The Sundance Film Festival mattered a great deal for 26 or 27 years, which is a long time when you think about how Robert Redford, Jeff Gilmore and John Cooper spearheaded the mythology of indie Hollywood and changed the game so much between the early ’90s and the mid teens, and how influential it all was. Nobody can take away those glory years. I was there for 25 or 26 of them (’94 to ’19, something like that) and I loved every chapter, every surprise, every breakthrough, every film that made a mark, every adventure and wild party. It’s all over now, but that’s the way of things. Sooner or later, every good idea or initiative or inspirational course of action comes to an end.
Four months ago Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Lost Daughter played Telluride, and I missed every showing. Weeks and then months passed. I finally caught it last night on Netflix. I was vaguely afraid it would be some kind of opaque feminist downer, but it’s not.
The Lost Daughter is a visually agile, nicely edited, well-detailed grabber, and nothing if not emotionally and psychologically complex (if a bit curious). It’s more than competently directed and certainly well written by Gyllenhaal, who adapted Elena Ferrante’s source novel. It’s one of the best films by a first-timer I’ve ever seen. Hats off.
The core subject is that some aren’t cut out for parenting. Yes, including some moms. Some are simply too selfish or neurotic or sex-starved, or too irked by the endless demands of young children. Some are consumed by artistic visions of one kind or another.
Olivia Colman‘s Leda Caruso, a 50ish professor vacationing on the Greek island of Spetses, is one such mom. She has two daughters in their mid 20s, but it’s clear they haven’t a great deal of rapport with her. Leda wasn’t much for it when they were younger (the 20something Leda is played by Jessie Buckley) and her recollections of that time are stirred by watching young Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her temperamental three-year-old daughter, Elena.
Leda is a bit testy and distant at first, but she and Nina, who has married into a large and somewhat overbearing family, become friendly in a cautious sort of way.
Semi-spoiler: The story-tension aspect is driven by a very strange and perverse thing that Leda does early on. It’s selfish and sociopathic, but also tied into memories of her own young motherhood and the frustrations she felt saddled with.
25 years ago I wrote the following about One Fine Day, the George Clooney-Michelle Pfeiffer parent romcom: “Raising kids can be exhausting, at times even soul-draining…we all know this.”
Joni Mitchell couldn’t hack it — couldn’t surrender to mothering because she had so much in the way of poetry and songwriting inside her, so much raw material to pull out and shape and hone.
When I was 14 or 15 I recall being told by a good friend of my mother’s that “kids are a pain in the neck sometimes, and sometimes we need to escape that…if we’re honest with each other we admit this.”
When my father became an AA guy and was looking to confess his failings to those he’d hurt, he told me he was sorry but was never cut out for parenting. Not everyone is. I heard him, forgave him.
When Jett and Dylan came along I resolved not to be an aloof dad, and that wasn’t easy given that I had to write all the time. But I decided it would be better to err on the side of emotional closeness and leniency. Maggie, my ex, was the cop; I was the adventurer.
Whether or not you can roll with The Lost Daughter will depend on your ability to understand or at least accept the bad parent pathology that it puts on the plate.
“I’ve experienced 2021 as the worst year for movies in quite a few decades. Perhaps if I seriously combed through the 1980s I might find some that were worse, but I nonetheless felt seriously unrewarded for all the hours I put in watching films that simply didn’t rise to the occasion, including some that found significant critical favor with others.” — from Todd McCarthy’s “It Was The Worst Of Times Off And Onscreen In 2021,” Deadline-posted on 12.30.21.
Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog — subtly rendered, expertly crafted, relentlessly downish — is the leader, having appeared on 243 lists and listed as #1 on 40 of them.
The runners-up (second through fifth place) are Drive My Car (sensitive three-hour grief monkey film), Licorice Pizza (amiable, meandering), Dune (sand in my lungs) and West Side Story (alive and pulsing). The next five are The Green Knight (pure moisture torture), Summer of Soul (found footage), Pig (quite grim but soulfully so), Titane (metallically perverse) and The French Dispatch (exquisitely composed but infuriating)…good God!
Leos Carax‘s Annette, easily the most hateful film of 2021 and one of the most agonizing sits of my entire life, appeared on 76 Best of the Year critics lists, and was listed as #1 on 7 of them. Think about that.
Hollywood Elsewhere has a certain handicap in this regard. Unlike many critics***, I tend to favor absorbing, well-contoured films about recognizable human beings that reflect (am I allowed to say this?) some aspect of the actual human experience as most of us live it on the planet earth, and so I ended up with the following top 15: King Richard, Parallel Mothers, West Side Story, Spider-Man: No Way Home (because of the final hour), The Worst Person in the World, A Hero, Riders of Justice, No Time To Die, The Beatles: Get Back, Zola, Cyrano, Licorice Pizza, The Card Counter (willfully ignoring the Tiffany Haddish diminishment factor), In The Heights and The Last Duel.
I had never seen either version of Angels in the Outfield. Mainly because Field of Dreams aside, I’m not much for sports fantasies. I’d certainly never considered watching the 1994 version, which earned a 33% Rotten Tomatoes rating with a 49% audience rating.
The other night, bored and listless, I decided to watch the black-and-white 1951 version. To my surprise it won me over within 15 or 20 minutes.
It’s basically a redemption story — A Christmas Carol set in Pittsburgh. Paul Douglas is Guffy McGovern, a coarse, foul-mouthed brute of a Pittsburgh Pirates manager, loathed by just about everyone. One evening he’s visited by an invisible, craggy-voiced angel who tells him “become a better person and I’ll fix it so the Pirates start winning some games.” Douglas goes along, and before you know it everything has turned around — his life, the fortunes of the Pirates, even his non-existent love life (i.e., local reporter Janet Leigh takes an interest).
Complications ensue, of course, but that’s pretty much it — an abusive asshole becomes a better person with some heavenly assistance. It’s a minor effort but it works.
Based on a story by Richard Conlin, Angels in the Outfield was written by Dorothy Kingsley and George Wells, and directed by Clarence Brown, king of the “house” helmers.
…who are deeply alarmed about Licorice Pizza, and particularly the non-sexual, one-sided ’70s relationship between Gary (Cooper Hoffman), a 15 year-old actor and waterbed salesman, and Alana (Alana Haim), a 25 year-old whom Gary has a huge thing for but never scores with.
A similar kind of relationship was depicted a half-century ago in Robert Mulligan‘s Summer of ’42, except back then the younger lad (Gary Grimes as an anxious 14 year-old named “Hermie”) and the 20something woman (Jennifer O’Neill‘s “Dorothy”) did the actual deed…once.
Dorothy is heartsick over her young Air Force pilot husband having been shot down over France, and so, half-drunk, she invites Hermie to bed. Hermie is not only aroused but transformed by this episode, but the next morning Dorothy disappears, never to be seen or heard from again.
Herman Raucher‘s screenplay is based on his own actual experience. At age 14 he really did get lucky with a heartsick 20something he called “Dorothy.” If only some wokester scolds from the 21st Century could have somehow been time-tripped back to 1942 Nantucket and saved poor Herman from the terrible trauma of making love with a beautiful woman at age 14.
Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “The biggest hurdle the Oscars face, especially in the time of a pandemic accompanied by a streaming revolution, is that the films that tend to be nominated are winning a smaller and smaller slice of the audience.
“[If] the nominees include Belfast, The Power of the Dog, Licorice Pizza, The Lost Daughter and The Tragedy of Macbeth, that will read as a roster straight out of the too-smart-for-school megaplex.
“I’m not saying don’t nominate those films. I’m saying that if those are the only films nominated, it’s going to be another year of the Oscars’ slow-motion implosion. Would it really be such an unspeakable vulgarity this year for the Oscar slate to include Spider-Man: No Way Home? Not as a token mainstream gesture but because it’s a film that honestly meant something to the larger public. Why has this become such an insane idea?
“What’s actually insane is leaving a movie like that one out of the mix. If the Oscars want a future, it would be a shrewd strategy for them to not inflict the death of a thousand cuts on themselves by using the dagger of elitism.”
HE to Gleiberman #1: Which Twitter elitists have insisted that handing a Best Picture nomination to Spider-Man: No Way Home would be “an insane idea”? I’m presuming we’re talking about the same dweebs who believe that Drive My Car is the film of the year, but…
HE to Gleiberman #2: If one of the nominees is King Richard, no one will think this is “straight out of the too-smart-for-school megaplex.” There are two family movies in Best Picture contention this year — one is excellent, the other less so. King Richard is the excellent one.
Last night, feeling jazzed about rediscovering Taylor Hackford‘s Proof of Life and realizing it’s a lot better than I’d recalled, I rewatched another violent, crime-related Russell Crowe film from the aughts — Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster (’07).
It remains a sturdy, absorbing, culturally fascinating, Sidney Lumet-like depiction of the rise and fall of heroin importer Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) and the scrappy, scrupulously honest detective, Richie Roberts (Crowe), who eventually busted and prosecuted Lucas in ’75 and ’76.
AG opened 14 years ago, and plays just as grippingly as ever — no diminishment, constantly engaging, stepped in the lore of Harlem and North Jersey. And my God, Denzel (52 during filming, now 67) looks so young! Younger, in fact, than he did in Spike Lee‘s Inside Man (’06). And what a murderer’s row of African American (or African British) players — Chiwetel Ejiofor, RZA, Cuba Gooding Jr., Joe Morton, Idris Elba, Common, the late Clarence Williams III, Ruby Dee, Roger Guenveur Smith, Malcolm Goodwin.
I was struck again by how satisfyingly well made this film is, as good in its own New York City way (the clutter and crap of the streets, high on those uptown fumes) as Lumet’s Prince of the City (’81).
One reason it plays so well, I was telling myself last night, is that big-studio movies, free from the influence of the superhero plague that was just around the corner in ’06, were generally a lot better in the aughts than they are now. 2007, remember, was one of the great all-time years.
…and if he still cared about creating silk screens at age93, he would have instantly recognized a couple of days ago that THIS (i.e.., the TMZ headline) is a 21st Century Andy Warhol silk screen classic if anyone ever saw one. Right up there with “Elvis Presley in FlamingStar.”
Last night and for the first time in 21 years, I re-watched Taylor Hackford and Tony Gilroy‘s Proof of Life. My vague recollection was that it had missed the mark, having lost money and gotten mixed reviews. I was wrong.
A believable, propulsive, well-textured kidnap, ransom & rescue drama set in South America (and largely based on a Vanity Fair article by William Prochnau called “Adventures in the Ransom Trade“), Proof of Life is good stuff — sturdy, smartly written and genuinely thrilling from time to time.
I found it very charismatically performed by Russell Crowe (relatively trim and quite handsome back then) and David Caruso. Alas, Meg Ryan is the opposite of that — as the anguished but argumentative wife of a kidnap victim (David Morse), almost everything she says and does is twitchy and annoying — she never seems to get hold of herself and get past her suspicions and resentments. Much better is Pamela Reed, as Crowe’s sister who flies down to assist.
I think the reception to Proof of Life got lost in the fog of the Crowe-Ryan affair. Hackford said this in so many words, that the film lost money because in the public mind the affair had overwhelmed the make-believe. Crowe was quoted as calling Hackford “an idiot” for saying this, but Hackford was right.
All I know is that after watching Proof of Life without the Crowe-Ryan mucky-muck, it came off better than expected — a strong, complex, grown-up thriller that ends with a great battle sequence.
Hollywood Elsewhere was a thriving business and a happy workplace for roughly 13 or 14 years. After launching in August ’04 ad income …well, it was touch-and-go for a while but found its footing sometime in early ’06. And then it grew and grew…offering stability, adventure, intrigue, annual European travel and a thriving lifestyle.
The worm began to turn with the horrific election of Donald Trump in November ’16. From that point on and certainly by the end of ’17 and into early ’18, you could feel the first tremors of wokesterism, triggered by perceptions of obstinate patriarchal whiteness as represented by the various bad guys of the moment (the Trumpster mob, Harvey, Woody, Roman and all the other alleged ogres who were being called out, many deservedly so).
Before I knew it the furies were swirling all over the place…anything that smelled even vaguely of older-white-guy attitudes or viewpoints became a form of evil. HE’s ad income began to drop in ’17 and ’18. It’s been a hellish four years.
HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko and David Scott Smith invited me to join them early Saturday evening at the Louvre. A connected friend of Svet’s escorted us inside to a restricted–accesstour of the Egyptian exhibit. I had never before wandered through this world-renowned museum as an invitation-only cool cat. No crowds or lines to cope with. The Egyptian statues, sarcophagi, relics and artifacts were nothing to sneeze at either. The highlight was the 4000 year-old chapel of the tomb (or “mastaba”) of Akhethotep, a bigwig in the Old Kingdom who was close to the king. (Egyptian rulers weren’t called pharaohs until the New Kingdom.)
Svetlana Cvetko, David Scott Smith at Louvre cafe — Saturday, 5.13.17, 7:50 pm.
I’m obviously fine with sharing judgmental or negative impressions of films, but I don’t like to dwell on them. One post is enough. But a few minutes ago I happened to glance at a poster for LoveActually, and it all came flooding back…
Svetlana Cvetko, David Scott Smith at Louvre cafe — Saturday, 5.13.17, 7:50 pm.
