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–shufflingoftweetspostedanhourago: 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.
When I read that Sony Pictures Classics had acquired The Wife, which a few of us flipped over after seeing it in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, I naturally figured they’d platform it sometime in late December and then launch a Best Actress campaign for Glenn Close in January along with a modest commercial opening.
Well, they’re not doing that. SPC has decided to open The Wife sometime in 2018 (probably next fall), and in so doing has forfeited what could have been a legendary Best Actress Oscar contest between two grand dames, Close and Meryl Streep, who will almost certainly be nominated for her performance as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in The Post.
Close’s performance as Joan Castleman, an under-appreciated wife of a best-selling, somewhat imperious author (Jonathan Pryce), would be a Best Actress shoo-in, trust me. She could even become the front-runner as no one wants to give Streep another Oscar. A nomination, okay, but not a win. Three Oscars on Streep’s mantle are enough.
SPC’s decision to withdraw Close from this year’s Best Actress contest has to be one of the most disappointing award-season calls of all time. They’re shutting down one of the hottest Best Actress contenders of the year in order to…what, save money? To give a better shot to Annette Bening, whose performance as Gloria Grahame in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool has a dicey chance of being nominated, at best?
Close can win, guys! 70 years old and Oscar-nominated six times (The World According to Garp, The Big Chill, The Natural, Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons, Albert Nobbs) but never a win. That’s called a compelling narrative and a strong reason to vote for her. Who in the Academy is clamoring to give Streep her fourth Oscar? Frances McDormand, Saoirse Ronan and Sally Hawkins give award-calibre performances in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Lady Bird and The Shape of Water, respectively, but Close would out-point them, and not just because of her age and history.
She’s playing a steely, classy, soft-spoken lady who’s bitten her tongue and quietly endured career frustration so that her husband can play the role of the big swaggering author. This is a character and a situation that taps into the feelings of God knows how many women out there, middle-aged and old, who’ve had to cope with an unwarranted lack of respect or opportunity or lower wages their whole lives.
This plus Close’s personal narrative would strongly favor a win, and yet SPC is turning tail and giving up without a fight. What Academy or guild member will feel big excitement about Close this time next year? Everyone will be saying “oh, now they’re finally releasing the film and pushing Glenn? Where were they last year?”
The biggest winner in this decision is I, Tonya‘s Margot Robbie, who might be able to snag the fifth slot now.
Brett Morgen‘s Jane (National Geographic, 10.9), a doc about famed primatologist Jane Goodall, recently screened at the Toronto Film Festival. No offense but I didn’t think it mattered enough to squeeze it into my brutal schedule. I was going to see it eventually out of respect for Morgen, but now I’m suddenly revved. That’s because I’ve been invited to a special 10.9 Hollywood Bowl screening that will feature a live orchestral performance of Phillip Glass’s enchanting original score. The film is mostly composed of recently discovered footage of Goodall finding her way into the study of chimpanzees in the early ’60s. The footage was (a) shot in Gombe, Tanzania by her then-future husband Hugo van Lawick, and is (b) intercut with interviews of present-day Goodall, who’s now 83.
Between the Cinefamily allegations, the Devin Faraci scandal and now the Harry Knowles Alamo Drafthouse controversy, a deeply stamped association between jowly, bearded movie geeks and creepy-pervy sexual behavior has been embedded. And now fresh torches are burning down in Austin and all across the twitterverse, and a sizable crowd is suddenly thirsting for the blood of a carrot-haired fat man.
Knowles, founder of Ain’t It Cool News, was accused two days ago of two instances of inappropriate contact and asshole-ish groping in ’99 and ’00. His accuser, Jasmine Baker, presumably waited nearly two decades for the same reason that Bill Cosby‘s accusers said nothing for so many years. Knowles has “categorically” denied Baker’s claims and also denied them in a tweet on Saturday, calling the allegations “100% untrue.”
Obviously many are assuming otherwise, or are convinced of same. Three AICN regulars — Steve Prokopy (“Capone”), Eric Vespy (“Quint”) and an as-yet-unidentified contributor known as “Horrorella” — have quit Knowles’ site. Maybe they have information above and beyond what Baker has stated, or maybe they’re terrified of being branded as allies or sympathizers and for safety’s sake are looking for tall grass. I know that right now the Twitter wolves are describing Knowles as a serial assaulter; a few seem to regard him as a fiendish life form second only to Bluebeard and Ed Gein.
Has anyone besides Baker accused Knowles of sexual assault? (I’m just asking.) Maybe Knowles is guilty of all kinds of things. Maybe what’s happening now is the beginning of some kind of justified mass payback for God knows how many sexual abusers who’ve over-stepped their bounds for God knows how many years. Or maybe two incidents of (alleged) reprehensible behavior shouldn’t quite earn Knowles the same condemnation that has justifiably been thrown as Cosby.
“You think of that young kid, sneaking his way into a studio and manifesting his own destiny…it’s a pretty fantastic Hollywood story” — Leonardo DiCaprio quote from Susan Lacy‘s Spielberg, an HBO doc that will begin airing on Saturday, 10.7. He’s referring to an oft-told story about the teenaged Spielberg flim-flamming his way around the Universal lot in the mid ’60s, pretending to belong, sneaking around, etc.
Lacy talked to Spielberg for 30 hours while collecting insights and recollections from J.J. Abrams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Dreyfuss, Ralph Fiennes, Harrison Ford, David Geffen, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Holly Hunter, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ben Kingsley, Kathleen Kennedy, George Lucas, Liam Neeson, Martin Scorsese, Oprah Winfrey and Robert Zemeckis.
Sayingitagain: Spielberg’s ass has been steadily smooched by every Tom, Dick and Harry in this town for the last 40 years. What are the odds that Lacy will attempt even a slight variation on this?
Postedon7.13.17: “I’m not saying the point of Lacy’s doc is to warm up the atmosphere and fluff up the bed on behalf of Spielberg’s The Post (20th Century Fox, 12.22), but it certainly won’t hurt in this regard.
“Imagine if Lacy’s doc was given to brutal honesty and was titled Super-Hack, and was basically about selling the idea that throughout his life Spielberg’s default instinct has never been anything more profound than wanting to get a rise out of Joe Popcorn, and that aside from E.T., Schindler’s List, Lincoln and maybe four or five other exceptions to the rule, there’s nothing wrong with banging out commercial movies or being the most talented and financially successful hack in Hollywood history.
“From ’75 through ’82 Spielberg was regarded by everyone (myself included) as a consummate filmmaker. He seemed to have an extraordinary ability to make his movies jump through the scrim — stylistically vivid, often entertaining, frequently impressive and, of course, financially successful.
“Spielberg knows his craft like few others, but 85% to 90% of his films have mostly been free of any kind of singular passion or deep-rooted beliefs about human nature and how the world works or an underlying current of any kind. Spielberg is a Capra-esque suburban sentimentalist who believes in the goodness of American families, small-town neighborhoods, emotional moms, chubby kids, aliens cute and ferocious, happy endings, carefully choreographed action and wow-level spectacle.
Jett Wells and Caitlin Bennett tied the knot around 4:25 pm today. Beautiful ceremony, warm weather, heartfelt vows, serene vibe, sniffles and hugs…the day couldn’t have been more note-perfect. Including the dinner, dessert, champagne for those who were drinking, etc. Congrats to the newlyweds and anyone else who had anything to do with this atmosphere of balm and cheer. Yes, thanks…another piece of wedding cake!
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘s The Battles of the Sexes (opening today) is fine as far as it goes. And I’m not saying “fine” as a dodge. It really is an acceptable, good-enough thing.
During my one-and-only Telluride viewing I never once said to myself “this isn’t working” or “why isn’t this better?” I was engaged in the true story as far as it went. I never felt bored or irked. Okay, perhaps a little let down when I began to realize that it wouldn’t be delivering any big knockout moments and that it was basically an acceptable, competently made sports drama with five or six good scenes. But I was always “with” it. No checking the watch, no bathroom breaks.
I wasn’t knocked out by Emma Stone‘s performance as tennis great Billie Jean King, but neither was I disappointed. I believed her; she’s fine. Ditto Steve Carell‘s performance as the occasionally clownish, gambling-addicted Bobby Riggs. Honestly? The performance that touched me the most was Austin Stowell‘s as Billie Jean’s husband, Larry, who shows grace and kindness as he realizes that his marriage is on the downslope due to his wife’s emerging sexuality, and that there’s nothing to be done about it.
Nobody at Telluride was over the moon about Battle of the Sexes, and a few were underwhelmed. But nobody put it down either. There’s nothing wrong with a film that rates a solid 7.5 or thereabouts. I wish more films were as moderately satisfying. I am not damning with faint praise here. Not every worthwhile film has to be brilliant.
“mother! is Darren Aronofsky’s Stardust Memories, his vehemently exaggerated satire on the burdens of fame. And for anyone who thought that Woody Allen’s 1980 film looked a gift horse in the mouth, critiquing fame from within its comfortable confines, mother! tops it — it’s a cinematic version of an equine root canal. The films’ similarities in intent and differences in degree emerge in one aspect in particular: while Stardust Memories doesn’t exactly flatter Allen’s character, in Aronofsky’s film the artist — freed from direct identification with Aronofsky’s own persona — comes off as an ingratiating monster.
“mother! is the story of a mid-career male artist — a writer, played by Javier Bardem — whose conjoined qualities of celebrity and vanity give rise to a uniquely destructive power. For Aronofsky, the calculus is cruel: the adoring crowd is motivated by a greedy and cavalier selfishness that is sought, enabled, nourished, sustained, and encouraged by the artist himself. His film flirts with the ridiculous and sometimes falls into it — though to ridicule it, or Aronofsky, for doing so is to miss both the point and the pleasure.” — posted by The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody on 9.18.
“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,...
