I was hoping that Rob Garver‘s What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, which I saw three nights ago, would deliver some degree of enjoyment. It’s much better than that. I found it wonderfully alive and attuned, electric, bracingly intelligent, well-honed and about as spot-on as a doc of this sort can be. If you’ve any passion for film or particularly the glory days of personal-vision American cinema (late ’40s to early ’80s), this is essential viewing and a whole lot of fun to sit through.

Filmed four years ago, Garver provides a rush of immense comfort and stimulation with perfectly timed, just-right film clips and talking-head dialogue to explain and depict what was going on in the legendary critic’s life and head over a half-century period. The effect, for me, is ecstatic. Razor sharp and smooth as silk and yet always with a drill bit…it goes right into the whole novelistic tumult and miasma of that wonderful period in film criticism (’60s to early ’80s)…making sense of it, cleaning it up and making it all perfectly understood.

Here’s an excellent review from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy.

And here are quotes that I typed as I watched it on my Macbook Pro:

Kael: “The world is divided between the people who get deep pleasure from doing a good job, and those who are just trying to get through the day. There are a great many critics who belong to the latter category, who are scared of their readers, scared of their editors, scared of the movie companies and with some justification, but are never good enough to conquer their fears. The point would be really to try and strengthen your own writing style and develop some more courage, because then you’re in a better position.”

Quentin Tarantino: “The way Pauline described Band of Outsiders…she said it was as if a bunch of movie-mad young French boys had taken a banal American crime novel, and translated the poetry they had read between the lines…that is my aesthetic! Right there! That’s what I hope I can do.”

David Edelstein: “I disagree violently with that term…I am not a Paulette.…I am a Paulinista…I have learned from her approach and applied it in my own way.”

Kael: “Every good critic is a propagandist…there’s no other way to play the game.”

Observation: “Pauline was a west coast girl, and somewhat lacking in deference to authority. What she couldn’t achieve in art, she was able to achieve in movie reviews…she said I want to loosen my style, to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we all learn at college…I wanted sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice. [Before Pauline] New Yorker readers were used to this rather genteel rolling prose. Pauline didn’t believe in categories…she was very much against snobbish art-house cinema…she embraced popular cinema…only bad critics impose an academic formula…what Pauline Kael called the gentlemen critics…she wrote like someone who had bought a ticket and found a seat and watched it with a crowd.”

Early last evening I saw Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favorite (Fox Searchlight, 11.23), and came away mostly pleased. All the things it’s been praised for so far — the comic perversity, All About Eve by way of Peter Greenaway, Dangerous Liaisons and Barry Lyndon lite, amusingly brittle performances (Rachel Weiss, Emma Stone, HE’s own Olivia Colman), the scabrous humor, Robbie Ryan‘s handsome cinematography — are there in abundance. I mostly had no beefs.

Lanthimos hasn’t backed away from his generally perverse sensibility, but The Favourite is certainly his most accessible, audience-friendly film.

Colman (whose performance in Tyrannosaur was so worshipped by this columnist that I raised money to pay for press screenings that Strand Releasing wouldn’t pop for) will definitely snag a Best Supporting Actress nomination, and Stone, who’s being currently tributed by the Telluride Film Festival, may also land a Best Actress nom. Perhaps Weiss also. Or all three will.

Set in the early 1700s, The Favourite is about a pair of shrewd, ruthless schemers — Weiss’s Sarah Churchill and Stone’s Abigail Masham — plotting and back-biting in order to gain favor with and power from the emotionally volatile, constantly-health-challenged Queen Anne (Colman).

For the first hour or so The Favourite is…well, not entirely “great” but a delightfully wicked hoot. It put me in reasonably good spirits. A critic sitting near me was laughing heartily and having a great old time; ditto most of the audience.

But somewhere around the 75-minute mark and until the end (basically the last 45 minutes) the film slows down and then begins to run out of steam. By the 100-minute mark I was muttering under my breath (a) “I’m starting to not care all that much who wins this battle of courtly influence” and (b) “let’s wrap this up already…why does it have to be two hours?”

Lanthimos began to try my patience in the way that Whit Stillman‘s Love and Friendship had. The laughing critic downshifted into chuckling, and then into silence.

28 or 29 years before Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, John Hughes and Dylan Baker created “Owen” — everyone’s idea of a hinterland Trump supporter, or certainly mine. Do they even make tin-buckle galoshes any more? My mother always made me wear them during rainstorms and snowfalls. Hate and humiliation.

Amazon is apparently serious about not ever releasing Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York. They’re scared of how the “always believe the victim” crowd will react if they open it, despite the Moses Farrow essay and the overwhelming evidence that Allen is no child molester. Amazon washing their hands is a way of saying (a) they don’t believe Moses and everyone else who’s shared a sensible evaluation of the accusation, or (b) they’re cowards. If and when they walk away they’ll be officially condemning an innocent man.

There’s an exhibit of Roma images in a Telluride gallery on Colorado Ave. I dropped by after finishing my Destroyer review. I needed a break and it gave me one.

By my sights, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma is much, much more than just a series of hauntingly beautiful, silver monochrome, to-die-for capturings of life in Mexico City around 1970 and ’71, and particularly that of a certain middle-class family (more or less based on Cuaron’s own) going through various trials and struggles and annoyances, including a constant supply of dog turds in the sheltered driveway of their two-story home.

At first it seems like Roma might be too laid back, too slow — a cross between Eric Rohmer‘s watching-paint-dry aesthetic and a black-and-white Nuri Bilge Ceylan film.

But as the incidents and details accumulate the scheme becomes clear — we’re getting to know this brood (an aloof doctor father, a spirited but resentful wife-mom, three young brothers, a sister and two live-in maids) and their realm in a bit-by-bit, layer-by-layer fashion, and gaining more recognition and understanding as it builds and moves along, everyone and everything becoming sharper and more dimensional in stages.

The strategy begins to pay off with greater and greater dividends around the halfway mark, and the last third is just wow, wow, wow, wow. And it’s not just the family that sinks in but the whole culture of Mexico City and the swirl of sexual and political events, characters and currents of that era, and especially how the infamous Corpus Christi massacre of 6.10.71 affects the fate of one of the maids, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), in a devastating way.

Put another way, Roma isn’t just one killer Alexa 65 shot after another, although you could theoretically ignore the particulars and just trip out on the widescreen coffee-table photo book art of it all. It’s a movie that doesn’t appear to be following a narrative through-line (or more precisely a collection of through-lines) until it gradually begins to do that, and then the hook is in and you realize that Roma owns you.

I’ve been in but mostly out on director Karyn Kusama — loved Girlfight, hated Aeon Flux, loathed Jennifer’s Body but found The Invitation a truly fascinating creepout. The latter is why I caught her latest, Destroyer, early this afternoon.

I felt three ways about it. One, I respected Kusama’s intention to out-badass every other badass rogue cop flick ever made. Two, I hated watching it. And three, for over an hour I was filled with self-loathing for being too chicken to leave.

It’s a complex L.A. crime tale about Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman), a wasted, walking-dead Los Angeles detective trying to settle some bad business and save her daughter from a life of crime and misery. It unfolds through a complex, pain-in-the-ass flashback structure, and is punctuated by all kinds of nihilistic, hard-boiled behavior by the mostly criminal flotsam characters.

Nicole Kidman as Detective Erin Bell in Destroyer.

Destroyer has guns, uniformed cops, blood, a scene in the Westwood Federal building cafeteria, purple ink, ugly asshole criminals with sickening haircuts, drugs, a handjob given to a dying criminal slob, a bank shootout, blah blah. Everything in this well-made if godforsaken film is scuzzy. Everyone and everything is covered in the stuff. Even I felt scuzzed out from my seat in the tenth row of the Herzog. Scuzzed and miserable.

Inner dialogue: “I’m in a beautiful Rocky Mountain town, surrounded on all sides by hotshot Hollywood types and cool rich people, and I’m in hell.”

30 minutes after it began I was going “oh, God, help me.” At the one-hour mark I had decided that stepping over six or seven persons sitting to my right would be too awkward, and at the same time a contrary voice was telling me “don’t do it, Jeff…tough it out.” At the 90-minute mark I was thinking “maybe if I take a short nap I’ll feel better when I awake and will enjoy the film a tiny bit more.” Then I decided “fuck it” and exited past two people to my left. I ducked out under the hanging velour curtain…freedom!

The movie is mostly about the way Kidman looks in this thing, like a combination vampire-zombie with dark eye bags and a complexion that suggests a heroin habit mixed with twice-daily injections of embalming fluid. Plus a Desolation Row, gray-streaked hair style.

Kidman and Kusama are saying “have you ever seen such a badass, hardass undercover female cop in your moviegoing life? Even in a zombie movie?” HE answer: No, I’ve never seen a cop character who looks this wasted, this dead-to-the-world, this gutted, this excavated, this George Romero, this Bela Lugosi-ish. Hats off!

Every Destroyer actor gives the kind of performance that makes you feel like your soul is draining out of the hourglass…Kidman, Sebastian Stan, Tatiana Maslany, Bradley Whitford, Toby Kebbell, Scoot McNairy and Jade Pettyjohn. Hats off to them all.

Now that Telluride screenings are flying fast and furious I’m going through the usual homina-homina-homina. No time to write anything, squeezed from both ends, Macbook Pro batteries dying too soon, Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless. It’s 6 am as we speak. I crashed just after 1 am and awoke four hours later to get a jump on things, but I couldn’t make myself get out of bed until 5:30 am. I have to catch the gondola up to the Chuck Jones at 8 am to catch a 9 am screening of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma. I feel as if a bear is scratching at the door of my room and going “mwwaagghhh!…more reviews, more coverage…Instagram and Twitter posts aren’t enough, bitch…mwaaghhAWNNN!”

Last night I saw Damien Chazelle‘s First Man at 7pm, followed by Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner at 10 pm. Both were (and probably still are) wowser thumbs-up immersions, but I have to say that Reitman’s film delivered a slightly bigger jolt in that I wasn’t sure how it would play (it’s a sharp, highly believable, exacting, well-acted, tip-top adult thing in all respects) whereas Chazelle’s film had been praised to the heavens in Venice. I therefore knew First Man would be dealing strong cards, but it was quite the surprise to realize by midnight that both films are heavy hitters.

The Front Runner is an exacting, brilliantly captured political tragedy, and easily Reitman’s best since Up In The Air. Yes, a Reitman comeback movie, and a good one at that. The 40-year-old director totally knocked it out of the park with Thank You For Smoking, Juno and Up In The Air but then seemed to lose that special touch over the last nine years. Now it’s returned. At least by my sights.

Gosling, Foy, Chazelle in Venice three days ago.

Hugh Jackman, Jason Reitman in Herzog theatre lobby last night around 9:40 pm.

The Front Runner reminded me at times of Michael Ritchie‘s The Candidate and sometimes surpassing that 1972 political drama in terms of believable campaign minutiae and a general drill-bit focus on the hundreds of little docudrama-like details that convince, divert and persuade. It also reminded me a bit of Mike Nichols‘ Primary Colors and James Vanderbilt‘s Truth, a first-rate politics-and-journalism film that was unjustly given the bum’s rush.

Hugh Jackman is totally first-rate as 1988 presidential contender Gary Hart — the ’80s liberal superstar in the Kennedy mold whom everyone angrily turned on at when his campaign totally fell apart over a brief, sloppily-arranged affair with a well-educated wannabe campaign worker Donna Rice. (She’s 60 now!)

But the screenplay, based on Matt Bai‘s “All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid” and co-written by Bai, Reitman and Jay Carson, portrays Hart in much more sympathetic terms — a guy who sadly screwed himself out of a shot at the White House over a mere dalliance but who had a real point when he argued that the media’s National Enquirer-like fixation on a sexual side issue that meant nothing and was nobody’s business to begin with was by far the greater mistake or misstep. Jackman makes you feel the rage about this.

The Hart-Rice affair was uncovered by Miami Herald reporters. Yesterday a friend from the Herald wrote to ask if the film identifies them chapter and verse, and I responded as follows: “The Miami Herald is completely and fully identified and the relationship between the Herald and Gary Hart is depicted as deeply antagonistic, especially on the Herald’s part. Kevin Pollack plays publisher Bob Martindale and Steve Zissis plays Tom Fiedler, one of the Herald reporters who chased the story. The Herald effort comes off as dogged but ultimately sleazy. This is not a positive portrait of the Herald or the press in general.

First Man is an intense, unconventional, psychologically penetrating take on the experience of Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and his wife, Janet Shearon (freckly-skinned Claire Foy, whom I last saw in Steven Soderberg‘s Unsane) from the early to late ’60s, culminating in the historic moon-landing mission of July 1969.

It’s no Ron Howard movie, that’s for sure — jarring, louder, lonelier, scarier, and well removed from that emotionally familiar, somewhat jingoistic universe of dramatic ups and downs that we all recall from Apollo 13.

I was seriously impressed with First Man because it’s really quite different — a kind of 16mm art film approach to an epic journey, an intimate, indie-styled, deeply personal movie writ large and loud with a rumbling, super-vibrating soundtrack. I agree with Owen Gleiberman‘s view that it’s the Saving Private Ryan of NASA space epics. The last 40 minutes or so (the 1967 fire tragedy to Neil and Janet’s post-mission meeting in an isolation area) are truly outstanding and suspenseful as fuck. It’s surely one of the measures of top-flight filmmaking that I was tense and worried about the success of a 50 year-old triumphant mission from 50 years ago.

And that rightwing “why have they ignored the planting of the American flag?” complaint is bullshit. The film shows two shots of the flag plus Neil’s kid raising the flag plus a shot of Neil saluting, or so it seemed to me.

Foy delivers the conventional emotional currents, calling Neil on his emotionally constipated bullshit but Gosling acts the hell out of Neil. Everything he does and says is very internal but you can read him in every scene. Don’t let anyone tell you that Foy owns this film — she does in an outwardly familiar sense but Gosling is doing something much braver and more intense in its own way.

Oh, the shaking, the throbbing, the rumbling, the overall loudness….wuuhhhrrrrnnannnggg…bang, bang, BANG, BUHNNG, WHAM, CLANG, ROAARRRRRRRMMMMmmmmm!

At Aretha Franklin memorial, Michael Eric Dyson to President Trump (starting at 1:12): “[You] orange apparition, you lugubrious leech, you dopey doppelganger of deceit and deviance, you lethal liar, you dimwitted dictator, you foolish bastard!”

David Lowery‘s The Old Man & The Gun (Fox Searchlight, 9./28) suffers, I’m afraid, from a bad case of the gentle blahs. Or, more precisely, from the congenials. It won’t hurt to sit through it, and it’s nice to watch Robert Redford glide through a mild-mannered bank robber film without anything bad or scary or challenging happening to him. Or to costars Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tom Waits and Tika Sumpter, for that matter.

A fictionalized, fable-like story of Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford), a real-life bank robber and prison escape artist, the film plays it light and mild all the way, and I’m sorry but it doesn’t put food on the plate. Because nothing really happens, no one is threatened or put to the test, nobody risks anything, nobody bares their soul…zip.

It’s a movie about comfort and conviction (i.e., an old guy loves robbing banks and so that’s what he does) and mild vibes and incredible good luck. Robbery after robbery after robbery, and nothing really happens to anyone. Okay, Tucker gets caught. Once. And then he gets out. And then…okay, I won’t spoil. But nothing happens.

I’m open to a movie about a polite and kindly thief who knows how to treat a lady (Phillip Borsos‘ The Grey Fox was an excellent film in this regard) but I didn’t believe a word of Lowery’s film. Not a damn word. Tucker robs banks without flashing a gun or threatening to shoot anyone, and nobody ever says “nope, I won’t give you the bank’s money” or “fuck you…if you want the dough you’re gonna have to shoot me.” A craggy-faced career criminal pulls off a couple of dozen robberies, and they’re all a walk in the park.

If Forrest Tucker had been a black dude, he would have been killed early on. In his youth, I mean. Cop bullets.

Almost all of The Old Man & The Gun is set in the early ’80s, and so Affleck, who plays a Texas detective, isn’t allowed to wear the ten-day-beard look — that didn’t happen until the mid to late ’80s, and only in the coastal cities at that. And I found the idea of a Texas detective being married to an African American woman (Sumpter) in ’81 highly unlikely. Not unheard of, mind, but things were different in this country 37 years ago, especially in conservative regions.