it was born in 1979 (and continues to grow inside of us today)” — and I didn’t care.
“Caught somewhere between a genealogy project, an oral history, and an in-depth video essay about the iconic scene that seared Alien into our imaginations, it reaffirms the film’s basic power without probing deeply enough to achieve any power of its own” — bullshit.
Guillermo del Toro is going to worship Memory, and tweet his ass off about it.
Acting rep-wise, Matthew McConaughey has gone through three or four stages. First he was the stoner guy from Dazed and Confused. Then he was the hunky blonde guy who starred in all those insufferable romcoms (The Wedding Planner, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Two for the Money, Fool’s Gold). Then he became Mr. McConnaissance with The Lincoln Lawyer, Bernie, Killer Joe, Mud, Magic Mike, The Paperboy and his Oscar pony, Dallas Buyers Club. And The Wolf of Wall Street. Then he became Mr. “Jesus Enough With The Grim and Gritty McConnaissance” with Interstellar, The Sea of Trees, Free State of Jones, Kubo and the Two Strings, Gold, The Dark Tower and White Boy Rick. Now with the help of Harmony Korine, he’s back to being the wild Stoner Guy.
“Heavy-handed camp about Hollywood — an attempt to fuse Sunset Boulevard, Vertigo, The Barefoot Contessa and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Peter Finch plays a Svengali-like movie director. His great star, the glamorous foreigner Lylah Clare, died mysteriously a few hours after marrying him, and now he is turning a young American actress (Kim Novak) into Lylah. The stale, gaudy script (from a teleplay by Robert Thom and Edward De Blasio) provides roles for Coral Browne as a bitch columnist, Rossella Falk as a predatory European lesbian, and Valentina Cortese as a designer.
“Maybe an amusing macabre pastiche could have been made of it if the director, Robert Aldrich, hadn’t been so clumsy; it’s a static piece of filmmaking. With Michael Murphy, George Kennedy and Ernest Borgnine, who has rarely been worse — he demonstrates his shouting range.” — Pauline Kael on Robert Aldrich‘s The Legend of Lylah Clare (’68).
Roger Ebert wrote the film was “awful…but fairly enjoyable“, while Life‘s Richard Schickel felt that the film would catch on as a cult classic because it was “not merely awful…it is grandly, toweringly, amazingly so…I laughed myself silly at Lylah Clare, and if you’re in just the right mood, you may too.”
At various times, director Robert Aldrich blamed Novak’s performance and bad editing for the film’s failure. But in 1972, Aldrich said “I think there are a number of faults with” the film. “I was about to bum rap Kim Novak, when we were talking about this the other day, and then I realized that would be pretty unfair. Because people forget that Novak can act. I really didn’t do her justice. But there are some stars whose motion picture image is so firmly and deeply rooted in the public’s mind that an audience comes to a movie with a pre-conception about that person. And that pre-conception makes ‘reality” or any kind of myth that’s contrary to their pre-conceived reality impossible.
At this morning’s Sundance Film Festival press conference, exec director Keri Putnamsaid that organizers had noticed “a disturbing blind spot” in the press credential process. “Diversity isn’t about who is making the films,” Putnam said. “It’s about how they enter the world.” She said that the festival noticed that they were admitting “mostly white male critics.” That influenced the kind of films that were championed by reviewers, which in turn meant that only certain types of films scored big deals and major distribution pushes.
“This lack of inclusion has real-world implications,” Putnam remarked. “So we decided to do something about it.” She said that organizers re-shaped the credential process as a result. “63% of the press is from underrepresented groups this year,” Putnam said.
Sundance exec director Keri Putnam.
So this is why Sundance ’09 declined to approve the festival press pass that I’ve been wearing for the last 25 years? Because I’m a white guy with certain standards? Because I tend to wave off those Sundance films (i.e., well over half of them) that are either so-so or don’t cut the mustard? Hollywood Elsewhere celebrates gold-standard or silver-standard movies…period. Bronze and zinc, not so much.
One question to Keri Putnam: Show me one other veteran Sundance journalist like myself, someone who’s been covering this festival like a locomotive for a quarter-century and who has championed the hell out of dozens of great and near-great films that began their lives in Park City…please show me one other veteran journalist of my history, standing or calibre who had their press pass declined this year. Just one.
Comment from “MD” at the bottom of Variety story about the Sundance press conference: “The Caucasion critics who were denied credentials based on their gender/ethnicity should be filing appropriate anti-discrimination lawsuits immediately.” Sold! Except who else was affected by Putnam’s anti-white-guy edict? I don’t think I can afford a lawsuit on my lonesome.
It’s my understanding, actually, that I may have been singled out for deep-sixing because last June or July critic Scott Weinberg may have sent Sundance a letter of complaint about me and my column. This, at least, is what an industry pal confided a few days ago. The alleged complaint presumably boiled down to the fact that a certain party or parties didn’t like my personality or my style of writing.
My first screening conflict of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival happens tomorrow morning. I had to choose between two sexual predator docs — Untouchable, Ursula Macfarlane‘s “inside story of the meteoric rise and monstrous fall of movie titan Harvey Weinstein,” which begins at 9:30 am, or Dan Reed‘s Leaving Neverland, a 236-minute study of the late Michael Jackson and his perverted penchant for the company of young boys.
I’d prefer to see both, of course, but I chose the Jackson doc. Because I’d like to see something truly damning about the guy, and because the nearly four-hour length suggests something epic. I’ll see the Harvey film soon enough.
Sidenote: Leaving Neverland begins at the Egyptian theatre at 9 am, but I’ve been told to be there no later than 8 am, and that 7:45 am might be even better!
