It’s not just my loathing of almost all Asian machismo action spectacle (martial arts, sword and wire ballet) that floats my boat. I’m also indifferent to Japanese anime and manga and regret whatever influence they may have upon modes of 21st Century filmmaking. It therefore goes without saying I never intended to acknowledge, much less see or write about, Rupert Sanders‘ Ghost In The Shell.
The Paramount release not only opened this weekend to sucky reviews but also underperformed — a lousy $19 million from 3,440 theaters. Yes!
The audience was 61% male vs. 39% female. Johansson’s skin-tight outfit plus the sexual aroma of Japanese manga indicated that Ghost In The Shell was basically about giving guys boners, which would explain the less ardent female response. Box Office Mojo‘s Brad Brevetnotes that Scarlett Johansson‘s Lucy opened with $43.8 million, due in part to a larger (50%) female following.
I’ve been mainlining movies my entire life, and I don’t even want to know about this weekend’s box-office biggies, much less sit through them. The dismally reviewed Boss Baby (50% Metacritic, 48% Rotten Tomatoes) narrowly edged Beauty and the Beast to win the weekend. Lionsgate’s Power Rangers came in fourth with an estimated $14.5 million. Who watches this shit? It’s April 2nd, and there’s almost nothing I want to see between now and May 1st. Well, two or three.
The only film opening next Friday that I believe to be 100% worthy is Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation.
Who cares about Going in Style, The Case for Christ and Smurfs: The Lost Village (all opening on 4.7)?
Daniel Espinosa‘s Life (Columbia, 3.24) is bullshit — an absolutely dreadful, soul-draining Alien ripoff. It’s basically just another CG display show (the monster is an unstoppable CG jellyfish-sting ray named Calvin) and an assurance of death among a crew of six on an International Space Station, and a question of how painful and gorey or grotesque their endings will be. We’re talking about rote handbook plotting, completely tired and 100% predictable…no snap, no freshness…unimaginative, uninvolving, checking my watch every 15 minutes.
Any critic who gives this thing a thumbs-up should never, ever be trusted again. Despite its first-rate CG and production values, Life is the very definition of a derivative piece of dogshit. On top of which Espinosa makes it perfectly clear at the finale that a sequel called Life: Eat The Earthlings is almost certainly in the offing. Don’t flatter yourself, pal. The only factor behind green-lighting this thing was a belief that the Calvin CG would be so cool that audiences wouldn’t be able to resist.
I was rooting for Calvin like my son Jett roots for the N.Y. Giants. For the cardinal sin of stupidity I wanted to see the crew members (Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya) die horrible slithery deaths…”get them, Calvin!….get them!…die, actors, die!” And since I didn’t give a damn about any of them and was also bored stiff by Calvin (too omnipotent, too slithery, no weaknesses, no intrigue), the film seemed to take about two and half hours to end, even though the running time is 103 minutes.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that you and a slithery monster are sharing a space capsule that’s about to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. You’re dead meat and you know it — no hope. But before the monster crawls into your mouth and transforms your bodily organs into currant jelly, you have a chance to make an adjustment. You can angle the capsule’s re-entry so that the heat shield doesn’t protect the capsule from the furnace-like conditions that occur during re-entry, which would cause the capsule to burn and melt and disintegrate into 10,000 flaming cinders. Which would kill the monster and save countless earthlings from a terrible fate. If you have any heroism or nobility it’s the only thing to do.
I saw Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation (Sundance Selects, 4.8) in Cannes about ten months ago. The great Mungiu, who shared the Best Director prize last May with Personal Shopper‘s Olivier Assayas, won’t be doing face-time interviews in Los Angeles. (Maybe phoners, I’m told.) My memory’s gone a little stale so I’m catching it again tonight at 7:30 pm.
But I’d see it again under any circumstance. All Mungiu films gain with repeated viewings. I’ve seen Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days four or five times, and I could watch it again right now.
I spoke this afternoon with renowned Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, whose ethical drama Graduation (a.k.a. Bacalaureat) was universally praised after screening yesterday morning. I called it “a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption.”
We discussed the film’s view of things, which is basically how capitulating to soft corruption can seem at first like nothing but that it can slightly weaken your fibre and make you susceptible to harder forms down the road.
Accepting and living with a certain amount of soft corruption is par for the course in my realm. It greases the wheels in this and that way. If you’re at all involved with the hurly burly, you know the truth of this. “This world is so full of crap you’re going to get into it whether you’re careful or not” — a quote from what film?
I mentioned a story I passed along yesterday about my father having persuaded a Rutgers professor to give him a passing grade despite having failed a final exam, which was definitely a soft ethical lapse. Mungiu smiled and said, “Life is complicated.”
Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper finally opens theatrically this Friday, almost ten months after jolting and dividing the Cannes Film Festival last May. It’s being shown tonight at LACMA with Assayas and Kristen Stewart sitting for a post-screening q & a. The excitement that I felt just after the Salle Debussy screening — a sensation I’ll never forget — will be semi-rekindled one last time, and then the movie will die like a mouse trying to cross the Santa Monica Freeway at rush hour.
Yes, this brilliant fear-and-anxiety flick is going to perish faster than you can snap your fingers, which is all the more reason to see it immediately. Unless, of course, you couldn’t care less about theatrical submissions and would rather wait for streaming, in which case I say “go with God” or “go fuck yourself” — take your pick.
Either way Personal Shopper is irrefutably one of the most original and unsettling ghost flicks ever made and certainly the nerviest this century. This has been proven, in a sense, by the pooh-poohers and naysayers. There’s never been an important, game-changing piece of art that hasn’t been trashed in the early stages by milquetoasts and conservatives.
Personal Shopper‘s brilliance is partly about the fact that it’s not so much a “ghost story” as an antsy mood piece about…well, a whole jumble of ingredients but all of them drawn from the here and now. It’s more of an uptown cultural smorgasbord that’s seasoned with a ghostly current that you can take or leave, but it certainly doesn’t hinge on standard shock moments — cracked mirrors, moving furniture and all that.
Remember that Assayas won the Best Director prize last May, and that honors of this sort are never given out lightly.
If you like typical bullshit fast-food ghost movies…if you’re a Conjuring fan…if you like your goose bumps served with pickles, onions and extra cheese in a to-go wrapper then I sincerely hope you have a miserable time with Personal Shopper. The more I think about paying customers who are too stupid or rigid-minded to get it, the better I feel. But if you liked The Innocents and The Haunting, there’s hope for you.
An Australian critic wrote last summer that “I didn’t know that all I wanted in a movie was Kristen Stewart scootering around Paris buying expensive designer fashions for rich people while texting a ghost who may or may not be her dead twin brother.” See? He didn’t know what was coming but he got it all the same. I’ve scootered all over Paris for years on end, and watching this film for the first time…I’m not exaggerating…was simply one of the greatest summaries of that transcendent Paris scooterbuzz thing…it was heaven.
Help me, God…help me to return so I can once again use my wits and agility to dodge all that Paris traffic at night and feel like Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless.
Personal Shopper is partly about how urban life can feel at times, creepy and cold and yet exciting at the same time, but it’s also about the way it all felt in the fall of ’15 (i.e., when Personal Shopper was filming), and about the vibe when you were roaming around Paris or any big-league burgh and coping with that current and feeling varying shades of fluidity and flotation. It’s a darting, here-and-there thing, a fleeting experience about the flutterings and rattles of spirits around the corner. Or deep within. Or out in the ether.
Jordan Peele‘s Get Out, which I saw in the Grove yesterday afternoon, deserves points for blending racial satire with a current of Stepford Wives-like horror, and particularly for the low-key restraint that Peele deals during the first 45 minutes or so.
But while I respect the audacity behind (as Armond White has pointed out) a mix of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and Meet The Fockers with B-level horror, I found what Peele is saying about Obama-era relationships between upscale blacks and whites to be easy and specious. Plus I was seriously disappointed by the standard-issue blood-and-brutality chops during the last half-hour, not to mention Peele’s complete indifference to logic and consequences at the final fade-out.
The critics who’ve gone hog-wild over the racial-anxiety-meets-horror concept have overplayed their hand. They’re singing praises from their own p.c. echo chamber partly because — wait for it — the director-writer and the good-looking, smooth-cat hero Chris (played by Daniel Kaluuya) are African-American, and because the 2017 Film Critic’s P.C. Handbook absolutely forbids dissing or even questioning any kind of subversive genre-bender of this type.
The truth is that Get Out starts well, slowly building on the intrigue and intimations of bad stuff to come, but it gradually devolves the more the horror elements take hold. It’s just not that clever or well thought-out.
SPOILER: Peele’s central idea is that good white liberals (i.e., the kind who “would’ve voted for Obama a third time if we could’ve,” as Bradley Whitford‘s Dean Armitage, the father of Kaluuya’s girlfriend Rose, says early on) are liars — they’re just as racist as any rural Trump fan but with the ability to hide behind a facade of gracious, laid-back behavior. Moreover, their goal is to de-ball blacks who mix them with them socially and politically, and so blacks who ingratiate themselves with allegedly enlightened whites are being hoodwinked and led astray.
Peele isn’t exactly expressing a philosophy of black separatism, but he’s obviously saying “watch out for upscale whiteys…they ain’t on our team.” All of Get Out‘s horror and mayhem stems from this basic viewpoint.
“Last night I caught a test screening of Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri,” reports a Los Angeles-based HE reader. “It stars Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes, an antique-shop owner, and it’s basically about the fact that months before the film’s events McDormand’s daughter was viciously raped and murdered. There’s been no news about the case in a long time and no arrests, and Mildred has begun to feel that authorities may be dropping the ball.
“So she rents out three billboards leading into town and puts up an advertisement that says something along the lines of ‘Why aren’t the cops doing more to catch the guilty?’ and singles out the police chief (played by Woody Harrelson). The police are of course riled about being called out like this (the rest of the town, including Mildred’s son, also think that the billboards are taking it too far), and so begins an interesting battle of wits between Mildred and the police department.
“I didn’t care for Seven Psychopaths much at all, but I really liked In Bruges. I think this film is on par with the latter quality-wise — it’s an incredibly smart, dark comedy with a great script.
One of the biggest self-congratulatory circle jerks and politically correct wank-offs in the history of the Sundance Film Festival happened late this afternoon when Nate Parker‘s heartfelt but sentimental and oppressively sanctimonious The Birth of a Nation ended and the entire audience rose to its feet and began cheering wildly, even ecstatically.
This is a sentimental, briefly stirring, Braveheart-like attempt to deify a brave African-American hero — Nat Turner, the leader of a Virginia slave rebellion in August 1831. But a black Braveheart or Spartacus this is not. Nor is it, by my sights, an award-quality thing.
It will almost certainly be nominated, of course, because it delivers a myth that many out there will want to see and cheer, but don’t kid yourself about how good and satisfying this film is. It’s mostly a mediocre exercise in deification and sanctimony. I loved the rebellion as much as the next guy but it takes way too long to arrive — 90 minutes.
Parker, the director, writer and star, sank seven years of his life into this film, and invested as much heart, love and spiritual light into the narrative as he could. But the bottom line is that he’s more into making sure that the audience reveres the halo around Turner’s head and less into crafting a movie that really grabs and gets you, or at least pulls you in with the harsh realism, riveting performances and narrative, atmospheric discipline that made Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave an undisputed masterpiece.
As noted, Parker doesn’t seem to even respect the fact that he needs to deliver the historic rebellion (i.e., horribly oppressed African-Americans hatcheting white slave-owners to our considerable satisfaction) within a reasonable time frame, which would be 45 minutes to an hour, tops. Kirk Douglas and his fellows broke out of Peter Ustinov‘s gladiator training school around the 45-minute mark.
Some Sundance movies are applauded and whoo-whooed, and others just sink in and melt you down. They get you in such a vulnerable place that your admiration is mixed with a kind of stunned feeling, like you’ve been hit square in the heart. Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester-By-The-Sea, which played this afternoon at the Eccles, is one of the latter. It’s not an upper by any stretch, but in no way is it a downer. It’s really one of the saddest films I’ve ever seen, and if you’ve got any buried hurt it’ll kill you. This is 2016’s first slam-dunk Best Picture contender, and it will definitely result, trust me, in Casey Affleck landing his first Best Actor nomination.
Cast & crew of Manchester By The Sea following 3 pm Eccles screening. Director-writer Kenneth Lonergan is on far left.
During post-screening q & a (l to .r.) Casey Affleck, Matt Damon, Kyle Chandler.
In part because Affleck has delivered the finest, most affecting performance of his life, and in part because he’s lucked into one of the best written lonely-sad-guy roles in years, and because the part, that of Lee Chandler, a Boston janitor and handyman struggling with a horrific mistake that has wounded him for life, taps into that slightly downcast melancholy thing that Affleck has always carried around. It’s like when Gregory Peck played Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird — it’s one of those legendary perfect fits.
I know what you’re thinking — “another grief recovery drama?” Trust me, it’s not that. For one thing its not about “recovery” in any usual, ordinary sense. And it’s about much more than that anyway, and the writing is just spot-on — masterful — in each and every scene. And it can be summed up in a stick-to-your-ribs line, spoken by Affleck’s Chandler, that everyone will remember after seeing Manchester sometime next fall: “I can’t beat it.”
I know what brilliant, gripping, well-crafted cinema feels like, and I’ve come to recognize the strategy of selling a bag of emotional goods to a particular audience, and I’m telling you like I’ve never told anyone in my life that Lenny Abrahamson and Emma Donoghue‘s Room (A24, 10.16) has been way over-praised by invested women and feminized critics, mainly because it pushes certain maternal buttons.
Key passage from my TIFF review: “Room is agony. The story sucks and the emotional currents, while strong, just fret and shudder and play out in a vacuum. It’s a film about confinement, confinement and more confinement. Okay, with a nicely delivered spiritual uplift moment at the very end. But the feeling of physical and psychological entrapment is nothing short of lethal. I for one felt like a dog in an airless box.”
Brie Larson might land a Best Actress nomination, okay, but I will take $100 bets right now against anyone who says it’ll be Best Picture-nominated. Update: I’ve thought about this a bit more and have decided against taking bets. Bizarre as this seems, it’ll probably be nominated — a notion I find extremely depressing. I feel awful about this. A movie I know is very unpleasant to sit through is being embraced big-time.