Not The Same as McMansion

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McMafia, the eight-part BBC1 minseries that will begin airing on AMC on 2.26, is based on a same-titled book by Misha Glenny and directed by James Watkins.

Glenny chose the name McMafia “because of how professional, organized and homogenous international gangsters have become,” it says here.

As Semiyon Kleiman (David Strathairn) tells banker Alex Godman (James Norton), “These people dress like bankers, they speak a dozen languages, they eat in the best restaurants, stay in the best hotels. But underneath all that sophistication, there’s an open grave in the Mexican desert with 50 headless corpses inside.”

McMafia “has been criticized for its stately pace and complex plotting,” a review stated. “It can feel a little po-faced, lacking the wit of a Hugh Laurie or a Tom Hollander, who both brought light and shade to The Night Manager.

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What About A #Time’s Up Hays Code?

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Welcome, much-needed changes to the movie industry have already been brought about by #Time’s Up and #MeToo, but it was suggested during a dinner last night that some kind of new Hays Code agreement might eventually be adopted by the motion picture, TV and streaming community. I wasn’t told, mind, that this idea is actually being kicked around, but a friend believes that the current climate might lead to such a measure, and who knows?

The new Hays Code agreement could partly seek to eliminate gender discrimination and pay disparity between men and women. I for one think that’s a pretty good notion if fairly implemented.

The friend also suggested, however, that another goal might be to institute sexual morality advisories that would discourage depictions of sexual misconduct and assault against women and minors without appropriate consequence. The sexual morality portion would be a matter of tremendous concern to filmmakers, he said. I don’t think I need to explain why this concern would be manifest among directors and screenwriters of all stripes and stations.

Again, I’m not saying that such an agreement is actually being discussed by anyone, but where there’s conversational smoke there’s sometimes fire. Maybe. I’m mentioning this because before last night I’d never heard such an idea, even in the loosest of conversations. We are witnessing, after all, the gradual emergence of a new form of liberal Calvinism these days, so it wouldn’t be totally crazy if a #Time’s Up production code was eventually agreed upon and instituted.

When we say Hays Code (named for Will Hays) we really mean the Breen code (named for Joseph Breen). It was adopted in response to what some regarded as a climate of tawdry morality in movies of the early 1930s. The code was a set of moral guidelines that was applied by major studios from 1934 to roughly 1968.

The code began to slowly erode in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but it ended with a bang when Elizabeth Taylor said “goddam you” to Richard Burton in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff (’66).

Maybe Harris Was Right?

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Last night I spoke to a knowledgable industry friend who agrees with Mark Harris about Woody Allen’s career being toast. While he’s appalled and horrified by the current terror and believes that the only sane response is to duck and wait it out, he also thinks A Rainy Day in New York will be over, done and finito for the Woodman.

He also suspects that Amazon will jettison A Rainy Day in New York, although they’ll look like gutless political cowards if they do this. On the other hand Call Me By Your Name star Timothee Chalamet, who costars in Rainy Day, will have to answer very carefully when a questioner brings up the Allen hoo-hah on the next red carpet.

He said that Woody needs $25 million to make his films, all in, and that he’s not going to be able to raise this without significant name-brand U.S. actors along with general support from the U.S. film industry. My friend didn’t say that Allen’s films are obviously winding down anyway in terms of quality, but others have noted this.

What about the European market? I said. Allen is worshipped in France, etc. Allen’s producers won’t be able to raise $25 million from European financiers alone, he said, because the European market for his films isn’t large enough.

He’ll have to scale his fee and production costs way down to make a European-centric feature — $10 million or even $9 or $8 million. He’ll have to shoot guerilla-style, hip pocket, on the fly, available light, etc.

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Margaret Atwood Under Fire

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In a 1.13.18 Globe and Mail piece, The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood lamented to some extent the Robespierre-resembling tendencies of some of the #MeToo brigade. The article was titled “Am I a Bad Feminist?” Here’s an excerpt:

“There are, at present, three kinds of ‘witch’ language. (1) Calling someone a witch, as applied lavishly to Hillary Clinton during the recent election; (2) ‘Witchhunt,’ used to imply that someone is looking for something that doesn’t exist, and (3) The structure of the Salem witchcraft trials, in which you were guilty because accused. I was talking about the third use.

“This structure — guilty because accused — has applied in many more episodes in human history than Salem. It tends to kick in during the ‘Terror and Virtue’ phase of revolutions — something has gone wrong, and there must be a purge, as in the French Revolution, Stalin’s purges in the USSR, the Red Guard period in China, the reign of the Generals in Argentina and the early days of the Iranian Revolution.

“The list is long, and Left and Right have both indulged. Before ‘Terror and Virtue’ is over, a great many have fallen by the wayside. Note that I am not saying that there are no traitors or whatever the target group may be; simply that in such times, the usual rules of evidence are bypassed.

“Such things are always done in the name of ushering in a better world. Sometimes they do usher one in, for a time anyway. Sometimes they are used as an excuse for new forms of oppression. As for vigilante justice — condemnation without a trial – it begins as a response to a lack of justice — either the system is corrupt, as in prerevolutionary France, or there isn’t one, as in the Wild West — so people take things into their own hands.

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Competing Harvey Keitel Stories

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Five days ago (1.10.18) “Yellow King Film Boy” posted an excerpt from a Gary Oldman interview. Stanley Kubrick‘s method of directing actors (“Do it again, please”) is alluded to,. Starting at 1:40 Oldman passes along a tale he’s heard about why Harvey Keitel walked off the set of Eyes Wide Shut.

Keitel had been hired to play the Sidney Pollack role (super-rich guy, one of the organizers of the secret orgy). As shooting happened between November ’96 to June ’98, Keitel’s departure was presumably sometime in early to mid ’97.

Keitel, says Oldman, was performing a bit in which he was just “walking through a door, and after 68 takes Keitel said, ‘I’m outta here, you’re fucking crazy…you’re fucking out of your mind.’ Because [Kubrick] would just say ‘do it again’…[he didn’t explain] what he was looking for, just ‘do it again’….I love Kubrick’s movies, but I don’t know how I would’ve worked with that.”

Oldman’s story is okay as far as it goes, but almost every actor who’s ever been in a Kubrick film has gone through this process of doing endless takes. Before signing on Keitel had to have heard about this tendency, so Oldman’s story makes Keitel seem like a guy with a short fuse and a temper.

The other story about why Keitel left Eyes Wide Shut is almost certainly bullshit, but it was passed along by director Lars von Trier, who was doing promotion for The Idiots at a Hotel du Cap press junket during the May 1998 Cannes Film Festival. The Danish director was chatting with a group of journalists in some cabana, and before passing along the Keitel story, which he got from a below-the-liner who had worked on Eyes Wide Shut before working for Von Trier, he told the journalists to shut off their tape recorders.

One of these journalists was F.X. Feeney, who told me the story a year or two later.

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Franco Saved By Aziz Ansari

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It sounds as if Aziz Ansari is another guy who should’ve thought twice before wearing a Time’s Up pin. He allegedly acted like an overly hormonal, overbearing asshole on a date last year with a woman who has gone public with a complaint about said behavior, on babe.net.

I wasn’t there and therefore know nothing, but there’s probably a little something to this. I’ve seen this kind of ardent behavior in bars and clubs. Guys who are determined to have it off with a girl they’ve nuzzled up to and are convinced the girl is equally interested, etc. I’ve never been that guy but I’ve seen it, and I’ve always felt sorry for the woman in each instance. Do I know for a fact that Ansari behaved as the woman in question asserts? Nope.

Ansari hasn’t been nailed in a Louis C.K. sense, but he’s certainly been bruised in a James Franco way. He needs to abase himself, grovel, atone, go to a clinic, etc. If I were in Franco’s shoes right now (not that I would be!) I would be thinking about sending Anzari a case of champagne, some fruit and a “thank you” note.

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Don’t Let Mob Have Last Word, Woody

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If I were Woody Allen I would re-dedicate myself to pushing on until I drop, if only to defy this Mark Harris prediction along with the Greta Gerwig/Rebecca Hall/Mira Sorvino chorus, which I’m sure is having its effect. I would (a) double down on my European financing options, (b) cast the best and bravest actors I can find, and (c) write a Crucible-like, On The Waterfront-ish allegory about a p.c. mob persecuting a woman who appears to be tainted on some level but isn’t in fact guilty of something she’s been accused of left and right. Allen needs to use this horror to propel his art, and (who knows?) go out on a bold note a la Crimes and Misdemeanors.

New Oscar Bait Hinges on Tribal Identity

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Yesterday’s “Oscar Bait Movie Is Over” piece, which arose from a discussion I had yesterday morning with Boston-based movie critic Jordan Ruimy, was easily one of the most revealing, finger-on-the-button sum-up pieces I’ve posted over the last year, if not the past two or three years.

Because while it began as a discussion of why The Post never got traction in the Oscar race, it wound up describing a major seismic shift in the way younger Oscar voters are seeing things now, as opposed to just five years ago when the old boomer-farty Oscar-worthy standards still applied.

Here are four comments, posted by Rosse Veneziano, filmklassik, Dr. New Jersey and Joe S. They re-articulate the basis thesis and sum it up nicely:

(1) RossoVeneziano: “There’s a new paradigm of Oscar baitness now, and The Post just doesn’t fit it. At all. Oscar-bait now means indie, socially relevant, ‘woke’ (or whatever new slang definition you wanna use for the same concept). Lady Bird and Get Out are 100% Oscar baits. No big-budget entertaining movie will ever win Best Picture again. Titanic today would never win. Never.

“Because Oscars are the new Spirits. Technical, artistic achievement means squat for the new-generation Academy. Best Director is the ceiling. For Best Picture they want politically charged messages and they wanna take a stand, and identity politics definitely drives their votes.”

HE insertion: Hence the head-scratchy Get Out fervor.

“The Post has the message but lacks a crucial element: identity. New members vote FIRST for the person — the movie itself is secondary. A vote for Lady Bird is mainly a vote for Gerwig, a vote for a woman to win it all. No one sees Spielberg as a revolutionary icon as he’s just another rich white guy. Uncool.”

(2) filmklassik: “A bit cheeky to say ‘never ever again’ (because who the hell knows), but yeah, in this particular cultural moment it is all about Tribal Identity. And what’s disturbing is, we have a whole generation now for whom Tribal representation is, to use one critic’s word, numinous. The under-40 crowd has invested Race, Gender and Sexuality with a kind of cosmic significance. It doesn’t mean a lot to them — it means everything to them. Indeed, much of their conversation and writing seems to always come back to it.”

(3) Dr. New Jersey: “A difference is I don’t think anyone making Get Out was thinking ‘Hey, this is Oscar material’ while everyone making The Post was thinking that very thing.”

(4) JoeS: “In a way, that actually reinforces RossoVeneziano’s post. Nobody was thinking Best Picture when Get Out came out last February. But then the whole indie vibe took over the landscape and it was cool to inflate this pretty good horror flick with social commentary into the awards discussion.”

On This Fine Sunday

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Never forget that the real cancer of American culture is not Donald Trump, not really. The consequences of a grotesque, dementia-afflicted sociopath in the Oval Office have been terrible all around, obviously, but the fundamental ground-level evil lies in that sad mass of rural, low-information lowlifes who voted him in.

They’re in great pain, yes, but they’ve demonstrated time and again they’d rather slit their throats than vote for their own interests. Democratic process- and institution-wise they’re emotionally disturbed sociopaths. They don’t give a damn about anything but how miserable they feel and how much they hate the economic and social realities of the 21st Century, and the great tribal loyalty they feel for that swaggering, bloviating, golf-obsessed turd — a guy who almost certainly smirks or shrugs his shoulders at their plight in private, and is playing them like a violin.

What do you do when cancer has invaded your body? Do you say “well, I may not like what this cancer is doing but I have to at least respect it…we live in a Democratic system, after all, and cancer cells have as much right to live and thrive as I do”? Or do you get chemotherapy and radiation and surgically remove the damn tumor?

In Honor of Aldo Ray

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The Salt Lake Tribune‘s Sean Means has finally nailed it down. The location of Park City’s all-new Ray theatre is the site of that big sports-equipment store (Sports Authority) that was there for years, a stone’s throw from the Holiday Cinemas.

The Ray’s upper floor is the location of a new Dolby-fied 500-seat theater. It’ll be roughly the seating capacity of the Library theatre and The MARC. The bottom floor will be for virtual reality razmatazz (i.e., VR, “augmented” whatever-the-fuck reality, mixed bullshit reality and outside-your-mind artificial bullshit intelligence).

Ray is located just across the parking lot from the “Yarrow” hotel, which of course has been called the Doubletree for the last couple of years. The 295-seat Park Avenue theatre, which is mainly for press screenings, is located inside that drafty establishment.

HE’s headline notwithstanding, the Ray is not named for the late Aldo Ray, a hot actor in the early to mid ’50s who was much loved by Harry Cohn. .

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Oscar Bait Movie Is Over

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Jordan Ruimy and I recorded a chat three or four hours ago, but the batteries in my recently purchased Olympus recorder died about 12 minutes in….brilliant. But two good things came out of our chat, and they both belong to Jordan, at least in this context.

Oscar-bait movies are regarded askance by younger industry types plus the new guild and Academy members. And this, Ruimy believes, is why Steven Spielberg‘s The Post never caught on. People smelled Oscar-bait calculation from the get-go, and they don’t like the mindset (an “important” story or theme done classy, aimed at 50-plus types, bucks-up stars and screenwriters) and the “game” of it all.

The 45-and-unders looked at this well-written, respectably made prestige flick with two boomer superstars (Streep, Hanks) and said, “Where is it written that we all have to stand up and salute Oscar-bait movies like little toy soldiers every fucking November and December?”

The fact is that two of the hottest Best Picture contenders — Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water and Jordan Peele‘s Get Out — are pretty close to B movies, or at least what used to be regarded as B-level material — a romantic monster flick and a dark horror-zombie satire.


Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’56)

Jack Arnold and William Alland’s The Creature From The Black Lagoon (’54).

In the mid 50s the forebears of these films — The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Invasion of the Body Snatchers — never had a chance of any kind of Oscar attention, much less respect, but The Creature from the Love Lagoon and Invasion of the White Suburban Obama Lovers are right at the top of the heap today.

Ruimy also believes that Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri may start losing cred due to backlash articles that I, frankly, haven’t paid attention to. One is Matthew Olson‘s 1.8.18 Digg piece titled “Expect The ‘Three Billboards’ Backlash To Dominate All Oscars Talk — Here’s Why.” Another is a Maeve McDermott USA Today piece called “The Growing Racial Backlash Against ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’,” posted on 1.3.18.

And don’t forget Bill McCuddy‘s adamant declaration that “Oscar voters will not pick Aquaman.” Older, grayer, creasier Oscar voters, he meant. The under-45s are fine with Aquaman, as noted above. Ruimy also sees an element of vulnerability in The Shape of Water.

So where does that leave us? It’s possible that both of these Fox Searchlight pieces will lose a cetain amount of steam over the next three or four weeks, and that Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird will surge in and take the big prize. Ruimy also believes that Get Out might also surge and scoop up the Best Picture Oscar, but I won’t have it…no!