I’m not saying that yesterday’ssuddenlossofcontrol of the facialmuscles on the right side of my face and my mouth in particular…I’m not saying I look like Charles Laughton in TheHHunchback ofNotre Dame (‘39) but half of my facial features, which were fairly top-of-the-line when I was younger and at least pleasant in recent years…my looks are prettymuchgonenow, and if I was scheduled to see Sutton today I would be worried about alarming her. In the space of 24 hours I have suddenly become a mildly grotesque figure…I am now RichardIII…dogs bark and howl as I pass by.
Before:
After:
Bonus points for anyone who can identify which film the above monster-in-the-mirror images are from. No, it’s not Martin Scorsese’s TheBigShave.
You go into a Michel Franco film (New Order and Sundown are recent HE favorites) with an understanding that dysfunction, severity and obsession will be served, and that some kind of rug will be be pulled out at some point. Franco doesn’t traffic in compassion and heartfelt currents as a general tendency; he does radical and harsh.
But that’s what I like or at least respect about Franco. He keeps the viewer on edge, and therein lies the tension.
So I was surprised when I saw Memory the other night and began to realize that it would be dealing the cards without the usual “uh-oh…when will the ferocious stuff happen?”
It’s basically a kind of strange-but-tender relationship thing…an acting-exercise drama about two damaged 40somethings — Jessica Chastain‘s Sylvia and Peter Sarsgaard‘s Saul — who probably shouldn’t get too deeply involved with each other because they have turbulent histories and are both too fucked up…Saul especially.
Memory is set in Brooklyn and you can really feel those down-in-the-weeds Brooklyn vibes. It settles into two families for the most part, and nobody’s really happy or steady or swingin’ from a star.
But the acting is so good and true…I felt immediately held and fascinated. I’m trying to think of the last time I saw a sexual relationship drama that had me thinking “wow, this might not end well and neither party seems to understand that…in fact it might end really badly.”
And yet things…I won’t say but this is easily the gentlest Franco film I’ve ever seen.
Sylvia is a cautious and brittle mom who works at an adult daycare center (a gathering of bruised and traumatized types) while raising the teenaged Anna (Brooke Timber).
Sylvia is wary of whatever might be around the corner, and so naturally she gradually gets involved — at first guardedly and tentatively, with Saul, who is clearly a bit weird but not dangerously so — a gentle, socially awkard beardo who’s plagued by some kind of dementia, and can’t seem to remember anything from the past.
Right away you’re wondering what semi-responsible woman (particularly one with a troubled parental and sexual history) would let this guy into her life?
The bottom line is that Chastain and Sarsgaard are quite the penetrators and dig-deepers, and for this reason alone Memory (Ketchup Entertainment, 12.22) is worth a watch.
Question: Why would a film distributor call itself Ketchup Entertainment? What if a similar operation called itself Mayonnaise Distribution? Or Miracle Whip Ltd.? Or Steak Sauce International? Or the Mustard Brothers?
Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song (Broad Green, 3.17) is more or less the same movie as To The Wonder and Knight of Cups — another meandering, whispering voice-over, passively erotic Emmanuel Lubezskitour de bullshit. All directors make the same movie over and over, of course, and this, ladies and germs, is another return to Malickland…what he does, what he can’t help recreating and re-exploring. I just sat there in my seat at Broad Green headquarters, slumped and going with it and silently muttering to myself, “Yuhp, same arty twaddle.”
The older Malick gets (he’s 73), the foxier and more barefoot and twirling the girls in his movies get, and this one, a kind of Austin music industry La Ronde, has a fair amount of fucking going on. And that’s fine with me. No “sex scenes”, per se, but a lot of navel-worshipping, I can tell you. Rooney Mara‘s, I mean.
At first Song to Song is about a romantic-erotic triangle between Faye (Mara), a guitarist and band member who doesn’t seem to care about music as much as whom she’s erotically entwined with at the moment, and two attractive music industry guys — Ryan Gosling‘s BV, a songwriter-performer, and Michael Fassbender‘s Cook, a rich music mogul. I can tell you Mara is definitely the focus of the high-hard-one action or, as Quentin Tarantino put it in Reservoir Dogs, “Dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick.”
Mara seems to start off with Cook and then move on to BV. Or was it Gosling first and then Fassbender and then a really hot French girl (Berenice Marlohe) and then back to Gosling at the very end with a Cook pit-stop or two? There’s never much sense of linear time progression in a Malick film so you never really know, but she definitely does them all.
There’s something vaguely L’Avventura-esque about Song to Song…pretty, wealthy people lost in impulsive erotica, embracing momentary pleasure, bopping from song to song, bod to bod, orgasm to orgasm, and all the while trying to make things happen within the Austin music scene. But falling away from the eternal, and hanging in too many cold-vibe high-rises and high-end homes and not enough folksy abodes with yards and dogs and oak trees. But with lots of rivers to gaze at.
I’m simplify as best I can recall: (a) Mara definitely becomes intimate with Gosling, Fassbender and Marlohe; (b) Gosling has affairs with Mara, Lykke Li and Cate Blanchett‘s Amanda, and (c) Fassbender — the most louche and perverse of the three — has it off with Mara, Natalie Portman‘s Rhonda (a waitress whose mother is played by Holly Hunter) and two prostitutes (or a prostitute plus Portman) during a menage a trois scene.
I was kinda hoping Fassbender would hook up with Blanchett and Marlohe, but it never happened. I was actually imagining a menage a trois between Fassbender, Gosling and Mara — that would have been something — or a menage a quatre between these three and Blanchett, even. Or a menage a cinque between these four and Val Kilmer, who is seen performing in a couple of brief outdoor-concert scenes but never gets to fuck anyone.
Barbie’s phenomenal summer success wasn’t/isn’t enough. GretaGerwig wants Oscar ratification on top of all that. Even while Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s PoorThings (i.e., Barbie meets Radley Frankenstein Metzger Satyricon) nibbles away at the mystique. Perhaps last summer will have to do?
Friendo: “Greta appears to be sniffing her fingers.”
On Sunday, 11.19 HE will attend a special screening of Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Man Who Knew Too Much — a 4K UHD restoration supervised by restoration guru Robert Harris.
Aside from the enhanced clarity and color, the presentation will also contain the original Perspecta stereo sound mix, which hasn’t been heard since the original 1956 release in first-run theatres. TMWKTM will be projected in 4K Super VistaVision. Bring the kids!
A q & a with Harris and Janet Maslin will follow the screening.
You have to admire Martin Scorsese‘s “killer’ footwear combo….those shiny brown Italian loafers accented by violet socks…perfect. Especially compared to Steven Spielberg‘s whiteside lace-ups and maroon socks…atrocious. Older guys are allowed to wear comfort shoes, agreed, but whitesides are completely verboten.
Marty looks like an elegant resident of Bologna or Milan…Spielberg looks like Joe Schlubbo at the hardware store.
Brooklyn friendo to HE: “Now that Napoleon is out of the running, it’s Killers of the Flower Moon vs. Oppie….neck and neck until March. Maestro may have given you multiple orgasms but that’s not gonna be universal. Bitch and moan all you want but you’re not changing this narrative.”
HE to Brooklyn friendo: “Honest people are admitting all over town that Oppenheimer is a brilliant film but a long, punishing sit. And nobody really likes Killers of the Flower Moon, and the Ernest and Molly Burkhart relationship, though based on fact, seems nonsensical. Neither film is really daring or delicious or devastating…neither delivers the kind of emotional highs that win Oscars. Oppenheimer tires, exhausts, depletes, gives you a headache, makes your legs ache.
In the minds of average non-obsessives the top two contenders are The Holdovers and Maestro…hands down.”
…but she sorta kinda wishes that David Grann‘s saga had been directed by, say, a full-blood Osage helmer instead…no offense. Martin Scorsese did the best that he could, she’s saying, given his white-guy limitations and the curious focus on Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Ernest Burkhart.
The director of Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Casino, The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street warrants respect, she’s saying — an A for effort.
“Marty is a titan, but he’s not bigger than history,” Gladstone has toldVariety‘s Selome Hailu.
“He’s a major shaper of it though. It’s the tricky nature of a story like this. You have more representation [in Killers], but coming from somebody who’s not from the community. So you always have to look at it with a different angle. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You just have to be very aware of the film that you’re watching and what lens it was made through.”
This almost felt like a fitting crescendo as the film was widely regarded as a crisis itself, albeit a “what the hell happened?” kind. The final production tab was $27 million, or roughly $275 million in 2023 dollars — a startling level of exorbitance.
Bounty had been shooting for two years, partly under the directorial command of Sir Carol Reed but mostly Lewis Milestone, who didn’t get along wih star Marlon Brando and vice versa. A few months earlier the film had been publicized as a cost-overrun disaster, particularly by a June 1962 Saturday Evening Post cover story, written by Bill Davidson, that identified Brando as the principal culprit.
Production was marked by constant tempest (Reed either quit or was let go, and Milestone, his successor, also left under turbulent circumstances), largely, according to Davidson, due to Brando’s egoistic big-star behavior. Brando sued the Post for $5 million over claims that the article had wrongfully damaged his professional reputation. It did, in fact, do that.
Filming was almost as prolonged and costly as the $31 million Cleopatra, which would open seven months later in June 1963.
I wouldn’t call Mutiny on the Bounty a flawed film as much as a “good but not quite there” one. It’s actually a well-written, handsomeiy produced, eye-filling wow for the first 70% or 75%, and Bronislau Kaper‘s score is inescapably rousing in a crash-boom-bang sense.
I would give it an 8.5 grade up until and including the mutiny sequence. But the tension flies out the window after the mutiny, and the remainder of the film is just okay. And Brando’s (i.e., Fletcher Christian‘s) high-minded urging that he and the crew should return to England to plead their case? Totally absurd. Tantamount to suicide. I agree with the decision by Richard Harris‘s Mills and other crew members to burn the ship after Brando suggests this hair-brained notion.
The act that ignites the mutiny scene as Brando’s Fletcher Christian tries to give fresh H20 to a thirsty seaman, and Howard’s Cpt. Bligh expresses his opposition.
Say what you will about Bounty‘s problems — historical inaccuracies and inventions, Brando’s affected performance as Christian, the floundering final act. The fact remains that this viscerally enjoyable, critically-dissed costumer is one of the the most handsome, lavishly-produced and beautifully scored films made during Hollywood’s fabled 70mm era, which lasted from the mid ’50s to the late ’60s.
It has a flamboyant “look at all the money we’re spending” quality that’s half-overbaked and half-absorbing. It’s pushing a certain pounding, big-studio swagger.
There’s a way to half-excuse Bounty for doing this. It was made, after all, at a time when self-important bigness was regarded as a kind of aesthetic attribute unto itself, with large casts, extended running times, dynamic musical scores (overtures, entr’actes, exit music) and intermissions all par for the course. And there’s no denying that a lot of skilled craftsmanship and precision went into this manifestation.
Bounty definitely has first-rate dialogue and editing, and three or four scenes that absolutely get the pulse going (leaving Portsmouth, rounding Cape Horn, the mutiny, the burning ship). And I happen to like and respect Brando’s performance — it gets darker and sadder as the film goes along — and you can’t say Trevor Howard‘s Captain Bligh doesn’t crack like a bullwhip. (Bosley Crowther‘s review said his emoting was imbued with “wire and scrap iron”, and that Brando’s came from “tinsel and cold cream”.) And Richard Harris and Hugh Griffith are fairly right-on. And everybody likes the topless Tahitian girls.
I’d forgotten how foppy and buffoonish Brando’s Fletcher Christian character is, and how frequently his contentious relationship with Trevor Howard‘s Captain Bligh is played for easy laughs during the first 100 minutes.
The extremely wide 2.76 to 1 Ultra Panavision image, shot by Robert Surtees and derived from the original 70mm elements, is really quite beautiful, and the colors are full and luscious.
My difficulties with the jokey humor aside, I have to acknowledge the “make love to that damn daughter of his” scene between Howard and Brando, and pay my respects to the way Brando pauses ever so slightly before and after he says the word “fight”. It’s the film’s wittiest moment — the only line that still makes me laugh out loud.
The decision not to offer a “making of” documentary on the Bounty Bluray was unfortunate, given that Mutiny on the Bounty‘s production history was one of the most expensive and out-of-control in Hollywood history, and therefore worth recounting for history.
Fox Home Video included an ambitious making-of-Cleopatra doc along with their Cleopatra disc, and it’s a far more engaging thing to watch than the film itself. Too bad Warner Home Video didn’t follow suit. Laurent Bouzereau or someone on his level could’ve really gone to town with it.
Will you look at that flaming eyesore of a jacket or shirt that Travis Kelce is wearing? Red, white and green blobs on a black background? It’s a clown garment.
Variety‘s Courtney Howard and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Frank Scheck have reviewed Meg Ryan‘s What Happens Later (Bleecker Street, 11.3), an older person’s romcom set in a snowbound airport, and based upon Steven Dietz’s play Shooting Star.
Apart from noting that it’s a two-hander and agreeing upon the magical realist atmosphere, the disparity of opinion is startling.
Scheck: “Not so much a romcom as a comic drama infused with strong doses of magic realism that some viewers will find charming and others insufferably twee. What might have proved effective theatrically comes across as wholly artificial and schematic onscreen, despite Ryan’s considerable efforts as both director and performer. The proceedings inevitably feel claustrophobic. While Ryan’s bountiful charm is as evident as ever, her character unfortunately comes across like an older version of the manic pixie dream girl. And the movie’s heavy-handed magical realist elements counter the slightness of the material to deadly effect.
Howard: “Meg Ryan not only dazzles before the camera in What Happens Later, but behind it as well, as director and co-writer. Through the prism of one former couple’s relationship woes, this effervescent, enlightened romantic comedy explores our innate need for reconciliation within ourselves and with each other. It’s a delight to welcome Ryan back to the silver screen after an extended hiatus, and in the genre she helped rejuvenate alongside filmmakers like Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron (to whom this film is touchingly dedicated).”
I haven’t seen What Happens Later, but Howard’s use of the term “touchingly dedicated” almost certainly indicates bias. She’s in the tank for romcoms, I suspect, and loves the idea of Ryan making one of her own.
