Actress-comedian Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) has developed a persona — a spirited cut-up who lives in her own little world — that has worked nicely for her. But during her 1.23 stint as an Oscar nomination announcer Haddish expanded upon this in a way that wasn’t necessarily flattering.
It seemed to me that Haddish portrayed herself that morning as being something of a cultural illiterate (“Ah gotta see this Dunkirk…a lot of people seem to like it”) and mis-pronounced the names of so many nominees (she even murdered Get Out‘s Daniel Kaluuya) that she seemed to be doing this deliberately as a bit. That or she simply couldn’t be bothered to rehearse.
Honest question: If you were the director of the MTV show would you suggest to Haddish that she (a) rehearse the names of nominees so as not to stumble as frequently as she did a few weeks ago or (b) suggest that she double-down on the mispronunciations as a way of furthering her rep as an irrepressible personality who couldn’t care less?
Brendan Fraser‘s heyday happened between Les Mayfield‘s Encino Man (’92) and Paul Haggis‘s Crash (’05) — 13-year run, top of the heap, good as it got. The downslide began somewhere between ’08 and ’10 with the third Mummy movie and Furry Vengeance (’10). Fraser endured a rough six or seven years but lately he’s been getting back into it.
Fraser has been making a modest comeback on TV over the last couple of years. The first bump came in late ’16 when he played a mournful secondary character in Showtime’s The Affair in ’16. While promoting this re-appearance, Fraser’s AOL encounter with Ricky Camilleri was regarded as one of the saddest such interviews in entertainment history.
Now he’s in FX’s forthcoming Trust, Simon Beaufoy‘s miniseries version of the John Paul Getty III kidnapping saga, and Condor, a miniseries inspired by Sydney Pollack‘s Three Days of the Condor in which Fraser will not play the Robert Redford role but some kind of conspiratorial heavy (possibly a version of “Higgins,” the CIA guy played by Cliff Robertson, or maybe John Houseman‘s character).
Three and a half weeks ago The Digital Bits‘ Bill Huntreported that Warner Bros. Home Video will almost certainly release a 50th anniversary 4K Bluray of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hunt had been hearing “for months” that the disc was being prepared, but after hearing the same from “retail sources” he became convinced that it’s really, really being released, and probably sometime in early April.
Stanley Kubrick‘s groundbreaker opened in the States on 4.3.68, right when the LSD market was booming among middle-class, college-age youth.
And now someone has released an image of suspicious-looking jacket art. Where is the crucial mention of “remastered UHD 4K”? Are you telling me WHV marketers would’t emphasize that selling point?
Does this mean Hollywood Elsewhere is going to finally purchase a 4K Oppo player? No, it does not mean that. I’ve been waiting for distributors to start releasing 4K versions of classic-era, large-format films (Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, The Ten Commandments plus all the VistaVision films and perhaps even an assortment of spiffed-up 35mm classics) along with 4K renderings of the Hitchcock and Kubrick libraries, and no one (not even Criterion) has even begun to do that.
The only 4K Bluray of a ’50s-era title that I know of is David Lean’s The Bridge On The River Kwai. Sorry to sound like a peon but I’m fairly satisfied with a 4K streaming version that I bought on Amazon; ditto the 4K streaming version of Lawrence of Arabia. As things currently stand I don’t believe I’d experience a serious 4K bump if I were to buy the UHD Kwai along with the 4K Oppo.
I’m also delighted with WHV’s six or seven-year-old Bluray of 2001, and am not persuaded that I’d get that much of a bump from a 4K version. Maybe I’m wrong — maybe the UHD 2001 will deliver the wowser like never before. But I’m from Missouri. If WHV wants to offer a 4K streaming version, I’d probably buy that. But ixnay on the hardware. At least for now.
Andrew Pollack, whose daughter was murdered in the Parkland massacre, to Orange Orangutan: “We’re here because my daughter has no voice…she was murdered last week, shot nine times. How many schools, how many children have to get shot? It stops here, with this administration and me, because I’m not going to sleep until it’s fixed. It should have been one school shooting, and we should have fixed it…and I’m pissed. Because my daughter, I’m not going to see again.”
There’s no way to say this without sounding like a lowlife, but Marion Cotillard has an excellent nude scene in Ismael’s Ghosts (Magnolia, 3.23). I’m sorry but she does, and I’d be lying if I said I was neutral or displeased by this. Ditto Depleschin if he said he doesn’t approve.
The other stand-out scene comes when Cotillard dances to Bob Dylan‘s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” I was reminded, of course, of Ralph Fiennes dancing in a similar fashion to the Rolling Stones‘ “Emotional Rescue” in Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash. Fiennes totally nailed it; Cotillard is okay.
“Just saw the Despleschin,” I wrote on 5.17.17. “Indulgent, too long, at times overheated, generally undisciplined, taxes the patience, no tension to speak of and all over the place. In a word, minor.”
I can’t imagine it’ll make the slightest dent in the U.S., even among admirers of the kind of talky, drifting French films that over-40 urbans used to pay to see at urban arthouses on slow Sunday evenings. Back before streaming lessened their interest in seeing them in theatres.
The story (which is a kind of free-associating fantasia) concerns an impulsive, immature film director (Mathieu Amalric…frequently shouting, slurping alcohol, smoking cigarettes and doing his bug-eyed, intense man-child routine) whose imagination heats up and starts to merge with reality when an ex (Marion Cotillard) returns after a long absence, and stirs up a hornet’s nest of emotions.
From the lefty-progressive perspective things are looking good for the ’18 midterms. Trump is a louche sociopath who’s dirty to the bone, and every now and then God actually steps in and says “okay, I’m gonna put my finger on the scale and help out the good guys for a change.”
But lately I’ve become worried about hinterland pushback against the left. I’m even starting to worry that Trump might, God help us, be re-elected if a decent Democrat contender isn’t nominated, and right now there’s no rockstar in the wings. Not because swing voters will regard Trump as a first-rate President, but because some may be genuinely terrified of the alternative — of politically correct Stalinoids coloring the culture and pointing the finger every which way.
Attending the 2018 Sundance Film Festival is what put the fear in. As I mentioned on 1.21, it was like a socialist summer camp in the snow — insular, forward-thinking, politically correct, change-oriented, Time’s Up-embracing, POC and gay-celebrating. It felt a teeny-weeny bit oppressive. Like a shortage of oxygen or something.
I’ve been a lefty all my life and feel a deep-seated kinship with progressive ideals and goals today, but I’m genuinely scared about what lefties have been generating image-wise. By that I mean two impressions that have sunk in about what has felt at times like a cruel and dictatorial temperament.
One impression, which is arguably inaccurate, is that many lefties feel that whiteness is a genetically diseased condition, and nothing genuinely fair and benevolent can come from white people these days because there’s too much racism and horror in their history and so the historical ledger sheet has to be balanced. It’s not that whites have been asked to step back and let people of other shades run the show, but there seems to be a general sense that less whiteness will be a good thing all around.
A couple of days ago N.Y. Times film critic A.O. Scottwrote about interviewing artists and celebrities for the Sunday T magazine. The final paragraph reads as follows:
“The most challenging interview was with Greta Gerwig. When we spoke on the phone, she was in Sacramento and I was in Rome. The time difference was ridiculous, time was tight, and I felt a little awkward about the fact that I had just filed my review of Gerwig’s Lady Bird. I ducked into a doorway on a semi-quiet street and took notes by the light of a streetlamp.”
This took me back to “Adapt or Die,” an HE post from Rome that was filed on 6.2.17:
“The wifi at Hollywood Elsewhere’s Rome apartment (154 via Monserrato) is all but worthless, so I’ve been tapping stuff out at the nearby Barnum Cafe (Via del Pellegrino 87). A half hour ago the Barnum proprietors told me I’d have to take the Macbook Pro across the street as their place turns into an eating establishment around 8 pm or so. No problem. The wifi is strong enough to extend several feet beyond the cafe’s walls. So here I am, tapping away on a worn-down cobblestoned street that’s been here for at least 2000 years.”
The Black Panther sartorial thing is not for guys like me, and by that I mean X-factor movie guys. To me a movie is a movie is a movie — it’s not any kind of statement about representation or cultural celebration or any of that. It’s all about structure and believability and planting the seeds and delivering the right kind of third-act payoff, and that’s all.
Michael Musto: “I’m sticking with Three Billboards…Three Billboards for Picture, Guillermo Del Toro for Director plus Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell. Martin McDonagh will win Best Original Screenplay. I’m going with Laurie Metcalf for Best Supporting Actress. Three Billboards has some complexity and some deeply flawed characters…it’s more intricate and so I would say a knock above.” Tom O’Neil: But there is a lot of hatred for Billboards out there. But they’re gonna want to put that Lady Bird vote someplace, so where does it go?”
Laurie Metcalf, he’s thinking. But I don’t think she’ll win, as much as I think she deserves to.
Then I segued into a riff about how movies tend to reflect the times and the culture they come from. I was thinking that the Quentin Tarantino brand, which has always included a swaggering, half-smirking, bordering-on-flippant use of violence at times, might not fit or reflect the post-Paris, post-San Bernardino culture now as well as it did the all-is-well Clinton ’90s.
I was thinking in particular of a 12.3 N.Y. Times survey piece I read this morning. Written by N.R. Kleinfeld and called “Fear in the Air, Americans Look Over Their Shoulders,” it basically observed that “a creeping fear of being caught in a mass rampage has unmistakably settled itself firmly in the American consciousness.” And I was wondering how that wink-wink grindhouse blood and brutality that colors the second half (and more precisely the final third) of Tarantino’s film is going to synch with that…or not.
Here’s a reasonably close transcript of our gun-and-culture discussion. I guess it wasn’t so much a discussion as a kind of argument, except it was more about Russell arguing with me than vice versa. I played it cool and made my points in a mild-mannered way. Listen and judge for yourself:
Wells: The Quentin cult, if you will, is, like, 23 years old, starting with Reservoir Dogs…right? Violence as attitude, violence as style, violence as fashion…not dealt with in an earnest, realistic way. The swagger thing.
Alex Garland‘s Annihilation (Paramount, 2.23) is “trippy,” all right — a visually imaginative, microbe-level, deep-in-the-muck monster-alien flick. And it will bring you down, down, down. It will drop you into a stinking, crawling-insect swamp of your own regrets and fears and lethargies and nightmares, and will make you long for the glorious release of shooting yourself in the mouth.
It’s mainly a CG/FX show with creatures and Spielbergian space aliens and dynamic production design. It’s “inventive” in terms of the day-glo tree tumors and in a generally fungal, micro-bacterial, fiendish-mitosis sort of way, but it makes you feel like shit. It’s unrelentingly grim — basically a film about lambs to the slaughter.
Annihilation is based on a trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer that I will never read, but more precisely on the same-titled book that launches the tale.
It’s focused on Area X, a creepy, muddy lowland area somewhere in the Southern U.S. that’s been invaded and biologically inflamed by aliens. It’s surrounded by a kind of psychedelic wall made of some kind of blow-bubble liquid.
Five well-armed soldier women — a biologist played by Natalie Portman plus Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez and Tuva Novotny — enter this realm on foot, hoping to figure out the root of it all and at the same time save the life of Portman’s husband (Oscar Isaac) who has escaped Area X but is all fucked up…lethargic, no memory, spitting blood, ridden with disease.
In the book it’s a team of four, not five, that goes in, and the women represent the twelfth such expedition. The eleven previous expeditions have all ended in death or erasure for all the participants. Who would be stupid enough to join the twelfth expedition under these circumstances?
Annihilation is imaginative in ways that might feel vaguely new if you haven’t seen Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Stalker (’79) or, more to the point, read “Roadside Picnic,” the 1972 Russian horror novel by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky that inspired the Tarkovsky film. Or seen the two American-made sci-fi thrillers — John McTiernan‘s Predator and James Cameron‘s Aliens — that came in their wake.
So it’s not precisely “new”, but it’s definitely a grade-A, above-average haunted horror film for sci-fi dweebs. But Joe and Jane Popcorn? Not so much.
“This is imaginative, that’s imaginative,” I muttered to myself last night. “Not that I give that much of a shit, but it’s imaginative.”
