Everyone knew that the recently released Bluray for Arthur Penn‘s Night Moves (’75) wouldn’t be all that spellbinding. Bruce Surtees‘ 35mm cinematography was never intended to be anything more than professionally presentable in a workmanlike fashion, and that was fine. But the Bluray definitely looks better than the various versions I’ve been watching for the last 35 years or so, including the ones offered on DVD and Amazon SD streaming. And that’s all I wanted anyway.
Devin Faraci, Cinefamily’s Shadie Elnashai and Hadrian Belove, Ain’t It Cool‘s Harry Knowles have walked the plank for alleged sexual assault and/or harassment…and now Harvey Weinstein, the swaggering king of the indie world in the ’90s and most of the aughts until ’13 or thereabouts, is being threatened along similar lines.
Variety‘s Brent Lang, Gene Maddaus and Ramin Setoodeh reported earlier this afternoon that the Weinstein Co. honcho “has hired a high-powered team of attorneys to push back on soon-to-be-published bombshell stories from the New York Times and the New Yorker detailing sexual allegations and improper workplace behavior against him.”
Variety says that “some women making the charges are believed to be on the record.”
“Multiple individuals with knowledge of the situation” have told Variety that Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey are the authors of the Times story, and that former MSNBC host and Woody Allen accuser Ronan Farrow is penning the New Yorker piece. One of the stories could appear as early as this week, the article says.
In a brief interview with Variety, Weinstein “declined to comment on the charges.”
I just flashed on the finale of Brian DePalma‘s Scarface with Harvey as Tony Montana and Kantor, Twohey, Farrow and Harvey’s alleged accusers as the Columbians scaling the fence of the Montana estate.
I don’t understand how anyone can dismiss Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade (Magnolia, 12.27), a traumatic-loss-and-revenge drama starring Diane Kruger, whose performance won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress award last May. You can criticize the film, I suppose, for what it doesn’t address (i.e., European Islamic terrorism) but taken on its own terms, it’s close to unassailable.
In The Fade dispenses chilly, carefully measured hardball realism, and does so in a gripping, emotionally jarring way that I believed top to bottom. It’s now the official German entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at next March’s Academy Awards telecast (3.4.18).
Set mostly in Hamburg, Fade starts with Katja (Kruger), her clean-living Kurdish/Turkish husband Nuri (Numan Acar) with a drug-dealing past, and their young son Rocco in happy-family mode. That lasts less than ten minutes. A home-made nail bomb outside Nuri’s office explodes, and Katja is suddenly a child-less widow. She wilts under agonizing pain and a near-total emotional meltdown, and understandably decides to temporarily medicate with drugs, and then nearly ends it all by slitting her wrists.
But a suspicion she’d shared with her attorney, Danilo (Denis Moschitto), about anti-immigrant Nazis having planted the bomb turns out to be accurate. Katja learns that evidence she had given the police has led to the arrest of Andre and Edda Moller (Ulrich Brandhoff, Hanna Hilsdorf), a pair of young neo-Nazis with international connections. There’s no doubt these two are the culprits — Katja had seen Edda leave a bicycle near her husband’s office two or three hours before the blast.
Then comes a second-act portion dealing with a trial of the accused that doesn’t end satisfactorily, and finally a third act in which the acutely frustrated Katja travels to Greece to carry out her own form of revenge-justice.
There are very few aspects or side-angles that elude Deadline‘s Pete Hammond when it comes to assessing a new film or, if the shoe fits, its award-season potential. At the same time he’s always had a fairly generous, big-of-heart attitude about the movie realm. (As do I on a certain level.) It’s precisely because Hammond is not a neghead Addison DeWitt type that I trust his impressions about Blade Runner 2049 much more than Jordan Hoffman‘s or David Ehrlich‘s.
Hammond observation #1: Blade Runner 2049 has “an overly long and drawn-out running time of 2 hours and 44 minutes that could have used some trimming. The storytelling takes its sweet time and quite frankly can be a bit confusing to see where it is all going, but maybe that’s the point.”
Hammond observation #2: “Even if I was submitted to waterboarding techniques I probably couldn’t reveal the details of this byzantine plot.” Wells interjection: The very mention of waterboarding obviously alludes to movie-watching torture, which was presumedly in Hammond’s mind.
Hammond observation #3: “Suffice to say this deliberately-paced film really comes alive once Harrison Ford comes on board about an hour and a half into it.” Wells interjection: It can be safely presumed that “deliberately paced” means slowly paced, leadenly paced, slightly boring, etc. In short, Blade Runner 2049 is more or less a stiff until Ford arrives.
From another critic friend: “Too much movie for how little story there was. A great looking movie; if I had the slightest interest in virtual reality (which I don’t), that’s a world I would want to walk around in. I assumed that the same climate dysfunction that caused the constant rain in LA in the first film had simply gotten worse so that, this much farther into the future, it alternately rains and snows.”
Sidebar: Hammond mentions that it snows in Blade Runner‘s futuristic Los Angeles. Which is quite the rarity as snow hasn’t fallen here since 1962. A 12.9.16 KCET.org article by Nathan Masters reports that snow once fell on the Los Angeles coastal plain with some regularity — about once per decade. Since official records were first kept in 1877, the downtown Los Angeles weather station observed measurable snowfall three times, in 1882, 1932 and 1949, and news reports recorded snowfall elsewhere in the Los Angeles Basin in 1913, 1921, 1922, 1926, 1944, 1957, 1962 — and then never again, for 54 years running.”
A draft I once read of Robert Towne‘s script for The Two Jakes, which took place in in 1948 Los Angeles, ended with a snowfall that actually happened in January ’49. I can’t remember if a snowfall appeared in Jack Nicholson‘s 1990 film version or not.
1:03 pm update: Tom Petty belongs to the ages…taken at age 66 by a severe heart attack. 1:57 pm update: No, wait…he’s still clinging to life, says TMZ. Various outlets reported earlier today that Petty was rushed to the hospital Sunday night after he was found unconscious, not breathing and in full cardiac arrest (i.e., heart totally stopped). He was taken from his Malibu home and to the UCLA Santa Monica Hospital. One report said that upon realization that Petty had no brain activity, he was taken off life support. NME is reporting that he’s gone. Others have him on life support. For a few moments his Wikipedia page was referring to him in the past tense, but now they’ve got him living again. The poor guy just played the Hollywood Bowl last Monday night. Nope…he’s gone. Wait, not yet. So sad, so sorry.
Devastating, horrific and indescribably sad, obviously, but not a surprising or even an unfamiliar domestic spectacle. 58 dead and probably climbing. Orlando, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, San Ysidro — last night’s Las Vegas massacre was the latest chapter (installment?) in an ongoing, slowly-unfolding nightmare brought to all Americans by the NRA, the legislators who’ve blocked any and all attempts to restrict the sale of automatic weapons, by gun freaks, by that whole diseased and reprehensible culture.
Fringe nutters like Stephen Paddock are unfortunately part of our American landscape, but how many of last night’s victims would be okay this morning if Paddock didn’t have an easily purchasable automatic arsenal? If he was restricted to single-shot weapons? Mass carnage is what automatic rifles are fundamentally about, and last night’s tragedy — why mince words? — is essentially on the political right, on conservative gun nuts.
Australia saved itself from this pattern of horror after a mass shooting occured in ’96, and here we are 20 years hence, soaked in gore and grief and probably fated to stay that way because of hinterland macho types and their obsessive, twisted need for their totems.
Nobody needs automatic weapons except for sick fucks who might one day use them.
Nicholas Kristof’s N.Y. Times piece spells it out, but we all know the restrictions by heart — universal background checks, prevent loose cannons from buying weapons of any kind, limit gun purchases to any one person over a certain period, etc.
The following is a re-wording of an HE piece posted on 7.26.15 and 3.7.12. I’m inspired to re-post after last night’s screening of a Lolita DCP at the Aero Theatre, as part of a general tribute to former Kubrick producer James B. Harris.:
Back in the early ’90s, a boxy version of Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita was issued on Criterion CAV laser disc. By this I mean a version that was partly presented in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio with occasional 1.66 croppings from time to time.
Dr. Strangelove was also presented this way (1.37/1.66) on an early Columbia-TriStar Home Video DVD, before the 1.85 fascists muscled their way in and started cleavering everything.
Yes, I’m happy that the current Lolita Bluray is cropped at 1.66, but boy, would I love to get hold of a high-def version of that 1992 Criterion laser disc. You think Kubrick didn’t sign off on the boxy Lolita? Of course he did.
Criterion presumably still has access to the original Lolita elements that they created their laser-disc version from. If they were to somehow wangle rights from Warner Home Video and offer a 4K-scanned version of this long-gone version (i.e., varying 1.37 plus 1.66 aspect ratios), I would buy it in a New York minute, and so would a lot of other physical-media freaks, I’m guessing. Or they could offer a streaming version on Filmstruck. Either way it would definitely sell.
I realize that relatively few people out there believe that “boxy is beautiful,” and that an alternating 1.33 and 1.66 version of Lolita means little or nothing to them, but I never bought this disc and never saw it anywhere, not once. And it’s killing me that today’s general fascist mindset (i.e., almost all non-Scope ’50s and ’60s films must conform to the 16 x 9 aspect ratio of high-def screens) makes it all but certain that this version of Lolita will never be exhibited or offered ever again. Unless Criterion changes its mind and makes the effort. I for one would be enormously grateful.
In the spring of ’18 or roughly 7 months hence, Trevor Paglen‘s Orbital Reflector, a 100 foot-long satellite that will have absolutely no purpose other than to inspire people to look up and watch as it passes overhead, will be launched into orbit. Well, not precisely — a condensed package will be launched, and then it will unfold and inflate into its full diamond-like shape at a height of 350 miles. Orbital Reflector will last in orbit for roughly two months, and then will gradually descend and burn up in the atmosphere.
Be honest — when was the last time you laid outside on your back after 10 pm and just watched the night sky for more than a minute or two? I used to do this from time to time in my druggy days. The cosmic altogether would just sink into your system after a while. I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t done this since I stayed in Independence, a little town adjacent to the Sierra Nevada mountains where the air is unpolluted for the most part and the night vistas are always sharp and clear. When was the last time U.S. citizens did this en masse? After Sputnik was launched in 1957? I’ll definitely be watching for Orbital Reflector several times during its 60-day lifespan.
A visual knockout, fine. Jaw-droppingly beautiful, okay. But who completely trusts those Blade Runner 2049 reviews? Right now it has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 98 and a Metacritic score of 85. You know you can’t trust critics. You know that a lot of them (especially the super-brainy, balding, dweeby-looking ones) live in tents inside their own rectums, and that many of them write their reviews not for Joe and Jane Popcorn but with an eye toward what their effete colleagues are thinking and saying. You can trust Hollywood Elsewhere to lay it on the line, but who else?
Kevin Maher of the London Times says BR49 is “not without problems” and yet it has a 98% rating? The Village Voice‘s Bilge Ebiri says it “cannot achieve the sublime slipperiness” of Ridley Scott‘s original Blade Runner. Metro UK‘s James Luxford says “the film belongs to Ryan Gosling” and yet I was told by a critic friend that Gosling’s performance is fucking boring.
After scanning the Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes scores, this same critic, not a huge fan of the film, said “I’m stunned that the reviews are this good.” Another critic said, “All I can say after sitting through nearly three hours of this [film] is thank God for Harrison Ford and Elvis Presley.” The latter refers to Ford’s Rick Deckard “living in some weird building somewhere, and among his entertainment options are life-size holograms of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe,” which are “pretty damned cool.”
I walk around in my canary-yellow sneakers like Woody Guthrie or Charles Bukowski and order the occasional hot dog or ice cream cone and rumble down the mean streets of Los Angeles on my scooter hog. I’m a real person and I don’t mince words, and if I like Blade Runner 2049 then maybe it’s got something. But you can’t trust the cloistered film monks. They live in their own world.
Everyone knows the set-up for Our Souls At Night, right? A pair of widowed 70somethings in a small town — Jane Fonda‘s Addie Moore and Robert Redford‘s Louis Walters — decide to forego loneliness and solitude by sleeping together. Not sexually but as a simple act of comfort and companionship.
Things are a bit awkward at first but not for long. They talk a bit and then a bit more, and they get to know each other, and they gradually come to everything good that you might expect to happen between two good people.
What happens doesn’t actually amount to a whole lot, but it seems like enough. The film isn’t about hanging with Louis and Addie as much as Bob and Jane, whom some of us have come to know pretty well over the decades. Louis and Addie are less wealthy and more conservative-minded than Bob and Jane, but otherwise there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of difference. Bob and Jane are good company for each other and for us.
What we get from their relationship are little comfort pills or, if you will, little spoonfuls of honey and squeezings of lemon in our tea. They speak quietly and gently to each other, never sharply or critically or sarcastically. Familiarity, trust…nobody’s in any hurry.
Our Souls At Night experiences a couple of mild downturns, mostly by way of Louis and Addie’s resentful grown children. Louis was a less-than-perfect father to his daughter (Judy Greer), and she reminds him of that for what I presume is the 179th time. Addie’s brief lack of vigilance led to a tragedy with her daughter, and so her alcoholic, occasionally abrasive son (Matthias Schoenaerts) reminds her of that also. Bluntly, hurtfully.
Schoenaerts’ character nearly destroys Louis and Addie’s relationship, and the film with it. He’s such an astonishing alcoholic asshole, and Addie, God help her, agrees with his view that she was the cause of her daughter’s death, and so Schoenharts, furious at Addie for her horrible non-error, pressures her into separating from Louis to make up for her mistake. What bullshit! Life is shorter than short, for God’s sake. If you’ve found a good thing, never let it go.
I wanted Addie to tell Schoenharts to go fuck himself, but she feels too guilt-ridden to do anything but indulge him. I wanted Schoenharts to bless his young son Jamie (Iain Armitage) by dying in a drunken car crash or slitting his wrists in the bathtub, but alas, no. Poor Jamie is living with an abuser, and is doomed to a life of anger and resentment and Al Anon meetings.
A movie that makes you wish for the absence or the death of a bad guy and then refuses to get rid of him is not, in my book, doing the right thing.
As I waited for the lights to come down and Last Flag Flying to begin, I was thinking the following: “This is a 30-years-later Last Detail sequel ** without Jack Nicholson or Randy Quaid and minus the names of the original characters, so it’s obviously going to feel hand-me-downish — not just older and saggier but lacking that Nicholsonian spark. But it still needs to deliver the spirit and character-rich humor and melancholy of Hal Ashby‘s 1973 original. And if it can’t manage that, it needs to invent something else that will work just as well.”
Well, forget all that.
Directed and co-written by Richard Linklater, Last Flag Flying (Amazon / Lionsgate, 11.3) is just a moderately passable older-guy road movie — a doleful, episode-by-episode thing about three ex-servicemen and former buddies — Larry “Doc” Shepherd (Steve Carell), Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) — assessing their lives and the world around them as they escort the casket of Shepherd’s soldier son, recently killed in Iraq, from Dover, Maryland (or Norfolk, Virginia — not sure which) to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
This is nearly the same path, of course, that the original film followed when Badass Buddusky (Nicholson) and Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) escorted Larry Meadows (Quaid) to the Portsmouth brig for the crime of having stolen $40 from a polio donation box. For whatever tangled reasons Linklater and original novel author and screenplay co-writer Daryl Poniscan chose to re-name Buddusky as Nealon, Mulhall as Mueller and Meadows as Shepherd. This led to ignoring the Last Detail origin story and making the trio into Vietnam vets with a shared history.
The difference is that (a) Nealon-Buddusky, as played by Cranston, is now an intemperate, pot-bellied drunk, (b) Fishburne’s Mueller-Mulhall has become a testy, sanctimonious prig with white hair, and (c) Carell’s Shepherd-Meadows has gotten shorter with age and become a quiet, bespectacled grief monkey (and who can blame the poor guy?)
The film mopes along in a resigned, overcast-skies sort of way, and after about 30 or 40 minutes you start saying to yourself, “Jesus, this thing is going to stay on this level all the way through to the end, and I’m stuck with it.”
There are two performances that merit special praise — J. Quinton Johnson‘s as a young Marine escort, disciplined but observant, who travels with the trio to Portsmouth, and Deanna-Reed Foster‘s as Mueller’s compassionate wife.
I know I’m supposed to say that Cicely Tyson‘s walk-on part as the mother of a deceased Vietnam vet rocked my realm, but it mostly registered as a “good enough but calm down” thing.
The Last Detail was based on Ponicsan’s 1970 novel. Last Flag Flying is based on Ponicsan’s same-titled 2005 novel, the main difference being that the book used the names and history of the original characters.
Here’s what I wrote to a critic friend the day after seeing Last Flag Flying:
“My instinct is not to dismiss this too quickly or abruptly. Sometimes less can be deceptively more, I’m thinking, and so perhaps I should give this meandering little film the benefit of the doubt by thinking it through a bit longer. But I can’t find anything beneath what my initial impressions were, which is that there just isn’t much here.
“I kept waiting for something truly intriguing, significant, jarring or emotionally moving to happen, but nothing ever did. It’s just a series of modest little road-trip episodes.
“The scene that pops the most, I suppose, is the airplane hanger scene when Carell witnesses his son’s dead and disfigured body and learns the truth about what really caused his death. I started to feel hopeful after this, but the film just settled back into a kind of lazy sluggishness after this, and nothing really happened.
“A very minor film, I’m afraid. If you compare it to Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (and how can you not?), it falls short in every regard — story, dialogue, performances, flavor, humor, emotional impact.
“Remember that great marital argument scene between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Midnight? I was hoping that Linklater and Ponicsan’s energy might try to go in the same direction and that something charged and confrontational might manifest at the end, but alas…no.
“I’m not calling Last Flag Flying a ‘bad’ or ineffective film, but it’s certainly underwhelming.
“What is it really saying? That it’s tragic and unbearably sad to lose a son, that official authorities are never to be trusted, that guilt can linger for decades or a lifetime, and that loyalty among men who’ve served in the military lasts forever.
“I’m quite irritated that the Last Detail character names have been changed…VERY irritated. Coarse & boozy Sal Nealon/Buddusky calls bullshit on everyone and everything. Mulhall/Mueller hobbles around on a cane, laments Buddusky’s alcoholism, and gradually lets his real self emerge. Meadows/Larry ‘Doc’ Shepherd weeps for his son and his recently deceased wife.
“I saw it Wednesday evening at 7 pm, and the after-vibe was one of vague confusion and befuddlement. The conversational huddles I heard were along the lines of ‘uhhm, what was that? Am I missing something? Did you read the book?,’ etc.
** The events of Poniscan’s “Last Detail” book, published in ’70, were supposed to be happening in ’68 or ’69, or just shy of 50 years ago. Ashby’s Last Detail film was released in ’73, which obviously makes it 44 years old. But the Last Flag Flying story takes place in ’03, or 30 years after the movie came out, which is why I used the above shorthand description — “a 30 years-later Last Detail sequel.”
Re–shuffling of tweets posted an hour ago: Hugh Hefner peaked as a progressive cultural figure sometime between the late ‘50s and the mid ’60s. Hef’s brand was over by the mid to late ‘70s, but respect must be paid on the occasion of his passing. Hefner was one of the key agents (if not the key agent) in the sexual-attitude liberation of Eisenhower-era America. Playboy, Hef’s brainchild, arguably did more to loosen the strings on the straightjackets that were being worn (or more accurately submitted to) by middle-class American males than any other cultural factor, and that was no small feat. Hefner is dead, but his legend — intense, pipe-smoking, white-collar guy ignites a libidinal revolution — will never die. Only in America.
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