Just about every visiting industry pro said “why did a film that generated zero festival conversation win the top trophy? What is wrong with the Toronto residents who voted for it? Are they saps? Why didn’t they show a little more taste?”
THR‘s Scott Feinberg on 9.15.24: “The Life of Chuck may be a lovely film, but it had virtually no profile coming in to the fest [and] generated virtually no discussion at the fest.”
An adaptation of a Stephen King novella, the “genre-trippping” feature costars Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, Chiwetel “Chewy” Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Mark Hamill (73 going on 94), Annalise Basso, Mia Sara and HE fave Nick Offerman narrating.
Neon will open Chuck stateside on 6.6.25 with a nationwide expansion a week later (6.13).
It was unnecessarily invasive and even cruel of Santa Fe authorities to release video of a cop examination of the Santa Fe residence of the late Gene Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa.
Okay, they blurred out the bodies but c’mon…this is humiliating.
That said, why were several rooms in their sprawling home such a revolting mess? It looks like a home occupied by alcoholics or druggies…people with no discipline or any sense of sanitation.
Why did they allow their home to become infested by rats? Is this an age thing? Do old folks just give up and surrender to chaos because it’s somehow more comfortable to do so rather than maintain order and cleanliness?
And the size of the place….Jesus. It looks like a sprawling hotel or a sporting lodge of some kind…at least twice as large as any reasonable older couple might require. What couple would choose to live in a place this cavernous?
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a popcorn movie…a cheeseball thang…half-promising, half-wallow, aimed at the schmoes. And you’d better believe it’s been overpraised. I suspected as much when the first reactions broke, and now I know.
At first it’s a Mississippi folklore comic-book fable (great music, ecstasy dancing, sweaty sex, good cunnilingus), and then Coogler flips a switch and it becomes an ultra-violent schlock vampire flick that hits too hard and just bleeds, howls, groans and sweats all over the place.
Sinners is peddling comic-book country lore…actually impactful, storied, mythical and nothalfbad during the semi-realistic first 40%, but once the X-treme vampire stuff kicks in it’s basically coarse, bloody, gut-punch schlock. Crimson geysers, ragged bite wounds, wooden stakes, burnt flesh. Primitive slop.
Young Miles Caton is a gifted Delta Blues singer-guitarist — Robert Johnson reincarnated. And hangin’ with 89 year-old Buddy Guy at the very end is a treat. The musical sequences in the juke joint are joyful and jumpin’. And yes, the sight and sound of a chorus of Irish vampires singing Irish folk tunes under the moonlight as the bloody-faced Jack O’Connell dances an Irish jig is wonderful (O’Connell is probably doomed to play surly villains from here on) — the most bizarre spectacle I’ve ever seen or heard in a monster film.
And the buffed-up Michael B. Jordan, playing twin criminal brothers from Chicago, is straight and sturdy enough. He also gets laid twice, or rather the brothers make out separately, one with Hailee Steinfeld (turning 30 next year), another with Wunmi Mosaku.
But the second half is just crude vampire mulch. Much of the drawlin’ dialogue is unintelligible…so slurry and mumbly that I knew early on that I had no choice but to resort to the Wiki synopsis. Skim through this sucker….Eugene O’Neill, it ain’t…crazy, cartoonish gruel…pulp mythology.
And Autumn Durald Arakawa’s cinematography is way too dark. That or the Westport AMC’s projector lamp is close to death.
Yeah, there’s an obvious racial current or metaphor…Coogler sprinkles in a few Klanners, fat rednecks and dumb crackers straight out of Mississippi Burning, and they all meet with just desserts. Jordan filling them with hot lead a la Billy Wilder‘s St. Valentine’s Day massacre is part of the grand finale…yeah!
Sidenote for fanatical bully contingent:
I’m a deepwater cinephile with the usual exacting standards…the standards met and fulfilled by thousands of filmmakers throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.
All the Metacritic and RT critics know there’s virtually no upside to slamming (or partially slamming) an ambitious Ryan Coogler movie that deals with deep-south racism and plays like a grindhouse flick from Sam Arkoff, and so they all put on their ballerina shoes before reviewing it.
I’ve begun to read Zach Dean‘s script of Day Drinker, a frothy thriller currently filming in Spain with a gray-haired Johnny Depp, 61, as an alcoholic named Kelly.
I’m only up to page 15, but it’s pretty clear that Kelly will either end up sober or a lot less shitfaced.
Dean’s story cruises around on a private yacht. Madelyn Cline, 28, plays the proverbial hottie; Penelope Cruz portrays a criminal of some sort.
Wikipedia says director Marc Webb (who always directs lightweight stuff) has actually been filming on the Canary Islands (Santa Cruz de Tenerife)
Depp’s Kelly is a friendly, enjoyable rogue…a charming fellow who needs to be sipping something at all times.
Dean’s script has a jaunty feel — I’ll give it that much. It ends with a twist,.
Nobody is a more passionate fan of Olivia Colman than myself, but she’s just not young or hot enough to play Benedict Cumberbatch‘s wife in The Roses (Searchlight, 8.29).
The 51-year-old Colman is only a year and a half older than Cumberbatch, but she looks…okay, not like his aunt but his slightly older attorney or business partner. She doesn’t look wifey-wifey.
When it comes to marriage, men who are doing well professionally always choose someone younger and hotter (i.e., arm-candy factor). Okay, some marry women their own age but if they do, the women are always significantly more attractive than the man, according to boilerplate male hotness standards. Regardless of age, the wife never looks older and is always hotter than the husband.
This was true of the dynamic between Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in the original The War of the Roses (’89). Turner was and is a decade younger than Douglas, and pretty much looked like her Body Heat self in that Danny DeVito-directed 20th Century Fox release.
The discussion of “InconvenientStatsThatJournosWouldBeWiseToIgnore” (4.15) was apparently shut down by socially concerned persons within the WordPress matrix. This may have been incited by the posting of 2022crimestatistics from the City of London website. Or not…I wouldn’t know. I know it wasn’t me.
I’m posting this because I used to be way behind the eight ball when young…I’ve forgotten some of the psychological particulars, but it was murder. Talk about being “misplaced inside a jail”…yeesh.
However you slice or strategize it, the 2025 Venice Film Festival (8.27 through 9.6) will likely constitute a much richer assortment of films than the Cannes Film Festival, which unfurls three and half weeks hence. Here’s a list of 2025 films that are somewhere between fairly and somewhat likely choices for the Venice gathering.
HE’s dream roster includes the Guadagnino, the Bigelow, the Cooper, the Nemes, the Aronofsky, the Berger, the Cianfrance, the Corbijn, the Greengrass, the Baumbach, the Assayas, the Schnabel and the Gibney…13 in all.
Not the Safdie, not the Lanthimos, not the Zhao, not the Fastvold, not the Winocour.
21. WIZARD OF KREMLIN / d: Olivier Assayas (a film adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli‘s 2022 book, directed by Olivier Assayas and starring Paul Dano, Alicia Vikander, Jude Law, Zach Galifianakis and Tom Sturridge with Dano playing Vadim Baranov.)
4.17, 6:45 am update: Caught the first two episodes last night. The urgent pacing and well-chiselled, fat-free narrative quickly affected me, especially as I got to know the crew (and even some of the patients). Even with the scampering rats I was hooked. Expectations exceeded.
Very few speedbumps and yet uncomfortable moments are part of the scheme…I get that. That said, I could’ve done without (a) that one, thankfully brief bit with the fat male patient using a bedpan (TMI) and (b) that woke moment when the young, good-looking doctor says a young couple whose son has accidentally ingested cannabis gummmies won’t face legal consequences because “they’re white”. Otherwise episode #2 just flew right by while pretty much flooding my system. The humanity fills your cup to the brim.
Noah Wylie is great, but then they all are. My “Shitsburgh” concern meant nothing as the show could be set in Portland or New Orleans or anywhere. I cried out when the damaged crimson fingernail of the dweeb med student was lanced with a needle…Jesus Christ! I know that more discomfort awaits, but I’m in. As long as the show doesn’t subject me to any close-ups of fat, swollen feet with fungus-y toenails, I’ll be okay. And the absence of soap opera stuff is wonderful.
Wednesday pm: I don’t like coming into a limited series three months late, but I’ve now decided I’ll suck it up and watch all 15 episodes of The Pitt. I don’t like this kind of long-haul commitment, but I guess I can get through it.
Why didn’t I jump in last January? Because (a) it looked like just another E.R. drama starring Noah Wylie, and (b) I’ve never liked Pittsburgh.
I haven’t been to the area since ’82 when I visited the set of George Romero‘s Creepshow (actually a suburb near Monroeville), and I remember muttering to myself that not having been born there was probably a blessing. Plus I didn’t like Rowdy Herrington and Bruce Willis‘s Striking Distance. And let’s not forget when Sienna Miller called it “Shitsburgh” back in ’08 or thereabouts.
I’m so sick of TheLastofUs, which is to say the draining, dispiriting genre of disease, rot and decay…dystopian finality ain’t what it used to be, you see.
I’m more or less okay with Pedro Pascal‘s Joel Miller, I suppose, but I really, really don’t care for the company of 21-year-old Bella Ramsey, who plays the brittle, glaring, strange-looking Ellie (really weird icy eyes).
Ellie is certainly “a lot.” And not just because she’s something of a Jackson Hole rock star in this godawful end-of-everything realm because she’s immune to the Cordyceps infection.
Early on Ellie and Dina (Isabella Merced) go after some growling zombies inside a warehouse of some kind, but instead of relying on firearms for protection Ellie decides upon wrestling and knifing them to death. Absolute 100% lunacy.
Ellie and Dina are sexually aroused by each other (of course! what else?) and gradually decide to make out on a dance floor during a community celebration. This prompts a local homophobe to bark and complain and call them “dykes.” And then right away Joel steps in and decks the guy, which naturally angers Ellie…such a snarly-face.
I’m not saying Ramsey is an unskilled actress or anything; I’m saying I don’t like her frosty, edgelord vibe. And I really do dislike the branding of actors who refer to themselves as “they/them” (i.e., sexually fluid or ambivalent) while wearing breast-binders and oddly identifying as Christian and autistic / neurodivergent, not to mention being a former pescatarian as well as a onetime victim of anorexia nervosa, and being sorta kinda “vegan-ish.”
Bella is so bold, so brave. If only Cary Grant or Kate Hepburn had mustered the courage to be fully and unapologetically non-binary…if only Kate had broken out of confinement and worn her hair in a tight bun along with some chest-binders while playing Tracy Lord in ThePhiladelphiaStory. Did Grant hide his autism? How long and hard did he struggle with his they/them-ness?
They, they, they, they, they, they….
Ellie’s youth and immunity mean viewers are unfortunately stuck with her unless the producers read the writing on the wall. But of course they won’t / can’t because Bella Ramsey is such a heavily branded Zoomer — an autistic they/them lesbian who’s worn breast-flatteners, etc.
Some actors have eyes that radiate and reach in and establish an immediate emotional rapport. You want their characters to win through or at least not be crushed by tumbling tides. I for one would be delighted if Bella were to vanish like that…poof! Her eyes are hard and frosty and oddly feral on some level. She’s almost like a new hybrid species. She’d actually be effective as some kind of fang-toothed daughter of Dracula.
