The spooky closing montage is the crowning crescendo of William Cameron Menzies‘ Invaders From Mars (’53). Without this sequence the film would amount to much less, certainly in terms of present-day esteem. The combination of that eerie choral music (composed by Mort Glickman, orchestrated by Raoul Kraushar) along with those trippy reverse-motion shots still get under your skin.
A huge round of applause to editor Arthur Roberts, and an extra round for Glickman — the choral music delivers the spook and the soul.
The new Ignite Bluray arrived just a couple of days ago, and on one of these video essays Glickman is given credit for the music by Invaders restoration master Scott MacQueen. Joe Dante and John Landis also deliver excellent commentary in the same essay.
Apologies for the crappy video capture — I should have shot it last night.
My God, Avatar2: TheWayofWater rerally romps and stomps like nothing I’ve seen in a long while, and the astonishing CG realism (which I couldn’t settle into at first — it took me 10 minutes to find my way into it) is quite the thing, and there’s no beating that last 50- or 60-minute aquatic pitched-battle, breaching-whale, pulse-rifle-burst, arrow-piercing “woo-woo!” destructathon.
A family that fiercely fights together loves all the more…ThePoseidon Adventure meets a return-to-Titanic sinkathon + TheAbyss drowning trauma + weeping death scene + the wildest, craziest, most vigorously sustained battle lollapalooza ever…worth the price and then some…pays off like a motherfucker.
James Cameron is a drop-dead brilliant action director…let no one ever challenge that statement.
And I’m now determined to practice my Navi cat howl-Māori battle cry.
But so much of Avatar2 is padded all to hell & is too fucking long, man…it could’ve easily, EASILY been 45 minutes shorter. The narrative pretty much stops in the middle section and becomes a bloated, ultra-costly real-estate video + a tricks-of-under-the-sea survival instructional + Club Med acqua-blue travelogue for glorious Pandora Shores.
The tech is marvelous and bracinglyreal & every last dollar seems to be on the screen. But there’s something oddly oppressive and even un-entertaining at times about being vigorously assaulted & smothered by so much CG dough…truckloads & truckloads of cash spent by the ultimate wizardly maestro of wildly expensive holy shit superfuck blockbusters. The film is a titanic grand-slam CG toy factory spendathon…whew!
I like the “family is a fortress” theme but my God, I was exhausted when it ended. I’m not altogether sure I want to see it a second time. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman was right when he called it thin. Pic seems to take as much as it gives.
Right after the first media screening of Avatar 2 I said for the 157th time that you can’t trust fanboys. The only reactions you can trust are those from “grumpy” critics, which is to say discerning types who don’t immediately drop to their knees when confronted with next-level CG.
I wouldn’t call Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman a grump or a grinch, but he’s no easy lay**. His assessment of Avatar 2, therefore, has value.
Key Gleiberman passage: “At its height, it feels exhilarating. But not all the way through. Cameron, in The Way of Water, remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that.
“The story, in fact, could hardly be more basic. The Sky People, led again by the treacherous Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), have now become Avatars themselves, with Quaritch recast as a scowling Na’vi redneck in combat boots and a black crewcut. They’ve arrived in this guise to hunt Jake down. But Jake escapes with his family and hides out with the Metkayina. Quaritch and his goon squad commandeer a hunting ship and eventually track them down. There is a massive confrontation. The end.
“This tale, with its bare-bones dialogue, could easily have served an ambitious Netflix thriller, and could have been told in two hours rather than three. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The Way of Water is braided with sequences that exist almost solely for their sculptured imagistic magic. It’s truly a movie crossed with a virtual-reality theme-park ride. Another way to put it is that it’s a live-action film that casts the spell of an animated fantasy. But though the faces of the Na’vi and the MetKayina are expressive, and the actors make their presence felt, there is almost zero dimensionality to the characters. The dimensionality is all in the images.”
In a forthcoming issue of Total FilmOppenheimer‘s Christopher Nolan is claiming that he and his crackerjack physical effects team “recreated the first nuclear weapon detonation without using CGI.” I’m not 100% certain but I think Stanley Kubrick went the same way for Dr. Strangelove‘s grand musical finale.
Brittney Griner is 6’9″, wears a size 17 shoe and has a deep manly voice that’s a little deeper than Will Smith‘s. We all understand her sexual orientation, but is she looking to man up in every physically noticable way? Because her dreads have been shorn and she’s wearing tight man-hair with whitewalls. (Did the Russki prison system insist on this?) I thought the dreds worked.
HE not yet having seen The Whale is entirely on A24 and their reps, who are totally playing “hide the ball” from certain viewers. The idea of seeing it in the city this weekend is an option, of course, but a conversation I had this morning with three friends gave me pause:
Friendo #1: “The Whale is very bad.” Friendo #2: “It’s a tough sit, but I was sobbing at the very end.” Friendo #1: “The Whale begins with Brendan Fraser jerking off to gay porn.” HE: “Is that how the play version began?” Friendo #1: “I didn’t see the play.” HE: “Jerking off? Please tell me [Darren] Aronofsky‘s camera shows restraint.” Friendo #1: “And then somebody walks in on him.” Friendo #3: “I missed the first minute at my Toronto screening. I got in when he was naked in the shower. I didn’t notice any jerking off. Maybe I missed it.” Friendo #1: “I don’t remember a shower scene, but the first scene definitely shows him jerking off, bro,” Friendo #4: “Yes! That’s how it starts!” HE: “Aaaggghh.”
I have always been an ardent fan of Mr. Aronofsky’s, but saying that I am genuinely fearful of seeing The Whale is putting it mildly.
Is it Hillary Clinton or Amber Ruffin who’s murdering “I Will Survive“? One of them can’t hit notes to save their life, and is therefore helping to Hannibal Lecter this song (i.e., eating its liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti).
It’s probably not Ruffin, a professional comedian-actress, so we know who the guilty party is. Hillary doesn’t know the lyrics either.
An inability to sing isn’t a felony, but sharing your melodic dysfunction with the world is.
This clip is from Carpool Karaoke: The Series — Chelsea Clinton at the wheel, Vanessa L. Williams riding shotgun, Hillary and Amber in the back seat.
Gloria Gaynor wishes she was in hell with her back broken.
The Hillary Challenge: Can you make it all the way through this video without jumping out a window? pic.twitter.com/JYjQ7RAAwg
I was under the impression that Raphael Warnock would defeat Herschel Walker by…I don’t know, 51% to 49%? Slightly better as it turned out. Warnock finished with 51.2% to Walker’s 48.8%. Think of it — 48.8% of Georgia voters wanted to send Walker, that clown, to the U.S. Senate.
Antoine Fuqua‘s Emancipation begins streaming on Apple+ three days hence (12.9), and I’ll tell you straight and true that it didn’t make me feel miserable. Nor did I find it boring. A fair amount of it is “believable” as far as that concept goes. And Will Smith‘s performance as Peter, a Louisiana slave who escapes from a work camp by running, splashing, wading and rowing his way across endless miles of swamp, is very commendable — there isn’t a single thing that Smith does or says that feels phony or pushed or sentimentalized or…okay, Smith’s Peter is a little Hollywoody.
Smith grew (or pasted on) a chin beard and dropped several pounds to remind us that slaves were almost certainly never well-fed.
There is, however, a thing that’s missing from this 132-minute action film, and that’s any sense of surprise. Nothing happens that you don’t expect to see, or that you don’t see coming from a mile away. Each and every white slave driver (including the top-dog psychopath, played by Ben Foster) is cruel, vicious and repellent as hell. Not to mention bearded and smelly-looking and afflicted with bad teeth (and almost certainly halitosis).
A surprise would have been for one white scumbag to be a little less evil than the others, perhaps a tiny bit guilt-ridden or even briefly, momentarily decent in his treatment of the slaves. But no — every single slaver is pure reprehensible scum. Which they were, of course, but you know what I’m saying…trying for a little originality or the unexpected is always appreciated.
A film such as this (based on fact but fueled by an expected catharsis in which the runaway good guy prevails at the end) is basically about rooting for the gruesome deaths of the scurvy white guys. There’s a slave revolt moment (Spartacus rebranded) that I especially enjoyed. Ditto the third-act moment when Smith murders the black collaborator (a replay of the climactic scene in Django Unchained when Jamie Foxx kills Samuel L. Jackson‘s Uncle Tom. I was puzzled by a scene in which Smith’s left-behind wife Dodienne (Charmaine Bingwa) mutilates herself with a cotton gin, but we’ll let that go.
The basic idea behind Emancipation is “how would it be if it wasn’t Peter but the Philadelphia-born Will Smith suffering as a slave in 1860s Louisiana, and if Smith, being a hot-shot movie star in the guise of a slave, was smarter and tougher and more tenacious than anyone else in the film”…so tough and tenacious that he fights off an alligator while underwater and then kills this growling beast with a sharp knife, just like John Wayne killed that Native American warrior in the first act of Red River.”
But let’s understand that Smith’s bad-ass slave is a satisfying heroic figure — a guy you’re glad to hang with. You don’t want him to die or get captured, and you definitely want him to fight and kill the psychopathic Foster in the third act. You want him, in short, to be Sylvester Stallone in First Blood, and he occasionally rises to that occasion.
But again, there are no surprises. I decided during the film’s first third, at which point I knew that Emancipation would be rife with cliches, that Ben Foster should be attacked by a gator while taking a poop, and then dragged into deep water and drowned and then eaten. Or, failing that, if he could get bitten by a cottonmouth snake and thereby weakened by the venom, leaving him no choice but to lie down in order to gradually gather his strength and is then attacked by a gator and dragged underwater. That would wake you right up — for a venal white character to die not for the sins of racism and cruelty, but because he was unlucky in a damp and dangerous environment.
But at the end of the day I didn’t feel too much hurt from Emancipation. Lots of white-guy hate, but how can anyone say it’s not justified in this context? Justified but not that interesting. But if you watch it with your expectations suitably lowered…if you remind yourself that Fuqua is a genre guy — basically a proficient hack — and there’s no way this film is going to knock anyone out…if you watch it with these understandings, it isn’t all that bad of a sit.
Sidenote: I tried reviewing Emancipation late last week and it just wouldn’t come. I don’t think I cared enough one way or another.
I did, however, admire Robert Richardson‘s desaturated, bordering-on-monochrome color scheme. It would have been ballsier to go with straight black-and-white, of course, but Fuqua doesn’t have that kind of integrity.
I was planning to share some off-the-cuff remarks before Monday night’s Bedford Playhouse screening of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon (Paramount, 12.23).
The special-event showing, courtesy of Paramount, kicks off Bedford Marquee, a new program that will occasionally showcase exciting new films two or three weeks before their release, and will include post-screening discussions when feasible.
Babylon began on time and all went well, but I couldn’t attend because of my Covid situation. I’m currently feeling fine with an 98.4 temperature, but it would have been cavalier to mingle. So early Monday afternoon I recorded some of the thoughts I would’ve shared live, transferred the eight minute and 45 second file to Vimeo and sent it to Bedford Playhouse bros Dan Friedman and Robert Harris.
I was told they might not be able to squeeze it in due to the fact that the film is on a specially encrypted DCP that can only be tested and played within a limited time frame. The DCP only arrived yesterday, due to bad weather and other delay factors and accompanied by bouts of anxiety and uncertainty — not unsual if you know anything about the workings of UPS and DHL.
Either way it was extremely cool of Paramount to allow us to present this herculean effort by director-writer Damien Chazelle, which I saw three or four weeks ago in Manhattan.
The next Bedford Marquee attraction will be a two-for-one deal — a mid-January screening of the recently restored Invaders From Mars (’53) along with a master-class from restoration master Scott MacQueen about the film’s exquisite visual transformation as well as a discussion of the film’s impact upon the sci-fi genre and how it reflected American culture and cold-war paranoia.
Inventively directed and impressionistically designed by the great William Cameron Menzies, Invaders From Mars is hands down the spookiest, most unsettling flying saucer film of the 1950s, due in no small measure to that eerie vocal-choir score by the unsung Mort Glickman.
Aside from the mildly distressing fact that I don’t look like I did 15 or 20 years ago, I’m okay with the video. Yes, I would prefer to wear amber-tinted shades a la Jack Nicholson but the red-frame, gray-tint ones are passable.
