Down at the Metrograph, the Safdie brothers are attempting to elevate their reputation and particularly that of Good Time, their latest film, by creating an association with several respected crime and urban adventure films — Heat, Thief, Miami Blues, Jackie Brown, The Running Man, 48 HRS., Jackson County Jail, Short Eyes, et. al. “Movie crime, real crime, heroes, zeroes, the naked, the dead and the termites eating away at your Lazy Boy’s legs,” the Safdie copy reads. “Here’s a bunch of movies that kept us hot and bothered all through the conception and realization of our newest feature.”
Don’t even go there, guys. It’s illegitimate — certainly a reach — to try and position yourselves in the same realm as Michael Mann, George Armitage, Walter Hill, Robert Young, et. al. Good Time (A24, 8.11) has good street energy but it lacks in so many other departments it’s not even funny. The Rotten Tomatoes critics who helped give Good Time a 94% rating were mainly jerking themselves off, trust me. Don’t go into the Safdies!
From “Dear Cops — Please Capture or Shoot These Assholes,” posted on 5.26.27: “The Safdie brothers know how to whip action into a lather and keep the kettle boiling, but I can’t abide stupidity, and after 40 minutes of watching these simpletons hold up a bank and run around and ruthlessly use people to duck the heat I was praying that at least one of them would get shot or arrested. I can roll with scumbags and sociopaths (like Robert De Niro‘s Johnny Boy in Mean Streets), but I need a little something I can relate to or identify with. If the repulsion factor is too strong, I check out. And that’s what I did in this instance. And good riddance.”
If Steven Spielberg‘s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom were released today, would the SJW twitter banshees create an even bigger stink about its racist, looking-down-its-nose depiction of Indian natives and Hinduism (or more precisely ‘thuggees“, who were more or less the anti-colonialist ISIS figures of Rudyard Kipling‘s era)? Or would everyone just shrug this depiction off as a winking homage to the thuggees in George Stevens‘ Gunga Din? Odds favoring scenario #1: 85%. Odds favoring scenario #2: 5%. Hate to admit this: Temple of Doom is empty and exhausting, but on a shot-to-shot, scene-to-scene basis it’s brilliantly shot, performed, choreographed and edited.
No one is rooting harder than myself for Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky (Bleecker Street, 8.18) to become a hit. If this happens Soderbergh’s studio-averse financing, marketing and distribution scheme, which he explained to the N.Y. Times two or three days ago, will rewrite the indie game.
It Logan Lucky connects the Soderbergh scheme (basically the old ploy of raising production funds by selling off foreign distrib rights plus selling post-theatrical rights to pay for marketing) will help ensure the health of smarter, sharper films that haven’t been dumbed down by the big studios. It will also offer an opportunity for others to follow in his wake.
But of course, Logan Lucky has to be a good film on its own two feet. Joe and Jane Popcorn have to want to see it for what it is. Movies are not about earnings and deals and maverick marketing strategies, but the ways in which they touch or tickle you deep down.
What isLogan Lucky exactly? I won’t know until tomorrow, but basically it’s Ocean’s 7-11. This, at least, is how Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson put it during last night’s Santa Barbara Film Festival party. This was also the title of a dogshit-level YouTube series that popped in ’08, but nobody remembers sub-standard stuff so let’s forget it even existed and call Soderbergh’s film the “real” Ocean’s 7-11.
This evening Tatyana and I attended a Hollywood hills party for Roger Durling‘s Santa Barbara Film Festival. It was held at a beautiful, ultra-modern mini-manse on Oriole Way**. The owner-hostess was longtime festival supporter and former Lynda.com ownerLynda Weinman. We chatted with Florida Project and Tangerine director Sean Baker. I told him I’d missed TFP in Cannes but wanted to catch it sometime in August, if at all possible. Baker was with Florida Project associate producer and actress Samantha Quan. Many of the usual journo suspects were there — Anne Thompson, Scott Feinberg, Peter Rainer, John Horn, etc. An elegant event, startling Belvedere vodka cocktails, an exquisite infinity pool and a knock-your-socks-off view.
Producer-actress Samantha Quan, Florida Project director Sean Baker at Tuesday evening’s Santa Barbara Film Festival party, hosted by Roger Durling and Linda Weinman. (I’m just as bothered by the fuzzy, non-focused appearance of Baker and Quan as you are.)
From Brent Lang’s 8.1 Variety story about Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Detroit, which opens on Thursday night: “What emerges in Detroit is punishing to watch. It’s a film without a moral victory. Innocent people die. Murderers go unpunished. Good men and women are left to pick up the pieces. Some are unable to move on. In a coda to the picture, Agee Smith’s character, Reed, gives up singing professionally and retreats from the world. ‘It’s a tough movie,’ admits Boal. ‘The movie is challenging to watch. We’re in a difficult spot in the world right now, [but] I’m hopeful that audiences will respond to the challenge that the movie poses and appreciate not being talked down to.'”
I was just noticing Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury‘s Leatherface (LionsGate, 9.21), a prequel to ’74’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the eighth film in the TCM franchise. And I was saying to myself, “You know something? I don’t a flying fuck about Leatherface’s backstory…does anyone?”
I actually don’t give a flying fuck about any character’s backstory…ever. I never cared about little Bruce Wayne seeing his parents murdered or how that trauma affected him as an adult. Tough shit, sonny! I had a pretty tough childhood also — get over it. Seriously — fuck you and your aloof, melancholy Wayne Manor attitude about everything. I’m sitting here in my cushy megaplex seat with a small popcorn and a Diet Coke. Entertain me, ya fuck.
If I never see another origin story, it’ll be too soon. Fuck all origin stories from here to kingdom come. I don’t want to know anything about what any character went through before the movie started. All I want to know about any character in any film is how they’ll respond to the particular thing that’s happening right now. Nothing else matters.
You could make an origin-story movie out of any major character in cinema, and you’d be some kind of destroyer of worlds if you did.
Did we need to know what North by Northwest‘s Roger Thornhill was like as a nine-year-old kid, playing marbles or stickball or falling in love with the girl next door? In Zero Dark ThirtyKathryn Bigelow told us nothing about the early formative years of Jessica Chastain‘s Maya, and that was totally fine with me. I didn’t give a damn about the evil father of Heath Ledger‘s Joker taunting him as a kid. I’ll never want to know about how Alan Ladd‘s Shane came to be an ace-level gunfighter, or how Clark Gable‘s Rhett Butler became a charming rogue. I’ve always hated, hated, hated depictions of young heroes in any context or franchise. Those movies are always awful. The only young anything I’ve ever liked was Young Frankenstein.
The only realm in which backstories are regarded as a big deal is that of (a) superheroes and (b) hit-movie sequels. You really do need to be a bit of a simpleton to be genuinely interested in backstories in the first place. There are NO backstories or character fill-ins of any kind of in Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, and it’s utterly wonderful for that.
I got up a little late, and I’ve been caught up in two side issues. Now I have to take Zak to Laurel Pet Hospital for his fungal sores, and then pick up some medication, hit the bank and then re-Fed Ex some immigration forms (which were sent back because of single error) and yaddah yaddah. Back on the HE stick sometime around 2:30 or 3 pm. Way it goes on occasion. Tonight is a special Hollywood hills party for Roger Durling‘s Santa Barbara Film Festival, which will mean missing a 7 pm screening of Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky. (Which I can see next week.)
On the occasion of the first full-boat trailer for David Fincher‘s Mindhunter, a ten-episode Netflix series that will debut on 10.13, here’s a riff I posted five months ago: The first two episodes were directed by David Fincher; the series is produced by Fincher, Charlize Theron, Josh Donen and Cean Chaffin. Like Zodiac, Mindhunter is set in the ’70s. Okay, 1979. It’s about a pair of FBI agents (Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany) interviewing imprisoned serial killers to try to solve ongoing cases. Which of course is precisely what Manhunter‘s Will Graham (William Petersen) and Silence of the Lamb‘s Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) did — i.e., interview Hannibal Lecter in an attempt to capture, respectively, the Tooth Fairy and Buffalo Bill. Written by showrunner Joe Penhall (The Road).
Last Tuesday (7.25) I expressed interest in Mike White‘s Brad’s Status(Amazon/Annapurna, 9.15). The trailer suggested it would be a smart, bone-dry father-son comedy about an insecure, middle-aged dad (Ben Stiller) who’s more than a bit haunted by career underachievement and, worse, by the dawning success of his son (20-year-old Austin Abrams).
My first reaction was “aah, this’ll be good and I wanna see it, but is Stiller playing the same kind of anxious, insecure 40ish guy he was in Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young? If so, should he be doing another so soon?”
Well, the trailer misled. Okay, Stiller’s character slightly resembles the vaguely terrified would-be hipster he played in that 2014 Noah Baumbach film, but Brad Sloan, the nonprofit counselor he plays in White’s new film, is a different kind of bird. A Sacramento guy who’s constantly in the grip of suppressed envy and twitches of self-disappointment, but who never descends into foolery or self-mocking caricature. Far from rich and no one’s idea of assured or super-confident, but an honest, moderately mannered fellow who can’t help….well, frowning at the mirror. At times. But doing his best to cover this up.
I saw Brad’s Status last night, and I think it’s really exceptional. It’s basically a smallish dramedy about Brad taking son Troy to Boston to check out some colleges. It begins as another Stiller humiliation piece, but it turns into one of the best mid-level adult dramas of this type in a long, long time, and a truly exceptional (which is to say very wise) generation-gap flick.
I wasn’t expecting that much at first, but about a half-hour in I began to realize that White’s film is a winning meditation about self-worth, self-image, self-assessment, real vs. imagined happiness and empty envy. It’s honest and real and very, very well written. Fleet, subtle, unforced. Fairly complex but evened out by the end.
Brad Sloan is easily Stiller’s best-written role and finest performance since Greenberg, but with a more appealing (if ambiguous) tone. More solemn and self-aware. Not stalled or self-destructive but forlorn and nearly resigned.
Brad’s Status is a character-inspection thing that cuts it right down the middle, on one hand making Stiller’s character seem overly envious or even a bit pathetic, and on the other giving him a certain degree of self-awareness and dignity and grace in the third act. It’s a quiet adult movie in the best sense of that term. It lets you sort it out, choose sides, figure the angles.
If Woody Allen had directed and written this it would be much more on the nose, or it would feel first-drafty. This is easily White’s best script since School of Rock, and his direction is just so. He balances the ingredients just right. I adore the way he doesn’t come down on one side or the other of any given issue or dispute. And I love that White himself is 47, right along with Brad.
Brad’s envy is focused on three college friends who went on to become rich and super-successful — Michael Sheen‘s Craig Fisher (a best-selling author), Luke Wilson‘s Jason Hatfield (a hedge fund guy) and Jemaine Clement‘s Billy Wearsiter (a now-retired playboy).
Without giving too much away there are a couple of payoff scenes in which Wilson and especially Sheen interact with Stiller. One of the brilliant aspects of White’s script is that he doesn’t precisely tell you that this or that guy is a complete dick, or that Stiller is better or worse than either one. He just lets you listen and consider.
And there’s a great score by Mark Mothersbaugh. And Stiller has an emotional scene during a third-act concert scene that really works, I think. I believed it, at least. I’ve been there, felt that.
And Austin Abrams is really great. He’s a brilliant under-player. I believed his every word and gesture. He looks and half-sounds like Bob Dylan might’ve sounded when he was 20 or 21.
Yes, Brad’s Status is heavily narrated. Voice-over explanations and fill-ins sometimes rub me the wrong way, but this time it works, partly, I suppose, because Stiller’s Brad is a thoughtful ex-journalist who knows how to explain things well, and so his narrative commentary (which is very well phrased) fits right in.
“Hey, Dad…are you having some kind of nervous breakdown or something?”
How do you assess the life, loves and triumphs of Jeanne Moreau in six or seven paragraphs? You don’t. You just type out the highlights, throw in an observation or two and then walk away, frustrated and irked.
I love this quote from a 1.13.01 interview with Alan Riding: “The cliché is that life is a mountain,” she said. “You go up, reach the top and then go down. To me, life is going up until you are burned by flames.” In other words, no retirement, no rest homes…bop until you drop.
It’s not disrespectful to note that Moreau was the first older actress about whom I had erotic fantasies. Past her physical prime but serious in the sack. In my head she was a world-class MILF, long before the term had been invented.
This was entirely due to her brief performance in Bertrand Blier‘s Going Places (’74), in which she played a destitute middle-aged woman, just released from prison, who eats, smokes, hangs out, walks on the beach and makes love with Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere for a couple of days before…well, before committing suicide. (Which I always thought was a cruel and unimaginative way to arrange for her character to exit the narrative.)
I had seen Moreau in Viva Maria (I’m recalling another very hot scene with George Hamilton) before Going Places, but I was inspired by that magnificent Blier flick to search through all her classic performances, and I think it’s entirely fair to say that aside from her mature emotings and world-class chops, Moreau was one of the most openly carnal actresses of her time. In a subtle, understated, sophisticated way, I mean.
