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Instant Haunting Classic

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Worth repeating: John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place, Robert Eggers‘ The Witch, Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook, Andy Muschietti‘s Mama and now Ari Aster‘s Hereditary.

Aster’s low-budgeter, which starts out in a sensible, unforced fashion before flipping the crazy switch around the halfway mark and going totally bonkers (and I mean that in the best way imaginable), is quite the brilliant horror-thriller. You can tell right away it’s operating on a far less conventional, far more original level of craft and exposition than a typical horror flick, or even an above-average one.

The best portions recall the classic chops of early Roman Polanski (particularly Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby) as well as Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents, but I was just as impressed by the performances — three, to be precise — as the shock-and-creep moments, and that’s saying something for a ghost film.


Hereditary director-writer Ari Aster during last night’s post-screening party at Neuehouse.

Hereditary costar Alex Wolff, director Eli Roth.

Hereditary begins as a suburban-milieu film about a family of five that’s just become a unit of four. Odd flickerings of weirdness begin to manifest, but nothing you can point your figure at. And then the number drops to three, and then the spooky-weird stuff kicks in a bit more. And then it goes over the fucking cliff.

The film is carried aloft and fused together by Toni Collette‘s grief-struck mom, Annie. It may be Collette’s most out-there performance ever. It’s certainly her most boundary-shattering in terms of connecting with the absolute blackest of currents. Collette convinces you that her character isn’t suffering a psychotic breakdown of sorts, that she’s going through her torments because it’s all 100% real, and at the same time allows you to consider that she has gone around the bend. Or that we may be watching a metaphor for the tortures of grief-driven insanity.

As the narrative advances Annie becomes more and more nutso, but relatably so. That’s quite the acting trick.

Nearly as effective is Alex Wolff as Peter, Collette’s guilt-crippled teenage son, and Ann Dowd as Joan, a kindly and sympathetic woman who meets Collette at a grief-therapy group. Gabriel Byrne is a little morose as Steve, Annie’s husband. The curiously featured Milly Shapiro is fine as Charlie — Peter’s younger sister, Annie and Steve’s daughter.

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Catching It Tonight

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I’ve heard it all (or most of it), read it all (or most of it), but am watching nonetheless. The DVD pops on 5.29.

From Frank Scheck’s 3.2.18 Hollywood Reporter review: “The documentary, co-directed by Jane McMullen and Leo Telling, brings out the infuriating ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ complicity of those who were aware of Weinstein’s behavior but did nothing to stop it.

“Paul Webster, a former Miramax executive giving his first television interview, says, “Working at Miramax was like being in a cult. The cult of Harvey. I knew I was making a deal with the devil.” He adds, “I think, looking back, that I did know. And I chose to suppress it. I think we were all enablers.”

“[Weinstein is] a terrific documentary, which does an excellent job of summarizing the events in a concise 52 minutes. But there’s one big problem: It’s not long enough. To fully chronicle the massive scope of its subject’s alleged crimes you’d need nothing less than a miniseries. In fact, a limited series. Make that a full season.”

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“Solo” Perspective

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HE reminder: Solo pops in two days. The second half is okay but don’t expect too much. I never felt turned on or lifted up or caught up in the flow of the thing, and I’m saying this as someone who half-enjoyed The Force Awakens, felt mildly engaged by Rogue One and was half-taken by portions of The Last Jedi. I just couldn’t respond any more. I couldn’t take the plunge.

Alden Ehrenreich does a relatively decent job of pretending to be a youngish, much shorter Han, and if you want to go along with this charade, be my guest. But there’s no eluding the fact he’s nowhere close to being a chip off the old block. There’s a moment when Ehrenreich, listing his strategic attributes to Woody Harrelson, says “I’m a driver”…and I almost said out loud, “Yeah, of a fucking Prius!”

I felt hugely bored and irritated during the first hour, which is all about adrenalizing the ADD crowd with the usual Star Wars distractions — Han-in-big-trouble, Han-escapes-trouble, Han drives like a bat outta hell, the usual derring-do, high-speed chases, pulse-weapon battles, skin-of-their-teeth escapes…wow, wow, wow, wow…nothing.

Solo finally shifts into gear with the arrival of Donald Glover‘s Lando Calrissian and the Millennium Falcon, and especially when the Kessel Run smuggle plan kicks in and yaddah-yaddah. But Han doesn’t get behind the controls of the Falcon until the 90-minute mark. And then the film keeps going for another 40 minutes — it should have ended at the two-hour mark already. Plus I honestly lost patience with Harrelson and Emilia Clarke’s characters pulling last-minute, character-shifting switcheroos. Plus the big poker game in which Han wins the Falcon happens at the very end, almost as an afterthought.

For the 37th time, in order of preference:

1. The Empire Strikes Back (’80). Far and away the most handsomely captured Star Wars film (the dp was Peter Suschitzky) until The Last Jedi (shot by Steve Yedlin) came along. The darkest and finest Star Wars flick because it’s essentially a noir, and because the story points are all about losing, which is totally against the formulaic grain of all fantasy and superhero flicks. Lose, bruise, run for your life. The heroes get chased, kicked around, outflanked, betrayed, ambushed and barely survive. Luke convulsed by self-doubt, losing his right hand in a light-saber battle, horrified by a revelation about his lineage. Han being captured, tortured and put into carbon freeze. Guts but no glory, wounds, pain, “there’ll be another time.”

2. Star Wars (’77) is entirely satisfying for what it is and occasionally quite special, but why is it I haven’t re-watched it in several years? Because it’s nowhere near as good as Empire and I just can’t seem to find the time.

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Regrettable Candor

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Asked by Time Out‘s Phil de Semlyen if he ever lost any roles due to being openly gay, Ian McKellen recounts the following: “One. Harold Pinter wanted me to be in a film of his [1983’s Betrayal] and he took me to meet the producer, Sam Spiegel. We sat in Spiegel’s office and I happened to say that I was going to New York. He said, ‘Will you be taking the family?’ And I said, ‘I don’t have a family…I’m gay.’ I think it was the first time I came out to anyone. Well, I was out of that office in two minutes. It took Pinter 25 years to apologize for not sticking up for me.”

The part that McKellen would have played, of course, was Ben Kingsley‘s — i.e., Robert, the publisher-cuckold. Kingsley was excellent — it’s my all-time second favorite of his, right after Don Logan — but McKellen would have absolutely killed. If I’d been in McKellen’s shoes that day in Spiegel’s office, I would have said “I don’t have a family” and left it at that. Then he would have delivered a great Pinter performance that would last and last forever. A shame.

McKellen came out in 1988.

Another Obiter Dicta Reveal

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There are brilliant X-factor horror flicks — John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place, Robert Eggers‘ The Witch, Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook, Andy Muschietti‘s Mama (but not It) and now Ari Aster‘s Hereditary — and there is the pig trough of horror-genre films.

Either you get what serious, classy, smarthouse horror films are up to, or you don’t. Either you understand that when a certain scare switch is flipped by way of hint, suggestion or implication (such as that little-ping moment in Rosemary’s Baby when Mia Farrow reads the journal of a recently-deceased victim of Roman and Minnie Castevet and comes upon the phrase “I can no longer associate myself…”), it connects with convulsive, deep-rooted terrors that are far more disturbing than anything you might find in It.

Not to paint with too wide a brush, but horror-genre fans tend to be on the coarse and geekish side in terms of their preferences. They’re basically about a general opposition to subtlety or understatement of any kind. Which is not to imply that Hereditary errs on the side of understatement. It certainly doesn’t during the second half. But the first half is almost a kind of masterclass in how to deliver on-target chills and jolts through fleeting suggestion rather than the usual sledgehammer approach.

In her 1.30.18 review of Hereditary, The Verge‘s Tasha Robinson wrote while Ari Aster’s film had been praised by Sundance critics as shocking and terrifying, there was nonetheless “some skeptical backlash from horror fans who felt burned by similar advance praise for films like The Witch and It Comes At Night, two extremely tense horror films in which not a whole lot ultimately happens.”

Robinson was dead serious. She really and truly felt that some horror fans (including herself?) felt “burned” by The Witch. Words fail.

From my 2.15.16 review of The Witch: “This is easily the most unsettling and sophisticated nightmare film since The Babadook. That’s a roundabout way of saying that the dolts who pay to see the usual horror bullshit will probably avoid it to some extent. Insensitive, all-but-clueless people tend to favor insensitive, all-but-clueless movies, and I’m sorry but The Witch is mostly too good for them — too subterranean, too otherworldly, too scrupulous in its avoidance of cliches. And because it goes for chills and creeps rather than shock and gore.”

Greatest All-Time Movie Poster?

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Poster designer Bill Gold, who passed yesterday at age 97, began in the advertising department of Warner Bros. The year was 1941, when Gold was only 20, and yet his Wikipage says he designed the poster art for Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca, which both opened in ’42. I don’t know who was running WB’s poster design department back then, but some older person was. I’m not throwing shade, but how likely is it that a fresh-faced 21 year-old, straight out of Pratt Institute, was the sole poster designer for two major WB releases, one of which won the Best Picture Oscar?

Gold was the art and concept guy for dozens of classic movie posters, but the Clockwork Orange poster, which he partially designed at age 50 or 51, was arguably his best. (The primary designer was Philip Castle.) Look at it — it doesn’t project lewd or grotesque vibes, but it almost makes the vague notion of ultra-violence and the old in-out, in-out by way of Alex DeLarge and his deplorable droogs seem almost delicious, like candy or ice-cream. Or at the very least slick and stylish, like album-jacket art for a cool band. I would argue that the Clockwork Orange poster is the greatest of all time. It’s perfect. One glance and there’s no forgetting it.

And yet Gold’s trippy one-sheet for John Boorman‘s Deliverance may be the most creatively mis-designed poster for a major studio release that I’ve ever seen. It suggests that what happened between Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronnie Cox on the fictional Cahulawassee River was a matter of individual interpretation or conjecture. Canoe-paddling out of a big eye suggests some kind of surreal or imaginary fantasy, which Deliverance certainly isn’t. The events that occur are absolutely real start to finish, and so the poster lies. Before today I’d never even seen it. So Gold gets one demerit.

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Son of Soft Corruption

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Sorry for re-posting, but Criterion’s Bluray of Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation pops tomorrow (5.22). Maybe there are some who missed my original review. Even if the jacket art bores or puzzles you, this 2017 film (which premiered in Cannes in May 2016) is really quite essential.

It’s a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption. It basically says that ethical lapses are deceptive in that they don’t seem too problematic at first, but they have a way of metastasizing into something worse, and that once this happens the smell starts to spread and the perpetrators start to feel sick in their souls.

I don’t necessarily look at things this way, and yet Mungiu’s film puts the hook in. I felt the full weight of his viewpoint, which tends to happen, of course, when you’re watching a film by a masterful director, which Mungui (Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, Beyond The Hills) certainly is.

And yet I tend to shy away from judging people too harshly when they bend the rules once or twice. Not as a constant approach but once in a blue moon. I’m not calling myself a moral relativist, but I do believe there’s a dividing line between hard corruption and the softer, looser variety, and I know that many of us have crossed paths with the latter. Let he who’s without sin cast the first stone.

Politicians or dirty cops who accept payoffs from ne’er-do-wells in exchange for favoritism or looking the other way — that’s hard, blatant corruption. Soft corruption is a milder manifestation — a form of ethical side-stepping that decent people go along with from time to time in order to (a) prevent something worse from happening or (b) to help a friend or family member who’s in a tough spot and needs a little friendly finagling to make the problem go away or become less acute.

The soft corruption in Graduation, which is set in a mid-sized town in Transylvania (the region in Romania where Dracula came from), has to do with a father (Adrian Titieni) who’s trying to help his daughter (Maria Dragus), an A-student who hopes to study psychology in London, with her final exam. Unfortunately she’s obliged to take the exam right after suffering an attack by a would-be rapist. The assault momentarily scrambles her brain, and she winds up not doing as well as she might have otherwise.

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Right Here, Right Now

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I’m coping with the usual post-Cannes, L.A.-blues syndrome. I missed last night’s 7:30 pm JFK flight, took a 9:40 pm flight instead. Two compassionate Jet Blue reps took pity and didn’t charge me a penalty. Tennessee Williams and the kindness of strangers.

Missing the 7:30 flight was 35% my fault, 65% the MTA’s.

I was underneath Penn Station on the A and D train platform. An A train with signs that said “JFK” and “Howard Beach” pulled in. It didn’t seem to be going southbound, but I was just fatigued enough to question my own sense of direction. (MTA subway-stop signage doesn’t always clarify which way trains are heading.) I asked a sharp-looking 20something woman, “Excuse me but is this train going to JFK?” Yes, she said. “Really?”

It didn’t seem right but I got on regardless. How could it not be JFK-bound with that signage?

Fake-out! It was a northbound train, headed for Harlem. How could the MTA do this? What kind of fiendish, diabolical minds, etc.? I lost about 15 or 17 minutes, all in. Call it 20. The result was that when I finally got to JFK, I missed the plane by a nosehair.

Middle of the Night

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Ethan Hawke‘s performance in Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed is one of his all-timers. In part, I feel, because he really knows how to channel “tormented”. (I still think Hawke’s anguished-younger-brother performance in Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is his all-time peak.) Somewhere over Kansas last night it hit me that the Hawke of, say, 12 or 14 years ago would been a supremely right Yeshua of Nazareth in Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ. If, obviously, Martin Scorsese hadn’t made his classic 31 years ago and had waited until the early to mid aughts. As moving as Willem Dafoe was, Hawke might have been a notch or two more affecting.

Finally!

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Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54, one of HE’s favorite docs at the Sundance ’18 festival, has finally been acquired for distribution. Zeitgeist Films and Kino Lorber have picked up U.S. rights and will presumably open it later this year. Took long enough!

From “The Way It Was“, posted on 1.22.18: “The ironclad rule about gaining entrance to the original Studio 54 (i.e., Schrager-Rubell, April ’77 to the ’80 shutdown over tax evasion) was that you had to not only look good but dress well. That meant Giorgio Armani small-collared shirts if possible and certainly not being a bridge-and-tunnel guinea with polyester garb and Tony Manero hair stylings.

“As I watched Studio 54 I was waiting for someone to just say it, to just say that Saturday Night Fever borough types weren’t even considered because they just didn’t get it, mainly because of their dress sense but also because their plebian attitudes and mindsets were just as hopeless. It finally happens at the half-hour mark. One of the door guys (possibly Marc Benecke) says ‘no, the bridge-and-tunnel people never got in“…never.’ I can’t tell you how comforting it was to hear that again after so many years.”

Studio 54 also screened during last month’s Tribeca Film Festival.