Daily

Two days ago I re-posted my 9.3.17 review of Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water. I hadn’t mentioned the Oscar-tipped Fox Searchlight release since it opened on 12.8, and it was time to hear some reactions.

Same deal now with Aaron Sorkin‘s Molly’s Game, which opened on 12.25.17 or 11 days ago. I posted a slapshot Toronto Film Festival “review” on 9.8.17, or three and half months before anyone had seen it. So here it is again. Those who’ve seen this motormouthed legal drama are invited to weigh in.

Tweeted on 9.8.17 at 9:30 pm: “Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game is an edgy, brutally complex, hard-driving motormouth thing with some excellent scenes, but the only people I cared about were Idris Elba‘s attorney (i.e., defending Jessica Chastain‘s Molly Bloom on illegal gambling charges), Elba’s pretty daughter and Kevin Costner’s dad character during a third-act park-bench scene with Chastain.

“I didn’t care about anyone else, and I basically found the whole thing, despite the very brainy writing, extremely fleet editing, the scrupulous attention paid to character shading plus that little sapling sticking out of the snow (a metaphor for unfair or random fate)…I found this whipsmart film demanding, not very nourishing and finally exhausting and soul-draining.”

Morning after #1:  Remember that high-velocity, rat-a-tat breakup scene beteeen Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara in The Social Network, which Sorkin also wrote? Molly’s Game is like that all the way through.  You can feel yourself start to wilt.

Morning after #2:  Chastain is so arch, clipped and super-brittle (this is more or less Miss Sloane 2), you just give up after a while.  Elba has a great rhetorical sum-up scene with prosecutors near the end, but is otherwise trapped in a game of verbal ping-pong.  And the various high-rollers who populate the gambling scenes (movie stars, heirs, hedge-fund guys, Russian mobsters) inspire one emotion — loathing.  I hate guys like this, and I have to spend two hours with a whole string of them?

Read more

Michael Wolff‘s “Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House” went on sale this morning at 9 am Pacific. I wanted a hardbound copy to have and hold, but I had this idea that others had the same thought and there’d be a line of 30 or 40 people outside Book Soup on Sunset. So I arrived at 8:30 am, and I was the third guy there. By the time the door opened there were eight or nine of us. No biggie.

I haven’t had time to sink into it, but I did a little skimming over breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien. I found a sentence with a missing word on page 3. “This was the job Bannon a week later” should read “”This was the job Bannon had a week later.”

It’s a fast, easy read — 310 pages — and it feels light when you pick it up. I don’t know where I got the idea that it would run 500 or 600 pages. Wolff got what he got from 200 interviews, and it only represents about 11 months in the saga — Election Day to October ’17 or thereabouts. It’s basically the Steve Bannon story, and the portions I’ve read are…I don’t want to use the word “hilarious” but so much of it is WTF-level.

It ends as follows: “Trump, in Bannon’s view, was a chapter, or even a detour, in the Trump revolution, which had always been about weaknesses in the two parties. The Trump presidency — however long it lasted — had created the opening that would provide true outsiders their opportunity. Trump was just the beginning.”

The Book Soup site is announcing that they’ve sold out of “Fire and Fury,” and that more copies will arrive in Monday, 1.8.

Read more

Barack Obama will be the first guest on David Letterman‘s new six-episode Netflix series, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. The hour-long Obama episode will begin streaming on Friday, 1.12. The remaining five episodes will appear over the next five months.

My first reactions to the Obama booking? I really don’t think he’s doing the country any favors with his light-dab, almost hands-offy comments about the ongoing psychodrama at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Just like he avoided mentioning the Russian intel situation in the weeks before the ’16 election. He’ll probably skirt it again with Letterman, and that’ll be a shame. There’s a madman in the White House so enough with the cheerful smoothie thing, the “I’m not President any more so I can kick back now and relax” routine.

Read more

What are the big takeaways from this morning’s Producers Guild of America nominations? Apart from the obvious, I mean, or the fact that 11 films — The Big Sick, Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Get Out, I, Tonya, Lady Bird, Molly’s Game, The Post, The Shape of Water, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri and Wonder Woman — were nominated for the PGA’s Best Picture trophy, which they call the Darryl F. Zanuck Award.

Takeaway #1: After being blanked by SAG and the WGA, Steven Spielberg‘s The Post has been saved from the guillotine. If it hadn’t been nominated for a Zanuck award, people everywhere would be saying “well, that’s it…The Post is dead meat.” But it was nominated, thank fortune, and so everyone’s now saying “it’s not dead!” Given that it’s the best Spielberg film since Saving Private Ryan, the SAG and WGA blowoffs seemed odd, to say the least. But now it’s back in the game, at least to some extent.

Takeaway #2: Anyone who looks you in the eye and tells you that Molly’s Game isn’t a punishing thing to sit through is a flat-out liar. There’s not enough oxygen, Jessica Chastain‘s brittle performance is a chore, and Aaron Sorkin‘s machine-gun dialogue talks you to death. So why was it nominated? I know some people who respect it but nobody loves it.

Takeaway #3: Why was Wonder Woman nominated? Because it made a lot of money and because the PGA wanted to …what, acknowledge two woman directors instead of one as gesture of support in this, the year of #MeToo pushback?

The PGA’s Documentary award nominees are Chasing Coral, City of Ghosts, Cries from Syria, Earth: One Amazing Day, Jane, Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower and The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee.

There are pack rats (i.e., people who never throw anything out and who gradually choke to death on the clutter) and those who throw a lot of stuff out but hang on to a few remnants. I’m one of the latter. The past will consume you if you let it.

Mark Pellington‘s Nostalgia (Bleecker Street, 2.16) was acquired during last year’s Sundance Film Festival, but it’s debuting at this year’s Palm Springs Festival. Pic “follows several people as they mutually come to a pivotal moment in their lives where they must rid of old family belongings,” etc.

The trailer indicates that Nostalgia has no story. It appears to be an acting-class format that allows several characters (played by Ellen Burstyn, Jon Hamm, Catherine Keener, John Ortiz, Bruce Dern, Amber Tamblyn, James LeGros) to share about the sentimental value of bric a brac they don’t want to part with.

Confession: I’ve never seen Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Nostalghia (’83).

I’ve always been intrigued by Walt Disney‘s Lady and the Tramp (’55) because it’s the only animated feature to be shot and projected at 2.55:1 — i.e., the early to mid ’50s Fox Scope aspect ratio that was phased out in favor of 2.39:1 in ’56 or thereabouts. To the best of my knowledge all other widescreen animated features have been presented in either 2.39 or, in the case of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Super Technirama (2.25:1).

There’s a new extra-laden Disney Bluray coming out on 2.27, but you can order a region-free British Bluray right now for less than $20.

The newbie has a ton of extras [see below], but not the one I’d like to see — a 1.37:1 version that was created for theatres that still hadn’t installed CinemaScope screens by mid ’55.

Eight years ago Fox Home Video released a Bluray of The Robe (’53), the first Hollywood feature shot in CinemaScope. The Bluray contained an alternate 1.37:1 version that was shot concurrently out of concern that the CinemaScope version might be a huge flop. As it turned out the 1.37 version never saw the light of day.

From Lady and the Tramp Wiki page:

“Originally, Lady and the Tramp was planned to be filmed in a regular full-frame aspect ratio [i.e., 1.37:1]. However, due to the growing interest of widescreen film among moviegoers, Disney decided to animate the film in CinemaScope making Lady and the Tramp the first animated feature filmed in the process.

“[But] problems arose as the premiere date got closer and [an awareness dawned] that not all theaters had the capability to show CinemaScope at the time. Upon learning this, Walt issued two versions of the film: one in widescreen, and another in the Academy ratio. This involved gathering the layout artists to restructure key scenes when characters were on the edges of the screen.”

Read more

Is Variety‘s Dave McNary a Get Out “woker”? Look below and consider how he structured his lede for this morning’s story about the WGA nominations. Do you detect a very slight note of favoritism in his decision to state that Jordan Peele‘s script has nabbed a Best Original Screenplay nom “along with” four others? Just a teeny-weeny bit of a “yay, team” attitude?

Imagine, for example, if McNary had written “Emily Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick has landed a Writers Guild of America nomination for top original screenplay, along with Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s The Shape of Water, Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Steven Rogers for I, Tonya.”

Or, better yet, imagine a lede that reads “Steven Rogers‘ I, Tonya has landed a Writers Guild of America nomination for top original screenplay, along with Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s The Shape of Water, Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Emily Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick.”

On second thought don’t imagine alternate ledes because they never would’ve happened.

If you’re going to indicate special approval for a nominee by listing it first and foremost among a group of five, you have to first consider the political climate, and it seems to me that not only McNary but Variety editors are “woke.”

Read more

From a portion of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” titled “Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President” and excerpted in the current issue of New York. The following comes from former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh:

“As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated.

“Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do.

“It was, said Walsh, ‘like trying to figure out what a child wants.'”

Read more