I haven’t read Will Beall‘s screenplay (which is based on Paul Leiberman‘s 2008 seven-part L.A. Times series titled “L.A. Noir: Tales From The Gangster Squad”), but the just-released trailer for Ruben Fleischer‘s The Gangster Squad (Warner Bros., 10.19) indicates a fairly fast and loose approach to facts a la Brian DePalma‘s The Untouchables (’87).
It’s being sold as a “get Mickey Cohen” movie in the same way The Untouchables was a “get Al Capone” flick. But just as the real-life Eliot Ness was portrayed as having made noise and gotten tough with Al Capone, in real life he pretty much stood by while the feds nailed the Chicago gangster tor tax evasion. Likewise the real-life Gangster Squad, led by John O’Mara (Josh Brolin in the film) and Sgt. Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling, ditto), never killed or jailed or put legendary L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) out of business. They mostly seem to have messed with his operations to some extent, or otherwise harassed and irritated. But that was it.
Like Capone, Cohen did time for tax evasion. Two stretches, in fact — one from the early to mid ’50s and the second from ’61 through ’72. The real-life Gangster Squad may or may not have played a role in helping to put Cohen in jail for the first tax-evasion rap, but so far I haven’t read, learned or been told that. (I had a chat yesterday with Tere Tereba, author of “Mickey Cohen: The Life and Times of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster,” and she didn’t seem persuaded that the Gangster Squad had that much to do with it.)
I failed earlier today to remember William Finley, the anguished central figure in Brian DePalma‘s Phantom of the Paradise (’73) who died four days ago in Manhattan, at age 71. It would appear that Finley was a fine fellow but face it — the world took note of his acting career mainly because of his roles in DePalma films (Sisters, The Wedding Party, The Black Dahlia).
Finley hit the mark in Phantom, portraying Winslow Leach and pouring his heart out for Jessica Harper, etc. But the stand-out performance in that flamboyant glamrock satire came from the brilliant Gerritt Graham as “Beef”…no?
I’m getting sick and tired of HE commenters saying I’m such a Steven Spielberg basher that I have no credibility when I write about his films — that I’m blinded by some blanket aesthetic contempt or whatever. Even Sasha Stone has suggested this. An hour ago I answered a couple of guys who threw this charge at me (“you have zero credibility when it comes to judging a Spielberg movie”) as follows:
I have no credbility because I’m convinced that Spielberg is a high-end journeyman hack with an all-but-incorrigible sentimental streak? There is ample…make that mountains of evidence to back up that view. He’s probably the only hack in Hollywood history with a personal net worth of over $3 billion, but that’s an asterisk, not a disqualifier. He loves what he’s doing and so do tens of millions of viewers, but he’s essentially a showman — an impersonal ringmaster in the Ringling Bros. tradition. He’s not quite the Cecil B. DeMille of our time, but he’s in that realm.
I’ve been grappling with Spielberg and his films for 40 years now (starting with the televising of Duel in ’71) and I feel I really know the man inside and out.
Almost all of Spielberg’s movies have been about the fact that he’s a skilled, highly gifted filmmaker who likes to “get” audiences and sell tickets. The charge that was first thrown at him back in the late ’70s and early ’80s (along with DePalma and Lucas) is that he’s a middle-class, not especially worldly or well-read kid from Arizona who likes to make movies about other movies, and that he’s not exactly swept away or lifted up with great feeling or conviction about the world outside the Hollywood realm.
Spielberg hasn’t really grown out of that. He still lives in his own world. War Horse is the latest of his films to make that abundantly clear.
With the exception of Schindler’s List and E.T. — arguably the only two films in his canon that have delivered truly personal, deep-down convictions and emotions (as opposed to generic sentimentality about family, tradition, the American way of life, the U.S. military during World War II, the paintings of Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, etc.) — Spielberg’s filmmaking passion has mostly been about being nothing more or less than commercially successful filmmaker.
Spielberg’s mission has always been about making Joe Popcorn enthralled and amused and soothed and entertained, and he’s always done this by showing us how happy and soothed and entertained Steven Spielberg is while making a film. He loves wearing that red coat and top hat and shouting “ladies and gentleman!” through a megaphone and bringing out the dancing elephant and the trapeze artists and the lion and the lion tamer with the boots and the whip and the chair.
Few have his naturally strategic directorial eye, or his special compositional instincts and intelligence. He’s always delivered that special mise en scene excitement, that snap-crackle-popcorn, but he’s never been a serious filmmaker who engages with the world he lives in and/or his own personal core issues (other than his love of cinema).
Spielberg never puts any intimate issues and passions into movies, probably because he doesn’t have any intimate issues and passions (other than his love of cinema). He’s about the cinema of impersonal passion and conviction, about his worship of movies that turned him on as a kid and of great influential directors and great classic films, and of solid craftsmanship and cool smash cuts and great rollercoaster chase sequences and all that.
He’s a jumble of talent and pizazz and a grab-bag of influences without any real core of his own. He’s Mr. Americana, Mr. Hook, Mr. Always (“It’s England, man!”), a money machine, and the most successful shallow filmmaker in motion picture history.
And for 13 years I’ve hated, hated, hated the fact that Spielberg cheated when he went in tight on the old grieving man’s eyes in the beginning of Saving Private Ryan and then cut to Tom Hanks and his comrades on the landing craft about to land at Omaha Beach. That was a wildly dishonest cut (or transition), and for me it brought the whole film down a notch or two.
Spielberg was a golden boy and a filmmaking dynamo operating in the exact right moment in time from Duel through E.T./Poltergeist, although I became convinced when I saw 1941 (which included an hommage to Jaws, four years after that film came out) that he was quite the egotist, and that he didn’t have the outside-the-Hollywood-realm experience or bull-headed integrity to be John Ford or Howard Hawks.
And then he resurged with the third Indiana Jones film (which I genuinely love on a chapter-to-chapter basis).
And then he found Schindler’s List, a story and a subject he deeply cared about and brought his core convictions to, and almost a total abandonment of his usual look-at-how-clever-and-enthused-I-am devices (except for the little red-tinted girl in the ghetto) and sentimentality (except for Liam Neeson weeping with guilt at the end).
As rendered by Universal’s new Bluray, Brian DePalma‘s Scarface “has, quite simply, never looked better,” according to Bluay.com’s Kenneth Brown. “There are a number of scenes that look quite good, fantastic even,” he says. And yet “edge enhancement has been liberally applied, edge halos and minor ringing are apparent throughout, intermittent noise reduction takes a toll, and crush is a serious issue.”
I need to take a night-school class so I’ll know what Bluray “crush” is. And “ringing” — I need to bone up on that one too. And “edge halos.” And “macroblocking.” And “rimjobbing.” I do, however, know what “edge enhancement” is.
I’m getting my Scarface Bluray on Tuesday morning, and will try to post a review before I leave for Telluride on Wednesday morning.
You realize, of course, that Will Beall‘s Gangster Squad is The Untouchables all over again, except it happens in ’50s Los Angeles with temperamental hair-trigger gangster Mickey Cohen (to be played by a bald-headed Sean Penn) being the target instead of Robert De Niro‘s Al Capone.
Otherwise, as a friend who’s read the script puts it, “Brian DePalma and David Mamet might want to think about a plagiarism lawsuit.” He didn’t mean that literally but in a flip, drink-in-his-hand sort of way.
Ryan Gosling has the Kevin Costner role and Josh Brolin…will he play Sean Connery? The Warner Bros. film will begin shooting in the fall under Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer.
Remember that ComicCon 2010 buzz about Tron: Legacy helmer Joseph Kosinski being “the new James Cameron“? After Tronmade the rounds he began to look like the new Peter Hyams. And now Kosinki’s latest project, a dystopian, post-apocalyptic graphic novelly action-quest thing called Oblivion, has been scuttled by Disney.
Kosinski, 36, will bounce back and may even make something good some day, but it’s entirely possible that he won’t. He’s one of the gamer/comic-book generation directors (Battle LA‘s Jonathan Liebesman, 35, is another) and I just don’t trust these guys. At all. Their heads are all about hard-drive visions and jizz-flash sensations, and they all seem to have some kind of cheap CG virus running through their veins.
The rap against the early ’70s whiz kids (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, DePalma, etc.) is that they weren’t bringing any real-life experience to their films — only love of other movies. But in retrospect their output seems quite fertile and meditative compared to that of Kosinski and Leibesman and their ilk — born in the 1970s and reared on the infantile fantasies brought about by Lucas and Spielberg, and nurtured by action figures, video games and computers, and destined to bring so much anguish to the likes of myself.
Everything that I love, admire and cherish about the Spanish and south-of-the-border fraternity (Inarritu, Del Toro, Cuaron, Lubezski, Amenabar, Bayona. etc.) is missing in sound-and-fury empties like Kosinski and Liebesman and their slick-operator elders Guy Ritchie and Michael Bay, et. al. They and the suits who support them at the studios are nothing less than a scourge, a pestilence…the spawn of Hollywood seed pods. And who pays to see their films? The ComicCon culture. This is why I’m not entirely kidding about F4 Phantoms strafing the faithful in San Diego, etc.
As God is my witness I never want to see a dystopian, post-apocalyptic graphic novelly action-quest thing ever again.
You have to laugh at Universal Home Video’s smirking chutzpah in announcing a $999 Bluray of Brian DePalma‘s Scarface, out on 9.6, which will include a specially designed wood-humidor packaging and other pointless perks. They’re obviously pitching this to the music industry’s rapper-gangsta culture. There will also be normally priced Blurays of same for those of us who just want to watch the film.
During an LA visit in 1982 I snuck onto the Universal lot. I literally climbed over a fence, and after some wandering around found a soundstage where Scarface was shooting. The huge set was Tony’s Miami mansion where the final shootout with the Columbians takes place. I walked right onto the stage like I belonged there, and nobody said anything. I remember a nicely dressed Michelle Pfeiffer and a couple of assistants leaving as I was arriving. There was a huge 12-foot-high oil painting of Pacino and Pfeiffer on the main floor, and I remember standing in front of it and thinking to myself, “Wow…nicely done.” And you can see the painting for about a second in the film.
I saw Zach Snyder‘s Sucker Punch last night, and the first review I read this morning was from Marshall Fine. His admiring assessment mainly said three things: (1) “If you’re looking for Sucker Punch to make sense, see another film,” (2) Yes, it has “some flaws” but (3) “Snyder, in the space of three films” — i.e., this + Watchmen and 300 — “has become the most distinctive visual storyteller since Brian DePalma.”
Calling the LexG’s of the world! Emily Browning as “Babydoll” in Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch.
That last statement is true in a faintly-tragic, merrily-we-go-to-hell way. Snyder does have a DePalma-esque visual paintbrush married to a crazy-maestro attitude . But I couldn’t let that “some flaws” remark stand so I wrote Fine immediately and said this:
“‘Flaws’? ‘FLAWS’? Sucker Punch is many things, but one of its goals — and it succeeds in record time, before the first act is over — is to torture people like me. Snyder has said he meant to make “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns”…machine guns and thunderclouds and samurai swords and red-eyed, medieval Japanese soldier-giants and hot kewpie-doll babes with false eyelashes, he meant. Either way the putrid remnants of the body of Lewis J. Carroll are now reanimating and reforming and adding flesh and bone and clawing their way out of the grave in order to find Snyder and his wife Deborah and strangle them in their bed.
“Snyder is a kind of visual dynamo of the first order who has created in Sucker Punch a trite-but-fascinating, symphonic, half-psychedlic, undeniably ‘inspired’ alternate-reality world — gothic, color-desaturated, Wachowski-esque — that is nonetheless ruled by so much concrete-brain idiocy and coarsely “mythic” cliches (i.e., an evil father figure so ridiculously vile and gross beyond measure that he makes the cackling, moustache-twirling villains of the Snidely Whiplash variety seem austere if not inert) and ludicrous, charmless, bottom-of-the-pit dialogue and cheaply pandering female-revenge fantasies that you literally CAN’T STAND IT and WANT TO HOWL and THROW YOUR 24 OZ. COKE AT THE SCREEN.
“Snyder is a masterful visual maestro (loved the proscenium arch ‘theatrical’ touches at the very beginning) but also — this is crucial to the Sucker Punch experience — an Igor-like, chained-in-the-basement, genius-level moron at dumbing things down. The movie is a digital torture device for those seeking at least a hint of compelling narrative, a tendril-ish remnant of logic, a tiny smidgen of story intelligence, and dialogue with a hint of flair or some kind of tethered-to-the-world normality.
“Apart from sending people like myself into tailspins of depression, Sucker Punch is essentially about the Warner Bros. corporate uglies giving loads of money to a wild-eyed 21st Century primitive and in so doing trying to turn on the younger female ticket-buyers with fantasies of power and revenge against all the oily men in their lives who’ve sought to exploit or use or treat them with cruelty. It is putrid ComicCon swill of the lowest order.
“In fact, Sucker Punch strongly suggests that there is, in fact, a ComicCon screenwriting software that is being secretly peddled to GenX and GenY filmmakers that insures that the exact same mythical imaginings and the exact same high-flying Matrix-y sword battles and the exact same wild-action-fantasy, go-to-the-next-video-game-level story progressions are repeated ad infinitum.
“Yes, there’s a worlds-within-worlds scheme going on (i.e., a dream-world-within-a-play-being-performed blahdeeblah) but it’s basically about LexG horndog lust and notions of hotpants girly-girls with onlinehookerblowjobslut fantasy names like Babydoll (the lead blondie played by Emily Browning) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (as in “you’ll go off like a rocket,” played by Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung)…oop-poop-pee-doop! Sucker Punch delivers like VHS porn, and I’m not just speaking of the dialogue but the acting. And to think of these nice, attractive, presumably intelligent actresses collecting a paycheck for their willingess to be chained in Snyder’s basement…the shame of it.
“How infuriating that a guy who really knows how to direct and whip up a frenzy with all kinds of serious, high-style production-design lather, is such a prisoner of his own sub-mental “holy shit, that’s so cool!” imaginings…such atrociously labored, poisonously cliched comic-book/video-game sludge that the mind reels & the stomach turns as the vomit goes splat on the sidewalk.
“This was Snyder’s first creation that came straight from his own imaginings (and also from the head of Steve Shibuya, “the guy who wrote the original score that Sucker Punch is based upon”). The tragedy is that there are no guiding hands or creeds or mechanisms or mentors in 2011 Hollywood to rein Snyder in and urge him to refine or re-shape or otherwise up his game. His producing-partner wife Deborah has obviously goaded him in this flamboyant direction, and the WB corporate hell-hounds are basically saying ‘yeahh, Zach…go for it, whatever, video-game fantasy crap…love it!”
“No offense but Sucker Punch feels to me like a ghastly, deranged and darkly depraved thing…it’s the apocalypse, the end, the flames of hell…and yet, at the end of the day, conversely brown and gooey.”
Cheers to Javier Bardem for having last night won the Best Actor Goya award for his performance in Biutiful. The Spanish Oscars were held last night in Madrid. Another gust of wind for the Biutiful sails.
No one will take the Best Actor Oscar from Colin Firth, of course, but if anyone could…
A week and a half ago I did a brief phoner from my Santa Barbara Film Festival hotel room with Biutiful director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. He was on a speaker and so was I, and when I played it back it was all but indecipherable. It was like we talking into tin cans connected by a piece of string. So I kind of went cold on writing it up.
We talked about Biutiful‘s nomination as one of the five foreign-language nominees, and it being an official submission from Mexico, and the fact that Mexico has never won despite being nominated eight times. And how Videocine, the Mexican distributor, is planning a re-release of 150 prints on 2.25, and how a re-release of this type has never been done before in Mexico.
This led to a discussion about what a battleground Mexico has become over the last couple of years and is pretty much what Columbia was in the ’80s and ’90s. “Worse than Columbia,” Inarritu said. There’s some kind of film in it, I said. Perhaps a blend of Brian DePalma‘s Scarface and Fernando Meirelles‘ City of God.
Last night’s big Goya winner was Augusti Villaronga‘s Pa Negre (Black Bread), a family drama in post-Civil War Spain. It won nine trophies.
I’m guessing that the Brian DePalma fan club isn’t what it used to be. 30 years ago his admirers, led by Pauline Kael, were legion. I was one of the faithful after his early to mid ’70s run ending with Carrie, but I began running hot and cold throughout the ’80s and ’90s, and didn’t really get off the boat until Mission to Mars (’00) — that, for me, was the final deal-breaker.
I know that my first stirrings of doubt in DePalma began with The Fury (’78) and then started to really take root with Blow Out (’81), a ripoff of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow Up (’67).
All I saw in the former, a paranoid political thriller with John Travolta and Nancy Allen, was an attempt at construction that never finally felt complete. Push the button, yank the chain. DePalma has never been much of a story-teller. It’s a cliche to say this but he’s always been a guy who lives for elaborate camera choreography as an end it itself. To me the characters and especially the dialogue in his films have always felt hackneyed and hand-me-downish.
What was the old Michael O’Donoghueline from Saturday Night Live around this time? “Every year Brian DePalma picks the bones of a dead director and gives his wife [Allen at the time] a job.”
Am I interested in watching this forthcoming Criterion Bluray version when it arrives on 4.28.11? Yeah. Maybe it’ll play better than it did the one and only time I saw it in a New York screening room during the first year of Ronald Reagan‘s presidency. But it’s telling, obviously, that I haven’t felt the slightest interest in catching it again. My memory is a little hazy, but I think I was somewhere between unimpressed and pissed-off when I first saw Blow Out. I just couldn’t get past the fact that Antonioni’s version had sunk in and stayed in my head while DePalma’s evaporated the second it ended.
Im Sang-soo‘s The Housemaid (IFC Films, 1.21) is a remake of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 Korean original. The consensus about the newbie at last May’s Cannes Film Festival seemed to be that the older film is better. I’ve never seen the original so that left me out. Ki-young’s film is said to be more Bunuelian with the housemaid acting in a devious and manipulative fashion. She’s much more the victim in the version I saw.
In my 5.13 review I described Sang-soo’s version as “a sexual hothouse melodrama made in the spirit of Claude Chabrol and Brian DePalma. By this I mean that The Housemaid (a) is about dark currents in a perverse well-to-do family and (b) has been made with a highly polished, primary-color sensibility that underlines every plot point and mood pocket, and ends on a note of flamboyance if not insanity that’s more about the director being in love with how it looks than anything else.
“I wasn’t entirely floored, just as I’ve never been that wild about DePalma’s more excessive exercises. Some of what happens in the second half is broad and lurid, and then the stops are really pulled out in the second-to-last scene. But Sang-soo Im (The President’s Last Bang) is a formidable pro, and the cast — especially Do-yeon Jeon, the female lead — give assured high-style performances. That’s the brush this film was made with, and you can either roll with this type of thing or not. I was down with it for the most part. I didn’t fight it, I mean.”
I’m sure that a DVD version of the 1960 original is available somewhere, but I don’t see it on Amazon.
The new Housemaid opens on Friday, 1.21 in NYC. It expands nationwide beginning 1.28. It will also be available on demand beginning 1.26 via Comcast, Cox, Cablevision, Time Warner, Bright House, Charter and Insight.
Movie-wise, the first three months of any year are always rough-going. The second and third month, actually, because January, bad as it is commercially, is always covered by the Sundance Film Festival. And yet last February and March each offered a film that ended up on some 2010 ten-best lists: Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer on 2.19 and Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg nearly 30 days later.
Not this year apparently, to go by appearances and guesstimates. Which January, February or March openings will at least get me through the bad patch? A few seem intriguing, but ingredient- or expectation-wise I’m not seeing anything that’s remotely Ghost Writer or Greenberg-level. If somebody knows something I don’t, please advise.
The best January release (1.21) I’ve seen so far — certainly the one with the strongest performance — is Martin Pieter Zandvliet‘s Applause (1.21). It’s a straight character-driven drama that feeds off the magnetic Danish actress Paprika Steen, who plays a divorced stage actress with anger, alcohol and general-incompatibility-with-the-world issues. It opens during Sundance but Steen has been gathering admirers since Applause began screening two months ago.
There’s also Sang-soo Im‘s The Housemaid (1.21), which I saw and half-liked eight months ago in Cannes. “A sexual hothouse melodrama made in the spirit of Claude Chabrol and Brian DePalma,” I wrote. “Dark perversity within a well-to-do family…I wasn’t entirely floored but was done with it for the most part.”
Peter Weir‘s The Way Back opens the same day, but you can take your time. “I knew going in that anyone making a journey of 4000 or 5000 kilometers on foot will face terrible strain and hunger and hardship,” I wrote on 11.24. “What, then, did The Way Back tell me? It told me that making a journey of 4000 or 5000 kilometers on foot involves terrible strain and hunger and hardship.
Nor was I taken with John Wells‘ Company Men, which opens the same day. A drama of layoffs and despondency affecting three Boston-area white-collar guys (Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper), it “plays like an intelligent funeral in a nicely furnished minimum-security prison,” I wrote during Sundance ’10.
There’s also Richard J. Lewis‘s Barney’ s Version (1.14), which I panned on 12.6. “[It’s] so steeped in the lives and culture of Montreal Jewry that I was having trouble breathing,” I wrote. “Barney’s Version isn’t just about boomer-aged Canadian Jews who grew up and lived in Montreal, but will probably only play with boomer-aged Canadian Jews who grew up and lived in Montreal.”
There’s a chance that Gregg Araki‘s Kaboom and Hans Petter Moland‘s A Somewhat Gentle Man (which I’m watching on disc tonight) could pan out so let’s not say anything.
I haven’t seen Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma, Ivan Reitman‘s No Strings Attached (rumored to be a possible Norbit-in-the-ointment film that could diminish Natalie Portman‘s Oscar chances), Season of the Witch (i.e., the latest Nicolas Cage IRS-debt film) or The Green Hornet (forget it).
It’s too early to discuss February or March with any authority. But the only February release that looks even half engaging right now is Miguel Arteta‘s Cedar Rapids (Fox Searchlight, 2.11 — a Sundance ’11 premiere). And only three March releases stand out for me — Jonathan Liebesman‘s Battle: Los Angeles (Sony, 3.11), Jonathan Hensleigh‘s Kill The Irishman (Anchor Bay, 3.11) and Carey Fukunaga‘s Jane Eyre (Focus Features, 3.11).