Wiki excerpt: “Aransas Bay is situated on the southeastern Texas gulf coast, approximately 30 miles (48 km) northeast of Corpus Christi, and 173 miles (278 km) south of San Antonio. It is one of seven major estuaries along the Gulf coast of Texas. There is a rich history of settlements on the bay, including ancient Native American campgrounds dating back millennia, 19th-century European immigrant towns such as Lamar and Aransas, and the present day cities of Rockport, Fulton and Aransas Pass. Resources such as shrimp, fish, oysters and oil are found in or near the bay, and contribute to the local economies.”
Around 6:20 pm I moseyed over to a nearby picnic-type area with food trucks, shaded by pine trees and decorated with strings of little white lights. Families, couples. I ordered a pasta dish and settled into the dusky mellow. The air was nice and warm. After the pasta I felt like napping. I stretched out on a bench. When I awoke 30 or 40 minutes later it was dark out. I don’t think I’ve ever done this in Los Angeles.
It’s the end of the world! Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have tested positive for COVID-19. Why, I’m asking myself, would this horrible dead-bat Chinese virus pick on the ultimate Mr. Nice Guy? How come Sean Hannity doesn’t have it? Why not Trump? We all need to watch Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. Or, better yet, Alfred Hitchcock’s TheBirds.
My 3.9 flight to Austin meant missing the Los Angeles all-media for The Hunt. I’ll post a review of this Craig Zobel-Damon Lindelof collaboration after catching it locally tomorrow night. Here’s a response from veteran movie guy and L.A. Times contributor Lewis Beale:
“I just saw this supposedly controversial movie. The main costars are Betty Gilpin and Hillary Swank. It’s basically a straight-to-video exploitation picture — very bloody — given a thin veneer of relevance with some political content. Featuring a bunch of TV actors and other folk — Sturgill Simpson as a rapper! — who obviously did it for the paycheck (a small one, since most are onscreen for only a short period before they’re knocked off).
“It’s about how a bad joke on the part of some wokester liberals about killing Trumpsters metastasizes into a ‘thing’ with deplorable conspiracy types. This forces the liberals to act on their joke and hunt the rightwingers a la The Most Dangerous Game.
“I found it watchable but nothing more, aided in no small part by a 90-minute running time. It portrays both sides of the political equation as jerks, but any controversial content is basically non-existent. The reviews will most likely be brutal.”
“A gory, hard-R exploitation movie masquerading as political satire, one that takes unseemly delight in dispatching yahoos on both ends of the spectrum via shotgun, crossbow, hand grenade and all manner of hastily improvised weapons.
“The words ‘trigger warning’ may not have been invented with The Hunt in mind, but they’ve seldom seemed more apt in describing a film that stops just shy of fomenting civil war as it pits Left against Right, Blue (bloods) against Red (necks) in a bloody battle royale that reduces both sides to ridiculous caricatures.
“As the umpteenth variation on Richard Connell’s ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ The Hunt is [nonetheless] one of the most effective executions yet (it surpasses the Cannes-laureled Bacarau, but drags along too much baggage to best last year’s Ready or Not).
“Regardless of one’s personal political affiliations, it’s hard not to root for the victims here, and one quickly distinguishes herself from the pack of Deliverance-style caricatures: Crystal May Creesy (Gilpin), a MacGyver-skilled veteran who served in Afghanistan and whose distrust of any and everyone makes her uniquely suited for a final showdown with Athena.
Dylan Wells lives in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood in South Austin. Our nabe is roughly six miles south of the hipster downtown area. As middle-class districts go it’s “pleasant” enough, but you’d have to add “culturally underwhelming.” It’s somewhere between blandly acceptable and “is that all there is?” Or so it seems, at least, to someone accustomed to walking around and sniffing the air in Brooklyn, Paris, WeHo, San Francisco, Prague, London, Venice, Munich and Rome.
South Austin is “fine” as far as it goes, but it lacks a nutritional quality. The suburbs of middle and northern New Jersey are shadier and more soothing-like, and certainly more architecturally distinctive. Ditto historic Key West and Telluride, Connecticut’s Fairfield County, the North shore of Massachusetts, Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley…I could go on and on.
In and of itself Dylan’s place is quite nice — sizable rooms, large and fragrant backyard, a sedate suburban atmosphere, great wifi, excellent TV. And it’s great to see him again, of course. And I love his husky, Rudy. And a half-mile away there’s a nice little tree-shaded area where you can order gourmet dishes from food trucks. And last night we found an above-average Vietnamese “pan Asian” place. I just wish we were parked closer to East Austin or the Mueller or Second Street districts.
I’m told that not that long ago (i.e., back in the ’80s and ’90s) South Austin had a relatively undeveloped rural atmosphere…small forests of oak trees, green fields, creeks and streams and generally pleasing aromas amid the up-and-down typography. Now the natural elements feel challenged if not smothered by an endless, character-free sprawl of bland-ugly shopping malls and gas stations (no sidewalks, nobody walks) and El Crappo discount stores.
Yesterday we drove for miles and miles and it was like “why would anyone want to live here apart from the fact that the neighborhoods are quiet and rents are reasonable?” There’s a basic feeling of blah-ness everywhere. Given my druthers I would rather live in a one-room rathole in an interesting neighborhood than in a flush spacious home in a neighborhood with a nod-out vibe.
If I had to live somewhere in Texas and couldn’t find a decent place in the downtown Austin region I’d like to live in artsy Marfa, which is way too far to drive to from here. (It’s closer to El Paso, but by “closer” I mean a three-hour drive.)
To escape the South Austin blahs we’ve decided to drive this weekend to Rockport, a beach suburb of Corpus Christi, and then stay another night in Laredo (and maybe mosey across the border for some good Mexican food).
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?
