Posted on 9.4.08: I just stumbled out of a screening of Rian Johnson‘s The Brothers Bloom (Summit, 12.19), a sumptuous but impossibly silly and logic-free jape in the vein of…frankly, the movie it most reminded me of was the 1967 Casino Royale, which still reigns as one of the emptiest wank-off movies of the mid to late ’60s.

It’s an elaborate, European-set con-artist movie that imparts none of the fun or the thrill of the game. I didn’t know what was going on half the time, and I stopped caring around the 45-minute mark. Rachel Weisz, as a rich mark named Penelope, is lovely and delightful to hang with — I’ll give her (and the movie) that. But Adrien Brody, as the conscience-wracked half of The Brothers Bloom (sick of being a con man, wants a real life, etc.), is glum and doleful and enervated, and infuriating for that.

Brody’s character’s last name is Bloom, as is his brother Stephen, who’s played by Mark Ruffalo…and yet Brody is repeatedly addressed as “Bloom” and Ruffalo is called “Stephen.” I fell in hate with the movie over this point alone.

I hated the relentlessly sullen poseur crap delivered by Rinko Kikuchi, who plays an appendage named “Bang Bang.” I wanted to see her knifed or shot or pushed into the ocean. All I could think when I watched Robbie Coltrane, who plays “the curator,” was “my God, the man has to lose some weight!” He’s really gone past the tipping point in terms of excess tonnage.

I lasted a little less than an hour, and I was reeling from the preciousness, the overdone continental cutesiness, the feeling of being simultaneously mauled, tickled, fucked with and drugged by the impossibly faux-Wes Anderson style of the damn thing.

Rian obviously wants to be Wes, but this movie makes The Life Aquatic look like Yasujiro Ozu‘s Floating Weeds.

Some will say that The Brothers Bloom is lush and stylistically mesmerizing and beautiful to bathe in, in the empty sense of that term. But this is the kind of movie that appeals to 30-something Entertainment Weekly or New York magazine feature writers who have no taste to speak of.

It’s ravishingly composed and oh-so-poised with a sense of old-world European train-car romance (as it once existed 50 or 60 years ago) , and yet so stuck on its cleverness that I wanted to reach out and strangle the movie — pull it right off the screen, leap on top of it like a 350-pound wrestler and choke the life out of the damn thing.

I counted at least 22 walkouts before I finally gave up. When I left two volunteers said to me, “Is it over? There are so many people leaving!” We all had a good laugh.

The identity of Rust‘s female armorer, the person primarily responsible for the safety of prop guns used on the set of the tragedy-plagued Alec Baldwin western, has been revealed in a 10.23 Daily Mail story.

The Santa Fe Reporter‘s Jeff Proctor declined to name her yesterday as she hasn’t been accused or charged in a crime; ditto Indiewire’s Chris Lindahl in another 10.22 story. But the Daily Mail team — Lauren Lewis, Jennifer Smith, Keith Griffith, Dhawn Cohen, Elizabeth Ribuffo — charged right in and blew the bloody doors off.

The armorer is Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the 24 year-old daughter of “legendary” gunsmith Thell Reed. Rust‘s assistant director — the guy who shouted “cold gun” before handing the loaded weapon to Baldwin, who subsequently and by way of a purely foolish accident shot and killed the film’s director of photography, Halyna Hutchins — is Dave Halls (Fargo, The Matrix Reloaded).

The Mail reports that Gutierrez-Reed’s last job was as head armorer for The Old Way, a Nicolas Cage western. She allegedly stated after that film wrapped that “she wasn’t sure if she was ready to be a head armorer,” and that “she found loading blanks into a gun ‘the scariest’ thing because she did not know how to do it and had sought help from her father to get over the fear.”

It’s been reported elsewhere that various concerns (safety, long hours, a refusal to pay for nearby motels) resulted in a production crew walking off the set of Rust on Thursday morning. “When the crew began to pack up, they found a team of non-union workers waiting to replace them,” the story reports.

It’s also been reported that firearms were accidentally discharged three times — including once by Baldwin’s stunt double who had been told the gun was not loaded, and twice in a closed cabin.

Friendo: “In all that’s been written about the tragic gun incident, one question has strangely not once been posed: Why was Alec Baldwin pointing the gun directly at the director and cinematographer?”

HE to Friendo: “I gather that the shot called for Baldwin to fire almost directly into the lens. That’s been done a few times on other films, or so I gather. The bullet hit Hutchins in the upper chest, exited through her back and hit the director, Joel Souza, in the clavicle area (i.e., the bone that connects the breastplate to the shoulder).

No family-friendly media outlet will speculate about how and when Brian Laundrie died. What’s the most likely scenario? A few weeks ago I speculated that Laundrie might wade into a river with the hope of being eaten by a crocodile, but that’s way too gruesome. Then again his remains were allegedly submerged in water for some time.

In the space of a few short weeks Laundrie, who apparently strangled his fiance Gabby Petito somewhere in Wyoming last August, became one of the most despised killers in U.S. history. But give him this. He was apparently so consumed with guilt that he took his life, or allowed a crocodile to take it for him.

This at least indicates that he wasn’t a total sociopath, that he understood morality and knew that he’d done a terrible thing.

The apparent fact that Laundrie killed himself, in short, means that he was capable, in the final analysis, of thinking and acting morally.

Posted on 9.27.21:

Friendo: “We’re not going to get an honest take on Eternals, are we?”

HE to Friendo: “Not until a straight shooter sees it…someone who isn’t a member of the Marvel choir or the ‘Chloe Zhao can do no wrong’ kiss-ass diversity club…someone like myself, I mean.”

Until it is reported there was an element of anger or aggression in yesterday’s accidental killing of Halyana Hutchins on the set of Rust, reporters and twitter wolves need to get stop trying to heartlessly link this tragedy to Alec Baldwin‘s reputation as Mr. Temperamental.

The poor guy is totally destroyed about this, but to the best of my knowledge what happened yesterday afternoon was purely a technical accident. It’s on the non-IATSE propmaster or armorer, whose name has not been released.

Jordan Ruimy: “Apparently the armorer [i.e., the gun person, different that the propmaster] went off set between takes and shot live rounds out of the Colt .45. The armorer apparently forgot to clear the weapon, so there was still a live round chambered. This is absolutely fucking unacceptable. The armorer is the one who should be held accountable.”

The Daily Mail is reporting that the armorer may be female, by the way.

I am now the proud owner of my very own R*O*T matchbook. Sent from England, arrived yesterday.

I intend to carry the matchbook in a show of solidarity against the anti-North by Northwest exhibit at “woke house” — i.e., the Academy museum. If you’re a late ‘50s Manhattan advertising man, announcing that “rot” is your personal trademark conveys a certain ironic cool. Only someone who’s supremely confident and at peace with himself could admit to having a putrid, decaying, shriveled-up essence.

Jeff Sneider is much more into proletariat popcorn movies than myself. Many times I’ve rolled my eyes at films he’s enjoyed. Sneider was the guy sitting right behind me during a Fox lot Jojo Rabbit screening and laughing his ass off — it was all I could do to not turn around and hiss “what the fuck, Jeff?” So his dismissal of Dune means more than my own.

DUNE: Another beautiful blockbuster bore. A totally dissatisfying 2.5-hr STAR WARS movie sans lightsabers. Cast did nothing for me aside from Oscar Isaac. Someone has GOT to convince Villeneuve to return to Prisoners-Sicario territory. And people want a PART 2 to this snoozefest? pic.twitter.com/p0WQ4EBXOl

— Jeff Sneider (@TheInSneider) October 22, 2021

Here’s a portion of yesterday’s paywalled riff about Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers:

One of the things I adore about this Sony Pictures Classics release (12.24.21) is that it respects a basic biological fact, a fact that Hollywood has only occasionally acknowledged — the bedrock genetic reality of family resemblance.

By the same token George Clooney ‘s The Tender Bar (Amazon, 12.17) has a problem with this, at least as far as the casting of young Daniel Ranieri is concerned. Clooney would have us believe that Ranieri, who seems to be descended from a (take your best guess) Sicilian or Lebanese or Egyptian heritage, is going to grow up to be Tye Sheridan — obviously a non-starter.

Clooney could be saying to his audience, “I know the kid doesn’t look like Lily Rabe or Max Martini but there’s this whole woke and diversity thing going on now, and we have to play ball with that.”

Pedro’s film sits on the opposite side of the canyon — it not only respects family resemblance, but uses it as a plot point.

Without giving away too much of the story, Penélope Cruz is Janis, a Madrid-residing photographer who becomes pregnant by Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a kind of biologist-anthropologist who’s doing forensic studies of the skeletons of victims who were disappeared by the Franco regime.

Their affair has been on the sly as Arturo is married to a woman who’s struggling with cancer. Anyway, the baby (a daughter) arrives and one day Arturo drops by. The instant he lays eyes on her you can tell he’s a bit taken aback. Arturo senses that something might be wrong as he sees nothing of himself in the child’s features.

We can see this also — it’s obvious.

This struck me as a revelation. Parallel Mothers is a movie that actually acknowledges that kids look like their parents (or occasionally like their grandparents)…imagine! Only rarely will U.S.-made films allow for this, and certainly not in present-tense Clooneyville.