The last four or five minutes of Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man is one of the all-time greatest finales of 21st Century cinema, hands down. Because it summarizes the basic ethos of the film — “If God doesn’t like you, you’re fucked and that’s that” — and because the approaching tornado storm is so perfectly ominous. The visual effects maestros were Oliver Arnold, Andy Burmeister and Alexandre Cancado of Luma Pictures.

Here’s a brief chat I had with the Coens on 9.13.08, during the Toronto Film Festival.

“Slow Death by Jewish Kiki,” posted on 9.11.09: “Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man is a brilliant LQTM black comedy that out-misanthropes Woody Allen by a country mile and positively seethes with contempt for complacent religious culture (in this case ’60s era Minnesota Judaism). I was knocked flat in the best way imaginable and have put it right at the top of my Coen-best list. God, it’s such a pleasure to take in something this acidic and well-scalpeled. The Coens are fearless at this kind of artful diamond-cutting.

“The wickedly funereal tone and lack of stars means it isn’t going to make a dime, but it’s a high-calibre achievement by the most gifted filmmaking brothers of our time, and it absolutely must rank as one of the year’s ten Best Picture nominees when all is said and done. The Academy fudgies will not be permitted to brush this one aside, and if they do there will be torches and pitchforks such as James Whale never imagined at the corner of Wilshire and La Peer.

“The worldview of this maliciously wicked film (which isn’t “no-laugh funny” as much as wicked-bitter-toxic funny, which I personally prize above all other kinds) is black as night, black as a damp and sealed-off cellar. Scene after scene tells us that life is drip-drip torture, betrayal and muted hostility are constants, all manner of bad things (including tornadoes) are just around the corner, your family and neighbors will cluck-cluck as you sink into quicksand, etc.

Read more

It’s warm today in Los Angeles — 65 degrees and only 11 am. The cold snap (evening temps in the 40s, which felt like 30s due to winds) is over for now. Soon it’ll be March, and then comes April and May. And then the fifth anniversary of the 6.19.13 death of James Gandolfini. I’m mentioning this because this morning I happened to re-read one of the ugliest comment-thread pile-ons in the history of this column. It followed a plainly-written “this is how it happened” piece about my having “crashed” (in a vague manner of speaking) Gandolfini’s funeral service at Manhattan’s St. John The Divine on 6.27.13.

For two days I was seething with rage while coping with a broken heart. The ugliness amazed me although a few commenters, at least, understood and respected the fact that I attended out of love and respect. Variety‘s Stephen Gaydos said it best in 6.28.13 post: “Wells is a huge [Gandolfini] fan and so he paid his respects to a guy who was talented and died too young. Those are the facts. The rest is cockatoo chatter.”

At the end of a local ABC News report about the funeral[above], the anchor guy states that “the funeral was closed to the press.” The beat-down I received that day was partly about my having claimed that press wasn’t invited (or at least that I wasn’t) and that I had to circumvent stern-looking women with clipboards who were checking names, etc.

Here it is again: “I got hated on big-time for tweeting about having crashed James Gandolfini‘s funeral this morning at Manhattan’s St. John The Divine. Yes, I flippantly used the term “funeral crasher!” because that’s what I was. But it’s the singer, not the song. The haters ignored the fact that I (a) asked for God’s forgiveness in having crashed, (b) ascribed my crashing success to the intervention of angels, and (c) said that I crashed with reverence and respect for James, David Chase and all the “made” Sopranos guys. The rush-to-judgment pissheads simply weren’t listening. They never do. They’re scolds…shrill finger-wagging scolds going “tut-tut!” and “no, no, no!”

“I didn’t crash Gandolfini’s funeral like some giggling monkey, and I didn’t take the subway up there this morning with the intention of crashing. I crashed it solemnly like some devoted choirboy or Sopranos family soldier. I just grimmed up and shuffled up the cathedral steps and…well, go ahead and laugh but I honestly believe that I got past security because some angel from heaven who lived in my area of New Jersey when he or she was mortal happened to look down from heaven at that moment and said ‘whoa, wait up…he’s okay…fuck it, let him through.’

Read more

Sometime in mid-July of ’99, or 18 and 1/2 years ago, I suffered through an all-media screening of Jan DeBont‘s The Haunting. I went with the hope that DeBont, whose stock had plummeted two years earlier after the catastrophe of Speed 2: Cruise Control, might rebound if he would only pay tribute to Robert Wise‘s The Haunting (’63) by relying on eerie suggestion rather practical and CG effects. Alas, he ignored Wise’s approach entirely.

“The Haunting isn’t merely bad,” I wrote in my Mr. Showbiz column. “It’s one of the emptiest, most ineptly plotted, synthetically programmed, pointlessly overdone summer movies I’ve ever seen. I’m now completely convinced that this is the movie that drove Liam Neeson to the brink of retirement. The film’s final close-up is of Neeson and Catherine Zeta Jones wearing looks of utter exhaustion with a hint of self-loathing, and you have to figure that gearing themselves up emotionally for this shot couldn’t have been much of a stretch.”

The Haunting wasn’t a financial wipeout — it cost $80 million to make, earned $91.4 million domestically and $177 million worldwide. But it was so grueling to sit through…well, I don’t know that The Haunting was the reason behind DeDont not landing another directing gig until three years had elapsed — Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (’03). But it sure didn’t help.

Read more

This ScreenPrism essay about the films of Stanley Kubrick is only six days old — it was posted on 2.18. Boiled down it basically says that Kubrick’s films all say the same thing, which is that humans are ignoble, disruptive and untrustworthy creatures consumed by self-denial and various foolish mythologies and delusions, but that the visual framings used by Kubrick to tell variations of this same sad story can be deeply lulling and at the same time transporting. Similarly, this essay is so soothing on a certain level that it will engage your mind and especially your memory while at the same time putting you into a kind of trance. I stopped listening to the young woman’s narration after two or three minutes, and yet I continued to absorb what she was saying by a kind of osmosis, by sinking into the clips like some kind of heated pool or bathtub. An amazing process.

Barry Levinson‘s Horsing Around In The Shower is based on a script by Debora Cahn, John C. Richards and David McKenna. It seems to primarily be a journalism saga, pitting the late Joe Paterno (Al Pacino), Penn State’s legendary football coach who disgraced himself by looking the other way while Jerry Sandusky (Jim Johnson) did what he did with God-knows-how-many young guys, against real-life Patriot News reporter Sarah Ganim (Riley Keough), who’s now working for CNN.

To go by the trailer Joe’s wife Sue (Kathy Baker) looked the other way also. HBO will debut the 102-minute film, which is actually called Paterno, on 4.7.

Again — you have to see Amir Bar-Lev‘s Happy Valley (’14) before watching the Levinson version.

Read more

I was reminded this morning of what a brilliant scary-movie director Andy Muschietti used to be. A little less than six years ago, I mean, when he was directing Mama in Toronto with producer Guillermo del Toro by his side. I’m speaking of a classic Mama bit that belongs in the annals of classic high-craft horror. The film is worth seeing for this alone.

From my January 2013 Mama review (“Battle of the Mommies“): “It involves an older sister stealing her younger sister’s blanket, and then a static hallway shot showing the two of them wrestling for control of the blanket in their bedroom but with only the younger sister visible. And then we see something unexpected. I laughed out loud. I mostly hate the geek realm, but for that moment I was in geek fucking heaven.

“Mama is a light-touch horror pic. A concoction that sneaks in with hints and teasing cuts and, okay, an occasional shock cut or shock-music prompt, but mainly little cinematic games that turn you on if you’re attuned, and if not you’ll just sit there like a popcorn-munching wildebeest and going ‘okay, okay but…c’mon, dude, where’s the really crazy shit? Where are the blood-soaked carpets?”]’

“All I know is that Mama is made for guys like myself. It’s not in the least bit gross or revolting, and it’s seriously, fundamentally scary.

“It’s also one hell of a calling card for first-time-director Muschietti as it feels like it was directed by a middle-aged pro. That’s a nod to Del Toro as he developed Mama, finessed it, worked on every aspect (it was shot in Toronto around the time of principal photography of Pacific Rim), and perhaps held Muschietti’s hand the way Howard Hawks held Christian Nyby‘s during the making of The Thing. It’s just that Mama feels so smooth and commanding and sure of itself.”

That was then, this is now.

Jessica Chastain recently explained her interest in wanting to work with Muschietti on an IT sequel, in which she’ll play a grown-up Beverly Marsh:

“Well, I love Andy and [his sister/producer] Barbara Muschietti,” she told Screenrant‘s Padraig Cotter. “I worked with them on Andy’s directorial debut, Mama. So we’ll see. They’re friends, they’re family. Anything that they’re doing I want to be a part of, so I hope we can make it happen.”

Except IT wasn’t nearly as creepy as Mama. IT actually made it clear, if you ask me, that the Muschietti who’d made Mama, a fellow who seemed to believe in the less-is-more Val Lewton approach, had been replaced by a studio-kowtowing hack.

Read more

Hold on, let me get this straight. The same woman who called the FBI on 1.5.18 and told them chapter-and-verse about Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz, that he’d bought several weapons with his late mother’s insurance payout and that he’s stupid and has murdered and cut up some animals and that he might be “getting into a school and just shooting the place up” because she knew “he’s going to explode”…that same woman also called the Broward County sheriff’s office, and neither the Broward guys nor the FBI did a damn thing about this, and as a result 17 people inside Stoneman Douglas High School (mostly students) were slaughtered by Cruz on 2.14, or roughly five weeks later?

Here’s a transcript of the call to the FBI.

This is completely insane — the FBI was told exactly what would happen and exactly who the bad guy was, and they didn’t do jack squat.

The best love stories are about relationships that don’t work out. Which is what Dominic Cooke‘s On Chesil Beach (Bleecker, Street, 5.18), an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s same-titled 2007 novel, is basically about. Set in early ’60s Weymouth, Saoirse Ronan plays Florence, an independent-minded lass who develops reservations about getting married to Edward (Billy Howle) and particularly about the confined, straight-laced life she’ll be expected to lead. And then it all falls apart over sexual anxiety.

I saw On Chesil Beachduring last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and I somehow knew it wouldn’t be much even before I sat down. I could feel the minor-ness. The problem, for me, was that it was more about pre-marital misgivings than anything else, and I just didn’t give a damn whether Ronan and Howle “did it” or not, or whether or not they wanted to get married or anything. I couldn’t have cared less.

Honestly? I cared so little about their doomed relationship that I left around the 75-minute mark, and quickly decided I wouldn’t write about it because I’d missed the last half-hour or whatever. Now I’m breaking my promise because the trailer has dropped.

Who wants to see a movie with that title anyway? It’s like calling a movie On Swizzle Stick. I wasn’t even sure how to say “Chesil” when I first saw it on the page — I think it’s pronounced chezzle. (The actual Chesil Beach is located southwest of Weymouth, which is part of Dorset County in southwestern England.) It sounds like a shitty little beach with a lot of rocks and pebbles that will hurt your bare feet if you take a stroll, and who wants to go through that?