Some may not be familiar with typical HBO Max numbers, or the difference between strong, decent and shitty levels of viewership. It’s my understanding that 693K viewers of In The Heights last weekend is somewhere between disappointing and shitty. I do know that Godzilla vs. Kong did a hell of a lot better over the first five days.
I invite any and all comments, but the theatrical reality has apparently been reiterated by streaming figures — outside of progressive wokester types and the good friends of Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, relatively few people were interested in seeing In The Heights. (Thanks to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy.)
Last night I paid my respects to the late Ned Beatty by watching Friendly Fire, a 1979 TV docudrama about the increasing revulsion shared by the real-life Peg and Gene Mullen (Carol Burnett, Beatty) after the mystifying death of their son Michael (Dennis Erdman) while serving in Vietnam.
Army reps tell the Mullens that Michael’s death was a “friendly fire” accident, but they’re stingy with facts. This fudging of specifics annoys, irritates and then enrages the Mullens. Traditional patriotic Iowans at the start, they gradually evolve into antiwar activists.
There’s no big shocking twist at the end — we simply discover that Michael died from “friendly” shrapnel that exploded near his foxhole due to a miscalculation. So Friendly Fire is not Costa Gavras‘s Missing (’82) — there’s no satisfying “gotcha” moment in which the military “bad guys” are revealed as guilty super-shits, and are then punished or shamed. None of that happens.
The movie isn’t brilliant — it’s lean and direct but it lacks a certain elegance. It feels like a rough cut, or a second cut — certainly not like a polished final cut. But it’s a reasonably good film.
Burnett and Beatty are brilliant in every scene — Burnett in particular.
Friendly Fire wound up winning four Emmy awards. Fay Kanin‘s screenplay was adapted from C. D. B. Bryan‘s 1976 book of the same name, which began as a series of New Yorker magazine articles Bryan had written about the Mullens.
I really hated Erdman’s dialogue as well as his performance. We get to know him a bit during the first 15 minutes or so, and he’s presented as way too modest and dutiful…almost angelic. The movie is telling us that Michael was anall–but–perfectfellow — smart, reasonable, soft-spoken, inspired, modest. He feels like a cypher, and I was saying to myself early on that I was glad he’d be dead soon because I can’t stand characters who are this pure of heart, this pure-as-the-driven-snow.
This morning a scolding, legend-in-his-own-mind type sent me the following clip…
HE response: “Obviously a disreputable viewpoint…a delusional, racially-slanted view of Civil War-era history. What’s your point? P.S. — hooray for the slaves who took over the Texas plantation and moved into the bedrooms!”
Scolding guy: “The point is, contrary to your blinkered, ill-informed perspective on the topic, this is the sort of bullshit that Critical Race Theory — the actual material, not the Robin DiAngelo bullshit — seeks to correct. It’s not a ‘religion,’ it’s not ‘Marxism’…it’s a response to over 200 hundred years of lies and romanticization. And to the nonsense that complacent whites believe — like when a black business can’t get financing in a white neighborhood, it’s because they have a bad credit score.”
HE response: “Apart from correcting bad information, Critical Race Theory, as you well know, advances the side-door notion that there is an inherently evil, Satan’s spawn quality to whiteness. And that the only measure that can lift this stain of evil from Amrican Anglo Saxon culture is to submit to intense CRT training and study. You know this, I should say, but you won’t admit it.
“An army of fair-minded people…Bari Weiss, John McWhorter, Bill Maher, Joe Rogan and the entire left-centrist, centrist and conservative population and many, many sensible parents of grade-school children are appalled and horrified about kids being taught that whites are inherently evil. Everyone out there understands this bullshit plain as day….except for woke myopics and fanatics like yourself. Because of you and your brethren, we may be doomed to suffer under President Ron DeSantis for four or eight years, starting in January ’25. Historians of the future are going to despise wokesters like nothing before or since.”
Less than a month hence Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, an in-depth documentary, will be screened and reviewed in Cannes, and we’ll all be obediently diving back into that Dealey Plaza sinkhole once again, for the umpteenth time.
The basic Stone view is that the JFK kill shot came from the grassy knoll, and that the back of his head was blown out with brain matter spilling onto a Parkland Hospital stretcher 10 or 15 minutes later. I’m not doubting what this or that Parkland doctor claimed he saw in emergency room #1, but Hollywood Elsewhere has never seen one glimmer of visual evidence to suggest that the back of JFK’s head was destroyed…nothing whatsoever.
In the Zapruder film it’s JFK’s right temple that explodes, not the rear of his head, plus a split second after the fatal shot Jackie Kennedy‘s white-gloved hand touches the back of his head — how come that glove wasn’t soaked with blood and brain matter?
Oliver Stone to Bloomberg News, 11.15.13 / 2:48: “The evidence in the case…you have to look at the evidence and apply common sense….in my mind the nub of JFK (’91) is that Kennedy was shot from two sides…he was shot from the back and he was shot from the front. And no matter how you fancy up the evidence and talk about gravitational physics and neuro effects and jet effects, it’s all blah-blah-blah.
“The man you see in the Zapruder film and [what] the autopsy revealed [along with] people who saw him right at that moment, right after the death…they all talk about the big shot, the kill shot was from the front. Shot in the front [actually the right temple] of his head, and it blew out the back of his head. It’s what people kept seeing, and they still see it to this day.
“People who were at the autopsy revealed to the assassination records review board that the autopsy photos that are now in the national archives have no resemblance to the head wound that they saw in Bethesda.”
He was damn good at whatever and whomever he played, but when you boil it down his best years happened in the ’70s. Bobby Trippe in Deliverance (’72), a racetrack boss in The Last American Hero, The Marcus-Nelson Murders, The Execution of Private Slovik, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings and Nashville, Arthur Jensen in Network (his greatest performance), Justin Dardis in All the President’s Men, Mikey and Nicky, Lex Luthor’s inept henchman Otis in two Superman films plus Friendly Fire, Wise Blood and 1941.
I lived in a Beachwood Canyon bungalow in ’84 and ’85 (2932DurandDrive), and I recall several times in which I watched the overalled Beatty doing work on his handsome Spanish-style home, which was right across the street from the Beachwood Cafe.
More and more frank depictions of sex and violence began to manifest in the mid ’60s, but relatively few actors have delivered what I regard as serious authenticity when it came to portraying gangsters, hitmen, ruffians, sociopaths, etc.
Any two-bit actor can wear a hollow, ice-cold expression or radiate animal hostility; the trick is to suggest serious malevolence with as little effort as possible, and particularly with your eyes and manner and body language. Bottom line: If you’re a serious monster, the camera can spot it right away.
In my mind one of the most believable bad guys ever was Michael Caine‘s Jack Carter in Mike Hodge‘s Get Carter (’71).
Please name other movie characters who radiated evil and malevolence without any showy gestures or demonstrations. Like Michael Madsen‘s Reservoir Dogs psycho, for example. Heath Ledger‘s Joker doesn’t count (way too showy); ditto Richard Widmark‘s giggly nutcase in Kiss of Death (too spazzy and cackly).
I’m talking about bad guys who simply are that rancid thing. You look at them, sense their vibe and you know they’re the Real McCoy.
Set in the early ’90s, Tick, Tick…BOOM! stars Andrew Garfield as a character based on Larson, a 20something composer and playwright grappling with doubt and uncertainty and whether or not he has the makings of a successful Stephen Sondheim-like composer. Larson finally hit it big when a workshop version of Rent opened off-Broadway in ’93. The Broadway version opened in ’96; the film version opened in ’05.
Pic also stars Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesus, Joshua Henry, MJ Rodriguez, Bradley Whitford, Tariq Trotter, Judith Light and Vanessa Hudgens. Produced by Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Julie Oh and Miranda, pic is written by Steven Levenson (Dear Evan Hansen).
There’s nonetheless a weird obsession that pokes through in two reviews of the film — Eric Kohn’s in Indiewire, Matt Goldberg’s in Collider. Both claim there’s something unseemly about the movie trying to “solve” the mystery of Bourdain’s suicide.
Why is it wrong for Roadrunner to examine Bourdain’s suicide and try to figure what happened? Are we not allowed to ask those questions? Or think about them? Are we invading the ghost of Anthony Bourdain‘s safe space? What the hell else is a documentary supposed to do but ask questions and, if possible or reasonable, look deeper?
You really never know where the next stupid woke umbrage is going to come from. The sensitives and their arbitrary dumbshit “moral” rules. This fucking generation of woke idiots is going to kill us.
Collider‘s Matt Goldberg: “A suicide is not a crime to be solved. It’s a tragic circumstance going to the depths of another person’s psyche. You can’t reason it out because no reason will be satisfying. There’s no conclusion where you will get an audience to think, ‘Oh, well I guess suicide made sense in this regard.’ It cannot comfort, and it cannot illuminate. And yet Neville attempts to reason out why Bourdain would take his own life as if that’s a question that needed to be answered beyond anyone’s morbid curiosity.
“This leads Roadrunner down a deeply dark road where the film basically insinuates that Bourdain’s romance with actor and filmmaker Asia Argento was personally destructive to his well-being. If this is a film about Bourdain and his legacy, then why do we need scenes showing footage of an episode directed by Argento that Bourdain’s coworkers felt were not up to the standards they had set? Why do we need talking heads alluding to tabloids that say Argento was cheating on Bourdain and that drove him to despair and ultimately suicide because his personality operated at extremes?
“Even if you have one talking head say, ‘I don’t want to pin a man’s suicide on the woman in his life,’ the fact that Roadrunner is even broaching that as a possibility is deeply gross and incredibly irresponsible.”
Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn: “Roadrunner enters dicey territory during its final act, as it delves into Bourdain’s relationship with actress Asia Argento, who’s absent from the movie as a participant but appears in ample documentary footage.
“By all indications, Argento brought Bourdain to a new plane of happiness in his final months, when he hired her to direct an episode in Hong Kong shortly before his death. It also gave him a renewed sense of purpose as he became a public voice in the #MeToo scandal with Argento’s revelations about being raped by Harvey Weinstein.
“Roadrunner, however, bursts the sunny image of Bourdain’s new partner with claims from his former collaborators that he cut them off in the midst of the relationship; then the movie goes one step further by hinting at the idea that his suicide was an erratic act of revenge as the romance went south. Despite one subject who makes it clear Argento isn’t truly to blame — Tony killed himself, after all — it’s still a queasy passage that comes dangerously close to exploiting the scenario with a murky explanation assembled from secondhand accounts.”
I may have been overly harsh yesterday in my dismissal of the 40-year-old Clash of the Titans. I’m walking it back a bit because the Harry Hamlin vs. Medusa sequence is half-tolerable. There’s no believing it, of course, but it’s spooky all the same. Otherwise the entire film is a tedious, old-hat, stop-motion joke.
In The Heights has stumbled and crashed at the box-office — not modestly but decisively.
Yesterday morning Forbes‘ Scott Mendelsonlamented an estimate of “a frankly mediocre $5 million Friday” and “an over/under $15 million weekend launch.” Then Varietyreported that Heights had earned even less — $4.9 million on Friday with an expected weekend tally of “just under $13 million.” Now Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin is reporting an $11 million weekend haul.
Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin: “The disappointing commercial reception for In the Heights is puzzling because critics embraced the joyous film, showering it with some of the best reviews of the pandemic era.” HE interjection: Nobody cares what elitist critics think — they live on their own woke planet.
Rubin: “Moreover, Warner Bros. put substantial marketing heft behind the picture, and director Jon M. Chu and Lin-Manuel Miranda devoted a great deal of energy into promoting the movie, which compensated for the fact that its cast was comprised of mostly unknown stars and emerging actors.
“The film’s hybrid release on HBO Max likely affected its box office business. [And yet] recent Warner Bros. releases like Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It still pulled in solid receipts despite being offered simultaneously on streaming.”
Make no mistake — In The Heights is a very well made, ace-level, stylistically assured neighborhood musical with an emotionally affecting current. It made me feel trapped, okay, but I resisted and toughed it out. The apparent message is that unsophisticated proles will only pay for theatrical if the film in question is scary, if it has wowser visual effects or if it’s aimed at kids and families. Teens on a Saturday night or children on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.
Friendo: “The original overestimates of how well In the Heights would do are, of course, the whole problem. (‘Projecting $20 million or higher!”) And that was definitely a case of seeing the movie through woke-colored glasses. ‘Look, it’s a Latinx musical! Every brown person in America will go! The same legions of cool brown people who are going to vote for Kamala Harris for president! What a wonderful progressive world!’
