Gutted, Ashen-Faced, Zombie-Like

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Excerpts from my 9.1.18 Telluride review of Karyn Kusama‘s Destroyer: “I’ve been in and out on director Karyn Kusama — loved Girlfight, hated Aeon Flux, loathed Jennifer’s Body but found The Invitation a truly fascinating creepout. And now Destroyer.

“This is a complex L.A. crime tale about Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman), a wasted, walking-dead Los Angeles detective trying to settle some bad business and save her daughter from a life of crime and misery. It unfolds through a complex, pain-in-the-ass flashback structure, and is punctuated by all kinds of nihilistic, hard-boiled behavior by the mostly criminal flotsam characters.

“Destroyer has guns, uniformed cops, blood, a scene in the Westwood Federal building cafeteria, purple ink, ugly asshole criminals with sickening haircuts, drugs, a handjob given to a dying criminal slob, a bank shootout. Everything in this well-made if godforsaken film is scuzzy in a just-so way. Everyone and everything is covered in the stuff. Even I felt scuzzed out from my seat in the tenth row of the Herzog.

“Destroyer is mostly about the way Kidman looks, like a combination vampire-zombie with dark eye bags and a complexion that suggests a heroin habit mixed with twice-daily injections of embalming fluid. Plus a Desolation Row, gray-streaked hair style. It’s also about the whispery way in which she speaks. I swear to God I missed over half of her dialogue.

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Obama to Lazy, Listless Millennials

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Obama: “Remember those hearings when members of Congress were asking Mark Zuckerberg questions, like they’d never used the internet before? That’s because they haven’t. Here’s your chance to vote for people who actually know what the internet is. And by the way, you wouldn’t let your grandparents pick you a playlist. Why would you let them pick your representative who’s going to determine your future?”

Millennials No-Accounts: “Okay, whatever…pass the Fritos, bruh. I have to work on my pot belly.”

Trust James Verniere

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I loved John Carpenter‘s original Halloween (’78) but I won’t even see David Gordon Green‘s just-opened rehash, which has earned $77.5 million — the second biggest October haul of all time and only $3 million less than what Venom earned a week or two ago.

I spit on the sensibility of those lowlifes who adore megaplex horror and complain that films like Hereditary aren’t scary enough. I regard these people as the dregs of cinema culture. By the way: Get Out isn’t really an elevated horror flick — it’s a racially-stamped, comic-flavored remake of The Stepford Wives, which makes it an in-betweener.

I knew from the instant that I read a Jeff Sneider tweet that he was hot to see Halloween during the Toronto Film Festival…I knew then and there it would be the same kind of wallowing broad-brush horror film that It was, and I hated that film with every fibre of my being.

I realize that my refusal to soil myself with an actual viewing of Green’s Halloween is going to result in some pushback, but my nose knows. “You don’t need proof when you have instinct.” — Lawrence Tierney in Reservoir Dogs.

Most of the critics were too cowardly to take swipes, but a few stood up. One was Boston Herald critic Jim Verniere, whom I’ve known since the early ’80s and whose taste is often in synch with my own or vice versa. So if Verniere thinks a movie more or less blows, that’s good enough for me.

Excerpts: “This new Halloween is not the worst or the best of the 10 we’ve had since John Carpenter’s 1978 classic. But at a time when we’ve seen innovative shockers like Get Out and Hereditary, do we really need a Halloween mixing Danny McBride-style (he co-wrote the script) dumb comedy in between gruesome murders from the original film?

“Like the original, David Gordon Green‘s Halloween telegraphs who is going to get killed next by knife, ax, hammer, knife again, Dyson vacuum, whatever.

“Jamie Lee Curtis‘s Laurie Strode could be the heroine of every woman afraid of a crazy, violent ex-husband. But no — we do not go there.

“Instead of a new Halloween, they should have remade Carpenter’s They Live — the Get Out of 30 years ago.”

Knew Their Craft

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For their Hud script, Irving Ravetch and wife Harriet Frank, Jr. were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and won both the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Writers Guild of America Award for same. Their other screenplays included The Long, Hot Summer (based on William Faulkner‘s “Spotted Horses”, “Barn Burning” and “The Hamlet”), Home from the Hill, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, The Reivers, The Spikes Gang, The Cowboys, The Sound and the Fury, Norma Rae, Murphy’s Romance and Stanley & Iris. Ravetch passed in 2010; Frank is still with us.

Hud: “How much you take the boys for tonight?”
Alma: “Twenty dollars and some change.”
Hud: “You’re a dangerous woman.”
Alma: “I’m a good poker player.”
Hud: “You’re a good housekeeper. You’re a good cook. You’re a good laundress. (beat) What else are you good at?”
Alma: “At taking care of myself.”
Hud: “You shouldn’t have to, a woman looks like you.”
Alma: “That’s what my ex-husband used to tell me. Before he took my wallet, my gasoline credit card, and left me stranded in a motel in Alberquerque.”
Hud: “What did you do to make him take to the hills? Wear your curlers to bed or something?
Alma: “Ed’s a gambler. He’s probably up at Vegas or Reno, dealing at night, losing it all back in the daytime.”
Hud: “Man like that sounds no better than a heel.”
Alma: “Only thing he was ever good for was scratching my back.”
Hud: “Still got that itch?”

Originally posted on 9.19.15.

Monkey Man

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The Tribeca Film Festival reviews for Sam Boyd‘s In A Relationship (Vertical, 11.9) were pretty good, but the only thing the trailer tells you is that Michael Angarano is the charisma guy. Not by any kind of slick, uptown GQ standard. He’s short and unassuming in a kind of Lou Costello-meets-Peter Falk-meets-Jonah Hill way — part Millennial slacker, part ragdoll. But he has that stand-out thing, that quality that you want to watch. Character, eccentricity. A 21st century blending of Jim Belushi in the late ’80s and Jack Nicholson in the early ’70s. He’s 30 years old and looks at least 37, due to a prematurely weathered, lived-in face. By the time Angarano is 40 he’ll look 55. By the time he’s 55 he’ll look like Gabby Hayes.

Lest We Forget: Mike Nichols

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One of the things I loved about the great Mike Nichols was that he was a great Jewish fretter, a creative worry-wart. I adore that quality in people; I worshipped the late Sydney Pollack for the same trait. It hit me this morning that Nichols died just shy of four years ago, but let’s pretend it’s been five so I can justify re-posting my 11.20.14 obit. From “Nichols Was The Man, Especially From ’66 to ’75“:

Nichols’ film-directing career, which was flourishy and satisfying and sometimes connected with the profound, lasted 40 years, or from the mid ’60s to mid aughts. Nichols had a touch and a style that everyone seemed to recognize, a certain mixture of sophisticated urban comedy and general gravitas. His first gusher was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff in 1966, and his last truly excellent film was HBO’s Angels in America. If you add Nichols’ brilliant early ’60s stand-up comedy period with Elaine May he really was Mr. King Shit for the better part of a half-century.

But his most profound filmic output lasted for eight or nine years, or roughly ’66 through ’74 or ’75 — a chapter known for a certain stylistic signature mixed with an intense and somewhat tortured psychology that came from his European Jewish roots.

Longtime Nichols collaborator Richard Sylbert, whom I knew fairly well from the late ’80s to the early aughts, explained it to me once. Nichols had developed that static, ultra-carefully composed, long-take visual approach that we saw in The Graduate, Catch 22, Carnal Knowledge, Day of the Dolphin and The Fortune, and this signature was, Sylbert believed, what elevated Nichols into the Movie God realm.

And then Nichols suffered a kind of crisis or collapse of the spirit after the failures of Dolphin and Fortune, and he withdrew from feature films for eight years, doing little or nothing for a certain period and then focusing on plays for the most part. He rebounded big-time with Silkwood in ’83, but the way he shot and paced that successful, well-reviewed drama showed that the great stylistic signature of his mid ’60s to mid ’70s films was no more. The ever-gifted Nichols never lost his sensitivity or refinement, but the anguished artist phase had ended.

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Of Course He’ll Lose…Naturally

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Despite the Houston Chronicle endorsement, Beto O’Rourke is currently too far behind Ted Cruz to be elected on 11.6. But at least he’ll be free to launch a 2020 Presidential campaign. For those who haven’t signed up for HE:plus (thanks!), here’s the entire Beto O’Rourke riff that I posted on 10.18:

The hour is getting late and the Democrats need somebody strong and flinty to run against President Trump, and the more I kick it around the more I realize it has to be Beto. The Texas Senate race has nationalized him in a positive light. He’s been a U.S. Congressman for five years. He has the moxie and the aura, and there’s no time like right now.

Nobody else in the Democratic field has that stand-up, here-I-am, take-it-or-leave-it quality…that lean and burnished tonality…that alpha mojo charisma that Beto has. He’s 46 now, 47 and 48 in 2020. Why the hell not?

A choice between a 21st Century Kennedy-like figure, a tough fourth-generation Irishman…an unapologetically liberal, principled, tenacious and patriotic Texan who knows how to skateboard and used to be in a band vs. a lying, bloated, dessicated, hopelessly corrupt, egotistical sociopath and dictator-coddling traitor who will be 74 in June 2020…are you kidding me?

Who else can it be? A voice is telling me that Elizabeth Warren, storied and committed and admirable as she is, might not win against Bluster Cheeto (impassioned granny schoolmarm vs. bellowing alpha bull in a china shop). Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are too old. Sen. Kamala Harris isn’t that well known, and there’s something about her that’s a little too admonishing and prosecutorial (i.e., threatening to hinterland male bumblefucks). And there’s something about Sen. Corey Booker that feels more like vice-presidential than presidential timber.

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