Originally posted on 7.19.08, reposted on 5.30.12: David Carr‘s “The Night of the Gun” reminded me of my own “farewell, my dignity” aspect of drug use. Constant humiliations, assaults on your self-esteem, stains on your sheets and your soul. One way or another, if you do drugs you’re going to be dragged down and made to feel like a low-life animal. Because that’s what you are as long as you let drugs run the show.

Recreational drugs didn’t exactly “run the show” when I was 22 or 23, but they sure were my friends. I saw my life as a series of necessary survival moves, spiritual door-openings, comic exploits, adventures, erotic intrigues — everything and anything that didn’t involve duty, drudgery, having a career and mowing the lawn on weekends. Pot, hashish, mescaline, opiates, peyote buttons, Jack Daniels and beer were my comrades in crime.

The opiate thing was about opium (the black gooey kind that you smoked) and, believe it or not, heroin. The way we saw it, smack was much hipper than your garden-variety head drugs. Opiates were more authentic, we figured, because guys like William S. Burroughs and Chet Baker did them. Where today I see only the danger, the depravity and the recklessness, back then we saw only the coolness.

I was never much of a user, but I did flirt from time to time. I was a candy-ass in junkie circles because I confined myself to snorting and smoking the stuff. One thing I learned pretty quickly is that “chippers” (casual users) have to be careful because heroin will make you throw up if you smoke or snort too much because your body isn’t used to it. Which mine never was because I wasn’t, you know, dedicated.

I was living in a crash pad in Southport, Connecticut. My sole source of income at the time was working part-time for a guy who ran a limousine driver service. The clients were business guys looking to go to Kennedy or LaGuardia or Newark airports. They’d call and I’d come over and drive them to the airport in their car, and then drive it back to their home. Doesn’t sound like much of an idea, but there were definitely customers calling from Westport, Weston, Easton, Wilton, Georgetown, Redding, Southport and Fairfield.

My deal with my boss, Peter, was to be on call at all times. A guy leaving for the airport in a couple of hours would call Peter, he’d call me, I’d drive over and so on. So one afternoon — a Sunday, possibly — a friend and I happened to have some of that snort-smoke stuff, and had retired to a barn out back for a little indulgence. We rolled a nice fat joint and soon I was royally Baker-ed. But just as we got back to the house the phone rang. It was Peter telling me to dress nicely and be at a certain client’s home in 45 minutes if possible, certainly no later than an hour. A trip down to Kennedy.

I’m hearing that Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel is “good but not great”, and that while Kate Winslet might snag a Best Actress nomination for her performance as the tragic Ginny, she won’t win because her performance, fine as it is, doesn’t match Cate Blanchett‘s Oscar-winning turn in Blue Jasmine.

Allen’s latest will screen for NY Film Festival press and Los Angeles press on Friday.

“Yes, there’s that meltdown scene that people seem to be talking about,” a guy tells me. “It’s shot, if I remember correctly, in a single take and is just heart-wrenching. It proved to me that Woody still has a fair amount of cinematic juice left in him. It also upped the entire movie’s quality for me as well.

“Jim Belushi is fine. Not much of a well-sketched character if you ask me, but you do care for him. Juno Temple is better!

“Overall Winslet is very solid, but she won’t win. No way, no how. She doesn’t even come close to reaching Blanchett-level greatness. Possibly a fifth slot awaits her? The fact that she’s already won all but seals it for me. Plus her accent is quite strange here. I’m not sure what she was going for. She’s still a great actress, but some notes didn’t ring true. If people are expecting a Cate Blanchett-level performance, they’d best lower their expectations. She’s really good and deserves that fifth slot, but Winslet is not Blanchett.

“Vittorio Storaro‘s cinematography is incredible. (HE: Deakins loses again?) There are some scenes where he uses the light in a given room so well, and in a way that’s very similar to the way he bright colors to light rooms in The Conformist. This is exceptional work from a true master of the form. He’s basically schooled Deakins with this film. As much as I hope Deakins wins that Oscar, Storaro deserves it way more.

“The scenes involving the mob felt like a mix of comedy and violence. Reminded me of Bullets over Broadway. They feel a little bit distracting, mess up the tone, especially when the soul of the film is Winslet.”

Yesterday News in English in Norway reported that Tomas Alfredson‘s The Snowman (Universal, 10.20) has gotten creamed by Norweigan film reviewers. They were generally “deeply disappointed,” the piece says, “with several panning it and giving the film a score of just two on a scale of one to six.”

The Snowman will screen for Los Angeles critics on Wednesday, 10.18, or a day before it opens. What does that tell you?

Straight from the shoulder: “The local film critics, well-acquainted with Nesbo’s books about the unorthodox Norwegian detective Harry Hole, had been waiting almost breathlessly for the film’s release themselves. It’s not often that a film shot entirely on location in Norway and inspired by a Norwegian is about to be distributed internationally, and expectations were skyhigh. When they finally got to see it, just prior to its festive premiere in Oslo on Tuesday, many were all but stunned.

“’What in the world has happened here?’ read the headline on the review published by newspaper VG, Norway’s largest tabloid distributed nationwide. It went on to complain that the ‘thriller’ was anything but, that it lacked the ‘page-turning’ characteristics of the book and contained so many “dramatic” changes in the plot of Nesbo’s Snowman that fans of Harry Hole (pronounced Hoo-leh in Nowegian) are likely to sound off in online commentaries.

“Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK)’s reviewer was just as unimpressed. Marte Hedenstad, part of the so-called ‘film police’ at NRK, was most disappointed that the depth and personality of the Harry Hole character ‘disappeared’ during the transition from book to screen. She claimed that also removed the intensity that made The Snowman an international best-seller.

“What’s left is a standard and quite boring crime story, that never got me to feel my heart in my throat,’ Hedenstad wrote. She conceded on national radio in Norway Tuesday morning that film versions of books often disappoint fans of the books who think they’re much better, but in this case, she and other reviewers believe director Tomas Alfredson made some major mistakes.

“’This is not my Harry Hole,’ she wrote, making it clear that in her opinion, the film does not do justice to the hero of Nesbo’s books who’s brilliant but struggles with alcohol abuse and self-destructive behavior.”

Last March a research-screening guy expressed measured enthusiasm for Joseph Kosinski‘s Granite Mountain, a true-life action tragedy costarring Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch and Jennifer Connelly. At the time it was a Lionsgate film slated to open on 9.22. Then a conflict arose between Lionsgate and production company Black Label Media, and the distribution rights shifted over to Sony. It was re-titled as Only The Brave and is now slated to open on 10.20. I just saw it the day before yesterday at a Dolby screening facility on Hollywood Blvd.

The squabble suggested it might somehow be weak or insufficient on some level, but Only The Brave is actually a well-made, better-than-decent film about tough Arizona firefighters who love their demanding, dangerous work, and how some of them care more about each other more than their wives or kids (or at least are still weighing the relative merits). In movie-lore terms they’re a team of Howard Hawks hombres, or guys who measure themselves by the same macho yardstick that Cary Grant applied in Only Angels Have Wings and which John Wayne demanded of his men in Red River. “How good are you?”, “Do you have what it takes?”, “Can I depend on you when the heat comes down and the going gets tough?,” etc.

Only The Brave is about the infamous Yarnell Hill blaze — an inferno that killed 19 Prescott-based firefighters in June 2013. All of them youngish and white (Prescott is one of the whitest cities in the country) and intensely proud of being a member of the elite Granite Mountain hotshots. It was the deadliest incident of any kind for U.S. firefighters since the 9.11.01 attacks, and the sixth-deadliest American firefighter disaster of all time.

So it’s basically about a merging of the Hawks ethos and 21st Century red-state attitudes, and then served on a silver tray as a big, sad-ass tragedy from director Jospeh Kosinski (Oblivion, Tron: Legacy), who knows from smooth, clean and decisive chops.

It’s based on a 9.27.13 GQ story by Sean Flynn (“No Exit: The Granite Mountain Yarnell Fire Investigation”). The screenplay is by Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer.

The lead-up to the tragedy (i.e., the first 75% or 80%) is what sold me. This is one of those unassuming, middle-of-the-road, regular-guy, red-blooded, beer-drinking action movies that you just know is going to work out. Not for the characters but as a dramatic piece. It just makes you relax and wait for it. Well-acted, nicely written and paced and just an all-around, well-handled ensemble piece about hairy-ass firefighting.

Josh Brolin and Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller have the biggest roles and, as you might expect, deliver the strongest performances.

I was slightly bothered by the fact that these guys are all conservatives but I got past that. When the big tragedy finally hits…I wouldn’t want to lie and say I didn’t feel slightly conflicted about the fact that these 19 guys who probably would have voted for Trump if they’d lived, but I felt the sadness, for sure.

What I’m about to mention wouldn’t have been mentioned in the ’90s or even the early aughts, but we live today in a p.c. realm that pretty much insists upon a vision of multicultural plurality and progressive racial identity politics, even when such a depiction doesn’t stand up to historical fact or likelihood (such as the casting of Leslie Odom, Jr in Kenneth Branagh‘s Murder on the Orient Express.

Each and every character in Only The Brave is Wonderbread because the town is almost entirely that. Needless to add this depiction goes against the multicultural projection ethos of present-day Hollywood, which usually insists on at least one or two Hispanic or African American cast members in any ensemble. Strange as it sounds, Kosinski, Nolan and Singer actually stuck to the demographic facts. Imagine that.

According to a chart I’ve found online, Prescott is 92.93% white, only 1.27% American Indian and Alaska native and 0.5% African American, and 0.83% Asian. Suburbanstats.org claims that 8% of Prescott is Hispanic.

Although I’m not a down-on-my-knees fan of Baby Driver, it’s nonetheless an exuberant, mad-style movie that warrants applause for delivering something fresh and inspired and seriously nutso. Which is a miracle in today’s realm. I saw it again tonight at the Academy, and enjoyed the hell out of Cameron Crowe‘s post-screening interview with director-writer Edgar Wright and supervising sound editor Julian Slatter.

Another chunk of of my 6.28 review: “Baby Driver is one of the most strikingly conceived, purely enjoyable fast-car crime flicks I’ve ever seen. With Ansel Elgort as a Ryan Gosling-level getaway driver who needs the right kind of song playing in his ear buds in order to make it all come together, Baby Driver is a kind of action musical -— cray-cray car chases and ferocious gunplay synchronized with the sounds and vice versa. To some extent it reminded me of Drive, and at other times of Thief, Gone In Sixty Seconds, Bullitt…that line of country. At times undisciplined and often quite mad, but a great visionary action-and-music flick.”

(l.) Director-writer Cameron Crowe speaking with Baby Driver director-writer following Tuesday night’s Academy screening.

If I wasn’t trying to read the general mood of the crowd I’d have Call Me My Your Name, Lady Bird, The Square, War For The Planet of the Apes, Baby Driver and The Florida Project in my top six slots on a quality-grade alone. If I take Dunkirk out of first place, what do I replace it with? My gut tells me The Post will probably be nudging into first place within five or six weeks. Maybe. I’m also starting to feel a little foolish keeping The Greatest Showman on my list, as 20th Century Fox hasn’t screened anything since that razzle-dazzle Cinemacon presentation last March. Wonder Wheel screens this coming Friday so we’ll see how that goes.

(More…)

“Does mother! have to be explained? What about the experience of watching it? It was so tactile, so beautifully staged and acted — the subjective camera and the POV reverse angles, always in motion…the sound design, which comes at the viewer from around corners and leads you deeper and deeper into the nightmare…the unfolding of the story, which very gradually becomes more and more upsetting as the film goes forward.

“The horror, the dark comedy, the biblical elements, the cautionary fable — they’re all there, but they’re elements in the total experience, which engulfs the characters and the viewers along with them. Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture, which I’m still experiencing weeks after I saw it.

“Good films by real filmmakers aren’t made to be decoded, consumed or instantly comprehended. They’re not even made to be instantly liked. They’re just made, because the person behind the camera had to make them. And as anyone familiar with the history of movies knows all too well, there a very long list of titles — The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo and Point Blank, to name just a few — that were rejected on first release and went on to become classics. Tomatometer ratings and Cinemascore grades will be gone soon enough. [Or] maybe they’ll be muscled out by something even worse.

“Or maybe they’ll fade away and dissolve in the light of a new spirit in film literacy. Meanwhile, passionately crafted pictures like mother! will continue to grow in our minds.” — posted in The Hollywood Reporter on 10.10.

Wells to Scorsese: I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for “the light of a new spirit in film literacy”…not in this Godforsaken culture.

Right now I’m wearing a $200 non-battery, handwound Swatch…good enough. Sidenote: Yesterday I was bullied and terrorized by the thought police for having written about a slow-reacting overweight person. It was a true story but I took it down because I was scared of what the thought police might do to me. Well, here’s another true story. When I was living in Westport in the late ’70s I knew an overweight guy who would roll into the kitchen and use the bathroom from time to time but who mainly sat on his couch and watched TV. One day he bought a self-winding watch, the kind that would wind itself if you engaged in a little natural movement. This guy was so sedentary that his watch stopped, or so his wife told me. This really happened.

There’s a special Academy screening of Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver this evening. I’m taking Tatyana because she’s never been to the Academy, and because I honestly like the first 90 minutes. A q & a between Wright and Cameron Crowe will happen post-screening. Someone (me?) needs to ask Wright the following question: “Why, after maintaining a sense of rhythmic and musical control over Baby Driver for almost the whole film….why did you go nuts during the last 15 minutes? You had things more or less together and then you went crazy and sent your movie over the side, off a bridge, into the river…WHY?”

From my 6.23.17 review: “Wright decides to send Baby Driver off the freeway around…oh, the 90-minute mark. And the last 15 or so minutes are flat-out insane and then infuriating. I was sitting there with my face contorted as I silently screamed, ‘What the fuck are you doing?…you fucking asshole! You really had something going there, but now you’re ruining the movie…you’re making it into some kind of bullshit Vin Diesel cum milkshake with a pop-fantasy ending made of dingleberries and drooling saliva. Why? Do you have a creative death wish?”

HE to director friend this morning: “I just saw Baby Driver last night….a wowser, near-great action musical for the first 80% or 85% followed by a ridiculously absurd, overly violent, catastrophically stupid finale that all but destroys the current and the vibe. A friend said ‘the wheels come off at the end‘ but they come off because Wright got under the car and loosened the lug nuts. Rarely have I seen a popcorn film as inspired and well-made as Baby Driver just blow itself up and shatter into pieces at the very end…a shame and a tragedy.”

The legendary Jane Goodall, the British primatologist and anthropologist commonly regarded as the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, has been interviewed and profiled countless times over the last 50-plus years. Everyone loves and admires her, and we all want to be as sharp, lucid and healthy as Goodall when we hit 83, which is where she is now.

Brett Morgen’s Jane (National Geographic, 10.20) is merely the latest filmed tribute to Goodall’s devotional calling, which began in Gombe, Tanzania in 1960 or ’62 or something like that, and continued into the 21st Century. The film covers her upbringing, how she got started at a chimp-watcher, her principal primate observations, anecdotes about her personal life, etc.

Does Morgen’s doc pass along anything new about Goodall? As far as I can discern, nope. It does, however, unspool a trove of heretofore-unseen 16mm color footage of of Goodall studying chimp behavior, shot during the ’60s and early ’70s by her then-husband Hugo van Lawick. The footage is luminous, well-framed and apparently was always shot around magic hour — Lawick had an eye, knew his craft.

On top of which Jane has been scored by Phillip Glass, whose symphonies always sound similar and I don’t care. (I know his Fog of War soundtrack backwards and forwards.) And it contains a lot of recent footage of Goodall talking to Morgen about pretty much everything.

Jane is a good and moving film. It has spirit, love…a glow about it. There have been many filmed studies of Goodall and her work, but this is the first smoothly composed, bucks-up, Hollywood-friendly version. Glass’s score encourages you to feel a bit of what Goodall probably felt or sensed as she began her studies. The film is comprehensive but not excessively so. It ignores a ton of material, but it only runs 90 minutes so whaddaya want?

I saw Jane last night at the Hollywood Bowl, at the invitation of National Geographic Films. Goodall and Morgen came out before the show began and shared a few words. Glass’s score was performed live as the film showed on a fairly large screen. The air was warmish, the sky was clear — a very soothing atmosphere. Will Jane be nominated for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar? Sure — why not?

Sidenote: A picnic bag of free food was provided to every invitee. The vittles included roast beef, watermelon and goat cheese salad, a sesame seed baguette, mixed berries and sweet cream, shrimp and a pint of shrimp sauce, a bottle of red and white wine, etc. I was concentrating on the shrimp and the shrimp sauce, and that was my undoing. At some point I shifted in my seat the wrong way and the open container of sauce flipped over and kerplopped on my lap. I moaned like a wildebeest being eaten by wild dogs. My right jeans leg was covered in red glop; both suede shoes, my socks and my black jacket got fuck-smeared also. “Ohhh, God…this is disgusting!” I went off to the bathroom and used about 75 paper towels to try and remove most of the shrimp sauce. It took me about 45 minutes to emotionally recover.

Did I let the shrimp-sauce disaster get in the way of my respect for Ms. Goodall or my admiration of her work or my enjoyment of Jane? Of course not. I’m not a six-year-old. On the other hand I’d be lying if I said I won’t think of that gloppy red goo every time I think of Goodall henceforth or consider a photo of a chimpanzee.

A guy who knows nothing says that a full-boat trailer for Phantom Thread was recently test-screened or focus-grouped, and that the title given in this trailer was The Phantom Thread, which of course sounds godawful. I can’t emphasize how much I hate the unnecessary use of “the” in any context or capacity. I don’t even like the “the” in “the end” — I prefer “finis.”