For me the biggest aspect of James Comey’s Senate testimony was the return of interest in the infamous pee-pee tape. Mainstream media pushed the pee-pee aside a long time ago, and nobody outside this realm wanted to wish for it for fear of disappointment and despair, but it’s probably real. I think. During the Cannes Film Festival I asked Loveless producer Alexander Rodnyansky, a rich Russian guy who knows people, if he’s at least heard that the pee-pee tape is genuine, and, if so, if there seems to be at least a fighting chance it’ll turn up one of these days. I regret to say Rodnyanksy gave me no encouraging replies, and so doing broke my heart.
Late yesterday afternoon I finally saw Patty Jenkins‘ Wonder Woman. I found it stirring from time to time, and, like everyone else, I loved the fresh company of a canny and compassionate female superhero who knows all the angles and pretty much can’t be defeated. Or shouldn’t be. I was thoroughly swimming in Gal Gadot‘s performance as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman, and particularly her character’s loathing of war and a nurturing, humanist determination to rid the world of this pestilence.
I wasn’t a fan of the bluish smokey gray color scheme during the World War I section, but I enjoyed some of the humor and the general winking attitude and professional aplomb. It’s a good film of this type as far as it goes. I didn’t mind a lot of it and I loved certain portions. Really. It’s not good enough to become a Best Picture contender in the fall, but I can understand why some who are super-thrilled by the cultural connotations would want to see this happen.
Wonder Woman poster in Paris metro
I also found Wonder Womandepressingly familiar. For this is yet another D.C. Comics superhero flick, and that means submitting to the same old D.C. formula elements — a draggy origin story that goes on too long, a romantic interest (Chris Pine‘s Steve Trevor), a team of colorful allies (Saïd Taghmaoui, Ewen Bremner, Eugene Brave Rock, Lucy Davis), several action set pieces, a pair of formidable but vulnerable villains (Danny Huston‘s Erich Ludendorff, Elena Anaya‘s Doctor Poison) and a super-demonic uber-villain whose cover identity is only revealed at the end.
To watch one of these films is to sit in a cage or a straightjacket and wait for the usual-usual to happen. It’s stifling. You’re watching it and saying to yourself, “I’ve seen this shit before and I know what’s coming, I’ve seen this shit before and I know what’s coming, I’ve seen this shit before and I know what’s coming,” etc.
From a friend: “The holiday in France is Whit Monday (white Monday) — the day after Pentecost. Pentecost is when the holy spirit (envisioned as a white dove) descended on the disciples. Remember, this is an almost all-Catholic country and Whit Monday is a national holiday.”
I was married here a few months shy of 30 years ago.
From Sasha Abramsky’s 5.18 Nation piece, “Trump Is a Cornered Megalomaniac”: “Yes, it’s a cause for celebration that this miserable, cruel man is on the ropes. [But] men like Donald Trump do not fade gently into their political night.
“Rather, with all nuance sacrificed in pursuit of their senescent need for the spotlight, they scrabble and scratch, lash out and fight. With no self-limiting or self-correcting moral gyroscope, they go down whatever paths they believe offer them the best chance of survival.
There’s something vaguely underwhelming about this N.Y. Daily News cover headline. Not bad, but it doesn’t quite slam it home on some level.
“[This] is a soulless, amoral thug, a con artist now fighting for his life. I do not doubt that, in the end, Trump will be destroyed, that all of those craven, fair-weather friends, those men and women in the GOP whom he embarrassed and humiliated, mocked and deliberately hurt throughout the primary process but who embraced him upon his electoral success, will turn on him as soon as they believe they can so do without destroying their own political careers.
“I do not doubt that he will be derided in the history books as an unmitigated catastrophe for the country. But while those fair-weather friends are still girding for their fight, and the historians are still whetting their pens, Trump, our wounded despot, remains a clear and present danger.”
Smoking Gun excerpt: “According to an arrest affidavit, police arrived at the Pinellas Park, Florida, residence of [Anderson], and were told that Scott had struck Anderson in the face with an open right hand, causing him to suffer a swollen lip with a cut.”
Scott “would not get off the phone after the two had sex,” Anderson allegedly told cops. Words ensued, Anderson said he asked her to leave, and Scott “became upset and hit him in the face.”
In other words, she didn’t “punch” him — she slapped him. Like angry women sometimes do. Like femme fatales have done to tough-guy actors in dozens upon dozens of Hollywood potboilers, gangster flicks and film noirs for decades.
Movies are movies and real life is real life, but what kind of pathetic wimp calls the fuzz after his girlfriend whacks him? Women will sometimes call the authorities if a guy gets rough (and well they should) but guys never do this. Ever! Just as surely as there’s no crying in baseball, a guy never calls the fuzz unless there’s been a shooting or stabbing.
There’s only one way to respond if your girlfriend slaps or punches you, and that’s to just stand there and take it like Lee Marvin did when Angie Dickinson walloped him in Point Blank — just stand there and let her go to town until she gets tired. Only chickenshit candy-asses whine and complain when this happens, much less pick up the phone and call John Law…God! Anderson needs to get in touch with that Vietnamese asshole who whined and howled when he was thrown off that United flight.
I don’t give a damn if I ever visit a late-night club ever again. Clubs and bars are strictly for under-45 salmon looking to spawn, and for me that notion disappeared a long time ago. But Loveless composer Evgeny Galperin, who resides in Paris and knows a few people, has told me that Tatyana and I can drop by Silencio, the club that David Lynch designed and opened six years ago, if we’re so inclined. Why not, right?
Last week a disparate community of tough female film critics and outraged femme-nazi types (Mary Sue, Jezebel) were howling about David Edelstein‘s 6.1 Wonder Woman review for phrases and terms within the review they felt were leering or sexist. Honestly? They seemed to have a point.
In a mea culpa piece that ran on Tuesday, 6.6, Edelstein said he’d been misunderstood or at the very least tarred and feathered with too hasty a brush. He also admitted to having used imprecise or poorly chosen language. Which imperfect writers occasionally do.
The bottom line is that Wonder Woman was and is a very big deal for women everywhere, and particularly in the wake of its huge financial success ($254 million worldwide thus far), and so anyone throwing shade in a way that sounded even a tad sexist was sure to catch hell. This Edelstein did, and in spades. The harridans didn’t disagree with him or reprimand him for incorrect attitudes or callous phrases — they wanted him seized, dragged into the street and clubbed to death.
I’ve tasted this wild-dog behavior myself and probably will again. Surround, bite, tear open stomach and anal cavity, pull out intestines and other organs, consume. It’s a terrible thing to experience, but this is the fucking realm I live in.
Edelstein: “In the context of this spate of comic-book movies (which I consider a blight, but that’s another subject) I underestimated how much a superheroine at the center of a woman-directed film would mean to many people, and descriptions I considered lively and complimentary would come across as demeaning. Moreover, if Wonder Woman will empower women at this moment in history — in which reproductive rights are imperiled, and an admitted groper is working to undo decades of gains for women — then some of the criticisms of my review are just. I reserve the right to think that this is not, overall, a very good movie. But it is an important one.”
“Show Me The Mummy”, posted on 3.20.17: “The Mummy has seemed like a fairly silly film from the get-go, and now those chickens are coming home to roost with talk swirling around that ‘people are laughing at it‘ and that a recent test screening (which may or may not have happened in Glendale on March 8th) drew lousy numbers and that it may not be quite good enough to launch a Universal monsters franchise a la Marvel universe.
“That’s what the basic game plan is — to use the presumed success of The Mummy to generate excitement in a reboot of several classic Universal monster films — ‘a whole new world of gods and monsters’ or words to that effect. That said, has anyone ever expected The Mummy to be anything more than a super-expensive piece of CG goofery? No. Was anyone taking it seriously when they made it? How could they? That Mummy trailer that popped last December makes it look like a satire of an absurdly expensive meta monster flick.
“This is all loose talk, of course. Nobody knows anything, least of all myself. And you always need to take a few steps back when it comes to second-hand sources.
“A screenwriter friend knows a guy who’s fairly close to The Mummy, and he’s hearing that the Glendale numbers weren’t good and that Universal execs are worried about the film’s commercial potential and that Cruise is distressed and that nobody wants to be part of ‘a shitty, hugely expensive, giantly over-budgeted movie,’ and that the most recent cut of The Mummy was screened last Friday for Universal brass.
“There also seems to be some concern (emphasis on the ‘s’ word) about whether audiences will be laughing ‘with’ The Mummy or ‘at’ it.
Another screenwriter friend who hears stuff claims ‘they were laughing at it like people did at Van Helsing, and that Cruise was being so stoic and fighting CGI crap and was too old for this silliness. And, of course, somebody yelled out ‘show me the mummy!’”
This is an opportunity to identify and burn into our collective consciousness the names of critics who gave this thing a modified thumbs up, and in so doing revealed themselves as accommodating to a fault or, if you will, movie-critic versions of Trump supporters (i.e., no matter how appalling they’ll give it a pass).
There is, of course, no right or wrong opinion about anything except when it comes to rancid bullshit CG-driven corporate franchise movies, in which case the only legitimate response is to show no mercy.
I’m not suggesting that the following critics are easy, but…well, I guess I am. They’re certainly indicating an unwillingness to consider the bigger picture, which is that the 21st Century corporate branding and franchising mentality has become a spiritual pestilence — the equivalent of digital locust swarms invading and blackening the souls of moviegoers who, as recently as 10 or 12 years ago, went to megaplexes with actual expectations (close to absurd in a present-day context) of seeing a good, smart, emotionally affecting film.
Brian Truitt, USA Today: “A tomb full of action-packed guilty pleasure that owns its horror, humor and rampant silliness equally.”
Louise Keller, Urban Cinefile: “Beyond the splendid visual effects and extravagant locations, the fun lies in watching Tom Cruise in top form, boyish charm intact, carrying the film with energy and charisma.” Forgive!
President Donald Trump to FBI Director James Comey on 1.27.17: “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”
In response to which Comey said, according to a prepared opening statement prior to Thursday’s testimony, “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner.
“At one point, I explained why it was so important that the FBI and the Department of Justice be independent of the White House,” Comey continues. “I said it was a paradox. Throughout history, some presidents have decided that because ‘problems’ come from Justice, they should try to hold the department close. But blurring those boundaries ultimately makes the problems worse by undermining public trust in the institutions and their work.”
Later on Trump returned to the “l” word: “He said, ‘I need loyalty.’ I replied, ‘You will always get honesty from me.’ He paused and then said, ‘That’s what I want, honest loyalty.’ I paused, and then said, ‘You will get that from me.’
For whatever reason Universal chose not to preview this Doug Liman-Tom Cruise adventure flick at Cinemacon, the mid-March exhibitor confab in Las Vegas. Why, I wonder — because it’s not popcorny enough? It feels totally popcorn — a broad attitude drug-smuggling thriller that seems to fuse the surreal and comedic. Barry Seal, the pilot-smuggler played by Cruise, was in his early to mid 40s when the action of the story occured, so Cruise, who turns 55 in July, is playing more or less age-appropriate. (Seal’s wife is played by 33 year-old Sarah Wright.) By my count Cruise has died in two films thus far — Interview With The Vampire (via natural vampirism) and Collateral (a death scene that improves with each re-viewing).
It would seem that the decades-old Blade Runner suspicion about Harrison Ford‘s Rick Deckard being a replicant has been answered by the trailer for Blade Runner 2049. Deckard, like Ford, has aged, and that, for me, feels like proof that Deckard is flesh and blood. Why on earth would the Tyrell Corporation have constructed replicants that age like humans? This would make no sense at all — none. The official synopsis says 2049 is about LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling) discovering “a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos,” etc. This “leads K on a quest to find Deckard, a former LAPD blade runner who’s been missing for 30 years.” It would follow, naturally, that the K-meets-Deckard moment happens in the third act. I’ve been told, in fact, that the latest cut of Blade Runner 2049, which was test-screened last night in Paramus, New Jersey, runs between 160 and 165 minutes, and that Ford doesn’t appear until “around” the two-hour mark. A guy who attended suspects the Denis Villenueve‘s film will play better with the critics than with your run-of-the-mill, popcorn-inhaling sci-fi geeks. That, to me, would be excellent news.
