Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! is about the madness, the mob, the awfulness, the vulgarity, the end, the abominations, Dr. Phil, the poison, the ego monsters and rampant obscenities and tables of half-drunk 20something girls wailing with laughter in bars…it’s about every unfortunate social horror of the 21st Century, manifested in an obviously allegorical form. 

This is definitely a Hollywood Elsewhere kind of horror film, or one that’s about much more than chills and shivers. Just as making people laugh is the lowest form of humor, simply trying to scare people is the lowest form of horror.

It doesn’t matter if you think the mother! effects are super-cool or run-of-the-mill. It doesn’t matter if the octagonal Victorian home that Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence are living in has a garage or a driveway. Because it’s not about the home or even the characters, but the world beyond and the realm within.

Anyone who sees mother! and concludes that Aronofsky is some kind of cold manipulator without a conscience or humanistic concerns…well, they’re not paying attention. His latest (which by my yardstick is easily one of his best, or certainly at par with Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream) is as valid and pungent a piece of social criticism as Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (which was about…what, the erosion of moral values and the waning influence of Christianity in the early to mid ’60s?) and Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (the self-loathing and lack of values among the bourgeois elite).

mother! is about…well, social rot and corrosion and the neurotic hunger for fame, about marriage and trust and social apocalypse, and possibly even Aronofsky’s past failings or shortcomings as a husband…who knows? It’s certainly about the fact that marriage to an intense creative guy can have its occasional rough spots.

It’s definitely a movie for upscale, review-reading, smarthouse audiences. It’s not aimed at your typical horror crowd. It’s an art film that uses the trappings of horror to make its points. Somebody (Aronofsky?) said after the Venice Film Festival screening it’s an allegory about global pollution and climate change. Okay, that works, but it’s not what I saw. 

For me, mother! may be the single most profound explanation or dramatization of the saying that “hell is other people.” It was to be seen and wrestled with. Especially if you’re married or living together.

Thomas Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War (Weinstein, 11.24) is an eccentric, visually unconventional period drama — that much is certain. 

The movie is basically an AC/DC thing — the battle between direct vs. alternating currents of electricity in the late 1880s and early 1890s, or a stab at creating compelling drama out of a battle of opposing modes and strategies for providing electricity to the public. 

This in itself, especially in an era of increasingly downscale if not submental approaches to mass entertainment, is highly eccentric. But the tone of inspirational strangeness doesn’t end there.

The DC team was led by genius inventor Thomas A. Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) while the AC approach was steamrolled by engineer-businessman George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) with a late-inning assist from genius Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult).

This is fine as far as histrionic line readings, personality conflicts and eccentric facial-hair appearances are concerned, but an especially striking visual style from South Korean dp Chung Hoon-Chung (It, The Handmaiden, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) compounds the fascination.

In an attempt to reflect the unusual, headstrong mentalities of Edison and Westinghouse, Gomez-Rejon and Chung have gone with a kind of early ’60s Cinerama approach to visual composition — widescreen images, wide-angle lenses and a frequent decision to avoid conventional close-ups and medium shots in favor of what has to be called striking if not bizarre avant-garde framings in which the actors are presented as smallish figures against dynamically broad images and vast painterly landscapes.

The look of The Current War, in short, closely resembles the extreme wide-angle compositions in 1962’s How The West Was Won.

This visual signature will constitute a huge draw for cinema dweebs, who will no doubt celebrate the audacious yesteryear novelty of such an approach, but average popcorn viewers are probably going to feel a tad confused and disoriented as they try to process what boils down to an experimental arthouse way of shooting a movie, and a curious historical biopic at that.

Gomez-Rejon and Chung deserve approval for choosing a highly unusual method of telling a story that — be honest — your average American moron is going to have very little interest in to begin with.

I can’t honestly say that the screenplay, penned by 34 year-old Michael Mitnick, really sang for me. It struck me as overly 21st Century in its adherence to certain colloquial signatures and attitudes, but at least it’s a dutiful, reasonably literate stab at an ornate subject that doesn’t exactly lend itself to dramatic convention.

I for one was excited and intrigued all through The Current War, but at the same time I was telling myself “this is great, fascinating stuff but it’s not gonna make a dime.” Cheers nonetheless to everyone involved, including distributor Harvey Weinstein, who needs a hit at this stage.

I really wish I had time to get into this more, but Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is screening at 9 am, and it’s now 7:57 am. And right after that is a screening of Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. I’ll wade into this a bit more during the early and mid-afternoon hours.

If you want to dance through the saga of what history has generally referred to as “the war of currents”, here’s a Wiki page summary.

I’ve been hearing good things about Martin McDonaugh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight, 11.10) since a West Los Angeles research screening 11 months ago. I’ll finally be seeing it tomorrow morning at 11 am at the Scotiabank plex. Today’s rundown: Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool at 2:15 pm, followed by The Mountain Between Us at 4:45 pm, and then some filing. Then a Sony Classics sit-down dinner at 7:30 pm, followed by a 9:30 pm screening of The Current War at the Princess of Wales.

I’m a lifelong sucker for grilled cheese sandwiches, but they have to be slim and tidy. A thin slice of mozzarrella and cheese on buttered toasted rye…yes! So it doesn’t make sense that I would order a sloppy, overstuffed grilled cheese sandwich with all kinds of sauce and chopped tomato and melted gag-all spilling all over the place when you bite into it, but that’s what happened yesterday when I popped into the Meltwich on Richmond.

A woman sitting nearby was staring at me as I struggled with all the gooey crap spilling out of the sandwich as I took my first couple of bites. I could tell from her expression that she despised my lack of couth and table manners. “Hey, lady…you try eating one of these damn things and see how well you do…you can’t, trust me, without looking like some kind of greasy drooling pig.”

I will never again order an overstuffed grilled cheese sandwich. Yo, Meltwich? We’re done. Why would you make sandwiches that bring disrepute upon your customers? That compromise their dignity in front of strangers? Do you think it’s cool or sexy to have gooey globs of cheese and chopped tomatoes and whatnot falling onto your paper plate and your shirtfront and even the floor? I don’t want to even think about your grotesque concoctions from this point on.

Craig Gillespie‘s I, Tonya, a drama about the notorious figure-skating sociopath Tonya Harding (played by Margot Robbie), was press-screened this morning at 8:45 am. A friend reports as follows: “A fairly straightforward re-dramatization of the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan figure-skating fiasco. It portrays Harding as typical white trash surrounded by more white trash. Doesn’t necessarily paint her as crooked or mean — just naive, indifferent and completely aloof about the whole situation. Robbie’s performance great, Gillespie’s direction solid but [this is nonetheless] conventional filmmaking.”

Three weeks ago I was invited to see Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, a 98-minute doc about Scotty Bowers, the amiable, formerly unsung go-between who wrote about servicing Hollywood’s gay and bisexual community during the ’40s, ’50s and beyond in a five-year-old memoir called “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.”

Tyrnauer’s film will screen tonight at the Toronto Film Festival, which means I can finally…hold on…the embargo notice says I can’t review it until 11:59 pm this evening. Okay, so I won’t. But I will share what I came to believe during the watching of it, which is that Bowers, whose tell-all book has been challenged and mocked and who’s been described here and there as an unreliable bullshitter, isn’t lying about anything.

For most of Tyrnauer’s surprisingly intimate, low-key, non-gossipy film is about old Scotty — a 90something, white-haired pack rat who owns two or three homes in the Hollywood hills and lives with a good-natured, seen-and-heard-it-all wife who loves him — and only intermittently about the mostly gay and bi movie stars and celebrities (Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, Katharine Hepburn, Noël Coward, James Dean) who regarded Scotty as a trusted pimp and pleasure-giver who could and did set them up with same-sex lovers.

After studying Bowers for 98 minutes and listening to him talk about how terrifying things were for gay and bi actors in the intensely homophobic ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, and considering the affection he has for his old gay friends and the strong feelings and immense respect they have for him…after the film is over you’ll probably be convinced, as I was, that Scotty is no bullshitter.

It follows that a high percentage of his recollections about the private sexual lives of movie stars are most likely true. I found this an inescapable conclusion. Just as your gut tells you that Donald Trump is one of the worst bullshitters in the history of western civilization, you can just sense that old Scotty is a straight-shooter. Okay, maybe he’s hazy on a few historical details but the man is 94, for God’s sake. Cut him a little slack.

I have not reviewed Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, but I’m telling you that Scotty Bowers is a man of apparent honor. Read this 3.19.12 profile of Bowers by L.A. Weekly‘s Paul Teetor, and then see Tyrnauer’s film, and then read “Full Service” and tell me I’m wrong. I don’t think I am. I really don’t.

I’ve posted four previous pieces about Scott, the book and Tyrnauer’s film — here they are.

Tweeted Friday evening at 9:30 pm, give or take: “Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game is an edgy, brutally complex, hard-driving motormouth thing with some excellent scenes, but the only people I cared about were Idris Elba‘s attorney (i.e., defending Jessica Chastain‘s Molly Bloom on illegal gambling charges), Elba’s pretty daughter and Kevin Costner’s dad character during a third-act park-bench scene wth Chastain.

“I didn’t care about anyone else, and I basically found the whole thing, despite the very brainy writing, extremely fleet editing, the scrupulous attention paid to character shading plus that little sapling sticking out of the snow (a metaphor for unfair or random fate)…I found this whipsmart film demanding, not very nourishing and finally exhausting and soul-draining.”

Morning after #1:  Remember that high-velocity, rat-a-tat breakup scene beteeen Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara in The Social Network, which Sorkin also wrote? Molly’s Game is like that all the way through.  You can feel yourself start to wilt.

Morning after #2:  Chastain is so arch, clipped and super-brittle (this is more or less Miss Sloane 2), you just give up after a while.  Elba has a great rhetorical sum-up scene with prosecutors near the end, but is otherwise trapped in a game of verbal ping-pong.  And the various high-rollers who populate the gambling scenes (movie stars, heirs, hedge-fund guys, Russian mobsters) inspire one emotion — loathing.  I hate guys like this, and I have to spend two hours with a whole string of them?

Morning after #3:  Yes, I felt sated and satisfied during the final judgment-and-verdict from the judge in Molly’s case, but by that time I was near death and dying for the film to end.

Back to tweet:  “I feel so worked over and emptied out by Molly’s Game that I need a neck massage, and I don’t even want to know about the after-party.”

I saw George Clooney‘s Suburbicon earlier today…wow. Fargo-ish, it’s not. But it should have resembled Joel and Ethan Coen‘s 1996 classic at least somewhat, I was telling myself, because the original Suburbicon script, written by the Coens in ’86 and set in the mid ’50s, was their first stab at a Fargo-like middle class crime noir. Nine or ten years later the Coens went back to the same James M.Cain well and created Fargo, and the rest is history.

In Suburbicon, Clooney and producer and co-screenwriter Grant Heslov have reworked things, keeping the Fargo noir stuff but also, it seems, diluting or ignoring that sardonic deadpan wit that we all associate with the Coens, and deciding to paint the whole thing with a broad, bloody brush.

When it comes to tales about greed, murder and doomed deception, there’s nothing duller than watching a series of unsympathetic, unwitting characters (including the two leads, played by Matt Damon and Julianne Moore) play their cards like boobs and then die for their trouble. There’s just no caring for any of them.

Most significantly, Clooney and Heslov have added a side-plot about how Eisenhower-era white suburbanites were racist and venal to the core, and how things really aren’t much different today.

The Suburbicon victims are the just-arrived Meyer clan (Karimah Westbrook, Leith M. Burke, Tony Espinosa), and from the moment they move into their new, ranch-style home in a same-titled fictitious hamlet (i.e., an idyllic real-estate development right out of Martin Ritt‘s No Down Payment) their cappuccino skin shade incites ugly pushback from just about everyone. But the situation doesn’t develop or progress in any way. The Meyers keep absorbing the ugly, and that’s pretty much it.

Remember how those small-town citizens greeted the arrival of Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles? Nearly the same broad-as-fuck tone prevails here. There isn’t a single non-racist white adult in Suburbicon. With the exception of Noah Jupe‘s Danny, who’s about ten, and the Meyers clan everyone in Clooney’s film has horns, hooved feet and a tail.

Clooney and Heslov to progressive industry hipsters and Twitter banshees: “We get it…whiteys carry the demon seed…a pox upon humanity…they totally sucked in the Eisenhower era and are probably no better right now…down with the curse of Anglo Saxon gene pools except, you know, for a certain small sliver of enlightened humanity that includes Glenn Kenny, Ellen DeGeneres, Greta Gerwig, Phillip Noyce and a few thousand others.”

Suburbicon is about a married middle-management milquetoast (Damon’s Gardner Lodge), obviously a close relative of William H. Macy‘s Jerry Lundegaard, scheming with his wife’s sister (Julianne Moore plays both roles) to scam a pile of dough by hiring a couple of thugs to kidnap and “accidentally” kill his wife. All kinds of hell breaks loose when the plan goes wrong.

Everyone’s catching Suburbicon at 11 am this morning, but after that it’s anyone’s game. Albert Tello is forcing me hike down to the Intercontinental on Front Street to pick up Molly’s Game tickets (screening + after-party), but should I wedge this in between Suburbicon and Stephen Frears‘ Victoria & Abdul or post-Abdul at 3:30 or 4 pm? Yes, I’ll regret missing the 5 pm The Death of Stalin screening but tomorrow’s another day. I don’t need to see Lady Bird again so soon after Telluride, but I’d like to drop by the after-event. 90% of this racket is about politely asking and then saying “thank you.”

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Hollywood Elsewhere attended a party this evening for Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name (Sony Pictures Classics, 11.24) at STK Toronto (153 Yorkville near Avenue Road) following a TIFF screening at the Ryerson. The film was rapturously received with a long standing ovation. The congenial Timothee Chalamet called me “Mr. Wells” (please!) and said he’s read all the stuff I’ve written about the film. He said he’ll begin shooting the new Woody Allen film (also starring Elle Fanning and Selena Gomez) on Monday in New York City. I chatted with Roger Friedman, Baz Bamigboye, Wilson Morales, et. al. Nice party, great food…thanks, Sony Pictures Classics.

Call My By Your Name star and likely Best Actor nominee Timothee Chalamet.

The guy standing to Timothee Chalamet’s left Giullian Gioiello.  CMBYN costar Armie Hammer at far right, next to yours truly. Director Luca Guadagnino to my immediate right.

Yesterday the winners of a Telluride Film Festival Indiewire critics poll were announced, and the news was very good for Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird. Tied for first place were Gerwig’s semi-autobiographical dramedy and Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, and the most admired performance “by a long shot” was given by Lady Bird star Saoirse Ronan. So we know where the Best Picture conversation is headed right now, at least in part.

And yet, believe it or not, there’s a fierce pushback narrative being mounted against Lady Bird by a certain nitpick contingent. It’s mainly about how they don’t care for Ronan’s lead character, whom director-writer Gerwig largely based upon her own teenaged self back in ’02. Not likable enough, they’re saying. Too bratty, too argumentative with her mom (Laurie Metcalf), disloyal to her fat best friend, too much of a social striver, etc.

I find this argument appalling as I believe Lady Bird to be an excitingly honest and beautifully assembled film that tells the often humorous, sometimes abrasive truth about what it’s like to be a bright, passionate 18 year-old with unformed ideas and serious hunger.  But you can’t order people to ditch their objections.

I was arguing with one of the nitpickers this morning. I reminded that Ronan’s character goes back to her best friend at the very end, and that kids say and do unattractive things to each other all the time in high school, and that mothers and daughters are often if not always at loggerheads during the teen years, and that Ronan says “I love you” to her mom at the finale. It’s honest, it’s real, it’s Greta’s life…c’mon. Some people are just dug in and unreachable.