Well, it’s not — the 4K 2001 will pop on 5.8.18. And the Amazon price is $41.99 — gougers! The perfectly rendered 2007 Bluray version sells for $22 to $28 less, depending on where you buy it. An HD streaming version sells for $12.99.
On 9.27.17, L.A. Times real-estate reporter Roger Vincent posted a mild-mannered piece about the newly renovated Westfield Century City mall. It mostly reads like a publicity release, but one phrase stands out: “In keeping with the more modern notion of encouraging visitors to linger…” Boy, do they ever!
I’ve roamed around this $1 billion environment six or seven times since it re-opened last fall, and it’s clearly been designed to discourage shoppers from knowing where they are in relation to the overall layout of the damn place. It wasn’t easy to find this or that store before the renovation, but you could manage it if you had any kind of directional sense. I’ve always had a pretty good nose. Now the walking areas no longer follow basic rectangular grids, and it’s more than a little difficult (unless you’re a frequent visitor) to determine where anything is except for Bloomingdales and Eataly.
Before you could rely on Century City office buildings as beacons, but the mall is now mostly a two-story affair and you can’t see them as easily. I mostly visit for screenings at the AMC plex, but the other night I had to ask twice after losing my bearings. No color-coding, no districts, no arrows on the cement, no Westfield app that would allow you to blue-dot your location, etc.
The basic scheme is unmistakable: encourage shoppers to blindly shuffle from store to store without any directional markers or any clear idea of the general layout. Rats in a maze, shopping zombies, etc.
Yes, there are mounted mall maps here and there, and yes, security guards will offer assistance if you ask, and yes, if you visit often enough you’ll start to develop an idea of where this or that store is, but the Westfield guys obviously decided to emulate the malevolent IKEA scheme, which I wrote about last April. And don’t get me started on finding walk-up exits and walk-down entrances to the underground parking area.
The basic impulse I have now about the Westfield C.C. mall is one of contemplative avoidance. Do I really want to go there and cope with a feeling of being in J.J. Abrams‘ Lost? The answer is “naah, not really.”
Three or four hours ago I saw this boldly colored Todd Alcott post on Facebook. I couldn’t remember the last film that genuinely unnerved me, but one of my all-time unnervers is Michael Tolkin‘s The Rapture, which I first saw…God in heaven, 26 and 1/2 years ago. I started to tap something out, and then it hit me that I’d already written a couple of things about it — a ditty in ’15, a few words in ’11.
Posted on 5.20.11: “The Rapture weirded me out on a level that I didn’t fully comprehend at first. So much so that I’ve only watched it twice. It’s not what you’d call a ‘pleasant’ film, but it sinks in and spreads a strange malevolent vibe — a profound unease, disquiet — into your system.
“Mimi Rogers hit her absolute career peak playing a telemarketing swinger-turned-convert who (a) sends her daughter to God with a bullet in the head and then (b) tells God to shove it when He/She is levitating Rogers up to Heaven during the finale.
“David Duchovny and Will Patton costarred. I was so taken by Patrick Bauchau‘s performance as a libertine that I sought him out at a party sometime in the late ’90s and wound up interviewing him at his Hollywood home.
“It’s a thinking-man’s horror flick, and one of the most chilling and profoundly creepy films ever — a perfect bitchslap directed at Godfreaks and the religious right.”
From 3.12 Guardian review by Monica Castillo: “While the movie is visually whimsical with its design and neon colors, the weakness of the source material still pokes out. Plot holes remain, despite screenwriter Zak Penn and Spielberg’s efforts to liven up the visuals and punch up the dialogue. I’m not sure I have a great understanding of how the game mechanics are supposed to work. If movement is required to move an avatar in the game, how do people play in the Oasis while standing in their living rooms?”
Last weekend Selma Blair was quoted by Metro‘s Katie Bailey saying that Cameron Diaz, who hasn’t made a film since Will Gluck‘s Annie (’14) and whose last good film was Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (’13), has more or less bailed on her film career.
“I had lunch with Cameron the other day,” Blair reportedly said. “We were reminiscing about [The Sweetest Thing]. I would have liked to do a sequel but Cameron’s retired from acting. She’s like ‘I’m done.'” Blair was presumedly screamed at that night by Diaz and her reps, and so she tweeted the following day (Monday, 3.12) that Diaz “is NOT retiring from ANYTHING.”
Today, or four days after Bailey’s Metro story, People‘s Mike Miller posted a story about how the 45 year-old Diaz “is loving her life outside the Hollywood spotlight.” Quoting “a source”, Miller writes that Diaz and her 39 year-old, tattoo-covered musician husband Beji Madden are “great” and “both very happy living the quiet life.”
Translation: Diaz’s career is in eclipse but she doesn’t want anyone thinking she’s not ready to return if the right part comes along.
Diaz’s career started to lose steam as she got older and her looks started to fade. You can’t say she didn’t appear in better films during the ’90s and early aughts. We all know that actresses often have a rougher time when they start to show mileage. Or something like that. I didn’t invent the system. I deplore it. But that’s how it goes in some cases.
The same thing happened with Brendan Fraser — career peak between ’92 and ’05, and then he began to age out.
If you ask me Diaz peaked from ’94 to ’05, or from age 22 to 33 — from her breakout debut in Chuck Russell‘s The Mask (’94) to Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes, in which she gave her career-best performance.
Not to mention Jacques Audiard‘s The Sisters Brothers, Paolo Sorrentino‘s Loro, Laszlo Nemes‘ Sunset, Terrence Malick’s Radegund (in German), Matteo Garrone‘s Dogman, Terry Gilliam‘s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and Xavier Dolan‘s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan.
It’s worth noting that Debruge and Keslassy, mindful of antsy industry currents, didn’t mention an especially enticing possibility — Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York, which will probably be dumped by Amazon (those antsy currents!) but which would be a major score for this world-class Cote d’Azur festival.
Woody’s films have played Cannes three or four times in the recent past, and a booking of his most recent effort, which partly deals with an inappropriate-age-gap relationship between Jude Law and Elle Fanning, would be a way for festival topper Thierry Fremaux to not only honor a relationship with a still-important filmmaker but declare that Cannes is about cinematic art first and nervous-nelly politics second.
Because you just know that a certain sector of American journalists will freak out if and when the Woody is chosen. Does Fremaux have the balls? Will Allen have the sand to face the Cannes press corps?
Debruge and Keslassy also suggest in their piece that Cannes should adhere to a gender quota system. “From the international success of Wonder Woman to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, the world is a much different place than it was in May 2017,” they remind. “Will Cannes delegate general Thierry Fremaux get with the program and include more female directors?”
I would imagine that Fremaux would indeed want to increase the presence of female directors this year, but HE’s Jordan Ruimy has a response to Debruge and Keslassy that I agree with 110%:
“Cannes is not a quota festival. It recognizes excellence in cinema. If a smaller number of female directors fail to produce excellent movies in a given year, that fault is on those directors, not Cannes. Lowering the bar to meet some dumb quota hurts women, not helps them. Festivals are supposed to be merit-based, and Cannes most of all in this regard.”
Greg Berlanti‘s Love, Simon (20th Century Fox, 3.16) is definitely half-decent — an antiseptic, intensely suburban gay teen romance that’s also about coming out. It’s the first big-screen adaptation of a YA novel (Becky Albertalli‘s “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda”) that I’ve actually half-liked, and it is kind of a big cultural deal that Fox is releasing a gentle, emotionally pliant, same-sex love story in 2400 theatres.**
Love, Simon is smartly written (the screenplay authors are This Is Us showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger) and straight-friendly, but — here come the caveats — it feels like a professional sell-job. Like an advertisement for the way things ought to be in Young Gay Utopia. It feels too tidy, too TV-realm, too “produced” and not, you know, laid-back enough. (Like Call Me By Your Name, say — a totally settled, unforced vibe flick from start to finish.)
Amiable, mild-mannered Simon (Nick Robinson) is a closeted high school senior living with his parents (Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Garner) and younger sister (Talitha Bateman) in a well-tended Atlanta suburb. But the realm is essentially a blend of Disney World and a 21st Century update of John Hughes Land — an affluent, multi-cultural, progressive-minded hamlet where almost everyone (except for one appalling sociopath, played by Logan Miller, who causes all the trouble) is cool about everything.
Although his parents and friends are fair-minded and accepting of whatever, Simon has decided to wait until college to announce that he’s gay. But then he falls into this anonymous online chat with another gay guy — a local kid who calls himself Blue. The movie is partly about guessing who Blue might be. It’s also about Miller’s batshit-insane character, Martin, who discovers Simon’s flirtation with Blue and uses this knowledge to blackmail him into helping him get together with one of Simon’s close friends (i.e., a girl). I was saying to myself “if this was Goodfellas Martin would get an ice pick in the back of the neck.”
Simon suspects (and we are led to presume) that Blue might be one of three guys — all good looking, one of a POC persuasion and the other two Caucasian, one dark-haired and one semi-blonde. They all seem like good candidates, but I was a bit disappointed when the real Blue was revealed. (Not my choice.) Simon, however, is ready to roll with all of these guys.
Want a better, less conventional ending? Simon is really attracted to A, vaguely attracted to B and not that attracted to C, and then Blue turns out to be C. And Simon says, “Aaah…okay…life is unfair. But it’s nice to know ya, brah. I like what you have to say.” And they become good friends.
I’m sorry but I’m two…actually make that three guys.
One, the cautious, considerate, even-steven, take-it-as-it-comes guy that I mostly am (or try to be) in a socially mixed context. Two, the guy I am at home when I’m not wearing my public mask, dealing with fatigue, frustrations, traffic, scrambled eggs, cats, fears, dry cleaning, the shoe guy, anxieties and plants as well as occasional moments of calm, comfort and serenity. And three, the guy who emerges when I’m writing the column.
The first and third guys rarely overlap, although sometimes they do. The second guy is on speaking terms with the first and third but he feels more kinship with the first. But the third guy…well, there wouldn’t be any Hollywood Elsewhere without him, so I need to let him do the dance, so to speak, as well as show a certain amount of deference and respect.
The dialogue in this scene is extremely dry and referenced. Deftly written, not a single lowball moment, and aimed at a sophisticated audience that will presumably pick up on the flicking pop-culture references. Lasting three minutes and 49 seconds, it delivers all kinds of concurrent moods and attitudes — sexual, hostile, aloof, indifferent, observant, dismissive — right on the money. “Give him whatever it is they drink…is a Coke around?…you don’t have to do all the old adenoidal glottal stuff and carry on for our benefit.”
I ducked out of last night’s Tomb Raider press screening around 7:55 pm or thereabouts. On my way out I noticed a lively crowd congregated in the Arclight lobby. I quickly learned it was a premiere screening for Max Winkler‘s Flower (The Orchard, 3.16). I never got invited to a screening, but it’s not like Flower was hotly buzzed about when it played the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival or, you know, is currently setting Twitter ablaze.
Given the reviews it got last spring from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Frank Scheck, Slant‘s Chuck Bowen and TheWrap‘s Dan Callahan, the publicists appear to be relying on the old hide-the-ball strategy.
“There’s nary a believable moment in Winkler’s edgy dark comedy about a rebellious teen girl (Zoey Deutch) who’s clearly meant to be amusingly crass but instead comes across as emotionally disturbed,” Scheck wrote. “Uneasily combining its determinedly edgy plotline with failed sentimentality, Flower is redeemed only by Zoey Deutch’s magnetic performance, which would be star-making if in the service of a better vehicle. The film also squanders the talents of such reliable comic pros as Kathryn Hahn and Adam Scott.”
The “edgy” plot is basically about Deutch’s Erica giving blowjobs to older guys in order to blackmail them for inappropriate sexual contact, and then deciding to nail an older guy named Will (Scott) for having allegedly molested Luke (Joey Morgan), the overweight, oxy-addicted son of her mom’s boyfriend.
Two thoughts about the trailer: (a) Deutch, who delivered a likable, easy-vibe lead performance in Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some!! (’16), has, as Erica, a brashly assertive Millenial screwball quality — you can tell right away that she’s “got it” as far as that term applies; and (b) why is Morgan, the red-haired, whale-sized guy whose sexual victimhood is the whole reason for the revenge plot…why doesn’t the trailer show Morgan saying a line or two?
Tomb Raider (Warner Bros., 3.16) is a third-rate, totally-by-the-numbers, CG-propelled exercise in female adventurer myth-building.
With the exception of Alicia Vikander‘s defiantly emotional performance as Lara Croft, which is surprisingly decent considering the circumstances, this cinematic effort by the great Roar Uthaug (pronounce his last name over and over until you can say it backwards in your sleep) struck me as a mostly boring, time-wasting programmer — a 21st century equivalent of Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.
Don’t let this and the other cruddy reviews stop you this weekend. You wanna see how Vikander measures up, right?
The truth is that this Swedish-born Oscar winner, all of 29, isn’t half bad as the video-game adventurer with the bow-and-arrow and the buff bod. She’s too small (5’5″) to be a convincing whup-asser and I could have done with fewer cries of pain, but she gives this gamer character everything she has inside, trying like hell to make Croft’s situation feel as earnest and real-deal as possible. Vikander certainly gives a more full-hearted performance than Angelina Jolie did in those two Lara Croft flicks (’01 and ’03) that came and went without stirring a single bowl of soup. And comparing VK’s boobs to Jolie’s is a non-issue.
The first 35 minutes of Tomb Raider are the most plausible and therefore tolerable, as they happen in a semblance of real-world London (Croft’s home) and Hong Kong, and then aboard a small ship bound for a remote location in the South China Sea.
Croft is a reluctant heiress. Yeah, I know — what kind of idiot says “nahh, I don’t want an inheritance — I’d rather be in debt as I deliver pizza on a bicycle”? She’s torn up about her disappeared and presumably dead tycoon dad (Dominic West) who vanished in ’09 while researching Himiko, the legendary shaman queen who was buried alive on the island of Yamatai, somewhere southeast of Japan.
A clue found in one of her dad’s effects results in Lara travelling to Hong Kong and then paying a ship owner (Daniel Wu as the good-looking, physically agile Asian guy who has to appear in all international-appeal action films) to take her to this place of rocky foreboding.
I paid no attention yesterday to a video clip of Hillary Clinton delivering her latest gaffe — i.e., a statement that is true but politically unpopular. While attending some kind of conference in India last weekend, Clinton explained that she carried the more economically advanced (which always goes hand in hand with “better educated” and “politically progressive”) states in the 2016 election, and that Donald Trump carried the none-too-bright bumblefucks — rural, despairing, Fox News-watching, racially resentful, angry, mostly overweight, appalling dress sense, in some cases opioid-addicted, etc. Which — hello? — is 100% accurate and then some.
And totally beside the point. Machine Democrats want Clinton to keep her yap shut about the ’16 election permanently, or better yet go away and stay away for the rest of her life. We all understand that bumblefuck resentment (“Don’t put us down because we put a malicious sociopath-tyrant into the White House…that would hurt our feelings and inspire us to re-elect him!”) could hurt their chances of winning big in the 2018 midterms, and Dems now have reason to be optimistic after last night’s narrow win by 33-year-old Democrat Connor Lamb in a special House election in southwestern Pennsylvania.
