slider

I have a rendezvous with Patti Cake$ (Fox Searchlight, 8.18). I missed it in Park City. I missed it in Cannes. I missed a 6.22 screening on the Fox lot. But I will see it soon, I trust. And I will surrender myself to the New Jersey-ness of it, as I was born and raised and suffered through years of adolescent angst in Westfield, New Jersey. Westfield was and is a comfy whitebread hamlet while Patti Cake$ is set in the grim streets of Bergen County — a far cry. But I lived in North Bergen in ’08 and ’09 and suffered once again due to the grotesque antics of the Hispanic Party Elephant, who lived one floor above. I don’t hate New Jersey but it has always brought me some kind of pain or lethargy or discomfort. I’ll never be at peace with it, but I shouldn’t blame Patti Cake$ for being a New Jersey thang. The word all along has been highly positive. (Here’s a good piece by a fellow New Jerseyan.) It’s said to be a spiritual descendant of Hustle & Flow and 8 Mile, both of which I loved. So I’m ready to do it.

Read more

I’ve been watching One, Two, Three since the ’60s, and I laugh at the final line in this clip every damn time. The gist of James Cagney‘s three-word retort: You threatened me so I fucked you up badly, but then I un-fucked you up so everything’s cool and what’s your problem?

The key thing is Cagney turning to his left and looking at Lilo Pulver instead of Horst Buccholz when he says it. This changes the pitch. Cagney’s Coca Cola exec knows he’s using lopsided moral logic but what the hell. Another example of how a joke has to be delivered just so with just the right touch of English or it won’t work. Wilder used to say this in interviews all the time.

In a 7.7 piece titled “How the Globalization of the Academy Shakes Up the Race,” The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has again reported that foreign-resident membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has increased big-time over the past 13 months. With 1457 new members added since June 2016, or roughly a fifth of the entire membership of 7650, hundreds upon hundreds of these newbies are from China, South Korea, Russia, Israel, Poland, Italy,  Japan, et. al. (Feinberg’s first post about AMPAS membership changes appeared two years ago.)

So throngs of new foreign voters will mean what in terms of Best Picture contenders? You tell me but here’s a theory. Because a more culturally varied membership indicates a less monolithic mindset, it could be that formulaic, emotionally pat feel-good flicks that often appeal to the blue-hairs — movies like Chicago, The King’s Speech, Crash, The Artist — might have a tougher time winning. Maybe. Or an increased influence from Chinese and South Korean members could mean, God help us, greater support for military spectacle, monster flicks, martial-arts crap or Hitchcock or Spielberg homage films. Okay, let’s not go there. All hail the policies of inclusion, and down with the dominance of the proverbial 62 year-old white male who used to represent the typical Academy voter.

From Brooks Barnes’ N.Y. Times profile of producer Amy Pascal, posted on 7.8: “Pascal’s producing projects are varied: superhero movies (Silver & Black), prestige-minded dramas (The Papers), bouncy comedies (Barbie). But almost every film on her docket involves female empowerment.

“’I’m not trying to correct or counterbalance,’ Pascal said, referring to male-dominated Hollywood. ‘I’m interested in women because I am a woman, and that’s what I understand.’

Producer Amy Pascal (Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Papers

“To illustrate her point, she turned to The Papers, which stars Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham, who hesitantly took over The Washington Post after her husband’s suicide in 1963. The screenplay finds Graham trying to catch up to The New York Times, which published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, enraging President Richard M. Nixon and leading to a landmark First Amendment court case, which prohibited the government from ordering that leaked information not be published.

“’It’s first and foremost a movie about Katharine Graham, a woman who went from being a little bit of a mouse to a lion,’ Ms. Pascal said. ‘And that, to me, was obviously really interesting. She had to struggle to decide to speak up.’

“She added: ‘I know that woman. I’ve been that woman.'”

HE interjection: The problem with The Papers, as I indicated last March after reading Liz Hannah‘s The Post (since retitled and rewritten by Josh Singer), is that Mrs. Graham spends too much time as a mouse (over 70 pages) and not enough as a lion.

Read more

There was some back-and-forth yesterday about Kier Simmons‘ timid approach to covering a G20 demonstration for NBC (“What Kind Of Pussy Reporter Wears A Crash Helmet?“). One of the comments mentioned that notorious scene at the beginning of Thunderball when Sean Connery wore a jetpack helmet. Connery had that Scottish machismo thing down just fine in Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger. But it all collapsed when he put that pussy helmet on. From that point on there was something vaguely deballed about the guy. The advertising team obviously agreed — the Thunderball posters showed Connery flying the jet pack without the helmet.

No argument about having to wear a helmet to ride a motorcycle around town (although I’d be happier if the helmet law was optional) and I understand the need to wear yellow hard hats on a construction site, but otherwise helmets are for eunuchs. I’ve never worn one of those pinko-pansy bicycle helmets in my life, and I never will.

It was announced today that Ava DuVernay will write and direct a five-episode Netflix series about the Central Park jogger case of ’89. I don’t know, man. Ken and Sarah Burns‘ The Central Park Five, a 2012 documentary, was one thing (i.e., not without problems but compelling). But a dramatic miniseries will be a whole ‘nother challenge.

The case was about the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a female stockbroker, in Manhattan’s Central Park on 4.19.89. Five young black dudes — Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — were wrongly prosecuted and falsely imprisoned, only to be exonerated and freed several years later. A flat-out expression of racist hysteria and institutional corruption.

Duvernay is facing two significant problems in terms of her main characters — the five alleged assailants and Meili. If DuVernay fudges, sidesteps or fabricates (as she did with her depiction of Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma), she’s going to run into trouble.

Problem #1: The teenagers who were unjustly prosecuted and imprisoned put their necks in a noose when they stupidly confessed to the crime during police interrogation. They were coerced, yes, but with the assent of parents and/or guardians. Their apparent motive in confessing was that they were tired and wanted to go home.

How do you dramatize this without the audience saying “what the fuck is wrong with these guys…have they ever heard of ‘you can hassle me all you want but I didn’t do it’ or, better yet, ‘I’m not saying anything until I talk to an attorney’?”

Problem #2: The victim’s decision to jog in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm was almost as stupid. I lived in New York City in the early ’80s so don’t tell me — what Meili did was flat-out insane. Nobody of any gender or size with a vestige of common sense should’ve jogged in Central Park after dusk back then (and especially in the late ’80s when racial relations were volatile and Manhattan ‘was a completely schizophrenic and divided city’), much less above 96th street and much less above friggin’ 100th street. Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. Any kid who’s read Grimm Fairy Tales knows that wolves lurk in the forest at night.

How do you dramatize Meili’s late-night jogging without the audience thinking “wait…is she an idiot?

Read more

Either you’re intrigued and excited by the idea of a spooky but essentially non-scary ghost movie, or you’re not. Or you’re able to embrace the idea of a silent and passive ghost under a bedsheet, or not. 90% if not 95% of ticket-buyers prefer the dead-obvious kind of ghost flick (i.e. anything in the vein of the Conjuring series) and maybe 5% or 10% (if that) have a place in their heads for smarter, subtler variations. Which is one way of acknowledging that David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story, which opens tonight, probably won’t be setting any box-office records. But man, it sure rang my bell at Sundance last January.

Please…if you’re smarter than a fencepost and can think outside the box, give it a looksee this weekend.

I’m not the first one to say this, but it could be argued that the scariest thing about A Ghost Story is Lowery himself.

From Madison + Vine’s Jake Coyle: “A Ghost Story is what it says it is, and it may well haunt you. It won’t scare you; it doesn’t even say ‘boo.’ But glowing light and ghostly soulfulness linger on like a quiet, scratching presence that won’t leave you.”

Posted last month: Apologies to David Lowery and A24 for forgetting to include A Ghost Story in my recent rundown of the best 2017 flicks thus far. It belongs and then some. I’m putting A Ghost Story just below The Square but above Get Out, which was in sixth place until a few minutes ago but is now in seventh.

The new ranking: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick (Lionsgate/Amazon, 6.23), (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (6) Lowery’s A Ghost Story and (7) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.

Read more

My heart went pitty-pat this morning when I read the following comment from HE reader GoToSleep: “I’m not sure what the tracking is for Spider-Man: Homecoming and of course this is anecdotal as fuck, but it was way too easy to get tickets at my Brooklyn Alamo theater. The 3D screenings, as of 11AM Thursday, are wide open for seats, and you can still get tickets for most of the 2D screenings.”

I’m presuming that the jaded-Brooklyn-hipster mentality is behind the “too easy” availability of Alamo ducats. Variety is forecasting $85 to $100 million this weekend. I for one would feel a slight surge of satisfaction or even comfort if the about-to-pop Sony release would under-perform to some extent. This would indicate a higher degree of franchise fatigue than the trades are currently detecting…please!

If you and your friends believe in fairies, you have to communicate to the dark empire that (a) you’re sick of the endless MCU and D.C. sequels, revisitings and reboots, and (b) you want more semi-original, Baby Driver-type fare (even if the wheels fall off Edgar Wright‘s action-musical during the final 15 minutes). Yes, I’m dreaming. Yes, I’m nursing a dead fantasy that the corporate-think poisoning of megaplex fare could perhaps be diluted or even turn a corner.

To me, the heartache of Aura’s sudden passing meant getting another kitten right away. I’ll never stop feeling sad about Aura’s cruel fate (she died after only eight years and a couple of weeks) but you have to get back on the horse. This morning I bought a five-week-old bluepoint Siamese kitten, whom we quickly named Anya. She’s a baby — being fed special young-kitten formula out of a bottle, crying a lot, likes to be constantly held or to sit next to a warm human body. But she’s smart and spirited and very emotionally responsive, like all Siamese. Yes, I know that kittens should stay with their mom until eight or ten weeks of age, but the guy was selling and she only cost $250 so I wasn’t about to school him or look a gift-horse in the mouth.

Read more

I don’t expect much from Janus Metz Pedersen‘s Borg vs. McEnroe as a whole, but I want to see it. The hot-tempered, possibly wackadoodle Shia Labeouf playing John McEnroe, the ’70s and ’80s tennis champ known for his emotional tirades and disputes with judges…perfect. Plus I always liked the way McEnroe would emit that combination cry-groan thing with every serve. I expect a classic expletive performance. Hair-trigger McEnroe was beaten by the cool and dispassionate Bjorn Borg at the conclusion of the 1980 Wimbledon Men’s Singles final, but he had his revenge two months later, beating Borg in the five-set final of the 1980 U.S. Open.

This is strictly second-hand but I heard something today that upset my apple cart. It comes from the periphery of the Woody Allen camp.  The talk (and please understand this is just “talk” as in “not necessarily bankable”) is that Woody, who will be 82 in December, has muttered something along the lines of “the movie I make in 2019 might be my last.” He’s currently casting his 2018 film, which he’ll shoot either later this year or early next year, and then see to the promotion and publicity, and then he’ll make his 2019 film. And once that’s done it may be “adios muchachos.” Because, I’ve been told, Woody suspects he may not have any juice left after the ’19 flick, that he’ll be “done.”

Wells response: Here are my definitions of Allen being “done.” One, he’s just dropped dead on Fifth Avenue while directing his latest film. Two, he’s been found been slumped over in bed, his yellow writing pad at his side. Or three, he’s become one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who might wander into a cafeteria with a shopping bag, screaming about socialism.

Even if Allen recently did mutter something about hanging it up, a new good idea could change everything in an instant…right? What would Woody do with himself if he stopped writing and directing? True, he’ll turn 84 in ’19, which would mean that over half of his life will have gone by. By the Clint Eastwood standard (i.e., 87 and is still cranking ’em out), Woody is far from done.

I hate the hyphen, for one thing. I hate that they’re rebooting Spider-Man for the second damn time. I hate the idea of paying to see a film that is entirely about drooling corporate hunger. I hate the obliging whore instinct that played a part in the current 94% RT score. What’s in it for me to sit through this thing? Maybe a little amusement or diversion, but how long is this Marvel Comic Universe shit going to continue? You know the answer. Until people start saying “Fuck Kevin Feige…I’m bored and I’m done.” I just don’t want to see Spider-Man: Homecoming. I really, really don’t. Who’s with me? That was a joke. The studios crank out another and the herd comes right over and starts slurping. I’ve loved a few Marvel flicks but c’mon, man…enough. Okay, I’ll come back for Ant Man 2 if Peyton Reed directs, and for Black Panther. But you know even Black Panther is gonna be more or less the same old slop in the trough.