It was while watching the recently released Captain Marvel trailer that I realized I’m sick to death of hearing the line “you have no idea.” As in “you have no idea how much shit is about to come down.” Or “you have no idea what’s really going on here.” Or “you have no idea who I am or what I’ve been going through.” Samuel L. Jackson is the guy who says it in the trailer, and the instant I heard it I said “okay, that’s it, no more.”
I’ve always hated this line because the characters who say it don’t actually mean that the person they’re speaking to “has no idea” about this or that, which would be another way of saying they’re basically clueless. What they mean is that the person in question doesn’t have enough information, isn’t fully aware of all the angles or doesn’t know the whole equation. All I know is that from this point on, any movie in which a character says “you have no idea” is bad news, as in badly written, chock of cliches, hackneyed, “give me a break”, etc.
Joaquin Pheonix will be a great Joker, most likely, but why are people pining for another Joker movie in the first place? How many Jokers and Joker flicks can the culture absorb before the seams start to fray and split open? Yes, it’s an origin story but weren’t we treated to the origins of Jack Nicholson‘s Joker in Tim Burton‘s original Batman? Not to mention Jared Leto gearing up for another Joker performance. There’s something diseased going on.
I’m sorry but the main thing I’m getting from Chevy Chase in this Washington Post video interview is “feeble, doddering, no longer sharp.” The water-dribbling-onto-the-T-shirt isn’t a bit — it’s an old guy whose physical coordination skills aren’t what they used to be. Chase is only 75, but he looks and sounds like he’ll be ready for assisted living in a couple of years. Hurt, angry, defensive. I’m sorry to say this but look at him, listen to him. His voice sounds a bit hazy and groggy — it doesn’t have that timbre, that snap any more. He needs to lose at least 75 or 80 pounds and go to Prague for some hair work.
A 9.20 Guardian article reports that Yale Law School professor Amy Chua, who has strongly endorsed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, privately told a group of law students last year that it was “not an accident” that Kavanaugh’s female law clerks all “looked like models.” The story reports that Chau has suggested to female students who wanted to work for Kavanaugh that they should “dress to exude a ‘model-like’ femininity.”
The article adds that Chau’s law-professor husband, Jed Rubenfeld, “told a prospective clerk that Kavanaugh liked a certain ‘look'” — a presumed allusion to a fashionably-dressed, hot-to-trot “fuck me” appearance.
Which indicates that the adult, judicially-focused Kavanaugh was looking for a certain atmosphere of tumescent arousal in his law office, and that right now he’s probably a middle-aged version of the 17-year-old horndog who tried to drunkenly have his way with Christine Blasey Ford back in the early ’80s.
Then again working with hotties is a standard Republican thing. We’re all aware that powerful right-wing guys tend to hire foxes — sexy, slender, alluring — and in many cases icy Nordic blondes, which is the template for pretty much every female Fox News employee.
Consider a 2.20.17 Guardian piece by Hadley Freeman called “Why Do All The Women on Fox News Look and Dress Alike? Republicans Prefer Blondes.” Freeman notes that right-wing women (i.e., Kellyanne Conway, Scottie Nell Hughes, Tomi Lahren, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ivanka Trump) all present “a uniform vision of girlishly long bottle-blond hair. [And they] all dress exactly the same, which is to say, mainstream feminine — dresses, not trousers; heels, not flats; no interesting cuts, just body-skimming, cleavage-hinting, not-scaring-the-horses tedium. These are the kind of women who take pride in saying things like ‘I’m not into fashion — I like style’, and by ‘style’ they mean ‘clothes that men like me to wear.'”
So yes, Kavanaugh is apparently a dog, but he isn’t an outlier — he’s just looking for the same kind of tingly stimulation from his female law clerks that Roger Ailes wanted from female Fox News staffers.
For what it’s worth, I once tried to help a pretty, dark-haired 20something woman — a good egg in my book — get a job interview with producer Don Simpson. I began by telling Simpson that she was sharp and well-educated with a disciplined social manner. Then I made the mistake of telling him she was good-looking. “In my experience that’s a negative,” Simpson replied. “Pretty women are accustomed to being flattered and catered to in certain ways. They’ve been told all their lives that the world will often defer to them or bend the rules to some extent, and so they’re not as hard-working and soldier-like as women who are are equally qualified but less attractive.”
Just mentioning that I knew and occasionally chatted with Simpson back in the ’90s is not a smart move on my part. Certain parties will shake their heads and conclude that anyone who was friendly with Simpson, whose attitudes toward women were reportedly problematic, might have similar issues. But I never spoke with Simpson about women or sex or anything in that realm; I loved talking to him because he was so shrewd and whip-smart about all the Hollywood players — who they were deep down, what their basic personalities and mindsets were, etc. I’ve mentioned the prejudice he had about interviewing attractive women for office or production jobs to point out that at least Simpson, who’s been dead for 22 years now, was no Brett Kavanaugh.
Trailer narration for The Oath: “How did this reasonable, mild-mannered husband and wife end up like this? One word: family.”
The trailer lies. In fact, the one-word answer is “Trump”. A corresponding five-word answer is “creeping Nazi Germany-like fascism.” Coupled with a pair of brothers with diametrically opposed views on a recently-requested government loyalty oath, which is only a step or two removed from reality.
One brother (played by director-producer-writer Ike Barinholz) is quite sensibly appalled; the other (or “bad”) brother supports the thinking behind the oath. Mix, combust, fireworks, FBI guys, chaos.
The Oath, which looks and feels a little raggedy, will premiere on 9.25 at the Los Angeles Film Festival. I don’t know how good Barinholz’s film is, but the fact that a raucous family comedy has a fascistic premise at all is obviously a portrait of contemporary white American culture, at least to some extent.
I’ve never understood why Landis, who directed, wrote and played the lead role, continues to refer to Schlock as “bad and appropriately named.” It was cheaply made — shot in only 12 days for $60K — but three or four scenes in this dopey little film are a lot funnier than The Blues Brothers and only slightly less funny than National Lampoon’s Animal House. If you’re stoned.
Schlock is more than a genre spoof — it’s a combination of stoner humor and social satire in the vein of the old, occasionally surrealist Ernie Kovacs show of the late ’50s and early ’60s. The below video clip (go to 3:11) contains a scene in which Schlock tears apart an orange beater in a parking lot, and it’s pure Laurel & Hardy.
The form-fitting ape suit, obviously inspired by the “Dawn of Man” apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, was designed by Rick Baker. Baker had almost no money to work with, and yet he did a pretty good job. And Landis’s performance is a lot of fun.
I don’t know why it took so long for a Bluray to appear, but I wonder if the March 2017 death of original rights holder Jack Harris had something to do with it.
The above clip was shot at The Old Place, a storied restaurant in the hills above Malibu. It begins slowly but hang in there. The blind virtuoso with a Zen attitude is played by Ian Kranitz.
Over the last few years I’ve learned to be wary of anything Dan Fogelman has had a hand in. I didn’t mind Last Vegas, which Fogelman wrote, but I pretty much hated Danny Collins, which he directed and wrote. I’ve therefore ducked screenings of Fogelman’s Life Itself (Amazon, 9.21), and apparently with good reason.
Fogelman’s latest has gotten creamed on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, earning respective ratings of 12% and 19%. As you might expect, Fogelman has called out the white-guy critical establishment for the usual usual.
“White male critics don’t like anything that has any emotion,” he recently told TooFab. “It’s concerning because it is important. It tells people what to go see. I think that the people with the widest reach are getting increasingly cynical and vitriolic. Something is inherently a little bit broken in our film criticism right now.”
Life Itself may or may not be a problematic film, but Fogelman isn’t wrong about critics disliking films with strong emotional currents. Or at least those saddled with a sense of taste. Being one of them, I can say they definitely prefer the use of suggestion, understatement and deft, darting brush strokes. They definitely tend to push back if the emotional gush is turned on too heavily. This is how anyone with cultivated taste buds would respond.
It’s also true about film critics being made up of mostly older white guys. And yet, as World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy has pointed out, many of the negative reviews were from female critics. Of the 19 female film critics who’ve reviewed Life Itself on Rotten Tomatoes, 17 wrote pans.
At the end of yesterday’s Other Side of the Wind review I wrote that “it must have been a whole lot of fun to have been part of the shoot back in ’70, ’71 and ’72…hugely enjoyable for those who were there and sharing a magic moment.” I noticed in the closing credits that director Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire) and Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy played partygoers. I wrote them and asked for recollections — they both responded.
McCarthy: “When I watched it I saw myself for about two seconds in a party scene shot with Cameron Mitchell and another actor I couldn’t identify. Joe McBride, who’s seen the film multiple times, said he saw me in two shots. Maybe when I get a DVD I can freeze-frame to be able to say with certainty how many times I’m onscreen and for how long. But the main thing was just being there.
“I was working as Elaine May‘s assistant on Mikey and Nicky during the day, then in the evenings — on and off for about a month — I would head to Bogdanovich’s house (212 Copa de Oro Road) to be part of Orson’s filmed ‘parties’ while Peter was away shooting Daisy Miller in Italy.
“I was even there for Orson’s 60th birthday” — 5.6.75 — “when he exploded in a rage when everyone paused late in the evening to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and present him with a cake. He was demanding that they continue working. Sometime after midnight, when there were maybe a dozen people left, he opened the freezer, pulled out a tub of ice cream and proceeded to eat the whole thing.
“But my favorite memory is of something that happened once a week. At 8 pm or 8:30 or whatever time it was, Orson would have a fit, yell at everyone in a fit of dissatisfaction and storm into his bedroom and slam the door behind him. A half-hour or an hour later, he’d come out in a fine humor and resume filming at once. My friend Gary Graver, the cinematographer, later told me what was really going on: Orson’s favorite TV series was Shaft (which aired from late ’73 to early ’74) and throwing this tantrum was his way of getting away to watch it.
“Working with Elaine and Orson, the two biggest mavericks in town, was my introduction to Hollywood.”
Crowe: “I think it was [during] my first trip to Los Angeles when my friend Phil Savenick said, ‘Let’s go be extras in an Orson Welles movie.’ It all felt very mysterious. We weren’t given the name of the film. We hung out all night in the backyard and big living room of a house in Bel-Air — Stone Canyon, I believe — and every thirty minutes or so, Welles would move through the set, look at us, and continue bantering with Peter Bogdanovich. We weren’t sure what was being planned or filmed. At a certain point cameras appeared. Welles appeared with Bogdanovich and shot a scene that took place in the backyard. There were long delays between takes.
“There were about thirty of us, and the best conversation among the extras was ‘If Orson Welles was a musician, who would he be?’ One of the extras argued strongly that he was like Stephen Stills, who wrote ‘For What It’s Worth’ and other classics at a young age. The other extras argued this theory down with relish. We finally decided the closest comparison was Brian Wilson. And right about that time, an assistant director came out and said, ‘Orson is going to bed. Anybody want to come back tomorrow?'”
In yesterday’s review of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind I wrote that “I can’t honestly call it a good film.” This morning a critic friend called me out for sounding namby-pamby. “You can’t honestly call it a good film?,” he wrote. “How about honestly calling it a shitty one?”
HE reply: “Because it’s hard to dismiss Welles’ final film after so much delay and difficulty on the part of his friends and colleagues to finally assemble and release it.”
Critic friend: “There’s no percentage in patting idiots on the head, as an old mentor used to say. The road to hell is paved with the best intentions.”
HE reply: “The Other Side of the Wind wasn’t made by an idiot. It was made by a man who had lost his compass.”
Critic friend: “I’m talking about the idiots who tried to salvage this film and give it meaning. He was absolutely a man who lost his compass, so what is the point of putting a spotlight on the product of that degraded talent? It’s like trying to revive late-era Tennessee Williams in an effort to find quality where there really is only confusion.”
Suitably chastised, I changed the opening of paragraph #2 to read as follows: “It’s not a good film. Any film that makes you say ‘wait…what’s happening?’ or “’what was that line?’ over and over is doing something wrong.”
What was Rod Serling‘s The Twilight Zone, boiled down to basics? During its 1959-to-1962 heyday it was a half-hour series about the fears, anxieties, neuroses and psychological maladies that flooded the anti-social undercurrents of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy eras. That or the issues that made Serling himself feel antsy and unsettled. It was not a show about “boo!” — it was about “what is this strange feeling I have in my gut?” or “why can’t I shake this memory from my childhood?” or “why do I feel trapped?” or “what if I just ran away from my high-paying job and moved to a small bucolic town called Willoughby…wouldn’t I be happier?”
Does anyone think that the latest Twilight Zone reboot, which will be hosted by Jordan Peele because Get Out was a racially-stamped reboot of Ira Levin‘s The Stepford Wives, which of course has nothing to do with the Serling aesthetic…does anyone think that this new streaming Twilight Zone will come within 100 miles of the deep-down fears, anxieties, neuroses and psychological maladies of the Trump era?
My presumption, in fact, is that Peel’s Zone will deliver cheap horror wanks because that’s what 90% of the viewing audience likes. They don’t want to know from their deep-down fears, anxieties, neuroses and maladies, and would probably run in the opposite direction of any streaming series that delivers anything resembling this.
Variety story: CBS announced Thursday that Peele will serve as host and narrator of “The Twilight Zone,” the revival of the classic science-fiction anthology that he is producing with CBS Television Studios and Simon Kinberg for CBS All Access. Peele and Kinberg are set to serve as executive producers alongside Win Rosenfeld, Audrey Chon, Carol Serling, Rick Berg and Greg Yaitanes.
The gifted Cary Fukunaga has been hired to direct the 25th James Bond film, which is untitled as we speak. A smart move for the Bond producers — a critic friend calls the Japanese-American director “a real chameleon who always rises to every occasion” — and, be honest, a paycheck gig for Fukanaga.
There’s a term for any name-brand director helming a Bond film — slumming. The pay is great but you’re still submitting to the factory-level requirements of a well-worn, whore-level franchise.
It’s no small footnote that Fukunaga will be the first American-born director to helm a Bond film; all the others have been British, New Zealanders (Martin Campbell, Lee Tamahori) or German-Swiss (Marc Forster).
What is the worst, most banal aspect of the Bond franchise that Fukunaga could theoretically turn away from? The Travel & Leisure luxury settings. Almost every exotic location that Daniel Craig‘s 007 visits is pornographically luscious — the perfect spot for your next damn-the-expense getaway with your wife or girlfriend. Agreed, the ambitious Mexico City tracking shot that Spectre began with avoided this trap but otherwise my head is flooded with memories of Mr. Bond revelling in drop-your-pants, Kardashian-level splendor. Which I hate because with minor variations flush travel-destination settings are exactly the same the world over. They spread the corporate poison.
The virulent pan of Spectre (MGM/Columbia, 11.6) by Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson is almost…touching? Mendelson is really, really disappointed in this thing — “the worst 007 film in 30 years,” he claims, or since, like, A View to a Kill or whatever.
This indicates, obviously, that Mendelson doesn’t go to Bond films for a nice wank-off, like most of us probably do. He apparently believes that Bond films have the potential to redeem and cleanse and change our lives…okay, his life for the better. Skyfall came a lot closer to this, he contends, and…uhm, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were relatively decent? Something like that.
Come to think of it, the reason I choose to write Hollywood Elsewhere every day is…well, it’s complicated. But I certainly don’t do it because it’s easy. I do it because it’s hard.