I’ve been reluctant to buy into Filmstruck / The Criterion Channel for a long time, but last night…all right, fine, fuck it, I bought a year’s subscription. Now I can finally watch a high-def streaming version of Ingmar Berman’s The Silence. And I can easily watch on my Macbook Pro 15-inch or via the Roku player or even on the (still not fully functional) iPhone.
In honor of A24’s new Climax trailer, a re-appearance of my Cannes Film festival review, posted on 5.18.18: Gaspar Noe‘s Climax is basically two movies, both running about 45 minutes, both scored to relentlessly pounding EDM and both about dancing bodies going to extremes — agile, mad, writhing, flailing around. It’s highly charged at first, but goes nuts in the second half and thereby dwindles.
The first half is “wheee!…lovin’ it!” and the second half is “waagghhh, I’m gonna die!” But they’re both kind of shallow. Energetic, orgiastic, dullish. No dimensionality. But at the same time Climax is worth catching. The mad energy is too intense to ignore.
The first half, once it gets going after a 10- or 12-minute long video interview sequence, is far better. Climax is suddenly a wild, breathless, crazy-pump tribal dance flick — three (or four?) longish Steadicam shots of 20something dancers (Sofia Boutella is the only one I recognized), auditioning for a tour of some kind inside a modest-sized dance hall painted strawberry red (which half reminds you of the reddish gym-sized dance hall in Robert Wise‘s West Side Story), going gloriously wild, letting loose and kicking out.
You could almost describe it as the first-act audition sequence from All That Jazz minus the grace and the training but set to EDM and with all kinds of push-push improv, sweaty and hot and bursting with crazy legs and arms whirling like helicopter blades. None of it guided by a specific dance style, much less a theme or a structure of any kind, but it’s pleasing to just sink into the tribal throb and just, you know, go with it. Shallow but cool in a frenzied sort of way.
And then comes the second half, which is about the dancers reacting badly and in some cases horrifically to some LSD-spiked sangria.
The problem with this portion is that LSD is presented as some kind of evil-trigger drug, as a loosener of civilized behavior and a portal to hostility. It’s predatory, of course, to slip LSD into anyone’s drink without them knowing, and yes, it’s likely that most people, young or not, would react fearfully and perhaps even with panic. I get it.
But deep down LSD is not some kind of vicious-agitator substance. It’s a Godhead drug, and it struck me as unbelievable that each and every dancer goes a little bit nuts here. Nobody — not a single soul — connects with any form of inner divinity and blisses out. Nobody just stops with the crazy and walks outside barefoot and marvels at the night sky.
There’s your rectangular-block, tidy-front-lawn suburbia (exemplified by my boyhood small town of Westfield, New Jersey), exurbia (the leafy, winding-road environs of Westchester and Fairfield counties — Wilton, Weston, Ridgefield, New Canaan, Chappaqua, Bedford) and finally your seriously serene Andrew Wyeth rich-folk farmland regions like the Berkshire foothills, where I was yesterday. Southfield, New Marlborough, Monterey, Sheffield, Stockbridge, Lenox.
I hadn’t visited this Western Massachusetts region since the mid ’80s, and had forgotten how quiet, how disarming, how completely far-from-the-madding-crowd it is. “Gently intoxicating” is one way to describe it The murmuring pines and hemlocks, and the occasional farm-fresh food stands by the roadside. There are whole regions in which your iPhone connectivity totally disappears, and you almost don’t mind. All you can hear is the grass growing.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m still a city boy at heart (and by that I mean Paris, Prague, Rome or Hanoi), but yesterday I felt as if I was 10 years old and sitting on a patch of tree-shaded grass and listening to a nearby waterfall.
“All Quiet on Fondamente de l’Arzere,” posted 14 months ago: There’s a soul-soothing atmosphere of quiet throughout the Dorsoduro and San Croce districts after dark. No scooters, no sirens, no thumping bass tones emanating from clubs, no half-bombed 20something women shrieking with laughter…just the barely-there sound of bay water lapping at pier pilings.
“There are many places, I’m sure, that are just as quiet when the sun goes down. But there are very few where you can’t even hear hints of civilization, where traces of the usual nighttime rumble aren’t at least faintly audible. I can sit at home in West Hollywood and feel cool and collected, but I’ll always hear the occasional helicopter or motorcycle whine or subwoofer speakers thumping in someone’s car or louche party animals roaming nearby. Venice is dead-mouse quiet, especially after 10 pm or thereabouts. You can hear a pin drop.
I didn’t hate The Meg, but I didn’t believe a second of it. But then you’re not supposed to.
Everyone knew that Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws was just a scary summer movie, but audiences were nonetheless persuaded that what they were seeing could be half-real. Spielberg did everything he could to make it suspenseful and flavor it up, throwing in clever tricks and diversions and making at least some of it stick to the ribs.
Meg director Jon Turtletaub has no such inclination. His weightless, stone-skimming film is part put-on, partly a Jaws competition piece and partly a $150 million theme-park jizzathon. It’s assembled like an early ’50s MGM musical, the shark encounters being the musical numbers, of course, and the dialogue scenes providing the usual connective filler.
I didn’t seethe and twitch as I sometimes do during bad movies. I sat there and guffawed from time to time, which I guess is a good sign.
The Meg definitely isn’t scary. It’s too dopey for that. It’s all about wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank…”we have your admission and candy money…we don’t care so why should you?…eh, that wasn’t too bad…that one half-worked, the other one didn’t…please have all fat guys get eaten by the Meg…oh, look, a fat 12 year old kid…can the Meg eat him too? O joy and rapture!”
Every single guy with even a slight weight problem in this film becomes Meg food, or so I recall. Does Page Kennedy get eaten? I think so but I’m not 100% sure. I was zoning out during the last third — i.e., awake but glazed over.
Three Hollywood Elsewhere rules for shark movies: (1) Feel free to kill off fat guys and all fathers and secondary characters, but (2) no feeding women to the shark or you’ll have the MeToo! movement on your ass, and (3) never kill off an entertaining character who has a sharp-tongued, irreverent attitude thing going on.
You don’t want to hear about the plot or the set-up, which is all hand-me-down, by-the-numbers crap.
Jason Statham is the studly tough guy who has an early traumatic run-in with the Megalodon, a 75-foot-long prehistoric shark, in a kind of Octopus’s Garden in the Phillipine trench. An underwater research facility funded by a mildly overweight billionaire nerd (Rainn Wilson) with fairly atrocious taste in footwear. Oceanographers exploring a hidden ecosystem in the trench, blah blah, but the Meg tries to eat a submersible piloted by Statham’s ex-wife (Jessica McNamee) blah blah. There’s also a fetching marine biologist (Li Bingbing) who quickly develops the hots for Statham. Her oceanographer father (Winston Chao) is bland boredom personfied.
There are maybe five or six “musical numbers” during the first two acts (whew, that was close, almost got eaten!). In act three the Meg decides to chow down on a crowded swimming area a la Jaws….hors d’oeuvres! And then the big finale in which Statham singlehandedly dominates and defeats.
There are lots of homages to other water-logged films. There’s a scene in which a giant squid wraps itself around a submersible a la 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. There’s a “reviving an apparently drowned pretty woman” scene a la The Abyss. There’s a scene with a little flop-eared white poodle called Pippin getting eaten, just like another dog named Pippin got eaten in Spielberg’s film. There’s a cable-drag scene out of Jaws. At one point Statham mounts and rides the Megalodon like Gregory Peck‘s Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (’56), and there’s even a close-up shot of the Meg’s eye looking right at Statham — an exact copy of Moby Dick doing the same with Peck.
I wasn’t able to catch a Manhattan screening of John Chu‘s Crazy Rich Asians (Warner Bros., 8.15). I can’t honestly say that I’m sorry about that, despite the excellent reviews. I realize it’s a big representation thing (i.e., the first all-Asian film to get a big opening since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club) but I have some issues. I have a problem with any film of any ethnic persuasion that sells itself with an image of an attractive young couple smiling and gently embracing. That image alone says “swoony girly flick.” I have a problem with any film that “takes you back to the greatest hits of Nancy Meyers, Richard Curtis and Nora Ephron” — aaggghhh! I have a problem with any film described as “two hours of romantic fantasy and real-estate porn, poured on so thick it’s almost lickable.” Anything wealth-porny makes me nauseous. And I have a huge problem with the critic who wrote “the only excuse you have not to see Crazy Rich Asians is because you hate love“…blecccch! I will see Crazy Rich Asians at the next opportunity, but I’m just saying.
Three years ago I repeated my long-held Taxi Driver perception that Travis Bickle died on the couch after that East Village shoot-out. Everything that happens in the epilogue — the newspaper articles praising him for having murdered a couple of pimps, Iris’s parents writing to thank him for saving their daughter, Cybil Shephard looking at him dreamily after he drops her off at her Grammercy Park apartment — is Travis’s dying fantasy. And then in the last shot he’s driving along and looks into the rearview mirror with a slight look of alarm, apparently sensing that something’s wrong and…zhhhoop! Bickle disappears.
It seems obvious as hell, but no one ever agreed with me. Until a week ago, that is.
“Last week, immediately after watching Martin Scorsese’s 1976 fever dream for the first time in more than a decade, I scrambled for my phone to confirm that I was not the only person who had completely misremembered the ending of the movie: I could have sworn Travis Bickle died.
“The last image I remembered from Taxi Driver was that famous, otherworldly slow-motion shot from above — a ‘priest’s eye view,’ Scorsese has called it — cataloging the carnage of Bickle’s killing spree as the police arrive. What I’d forgotten was the movie’s surreal coda, in which Bickle not only survives but becomes a vigilante hero in the newspapers, receives a letter from 12-year-old Iris’s parents thanking Bickle for saving their daughter from a life of prostitution, and, perhaps least plausibly, gets another chance with his WASP goddess, Betsy, even though she knows he has just murdered three people and the last time she saw him he showed up at her workplace to harass her, threaten her, and tell her she was scum just like everybody else. With all due respect to Paul Schrader, I liked my ending better. It had a certain closure.”
Wells to Zoladz: Schrader and Scorsese’s ending is your own. They’re obviously telling us that we’re watching Bickle’s bullshit fantasy about what happened after the Lower East Side shoot-out.
Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Ballad of Flat and Scruggs….sorry, The Ballad of Lester Scruggs…sorry, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs will play the 56th New York Film Festival (9.28 to 10.14). Which apparently means that after debuting at the Venice Film Festival it won’t play Telluride or Toronto.
The three headliners at this storied Manhattan festival are Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite (opening night), Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma (centerpiece) and Julian Schnabel‘s At Eternity’s Gate (closing night).
Other New York Film Festival selections: Jafar Panahi‘s 3 Faces, Jia Zhangke‘s Ash Is Purest White, Lee Chang-dong‘s Burning, Pawel Pawlikowksi‘s Cold War, Louis Garrel‘s A Faithful Man, Alice Rohrwacher‘s Happy as Lazzaro, Alex Ross Perry‘s Her Smell, Claire Denis‘ High Life, Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, Jean-Luc Godard‘s The Image Book, Ulrich Köhler‘s In My Room, Olivier Assayas‘ Non-Fiction, Tamara Jenkins‘ Private Life, Richard Billingham‘s Ray & Liz, Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Shoplifters, Dominga Sotomayor‘s Too Late To Die Young, Christian Petzold‘s Transit and Paul Dano‘s Wildlife.
I’m getting the worst kind of perverse Michel Gondry twee vibes from this thing. Gondry + Jim Carrey + Mr. Rogers + black holes of self-loathing = Kidding, a new Showtime comedy series with Carrey, Judy Greer, Frank Langella and Catherine Keener…good God. The life of kiddie-TV star Jeff Pickles (Carrey) “spirals out of control” after an incident of infidelity is discovered by his wife, Jill (Greer). Has Jeff cheated on Jill with a puppet or a live human? I’d much rather jump off the Brooklyn Bridge than watch Kidding. I would watch it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t so Gondry-ized…if Jeff was a cynical, cigar-smoking, poker-playing infidel whose “Mr. Pickles” identity was a total lie…THAT I would watch and cheer and have fun with. Kidding premieres on Sunday, 9.9 at 10 pm.
Robert Redford, who turns 82 on 8.18, first disclosed his intention to retire from acting on 11.10.16, in an interview with his grandson Dylan. Several publications reported this the next day, although Redford’s publicist, Cindy Berger of PMK*BNC, insisted otherwise, claiming that her client “is certainly not retiring because he has several projects coming down the pike.”
Well, Redford said a day or two ago that he’s really, really hanging up his spurs, and that David Lowery‘s The Old Man and the Gun (Fox Searchlight, 9.28) will be his gentleman swan song.
Redford’s greatest accomplishment, hands down, was launching the Sundance Film Festival. He really and truly changed…hell, revolutionized the landscape of American independent film. He upgraded, deepened, emboldened and monetized it beyond all measure.
The best film he ever directed was Ordinary People; Quiz Show and The Milagro Beanfield War were a distant second and third. The worst film he ever directed was The Legend of Bagger Vance, a.k.a. “bag of gas.” But acting is what he’s retiring from, and so an assessment of his best films and performances is in order.
Technique-wise and especially in his hot period, Redford was (and still is) one of the most subtle but effective underperformers in Hollywood history. He never overplayed it. Line by line, scene by scene, his choices were dry and succinct and exactly right — he and Steve McQueen were drinking from the same well back then.
Redford’s safe-deposit-box scene in The Hot Rock (i.e., “Afghanistan bananistan”) is absolutely world class. And the way he says “I can’t, Katie…I can’t” during the The Way We Were finale is brilliant. That scene could have been so purple or icky, but he saves it.
Redford’s acting career can be broken down into three phases — warm-up and ascendancy (’60 to ’67), peak star power (’69 to ’80) and the long, slow 34-year decline in quality (’84 to present).
Mark Harristweeted last night that “not many actors can claim six decades of work almost entirely on their own terms.” But Redford’s power to dictate those terms lasted only during that 12-year, golden-boy superstar era, or between the immediate aftermath of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Brubaker, his last “’70s film.”
Redford’s best peakers, in this order: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (’69), All The President’s Men (’76), Three Days of the Condor (’75), The Candidate (’72), Downhill Racer (’70), The Sting (’73), Jeremiah Johnson (’72), The Hot Rock (’72), The Way We Were (’73), Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (’70), The Electric Horseman (’79) and Brubaker (’80) — a total of 11.
Think of that — over a 12-year period Redford starred in 11 grand-slammers, homers, triples and a couple of ground-rule doubles. That’s pretty amazing.
Mezzo-mezzos & whiffs during peak period: Little Fauss and Big Halsy, The Great Gatsby, The Great Waldo Pepper, A Bridge Too Far (4).
Margot Robbie has her Sharon Tate down pretty well. Or Quentin Tarantino‘s costume or hair people do, I should say. I’m sure Robbie feels good about playing someone hot and sexy after looking like a pasty-faced, flame-haired horror in Mary, Queen of Scots. I’ve said this five or six times, but we don’t want to see the slaughter in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. We want Leo and Brad to bust in and blow Tex Watson away, and maybe one of the Manson girls besides.
“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...
