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The Papers is the official title of Steven Spielberg‘s currently shooting Oscar-bait film that will pop on 12.22.17 via 20th Century Fox. Working from a script by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, the drama is about how Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) grappled with a decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in June 1971.
Tom Hanks as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, Meryl Streep as Post editor Katherine Graham in Steven Spielberg’s The Papers.
One question: Has anyone ever heard or read of the Pentagon Papers being casually referred to “the papers” by anyone, ever? I haven’t. When I first saw the updated Wiki page I thought of Jimmy Two-Times in Goodfellas saying “I’m gonna get the papers, get the papers.”
I reviewed Hannah’s solo-authored script (which was called The Post) on 3.17.17. I said it was about how Graham, who initially saw herself as less than ideally suited to the task and was little more than a blandly embedded figure in Washington social circles, gradually grew some courage and a sense of journalistic purpose during the Pentagon Papers episode, which transpired over a 17-day period in June 1971.”
How will the final directing credits be worked out? “Directed by Ron Howard, Phil Lord & Christopher Miller“? “Directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller with some last-minute finessing by Ron Howard“? “Directed by Ron Howard — Initial, Tonally Unsatisfying Footage Captured by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller“?
It seems to me that Howard should just come in like a pro, finish the job and forget about any credit. It would be beneath him to say “those other guys didn’t get along with Kathy so I want credit for bringing this film home.” Howard is a highly respected, first-rate director who doesn’t need to grab any credit when in fact he’s been brought in as a high-class janitor — a clean-up guy.
Remember Dustin Hoffman taking Robert Redford‘s copy and “polishing” it in All The President’s Men? Roughly the same deal here.
Perhaps some reshoots will happen, but the fact remains that most of the shooting has already happened, and the scenes that have been shot can only be edited or finessed in certain ways. Right?
Woody Allen on Donald Trump, quoted by Screen Daily: “I still don’t know why he wanted the job. I never felt it was up his alley. It never occurred to me that he would win the presidency or that he was even interested in politics. There was never any hint of that.” Wells to Allen: He wanted the job in order to commercially re-vitalize or reinvigorate the Trump brand, which had never fully recovered from the stigma of four bankruptcies.
Most of Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver (TriStar, 6.28) is inspired — 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 essentially 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 times of Thief, Gone In Sixty Seconds, Bullitt….that line of country.
The four or five car chases in the film are exhilarating nutso stuff, but at the same time the action is undisciplined and show-offy and actually quite mad — Wright going for the gusto without regard to probability or (that horrid word) reality, but at the same time delivering the best squealing-rubber thrills since Gosling and Nicholas Winding Refn pooled forces, and absolutely leaving the bullshit fantasy realm of the Furious franchise in the dust.
But then Wright decides to send Baby Driver flying 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.”
I am nonetheless recommending Baby Driver for those first 90 or so minutes. But at the same time I’m telling you that any critic who’s written a gushing pass without mentioning that it destroys itself over the last 15 minutes or so…anyone who ignores this DEAD OBVIOUS FACT is a lying, jizz-whizzing whore who can never be fully trusted ever again.
Five weeks ago I raved about the first trailer for Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘s Battle of the Sexes (Fox Searchlight, 9.22), and particularly a hunch that Steve Carrell‘s performance as tennis blowhard Bobby Riggs “is going to get most of the award-season action” with Emma Stone having won a Best Actress Oscar earlier this year. This was met with instant derision by the comment thread know-it-alls. (“No Oscar nom…Carrell in Anchorman mode…better in The Big Short,” etc.) This new trailer highlights another strong contributor — screenwriter Simon Beaufoy. If you can’t sense from the trailer that Battle of the Sexes is well written, you can at least presume that the top-notch quality of Beaufoy’s previous screenplays will manifest again — The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Everest, etc.
I’ve always loved this photo of WNBC newsman Gabe Pressman listening to the Beatles during their first-ever U.S. press conference, minutes after they landed at JFK airport on 2.7.64. Here, in a nutshell, is the great hair gulf between generations — the 39 year-old Pressman, a WWII veteran and very much a Brylcream man, pondering a new wave of longish, non-Brylcreamed hair as the world turns and a new chapter begins. Anyone who grew up in the tri-state area in the ’60s and ’70s remembers Pressman — hard-nut TV street reporter, always with the mike, more than 60 years on the beat. He began in the mid ’50s and never retired. Wiki excerpt: “Until the very end, Pressman worked part-time at WNBC, mostly as a blog writer about New York City news on the station’s website. He was [also] active on Twitter. In 2014, he stated that an arthritic knee kept him from chasing stories like he used to. A few months before his death, Pressman covered the annual Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in New York.”
I just got an auto-response email that says “I am currently out of the office with no access to emails.” I get the message — “please converse with my associates while I re-charge” — but if it were me, I would say the following: “Of course, naturally, I’m receiving your emails. I’m not dead or in a coma or hibernating in a deep, dark cave or stranded on a Himalayan mountain peak or camel-ing across the Jordanian desert. I’m hearing you, reading you. I’m just doing that soul-nourishing, plant-watering thing that we all need to do from time to time. No biggie. Talk to you soon.”
Apologies to David Lowery and A24 for forgetting to include A Ghost Story in my recent rundown of the best 2017 flicks thus far. It belongs and then some. I’m putting A Ghost Story just below The Square but above Get Out, which was in sixth place until a few minutes ago but is now in seventh.
The new ranking: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick (Lionsgate/Amazon, 6.23), (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (6) Lowery’s A Ghost Story and (7) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.
Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story.
From my 1.25.17 review — “Odd, Minimalist, Engagingly Trippy Ghost Story“:
“David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story (A24) lives on the opposite side of the canyon from Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart‘s Personal Shopper, a ghost tale which is all kinds of different and original but seriously scary from time to time. It has to be said upfront that Lowery’s film isn’t all that scary. Okay, two or three moments put the chill in but this isn’t the game plan, and that’s what’s so cool about it. Really. Either you get that or you don’t.
“For this is basically a story about a broken-hearted male ghost (or formerly male) who doesn’t know what to do with himself, and so he mopes around and says to himself ‘Jesus, I feel kind of fucked…where am I?…what’s happening?…am I gonna stand around watching humans for decades or even centuries? I don’t know what the hell to do.’
There’s no way to not speak highly of Matthew Heineman‘s City of Ghosts, which premiered at Sundance ’17 and which I saw last night at a special screening at CAA. It’s a melancholy doc about a team of brave Syrian dudes who’ve been filing online reports since early ’14 about the atrocity-filled occupation of Raqqa, their home town, by the ideological fiends known as ISIS.
Hands down, all the critics are swearing by Heineman’s doc and bowing down. I’m an admirer also, but I have a few questions.
Co-founded by the 26 year-old Abdalaziz Alhamza, the group has been posting about the medieval brutality of ISIS (killings, beheadings, torture, deprivations) via their website, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently or RSS. Initially based in Raqqa and then Turkey and finally Germany, they’ve passed along reports (which have occasionally included photos and even videos) from brave citizen correspondents. If ISIS could get their hands on any these guys they’d be quickly killed, just as surely as their friends and family have been shot or beheaded without mercy.
Following last night’s CAA screening, a discussion of Matthew Heineman’s doc with RSS co-founder Abdalaziz Alhamza sitting at far left.
Who doesn’t know that ISIS is one of the rankest manifestations of absolute evil in the history of the species, and that the only righteous solution is to herd the entire army and particularly its leaders into a huge, 300-foot-deep hole in the Syrian desert, and then bury them alive under thousands of tons of sand? Everyone understands this, no one disputes, settled issue.
Nonetheless your heart goes out to the RSS guys. You feel almost nothing but admiration and respect. Anyone reading this who wants to help out should send money to RSS. I myself am planning to send a little coin. If nobility and bravery count for anything, City of Ghosts, which has been playing the festival circuit for six months now, will almost certainly be nominated for a Best Feature Doc Oscar.
But here’s the thing, a criticism that none of us are supposed to mention. Too much of City of Ghosts is about lethargy and resignation and guys sitting in front of computer screens with glum expressions. Yes, I know — who can blame them? What’s been happening to their home city is almost too brutal to ponder. But the fact remains that too much of this film is about a kind of semi-passive contemplation of the seemingly unstoppable horror of ISIS. Yes, the RSS guys are fighting them but there’s no hint that the tide may be turning when in fact it is.
The truth is that Heineman’s doc doesn’t leave you much at the end of the day. It fills you with sadness and despair. I for one believe it should do better than this, and it could start by bringing the story up to date.
Stronger (Lionsgate/Roadside, 9.22), David Gordon Green‘s film version of Jeff Bauman‘s “Stronger” (co-written by Bret Witter), is obviously cut from a different cloth than Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg‘s Patriots Day. It’s a kind of “Neitszche, fuck yeah!” film, or rather a feature-length echo of the German philsopher‘s famous quote along these lines.
In a nutshell: How I survived and built past the loss of my legs after the 2013 Boston marathon bombing.
How can Jake Gyllenhaal‘s performance as Bauman not translate into a major Best Actor bid? You can tell he’s dug pretty deep. The only way this wouldn’t ignite is if reviewers and Academy types start moaning “what, another triumph of the spirit over trauma and adversity thing? We’ve seen this story 20 or 30 times.”
My first thought was that Gyllenhaal’s resemblance to Bauman is fairly striking, but my second was that he’s still Jake Gyllenhaal and is therefore too good-looking for Tatiana Maslany, who plays Bauman’s girlfriend (and later wife) Erin Hurley. Look at them together — she’s just not in his league. I’m sorry to irritate everyone by reminding that birds of a feather almost always flock together. If you look at photos of the real Bauman and Hurley [after the jump] you’ll see they’re closely matched.
I’m presuming that the end of the film will dramatize the fact that Bauman and Hurley decided earlier this year to get divorced. (The Hollywood Reporter‘s Pamela McClintockreported this last February.) A closing-credit acknowledgment won’t do — Gyllenhaal and Maslany have to act it out.
The CG leg-removal effects are obviously state of the art.
On 5.12.17, or three days after he fired FBI Director James Comey, President Trump tweeted that “Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” During his 6.8 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey said “I’ve seen the tweet about tapes…Lordy, I hope there are tapes.” Orange Orangutan refused to confirm or deny if recordings exist of his conversation[s] with Comey. Today he tweeted the following: “With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.”
You contemptible bullshitter, you swaggering phony. You make me sick with your empty taunts and braggadocio.
From CNN.com: Ten of the 12 jurors in Bill Cosby’s recent assault trial voted to convict the comedian on two counts of aggravated indecent assault, but the case was declared a mistrial because two people on the panel continued to hold out, a juror told ABC News.
The jury consisted of four white women, six white men, one black woman and one black dude. Since the mistrial announcement my assumption has been that the two hold-outs (i.e., refusing to convict) were either among the four white women or the six white guys. Seriously — the applicable phrases are (a) tribal dynamic and (b) do the math.
Cosby faced three counts of aggravated indecent assault. CNN reports that the vote was 10 to 2 to convict him on charges that he digitally penetrated Andrea Constand in January 2004 without her consent, and 10 to 2 that he gave her drugs that substantially impaired her ability to resist, the juror told ABC Wednesday. The vote was 11 to 1 to acquit Cosby on a charge that he digitally penetrated her while she was unconscious or unaware.
