Now that Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth has opened at the New York Film Festival and drawn polite raves from 90% of the critics, it’s time to come down to earth and examine what people really think.

Friend of Jordan Ruimy: “I was very cold on this…the whole time watching I was thinking BORING. The performances are very subdued…Denzel has a couple of genuinely moving moments… but Frances McForman’s Lady Macbeth part is truncated and even the ‘out damn spot’ scene was heavily edited…the cinematography and sets have a stark theatrical look, which struck me as fake…\lots of artifice in general which I usually like but not this time…I’m frankly surprised by the over-the-top high praise…[the film] felt completely unnecessary… I’m sure the cast and crew had a great time doing it but why?”

[HE interjection: Because Frances McDormand wanted to play a 60ish Lady Macbeth, and so she asked her husband to direct a stage version and Joel, wanting to oblige, decided he’d prefer shooting it on film.]

Critic friendo responds: “What does ‘unnecessary’ mean? Why is a movie ‘necessary?’ This is a tale of corporate scheming and ruthlessness that fits very well into the spirit of our time. If this guy found it boring, so be it, but I wasn’t bored for a minute. The movie is visually transfixing. Denzel is terrific in it — emotional and alive.”

Guy who attended Tavern on the Green after-party: “Opinions were all over the map. I’d say two-fifths [or 40%] of the people I talked to were highly enthusiastic, and all in the same way — caught up in the film’s amazing look, and in Washington’s performance. Of the remaining three-fifths [or 60%]**, I’d say half of them thought it was decent but not better, and half actively disliked it. So it’s not for everyone. But I actually think it’s a commercial movie. At least, to the extent that a movie of Macbeth can be. (Even the Polanski version, I believe, was a box-office bomb.)”

** What he’s basically saying is that 30% of the people he spoke to, or close to one-third, hated it. And this was a crowd of swells, remember — invitees who probably felt it would be impolite to enjoy free food and drink while trashing the film. So you can probably raise that 30% to 40%.

I haven’t seen Erin Elders‘ The Cleaner (1091 Pictures, 10.12), but I will. It appears to be some kind of mid-range noir about a financially struggling owner of a cleaning business (King Orba) who accepts a $1K payment from a singer (Lynda Carter) to find her estranged son, but eventually gets caught up in some bad shenanigans.

Exec producer Luke Wilson costars along with Shelley Long, Eden Brolin and Shiloh Fernandez.

I hadn’t actually heard of The Cleaner until I received an emailed invitation at 10:11 am this morning to see it this evening at the historic casino on Catalina Island, under the auspices of the Catalina Film Festival. The ferry (comped) leaves San Pedro at 5 pm, the screening begins at 7 pm, there’s some kind of after-party (although without the presence of Orba, Wilson, Carter or Long), and a ferry returns to San Pedro at 11:55 pm.

Yes, I was invited less than seven hours before the ferry departs San Pedro. “That’s insulting!” I muttered to myself. Then my mood changed.

I suddenly decided that I loved the idea of travelling 26 miles across the sea to see an iffy film noir and then returning to the mainland in the black of night…I loved the last-minute craziness, and there’s something perversely entertaining about being invited this late. I would’ve actually preferred being invited at noon or 1 pm — “please get yourself down to San Pedro in less than four hours!”

I especially loved the portion of the invite that said “we can take care of your DAY TRIP to the island via the San Pedro port,” which seemed to imply that I’d have to pay for the late-night return.

My reply to p.r. agency: “JEFFREY WELLS expressing thanks for invite & interest in seeing the film, but why am I being invited only hours before the ferry departs? Isn’t that a bit sudden? And why the Catalina Film Festival in the first place? And why are you emphasizing that the producers will cover the ‘DAY TRIP’, which seems to indicate that I’ll have to book my own passage back to San Pedro? And who’s King Orba? And how come King Orba isn’t attending the after-party, not to mention Wilson, Carter, Long and the others?”

Honestly? Orba seems like a nice guy and a reasonably appealing actor. He has a pleasing, mellow-type voice. I’m actually interested in seeing this.

I’m not sure how to process the line in which Carter offers him “one thousand dollars” to find her son. It might be a joke a la Mike Myers demanding a ransom of “one million dollars” in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (2011), or it could be sincere.

The agency has offered to send me a link for an embargoed review, available to post on 10.11.

Antoine Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal‘s The Guilty (Netflix, 10.1 — currently in theatres) is a fairly exacting remake of Gustav Moller’s same-titled original, which starred Jakob Cedergren as a suspended beat cop working as a 911 call-center responder, and dealing with an apparent abduction of a youngish mother by her ex-husband.

The Fuqua-Gyllenhaal uses almost the same story, mostly the same dialogue (written or more precisely polished by True Detective‘s Nic Pizzolato), many of the same shots, same tick-tock suspense factor.

I watched Moller’s film before the Fuqua, and I’m telling you right now that the Danish version is way better. Like Moller’s, Jake and Antoine’s version is a single-set thriller that’s all closeups and MCUs and computer screens. The Moller takes place in a Copenhagen call center; the Fuqua-Guyllenhaal is set inside a Los Angeles complex during a major fire and is constantly reaching for the big moments, and is marred by Gyllenhaal’s over-acting.

Moller’s version unfolds in a straight, matter-of-fact fashion — the story happens on its own terms and the suspense isn’t diminished by the subdued tone.

I’m sorry that Fuqua didn’t tell Gyllenhaal to turn it down and ease up. The result is too much sweating, too many hostile outbursts, and too much showboat weeping at the end.

And speaking of weeping, Riley Keough‘s voice performance as the abducted wife is infuriating as she cries and whines and moans in a one-note way. Her character has every reason to feel traumatized and terrified, of course, but the Danish actress in the same role (Jessica Dinnage) occasionally downshifts and delivers a change-up or two, and is much more interesting for that.

As the 45-minute mark in the Fuqua version approached, I was muttering to Keough “Jesus, can you deliver one line of dialogue without sounding like Minnie Mouse on a bad acid trip, fighting back the terror and the tears?”

Peter Sarsgaard, Ethan Hawke, Eli Goree and Paul Dano also do some voice-acting, but there’s no recognizing them.

Paul Verhoeven‘s Benedetta (IFC Films, 12.3) won’t open for another two and half months, but like many films that have been in the oven for a long time and promoted heavily for months on end, I’m starting to feel as if I’ve already seen it. Although the factors that led IFC Films to decide on a December opening probably weren’t extraordinary, a voice is telling me it should come out sooner.

With the exception of Screen Daily‘s Stephen Whitty, the critics who’ve seen Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth via the New York Film Festival are not only admiring but in some cases highly enthused.

Right now both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are posting 89% approval ratings.

How does this square with the fact that nothing came of a months-old screening for Cannes topper Thierry Fremaux, and the fact that the Venice Film Festival committee didn’t care for it, and declined to invite it to the recent 2021 gathering.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman and THR‘s David Rooney found Coen’s film impressive. To go by their reviews, The Tragedy of Macbeth sounds respectable enough. Perhaps not to everyone’s liking, but certainly a film with integrity and a certain scheme. And yet Venice turned it down.

Nonetheless something about these upbeat notices feels a tad suspicious. Robert Daniels calling it “definitely the bleakest adaptation” of Shakespeare’s tragedy prompts the inevitable “okay but why?” Macbeth isn’t bleak and bloody enough on its own? How does Coen’s decision to make his Macbeth stark and stripped down and lacerating…in what way does this approach enhance the material?

Roman Polanski’s 1971 version of this melancholy masterpiece was and is a knockout on so many levels, and yet critics at the time were partly dismissive because they didn’t care for Polanski having injected his own personal tragedy (i.e., the savage murder of his wife and her housemates two years earlier) into the film. And yet, perverse as this sounds, Polanski’s history gave his Macbeth an urgency and an attachment to the early ’70s zeitgeist; in this context very much alive.

What igniting element has prompted Joel Coen’s film other than wanting to give his gifted wife (Frances McDormand) a chance to play a great role? No Country for Old Men was a superb suspense film about a stalking killer, but it was also about a certain cultural poison that, in the view of original author Cormac McCarthy, had begun to infect the water table. What is informing Coen’s Macbeth in this sense? What’s the echo factor? Does it have one?

Friendo: “It’s no secret that pandemic-era film critics have veered towards hyperbole and over-praising certain films. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case with Macbeth, but I’m very excited to see it. Visually, it looks stunning.”

In the unlikely event that Joe Biden decides against running in ’24, Kamala Harris somehow snagging the Democratic nomination for President would absolutely ensure a Republican win. I admire and respect Harris, but she just doesn’t have it. Even if Donald Trump becomes her Republican opponent…I actually don’t have a reading on that hypothetical race, but God help us if that were to happen. Let’s imagine that Biden declines to run for whatever reason — which potential Democratic candidate could step in and win?

BooneOakley‘s “Don’t get vaccinated” van campaign, which happened last Sunday in Charlotte for only a few hours, should be used nationwide. Earnest pleas to millions of Covid vaccination skeptics to please reconsider and take the stab have not worked among certain pockets of rural white bumblefucks, African Americans and Hispanics so maybe a sardonic negative approach will get through to more of them. (Charlotte vaccinations have reportedly risen around 20% since last weekend.) As we speak roughly 182 million Americans — 54.8% of the population — have been fully vaccinated, although 77% of U.S. adults have received at least one dose.