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I haven’t seen Jake Scott‘s American Woman (Roadside/Vertical, 6.14), a hardscrabble child-rearing drama starring Sienna Miller. But I know that an erroneous impression about the film is conveyed in a 5.12 Miller interview by Indiewire‘s Kate Erbland.

The headline reads “Sienna Miller Explains Why She Finally Tackled a Lead Role After Acting For 20 Years.” The article begins by describing American Woman as “a smart and progressive film rooted in the female experience…more than that, it stars Miller as the eponymous American woman, marking the first lead role for the actress in a 20-year career.”

In the third paragraph Erbland quotes Miller as follows: “I’ve never carried a film…to be in every scene was really daunting and really challenging, without having a bigger male costar to hide behind and blame things on or being a vehicle for someone else’s film.”

In fact Miller carried a film 13 years ago when she played Edie Sedgwick in George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl (’07), which I found sad, striking, richly atmospheric and pretty much the cat’s meow all around.

You could argue that Factory Girl is a two-character drama with Guy Pearce costarring as Andy Warhol, but my recollection is that Miller’s Sedgwick was much more substantial. Factory Girl was her story, her arc — Sedgwick was the one who experienced all the hurt.

I was seriously taken with Miller’s acting, and in fact interviewed her one January afternoon at the Chateau Marmont, focusing on what I regarded as a breakthrough performance. Miller was only 25 at the time.

Here’s an HE piece (posted on 6.19.07) about the three versions of the film, and about the final version being released on DVD.

Excerpt: “The saga of George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl will be reshuffled once again with a third version set for release on July 17th. The cliche would be to call the film’s arduous shape-shifting ‘a long strange trip’ but it really has been that.” The film had basically been through the Harvey Weinstein meat-grinder process.

“I was lucky enough to see the first version — ’60s Andy Warhol-ish, instinctual, somewhat raw and downtownish — last summer, and I raved about it soon after, and particularly about Sienna Miller‘s tragically fluttery performance as Sedgwick.”

You can stream an HD version of Factory Girl on Amazon.

Here’s one of the shots I took of Miller when we did our January 07 interview at the Chateau Marmont:

To my mind the only serious problem with Martin Scorsese‘s Rolling Thunder Revue doc is that he includes four phony talking heads among several real ones, and thereby violates the trustworthiness that we all associate with the documentary form, and for a reason that strikes me as fanciful and bogus.

The doc acquaints us with 22 or more talking-head veterans of the tour (Dylan included) but among this fraternity Scorsese inserts what Toronto Star critic Peter Howell is calling the “four fakers” — made-up characters portrayed by real, recognizable people:

Sharon Stone, who was 17 when the Rolling Thunder Tour was underway, seems to be speaking as herself but she’s actually “playing” The Beauty Queen. At first Michael Murphy seems to be speaking from his own perspective, but then you realize he’s playing The Politician. Actor-performer Martin von Haselberg (the husband of Bette Midler) plays The Filmmaker. And Paramount chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos portrays The Promoter.

Some of what they say to the camera might be factually correct in this or that anecdotal way, but it’s all basically bullshit — made-up, written-out or improvised recollections that are performed for a chuckle, for the hell of it.

Scorsese explains his decision to include the four fakers in the press notes: “I wanted the picture to be a magic trick. Magic is the nature of film. There’s an element to the tour that has a sense of fun to it…doing something to the audience. You don’t make it predictable. There’s a great deal of sleight of hand.”

In response to which I said to myself “WHAT?” Who says RTR was driven by a sleight-of-hand, put-on mentality? I never heard that before. I thought it was about keeping it real, small-scale, people-level, driving around in a small tour bus, passing out pamphlets, etc.

Exasperated, I wrote an email to Howell, who actually attended an RTR concert in Canada at age 19 and reviewed the concert for a Toronto daily.

Wells to Howell: “Did you feel that the RTR show you witnessed was ‘a magic trick…[with] an element to the tour that has a sense of fun to it…doing something to the audience, unpredictable, sleight of hand,” etc.? What the fuck is Scorsese talking about, ‘sleight of hand’? What the fuck does that actually mean? Sounds like gibberish to me.”

Howell to Wells: “It’s total gibberish. What annoys me about this, actually depresses me, is that the Rolling Thunder Revue wasn’t some kind of scam or magical stunt by Dylan. I was there. I saw the show. I read all the reviews and interviews. It was seen at the time as a sincere attempt by Dylan to get back to his musical roots, as an antidote to the giant stadium tour of the year before. He seemed to believe this. Dylan says in the film the RTR wasn’t a moneymaker, just a great musical event with the sideshow altruism of trying to free Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter from an unjust jailing.

“That’s how I took it in at the time. Sad to think that Dylan and Scorsese are now making it out to be a colossal con job to show how cool they are and to keep the fans guessing. Remember when we thought of Dylan as the real deal, a guy who would speak truth to power? Now he seems determined to convince everybody that he never really meant or cared about most of what he did and sang about.

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Posted in Park City on 1.29.19: “I was half-mesmerized by Julis Onah‘s Luce (Neon, 8.2), a tautly written, convincingly performed domestic drama about racial agendas, attitudes, assumptions and expectations. Set in an affluent Virginia suburb, the film explores a racially mixed group of characters and asks what their core-level attitudes or assumptions about “Luce” (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.), an adopted, African-born high school student, might be. But what it’s really doing is asking the audience these same questions.

“Based on J.C. Lee’s 2013 play of the same name and co-adapted by Lee and Onah, it’s basically about uncertain or ambiguous attitudes about Luce, who may or may not be as bright, likable and reassuringly well-behaved as he projects himself to be. Or maybe the real problem is in the eyes of certain beholders.

“The trouble starts when Harriet Wilson (Octavia Spencer), a vaguely huffy, side-eyed teacher, assigns Luce to write about a historical figure but with a special encouragement to ‘think outside the box.’ When Luce writes about a ’70s activist who flirted with terrorism, Harriett bristles and even freaks a bit. For whatever reason the notion of Luce being some kind of closet radical alarms her, and so (this struck me as weird) she decides to search his locker for possible evidence of subversion. She finds a paper bag filled with illegal fireworks.

“Harriet meets Luce’s adoptive mom Amy (Naomi Watts), shows her the essay and bag of fireworks. Amy tenses about violating Luce’s privacy, but at the same time is grappling with concerns about her son, who was reared in a war-torn African nation during his first ten years, and the kind of person he may be growing into. Or perhaps is hiding behind a veneer of charm and good cheer.”

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We all know what happened with Martin Ritt‘s Hud. Ritt, screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank and Paul Newman wanted audiences to react to the selfish and insensitive Hud Bannon with a mixture of fascination and repulsion — as a symbol of middle-class cynicism and opportunism that was shaping the culture of 1963 America.

Instead audiences (teens especially) found Hud a roguishly charming renegade, and even a half-admirable rascal on a certain level. Newman: “The last thing people would do, we thought, was accept Hud as a heroic character…his amorality just went over their heads…all they saw was this western, heroic individual”.

The bottom line, I think, is that younger audiences weren’t so much delighted with Hud’s caddish behavior as uncomfortable with Melvyn Douglas‘s Homer, a gruff and taciturn voice of old-school morality who constantly frowns at Hud and regards him as rank and poisoned.

Younger audiences interpreted Homer’s admonishments as an echo of their parents and grandparents’ beliefs, which they found stifling to some extent. Hud repped a certain impudent freedom.

Years later Ritt said that kids who saw Hud as some kind of irreverent anti-establishment type were expressing the emerging values of the coming counterculture of the late 1960s.

50 years later the same kind of thing happened with Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street. Scorsese, screenwriter Terence Winter and Leonardo DiCaprio presented what they believed was a half-comic, half-repugnant satire of Wall Street lunatics and the rancid values of guys like Jordan Belfort — a darkly comic indictment of greed and avarice among the 1%.

Instead a good portion of the audience got a huge kick out of Belfort’s excessive behaviors and ravenous appetites, and those of Jonah Hill‘s Donnie Azoff and the general madman culture of Stratton Oakmont. I remember LexG tweeting back then that he’d enjoyed WoWS for “the wrong reasons.” I had a distinct sense that a lot of people were in the same boat.

What other significant films were supposed to deliver a sobering moral lesson or inspire ethical revulsion, but in the minds of moviegoers wound up providing a kind of debased brand of entertainment?

Among my initial reactions to Rocketman, filed during the Cannes Film Festival: (a) I respected the traditional musical scheme and the Ken Russell-meets-All That Jazz theatricality, (b) it’s a “better”, more ambitious film than Bohemian Rhapsody, and yet (c) the only portions I actually “liked” were the first 40 or 45 minutes’ worth (i.e., the young-Elton English stuff), and (d) that once Elton hits the big-time in Los Angeles and starts self-destructing with booze and cocaine (a section that lasts 60 to 70 minutes) the film becomes…well, a bit tiring.

Watching an angry, miserable, emotionally distraught rock star self-destruct (which I’ve seen a hundred times in a hundred rockstar bios and docs) is essentially numbing.

I paid to see Rocketman again last night with Tatyana, and experienced roughly the same reactions. Except, that is, for (d) — those 60 minutes of flamboyant self-destruction don’t play very well the second time. Like, at all.

I’m not walking back my view that Rocketman is a “better” film than Bohemian Rhapsody — it’s certainly more ambitious — but it’s boring to watch a guy snort coke, guzzle vodka, wipe away tears and snarl at people in scene after scene. Get to rehab already!

My advice to those who liked Rocketman after a single viewing is to leave it there.

Tatyana was moderately okay with it and appreciated the early song-and-dance sequences (“I Want Love”, “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fightin’) but she, too, felt that some scenes dragged on for too long during the second hour. She said she liked Bohemian Rhapsody better. She respected Taron Egerton’s performance and thinks he’s a good actor “but I noticed the time when I was watching Rocketman, but I never noticed the time with Rami Malek.”

I’ve mentioned this before but Egerton bothers me. His singing voice isn’t close to Elton’s, and he doesn’t begin to physically resemble him. Plus he’s taller, broader and more muscular than the Real McCoy. I’m sorry but Egerton just isn’t right. Plus he’s constantly “acting”. I’ve seen Elton twice in concert, talked with him at a party, been listening to his songs since the Nixon administration, etc. And I just can’t give in to Egerton the way I submitted to Malek-as-Freddie Mercury.

In a chat yesterday with Late Night screenwriter and costar Mindy Kaling, director Nancy Meyers (It’s Complicated, Something’s Gotta Give, Father of the Bride) struck back at critics who have taken her to task for making superficial “copper pots and white sweater” movies — i.e., wish-fulfillment romcoms about well-off women who live in swanky homes with luxurious, to-die-for kitchens.

“I don’t love [it] when a journalist or critic will pick up on that aspect, because they’re missing why it works,” Meyers complained. “It’s never done to male directors who make gorgeous movies, or where the leads live in a gorgeous house.”

As one who’s repeatedly brought up the copper-pot thing, I’ve never felt there was anything necessarily problematic about Meyers’ characters hanging out in spacious kitchens with gleaming copper frying pans, etc. The problem is that her romcoms rarely seem to rise above this fetishy focus or characteristic — they rarely dig in and climb up to the next level a la James L. Brooks in the’80s and’90s. With one exception (i.e., The Intern), her movies are primarily delivery devices for upmarket wealth porn.

Just about every Nancy Meyers movie involving a female lead of a certain age begins with Meyers saying to herself, “Wouldn’t it be wonderfully satisfying and exciting if…?”

Example: The romantic fantasy in It’s Complicated is that after a foxy older divorced woman (Meryl Streep) begins seeing an attractive new guy (Steve Martin) her re-married, somewhat girthy ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) gets the hots for her and starts cheating on his younger wife (Lake Bell) as they begin an extra-marital affair.

I didn’t buy this any more than I bought the basic plot of Meyers’ Something’s Got To Give (Jack Nicholson‘s randy music executive falling for Diane Keaton‘s affluent screenwriter as she’s courted by Keanu Reeves‘ young physician). In real life a guy like Baldwin would cheat on his new 30something wife with another young ‘un.

The point is that Meyers’ films are always about comfort — i.e., about upper-middle-class affluence, bright chatter, attractive lighting and an attractive older female lead getting to express how strong and soulful she is in the third act.

From my thumbs-up review of The Intern (9.25.15): “Meyers is just as much of a consistent and well-defined auteur as Michael Mann or John Ford or Samuel Fuller — she just makes movies that always happen within a realm of comfort, affluent insulation, alpha vibes and 40-plus romantic pangs. And so nothing rude or disturbing or creepy or traumatic happens, and you just have to accept that this is par for the course.

“A visit to Nancy Meyers Land means shutting out…what, 80% or 90% of the misery and aesthetic offenses and uncertainties and annoyances and dull horrors of real life?”

Yesterday YouTube announced a decision to specifically prohibit hate-agenda videos, or those “alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status,” per a statement posted here.

This sounds like the right way to go except — except! — when it comes to removing Leni Riefenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will (’35), a rhetorically abhorrent but nonetheless masterful piece of political propaganda.

Will is subject to removal because it “promotes or glorifies Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory,” the YouTube statement declared. Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn has reported that a full-length Triumph was removed from YouTube last night. But there are still several clips from the film currently viewable.

The problem is that the cinematography and editing of Triumph of the Will have long been regarded as brilliant in and of themselves. On a purely visual level the film is widely acknowledged as a seminal influencer of generations of filmmakers. Some critics claimed that Will seemed to have influenced the final resistance-assembly scene in Star Wars when Han, Luke and Chewy are awarded medals by Princess Leia. And don’t forget that 1984-ish Apple ad.

There isn’t a cinematographer or director who won’t acknowledge that Triumph of the Will is a major cinematic milestone.

Obviously it can be watched via other platforms. I own a high-quality Bluray that Robert Harris restored in 2015. But what YouTube has done feels slippery-slopey.

There is a difference between garden-variety hate-mongering and important cinematic history.

If you take Triumph of the Will down from YouTube then in a certain way the Nazi Nuremberg rally of 1934 “didn’t happen”, and once you do that elsewhere how different would it be, really, to remove any and all visual records of the Holocaust? Because once you’ve done that in all formats then the murder of six million Jews “didn’t happen” either. The sword cuts both ways.

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HE to Rob Garver, director of What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael: “I saw your brilliant, deeply moving doc in Telluride in 2018, but here we are eight months later and no distribution arrangement? It seems to still be playing the festival circuit (Miami last January, Princetown and Edinburgh this summer) but I don’t understand why it isn’t available as a streaming option at this stage. I would kill to own a Bluray of your film.

“Plus now there’s a 100th anniversary celebration of Kael’s favorite films happening at the Quad (6.7 thru 6.20) and they aren’t showing your doc as part of the presentation? What’s up with that?

Critic friend: “It’s mystifying [that distribution for Garver’s film hasn’t been arranged]. People are acting like there isn’t a big enough audience for it, but documentaries come out every day that have a micro-sliver of an audience (if that). And the movie’s terrific! I was almost shocked by how good it was (given that it’s basically the story of Pauline’s writing — a tricky vantage to sustain over a whole movie).

“I’m always astounded at the hostility to Pauline that comes up in your reader comments, as if her opinions are now not worth the paper they were printed on. Jesus — the levels of male myopia. (And yes, I do think it’s a dude thing.) But as a fan, both of her and the movie, you should really beat the drum for a distributor to pick it up. I could see it playing for a month at Film Forum alone.”

And in Los Angeles at the Nuart or Westside Pavillion. And at the Castro in San Francisco. And so on. And then onto Bluray and streaming.

HE response: Michelle Williams‘ Gwen Verdon out-points Sam Rockwell‘s Bob Fosse, agreed, but both are knockouts. I’ve been saying all along that Williams gives the more affecting performance, but Rockwell’s expression as he’s lying on that Washington, D.C. sidewalk at the very end of “Providence” (premiered on 5.28, caught it yesterday on the plane) is one of those unforgettable moments. His eyes don’t convey shock or terror but a kind of quizzical “really?” He seems almost half-amused by the realization that there really is such a thing as an “end” of a life. The way he’s looking at Williams and going “wow, okay, this is it…thanks for our life together, turbulent as it sometimes was…sorry I was such a selfish dick but that’s who I am or, you know, what I was”…WOW! Yes, Williams owns it for the most part, but Rockwell’s Fosse is easily his finest performance and his first epic one.

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There are sea-faring dramas (i.e., films that primarily take place on floating vessels making longish or otherwise difficult voyages) and there are submarine movies (i.e., films that mostly happen underwater in 20th Century submersibles). These are two different kinds of aquatic animals and should not be mixed up or confused.

Topping the list of HE’s finest sea-faring dramas: Peter Weir‘s Master and Commander, J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat, Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd, John Huston‘s Moby Dick, Lewis Milestone‘s Mutiny on the Bounty (no one’s idea of a great film but one that delivers excellent 18th Century sea-faring realism), Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips, Wolfgang Petersen‘s The Perfect Storm, James Cameron‘s Titanic, Richard Sales‘ Abandon Ship!, Byron Haskin‘s Treasure Island, John Sturges‘ The Old Man and the Sea, Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi.

No good: Ron Howard‘s In The Heart of the Sea. Irritating: Baltasar Kormakur‘s Adrift w/ Shailene Woodley. Disqualifiied: the stupid Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Cabin Boy.

HE’s finest submarine movies, in this order: Das Boot, Crimson Tide, U-571, The Hunt for Red October, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Destination Tokyo, Run Silent, Run Deep, The Enemy Below, Ice Station Zebra, Up Periscope, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea….what others?

Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws is neither fish nor fowl — it’s basically a landbubber monster movie that concludes with a third-act voyage in which three men try to hunt down and kill the beast.

In an April ’16 Tom Hanks career assessment piece, I wrote than “once your cards have gone cold, it’s awfully hard to heat them up again.”

I added that “there’s nothing more humiliating than for a man who once held mountains in the palm of his hands having to push his own cart around the supermarket as he buys his own groceries and then, insult to injury, has to wait in line at the checkout counter.”

The piece was triggered by a Hanks quote from a Tribeca Film Festival discussion with John Oliver: “I peaked in the ’90s.”

Hanks had been respectably plugging along since the end of his late ’80s-to-early aughts heyday (The Road to Perdition was his last big score in that run). Holding on, hanging in there. But just a few months after the Oliver chat, his cards began to warm slightly. Then they got hot again.

Hanks’ less-is-more performance as the white-haired Chesley Sullenberger in Clint Eastwood‘s Sully was respectfully received; ditto his Ben Bradley in Steven Spielberg‘s The Post. But the strongest indication that his mojo was back came when Hanks improvised his way through a pause in a West Los Angeles performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

It seems like a fait accompli that Hanks will be be Best Actor-nominated for playing the amiable Fred Rogers in Marielle Heller‘s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Sony, 11.22).

Six months later Hanks will star as Commander Ernest Krause in Aaron Schneider‘s Greyhound (Sony, 5.8.20), a World War II drama. Later that year he’ll star in Miguel Sapochnik‘s BIOS (Universal, 10.2.20).

Who knows if Hanks will star in Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World, a post-Civil War-era drama, but the project was certainly announced a few months ago.

At some point down the road Hanks will reportedly portray Colonel Tom Parker, the cigar-chomping, straw-hat-wearing hustler who did more to destroy Elvis Presley‘s life and career than anyone besides Elvis himself, in a Baz Luhrman-directed drama.

That’s quite an impressive lineup for a guy whose career had appeared to be in flatline mode only four or five years ago.

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Robert Pattinson is officially locked and loaded to play Bruce Wayne + alter ego in Matt Reeves‘ The Batman.

Reeves: “I’ve talked about making it a very point of view, noir-driven definitive Batman story in which he is investigating a particular case and that takes us out into the world of Gotham. I went on a deep dive again revisiting all my favorite comics. Those all inform by osmosis. There’s no continuation of the Nolan films. It’s very much trying to find a way to do this as something that for me is going to be definitively Batman and new and cool.”