Seizer of Days

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I’ve just come from a screening of Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind. I was presuming it would be a sad, moving experience going in, and Zenovich hasn’t disappointed. Her film is simple, touching, direct — not a softball portrait that avoids the pitfalls and dark places, but a very comprehensive story of a fascinating whirling dervish and comic firecracker for whom the bell tolled.

Who didn’t love the guy (at least during his 20-year peak period), and who didn’t feel the thud in the chest when his suicide was announced on 8.11.14?

I have to hit Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot (which a critic friend has told me is “a very good, very well acted 12-step movie”) but with Williams on my mind I thought I’d re-post a couple of riffs from the HE archives.

8.11.14: Robin Williams, 63, has been found dead of asphyxiation. In other words by his own hand. I’m very, very, very sad about this.

The poor guy had been wrestling with severe depression, probably in part because his heyday was clearly over and he was on a kind of career downswing. I hate to say this but he was. [Update: Also Lewy body dementia.] Life can feel so awful and cruel at times when the heat leaves the room and the candle starts to flicker. The weight can feel crushing and oppressive. And for a guy who seemed to burn a lot more brightly than most of us, certainly in the late ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. A genius improviser, gifted madman and comic superstar for at least…what, 30 years or so?

Williams hadn’t been landing the greatest films or roles over the past decade or so but from the peak of Mork and Mindy fame until One-Hour Photo…what a run! But this…this hurts. It reminds us that we’re all hanging by a thread in a sense, some thinner or stronger or more resolute than others.

Williams’ best films and performances: The World According to Garp (’82), Moscow on the Hudson (’84), Good Morning, Vietnam (’87), Dead Poets Society (’89), Awakenings (’90), The Fisher King (’91), Aladdin (’92), Mrs. Doubtfire (’93), Jumanji (’95), The Birdcage (’96), Good Will Hunting (’97), Insomnia (’02) — 12 films in all.

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Black Street Cred

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In the ambitious but mediocre Blindspotting, the sympathetic, Oakland-residing Colin (Daveed Diggs) is trying to stay out of trouble over the final three days of his parole status. Unfortunately, his longtime best friend is a violent, hair-trigger, gun-wielding asshole named Miles (Rafael Casal) so right away you’re wondering “is Colin as stupid as he seems, or is he just temporarily stupid?”

Even more unfortunately for the audience, Casal, a 32 year-old playwright and performance poet, relies on a broad caricature of Oakland street blackitude — machismo shit talk, constant strut, a mouthful of gold fillings, flashing pistols, drop-of-a-hat hostility, etc.

In the view of Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy “the volcanically emotive Miles” is “a character so brainlessly compulsive and violent that he becomes pretty hard to take after a while.”

White guys adopting the posture of angry, ready-to-rumble street brahs is an old bit. Hip white kids have been pretending to be urban desperados since at least the early ’90s. Gary Oldman as Dretzel in True Romance (’93). Josh Peck in Jonathan Levine‘s The Wackness (’08). The best comic reversal of this was Richard Pryor‘s imitation of dipshit white guys in Richard Pryor — Live in Concert (’78).

Casal’s Miles is easily the most irritating variation I’ve ever seen. I was hating on him 15 minutes into the film.

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Sidestepping Candy Ass

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Colin Firth has told the Guardian that he “wouldn’t” work with Woody Allen again, blah blah. So Moses Farrow is lying…right, Colin? The bottom line is that Firth, like Timothy Chalamet and other character-challenged thesps, is simply too scared to say anything else. In a 1.19.18 Guardian piece, Los Angeles p.r. crisis expert Danny Deraney says that working with Allen now would be “extremely toxic, and why would you want to surround yourself and your career with potential damaging consequences? I don’t think your performance will be taken seriously. Everyone will be [asking] why did you do it?” We’re living through bad times, scoundrel times.

Private Life (Yeah, Partly), Blindspotting (Nope)

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Blindspotting star-cowriter Daveed Diggs, director Carlos Lopez Estrada, costar-cowriter Rafael Casal before last night’s pigfuck screening (i.e., way too many corporate entourage types elbowed aside ticket holders, resulting in delayed start time) at the Eccles.

(l. to r.) Private Life‘s Paul Giamatti, breakout movie-stealer Kaylie Carter, Molly Shannon, Kathryn Hahn at Eccles prior to last night’s 9 pm screening, which actually started at 9:20 pm.

Atmospheres

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Right now (and I’m using that term loosely) the plan is to catch two Sundance ’18 films plus do an interview. I’m blowing off a screening of Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s Monsters and Men at 12:15 pm, but am definitely chatting with Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot costar Jonah Hill at the Waldorf Astoria Canyons. Then comes Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind at the MARC (5:30 pm), and then I won’t be seeing Jessie Peretz‘s Juliet Naked (6:45 pm) — publicists can’t help with a ticket (!). Finally there’s a 9:45 pm screening of Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. And if I really want to burn both ends, there’s a Don’t Worry midnight after-party at the Grey Goose.

“Seamless” Wind Assessed

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As noted, the first-ever screening of a full-boat version of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind happened last Tuesday night (1.16) at Santa Monica’s Ocean Ave. screening room. The reconstituted, inside-the-industry, early ’70s montage-hodgepodge will presumably be refined a bit more before debuting at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.

HE to friend who attended Tuesday’s screening: “Is it…what, a fascinating but surreal early ’70s timepiece? Is it a slipshod, free-associative whatsit without a narrative spine, or does it sorta kinda have something going on? Orson was a near-genius at times, and he obviously did his very best and worked his fingers to the bone, but be honest — is it some kind of visual dazzler, an interesting piece-of-shit or a major discovery or what? Can you give me a thought or two or a hint or two about how it plays, how it feels?”


Cruddy, bleachy image of scene from The Other Side of the Wind with costars Peter Bogdanovich, John Huston.

Friend to HE: “[The film we saw Tuesday] is very much in the spirit of the pre-existing 42 minutes of cut footage, which have been around forever. DP Gary Graver used to regularly screen it. Are you familiar with that material?”

HE to friend: “Naah, never saw it. So the whole movie feels like an expanded version of 42 minutes of cut footage? It doesn’t have shape, narrative tension, thematic clarity, a second-act pivot, a strong ending…NONE of that stuff? Just a grab-bag of cut footage, only longer? That doesn’t say much for the editors, does it? All this work, all these years and all this trouble and expense, and it’s a sprawling cut-footage wank-off? C’mon, there has to be more to it than this. Orson Welles is listening from above.”

Friend to HE: “No, what we saw is not a longer version of the 42-minute cut footage. Josh Karp wrote an entire book about the film which lays it all out. But in a nutshell, this is not just ‘expanded footage'” This is not a short film which has been made longer.

“Orson had a feature script. He shot that movie, infamously, over a period of years. Then he fine-cut the 42-minute version. Then he got busy, got distracted and then died. The 42 minutes were scenes from different parts of the story. The 42-minute reel is famous because its cutting style is so radical — Orson was trying to reinvent editing and shooting styles, as collage.

“The only thing I can compare it to would be parts of JFK, decades later, where Oliver Stone and Bob Richardson were intercutting lots of film stocks and jumping around, to keep you off-balance.

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Aahhh, What Does He Know?

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HE to Mira Sorvino, Greta Gerwig, David Ehrlich, Eric Kohn, Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Hall, Griffin Newman, Reese Witherspoon and all the other Woody condemners: Speaking as a committed, like-minded community of gentle souls, what can we do to stop or at least strongly discourage this kind of cruel, unscrupulous lying in a public forum, especially about a matter that deeply concerns us all?

CG Gamer Action Prison

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I don’t believe any of the action stunts that Alicia Vikander and/or Lara Croft perform in this stupid-ass trailer. Zilch. Not for one split second. Nobody leaps off a sinking ship in the middle of a raging typhoon and lives. Nobody grabs hold of an overhanging tree limb at the last second and thereby escapes going over a super-tall jungle waterfall. Almost everything Vikander physically performs is video-game-level bullshit, video-game-level bullshit and — just to break the monotony — video-game-level bullshit. What kind of fingernail-chewing moron would pay money to watch this shite? CG stunts of this sort aren’t worth spit in the realm of real-deal physics. Yes, I realize that’s a dirty concept these days.

Morris’s Double-Barrelled Three Billboards Takedown

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Needled and annoyed by Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri, N.Y. Times film critic Wesley Morris has delivered a nicely composed takedown essay, one that’s fun to read and re-read and share with your friends.

Being juicy and chewy and quotable, it will, make no mistake, hurt Three Billboards‘ rep among that sector of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that reads the Times and mulls this stuff over and yaddah yaddah.

Morris has called the Fox Searchlight release a “misfire,” “grating,” otherworldly, quirkily pretentious, “a cupcake rolled in glass,” an “off” thing and more or less the new Crash-ola.

Morris also finds the film irritating from a racial pigeonhole perspective. Two black characters (Amanda Warren and Darrell Britt-Gibson) seem “almost Muppet-like,” he says, and Ebbing’s temporary black police chief (Clarke Peters) comes off as Sidney Poitier-ish, he says.

Morris doesn’t mention that he’s a proselytizer for Jordan Peele‘s Get Out, but he is, trust me (“Jordan Peele’s X-Ray Vision“), and he knows that if his piece winds up wounding Three Billboards that part of the Best Picture heat storm will shift over to Get Out along with the already-favored The Shape of Water.

There’s an “illusion” about Three Billboards that’s been “presented by the people running the [award] campaigns,” Morris write, “and [this] in turn…has become the custom for lots of us.

“Three Billboards can’t be just the misfire that it is. The enthusiasm for it has to represent the injustice the movie believes it’s aware of — against young murdered women, their suffering dysfunctional families and black torture victims we never see — but fails to sufficiently poeticize or dramatize what Mr. McDonagh is up to here: a search for grace that carries a whiff of American vandalism.

“Of course, few movies can predict their moment, but Three Billboards might be inadequately built for this one.”

Again

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During this morning’s 1.18 interview on CBS This Morning, the 32 year-old repeated her molestation claims against her adoptive father.

One of her statements stuck in my mind: “He often asked me to get into bed with him when he had only his underwear on and sometimes when only I had my underwear on.” Is this all that strange, if true? Don’t all little kids sleep with their parents when they’re five or six or thereabouts with everyone wearing underwear and whatnot? My two boys did all the time. If one of them had been a little girl the vibe would’ve been no different. Seven year olds are seven year olds.

Woody Allen issued the following statement to the show’s producers:

“When this claim was first made more than 25 years ago, it was thoroughly investigated by both the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital and New York State Child Welfare. They both did so for many months and independently concluded that no molestation had ever taken place. Instead, they found it likely a vulnerable child had been coached to tell the story by her angry mother during a contentious breakup.

“Dylan’s older brother Moses has said that he witnessed their mother doing exactly that — relentlessly coaching Dylan, trying to drum into her that her father was a dangerous sexual predator. It seems to have worked — and, sadly, I’m sure Dylan truly believes what she says.

“But even though the Farrow family is cynically using the opportunity afforded by the Time’s Up movement to repeat this discredited allegation, that doesn’t make it any more true today than it was in the past. I never molested my daughter — as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago.”

From Moses Farrow on Twitter: “I’m deeply saddened for my sister. As she stated, this has been her reality since childhood. I have broken my silence of the abuse by our mother and my healing began after getting away from her. I can only hope that my sister can do the same to finally heal.

“What breaks my heart the most is while I know that my sister, Dylan, believes what she says, I also know from my own experience, that it simply never happened.

“So many times I saw my mother try to convince her that she was abused — and it has worked. Some day, I hope Dylan can escape from my mother, confront the truth and begin her own healing. #truthislouder”

First Looksee, Tiny Room

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The first-ever showing of a full-boat version of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind — presumably rough and ragged but resembling the final cut — screened the night before last (Tuesday, 1.16) at the Ocean Avenue Screening Room in Santa Monica. Restricted invitations, 36 seats. Study the below photo and identify the viewers — Rian Johnson, Peter Bogdanovich, Quentin Tarantino, Larry Karaszewski, Crispin Glover, Danny Huston…who else? Yes, that’s Alexander Payne in the center with the white shirt, and he’s talking to partially obscured screenwriter-director Scott Alexander.

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