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I was hoping that Rob Garver‘s What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, which I saw three nights ago, would deliver some degree of enjoyment. It’s much better than that. I found it wonderfully alive and attuned, electric, bracingly intelligent, well-honed and about as spot-on as a doc of this sort can be. If you’ve any passion for film or particularly the glory days of personal-vision American cinema (late ’40s to early ’80s), this is essential viewing and a whole lot of fun to sit through.

Filmed four years ago, Garver provides a rush of immense comfort and stimulation with perfectly timed, just-right film clips and talking-head dialogue to explain and depict what was going on in the legendary critic’s life and head over a half-century period. The effect, for me, is ecstatic. Razor sharp and smooth as silk and yet always with a drill bit…it goes right into the whole novelistic tumult and miasma of that wonderful period in film criticism (’60s to early ’80s)…making sense of it, cleaning it up and making it all perfectly understood.

Here’s an excellent review from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy.

And here are quotes that I typed as I watched it on my Macbook Pro:

Kael: “The world is divided between the people who get deep pleasure from doing a good job, and those who are just trying to get through the day. There are a great many critics who belong to the latter category, who are scared of their readers, scared of their editors, scared of the movie companies and with some justification, but are never good enough to conquer their fears. The point would be really to try and strengthen your own writing style and develop some more courage, because then you’re in a better position.”

Quentin Tarantino: “The way Pauline described Band of Outsiders…she said it was as if a bunch of movie-mad young French boys had taken a banal American crime novel, and translated the poetry they had read between the lines…that is my aesthetic! Right there! That’s what I hope I can do.”

David Edelstein: “I disagree violently with that term…I am not a Paulette.…I am a Paulinista…I have learned from her approach and applied it in my own way.”

Kael: “Every good critic is a propagandist…there’s no other way to play the game.”

Observation: “Pauline was a west coast girl, and somewhat lacking in deference to authority. What she couldn’t achieve in art, she was able to achieve in movie reviews…she said I want to loosen my style, to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we all learn at college…I wanted sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice. [Before Pauline] New Yorker readers were used to this rather genteel rolling prose. Pauline didn’t believe in categories…she was very much against snobbish art-house cinema…she embraced popular cinema…only bad critics impose an academic formula…what Pauline Kael called the gentlemen critics…she wrote like someone who had bought a ticket and found a seat and watched it with a crowd.”

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By my sights, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma is much, much more than just a series of hauntingly beautiful, silver monochrome, to-die-for capturings of life in Mexico City around 1970 and ’71, and particularly that of a certain middle-class family (more or less based on Cuaron’s own) going through various trials and struggles and annoyances, including a constant supply of dog turds in the sheltered driveway of their two-story home.

At first it seems like Roma might be too laid back, too slow — a cross between Eric Rohmer‘s watching-paint-dry aesthetic and a black-and-white Nuri Bilge Ceylan film.

But as the incidents and details accumulate the scheme becomes clear — we’re getting to know this brood (an aloof doctor father, a spirited but resentful wife-mom, three young brothers, a sister and two live-in maids) and their realm in a bit-by-bit, layer-by-layer fashion, and gaining more recognition and understanding as it builds and moves along, everyone and everything becoming sharper and more dimensional in stages.

The strategy begins to pay off with greater and greater dividends around the halfway mark, and the last third is just wow, wow, wow, wow. And it’s not just the family that sinks in but the whole culture of Mexico City and the swirl of sexual and political events, characters and currents of that era, and especially how the infamous Corpus Christi massacre of 6.10.71 affects the fate of one of the maids, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), in a devastating way.

Put another way, Roma isn’t just one killer Alexa 65 shot after another, although you could theoretically ignore the particulars and just trip out on the widescreen coffee-table photo book art of it all. It’s a movie that doesn’t appear to be following a narrative through-line (or more precisely a collection of through-lines) until it gradually begins to do that, and then the hook is in and you realize that Roma owns you.

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I’ve been in but mostly out on director Karyn Kusama — loved Girlfight, hated Aeon Flux, loathed Jennifer’s Body but found The Invitation a truly fascinating creepout. The latter is why I caught her latest, Destroyer, early this afternoon.

I felt three ways about it. One, I respected Kusama’s intention to out-badass every other badass rogue cop flick ever made. Two, I hated watching it. And three, for over an hour I was filled with self-loathing for being too chicken to leave.

It’s a complex L.A. crime tale about Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman), a wasted, walking-dead Los Angeles detective trying to settle some bad business and save her daughter from a life of crime and misery. It unfolds through a complex, pain-in-the-ass flashback structure, and is punctuated by all kinds of nihilistic, hard-boiled behavior by the mostly criminal flotsam characters.

Nicole Kidman as Detective Erin Bell in Destroyer.

Destroyer has guns, uniformed cops, blood, a scene in the Westwood Federal building cafeteria, purple ink, ugly asshole criminals with sickening haircuts, drugs, a handjob given to a dying criminal slob, a bank shootout, blah blah. Everything in this well-made if godforsaken film is scuzzy. Everyone and everything is covered in the stuff. Even I felt scuzzed out from my seat in the tenth row of the Herzog. Scuzzed and miserable.

Inner dialogue: “I’m in a beautiful Rocky Mountain town, surrounded on all sides by hotshot Hollywood types and cool rich people, and I’m in hell.”

30 minutes after it began I was going “oh, God, help me.” At the one-hour mark I had decided that stepping over six or seven persons sitting to my right would be too awkward, and at the same time a contrary voice was telling me “don’t do it, Jeff…tough it out.” At the 90-minute mark I was thinking “maybe if I take a short nap I’ll feel better when I awake and will enjoy the film a tiny bit more.” Then I decided “fuck it” and exited past two people to my left. I ducked out under the hanging velour curtain…freedom!

The movie is mostly about the way Kidman looks in this thing, like a combination vampire-zombie with dark eye bags and a complexion that suggests a heroin habit mixed with twice-daily injections of embalming fluid. Plus a Desolation Row, gray-streaked hair style.

Kidman and Kusama are saying “have you ever seen such a badass, hardass undercover female cop in your moviegoing life? Even in a zombie movie?” HE answer: No, I’ve never seen a cop character who looks this wasted, this dead-to-the-world, this gutted, this excavated, this George Romero, this Bela Lugosi-ish. Hats off!

Every Destroyer actor gives the kind of performance that makes you feel like your soul is draining out of the hourglass…Kidman, Sebastian Stan, Tatiana Maslany, Bradley Whitford, Toby Kebbell, Scoot McNairy and Jade Pettyjohn. Hats off to them all.

Nobody knows anything except for the fact that Ethan Hawke and Glenn Close are brilliant in First Reformed and The Wife, respectively. I feel like a wuss for allowing Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil to nudge me into making predictions based on almost nothing but gut feelings, intuition, insect antennae vibrations, hairs on the back of my neck, little devils and angels whispering on my shoulders (except in the cases of Close and Hawke).

But you know what? A lot of these names are going to be top contenders anyway. Because people want what they want, and they can sense things. On top of which I am occasionally Zoltar, the all-knowing channeller, award-season mystic and Academy whisperer. Please tell Zoltar what’s coming that he’s missing, etc.

Comment from a guy who hears things, gets around, knows a thing or two: “The long drive must be affecting your mind. Lakeith Stanfield for Sorry to Bother You????? Single worst movie I have seen all year. Green Book‘s Viggo Mortensen AND Mahershala Ali, with Viggo in front position of those two.”

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Winslow and Holbrook, specifically. Poor Winslow isn’t exactly down-at-the-heels, but it doesn’t seem all that economically robust. It has a swanky Spanish-styled hotel and two or three nice bars or restaurants (maybe more), but the atmosphere feels a bit flat. If it weren’t for that Jackson Browne-Glenn Frey song “Take It Easy,” things would probably be that much leaner. There are statues of Browne and Frey dead smack in the center of town.

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From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review of Damian Chazelle‘s First Man: “The fact that space travel, viewed from the inside, could look and feel so much more abrasive and hazardous than we might ever have thought is part of the raw dramatic power of First Man. The movie captures that death was always part of it. The steep risk factor, the sheer number of pilots and astronauts who lost their lives, the scary macabre thrust of the voyages — it was all a dream poised on the edge of an abyss.

“First Man bears the same relation to the space dramas that have come before it that Saving Private Ryan did to previous war films. The movie redefines what space travel is — the way it lives inside our imagination — by capturing, for the first time, what the stakes really were.”

The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney says that “this sober, contemplative picture has emotional involvement, visceral tension, and yes, even suspense, in addition to stunning technical craft.

“The extent to which mainstream audiences will respond to the lengthy film’s unfaltering restraint remains to be seen” — in other words, portions of the popcorn crowd may feel unfulfilled in terms of standard jingoistic rah-rah vibes. “But this is a strikingly intelligent treatment of a defining moment for America that broadens the tonal range of Chazelle, clearly a versatile talent, after Whiplash and La La Land.”

Nobody has a history of generating shock waves across the men’s fashion universe like Ryan Gosling. A brown suit with almost ’70s-style wide lapels? Along with a complex-pattern print shirt that may have been bought from a roadside seller in Tijuana?

Beware of any Alex Billington rave of any FX-rich, eyeball-filling movie — he’s Mr. Easy in this regard.

Late yesterday afternoon Tatyana and I did a Griffith Park Observatory hike. We started by sneaking through a security gate and strolling past Angelina Jolie’s stately manse, which was known for decades as the one that Cecil B. DeMille once lived in. Then we humped it up Catalina Drive and onto the hill trails that lead to the observatory. I hadn’t visited this historic location for 26 or 27 years. To me it’s not a scenic tourist spot as much as holy James Dean ground — i.e., where the knife fight happened in Rebel Without A Cause. Remember that I own a deep-red James Dean jacket.

The former Cecil B. DeMille mansion, now known as the place where Angie and the kids live.

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It was reported yesterday that Louis C.K. came out of hiding Sunday night for 15 minutes. After being outed last November by the N.Y. Times for being a weenie wagger and then confessing to same a few days later, the 51 year old comedian performed a surprise 15-minute set at Manhattan’s The Comedy Cellar.

The message was “okay, I took myself out of circulation nine months ago for good reason, but now that I’ve done some isolation time — call it a meditative prison sentence — I’d like to begin to inch my way back into performing again…is that cool or, you know, what do you think?”

Guys seem willing to cut him a little slack while women are like “what, he’s back already?”

HE’s view is “well, what he did was obviously grotesque, but how many months of living in the shadows does he have to commit to before he’s allowed to start performing again? He didn’t kill, rape or sexually stalk or harass anyone, at least not on a sustained basis. And he didn’t expose himself to children. He copped to being a creep and threw himself on the church steps. He needed to go away, obviously, but what kind of a sentence does he need to serve? A year? Two years?”

Is the general #MeToo position that he deserves (a) a death sentence, (b) a life of wandering in the desert like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, (c) five or ten years of wandering or (d) something less severe?

Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman told the Times’ Melena Ryzik that “there can’t be a permanent life sentence on someone who does something wrong.”

What Louis C.K. did with those women who spoke to the N.Y. Times wasn’t just hurtful and offensive — it was astonishing. Before that story ran I’d never even heard of a guy whipping it out as a form of foreplay or whatever. My reaction was “who does that?”

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I’m sorry but I’m getting the wrong kind of signals from this barely-there teaser for Brady Corbet‘s Vox Lux, a seemingly angst-ridden music-industry drama that focuses on 18 years in the life of Celeste, a gloomhead pop superstar (Natalie Portman). I don’t mean the kind of signals that suggest a possibly bad or frothy or ineffective film (I read a draft of the script a year or so ago and it wasn’t half bad), but indications that some of us may not give that much of a shit.

Making it in the music business is no small feat, and lasting, much less maintaining relevancy, in the limelight for over 15 years is even tougher, and so I vaguely resent films that suggest superstardom is mainly about having great hair and the right kind of wardrobe and expert lighting design and multitudes screaming your name.

Put another way, I vaguely resent movies about hugely popular performers that fail to convey how difficult it is to be even a competent, half-decent musician-performer (I’m saying this as a formerly mediocre drummer), much less fulfill a phenomenal potential. Geniuses don’t have to sweat the inspiration part, but they still have to work and perspire their asses off to make the song (or the novel or the film or the haute couture line) come out right. Movies always seem to ignore the creative struggle aspect.

Oh, and a Scott Walker score isn’t enough. There has to be a good, solid film to complement his input…sorry.

Corbet’s 110-minute drama, currently without distribution, will premiere soon at the Venice Film Festival. Raffey Cassidy, Jude Law, Stacy Martin and Jennifer Ehle costar.

Frank Tuttle‘s This Gun For Hire (’42) is primarily a violent thriller, but the combination of frostiness and vulnerability in Alan Ladd‘s Raven, a professional assassin, feeds into a vibe of brusque indifference and existential despair. Released two years before Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity, I’ve always regarded This Gun For Hire as the first high-impact film noir. Which puts it into the pantheon of 1940s releases. Pretty much every film-loving dweeb subscribes to this view.

But for some odd reason Universal has never released a Bluray or streamed it in HD. Here we are in 2018, and the only way to watch this still engrossing, hard-boiled drama is on that same shitty DVD Universal released 14 years ago. Why don’t they get the lead out and remaster it? It would be fairly criminal to just let it remain a 480p experience.

Ladd’s breakout performance made him a big star, but his flush days lasted only about 15 years, give or take. The poor guy died at age 50, of an accidental suicide in January of ’64.

“Once Ladd had acquired an unsmiling hardness, he was transformed from an extra to a phenomenon. Ladd’s calm slender ferocity make it clear that he was the first American actor to show the killer as a cold angel.” – David Thomson, “A Biographical Dictionary of Film.”

“One shudders to think of the career which Paramount must have in mind for Alan Ladd, a new actor, after witnessing the young gentleman’s debut in This Gun for Hire… Obviously, they’ve tagged him to be the toughest monkey loose on the screen. For not since Jimmy Cagney massaged Mae Clarke‘s face with a grapefruit has a grim desperado gunned his way into cinema ranks with such violence as does Mr. Ladd in this fast and exciting melodrama. Keep your eye peeled for this Ladd fellow; he’s a pretty-boy killer who likes his work…Mr. Ladd is the buster; he is really an actor to watch.” — from Bosley Crowther‘s review of This Gun For Hire (’42).

The great Neil Simon has passed at the age of 91. Great as in hugely popular, prolific, hard-working, driven. I always admired his success and relentless output and came to respect some of his more mature material of the ’70s and ’80s, but I never regarded him as a heavyweight. Which he didn’t need to be because he was “Neil Simon.”

I was always impressed and often amused by Simon’s screenplays, which were usually adaptations of his hit Broadway plays, but I never thought they were profoundly moving or emotionally devastating or anything in that realm. They were mostly safe, likable and easily digestible stories about middle-class relationships (love affairs, marriages, families) for all ages but mostly for people born between the 1920s to the mid ’40s, or those who came of age with a “life can be brutally hard” sensibility that definitely resulted in a pre-boomer attitude.

Born in 1927, Simon grew up during the Depression and World War II and obviously believed that the gift of laughter was worth its weight in gold. His plays were never silly or juvenile and occasionally had bite and tension, but they were always “likable” and uplifting. Simon was a smart, very shrewd guy who used his life experience (struggling New York Jewish) to propel and sharpen his stories, but he always needed to entertain. And that he did. He wrote clean and true and, having come from TV comedy in the ’50s, knew about timing and pacing. His dialogue always felt “written,” but in a pleasingly professional way.

Simon was always a New York playwright first and a Hollywood screenwriter second.

A few months ago I re-watched Gene Saks‘ adaptation of Barefoot in the Park (’67), which Simon wrote in the very early ’60s (which were basically the ’50s extended up until the Kennedy assassination) and which opened on Broadway in October 1963. Costarring Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Mildred Natwick and Charles Boyer, it’s very easy, witty and unthreatening. Always alert and “real” as far as it went, and never tiresome or lacking in pep.

As a failed screenwriter I know something about how difficult it is to write well and concisely while generating laughs and sustaining dramatic tension, and so I have nothing but respect for that play and film. But there’s nothing earth-shattering about it.

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“We have the problem that they tell us Logan is a great movie. Well, it’s a great superhero movie. It still involves people in tights with metal coming out of their hands. It’s not Bresson. It’s not Bergman. But they talk about it like it is. I went to see Logan ’cause everyone was like ‘this is a great movie’ and I was like really? No, this is a fine superhero movie. There’s a difference but big business doesn’t think there’s a difference. Big business wants you to think that this is a great film because they wanna make money off of it.” — Ethan Hawke quoted on 8.23 by The Film Stage‘s Rory O’Connor.

The same thing is happening now with reports about Disney pushing Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther as a serious Best Picture contender. I wouldn’t be surprised if it lands a Best Picture nomination — in fact I’m predicting flat-out that it will.

But it can’t win, of course. One, it doesn’t really kick into gear until the last hour. And two, it’s basically a Marvel movie adhering to the same basic story beats that other Marvel flicks have followed, the difference being the native African representation factor and the whole historic pride thing that goes along with that, and of course the huge box-office factor. At the end of the day it’s going to win the Best Popular Film Oscar — we all know that.

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