Getting eight and 1/2 hours (as opposed to the usual five or six) does wonders for your basic outlook upon life. It’s almost Halloween, November is just around the corner, and it feels like July here. The sky is radiant blue and everyone I see seems to be in a great or at least an easy mellow mood. I had the car washed this morning, and as I drove out of the lot it seemed as if all of West Hollywood was just as gleaming and squeaky clean. Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner milieu, a portrait of a poisoned Los Angeles in 2019, was absolute bullshit. Blade Runner 2049 is, of course, a prophecy of ecological run to come, and that’s where we’re definitely heading with criminals like Scott Pruitt running the EPA, but BR49‘s idea of what Los Angeles will look like 32 years hence is almost surely just as ludicrous as Scott’s.
Is she in the shower? What’s she doing, snapping her fingers or snorting cocaine out of a small spoon that we can’t see? One of the two.
Last night Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro posted a financial obituary for Blade Runner 2049. At a suspected cost of $170 million plus p & a, it might make $35 million by Sunday night…maybe. “An awful start…kerplunk,” says D’Allesandro. And it’ll be lucky to hit $100 million by the end of its domestic run. And European returns aren’t so hot either….phfffft.
D’Allesandro quote: “One financier remarked that they weren’t impressed by Friday’s early European B.O. results, and that it’s now up to Asia to save Blade Runner 2049.” Asia! We’re dying! Please save us!
Before this toxic gloomfest disappears with its tail between its legs, please share what you thought and felt as you sat through it last night or earlier today. If you hated it, fine. If you hated watching it but respected it anyway (like me), fine. But please post something from the heart or the head before it becomes a dead issue.
From Nick “Action Man” Clement: “Not a fan. Yes, it looks amazing, and it felt like a Denis Villeneuve movie in construction and aesthetic design and I still absolutely love this spellbinding filmmaker, but the 2049 narrative offered zero surprises, far too much bloat (there’s no valid reason this should have been close to three hours), and nothing of any serious engagement other than some really nice shots of the spinners flying around and Ryan Gosling giving a nice Ryan Gosling performance.
“I found it rote, stunningly predictable (I could have written this movie), and stodgy where it should have been gripping. The musical score is unmemorable, offering nothing but annoying BLLLAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMM on the soundtrack, often times drowning out the dialogue.”
I can’t say I “enjoyed” watching Blade Runner 2049 last night, but I can honestly say this morning that it’s gained upon reflection.
I’ve sat through my share of futuristic jizz-whizz fantasy flicks — nutrition-free wanks that you don’t respect the next morning. Denis Villeneuve‘s 30-years-later sequel to Ridley Scott‘s 1982 Blade Runner is no cheap-high ride — it’s a grim dystopian dream-trip, ruinously “beautiful” but soul-draining — but if you just surrender to the toxicity and allow it to pollute your system and your soul, you’ll probably realize the next morning that Villeneuve has deepened and expanded the overall tale. He’s made a serious film to which attention must be paid.
Perhaps not in a way that will matter all that much in the general realm and yes, you might feel a little sick from all those residual poisons, but a few hours later you’ll be glad you submitted. Because as much as I disliked sitting through it, Blade Runner 2049 stays with you, and that’s always a mark of something profound or at least high-fibre-ish.
It lasts an eternity — I checked my watch at least five or six times, and my muttered mantra all through it was “I don’t give a shit about any of this, I don’t give a shit about any of this, I don’t give a shit about any of this” — but it’s certainly a major vision thing. Pay your $16 dollars and sink into a thoroughly gloomy realm of super-holograms (including ones of Frank Sinatra and Vegas-era Elvis Presley), rot, ruin and industrial scrap, a toxic shithole populated with grim-faced characters you would just as soon squash as look at, a world of hair-grease and sprayed sweat and impassive, cold-death expressions, and all of it blanketed with rain, snow, sludge and chemical mud-glop.
And oh, yeah, for a story that you won’t give two shits about. A dingleberry doodle plot involving memory implants and oscured lineage and a secret no one must know (no one! just ask Jared Leto!) and a little wooden horse with a date (6.10.21) carved into the base, and some shit-hooey about original replicant creator Eldon Tyrell having given Rachael, the experimental replicant played by Sean Young in the ’82 original, the organic potential to reproduce and blah blah. And a narrative pace that will slow your own pulse and make your eyelids flutter and descend, and a growing need to escape into the outer lobby so you can order a hot dog and check your messages.
BR49 should have run two hours, not two hours and 44 minutes.
Do yourself a favor…seriously. Before seeing it this weekend, read the Wikipedia synopsis. Doing so will remove the irritating, hard-to-follow story tease and allow you to just concentrate on the visuals, which is all this thing is about anyway. It doesn’t matter anyway — nothing does, it’s all shit and distraction, you’re all just contributing to the Warner Bros. bottom line, to Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford‘s wealth while you subtract from your own. We’re all punks, fools, suckers, knaves. Warner Bros. pours a little whiskey onto the plastic floor, and like Ford’s Blade Runner wolf dog we lick it right up.
Fuck the story, fuck the lineage factor, fuck it all. Just sink into the chilly murderous vibe and Gosling’s impassive, glazed-over robot eyes, and Ford’s subtle emotional delivery (has he ever cried before on-screen?). Nobody cares and it doesn’t fucking matter if RG or Ford or Kevin Tsujihara are replicants. I’m a replicant with the capability of siring children and writing a daily column. What difference does it make if I’m an android or not, or if I dream of electric sheep? Nobody cares, nothing matters, it’s all bullshit.
What of the virtual-reality ho chick, the homicidal super-bitch and the brittle, tough-cookie supervisor played by Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks and Robin Wright? Smart women will not be pleased. (After the show a friend was listening to a whipsmart feminist deploring these characters and the phony, piss-poor writing.) For these are cardboard, non-dimensional figures (women acting like men or fulfilling men’s fantasies) who would never be hatched by a woman screenwriter. Grow some soul and awareness, Hampton Fancher and Michael Green.
How important is Gosling’s little wooden horse, and how does it feed into everything else? I’m still scratching my head about that, but I’m sure someone will explain it later today. Is Gosling’s “Joe” the replicant son of you-know-who? I didn’t give a shit. Is there any kind of emotionally satisfying undercurrent in any of this? Fuck no.
There’s one moment — one! — that made me sit up in my seat and say to myself “wait, hold on, this is semi-poignant.” But the spoiler whiners will kill me if I get specific. It involves Ford and a younger woman — I’ll leave it at that.
I knew this wouldn’t be a glorious, all-around triumph. I knew it would be brilliant but problematic. I knew not to trust those rave reviews written by balding, bespectacled and/or heavyset dweebs. If they’d written “it’s a bear to sit through and it makes you feel like shit, but it’s a masterpiece,” okay, but too many of them just wrote “it’s a masterpiece!” This is why people don’t trust critics. They live in their own world.
I’ve seen Susan Lacy‘s Spielberg (HBO, 10.7), a two-and-a-half-hour doc about the journey and the psychology of Steven Spielberg, and I’m telling you there’s more emotional revelation and honesty and cinematic punch in this thing than in many of Spielberg’s features, certainly the ones he’s made over the last 20-plus years.
It begins with a taste of Lawrence of Arabia and then a recollection from Spielberg about how he saw it repeatedly at age 16 and how it seemed so masterful that he nearly gave up his dream of becoming a movie director. Right from the start I was saying to myself, “I love this…this is about my church, my faith and all the movie dreams I’ve carried inside for decades…I love it already and it hasn’t even begun.”
Does Lacy shamelessly brown-nose? Yup, ‘fraid so. Does she sidestep, avert her gaze, emphasize the positive and avoid tough questions at almost every turn? Yes, she does. Is Spielberg, in fact, a 150-minute blowjob? Yeah, it is. But it’s a classy and beautifully assembled one. Spielberg delivers what most of us refer to as “the goods.” It offers balance, panache, love, perspective, open hearts, insight, joie de cinema and elegant editing and…oh, just a feeling of immense comfort and familiarity and fraternal bon ami.
I kind of loved it despite Lacy’s herculean determination to avoid telling the real truth about Spielberg-the-magnificent-and-bowed-down-to, which is that he’s a truly gifted lightweight, a very clever and hugely energetic guy who knows how to shoot the hell out of anything but has come to few conclusions and has next to nothing to say about the human condition or the state of the world, but has been insanely successful and that’s all that matters to most of the people in this town so what the hell…ass-smooch!
I take back that “nothing to say” stuff — Spielberg has often expressed his sentiments about how suburban family life is the greatest thing and how moms are generally more reliable than dads and that having an inner fantasy life can save you, etc.
The best parts are about Spielberg recalling his home life in a Pheonix suburb, his early discomfort about being a supposed Jewish outsider (a mindset that he profoundly reversed with the act of making Schindler’s List), his parents’ divorce (although he never explains why), the early feelings of inadequacy, how he had no life until his first son, Max, came along, etc.
Wizaemsky was portrayed by Stacy Martin in Michel Hazanavicius‘s Redoubtable, which I panned after catching it at last May’s Cannes Film Festival.
It’s been reported that Wiazemsky was 17 when her affair with Godard began. I’m figuring more like 19. She was born in ’47, and was 18 when Au Hasard, Balthazar (released on 5.25.66) was shot in the summer or fall of ’65. In her book “Jeune Fille” Wiazemsky wrote that Bresson was obsessed with her and never let her out of her sight, so it seems unlikely that Godard was circling her then. The timetable indicates that the Godard coupling began in late ’65 or ’66.
Dan Gilroy‘s Roman J. Israel, Esq. is “a whipsmart, cunningly performed, immensely satisfying film in so many ways. Such a skillful job of character-building on Gilroy’s part, layer upon layer and bit upon bit, and such a finely contoured performance by the great Denzel Washington. My only hang-up is that I wanted a different ending. Gilroy’s ending isn’t ‘bad’, per se, but I didn’t agree with it — I didn’t want it.
“Otherwise this is such a brilliant, invigorating and fully believable film for over-30s — milieu-wise, legal minutiae-wise, Asperger’s-wise. It’s my idea of pound cake topped with whipped cream and strawberries…give it to me. You can take a terrific bath in this film and never feel unsatisfied that the story isn’t quite delivering the way you want it to. Until the last 25 or 30 minutes, that is, but even then it’s not a fatal problem, just an air-escaping-the-balloon one.” — posted on 9.10.17 from the Toronto Film Festival.
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 Setoodehreported 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.
