slider

It took me a few months to catch up with Eskil Vogt‘s The Innocents. I finally streamed it last night, and wow…easily one of the most unusual and strikingly rendered creep-out films I’ve ever seen. A series of eerie, first-rate jolts that accumulate into a feeling of being sucked in and tied down. And yet a film that leads to a moral reckoning.

It definitely ranks alongside The Witch and The Babadook and films of that ilk, films aimed well above the heads of your average horror-loving sloths who prefer the usual formulaic slasher crap. I’m not, however, calling it a slice of elevated horror because Vogt, who also co-wrote the screenplay of Joachim Trier‘s The Worst Person in the World, never allows the film to step into flat-out psycho screamville. But he certainly gives you the willies.

And I loved the fact that The Innocents focuses entirely on four pre-pubescent children living in a high-rise Oslo apartment complex, and what they’re seeing, feeling, channelling and manipulating by way of ESP, mind-reading and telekinesis, and how their parents never realize what’s actually going on. Start to finish the parents don’t have clue #1.

It’s about one of these kids (Sam Ashraf‘s Ben, a ten-year-old of Indian descent who lives with his single mom) having discovered the ability to move small objects via telekinesis, and Ben revealing this gift to Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), a quietly observant lass of relatively few words (or certainly when her mom and dad are around) who seems around eight years old. Ida has an older sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who’s suffering from non-verbal austism, and yet once Ben allows them to marvel at his special abilities Ida and Anna start to acquire a vague form of ESP and mind-reading on their own.

Soon added to this equation is Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), an eight-year-old neighbor with vitiligo who intuitively “reads” Anna, who in turn gradually starts to communicate and even talk as she picks up on the tremor-like powers of the vaguely weird Ben.

Alas, Ben soon reveals himself to be a demonic little sadist who doesn’t blink an eye as he drops Aisha’s cat from a high stairwell, and then crushes the poor thing’s head. And that’s just the beginning of the killings. I won’t reveal Ben’s other victims, but I did find fault in the matter of a certain adult who winds up dead on a kitchen floor. Ben is no dummy, and he surely understands that dead bodies have to be buried or burnt or they’ll stink the place up. I don’t know why Ben (i.e., Vogt) doesn’t attend to this basic no–brainer situation.

Telekinesis, thought transference…you can sense early on that increasing weirdness is right around the corner, and that Ben will eventually turn into a version of that little Twilight Zone shit from 60 years ago who flatlined people he didn’t like and turned one alcoholic neighbor into a jack-in-the-box and then buried him 50 feet under a cornfield.

This is a very effective, highly original, low-key children’s tale that puts the hook in (it actually feels like a kind of serum) and never lets up.

Ben and his mom, of course, are immigrants of color (ditto Aisha and her mom). If and when The Innocents is remade for American audiences there’s no way the evil Ben character will be played by a young actor of color, and certainly not by a kid of African-American descent. Non-white actors of whatever age cannot play demonic killers. Okay, it’s possible, I suppose, but highly unlikely.

The Innocents premiered in Cannes under the Un Certain Regard program, but I wasn’t there. Nor was I at Austin’s Fantastic Fest when it showed there in September ’21. IFC picked it up but did the film no favors by labelling it as an IFC Midnight thing, which suggests it’s a genre film aimed at low-rent horror fans. It’s much better than that — it’s an elegant, odd little spooker that could have been a Jack Clayton or Roman Polanski film in the mid ’60s.

To use a Michael Caine-ism, Self-Styled Siren (aka Farren Smith Nehme) has blown the bloody doors off the urban myth about John Wayne being so angry at Sacheen Littlefeather for reading Marlon Brando‘s statement about declining the 1972 Best Actor Oscar that he had to be restrained by six security guys lest he physically assault or throw her off the stage.

Was Wayne, standing backstage, angry about the Brando statement? Yes, he was. But the rest is almost certainly bullshit, folks! Probably “never happened,” says Self-Styled Siren. It’s basically a tall tale that’s been passed along from one shady narrator to the next for decades.

So who’s at fault? Littlefeather, 75, is the most recent myth-bearer. SSS reports that Littlefeather didn’t actually witness an enraged Wayne being restrained by security guys. Or maybe she did…who knows? On 8.16.22 NPR quoted Littlefeather claiming that Wayne “attempted to assault me onstage…he had to be restrained by six security men in order to prevent him from doing exactly that.” Two days later she told Variety‘s Zack Sharf that Wayne “came forth in a rage to physically assault and take me off the stage. And he had to be restrained by six security men in order for that not to happen.”

The suspicion is that Littlefeather has primarily been repeating what she’s heard or has come to believe. Considering Wayne’s longstanding reputation as a racist conservative who once called Native Americans “greedy” for not sharing land with white settlers, Littlefeather, a Native American activist, is understandably sympathetic to any anti-Wayne narrative that comes along.

Who hatched the myth about Wayne being restrained? The original bad guys, SSS reports, are late Oscar show producer-director Marty Pasetta and (apparently) British writer Joan Sadler. But the biggest bullshitter…okay, the most questionable storyteller was Sadler, it appears. The only problem is that SSS provides no article sourcing, and that information about Sadler is quite scant.

It all started with Pasetta saying in 1974 that Wayne was “in an uproar” over the Brando-Littlefeather statement. (Uproar, in this context, refers to an angry vocal response.) And yet at the time Pasetta didn’t mention Wayne wanting to physically assault or intimidate Littlefeather.

Seven years later Sadler came along, according to SSS, with a 1981 article that (partially?) focused on the 1973 incident and which mentioned “six security men” who had allegedly restrained Wayne. SSS offers no link to the Sadler piece, but here’s the passage in question: “Backstage the late John Wayne, ever game for a scrap with the Indians, wanted to bound on stage to personally eject Littlefeather before she could speak. It took six men to hold him back.”

Seven years later, in 1988, Pasetta finally began talking about the security guys and Wayne threatening to drag Littlefeather off the stage. Why Marty hadn’t mentioned this any time previously is anyone’s guess.

So let’s just say that the mysterious Sadler did it, and that Pasetta (who was killed in 2015 by a drunk driver in Palm Desert) jumped into the pool after the water had already been warmed up by Sadler. And then, years later, Littlefeather decided that the same swimming pool water seemed inviting and so she became a proponent of the “six security men” blah blah.

This, in any event, is what SSS has concluded, and considering that she committed a fair amount of study and shoe-leather reporting, it’s fair to give her the benefit of the doubt.

If I hadn’t titled this article “Unreliable Narrators,” I would have gone with “Sadler and Pasetta Did it.”

Read more

Industry friendo: “Hired in the aftermath of #MeToo, no experience in features and someone known not to even read scripts while at NBC, Amazon’s Jennifer Salke has always been a smoke and mirrors executive, and right now Jeff Bezos is getting snowed by her hype and penchant for overspending. Amazon Studios’ first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power ia rumored to have a price tag of $465 million for the first season alone. And yet little buzz has resulted since Jackson’s original trilogy is all anybody needs. There’s no way to justify that cost. Somebody nicknamed it ‘Late Night Tolkien’ in reference to the fortune that Salke spent and lost on Mindy Kaling’s woke comedy, which ended up minus $40 million.”

A little more than three years ago N.Y. Times reporter Kyle Buchanan posted an intensively researched piece about the future (if any) of movies, especially in the minds of Millennials and Zoomers. The piece was called “How Will the Movies (As We Know Them) Survive the Next 10 Years?“.

The basic answer was that movie loyalty is a thing of the past and that cinema culture as most of us know it isn’t likely to survive.

The keeper quote was from Kumail Nanjiani. The basic thrust was about 20somethings not being into movies as a rule, and watching them sporadically at best. The quote is pasted below. It would seem that Nanjiani’s “friend who directs big movies” was on to something.

Today the youngest Zoomers are ten years old, and anyone younger is Gen Alpha. For years the running joke with Millennials and Zoomers is that ADD isn’t a bug but a feature. I’m presuming that the Kumail observation goes double or triple when it comes to 15-and-unders.

Ask a typical tween or young teen what their favorite films are and a good percentage, I’m guessing, will give you a slightly quizzical look. Focusing on anything longer than a TikTok video is a challenge. Phone screen and streaming content, sure, but I would be hugely surprised to hear that even a small percentage watch “films.”

We all understand that attention spans, at least as far as scripted stand-alone dramas and comedies lasting 90 minutes or longer are concerned, have been diminishing among younger people since the ‘80s.

When I was a tween and young teen, I was watching actual films made by name-brand filmmakers. I saw King Kong and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms when I was eight or nine. I saw and loved Red River when I was ten. I knew who Julie Christie, Terrence Stamp, David Hemmings, Olivia Hussey, Paul Newman, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Kenneth Tobey were. I watched adventures, comedies. My mother used to go to Ingmar Bergman films and come home and rave about them.

What do I actually know about where young Zoomers and Generation Alpha are at in terms of cinema? Not much but I can guess.

Present-tense despair: If there was ever a demographic whose taste in films represents a blend of Dante’s Inferno (or my idea of it) and a metaphor for the ruination and death of cinema as you and I and people like David Fincher, Ari Aster, Todd Field, Peter Farrelly, Luca Guadagnino and Chris Nolan know it, it’s almost certainly tweens and young teens of 2022.

Read more

This wouldn’t be worth touching but it’s Sunday afternoon so what the hell. Sometime in the mid ’70s Joan Crawford shared a complaint about the sexual explicitness of Last Tango in Paris, and particularly about a nude scene performed by “fat” Marlon Brando, she claimed. Brando certainly became a sea lion in the ’80s, ’90s and early aughts, but when Tango was filmed in late ’71 and early ’72 Brando (born in ’24, 47 at the time) was relatively trim. He wasn’t even stocky. Born in ’05 or thereabouts, Crawford was around 70 when she shared this opinion. She passed in ’77 at age 72, give or take.

Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, a kind of philosophical Moses when it comes to articulating wokeness, has written an 8.13 column titled “From Blonde to Star Wars, Hollywood Needs to Accept Actors’ Accents.”

Right away you’re thinking okay, Kohn is going to argue that it’s not the performances that matter these days, but the representations. Which he more or less does.

Okay, the performances matter to some extent, but probably not as much as the electrifying idea of a Cuban-born woman playing Marilyn Monroe with the accent of a Cuban Airlines flight attendant….that’s something to really feel good about and celebrate.

It follows, naturally, that anyone who has a problem with a Cuban-accented Marilyn is a bigot.

Kohn is also going to argue, you’re thinking, that Moses Ingram‘s Baltimore street accent fits right into the Obi-Wan Kenobi universe without a hiccup, and that anyone who complains about Ingram not speaking in the crisp British speech patterns of previous Imperial villains (a tradition that goes back 45 years) is also a bigot, or at the very least someone who doesn’t get it.**

But Kohn doesn’t argue this. He kinda dodges the issue, in fact. He implies, of course, that people who’ve expressed concerns about Ingram’s Obi-Wan performance are racists (he wouldn’t be a good wokester troubador if he didn’t) but otherwise he doesn’t even allude to the arguments that ensued after Obi-Wan premiered.

As for the Blonde star, he relies on a quote from Bodies Bodies Bodies costar Maria Bakalova, to wit: “I think Ana de Armas is an incredibly talented actress and that’s what should matter. It sounds like she has her natural accent and it should be about the feeling you get from the performance.”

Due respect but no. Armas is playing an iconic superstar whom everyone knows rather well, and who spoke with an unmistakably homespun Los Angeles accent. I think it’s silly for anyone to play her with a Cuban accent, or for that matter a British, Russian or Australian one. We’re all residents of the planet earth and we all know what goes so why are we playing games when it comes to portraying famous people? It invites derision.

If you’re going to dye your hair platinum blonde and wear all those flashy Monroe outfits (as de Armas did) you’re obviously making a stab at physical resemblance, so speaking-wise you should at least try to sound like her. Or allow yourself to be dubbed. (You know what would’ve been cool? If tech guys had digitally reconstituted Monroe’s voice into micro-vowels and micro-consonants and then dubbed AdA with Monroe’s actual voice, so to speak. Seriously.)

The next time they make a movie about John F. Kennedy, how about casting Gael Garcia Bernal in the part? Okay, so Bernal is six or seven inches shorter than Kennedy was and he doesn’t resemble him even slightly, but the important thing would be the representation aspect…right, Eric?

Read more

Last night I finally saw King Vidor and Ayn Rand‘s The Fountainhead (’49), start to finish. (I had previously only seen clips from the rock quarry scene.) I was amused and at times frustrated, but never bored. And that’s saying something.

For this is one crazy, bizarre and curiously obstinate film of ideas (individual vision vs. collective go-alongism**) and ardent sexuality (i.e., Gary Cooper‘s Howard Roark putting the high hard one to Patricia Neal‘s Dominique Francon).

It’s not at all realistic or convincing as far as anyone’s idea of human behavior is concerned, but it’s certainly been written with a capital “W” by someone with a strong (as in “listen to me….no, really listen!”) point of view about vision vs. commerce, that someone being Rand, of course.

It’s a nutty movie, but at least it understands itself and stakes its philosophical claim and lays the Randian agenda face up on the table — take it or leave it.

Howard Roark is a gifted, strong-willed architect of principle who won’t be compromised or pushed around, not to mention a tough, brawny fellow with a pulsing, rock-hard donkey schlong who knows how to slam ham like a champ.

I can’t say The Fountainhead is an especially good film, but at least it’s ballsy in more ways than one, not to mention plain-spoken.

The Fountainhead was shown in 35mm at the Film Society of Lincoln center’s Walter Reade theatre. (Saturday, 8:30 pm show.) It looked clean (scratch-free) and well cared for, but there were almost no decent blacks to be savored in the whole thing. Almost every frame was composed was in varying levels of gray. I’m not saying it looked bad but it had a vaguely diminished, half-milky quality. It didn’t excite me.

Face facts — 35mm prints are getting older and older as speak, and quite often can’t stand up to the sharp, richly hued look of digital.

And my God, poor Patricia Neal! Having vigorous off-screen sex with Cooper must have been great, but that heightened, bug-eyed, flaring-nostrils way of emoting is awful. In just about every scene she’s saying “I can’t deal with my libidinal longing, Gary…I want to be ravaged!!” And King Vidor, who should have known better, actually encouraged Neal to give this kind of embarassing, over-the-top performance. She was 15 times better in The Day The Earth Stood Still (’51), 25 times better in A Face in the Crowd (’57) and 50 times better in Hud (’63).

Friendo to HE: “Neal was only 22, It was her second film after a Ronald Reagan comedy shot a few months previous.”

HE to friendo: “Okay but what’s Vidor‘s excuse? He was in his mid 50s during filming — by any yardstick a seasoned director who knew the ropes. And yet he encouraged Neal to deliver almost a parody of a sexually charged performance. Good God. Two years later, at age 24, Robert Wise guided her into a fully believable, calmly centered, first-rate performance in The Day The Earth Stood Still. That flared-nostril stuff isn’t on her — it’s on Vidor.”

** In today’s world Howard Roark would be written as a courageous anti-wokester (i.e., someone like myself) and the villainous go-alongers would be modelled upon the you-know-who brigade (Eric Kohn, Anne Thompson, David Ehrlich, Elizabeth Wagmeister, Clayton Davis, Tom O’Neill, the Toronto Film Festival Stalinists, etc.).

Read more

What 2022 male supporting performance is the most award-worthy right now? Easy answer: Colin Farrell‘s Oswald “Oz” Cobblepot (aka “Penguin”) in Matt Reeves‘ The Batman. Hands down, no question. And yet in Anne Thompson‘s IndieWire prediction piece about the hottest contenders in this category, she calls Farrell’s performance a “long shot.”

Thompson has posted a whole rundown. I don’t even want to weigh in except in the matter of Farrell.

“I think it makes a difference when a movie is physically bigger than you. I mean that. Your relationship to it changes.” — film critic Bilge Ebiri.

There’s no disputing that King Vidor‘s Duel in the Sun (’46), the derided David O. Selznick-produced western that became known as Lust in the Dust, is a groaner. Ditto The Fountainhead (’49), a boldly sexual adaption of Ayn Rand‘s novel with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. A pair of unsubtle big-studio movies about passion and fucking — overwrought and overplayed.

And yet I’ve never seen either in a theatre of any kind, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center is showing presumably handsome 35mm prints of both on Saturday as part of a Vidor retrospective. I’m tempted for obvious reasons.

I became a “bad kid” when I entered my early teens. Defying authority, shitty grades. I had all kinds of low-self-esteem issues, but that’s standard for any child of an alcoholic. I was certainly lippy and insolent with my dad, Jim Wells — a Mad Man exec who worked for J. Walter Thompson. I regarded him as a gruff, flinty, foul-tempered dick because — make no mistake — he was that.

One summer evening Jim and I came to blows, or rather he lost his temper and beat the shit out of me. I was 16. I suffered a head gash, bleeding all over my white shirt. I was seeing a therapist at the time, and as it happened I had a 7 pm appointment that evening. I told the therapist (who was also a serious dick) what had happened, and he took my dad’s side. He basically said, “Bruises and bloody shirt aside, kids like you are bad news and frankly you deserved it.”

In short, during a single summer evening I became 100% convinced that domestic parental violence was something to be avoided in the future, and that family therapists were not necessarily bringers of profound perception and wisdom.

Why hadn’t I grabbed a drinking glass and smashed it across my dad’s head during our kitchen fist fight? You know, like Joe Pesci does in that Copacabana fight in Raging Bull? I’ll tell you why. Because I was more of a lover (i.e., a movie lover) than a scrapper, plus I was basically too chicken to get seriously violent with my taller, heavier and stronger dad. When the kitchen fracas began I was mainly rope-a-doping — focused on protecting myself. But God, if I could relive that moment right now and if I had a hammer…

A year or two later I happened to watch Clarence Brown‘s Human Hearts, a family drama about a rebellious, independent-minded son (James Stewart) and his stern preacher father (Walter Huston). Huston has slapped Stewart around a few times, but prior to a fresh altercation Stewart tells him, “If you hit me, pop, I’m going to defend myself.” They tussle and Huston winds up giving Stewart another beating.

That was not the outcome I was hoping for.

Until last night I had somehow never read about James Garner‘s violent fight with his stepmother, Wilma. His alcoholic father married Wilma when the future movie star was five, in 1933. From the get-go Wilma was a “nasty bitch,” Garner recalled. His brother Jack later called her “a damn no-good woman.” Wilma would scold and beat Garner, and whenever he crossed the line Wilma would make him wear a dress and call him Louise. James finally had it out with Wilma in ’42, when he was 14. She came at him and he pushed back, finally “choking her to keep her from killing him in retaliation.”

Give her what for, Jimbo!

One way or another parents often manage to fuck their kids up. They brutalize and leave scars.

My son Dylan is currently back to regarding me as a dick in somewhat the same way that I regarded my dad long ago. (The difference is that I was 16 and Dylan is 32.) But in my late 20s as I sucked all that in and said “okay, that happened” and decided to cut my father a break, especially after he entered AA and apologized for his poor parenting skills and whatnot, explaining as honestly as he could that he just wasn’t cut out for being a good dad.

N.Y. Post article, posted today [8.10]: “Canadian rock guitarist Gord Lewis was found dead in his Hamilton, Ontario home on Sunday after he was allegedly murdered by his own son. Jonathan Lewis, 41, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder as the Hamilton Police Department continues to investigate the case, according to local reports.”

I would love to see a short film about Garner and Wilma’s relationship, ending with the strangle slapdown.

My last piece about Ignite’s Invaders From Mars 4K Bluray appeared just over four months ago (3.31). The deluxe disc (stacked with extras) pops on 9.26.

I somehow hadn’t paid attention to a radical new trailer that first appeared five or six weeks ago. I’ve only just watched it. The visual scheme is nothing if not eccentric (Invaders From Mars on mescaline, and then re-imagined by Peter Fonda‘s character in The Trip), but I can’t help wondering why the haunting Invaders From Mars score, credited for decades to Raoul Kraushar but actually composed by Mort Glickman, wasn’t used.

The new trailer is fine, or certainly harmless. I happen to be a bigger fan of the old ’53 trailer, which has also been restored.