…when a brazen envelope-pusher has been heavily hyped in overlapping festival pressure-cooker environments like Venice and Telluride, and then Jeff Sneider comes along and goes “wait…whut?”
Allow me to clarify — Poor Things is Barbie meets a heterosexual Victorian British empire version of Fellini Satyricon.
Let no one say L.A. Times critic Justin Chang isn’t a man of character. For he’s pannedAlexander Payne’s TheHoldovers, the almost universally praised, odd-couple prep school comedy with Paul Giamatti as a curmudgeonly ancient history professor, and newcomer Dominic Sessa as a bright malcontent student.
Chang may be an outlier in this regard, but it takes balls to stand against the majority. I should know.
Chang slamsTheHoldovers for being insincere (“flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic”) but also, it seems, because of an incident of racial animosity between two minor characters — a snotty white kid named Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner) and a fragile Korean student named Ye-Joon Park (Jim Kaplan).
Early on Kountze belittles Park, you see, by calling him “Mr. Moto” — apparently a trigger in more ways than one.
Chang: “In reducing Ye-Joon to such an abused prop, is TheHoldovers really any better [than Kountze]? Can anyone watch a scene this callous and then be honestly moved by [Giamatti’s] speech about the injustices of American racism, classism and white privilege?”
Inshort TheHoldovers, which is mostly set in December 1970, is guilty of a 2023 woke crime. In Chang’s head, I should add.
What exactly are “good” sex scenes? In my book they’re scenes that make you feel something primal and deep down. Scenes that make you damp or hard. It doesn’t extend much beyond that.
This morning a friend asked for suggestions for some good ones. I thought she meant “out of the ordinary” so I mentioned the subtle eroticism of Gunnel Lindbloom‘s sex scenes in Ingmar Bergman‘s The Silence (’63). Or the Kris Kristofferson-Sarah Miles sex scenes in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With The Sea (’76), or the Kristofferson-Jane Fonda scenes in Rollover. Or the stand-up fuck in Last Tango in Paris (’72). Or the Cry Toughbedroom scene between John Saxon and Linda Cristal. Or the Straw Dogs rape scene, which no one is allowed to mention because it represents the sordid sensibility of a reviled chauvinist.
Friendo: These are not good sex scenes. To me they have to be full of sensuality, tension, romance, love. HE: What’s love got to do with it? Friendo: I need one more title and none of these work HE: How about those incredibly hot beard-stubble gay sex scenes in Andrew Haigh‘s All Of Us Strangers? Or Burt Lancaster & Deborah Kerr on the beach in From Here to Eternity, and in The Gypsy Moths? Or Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead. Friendo: I like the ones more from my generation, like the 1980s HE: Jesus, just Google it.
So she settledon the fabled sex scenes in Shakespeare in Love, The Year of Living Dangerously, Body Heat, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Betty Blue, 9 1/2 Weeks, Striptease, Witness, Damage, Bugsy, The English Patient. Bull Durham and The Notebook. They work for me also, sure, but everyone references them.
Why is Netflix shorting David Fincher‘s The Killer in terms of theatre bookings? I don’t know what’s happening in Biloxi, Albuquerque, Fresno or Montpellier, but people who live in the suburbs of New York and Los Angeles are definitely being told “sorry, guys, but we’ve decided not to show The Killer in your neck of the woods this weekend or next…no offense but tough darts.”
As a gesture of award-season respect and a tip of the hat to Fincher’s rep as a major-league auteur, Netflix will be showing The Killer in several theatres starting tomorrow, or between Friday, 10.27 and Friday, 11.10, which is when it’ll begin streaming.
And yet it won’t be playing in any AMC or Cinemark theatres in the general area, which means that NYC-area suburbanites looking for a big-screen experience will have to see it in Manhattan or Brooklyn (it’s at the Paris, Regal Union Square and various Alamo theatres) or at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville.
Why restrict access? Netflix seems to be saying “we don’t think The Killer will please Joe Popcorn types or suburban audiences and that it’s better to restrict bookings to hipper big-city theatres and cutting-edge crowds.”
That’s an insult, man…”we don’t think you’re deep or sharp or thoughtful enough to get this film.”
There’s no question that The Killer is one of 2023’s beautiful oddities…arguably the most curious-feeling, finely crafted, possibly-residing-on-another-planet film around. Actually the only one that adheres to a perverse and particular scheme of this sort….fascinating but ice-cold.
At first it resembles a typical genre programmer about a professional assassin, but it soon gets hold of something more, something else. We all know what “escapism” generally feels like, and that it tends to feel slick and smoothed-over and occasionally frothy. I only know this isn’t the deal with The Killer…that there’s something weirdly isolated, existentially detached and almost liberating running through it…something above and beyond and residing within.
All I can say is that Netflix’s “we don’t want to make it easy for suburbanites to see this film” isn’t cool. If I were Fincher I would be hugely pissed, but then I’m not him.
To hear it from the vast majority of critics, new movies are always one of two things — (a) masterful, brilliant, fulfilling and irresistably enjoyable or (b) disappointing or slack or even stinky. They’re never in-betweeners — not great but passable, very well made but not especially riveting, 70% worthwhile but 30% problematic, etc. Or mostly problematic but with a few really good aspects.
Worst of all, critics will often distort with overpraise. Sometimes you can just tell that they’ve decided to give a certain film is getting a pass because it exudes the right kind of social bonafides, and that’s that.
Anatomy of a Fall is a thorough, exacting and meticulous (read: exhausting) “what really happened?” exercise by way of a courtoom procedural, and is certainly smart and interesting as far as it goes but let’s not get carried away…please.
Sandra Huller is excellent as a bisexual writer accused of murdering her angry, pain-in-the-ass French husband (Samuel Theis), but the film goes on for 152 minutes, and the cloying kid playing Huhler’s half-blind son (Milo Machado-Graner) lays it on too thick, and the loud and relentless playing of an instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” drove me fucking nuts. The more I heard it, the more angry I felt…”Why is Triet making me listen to this over-loud track over and over?”
Another highly dubious declaration from Richards: “What makes Anatomy of a Fall so compelling is that Triet and Arthur Harari’s script has you constantly battle with yourself over whether or not you believe in Sandra’s innocence.” Not so! No battle! I was never even faintly persuaded that Huller might be a murderer…not for a minute.
…but since Jeff Mclachlan already has, there’s no harm in commenting. Both men were somewhat overweight during filming. Plemons has since dropped a ton of weight (he’s almost skinny now) and Leo has also slimmed down. Plus Plemons never takes his cowboy hat off, and that camoflauges or offsets his facial appearance.
I watched my Patton Bluray this evening for the seventh or eighth time (I’ve lost count), mainly to savor Fred J. Koenekamp‘s glorious cinematography.
Franklin J. Schaffner‘s Oscar-winning film (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay plus three more) was captured in 65mm Dimension 150, which has a panoramic, large-canvas feeling…acres of head and side room, and no MCUs or close-ups or inserts except at the very beginning, just before the big American flag speech. Plus every shot is crisp, windowpane clear, spit-shined to perfection.
During the slapping-of-Tim Considine scene in Sicily a delicious fantasy came to mind — George C. Scott‘s three-star general somehow straddling the swamps of time and coming face to face with a trio of Millennials or Zoomers from ’23, and listening to their white-male suppressive, enemies-of-free-speech, our-way-or-the-highway theology and views on gender fluidity and hormone injections and occasionally slicing dicks and breasts off, and finally becoming enraged and slapping the shit out of all three with a leather glove….”shut aahhhp!…ya goddam wokesters!!”
Schoenkamp’s cinematography and Jerry Goldsmith‘s legendary score were Oscar-nominated, and both lost. The winners in their respective categories were Freddie Young for Ryan’s Daughter and Francis Lai for Love Story.
Since the news of Richard Roundtree’s passing I’ve been trying to think of something specific to say. A legendary and iconic actor, sure, but they’re all saying that. And then a hazy memory, 41 years old, surfaced this morning.
I attended a midtown Manhattan press luncheon for One Down, Two To Go (’82), a cops vs. bad guys martial-arts film that was directed and written by Fred Williamson. Roundtree costarred with Williamson, Jim Brown and Jim Kelly, and the gang was all there.
The gathering happened somewhere in the theatre district. There was a meet-and-greet before the food and speeches, and Roundtree was warm and congenial. (Or so I recall.) Wonderful smile, great vibes.
The film was about to come out, and apparently the word was that exhibitors weren’t that happy with it. (Or it wasn’t tracking all that well with Joe Popcorn….something like that.)
At the lecturn Williamson delivered the comic highlight — a now-classic story about a tasty new brand of dog food that had been carefully prepared and brilliantly marketed, but unfortunately the dogs didn’t like it and that was the bottom line.
Ten days ago I wrote six paragraphs about David Fincher‘s The Killer, and it came out just right because (this is important) I hadn’t really explored what I was feeling deep down…I just said “this movie made me feel so damn engaged and electrified, escapism-wise”, and I did so without asking why or trying to protect myself from the usual HE slings and arrows. Because that is what this site is partly about….dicks firing beebee pellets.
If I had a magic wand I would wave it like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and transform The Killer into one of the locked-and-loaded, no-escape-clause 2023 Best Picture nominees…I would have no hesitation about this whatsoever. Because the Movie Godz are sold on the value of this film and so am I….and when you’re right, you’re right. And I don’t want to even think about what the Perri Nemiroffs of this world feel about The Killer. It’s not worth fooling with.
I knew deep down that I’d said the right and necessary thing when I wrote that Fincher’s revenge film (and that’s what it is — a sleek and efficient survival and revenge thing that will only warm the hearts of earth-orbiting, X-factor, don’t-fence-me-in fellows like myself)..I said that it “feels like a kind of new-age opiate…it’s about the joys of living a cold and barren life….it mainlines the hollow.”
Strange as this may sound, typing these words felt like a breakthrough of sorts. Without planning it out or thinking it through I had randomly but decisively admitted that there’s something to be said for living a life of smart solitude and fleet escapism…a life defined or punctuated by apartness, alert alienation, fake IDs and chilly satisfactions. And at the same time I live for rare meltdown moments in exceptional grade-A films…I’ve been watching the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol every holiday season since I was nine or ten years old…at the same time I love staying a step or two ahead of pursuers and living for the chase and the game of it all.
The instant that I acknowledged that a cold and barren life could radiate joy and satisfaction…well! I don’t think I’ve ever read something like this from any movie critic anywhere, and to compound matters I’m not even sure why I’m making this distinction as we speak.
It’s 4:45 pm and I have some stuff to do, I’m afraid, so I have to shut this down, but I can’t leave without asking what’s up with Elvis Mitchell‘s baggy-ass, dark-blue, fresh-off-the-rack jeans with the cuffs folded up, not to mention those plastic, lace-up space shoes with the three-inch soles? The photos are from last night’s post-screening q & a at the David Geffen Theatre at the Academy Museum.
I loved David Fincher’s TheKiller (Netflix 10.27)…a great escape film if I’ve ever seen and felt one. It took me out of myself and dropped me into a higher realm, or at least my idea of one. It redefines the meaning of the word “chill” in a way that will either knock you out or, if you’re an ideologue or a shoulder-shrugger or a constipated, closed-off type, leave you with shards.
It’s first and foremost about the supreme comfort of living in a super-clean, perfectly crafted Fincher film, and about the joy of being a ghost and travelling alone like a nowhere man, and about the blissful solitude and curious joy of disassociative technique…about the existential solace and solitude of having a wonderfully endless supply of fake IDs, fake passports and fake license plates, and maneuvering through flush and fragrant realms and the zen of nothingness…about the almost religious high of not giving a single, solitary fuck.
Despite sitting in a too-small Paris theatre seat (I could barely move my legs) and despite Fincher’s film starting almost a half-hour late, I was in heaven start to finish. It’s all about eluding fate and slipping the grasp, about playing a fleet phantom game and, much to my surprise and delight, about chasing down several unlucky functionaries and nefarious upper-caste types and sending them to God.
It’s about a side of me (and of Fincher, of course) that loves being on the move and managing to slip-slide away like Paul Simon but in a GOOD way or at least an extremely cool one…about being blissfully free of conventional entanglements and concerned only with slick stealth and ducking out of sight and, despite suffering a bruise or two, gaining the upper hand.
TheKiller is about the joys of living a cold and barren life…it mainlines the hollow but feels like a kind of new-age opiate…it turned me on like Joni Mitchell’s radio, and I’m still feeling the buzz and humming the melody the morning after. I can’t wait to see it another two or three times, bare minimum.
Thank you, Mr. Fincher, for slipping me a great nickle bag of smack and what felt last night like the best meaningless-but-at-the-sane-time meaningful movie high I’ve had in a dog’s age.
Worldwide apocalypse, everything falling apart, deer emerging from the forest….Rumaan Alam‘s Leave The World Behind (Netfix, 11.22) appears to be M. Night Shyamalan‘s Knock at the Cabin, Part II only with bigger names (Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke) and minus the idiotic plot contrivance about how the death of four people can somehow save the world….I don’t want to remember it.