Loads of crappy films have been shot in Monument Valley. The worst are Gore Verbinski‘s The Lone Ranger and Seth McFarlane‘s A Million Ways To Die in the West. The last decent one was Ridley Scott‘s Thelma and Louise. For all their tedious eccentricity and Irish sentimentality, the John Ford films — My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, The Wagon Master, Rio Grande, The Searchers and Sergeant Rutledge — are still the best.
Hollywood Elsewhere agrees with the 44% of critics polled by Indiewire that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma was the best film of the 2018 Telluride Film Festival, and with the 50% who named Cuaron as the festival’s best director.
I also agree that Damien Chazelle‘s First Man ranked a close second, but I differ from the pack in having chosen Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me? as the festival’s third-best film.
The greatest performance, hands down, was given by Melissa McCarthy in Heller’s film. I had an amusing time with Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite, and thought Olivia Colman‘s performance as the ailing Queen Anne was Telluride’s second best. I also approved of the Favourite perfs by Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz.
Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner struck me as hugely satisfying in a complex, layered, adultly-seasoned way. I’m sorry I didn’t get to Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind, and I worshipped Rob Garver‘s Pauline Kael doc. The two biggest disappointments were David Lowery‘s The Old Man and the Gun and Karyn Kusama‘s Destroyer.
I meant to send my answers in to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, but I was furiously posting my own stuff between yesterday’s screenings, and then I couldn’t get a decent signal as Chris Willman and I were driving last night from Telluride to Mexican Hat.
Cameron Diaz shared this in 2013, when she was 41 going on 42. She wasn’t wrong, but it sounded disingenuous. Some may understand that fame can be a kind of plague or albatross, but everything Diaz has in life came from the fountain of Hollywood success and worldwide fame. HE to Diaz: “Okay, you’ve convinced us, but if you could suddenly become anonymous and divested of all the perks you’re currently enjoying by clapping your hands three times, would you clap your hands three times?”
Pasted on 3.15.18: People‘s Mike Miller has posted a story about how the 45 year-old Diaz “is loving her life outside the Hollywood spotlight.” Quoting “a source”, Miller writes that Diaz and her 39 year-old, tattoo-covered musician husband Beji Madden are “great” and “both very happy living the quiet life.”
Translation: Diaz’s career is in eclipse but she doesn’t want anyone thinking she’s not ready to return if the right part comes along.
New Favourite poster to Joe and Jane Popcorn and Millennials In Particular: “We’re a witty upmarket award-season comedy set in the 17th Century. We realize you may find the idea of two hours of arch, wicked humor slightly intimidating, but rest assured you’ll be quite comfortable. And don’t worry about the sepia-toned colors in the poster — our film is actually bursting with lovingly lighted, Barry Lyndon-like compositions, each glowing with God’s natural palette.”
In this trailer for Paul Greengrass‘s 22 July (Netflix, 10.10), I can feel the fleet hand of editor William Goldenberg (Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Detroit). Not so much an account of the 7.22.11 far-right terrorist attacks but “one survivor’s physical and emotional journey to portray the country’s path to healing and reconciliation,” to go by the notes. Greengrass directed and wrote.
22 July is one of the Netflix films that got yanked from last May’s Cannes Film Festival as a result of that now-infamous dispute.
One of the reasons I’ve seen United 93 eight or nine times is Barry Ackroyd‘s cinematography + the editing by Clare Douglas, Richard Pearson and Christopher Rouse. Remember the “too soon!” crowd? They needed more than five years after the 9/11 catastrophe to sit through a first-rate recreation. I was knocked dead flat.
Mexican Hat, northeastern gateway to Monument Valley — Tuesday, 9.4, 6:45 am. Nice scenery, okay, but $200 and change for the slowest, shittiest wifi I’ve experienced in years.
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy suspects that down the road there may be an SJW backlash against Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite. When someone describes the film in November as a drama about three lesbians being horrid to each other, a Twitter brigade may respond that this kind of negative representation is unhelpful and even arguably homophobic.
I don’t see this happening as the film is obviously delivering a certain kind of dry black comedy that requires venal behavior for the humor to kick in, but never underestimate the snowflake capacity for taking offense. The scheming, viper-like nature of Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone‘s characters is, of course, just an aspect of the same perverse, mean-spirited shit Lanthimos puts in all his films.
Earlier today Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil asserted that I’m predicting Melissa McCarthy‘s performance in Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me? to “win” the Best Actress Oscar. Nope — I’m just saying that right now MM’s unaffected, often riveting performance feels like fresh fireworks, and that she’s suddenly even-steven with The Wife‘s Glenn Close.
Emphasizing: I did not bump Close down to third place. Well, I did but that wasn’t the intention. The Gold Derby format doesn’t allow for ties and, as noted, I’d just seen Can You Ever Forgive Me? when I voted and was feeling a Telluride contact high.
Repeating: I put The Favourite‘s Olivia Colman into my #2 slot, but Colman’s performance doesn’t belong in the Best Actress category. She’s totally supporting. If you regard The Favourite as a kind of palace-intrigue con movie, Queen Anne is the “mark” while Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are the con artists. Colman is being played the whole time, and lead actors are always the players, not the played.
I’m not saying Weisz and Stone are hoodwinking the queen a la Robert Redford and Paul Newman conning Robert Shaw in The Sting, but ask yourself this: If you were in charge of The Sting‘s Oscar campaign, would you put Shaw up for Best Actor?
I missed Lee Chang-dong‘s Burning in Cannes, but caught it late last month in Manhattan. A chilly Patricia Highsmith-meets-F. Scott Fitzgerald drama about class envy and resentment, Burning is creepy, thoughtful and mystifying in a good way. It percolates and resonates and stays with you.
But it’s a half-hour too long (148 minutes) and suffers, I feel, from an underwritten protagonist (Jong-su, played by Yoo Ah-in) who’s allegedly a writer but doesn’t talk like one, and who regards everyone and everything with a kind of dazed, open-mouthed stupor.
Fitzgerald and William Faulkner are referenced by Jong-su, but he looks and behaves more like a lazy student than a writer hungry to say something. At one point he notes that South Korea is full of Jay Gatsby types — that’s the sum total of his insights shared in the entire film. Plus he dresses poorly and has a dorky flat-top haircut. Sorry, bruh, but will you close your fucking mouth, please?
The film starts intriguingly when Jong-su falls for Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), whom he vaguely knew and found unattractive as a teenager, but he soon realizes she has a rich, blase. socially connected boyfriend named Ben (Steven Yeun) who drives a Porsche.
Jong-su, Hae-mi and Ben became a kind of odd trio, hanging out and going to parties, etc. Around the halfway mark Ben casually reveals he’s into burning rural greenhouses, presumably as an expression of sociopathic contempt for the middle and lower classes. Then Hae-mi disappears, and Jong-su begins to wonder if Ben might have killed her for sport.
Based on “Barn Burning,” a 26 year-old New Yorker short story by Haruki Murakami, Burning will open in New York on 10.26 and in Los Angeles on 11.2 before opening nationwide on 11.9.
It wasn’t for lack of trying, but I missed this morning’s 9:15 screening of Yann Demange‘s White Boy Rick. I packed last night (the Mountainside requires an evacuation by 10 am) but not entirely, and I didn’t rise early enough. My energy levels were probably lessened on some level by the not-so-hot reviews thus far. I’ll just have to see it in Toronto.
I’ll be catching a noon screening of Olivier Assayas‘ Non-Fiction at the Pierre, and then a 3:45 pm screening of Ed Zwick‘s Trial By Fire at the Herzog. Maybe. Presumably.
Chris Willman and I will be heading out of town by sometime around 6 pm, give or take. I have this idea about driving all the way to Monument Valley, which should take around four hours. The idea would be to stay at Goulding’s or The View and awaken to all that John Ford splendor. And then drive all day Tuesday and into the evening before reaching Los Angeles.
Memo to Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil: Suddenly and out of the blue, Can You Ever Forgive Me‘s Melissa McCarthy is 2018’s leading Best Actress contender. Easily, no question, hands down. But Gold Derby editors are a bit confused about the contenders in The Favourite. Colorfully eccentric and emotionally affecting as Olivia Colman‘s performance as Queen Anne is, her role is essentially supporting. The queen is the object of everyone’s attention, but she’s malleable, flighty, unstable and bed-ridden half the time. The lead protagonists, the duelling characters with steel and assertiveness, are played by Rachel Weisz (Sarah Churchill) and Emma Stone (Abigail Masham). You’ve got to move Colman into the Best Supporting Actress category (I currently have her as the second-rated Best Actress contender but she belongs in supporting, where she would be the top contender) and move Weisz and Stone into Best Actress competition.
A warm and relaxing time was enjoyed by all at Universal’s First Man gathering at the Sheridan Bar (6:30 to 9:30 pm). The usual journalistic suspects (myself, Pete Hammond, Sasha Stone, Chris Willman), Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling plus director Damien Chazelle, First Man costar Olivia Hamilton, screenwriter Josh Singer, producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, et. al. Delicious food and desserts in the rear salon, lotsa joshin’ and good cheer. Everyone got a good laugh out of the First Man ubiquitous flags tweet [below] that appeared early this morning.
