Daily

All white performers who’ve mimicked or sampled black music, performers or styles are dickish exploiters who need to be corrected and bitchslapped. Justin Timberlake, who has appropriated aspects of black culture in his musical performances (and who was apparently, in the view of some, the careless orchestrator of Janet Jackson‘s boob-flash during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show), found this out yesterday. His crime was tweeting that he was “inspired” by remarks during Sunday’s BET Awards by Grey’s Anatomy actor and social justice activist Jesse Williams, and for subsequently tweeting to a black critic that “the more you realize that we are the same, the more we can have a conversation.”

Williams ranted about “this invention called whiteness” that has specialized in “ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit”. Williams said in so many words that “we need to restructure whites’ function, and ours.”

In short, guys with attitudes like Timberlake’s need to be straightened out and probably diminished for the time being, and, by extension, the memory of infamous music-industry exploiters like Morris Levy needs to be retroactively re-addressed. I don’t think it’s pushing things too far to say if Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips had returned to earth to give their own BET speech, the audience probably would have thrown fruit and booed their asses…right?

Perhaps Presley and Phillips would have been pelted with tomatoes and with ample justification, obviously, but they were coming from a whole different era when they stole black music in order to sell it to ’50s whites. We all do what we can according to the rules and restrictions we encounter when we step up to the plate.

Consider this 6.27 Guardian piece by Rebecca Carroll, which riffs on what Williams was saying. It’s angry and dismissive and reiterates the basic p.c. chant of many progressive black artists, which is that (a) we ain’t “all one” and (b) it’s time for white-ass artists, music executives and TV/movie producers to shut up and chill at the back of bus while artists of color reap the cultural whirlwind, correct the imbalance and reshape things to come.

Read more

Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s Swiss Army Man did $105K last weekend in three theatres, which is pretty good. It opens wide this coming Friday. The initial Sundance kerfuffle (i.e., the film being nearly killed by Jeff Sneider and Ramin Setoodeh) seems to have subsided in favor of this A24 release becoming a “thing.” The 62% Rotten Tomatoes rating obviously means it has a fair amount of fans — that figure could just as easily be 72% or 52%. There seem to be more people agreeing with than disputing this Amy Nicholson remark: “When I first saw it at Sundance, I wrote it off as sublimely stupid. The second time, I realized it was stupidly sublime.” What do I think? After the Sundance rumble I was ready to blow it off because of the farts alone (any movie that makes liberal use of peeing, farting, shitting and belching usually encounters some form of HE resistance), but I guess I’ll be seeing it….uhm, by Wednesday?

I was watching portions of this yesterday between flights. There’s acting here, obviously, but I felt it anyway. Every successful campaign needs a certain lift-all-boats factor, and I can sense a certain musical convergence here. Agreed, it’s mainly the Warren music but she does have a way of making the hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Hillary idea seem…well, something I can let go of. There’s a current here. Yesterday’s Ohio rally was obviously a tryout. Hillary wanted to see how it would go, how it might feel. Now she knows.

A 6.28 NBC News story reports that Hiddleswift fans (i.e., Taylor Swift fans who have a passing interest in her recently revealed relationship with Tom Hiddleston) can buy break-up insurance from Taobao, China’s biggest online marketplace. Which is a thing, of course, because everyone has decided that Hiddleswift isn’t long for this world. Mainly because Swift goes through guys like potato chips so it’s basically a matter of when her next mood swing will kick in. Or Hiddleston’s. Whatever.

It’s obviously a dance of the indulged. They’re spinning around Roseland, and when the music stops that’s it. There are many ways by which the “music” in a relationship can stop playing or more precisely can stop being heard. I had a symphonic run with a beautiful blonde from the late spring to mid fall of 2013 so don’t tell me. (The dream wore off, life issues accumulated, her mood changed and I got dumped…that’s life. And yet God still sheds His grace on occasion.)

I’m giving Hiddleswift another three to four months. Two? If either of them encounters the slightest career pothole or slowdown of any kind, it’s over. On top of which Hiddleston is believed to be a bit of a carouser. Clint Eastwood said it decades ago: “No matter how beautiful or desirable a woman may seem, there’s always some guy in her life who’s tired of fucking her.”

The following description of Jeff Goldblum‘s darting, in-and-out, constantly self-conversing way of being or behaving, written by New Yorker critic Anthony Lane and included in his review of Independence Day: Resurgence, may be the most on-target description of the guy I’ve ever read.

“I will watch Goldblum in anything,” Lane begins.  “That stop-start delivery, all ums and hums, combines with his smile — so winning, yet so quick to die — and his buggy eyes to suggest a soul both hyper and hazed over.  You never quite know how he will respond to any predicament, nor, you sometimes feel, does he.”

Every good film ever made has conveyed the same thing to viewers everywhere, which is that the key creatives made it for reasons above and beyond wanting to get paid and further their careers. They made it because they’d either lucked into or developed something really good, and it really turned them on to work their tails off and assemble it just so and put it on a screen. I don’t have a hint of an inkling of a glimmer of that notion from this Rogue One trailer. All I’m detecting is Disney’s desire to milk that Star Wars cow big-time. Couple that with (a) the presence of Ben Mendehlson and (b) director Gareth Edwards telling EW ‘s Anthony Breznican that he wanted to “pinch” himself when he met James Earl Jones and I’m left feeling…what’s the term, dispirited?

Aftermath: There was incessant wailing yesterday (Monday, 6.27) from fanbabies about my having posted a Rogue One fan-created trailer rather than the official one. (One of them was a Baby Huey-sized critic from a site I won’t mention.) I didn’t think it mattered that much as the vast majority of the fan trailer was/is from Rogue One — there was no ambiguity. And I didn’t “screw up.” I just posted it because I fucking felt like it. But God, Jesus, fine. I didn’t get around to switching it during my Vegas/McCarran stopover late last night, but I’ve done it now. Anal much?

“I didn’t see Knight of Cups when it came out because, I told friends, all I needed to do was close my eyes and imagine it. I already knew it by heart. But time and VOD and an ex-critic’s sense of obligation forced my hand and tonight I watched it. All of it. I can be as much of a cinema snob as the next fellow. I even have soft spots in my heart for Brackage and Tarr. But really?” — Paul Schrader, Facebook-posted on 6.25.16.

Schrader responder: “The film reminds me of what Brando did when he parodied himself in The Freshman. He was saying ‘fuck you, I never cared about any of it’.” [Wells intervention: Which is a complete lie. Of course Brando cared during his Streetcar-to-Waterfront heyday & again during his early ’70s comeback period (Godfather, Tango) — he began to lose interest after that but he was obviously invested before.]

“It’s easy to forget that Days of Heaven was considered experimental and non-linear and people reacted to it by saying it was incredibly boring to sit through.” [Wells intervention: No, it wasn’t. Not by people with brain matter. It was generally regarded as a close relation of Badlands, lovers on the run fused with that dreamy, pastoral thing. Anyone who called Days of Heaven “boring” when it opened in ’78 was immediately discredited.]

“Similarly 50 years from now people will consider Knight of Cups to be supremely narrative and not experimental in the least.” Wells interjection: Bullshit.

“Malick is also saying ‘fuck you’ to the people who’ve been rejecting him for decades.” Wells interjection: “Decades”? The Great Malick Rejection began with To The Wonder and reached gale force in the wake of Knight of Cups.

Read more

I never received invite #1 to see Steven C. Miller‘s Marauders, which of course is opening on Friday (7.1). The Falco guys invited me to a NYC screening, but no LA-based publicist has invited me to jack squat. Has the premiere already happened? Is there a screening this week? I feel concerned about the participation of Dave Bautista. I feel deflated when I hear/see women weeping during a bank-robbery sequence. I feel conflicted in general. In your hands…or not.

The Hillarybots (i.e., a crowd vividly repped by Sasha Stone) who keep saying it’s time for Bernie to persuade his followers to vote for Hillary have some kind of entitlement complex — “She won the most delegates so shut up, bow down and get in line.” Hold on, hold on — it’s on Hillary to bring these people in, not Bernie. But one way to totally smother enthusiasm among the Berniebots will be for Hillary to choose Tim Kaine, a go-along Virginia Senator and liberal-humanist establishment politician, as her vp. Hillary will never be a levitational candidate, but Hillary + Kaine….good God, welcome to the ’90s. 

“Curiosity is the lifeblood of creativity, and when we lose curiosity I think we lose, entirely, inventiveness and we start becoming old.” — Guillermo del Toro. On August 1st a portion of GDT’s “Bleak House,” which I was given a tour of in December 2012, will be on view for nearly four months (8.1 thru 11.27) at a Los Angeles County Museum presentation called “Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters.” The show will present 450 objects, or roughly 10% of GDT’s entire collection.

Actors starring in smaller-scale films tend to seem recognizably human, but when they appear in blockbusters they exude a narcotized aura, as if their organs (including their brain) have begun to shut down. So it is with Chris Pine. I realized he was an interesting actor seven years ago when I saw him in a Geffen Playhouse production of Farragut North. Pine was at least semi-engaging in Unstoppable, Z for Zachariah and Into The Woods, and his performance as a Texas bank robber in David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water, which I saw in Cannes last month, may be his best yet. But mostly Pine makes big-budget CG action crap, and movies like this send me into the cave of hell. I will do nothing but submit and suffer when I see Star Trek Beyond, all so I can go home and explain how it feels to nod off from a lack of oxygen, and how many times I retreated to the lobby to check messages, etc.

Sorkin remark #1: “No one ever in life starts a sentence with ‘dammit.'” Wells counter: “True, but I say ‘dammit’ to myself over and over so if a character is alone at a desk, in bed, driving or in the shower, it’s usable.” Sorkin remark #2: “I’m in a constant state of writers’ block. Writers’ block is my default position.” Wells counter: “What Aaron means is that it’ll sometimes take him a couple of hours to start churning out thoughts and passages. Which is more like writers’ stall than block.” Sorkin remark #3: “It’s not that dialogue sounds like music…it actually is music.” Wells counter: “But if you try too hard to write ‘music’ it’ll come out stilted and turgid. You just have to turn on the spigot and hope for the best.”