“Francis Coppola has seemingly lost his mind. Watching Megalopolis just now and listening to random moo-cow boos as the closing credits began to roll was a very sad and sobering experience. It’s not just an embarassment and a calamity — I almost feel like weeping for the poor guy — but a film that hasn’t a prayer of attracting any Average Joes or Janes whatsoever, and you can totally forget any sort of fall awards campaign or any distributor even flirting with paying for same…no way, man!” — posted from Cannes on 5.16.24.
Note: Lionsgate has zotzed the inaccurate Megalopolis trailer…yanked, gone.
Five days ago (8.16) World of Reel‘s JordanRuimyposted a limited consensus view (i.e., three viewers) that James Mangold‘s A Complete Unknown, recently research-screened, is allegedly “just okay”, partly due to an opinion that it runs a bit long (two and a half hours).
The law west of the Pecos says that we should never, ever put much stock in research-screening reactions. Still, the Ruimy piece instills a slight feeling of concern. My guess is that Mangold being Mangold, A Complete Unknown may (I say “may”) be leaning toward the usual game plan of a generic biopic, and very much not in the vein of Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There.
Way back in ’22 I wrote the following:
Remember the aggravated conflict between Steve McQueen and director John Sturges on Le Mans, the ’71 racing flick? It came down to Sturges wanting to tell a story about a race car driver…a story that would deliver some kind of emotional resonance for the audience…and McQueen wanting to make a boundary-pushing anti-movie about the racing experience. He didn’t want to invest in the usual strategies and beats — he wanted to immerse audiences in the reality of what big-time racing is really about…how it sounds and smells and makes the bones vibrate.
I’m wondering if a similar conflict has been animating the development of A Complete Unknown (previously Going Electric) since 2020.
HE to Mangold: Be Steve McQueen, be Steve McQueen, be Steve McQueen.
Somebody (Mangold?) wants to fashion a semi-traditional musical drama set in the early to mid ’60s…a script with a solid three-act structure and the right kind of dialogue from the right characters and so on. Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan (this could be the best role he’s ever had) and God-knows-who as Albert Grossman, Pete Seeger and the boys in The Band, etc.
And somebody else is saying “fuck all that…I don’t want a regular-ass popcorn movie that quote-unquote ‘tells the story’ of Bob Dylan’s musical journey between ’63 and ’65…I want a movie that feels and unfolds like ‘Murder Most Foul‘ except delivering a theme about birth rather than death and finality.
But the way to do this is to not try and fashion a traditional-feeling James Mangold film. If you make another Ford vs. Ferrari but with a story focused on Dylan vs. Folkies Who Don’t Like Electric, it’ll be a disaster.
I’m not saying don’t write a good script or don’t use it as a structural diagram or launchpoint, but you can’t make “a Mangold film”…you have to find your way into a different psychology and more of a Hoyte von Hoytema shooting style. Mangolr did quite well with Walk The Line, of course, but this is 2022 and the old Mangold ways have to give way to the new. (Or in this case to the “old”.)
Listen to me, you HE antagonist: The way to make this fucking movie is to just sink into the music, man, and shoot as the story evolves…make it feel like an acted-out Don’t Look Back…use the kind of raw, Dogma-like documentary approach that Lars Von Trier might have gone with if he’d shot Going Electric 15 or 20 years ago…make the kind of film that Luca Guadagnino or David O. Russell or Paul Greengrass might make if they were on a roll…something loose and jam-sessiony and semi-fragmented…find your way through it because you know where it’ll end up at the end so the pressure’s off.
Make a film about Dylan’s folk-to-electric transition that’s as good as Greengrass’s 9/11 movie.
To paraphrase Hal Holbrook‘s “Deep Throat,” just “follow the music.”
Since 2010, Hollywood Elsewhere has been attending the TellurideFilm FestivalPatron’sBrunch. It’s been a great pleasure to munch and hobknob with actors, filmmakers, fellow press folk, etc. Delightful. But this year’s brunch (Friday, 8.30, 10 am) is a differentbird. Some press folk are being disinvited or elbowed aside or what-have-you, and I’ve just learned I’m on this list.
Hey…nosweat. Water off a duck’s ass. It’s all about the movies, bruh. Maybe I’ll be re-invited next year. It’s all a dance.
Posted this morning at 8 am: Well adjusted and professional adults who know next to nothing about the ins and outs of a certain situation don’t jump to conclusions.
The patrons (flush folk who pay $3500 a pass) have been increasingly riled about the brunch being over-crowded with too many aggressively chatty press people (who pay $780 for a basic “festival pass”) and their tendency to dominate opportunities for face-time with brunching celebs. I’ve been hearing about such complaints for a few years.
Apparently push has come to shove over this issue, and as we speak the festival is extra concerned about alienating or angering the swells.
I know Telluride honcho Julie Huntsinger well enough to know it’s not some “we kinda don’t like you as much today as we did five or ten years ago” deal.
A sizable group of press has never attended the patron’s brunch in years past. It’s never been a “come one, come all” situation. This year Julie has been lamentably pressured into expanding the roster of non-invited press…that’s all.
Will THR profile assassin Rebecca Keegan be cordially told “sorry, not this year”? Will any reps from the Penske mafia (Deadline’s Pete Hammond, Michael Fleming, IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, THR’s Scott Feinberg) receive this message from Telluride management? Of course not. They’re too politically powerful, too well-armed.
I haven’t seen a list of the people who’ve been zotzed, but I’m presuming they’re among the smaller, more independent fish in the pond. I’ve attended the brunch for 14 years straight (since 2010) but not this time.
I’m not passing along loose talk about anyone else who may have been handed a proverbial “black spot” (Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”) or who have otherwise been elbowed aside.
Chris Nashawaty‘s “The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982” celebrates eight landmark films that opened 42 years ago — Conan the Barbarian, The Road Warrior, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, The Thing and Tron.
But only three of these were truly stellar and earthshaking — E.T, The Road Warrior and Blade Runner. The other five were noteworthy but problematic here and there.
Poltergeist was pretty good but not classic. I actually sorta kinda disliked The Thing (I prefer the 1951 HowardHawks version to John Carpenter’s) and Tron. Ricardo Montalban was great in The Wrath of Khan but otherwise calm down.
I caught Aliens at the big Los Angeles all-media screening, which happened eight or nine days before the 7.18.86 opening. I had such a great time at the all-media that I went a second time at Westwood’s Avco on Wilshire Blvd. — the same theatre where Tarantino and his Video Archives pallies were. The all-media crowd was on fire, but the commercial screening (I attended an early evening show) was even better, more reactive, more roof-lifting.
Cailee Spaeny says “horror” three times in this interview clip, but says it correctly only once (i.e., the first time). The second and third time she says ‘WHORE.”
Horror is a two-syllable word that Marlon Brando had no trouble pronouncing correctly in Apocalypse Now (“The horror…the horror”) but Spaeny mouths a one-syllable version. When Spaeny said it the second time I thought she’d made a simple grammatical mistake, which we all do from time to time, but then she said it again.
Saying “horror” clearly is obviously not rocket science. You emphasize the first syllable but then you tell the back of your tongue to follow up with the second syllable, and Spaeny blows it twice.
Ask any RADA graduate to pronounce “horror” and they’ll nail it without effort. James Whale said it correctly. Ditto Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Val Lewton, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee. Even Lon Chaney, Jr. said it correctly. But Spaeny can’t get there.
This is called the degradation of the King’s English by an Amurrican. This is called a lack of an exacting education. This is called a shopping mall way of speaking. This is basically a Millennial-Zoomer disease.
So Pedro Almodovar‘s The Room Next Door (Sony Pictures ClassicS, 12.20) costars Julianne Moore and TildaSwinton, but with a few supporting characters.
Why, then, does it feel like a two-hander? It seems to be about Swinton’s war-correspondent character winding down toward finality. Could it be Pedro’s version of Wim Wenders‘ Lightning Over Water?
Swinton has described the film as “a natural successor, strangely, to Pain and Glory.”
Last night the cheering Chicago multitudes said over and over, “We love you, Joe!” But deep down they were saying, “For 24 days we thought you were determined to send us to hell, Joe…you seemed as committed to a Trump presidency as much any MAGA fanatic, and we were horrified and howling. We thought you’d not only lost your mind but turned into a kind of Irish banshee. But thank you, Joe…thank you for caving to reality…thank you for not murdering this country.”
And a part of me will never forgive AOC for having a funny-looking, galumphy, red-haired boyfriend with huge feet, a tiny-eyed “bin racoon” who was obviously not her match…a woman can’t run for president if the appearance of her boyfriend/husband is a topic of negative conversation.
I’d be surprised if film-loving Millennials and Zoomers had the slightest awareness of Peter Medak‘s The Ruling Class (’72). It’s too British, too mid-20th-Century and too propelled by class hatred (iconoclast British lefties despising old-school Whitehall elites) to connect with 21st Century viewers, but very few films fiddled with murder, sex, notions of universal love, vaudevillian music-hall humor and demonic horror like this one did. It may be the only film that successfully mixed these elements.
Peter O’Toole wore a straw-blonde Jesus wig during the first 65%, but his slightly reddish, honey-colored hair during the final 35% is a real trip….gleaming, eye-filling.
