I like the idea of a young New York guy (Callum Turner) discovering that his married dad (Pierce Brosnan) is having it off with a significantly younger hottie (Kate Beckinsale), and then slipping into the situation and boning the girlfriend himself.
And I’m willing to forgive director Marc Webb for those two Andrew GarfieldSpider-Man reboots that no one really cared about, primarily because he directed 500 Days of Summer. And I’m willing to forgive screenwriter Allan Loeb for having written Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps because he also wrote Things We Lost In The Fire.
The only thing that gives me slight pause is the fact that Turner has eyes like Johnny Hallyday‘s, which is to say eyes like a timber wolf — a timber wolf in stylish, round-rim glasses. Some guys have warlock eyes (Stephen Frears), some have big cow eyes (Cary Grant), some have Walken eyes, some look like otters (Benedict Cumberbatch) and others have eyes like Turner…just saying.
It’s also fair to ask where these eyes came from genetically. Brosnan obviously doesn’t resemble a timber wolf and neither does Cynthia Nixon, who plays his mom. Look at the guy…come on! (Nobody ever seems to notice this stuff, much less comment about it, except me.)
I’ve nothing left to say about Comic Con, but I’m gonna say it anyway.
For the last few years this infernal San Diego gathering has been Hollywood Elsewhere’s idea of Evil Central — the absolute dregs of cinema culture congregated en masse, goofballing and cosplaying in one ten-square-block area of downtown San Diego, ripe for strafing as they fiddle with this or that pathetic fantasy…anything to distract them from the general drift and hollowness of their day-to-day lives.
Last year I said I wouldn’t go there with a knife at my back and a $1000 cash bribe in a brown paper bag. My refusal price has since gone up. This year I wouldn’t attend Comic Con with an offer of (a) $1500 in cash, (b) a RT flight to San Diego in a private jet, (c) ten gratis sushi dinners, (d) a year’s supply of dark Italian Starbucks Instant and (e) a $300 gift certificate from The Kooples.
Okay, the British guy who managed to actually fly around like a low-altitude Iron Man deserves a round of applause.
“Cons are for partying and cosplay and raucous behavior,” a “retired organizer of genre cons” named faustidisqwrote last year. “This attitude attracts so many different people now and not just the fat basement dwellers who used to be the only types. But at least those comic book guys weren’t pushovers to taste. They were well-read and quite articulate and knew their movie history. Nowadays, it’s a ‘look at my costuming group’ and ‘can I sneak into that press event, dude?’ attitude.”
Me too: “Except for noteworthy exceptions like Ant-Man, Avatar, portions of the 2014 Godzilla, the original Guardians of the Galaxy, the first two Captain America flicks and others I’m forgetting right now, the Comic-Con influence is the nexus of evil in the action-movie realm.
Presumably everyone knows by now that Criterion is coming out with a 4K-mastered Barry Lyndon Bluray on 10.17, or about three months hence. The big thing from HE’s perspective is that they’re going with a totally correct 1.66:1 aspect ratio. This amounts to a stiff rebuke to longtime Kubrick associate and Warner Home Video consultant Leon Vitali, who six years ago persuaded WHV to release a Lyndon Bluray that cropped Stanley Kubrick‘s masterpiece at at 1.78:1.
A somewhat taller Barry Lyndon image than the 1.66 one that will appear next October via Criterion, but one I nonetheless prefer.
Aspect-ratio-wise, this image is the same one used on the Criterion BarryLyndon page. The a.r. is roughly 1.78:1.
Glenn Kenny actually provided the coup de grace in the form of a letter confirming Kubrick’s wish to have Lyndon screened at 1.66, but HE felt a surge of pride regardless because I’d insisted all along that 1.66 was the only way to go.
Why doesn’t Criterion’s Peter Becker man up and admit that his company’s decision to go with a 1.66 a.r. on their Lyndon Bluray was at least a partial offshoot of the HE/Kenny-vs.-Vitali debate? Why don’t they just act like men and cop to it instead of pussyfooting around and pretending it never happened?
The ultimate way to go, of course, is for Criterion to present its remastered Barry Lyndon on an actual 4K Bluray, as opposed to a 1080p Bluray using a 4K scan. If they do this I’ll break down and buy a 4K Bluray player.
Last night I saw a 70mm IMAX version of Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk. Staggering, breathtaking, HANDS DOWN BRILLIANT — not just a Best Picture contender for 2017 (obviously) and not just Nolan’s best (ditto) but easily among the greatest war films ever made in this or the 20th Century. Saving Private Ryan, step aside. The Longest Day, sorry. Full Metal Jacket, down half a peg. Gabriel’s trumpet is blaring from the heavens — this is a major, MAJOR 21st Century achievement.
Dunkirk is not just exceptional cinema but majestically its own thing in an arty, stand-alone, mad-paintbrush sort of way — emotional but immediate and breathtaking, but at the same time standing back a bit by eschewing the usual narrative and emotional engagement strategies that 100 other war films have used in the past (and will probably use again and again in the future).
Thank you, Chris, for not explaining who each character is or giving me their back story or supplying them with an emotional speech or two. Thank you for just plunking me down on that huge Dunkirk beach of 75 years ago and letting me fend for myself, for putting me right in the middle of 400,000 young British troops trying to get the hell out of there before the Germans come and rip them to shreds with bombs and hot lead.
Dunkirk is way above the usual-usual. It will tower, stand astride, fly, soar, float, bob and IMAX the shit out of you. A Colossus of Rhodes awaits at your nearest IMAX theatre. Just don’t see it on a regular-sized screen…please. Go as big and loud as you can. Beg, borrow, wait in line…whatever it takes.
Does everyone understand the exceptionalism here? The critics do but others don’t. People who like the usual massages and neck rubs (i.e., guys like Jeff Sneider) are expressing concerns. I’ve been told that a certain name-brand journalist found it a drag. Some (okay, a couple of women) feel it’s not personal or emotionally affecting enough in the usual theatrical-device ways.
Dunkirk is about Nolan saying, “Okay, look, of course…I know how to do that kind of film. Anybody can make that kind of proscenium-arch, emotional-bromide war film if they have the funding and know a little something about screenwriting and camera placement. Please understand I am not doing that kind of film out of choice. This is a giant-ass art film. This is a ‘less story and next-to-no-character-detail equals richer cinema’ thing. This is a highly selective, God’s-editing-machine take on a World War II tragedy that actually turned into a heartening thing in actuality.”
Tatyana says it’s really great in terms of visual splendor and the land-sea-air concept “but I didn’t see or feel any characters except for the guy on the boat [i.e., Mark Rylance]…it’s just about people struggling to survive, and it’s awful when people can do nothing or next to nothing to save themselves…so despairing, no content, no emotions or empathy, an empty movie…unlike The 9th Company or Stalingrad, which I quite liked….bombing, bombing, bombing….emotions and involvement are so much more important to me than the shape or size of a screen.”
Thank God for the great Tom Hardy, the Spitfire pilot who mostly performs from behind a pilot’s mask of some kind. It’s the best thing he’s done since Locke.
Obviously I’ve been in the tank for Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name since last January’s Sundance premiere, but no more than any of the other big HE favorites in recent years — Manchester By The Sea, 12 Years A Slave, Zero Dark Thirty, A Separation, Birdman, Silver Linings Playbook, et. al. Naturally I’ve been expecting to see this landmark film play the Telluride Film Festival. Everyone regards TFF’s annual offerings as pretty much the finest distillation of early-to-mid-fall smarthouse or award-friendly cinema, so how could Guadagnino’s film not begin its award-season adventure there?
If a really good film starts its journey in Telluride or for that matter Venice (like Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing will), it will automatically radiate a special tingle vibe or savory aroma throughout the season. A Telluride debut is a gold-seal thing whereas a Toronto premiere is…well, lively and certainly welcome but without that special aromatic lift.
Which is why I went into a state of catatonic shock yesterday when I learned that Call Me By Your Name has been heave-ho’ed by Telluride’s Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger. Not due to a lack of admiration or respect (or so I gather) but because of organizational egos and politics. CMBYN‘s apparent sin was having had its world premiere at Sundance ’17 plus a European premiere the following month at the Berlinale. Telluride has screened only three Sundance debuts in its entire history, I’m told.
Yes, Manchester By The Sea was shown at Telluride ’16 eight months after debuting at Sundance, but that was because Telluride mounted a special tribute to Casey Affleck. The Affleck tribute, of course, was just an institutional ploy to sidestep Telluride’s own edict or disinclination to show Sundance films. Had they been so inclined Tom and Julie could have easily justified screening CMBYN by running a special Luca Guadagnino tribute.
Is Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes as good as the critics (myself included) have been saying it is? Does it in fact traverse the realms of smart summer tentpole, masterful art-film composition and epic storytelling at a high emotional pitch? Is it as satisfying for the snoots as the slovenlies? Is it an emotional tour de force, a band-of-brothers film, a ferociously realistic war movie, and a kind of Great Escape rolled into one? Is Reeves a rightful successor of the kind of achievement that Peter Jackson and George Lucas managed in decades past? Is it the most satisfying trilogy of its kind since the original Star Wars threesome (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi), or is it better?
The new Wrinkle In Time trailer begins with Chris Pine asking “what if we are here for a reason? What if we are part of something truly divine?” HE answer: Don’t be tedious. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Okay, you could call the relentless, never-ending cycle of creation, destruction and renewal a divine thing if you want, but the only reason any of us are here boils down to mere chance. In other words, we got lucky. Ava DuVernay and Jeffrey Wells were born on this blue planet for exactly and precisely the same reason that a certain blade of grass sprouted on a large fairway at the Bel Air Country Club last March. Why did this particular blade of grass happen to punch through the soil? Because God has a plan.
Seriously, this teaser feels like a mystical mumbo-jumbo hodgepodge. It gave me a stomach ache. In part because Oprah Winfrey plays Mrs. Which, Reese Witherspoon plays Mrs. Whatsit and Mindy Kaling plays Mrs. Who. (The latter is rumored to be the great granddaughter of Who, the baseball player from the Abbott & Costello “Who’s On First?” routine.)
The 12th paragraph gets to the nub of it: “Tarantino wants to tell a story about how the age of free love morphed into something horrific — a transformation that still has disturbing implications today. Will he play it straight or Tarantino-ize it? My instinct (or maybe it’s just a hope) is that Tarantino can’t reduce the Manson story to another of his concoctions. I mean, he can, of course, but it wouldn’t feel right, and it wouldn’t be inspiring cinema.”
HE opinion: As intriguing as this project sounds, Tarantino is incapable of playing it even semi-straight. He’s not a docu-dramatist — he’s a creator of alternate Quentinworld fantasies. His last three films have mined the past — Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight — and each time he’s reimagined and re-dialogued history in order to transform his tales into his own brand of ’70s exploitation cinema. Why should QT play his cards any differently with the Manson family?
Gleiberman said this morning that location-wise he wants Tarantino to deliver an exact duplicate of everything we know about the Manson geography (Spahn ranch, Haight-Ashbury, etc.) but “make it feel new.”
“Alas, Tarantino is not a realist,” I replied. “Never has been, never will be. His Paris neighborhood set in Inglorious Basterds looked exactly like that — a phony sound stage realm. And remember that he reimagined an anti-Semitic, Jew-hunting Nazi Colonel as a witty talk-show showoff who loved to giggle at his own jokes. Remember also that in the same film Tarantino gave a French country farmer the name of ‘Bob.'”
There is still, we’re told, a contingent of old-school SAG conservatives who are again determined to ixnay a CG-augmented Andy Serkis performance in the realm of Best Actor nominations. His latest and greatest, I mean. The unqualified raves for Serkis’ Caesar in War For The Planet of the Apesmake this alleged SAG recalcitrance and obstinacy seem all the more embarassing. SAG naysayers can dismiss or marginalize Serkis’s soul-stirring performance but critics and ticket buyers know the truth of it, as history soon will.
Wake up, Academy and guild members — great acting is great acting. Filmmaking in 2017 is ten times more digitized than it was ten years ago, and 50 times more than it was in ’97 and so on. The bouquet of roses and aroma of strong coffee is in the air. You can’t continue to say “what coffee smell?” year after year after year. This is reality, Greg.
“Andy Serkis’s performance as Caesar is one of the marvels of modern screen acting…the motion-captured, digitally sculpted apes [in War] are so natural, so expressive, so beautifully integrated into their environment, that you almost forget to be astonished by the nuances of thought and emotion that flicker across their faces.” — from War review by N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.
“If he weren’t acting with dots on his face to be replaced by a detailed computer simulation of an upright chimpanzee, it would be all but impossible to deny Serkis an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.” — BFI critic Kim Newman.
In a just-released Awards Daily poll, over 100 newspaper, magazine, and online film critics and movie writers have named Jordan Peele‘s Get Out as their favorite film of 2017. What a lazy, submissive, grass-munching herd.
The lead of Jordan Ruimy’s article about the findings reads, “There was a time when film critics used to be a very unpredictable lot”…no longer! The runners-up were Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver and James Mangold’s Logan. A portion of those polled mentioned Cannes and Sundance films that will like emerge as the ’17 award season’s most critically acclaimed films. The most frequently mentioned were Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, Dee Rees’ Mudbound and Kogonada’s Columbus.
For the third time, Hollywood Elsewhere’s own Best of ’17 list: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation, (6) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (7) David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, (8) Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (even though I fundamentally regard this Paris-based ghost story as last year’s news as it premiered nearly 14 months ago at the ’16 Cannes Film Festival) and (9) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.
And who would Pitt play exactly? My first thought was convicted Manson Family murderer Tex Watson, but Watson was 24 when the murders happened and Pitt will turn 54 next December so how would that work?
I agree that Jeremy Davies would make a perfect Charles Manson. All he has to do is use a sharper, raspier voice.
For what it’s worth I agree 100% with Vanity Fair‘s Joanna Robinson that Tarantino should forget about making a feature and go instead for a six- or eight-episode HBO miniseries. Or at the very least that he should expand upon the feature after the initial release with an HBO miniseries version. The Manson murder saga is a long, gnarly, sprawling thing with all kinds of crazy tangents and sub-plots and side views. A decent movie version would have to be Zodiac-sized, at the very least, or at least three hours.
No hyperbole here. I’m going to play it cool and calm. Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of The Apes is a grounded, eye-filling super-epic, but I’m not going to get carried away. So I won’t be calling it a delivery device for some magical movie potion or, you know, a blessed and majestic achievement for the ages or the answer to any of your personal prayers. Well, maybe one: “Oh Lord, please save us from the scourge of summer movies by giving us a great film — primal, painterly, deeply rooted, character-driven, beautifully fused — that just happens to have a mid-July release date.”
Yes, it’s a franchise flick (further installments are probably inevitable) but Reeves, director of the second and third installment in the 21st Century apes trilogy, has enhanced the brand above and beyond. War is part popcorn and part arthouse, and graced with exquisite chops start to finish. It’s a kind of wintry Apocalypse Now in simian…wait, I said no hyperbole.
But it is that, dammit. A dystopian thing, an emotional tour de force, a band-of-brothers film, a ferociously realistic war movie, and — I love this — a kind of Great Escape meets Escape From Alcatraz in a snow-covered (you could almost say enchanted) forest. The key terms are “measured just so”, “exquisitely composed” and “the whole greater than the sum of the parts.”
War traverses the realms of smart summer tentpole, masterful art-film composition and epic storytelling at a high emotional pitch. If the snoots and the slovenlies are equally satisfied you know a film is up to something extra.
So yes, War For The Planet of the Apes is an answered prayer of sorts, except God had little to do with it. Okay, maybe in the usual sense (i.e., God as co-pilot or the vague architect of destiny), but it was Reeves who Pattoned this thing…who rolled up his sleeves, came to grips, demanded certain standards, co-wrote the War script with Mark Bomback, led his troops into the forested northwest and made a couple of thousand creative decisions over three and a half years.
Rupert Wyatt launched the apes trilogy in 2011, but Reeves has carried the weight since late ’12 and has now brought it home.
It would sound obsequious to call him the simian maestro, but we can at least say that Reeves is the Peter Jackson of this exquisitely hairy CG realm. The Academy waited for Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Return of The King before handing him a Best Director Oscar, even with the layered and laborious Return (be honest) not being all that great. But War is a staggering piece of work — ask any big-league critic. Surely a similar consideration is due to Reeves for concluding an epic saga on such a grand and Spartacus-like note.
