According to a 12.20 article by Kenneth Partridge, the disdain for Paul McCartney‘s “Wonderful Christmas Time” (’79) has never ebbed. Anyone whose musical tastes are the least bit refined is probably a hater. I don’t blame them, but you can’t visit any Bloomies or Nordstrom or a department store of any kind during the holidays and not hear it played repeatedly.
Yes, of course — John Lennon‘s “And So This Is Christmas” is a much better tune, by any criteria you’d care to mention. But I’ll bet Macca’s is the most popular among the hoi polloi.
Of the three songs below, my guilty-pleasure favorite is “Christmas Time Is Here Again.” I’m sorry but it’s infectious.
I’ve taken my temperature three or four times today, and right now it’s 97.9. I don’t quite feel at peak strength, but I’m past the worst of the Omicron seige. This is the first day since last Tuesday that I haven’t wanted to sleep like a corpse. In fact I’ve been standing at my desk for eight hours.
I thought I might start to climb out of it yesterday (Thursday) but Omiconrallied and refused to back down. But it’s mostly gone today, or is certainly receding. It was a bear for about twoandahalfdays. I couldn’t do anything but sleep, night or day. I managed to tap some stuff out on the phone, okay, but sitting up was out of the question.
I’ve been told, by the way, that my grandfather name is “papa” — the same name that my father embraced when Jett and Dylan were young. I guess I’m okay with it, but can’t Sutton just call me Jeff? How any grandfather could accept being called “gramps” or “grandpappy” or “boompah”…Jesus!
After last week’s euphoric reaction to the second half of Spider–Man: NoWayHome, I fell into an unusual state of mind. Almost beatific. I began to consider that maybe, just maybe, I’d allowed myself to judge too harshly when it came to big CG-driven tentpole films. Perhaps I was evolving on some level, I told myself.
That shit is now over and done with. For last night I sat through Lana Wachowski’s TheMatrix: Resurrections, and I’m back to hatingagain. BIG hate. Which is where I belong — where God wants me to be. I’m talking “throwing up on the Persian rug” hate.
Death to putrid corporate cash-grab sequels like this one…death to all absurdly complex, dingle-dangle mind-fuck movies that bury the viewer in awful dialogue and hopelessly complex lotting and feelings of frustration that very quickly lead to “man, I really don’t give a fuck about any of this” and then to prolonged screaming. Death to endless martial-arts fight scenes in which the combatants get punched or kicked 67 or 78 times and don’t weaken or slow down in the slightest.
Fuck this movie for further tarnishing the memory of the original 1999 TheMatrix, which I’ll always love. Everything I hated about TheMatrix: Reloaded and TheMatrix: Revolutions — the horrible sense that a good idea is being mangled and twisted and then lost in the shuffle…those awful 2003 vibes are delivered in industrial-strength doses in Resurrections. It starts out badly or clumsily or ever-emphatically (less than ten minutes I sat up the couch and said out loud “this is bad”), and then it gets worse and worse and still worse. I was dying by the end. It’s a horrible film.
There’s one good moment in The Matrix: Reloaded…one in which Neo is trying to escape from a subway tunnel. He takes off like a bullet but two seconds later ends up exactly where he started. No elaborate FX, just a simple camera trick that Buster rKeaton could have dreamt up…and it’s the coolest moment in the film.
There’s a similar small pleasure in Resurrections — a line of dialogue spoken by Jonathan Groff‘s “Smith” character, the head of a booming San Francisco video-game company due to a wildly popular Matrix game created by Keanu Reeves‘ Thomas Anderson (aka Neo). In a one-on-one with Anderson, Smith explains that Warner Bros., the parent company, “has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy, with or without us” — presumably the same conditions that led to Wachowski’s involvement in Resurrections. This, at least, was mildly amusing — the only moment in the entire film that worked.
Otherwise I sensed trouble almost immediately. As soon as I glimpsed Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and listened to his half-solemn, half full-of-shit metaphysical patter after he decides that he doesn’t want to kill “Bugs” (Jessica Henwick) and her pallies after all, I muttered “but of course, the new Morpheus…Larry Fishburne’s son or whatever because Fishburne is 60 and probably overweight and unable to handle the martial-arts moves that he performed 20-plus-years ago.”
It turns out that Morpheus II is the same Fishburne and the same old Morpheus — he’s just 25 years younger and looks and sounds like the guy who played Bobby Seale in Aaron Sorkin’s TheTrial of theChicago7. But right away — during the obligatory opening action sequence, which films of this sort have to begin with because default Matrix knuckle-draggers are looking for as many bullet-time sequences as possible…bullettime! bullettime!… where was I?…
I was a huge admirer of Potter’s 1978 original presentation (critics adored it), and my reaction to the Ross (which I reviewed for The Film Journal) was something along the lines of “as remakes go this is truly a brave and striking effort, and almost as good as the BBC version. I adore many of the musical sequences, but something feels wrong…it’s a film about how grim and draining and merciless life was for so many during the Depression, yes, but it’s also a kind of heavy-sauce mood trip, almost a horror film…a feeling of walls closing in.”
Ross and Potter’s versions were pretty much identical. A struggling Depression-era loser named Arthur Parker (played by Steve Martin in ’81, Bob Hoskins earlier) lives in a fantasy retreat of popular songs in order to keep his spirit going and endure life’s constant misery. The contrast between the harsh reality of Arthur’s actual life vs. the the dreamworld songs that fill his head (and those of costars Bernadette Peters, Christopher Walken, Jessica Harper and Vernel Bagneris) either moved you or sank you, but how could anyone fail to admire the audacious concept?
I’ve always been a fan of what Pennies From Heaven was about and how it got there. Brave and highly inventive, honoring the Potter while advancing its own signature, etc. Martin and Bernadette Peters were excellent. The black-and-white homage to a Fred Astaire + Ginger Rogers dance number in Follow The Fleet was pretty great, as I recall. I remember being extra impressed by Walken’s big dance number. But I haven’t once re-watched it over the last four decades. Not once.
Because somewhere around the halfway or two-thirds mark Pennies From Heaven drops a pill into your system that feels more dispiriting than anything else. It keeps leaning in the direction of despondency, death and doom. It’s a movie that says “most of us are rats on the treadmill, and the game is totally rigged against us so you may as well resign yourself to the endurance of it all…in all likelihood the only respite you will experience with any regularity will be in the realm of fantasy.”
Lars von Trier‘s Dancer in the Dark (’00), which I’ve seen three or four times, used pretty much the exact same premise. This time Bjork was the tragic and incorrigible daydreamer who, like Martin and Hoskins before her, ended up on the gallows.
Pennies From Heaven was a bust — $22 million to produce, $9.1 million in theatrical revenues. My pet peeve was the way Bagneris’s accordion player was initially portrayed as another sad but sympathetic loser, and then he turns out to be a rapist and a murderer of a young blind girl. Bagneris seemed like a weirdo to begin with, and for some primal reason I was repelled by the idea his character turning into a secret maniac, and of Martin being convicted for Bagneris’s crime…this was my big drop-out moment a la William Goldman.
Could Netflix or Amazon or Hulu be persuaded to fund a remake today? Or a similar musical tragedy with the same basic premise?
82 year-old Fred Astaire on Ross’s film: “I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They don’t realize that the ’30s were a very innocent age, and that [the film] should have been set in the ’80s. As is it’s just froth. It makes you cry it’s so distasteful.”
Why would Brad Pitt degrade his brand by costarring in a obviously ham-fisted, aimed-at-blithering-idiots, piece-of-shit adventure comedy like The Lost City (Paramount, 3.25)? It’s been 37 years since Romancing The Stone and nobody will give a shit anyway, but that’s more or less the template. (Or, if you will, Romancing The Stone meets a slightly less bullshit-stuffed Jungle Cruise.) Kathleen Turner played a reclusive romance novelist back then and Sandra Bullock is playing a romance novelist now. Channing Tatum is the new Michael Douglas, a brawny hero with feet of clay. Beware of directors Adam and Aaron Nee.
I will not watch this film. If I do, I will hate it.
Last night Ben Affleck told Jimmy Kimmel that his reported remarks to Howard Stern about supposed links between his alcoholism and his waning marriage to Jennifer Garner, which sounded to a lot of people like “Jennifer made me an alcoholic,” were taken out of context and turned into toxic click-bait by voracious online rewriters.
Affleck did reportedly say that he and Garner “probably would’ve ended up at each other’s throats,” and if they hadn’t divorced “I probably still would’ve been drinking…part of why I started drinking was because I [felt] trapped…I was like, ‘I can’t leave because of my kids, but I’m not happy, what do I do?’ And what I did was [I] drank a bottle of scotch and fell asleep on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution.”
There was certainly more to their marriage than just this awkward summary.
Two thoughts:
(a) A “bad” or unfulfilling relationship (sexual boredom? constant conflicts over values and lifestyle issues? feelings of being intellectually stifled or constantly misunderstood or challenged?) can result in a repeating, no-way-out negative dynamic, and that can make a husband or a wife feel trapped. A couple can sometimes gradually work through this stuff; other times it’s hopeless. Anyone who’s been married knows what I’m talking about.
(b) Imagine if Garner had been the one who succumbed to alcoholism and sought a divorce while agreeing to joint custody, and who later said to Howard Stern the same things that Affleck said. Imagine if she’d said “I really wasn’t happy and every day was an ordeal, and yet there I was, stuck in a bad marriage, and I had to figure some way out of it…if I’d stayed with Ben I probably would’ve remained an alcoholic.” No one in the twitterverse or on The View or anywhere else would’ve trashed Garner like Affleck got trashed yesterday. Because the media always turns a blind eye when a woman admits to some kind of selfish behavior or failing, because if they don’t cut her a break or rush to her defense they’re probably sexist pigs under the skin. But if an older guy (white or BIPOC) admits to some selfish failing the media always chimes in with “look, a suspected asshole just admitted he’s an asshole!”
Of course I love Wes Anderson creations…of course I do! It’s just that many of my Anderson faves are his commercials, and those dozens upon dozens of YouTube parodies. Feature-wise I’ve always been and will always be fully respectful of Anderson’s brand or stylistic stamp, and that includes, believe it or not, The French Dispatch, which I had a mostly unpleasant time with at Telluride last September.
But I am a genuine, whole-hearted fan of only a handful of Wes’s films — Rushmore (which I’ve always adored like a brother), Bottle Rocket, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the original black-and-white Bottle Rocket short, most of The Royal Tenenbaums. But I dearly love the Wes signage, specifically the shorts and parodies. The SNL Anderson horror film short is heaven.
I will always be on Team Anderson, and I will never resign. Partly because I’m 100% certain that one day he’ll reach into his heart and decide to broaden his scope, or perhaps even re-think things somewhat. (Wes is still relatively young.) He has to — artists have no choice. I just hope and pray he’ll make more of an effort to blend his hermetic Wesworld aesthetic with the bigger, gnarlier, more complex world that’s been there all along.
Two and a half years ago I suggested that 2007 was and is one of the great film years, or roughly at par with 1999, 1971 and 1962 and 1939.
I listed 25 2007 films of serious merit — American Gangster, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, No Country for Old Men, Once, Superbad, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, Things We Lost in the Fire, Zodiac, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, I’m Not There, Sicko, Eastern Promises, The Bourne Ultimatum, Control, The Orphanage, 28 Weeks Later, In The Valley of Elah, Ratatouille, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Darjeeling Limited, Knocked Up and Sweeney Todd. Just as strong as ’99, and perhaps even a touch better.
The idea in re-posting this is to note that 15 years have elapsed since ’07, and to ask if anyone feels that any of these annums have measured up to ’07 or any of the previous banner years.
I happen to believe that everything started to go badly the following year — 2008 — with the debut of Iron Man and the subsequent increasing power of the superhero genre (DC Extended Universe, Marvel Cinematic Universe), and that “my” kind of movies haven’t been the same since. Strong, distinctive films have broken through every year, of course, but the pickings have been getting slimmer and slimmer since ’08, and especially since the Robespierre thought plague began to poison the water in ’17.
But don’t let me stop anyone. If you’re persuaded that ’09 or ’11 or ’16 were up to snuff, please make your case.
Herewith a toughbutfairassessment from Variety’s Owen Gleiberman about why West Side Story (and it breaks my heart to say this) appears to be a flopperoo, at least as far as viewing appetites outside your X-factor Millennial, older GenX and boomer demos are concerned.
Not technique- or chops-wise but vision-wise in terms of reading the cultural zeitgeist, Gleiberman is saying that Spielberg’s instincts are perhaps no longer in synch with things, at least notinarazor–sharpway and certainly not like they were between Duel and Schindler’sList/Jurassic Park. He’s gotten older. It happens.
Arrogant assumptions + klutzy presumptions that it wouldn’t all come out in the wash don’t translate into “disgrace” for ex-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. He’s not a panting sexual animal, and isn’t in the same league with brother & ex-governor Andrew at all. It was rash and sloppy for the SNL team to slander him with the “d” word.
By the way, with Chris Wallace resigning from Fox is it feasible for the Trump-loathing Chris to fill his slot? Probably not, I would imagine.
Last night I watched Joel Coen and Frances McDormand‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (Apple, 12.25). For some reason I woke up at 4:30 this morning, and just as my head was clearing a friend texted to ask what I thought.
“Not half bad!,” I replied. “I found it striking, gripping, strict and to the point. The grim grip of horror that resides in the human heart. A literate, thinking person’s story of doom foretold. The austere approach was more captivating than expected, given the Venice turndown and the spotty word of mouth.
“It’s relatively short (105 minutes), so much so that it almost felt like Macbeth’s greatest hits (abridged). I loved the spooky sets and the dense fog and the circling hawks and definitely the performance by recent NYFCC award-winner Kathryn Hunter, who plays the three creepy witches. And I was very impressed with Alex Hassell’s highly disciplined performance as Ross. And I adored Bruno Delbonnel’s sharp and silvery cinematography.
“McDormand really nailed her eerie, obsessive, sharp-taloned Lady Macbeth — she was almost coming from the same place as Hunter. Now and then Denzel’s delivery of this or that passage was quite affecting; at other times (“Cans’t thou not minister to a mind diseased…pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?”) a bit under-nourishing. But he’s still The Great Denzel.
“I still vastly prefer the 1971 Polanski version but Coen and McDormand definitely found their own tone and approach. It’s a film that warrants respect.”
The cast of Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth, a play about medieval Scotland, is pretty close to one-third African American. Presentism is par for the course these days, of course, but Coen and wife-producer-costar Frances McDormand seem to have moved beyond your obligatory woke casting requirements.
Yamato had brought up the issue of diverse casting and multi-ethnic representation. Even though Hail Ceasar was set in the racially illiberal early ’50s, her beef was basically #WhyIsHailCaesarSoWhite? Joel’s attitude was quite resistant and in fact fairly dismissive. Boiled down, his view was “why should I ethnically mix up my cast just for political reasons?”
It’s probably fair to say that a different Joel was at the helm when it came to casting The Tragedy of Macbeth. I know nothing, but I suspect that McDormand told him “you can’t really play it that way now, plus there are so many great actors of color out there…you should get in on this.”
Obviously Joel could have ignored the presentism requirement and made Macbeth as a traditional all-paleface play a la Roman Polanski and Orson Welles, and if anyone had complained he could have used the same argument he threw at Yamato. So why didn’t he? Because the Yamato mindset is industry-wide now, and he figured “well, I guess I need to get with the program…why make trouble for myself?…why not just embrace presentism and turn it into a plus?”
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