Attention Darren Aronofsky loyalists: The word has gone out that mother! is an allegory about something or other. Climate change, haunted Biblical prophecy, invasive social-media malevolence, a personal Aronofsky confession…you tell me. It’s not about the images, behaviors and disturbances presented on the screen, but whatever may be suggested or implied by same. Go to town and kick it around, but don’t limit yourself solely to the visual and aural content.

Ben Croll’s 9.6 Indiewire review (“Aronofsky’s Audacious and Rich Cinematic Allegory Is His Most Daring Film Yet”) is one manifestation of this mode of absorption. As Croll writes, “Come for the house that bleeds; stay for the reflections on parenthood and the difficulty of living with fame.”

Excerpt #1: “Awash in both religious and contemporary political imagery, Aronofsky’s allusive film opens itself to a number of allegorical readings, but it also works as a straight-ahead head rush. Not just another baroquely orchestrated big-screen freak-out in the vein of Black Swan (though it is very much that), the film touches on themes that — if too hazily figurative to be in any way autobiographical — at least tread on factors in the director’s own life.

Excerpt #2: “The film is divided into two parts that roughly parallel one another for reasons that eventually make themselves clear. Both follow married couple Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem (and yes, their nearly 20-year age gap is an important and oft-commented upon plot point), who go unnamed as a way of telegraphing that they’re meant to represent Bigger Things.”

Excerpt #3: “Aronofsky and Paramount have launched one of the more secretive marketing campaigns in recent memory, which is odd because “mother!” is a not a particularly twisty-turny affair. Both parts of the film play out like the first few chapters of The Hobbit, where a growing number of unexpected guests pop in to break the leads’ bucolic solitude, and twist them toward different ends.”

Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers has seen Richard Linklater‘s Last Flag Flying (debuting at New York Film Festival), Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel (ditto) and Alfonso Gomez Rejon‘s The Current War (TIFF). Here are his observations:

Last Flag Flying: “Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne all hit acting peaks in Richard Linklater’s look at three military buddies still trying to heal psychic wounds three decades after they served together in Vietnam. The trio is forced to reunite after years apart, however, when Carell’s son dies while fighting in Iraq. It’s the mission of these middle-aged men to bring the boy home for burial. The Boyhood director’s latest is a triumph that also features stellar newcomer J. Quinton Johnson (Everybody Wants Some) as a young marine.” Wells reaction: An acting “triumph” or a general triumph all around? Too vague.

The Current War: “How will today’s audiences, with notoriously short attention spans, react to a century-old battle between Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) over whose electrical system was better? For those who think AC/DC is just an Australian rock band, this period piece will be an education — though not a dull one. As directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) from a script by playwright Michael Mitnick (Sex Lives of Our Parents), this drama bursts with cinematic energy and is fueled by a plot as relevant as who’s building the next and best smartphone app. As for Cumberbatch and Shannon, they’re acting titans.” Wells reaction: Travers seems to imply that it’s strictly for 45-plus viewers due to Millenials not being the slightest bit interested.

Hollywood Elsewhere’s Porter flight arrived in Toronto around 3 pm or thereabouts. I went straight to the Airbnb at 74 Oxford Street in the Kensington district, which may be my favorite Toronto neighborhood of all time. I picked up the press pass and other materials at the Bell Lightbox around 5 pm, and then hung in the press room until the 7 pm closing. I guess I’ll grab a salad and plan the next few days.

HE’s own Tatyana Antropova, taken as we left Telluride early Monday afternoon. The drive back to Albuquerque took five and a half hours.

I won’t be seeing Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! until Sunday morning (9.10), but I’m loving how it’s provoking intense reactions. From Daily Beast critic Marlow Stern: “This is a film designed to fuck with you. And fuck with you it does.”

The Playlist‘s Jessica Kiang: “An incendiary religious allegory, a haunted-house horror, a psychological head trip so extreme it should carry a health warning and an apologia for crimes of the creative ego past and not yet committed, it’s not just Aronofsky’s most bombastic, ludicrous and fabulous film, spiked with a kind of reckless, go-for-broke, leave-it-all-up-there-on-the-screen abandon, it is simply one of the most films ever.”

mother! director Darren Aronofsky, snapped a day or so ago at the Venice Film Festival.

There’s a paragraph in Todd McCarthy‘s THR review that strikes me as one of the most damning descriptions of of a reputable name-brand filmmaker that I’ve ever read by a reputable name-brand critic.

“Beyond the climactic free-for-all lunacy, this seems above all a portrait of an artist who has untethered himself from any and all moral responsibility,” McCarthy writes, “one so consumed by his own ego and sense of creative importance that he’s come to believe that nothing and no one remotely competes with the importance of his work.”

In other words, McCarthy is saying, Aronofsky is some kind of sociopath. This obviously argues with Aronofksy’s claim that mother! is meant to be some kind of climate-change allegory. If I were Aronofsky I would write a THR guest editorial and spell things out, especially about the necessary task of provocation that most major-league artists try to live up to.

Naturally, the McCarthy review makes me want to see mother! all the more.

I saw IT (Warner Bros., 9.8) last night, and I’m sorry but it’s shit. Did I just say that? Would it sound less damning if I called it an IT sandwich?

What I mean is that the movie I saw at Loews Lincoln Square felt like shit to me — professionally polished but with a sensibility that felt coarse and calculating to a fare-thee-well. It’s basically a low-rent scare-a-thon for the none-too-brights… tediously familiar (small Maine town, Stephen King porridge, pre-teen pallies doing the Stand By Me thing) and strictly aimed at those who need a “holy shit!” or “oh, Jesus, that was gross!” moment every five or six minutes.

Sorry, dude, but I have aesthetic standards. IT radiates pro-level assurance from a character, dialogue and general compositional standpoint, but the spooky/scary moments (most of which involve Bill Skarsgård‘s demonic clown, i.e., “Pennywise”) are used too often, and are too in-your-face.

As scary flicks go I prefer subtle chills and tingles (the kind that producer Val Lewton provided in the ’40s, and which 21st Century audiences encountered in Andy Muschietti‘s Mama, Robert Eggers‘ The Witch and Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook) rather than torrents of blood gushing out of a bathroom sink. 

I recognize that most American moviegoers love the blood-torrents approach, and that mine is a minority view. Nonetheless there’s no question that (a) I have better taste in scary cinema, and (b) that most American horror fans are popcorn-munching boobs.

IT is expected to make at least $60 million this weekend and possibly earn three times that overall. This tells you a lot about the taste levels of your average American moviegoer.

I was cautiously optimistic before last night’s showing because of Muschietti’s direction. I was expecting or at least hoping that he might duplicate some of those subtle, fleeting, spine-chill moments that he and producer Guillermo del Toro brought to Mama. No such luck. 

Muschietti’s thinking seems to have been “if I play it too adult and classy, the fans of Walmart-level horror films will tune out. I have to keep goosing them, over and over…one shock moment every few minutes. If the dumbshits don’t tell their friends that it’s their kind of horror film, IT will go belly-up and I may have a bit of difficulty scoring my next highly-paid gig.”

I’m presuming that Muschietti was leaned on by three IT producers with flagrantly non–Val Lewtonish instincts — Roy Lee (The Grudge, The Ring), Don Lin (Gangster Squad, Lego Movie, Lego Batman Movie) and Seth Grahame-Smith (author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter). In my mind these guys are demonic — the devil incarnate.

Arrow Academy’s Bluray of Robert Aldrich, James Poe and Clifford Odets‘ The Big Knife popped on 8.28. DVD Beaver screen-capture comparisons show that the Bluray looks much better than the 2003 DVD. The sore spot is the cropping — the Bluray uses a 1.85 cleavered image while the DVD went with a standard mid ’50s boxy format. Consider the comparison framings of a scene between Jack Palance and Shelley Winters [below]. If you think the cleavered Bluray image is preferable, there’s really something wrong with you. Obviously being able to see Palance’s hair and sideburns…either you get it or you don’t.

Posted on 1.2.17: Dee Rees‘ Mudbound (Netflix, 11.17), a ’40s period piece about racial relations amid cotton farmers toiling in the hardscrabble South, bears more than a few resemblances to Robert Benton‘s Places In the Heart (’84).

The latter is far, far superior — better story, more skillfully written, more emotionally affecting. But three Mudbound performances — given by Carey Mulligan, Mary J. Blige and Jason Mitchell — are quite special and almost redeeming.

Based on Hillary Jordan‘s 2008 novel, Mudbound (adapted by TV writer-producer Virgil Williams) is about the relations between the white McAllans, owners of a shithole cotton farm (no plumbing or electricity) in the muddy Mississippi delta, and their black tenant-farmer neighbors, the Jacksons, in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The McAllans are composed of paterfamilias Henry McAllan (a sullen, beefy-looking Jason Clarke), his city-bred wife Laura (Mulligan), their two kids, Henry’s racist dad (Jonathan Banks) and Henry’s younger brother, Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), who recently served as a bombardier during the war in Europe.

The Jackson principals are Hap (Rob Morgan), his wife Florence (Blige) and their oldest son Ronsel (Mitchell), also a recently returned WWII veteran.

Jamie and Ronsel relate to each other because of their similar age, shared war experience and not being as tied to regional racial traditions, and Laura is obviously a more refined and compassionate person than her somewhat grunty husband. But the low-rent, under-educated delta atmosphere represses like a sonuvabitch, and from the moment the McAllans arrive you’re thinking “wait, I’m stuck in this hellish mudflat environment for the rest of the film?”

You’re also thinking “why has Mulligan decided to marry the pudgy, ape-like Clarke — she could obviously do better.”

Yes, Mudbound has a heart and a soul and a compassionate view of things. But my mantra as I watched it was “lemme outta here, lemme outta here, lemme outta here, lemme outta here, lemme outta here,” etc.

“Tell me you haven’t predicted Best Picture status for The Battle of the Sexes,” I texted a friend this morning. “Or called it the leading Best Picture contender out of Telluride. 

“It’s an acceptable, good-enough film with five or six good scenes. But it’s no more than that, or certainly not in the view of the Telluride chattering class. It’s fine as far as it goes and sufficient for what it tries to do, but nobody I spoke to last weekend was over the moon about it, and a few were underwhelmed.”

The person I texted replied that she hadn’t called The Battle of the Sexes the leading Best Picture candidate out of Telluride, and only that it could (as opposed to would or should) win the Best Picture Oscar. 

Trust me, that’s a very flimsy possibility.

In the HE realm the definite contenders right now are Dunkirk, Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, probably The Post and possibly Darkest Hour. 

As acceptable and moderately satisfying as The Battle of the Sexes is, it doesn’t begin to possess those X-factor attributes that often or usually propel a film into Best Picture contention.

And you can probably forget The Shape of Water also. I’m starting to think that the raves out of Venice are going to gradually subside and that more level-headed voices (i.e., fewer fanboys) will start to dominate the conversation. The great Sally Hawkins will almost certainly land a Best Actress nomination, but the film…well, we’ll see.

Other Best Picture potentials: Mudbound, Phantom Thread, Roman Israel, Esq., The Big Sick. Not happening: Downsizing, Wonder Woman, Wonderstruck, Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Why isn’t there a film as good as Moneyball opening this fall? Some kind of adult, male-centric, amply-funded middle-class movie that really rings the bell, I mean. A film as superbly written, I mean, and directed (by the great Bennett Miller) and scored with such delicacy and finesse (by Mychael Danna). And cut with such confidence and with just the right portions of smarts, charisma, undercurrents and misty-eyed emotion.

Posted on 9.7.11, “Moneyball is mystical, statistical, spooky, emotional and wonderfully original. And wonderfully ‘pure’ in a sense. The complexity mixed with the spirituality and the political reality of things…just brilliant.”

Moneyball opened close to a decade go, and that seems like a century ago in terms of what’s getting made these days and where the Hollywood culture is at and who’s investing in what. I’m very, very afraid that American megaplex flicks like Moneyball (i.e., ones that might turn out just as well) are never even getting their chance at bat.

From Scott Feinberg’s 9.5 assessment piece, “Lady Bird Could Be a Rare Female-Centered Oscar Contender”:

“Lady Bird seems to go over best with women, but the Academy’s demographics, despite recent efforts to increase diversity, still do not favor female-centric movies. Still, one or two such films manage a Best Picture Oscar nomination each year, and Lady Bird could well be one of them this year, especially with Rudin behind its sails. 

“Even more likely, though, are noms for Saoirse Ronan as Best Actress, Laurie Metcalf as Best Supporting Actress and Greta Gerwig for Best Original Screenplay, and perhaps Tracy Letts as Best Supporting Actor as well.”

HE to Feinberg: (1) If Lady Bird goes over “best with women”, how do you account for Sasha Stone‘s measured, less-than-wholehearted approval (she wrote this morning that Lady Bird is “still in pretty good standing for a [Best Picture] nod, at least right now”) and guys like me doing somersaults?;  

(2) Ladybird isn’t going to “manage” a Best Picture nomination — it is a Best Picture nominee waiting to happen. At least that. The only thing to worry about are people complaining about Ronan’s character being “somewhat unlikable.”; 

(3) You’re not forecasting a Best Director nomination for Gerwig? It’s her movie, her life, her soul, her casting, her dialogue, her style and editing choices…everything. How could her direction not be nominated alongside Ronan and Metcalf’s performances?

Excerpted from Peter Debruge‘s 9.3 Variety review of Paul McGuigan‘s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool: “[In this] lovingly crafted but tough-going biopic, one-time bombshell Gloria Grahame — a character Annette Bening dons like a pair of elegant opera gloves — disappears 40 minutes in, replaced by a slow-motion and rather standard-issue terminal illness victim, daintily coughing her way to her death bed for the rest of the movie. The first couple reels are golden [with] McGuigan truly giving us a gift, humanizing a figure whom most have only objectified. Though sniffles could be heard from every corner of the Telluride Film Festival screening where this drawn-out weepie premiered, you may well find yourself wishing the old gal would just go on and die in Liverpool already.”

Yesterday morning Toronto Star critic Peter Howell posted his annual Toronto Film Festival “Chasing the Buzz” piece. 25 critics, pundits and know-it-alls naming a special TIFF film that they really like or are especially looking forward to.

I chose Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, as you might expect. If I’d been allowed to name five I would have added Dan Gilroy and Denzel Washington‘s Roman J. Israel, Esq., Ruben Ostlund‘s Palme d’Or-winning The Square, Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billlboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (which I recently saw and can heartily recommend).

I read Howell’s article late last night, and was startled by the following quote from MCN’s David Poland about Angelina Jolie‘s First They Killed My Father: “A foreign-language film that could be a contender for Best Picture.” Is the Poland curse still potent? Time will soon tell. Here’s my opinion of the film.