All the gossipers are reporting that Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, who both recently costarred in Adrien Lyne‘s Deep Water, are frolicking. As previously noted Affleck looks good these days — the “fat bearded boozer” thing has fallen by the wayside. Life is always best when the aroma of possibility is in the air.

Olive drab plus bright orange…the outdoor color combo from hell. For roughly 20 years Stanley Kubrick wore this same awful, warm-weather, bundle-up hoodie, all through Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut.

Apparel-wise Kubrick never seemed to give a damn. He always dressed with a minimum of fuss and a general aversion to fashion or even style (except perhaps “workaholic nerd style”). From the late ’50s to early ’70s he wore the same dark blue suit and white shirt. And then, sometime after A Clockwork Orange, came the olive-drab hoodie.

I’ ve hated the sight of this damn jacket for decades, and I just wanted to finally say it out loud. You could almost say (i.e., not really) that on a certain level I’ve never forgiven Kubrick for this aesthetic offense. If he had worn a dark blue windreaker with wolf fur, I would have been fine with that.

I’m very sorry that Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost, which had been scheduled to debut at South by Southwest on 3.14 with a follow-up on 3.17, has taken a COV-19 torpedo along with the whole SXSW ship. Yes, Rod and I are friendly but this is nonetheless a strong, vital and worthy film, and it would have been suitably launched had things gone off as planned. Life is unfair.

Early last November I caught a not-quite-finished version. A U.S. forces-vs.-the-Taliban war flick based on Jake Tapper’s book, it’s a rousing, highly emotional drill into another tough battle that actually happened, and another example of the kind of combat flick to which we’ve all become accustomed — one in which the U.S. forces get their asses kicked and barely survive.

Tapper’s same-titled book, published in 2013, is about the ordeal of U.S. troops defending Combat Outpost Keating. Located at the bottom of a steep canyon and absurdly vulnerable to shooters in the surrounding hills, the outpost was brutally attacked by Taliban forces on 10.3.09. For a while there it was very touch-and-go. The base was nearly overrun. Eight Americans and four Afghans defenders were killed.

Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha and Specialist Ty Michael Carter (respectively played in Lurie’s film by Scott Eastwood and Caleb Landry Jones) were awarded the Medal of Honor.

The Outpost starts off, naturally enough, with a subdued queasy feeling of “okay, how long before the bad stuff starts?” What happens is that things start to go wrong vaguely, gradually, in small measures. Then it upshifts into unsettling (a name-brand actor buys it) and then bad to worse, and then worse than that. And then the bracing, teeth-rattling 30- to 40-minute finale.

Lone Survivor, Hamburger Hill, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, In The Valley of Elah, Platoon, We Were Soldiers, Pork Chop Hill — American forces go to war for questionable or dubious reasons and the troops engaged get shot and pounded all to hell. Those who barely survive are shattered, exhausted, gutted. War is bad karma.

It just occured to me that one of the things I loved about Zero Dark Thirty, which is not about the military but the intelligence community, is that it ends with a feeling of modest satisfaction — bad guy smoked, mission accomplished, all is well.

I know I was expected to feel a similar kind of satisfaction from Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge, but I didn’t.

Variety‘s Steven Gaydos, posted last November: “Thanks for calling attention to this terrific film that packs a wallop. Really an edge of the seat experience from start to finish and deeply moving as well. Very Charge of the Light Brigade in that ‘military intelligence’ once again proves oxymoronic and brave young souls are left to figure a way to save each other from catastrophe. Heroes.”

It would appear that Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz‘s Antebellum (Lionsgate, 4.24) is a female-branded revisiting of Twelve Years A Slave by way of H.G. Wells. Successful author Veronica Henley (Janelle Monae) suddenly becomes a slave in the cotton fields after time-travelling back to the Antebellum pre-Civil War South. The trailer tells us, however, that it’s Veronica’s fate “to save us from our past.” So she’s going to overturn slavery in the same way that Rod Taylor lead an Eloi rebellion against the Morlocks? Or lead a Spartacus-like revolt a la Birth of a Nation? Or maybe a little Harriet action? Or transport her plantation pallies back to 2020 and find them jobs in online publishing?

The Daily Beast is reporting that “some” employees of the Hachette Book Group “walked out” of the publisher’s U.S. offices today in protest of the company’s decision to publish Apropos of Nothing, a new memoir by Woody Allen. According to the story, this cabal of #MeToo blacklisters has “been furious” with a decision by Hachette imprint Grand Central Publishing to release Allen’s book “despite allegations that Allen molested his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow.”

This is why everyone hates the wokester Khmer Rouge and the whole cancel-culture mentality. Because they’re totalitarian brutes at heart, and because in this instance they (the Hachette squad that walked out, I mean) are illogically opposed to what is indicated by the facts. This is one instance in which “believe the victim” is a highly questionable guideline.

Here, for the 19th time, is the HE argument:

(1) There is no evidence to support Dylan’s claim. But there’s a fair amount of evidence and ample indications that Mia Farrow, enraged by Woody’s romance with Soon-Yi Previn, made it all up to “get” Woody during an early ’90s custody battle, and as part of this determination coached Dylan to make the claims that she did. I happen to personally believe this scenario. There’s simply no rational, even-handed way to side with the “I believe Dylan Farrow” camp.

(2) If after reading Moses Farrow’s 5.23.18 essay (“A Son Speaks Out“) as well as Robert Weide’s “Q & A with Dylan Farrow” (12.13.17) and Daphne Merkin’s 9.16.18 Soon-Yi Previn interview…if after reading these personal testimonies along with the Wikipedia summary of the case you’re still an unmitigated Dylan ally…if you haven’t at least concluded there’s a highly significant amount of ambiguity and uncertainty in this whole mishegoss, then I don’t know what to say to you. There’s probably nothing that can be said to you.

(3) Excerpt from Yale–New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic report (issued in 1993): “It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen. Further, we believe that Dylan’s statements on videotape and her statements to us during our evaluation do not refer to actual events that occurred to her on August 4th, 1992.

(4) “In developing our opinion we considered three hypotheses to explain Dylan’s statements. First, that Dylan’s statements were true and that Mr. Allen had sexually abused her; second, that Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family and who was responding to the stresses in the family; and third, that Dylan was coached or influenced by her mother, Ms. Farrow. While we can conclude that Dylan was not sexually abused, we can not be definite about whether the second formulation by itself or the third formulation by itself is true. We believe that it is more likely that a combination of these two formulations best explains Dylan’s allegations of sexual abuse.”

I’m sorry but I found Guiseppe Capotondi‘s The Burnt Orange Heresy strangely sodden and downish. I didn’t hate it and actually respected it for what it is — a heart of darkness tale about the wealthy and insincere. It’s a “good” film, I suppose **, but I’ll never watch it again. I felt vaguely drained when it ended.

It basically left me uncharmed and un-intrigued and wondering who would be so bone stupid as to try and dispose of a body in three or four feet of water? And in the daytime yet! And who, for that matter, would allow a certain dangerous fingerprint to be seen and inspected and wondered about by untold hundreds or thousands of art-gallery browsers?

Based on the same-titled 1971 book by Charles Willeford (who also wrote Miami Blues), Heresy is a kind of moral depravity drama about the fine fakery of art or the artfulness of fine fakery. Art forgery, pretension, specious assessments that persuade certain wealthy people to part with immense sums for this or that object d’art, empty myth and the general film-flammery of it all…fuck all or fuck off or whatever.

It’s basically a four character thing, and all it does, really, is hover. It never lands (not really) or generates much in the way of intrigue or suspense. It does give you a certain queasy feeling. Which is something.

The main protagonists, Milan-based art critic James Figueras (Claes Bang) and a watchful Minnesota tourist named Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki) are, for lack of a better term, the main protagonists. They meet at the very beginning and quickly fuck, and before you know it are cruising west in Figueras’ Range Rover to visit the super-wealthy Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger) at his Lake Como villa.

Figeuras has an ethically questionable past, it seems, and Cassidy has discovered this, which is why he’s invited the Man from Milan to discuss a slightly dicey proposition.

A bearded J.D. Salinger-like painter named Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland) lives on the grounds nearby, and Cassidy wants Figueras to steal one of his fabled paintings, even though Debney hasn’t sold or even shown any paintings in years. (He’s painted a few but has burnt them all, apparently.) And so the keenly ambitious Figueras, still with the stork-like Hollis, is soon chatting with Debney and before you know it…a surprise. A great feeling of disappointment, in fact, that knocks Figueras for a loop.

And before you know it there is great anger, flames, a forgery, a sudden disappearance, a death by stupidity (the victim, I mean, is too stupid to understand that expressing fierce moral outrage at an art crime is not the brightest idea when confronting the perpetrator) and a certain after-feeling of “uh-oh, I wasn’t smart enough to play my cards in such a way that I won’t get caught.”

Jagger gives the most amusing and flavorful performance. That Cheshire cat grin of his. I loved Bang in The Square and this time…well, he’s good enough. I didn’t get the wonderfulness of Debicki when I saw her in Widows, and I still don’t. Sutherland is okay as the reclusive painter but he doesn’t (i.e, isn’t allowed to) radiate much.

There isn’t a huge amount of Lake Como footage, but what little I saw I enjoyed. I’ve never actually been there — the closest I came was when I visited the nearby Locarno Film Festival in ’03. It was in the middle of a brutal heat wave, and the boys and I swam in Lago Maggiore every day.

** It doesn’t stink.

Last Friday I mentioned something I’d heard about Gavin O’Connor and Ben Affleck‘s The Way Back, a sports redemption drama about an alcoholic basketball coach. The thing that I heard (and that I shared) is that “it’s not Hoosiers.” I saw it the night before last, and it isn’t.

But you know what? In some ways Brad Inglesby‘s script is as dramatically reputable as Hoosiers — it’s rooted in a real, recognizable, occasionally unfair world of fundamentally decent but occasionally flawed people. And O’Connor’s direction is respectably lean and dutiful, pared-to-the-bone and bullshit-free.

And Affleck’s lead performance…well, he certainly knows what it’s like to be a middle-aged drunk, doesn’t he? That authority and experience filter through. The cynicism, the swearing, the hair-trigger eruptions, the lethargy.

And the film itself is definitely decent. Not levitational but sturdy. I’m giving it an eight. Not an eight-point-five but an honest eight.

Because, for the most part, it isn’t Hoosiers. It’s a step-by-step story about a guy with a serious problem, and while it’s embroidered and punctuated with basketball issues and strategies and the usual ups and downs, it doesn’t turn on the game. It turns on what Affleck’s character, a divorced construction worker who gives up boozing after taking a coaching gig for the same South Bay basketball team that he gloriously played for in the early ’90s, does about his addiction.

It’s not a “let’s man up and put our problems behind us so we can win the playoffs” drama — it’s an emotional (and psychological) saga of a guy who’s furious about something ghastly that happened to him and his ex-wife, and about how he copes with this terrible scar on his heart and soul.

Does he (or more precisely can he) leave the past where it is and live as best he can in the present? Or not? That is the question.

I loved how The Way Back isn’t afraid of Jack’s rage and subliminal longing for self-destruction — it digs right down into that pit. It isn’t the least bit tidy or sanded down or escapist.

What didn’t I like about The Way Back? The horrible San Pedro atmosphere, for one — the blue-collar resignation, the sight of distant harbor cranes and the constant sound of drilling and construction machinery and the hilly typography and the faintly run-down pre-war bungalows and the atmosphere of fog and moisture and the faint flickerings of despair. What a ghastly town in which to exist! (Notice I didn’t say “live” — the best you can do in a town like San Pedro is mark time and hope for a “get out of jail” card.)

If I was somehow stuck in San Pedro (or wherever the hell the film was shot…Carson? Signal Hill?) with no chance of escape, I wouldn’t embrace alcoholism but I’d be sorely tempted to find some form of escape. The whole ugly South Bay sprawl…later.

Another thing that bothered me is a decision to use a certain family tragedy, conveyed around the halfway mark, to explain Affleck’s boozing, and, we’re told, why he had turned to the bottle before and why it only takes a little sharp prodding to make him jump back in. It’s called “laying it on a bit thick” or, you know, overly precise cause-and-effect plotting.

Back in the early ’90s I passed along a boozing story (not my own) to my father, who’d became an AA devotee in ‘75. He found it darkly amusing. It was about a mild-mannered AA dilletante who’d been in and out of sobriety for years, but who notably began bending the elbow again because things were going so well in his life. He felt that the Gods were being so nice to him and so amazingly gracious and charitable that he could celebrate this fact without paying the price. “Wow, the sun is shining and things are going so great…I can start drinking again and have a lot of fun in the evenings, like I did in high school and college!” Hilarious.

Critic pally: “That’s not only a great story but it’s quite typical of something. Drinking because you think things are going just great is one of the best excuses for (functional) alcoholism out there. You’ve mastered your life, and you will master the drinking! Insidiously, that’s part of how it masters you.”

SPOILER:

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Matt Reeves‘ new Batmobile is straight out of a Burt Reynolds redneck movie from the ’70s and early ’80s. Mostly, I mean. With certain variations and upgrades. I don’t know muscle cars very well — I’m certainly not a fan of the whole rural, beer-guzzling culture that worships stripped-down studmobiles with loud colors and no mufflers — but the design of Rbatz‘s new ride is pure bumblefuck, pure Daytona 500.

Reeves seems to be saying to the fan base that while Bruce Wayne/Batman may be a rich guy (i.e., inherited wealth) and a one-percenter, his taste buds are fully in synch with Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby. HE applauds this departure from the usual-usual– at least it’s not same old shite.

Bruce Wayne to fanbase: “Yeah, I’m loaded and so what? What matters is that I understand you guys…I love this kind of rumbling, chooga-looga blue-collar beast, and it makes me feel good to drive this kind of ride…it means I’m a regular Amuhrican dude…yeehaw!”

It’s not surprising that David Fincher‘s Mank (Netflix, award season) was shot in silvery monochrome, but it is a bit curious — certainly noteworthy — for a film set in old-time Hollywood (1940 to ’41) to use an aspect ratio of 2.39:1. In a period realm, widescreen a.r.’s summon associations with the ’50s and ’60s. Then again I personally adore black-and-white Scope — it’s among my absolute favorite formats (along with 1.37:1 Technicolor and 1.66:1 VistaVision).

It’s also unusual that Mank was the first theatrical feature to be shot by Erik Messerschmidt in a senior dp capacity. Fincher is using him because he served as dp on a few episodes of Mindhunter. Messerschmidt also did additional photography on The Empty Man and second-unit photography on Sicario: Day of the Soldado. He served as gaffer on Fincher’s Gone Girl (’14).

A seemingly reputable air-travel website is reporting that American Airlines has announced that they’re suspending their flights from both Miami and New York to Milan through 4.25.20. American Airlines notes that this decision is being made due to a reduction in demand. It also reports that last night a New York to Milan flight was cancelled “after an American Airlines crew allegedly refused to operate the flight “due to fears related to coronavirus in Northern Italy.”

Plummeting demand for a product or service invariably results in lower prices. This is why I recently decided to fly to Cannes by way of Milan rather than Paris. Why, then, are round-trips fares for New York to Milan flights still costing $600? That’s a typical, non-pandemic price. I’m looking for RT prices to drop to $400 or $450 tops, but they stubbornly won’t budge.

Please read Owen Gleiberman‘s 3.1 Variety essay, “The Success of The Invisible Man Reveals the Fallacy of ‘Get Woke, Go Broke.'”

The article is in fact required reading for the contrarian dickheads who accused me yesterday of sounding like a broken record for merely pointing out the woke political undercurrent in The Invisible Man — for saying the film was rotely efficient as far as it went but at the same time was brandishing a certain socio-political consciousness.

Bobby Peru was the worst of them. As I wrote yesterday, “In Peru World films can only be made or processed as purely neutral artistic creations…there can be no such things as political or cultural influences.” He lies, he obfuscates, he blows smoke, he chokes on it.

I’ll admit that in my initial review I didn’t elaborate upon the real-world metaphors in The Invisible Man, partly because I felt numbed by the familiar horror-thriller shocks (Benjamin Wallfisch‘s assaultive score in particular) and partly because the subtext felt built-in from the get-go. But that aside…

Gleiberman #1: “Over the last few years, Hollywood’s mostly superficial onscreen attempt to deal with issues of women’s empowerment has resulted in a track record dotted with box-office failure, and this has given rise to a certain knee-jerk misogynistic appraisal of that phenomenon. It goes back, in a way, to the Ghostbusters remake, which was greeted with undisguised hostility before it was ever released. And when it turned out to be a so-so movie, it got beaten up on as if its failures, comedic and financial, somehow meant something.”

Gleiberman #2: “You could say that the premise of just about every woman-in-peril movie is that toxic masculinity is out there, that it’s scary and violent and dangerous, and that it’s coming for you. (That was true decades before the term ‘toxic masculinity’ was invented.) But when you watch The Invisible Man, the fearful and cunning new thriller starring Elisabeth Moss as a woman who fights off the cat-and-mouse stalking moves of a man she can’t see (and who therefore, to everyone else, doesn’t exist), what’s new is the heightened awareness of what it feels like — what it means — to be a woman in trouble whom no one believes. That’s what makes the film an expression of the #MeToo world.

Gleiberman #3: “The dimension that lifts the movie above Sleeping with the Enemy or a glossy FX potboiler like Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man is the dramatic finesse with which it turns Cecilia’s predicament into a potent projection of something that’s now at the heart of the culture. What I wanted to say is that her predicament — she’s under attack but people think she’s crazy, because her abuser is (supposedly) dead and (in reality) invisible — works as a metaphor.”

HE to Gleiberman: “Dramatic finesse”? This is a Blumhouse film deploying the usual suspense-and-shock tactics. And to emphasize her anxiety and panic, Moss does everything but bleed from her eyeballs.”