In a 6.122 THR article by Borys Kit, Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman is described as “an expensivevanityproject.” The statement is Kit’s own, and I’m sorry but it’s bullshit.
The Irishman is easily one of the greatest films of the 21st Century, and the last 30 or 40 minutes delivers perhaps the most devastating passage about grief, regret and facing the end of one’s life in the history of movies.
For the 47th time, “Wild Strawberries with handguns.”
Parasite is a toy movie…a toy movie about class conflict, made by a serious, super-crafty cineaste and blah blah. Don’t crank me up again about the drunken con-artist family letting the fired maid into the house, etc. History will not be kind.
If there’s a general consensus about the Depp-Heard verdict, it’s probably something like “it’s finally over…let it go…whatever the truth of it, Depp seemed more honest than Heard plus he’s certainly more likable…it’s gone on long enough…let it go.”
“One might have thought — or, at least, I might have thought — that we’d be in a more enlightened place by now. And yet despite the public reckonings of #MeToo and the recent reexaminations of pop culture figures — Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Janet Jackson and others — there is precious little introspection over the widespread hatred of Ms. Heard.
“This trial seems to have exposed some of the rhetorical weaknesses of #MeToo. ‘Believe women’ for example — a phrase that was meant to underscore how rare it is for a woman to lie about her own abuse — had somehow morphed into ‘believe all women,’ which left no room for the outlier. That has apparently become, as the comedian Chris Rock put it this week, ‘Believe all women…except Amber Heard.’
“The intent of that early slogan was, in part, to encourage the public to treat women who speak up with basic dignity and respect, however messy and imperfect they or their stories may be. Yet none of that seems to have trickled down here.”
Still in Toronto due to a pair of Air Canada flight cancellations yesterday (one due to a sick pilot, the other due to New York weather)…you don’t want to know. Not to mention Justin Trudeau‘s infuriating insistence upon masking. I left Paris yesterday morning at 8 am. By the time I arrive tonight I’ll have been travelling for roughly 42 hours.
Except for the wounding, bandaging and eventual healing of a pigeon, next to nothing happens of any serious consequence in Kelly Reichart’s Showing Up, which I reviewed a few days ago in Cannes. And yet despite the absence of a compelling story, it’s reasonably engaging…okay, mildly diverting.
But is it also about significant invisible things…undercurrents that signify what’s actually going on in not just the characters’ lives but perhaps even our own? That’s the key question, and honestly? I can’t say that I felt much of this.
What are the most highly regarded films in which relatively little transpires plot-wise but which signal that somethingisgoingon, and in some cases more than a little something?
Certainly the five Antonioni classics of the ‘60s (L’Avventura, L’eclisse, La Notte, RedDesert, Blow–Up). Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. Chris Petit’s RadioOn. I’m already running dry. Which others?
PostedinJuly2021: Most of us are attuned only to life’s tangibles — food, shelter, warmth, money, clothing, pets, guns, cars, shoes, homes, furniture, trees, hills, mountains, oceans, swimming pools, sailboats. Things we can see, touch, smell, eat, wear and dive into.
But others, fortunately, are also mindful and in some cases stirred or motivated by invisible things — thoughts, feelings, spirits, ghosts, dreams, intuitions, morality, melancholy, premonitions, memories.
Any filmmaker can focus on the tangibles. Most of them do, in fact. Movies that are strictly about tangibles are “mulch” movies, a term that I defined earlier this month. Mulch is the source of our shared Hollywood ennui…the muck at the bottom of the dried-up lake…the disease that keeps on infecting…the gas that fills the room.
Except for a smattering of elite, award-season stand-alones (or festival movies) and select forthcoming streamers like HBO’s Scenes From A Marriage (Bergman remake), Hollywoodmakesalmostnothingbutmulchthesedays. The streaming + re-emerging feature realm is flooded with mulch…empty, inane, meaningless, spirit-less, jizz-whiz “content” crapola that nobody wants to see or cares about, but they’re made anyway because the zone-outs and knuckle-draggers need stuff to watch.
But only serious directors are able to convey or dramatize the presence of invisible things. The finest films are actually concerned with a mixture of tangible things, which is natural and inevitable in any corner of life, but are driven by the invisibles.
And the best of the best almost never articulate in so many words what the invisible currents or particles are about. They hint at them or nudge audiences into considering or meditating upon their presence, but they never say “these are the things that really matter.” The great films always say “you figure it out…you put it together.”
The more a film is focused upon or at least mindful of the invisibles, the richer and more accomplished it is. And the more moving, of course.
“Original Top Gun helmer Tony Scott was to have directed Top Gun: Maverick. Tony had a signed contract with Paramount and was developing the screenplay. But ten years ago this August, Tony jumped off a San Pedro bridge to his death. I am not certain of the whys behind the suicide**, only that it is always a sad event when someone checks out early. It’s especially sad when it is someone as sunny, bull-headed, and easy-to-laugh as Tony. He silently battledcancerfor40years but kept it quiet. There was no sign of it in the coroner’s report or any other underlying health issues. His brother, Ridley, called his suicide ‘inexplicable.’
“I first met Tony on the screen. He was a lad of 15 years. He starred in his older brother’s first experimental film. It was shot with a Bolex in Hartelpool England. The movie was called Boy & Bicycle — 45 minutes of Ridley Scott doing fancy camera moves while Tony rode around. It was not as powerful as Truffaut’s first film which also tackled the subject matter of bicycles, but it showed the daring and power of the film language that Ridley would later command in movies from Alien to Blade Runner to Gladiator.
“Tony had a sweet demeanor in that short movie. While he was 8 years older than I, I always treated him like a younger brother. What does that mean? I was kind but firm with him because he could be prone toward mischief and disobedience even while smiling and hugging you.
“In the flesh, I first met Tony in an interview with Ned Tanen, the head of the studio, at Ned’s house in [Santa Monica] on Channel Road. The meeting was to determine if Tony should direct Top Gun. During the high-tension meeting, Tony fell asleep. In mid-sentence. While explaining his vision in Ned’s favorite chair.
“35 Hollywood directors had turned down TopGun. The producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, were anxious to keep the project alive. But NO ONE wanted to get near it. Don and Jerry had a monster hit with Flashdance. BUT when first viewed, Flashdance was a hot mess. After the preview, the theatre was empty. The audience had walked out. It was that bad. Flashdance went through 35 arduous previews until it morphed into an audience-pleasing juggernaut success. Paramount was infamous for previewing until the movie was the best it could be.
“After the meeting with Scott, Tanen turned to me and said ‘well, what do you want to do?’
“Then came the most important prompt of my life. I learned so much through that prompt. Ned said, ‘Listen, I hate this fuckin’ project. I hate these fuckin’ looney-tune producers. Everyone in town hates the script. But I believe in you. If you want to make a fuckin’ movie with this Brit who falls asleep in the middle of a job interview, then be my fucking guest. You make the decision, right or wrong. And when this fucking movie comes out, you’re going to wear it, for better or worse. You get it? Do you understand me?’
“I took up the gauntlet. To be fair, Scott was jet-lagged. He had gotten off a plane from London and was rushed to Ned’s house for the meeting. I felt bad for my younger brother.
“That night, I booked a projection room on the Paramount lot, ordered some take-out, and watched Tony’s last movie, The Hunger, about lesbian vampires. It was beautiful to look at, and it was godawful. Commercial storytelling demands that a director put the energy of the narrative in the right place. It was a bunch of pretty images and nothing more.
“In The Hunger, Tony was so focused on closeups of high heels and red-painted mouths and endless fluttering curtains, I never had a clue where I was in the story. He never established the geography of the narrative. There were no masters. No exits and entrances of people into rooms. Where the heck were we?
“After a sleepless night, I asked to have breakfast with Tony and his manager, Bill Unger. I explained to Tony that we would hire him to direct Top Gun under two conditions: 1) adhere to the budget of $13.5 million and 2) in every scene, shoot a master up front as protection. ‘We have to know where we are, Tony. You are a brilliant shooter but we have to know where we are. If we are shooting a bar scene, we need to see the bar to establish the scene. That goes for every scene, whether it be an air hanger or a classroom. ‘I promise, mate,’ he said as he smiled and hugged me.
“I went back to Tanen and told him we had found our man. I explained why we were hiring him, what the simple strategy of obtaining master shots in each scene. I told Ned that I had gone over the financials and believed with some certainty, with Tom Cruise’s star power, we could reach at least break-even if the picture did $50 million in U.S. box office. With that box office, we should do at least 3 million units in home video.”
Tanen: ‘Listen to you,’ he laughed. ‘You’ll have my job in 3 years.’
“’I appreciate the responsibility and for your belief in me,’ I said. ‘No one has ever believed in me like that.’
“’Get outta here,’ he said but he was choked up. Three years later, I took over his job. He was tired of it. Ned helped me believe in myself. I never worked so effing hard to make Tony work as the director in all my life.
HE-posted on 8.23.15: One noteworthy thing about Michael Caine‘s icy performance in Get Carter is that he always looks stern, steady and focused. He never blinks an eye.
And yet by his own admission Caine was half in the bag while filming this Mike Hodges gangster flick. During the ’60s and early ’70s Caine was smoking at least 80 cigarettes and “drinking two to three bottles of vodka” a day, he’s said.
Caine reportedly quit cigarettes “following a stern lecture from Tony Curtis at a party in 1971,” and has credited his wife Shakira, whom he married in ’73, for steering him away from vodka.
I’m not up on makeup techniques. I don’t know the functional differences between foam latex, gelatin, silicone and gypsum cement. But I’m moderately impressed by the Elvis transformation of Tom Hanks into Colonel Tom Parker, at least as it appears in the below photo.
A guy who’s seen Baz Luhrmann‘s film says that Hanks’ bulky, big-nosed Tom didn’t strike him as wow-level, but sometimes this stuff is in the eye of the beholder. The ears might belong to Hanks or not — I can’t tell. Otherwise I’m impressed by the thinning gray hair, the spray-tan complexion and especially the schnozz.
I understand, by the way, that while the film doesn’t transform Austin Butler into classic “fat Elvis” proportions (which reportedly manifested during the last couple of years, sometime between ’75 and the singer’s death on 8.16.77), Vegas-jump-suit Butler does appear slightly bulkier, or so it seemed to this observer.
Parker died in January 1997, or nearly 20 years after Elvis ascended.
Metronom, the debut effort by Romanian director-writer Alexandru Belc, is a spot-on, nearly perfect political drama about a pair of Bucharest-residing lovers in their late teens (played by Mara Bugarin and Serban Lazarovici) whose relationship is tragically perverted by Romania’s secret police.
It’s not a Cannes competition entry but part of the Un Certain Regard line-up, but if it were a competition film it would be a top Palme d’Or contender, at least in my book.
Set in October 1972, Metronom doesn’t particularly resonate with our present catalogue of political horrors, but serves as a time-capsule reminder of the beastly oppression of the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime, which ran Romania from early March of 1965 until Ceaucescu’s overthrow and execution on 12.22.89.
The story is principally told in personal, emotional and intimate terms, and is focused on the ins and outs of the relationship between Ana (Bugarin) and Sorin (Lazarovici). The inciting incident scene, which doesn’t happen until roughly the 45-minute mark, is a party in which they and their high-school-age friends listen to a Radio Free Europe broadcast by rebel DJ Cornel Chiriac (1941-1975).
Chiriac’s shortwave radio show, “Metronom,” delivered uncensored news from the non-Communist west along with contemporary rock music, and thus was feared and, as much as possible, suppressed by the Securitate.
As the party kids listen they decide to write a “thank you” letter to Chiriac for providing an anti-Commie view of the world, both topically and musically. Such an act, of course, was regarded by the bad guys as subversive and criminal, and so before you know it (and I mean while the party is still going on) the goons bust in, arrest the kids and take them down to headquarters to sign confessions about the letter.
Did someone rat them out?
That’s all I’m going to say about the plot, but what happens certainly has a significant effect upon Ana and Sorin’s relationship. Let’s just say that the last 55 minutes of this 102-minute film are quite chilling. This mood is complemented by Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s shooting style, which follows the standard Romanian-cinema aesthetic — plain, unfussy, longish takes.
I’ll admit that Metronom tried my patience here and there. Some shots seem to last too long. Bugarin’s performance is hard to read at times,. During the party scene there’s an announcement by Chiriac that rock superstar Jim Morrison has died in Paris, which is a problem given that the Doors frontman passed on 7.3.71, or roughly 15 months before the party scene in question. And near the end there’s a post-interrogation scene between Ana and her best friend Roxana (Mara Vicol) that doesn’t quite stick the landing.
But otherwise Metronom is quite riveting — an emotionally relatable story of state terror that sticks to your ribs.
Last night I attended a midnight screening of Brett Morgen‘s Moonage Daydream, a splashy, busy-bee, all-over-the-place, paint-splatter documentary about the great David Bowie, who passed a little more than six years ago.
I was filled with excitement as I walked up the red-carpet staircase, and less than a half-hour into it I was feeling…well, partially impressed but increasingly deflated. It starts off like a house on fire, but it wore me down with all the frenetic energy.
It’s strictly for Bowie fans who know the whole story, but I wanted clarity and focus — stuff that would broaden my Bowie vistas, and certainly deliver more than just an audio-visual assault with clips of this and that. Early on I was going “okay, enough with the Ziggy Stardust concert footage…move on to something else, Jesus.”
I know how this sounds, but because it was late I wanted a little meditation and reflection, and I began to feel annoyed by the absence of the usual-usual — no calm-down portions, no talking-head perspectives (which are stylistically old-hat, of course, but comforting), not enough focus on Bowie’s films or stories about the making of them. And I really wanted to see footage and anecdotes and whatnot from the pre-Ziggy period (late ’60s to Hunky Dory).
There’s a brief section in which Bowie is heard talking about his half-brother Terry, who turned young David onto the cooler subterranean side of things, culturally and musically. Poor Terry eventually succumbed to schizophrenia and spent the rest of his life in med wards. I related to this as my late sister Laura also went schizy (in her mid teens) and suffered a similar fate.
Within 15 minutes I noticed three or four Zoomers getting up and leaving. And then a couple more. After 35 or 40 minutes a friend I attended with did the same. I quit just past the one-hour mark. No way was I sitting through all 134 minutes. It was fucking 1 am, I’d been up since 7, I’d written all day and then seen the Park Chan-wook and the Cronenberg…later.
It’s not that I don’t respect Morgan avoiding conventional doc schemes, but Moonage Daydream doesn’t let you breathe and is scattered all over the map, or at least as far as the first hour is concerned.
How could there be negative reactions to this trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One? It looks great, especially the footage of Tom Cruise riding on horseback through sand dunes, dressed in Middle-Eastern commando garb?
The only negative I can think of is the fact that this Paramount release doesn’t open until 7.14.23 — 14 months hence.
He basically said that CG comic-book spectacle films are systematically draining the poetry, music and gravitas out of the moviegoing experience.
Once in a blue moon a big franchise film will hit the magic button and deliver something transcendent. One example was last December’s SpiderMan: No Way Home, which I said over and over should be Best Picture-nominated. But mostly they don’t do this. Mostly they just make money.
Gray argues that the big studios “should be willing to lose money for a couple of years on art film divisions, and in the end they will be happier.”
In less extremist terms, Gray is suggesting that the big boys should consider reverting to the ’90s and early aughts system in which specialty divisions made smaller films — films that weren’t expected to bring in huge profits but didn’t necessarily lose money. Which means, of course, that above-the-title talent would have to accept lower fees for making these films. (And there’s the rub.)
HE version: The studios should at least be willing to make smarthouse flicks with a reasonable shot at breaking even or becoming modestly profitable.
Francois Truffaut once said that when one of the films produced by his company, Les Films du Carrosse, reached break even he and his colleagues would pop open a bottle of champagne.
