“And though it is no one’s business, the president’s petulant personal attack against yet another woman’s looks compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift. If she had, it would be evident to anyone watching Morning Joe on their high-definition TV. She did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret. Her mother suggested she do so, and all those around her were aware of this mundane fact.” — from Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski‘s 6.30 Washington Post op-ed piece.
In order words, Mika underwent a little touch-up. Big deal.
The Greatest Showman (20th Century Fox, 12.25), a traditionally-styled musical biopic of P.T. Barnum, obviously isn’t attempting to deliver anything close to historical realism. It’s clearly a big, brassy, up-spirited musical — aimed at the ticket-buyers, full of feeling, going for the gold and the glory.
In a 6.28 Playlist piece, Greg Ellwood floated several 2017 Best Picture candidates, breaking them down into likely contenders vs. potential nominees. Here’s a fast assessment of the first category with some titles dismissed because of some hair-trigger, highly subjective, highly personal rationale or perception. 22 films are assessed here; Ellwood has more on his lists:
Ellwood’s Likely Contenders (alphabetical order):
1. Denis Villenueve‘s Blade Runner 2049 / HE says nope — high-end sci-fi stuff walks — that test-screening report about Harrison Ford not showing up until the very end doesn’t help matters.
2. Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name / HE says you bet your booty.
3. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War / HE says nope — smells dicey — Benedict Cumberbatch delivering another eccentric genius scientist performance in the wake of The Imitation Game? — Ben-Hur director Timur Bekmambetov having produced (along with Basil Iwanyk and Steven Zaillian) implies trouble.
4. Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour / Gary Oldman will obviously compete for the Best Actor Oscar, but no one has a line on the film itself.
5. Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Detroit / HE says you bet your booty, especially with those raised eyebrows over that August 4th release date having recently been lowered.
6. Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing / HE says probably, most likely …remember that Payne’s Cinemacon product reel sold everyone on this puppy…darkly funny while delivering an allegory that the dumbest popcorn-muncher will get…audacious concept, first-rate VFX, etc.
7. Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk / HE says senses uncertainty at this stage…post-production rumblings about it being more of a grand technical exercise than anything else….curious history lesson (“they got their asses kicked but they did it together, as a nation!”) mixed with knockout IMAX visuals.
8. Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project / HE says strictly Gotham and Spirit Awards.
9. Jordan Peele‘s Get Out / HE has been saying all along that this clever, racially attuned horror comedy, the kind of thing that John Carpenter might have directed in the ’70s or ’80s, has been way overhyped. Will this stop Academy members from nominating it for Best Picture? If you have to ask this, you don’t know the Academy kowtows.
Get out your guns and think about drilling those pathetic bitch liberals for “bullying and terrorizing the law abiding with their lying protests.” Stand up for freedom, stop the madness, and show these lefty assholes who’s boss. This is a real NRA ad, posted on 4.7 but breaking within the last 24. NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch sounds to me like a seriously dangerous person. Her rhetoric is meant to sound serious but it feels freaky, seemingly pushed to the edge of parody.
Last month a slew of Cannes-attending journalists and critics raved about Alejandro G. Inarritu and Emmanuel Lubezski‘s Carne y Arena, a virtual reality Mexican immigrant experience. It happened inside a hangar at the Cannes Mandelieu airport. Here’s my reaction piece, posted on 5.18.17. Everyone said the same things — immersive, visceral, jolting, head-turning, thought-provoking, unforgettable, etc.
The basic drill is “you’re really there” in the sense that you’re not watching but living it on your feet…feeling the vibe, smelling the fear, grappling with the trauma of getting busted and pushed around deep down. Border guards yelling and pointing guns as you stand barefoot on the cool desert sand at dawn, and then you drop to your knees with your hands on your head.
A longterm engagement of the exact same experience will debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art three days hence — i.e., Sunday, 7.2. It’ll cost $45 a pop if you’re not a LACMA member, student or senior. But in sharp contrast to the celebrated Cannes installation, there’s been zero promotion behind the LACMA thing. I’m guessing this is because the LACMA installation can only accommodate one person at a time (the experience lasts 6 1/2 minutes), and that the costs of presenting it will far outweigh whatever income might result so no one wants to spend too lavishly.
I understand that, but I wanted to experience it a second time and this time bring Tatyana, whom I tried to escort to the Cannes installation before being told by the IDPR guys that there was a strict “no friends or partners, only credentialed journos” policy in place. Alas, I was just told by the IDPR guys yesterday that there’ll be no assistance in visiting the LACMA thing, and if I want to catch it again I should just fork over the $45 ($90 for two of us) like anyone else. Okay, fine, but how about allowing me to see it sooner rather than later, without having to arrange my own visit from the back of the line like the rest of the citizens? Nope — you’re on your own, I was essentially told. Okay, fine. But in retrospect I wish they hadn’t been so strict in Cannes about not letting journos bring girlfriends.
John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt and Alfonso Bedoya, among many others, didn’t shoot The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (’48) from inside a silvery black-and-white membrane, but within a normal, full-color reality realm like anything else. I feel safe in saying that the first two shots were probably captured in real photographic color; the last one is colorized.
Director Paul Thomas Andersonpulled a Steven Soderbergh on Phantom Thread, the ’50s-era fashion-world drama with Daniel Day-Lewis that Focus Features will open on 12.25.
I regret to say I’m no fan of Gillian Robespierre‘s Landline (Amazon/Magnolia, 7.21), which I saw last night at the Rodeo Screening Room. (I ducked it at Sundance last January.) And I’m saying this as a devout fan of Robespierre’s Obvious Child and particularly Jenny Slate‘s performance in that noteworthy 2014 film. Slate is also the star of Landline, and I’m sorry but I didn’t care for her character this time. I didn’t care for anyone‘s character in the entire film.
If I were to run into any of these guys at a party, I’d make up an excuse and bolt within 25 or 30 minutes. Why? All they talk and think about are themselves — their own little dwarf realms. Me, me, mine, mine, why, why…unhappy, vaguely pissed off, unsatisfied, fickle this, fickle that, etc.
Set in ’90s Manhattan, Landline is cut from the same basic cloth as Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters — an episodic tale of a smartypants Upper West Side Jewish-Italian family (half-healthy, half-neurotic) and how they cope with infidelity and general middle-aged weltshmerz. It’s particularly about Slate’s Dana cheating on her fiancé Ben (Jay Duplass) with a glib lightweight type (Finn Wittrock) and how this affair precedes or somehow sparks an interest in Dana bonding with her younger, very bratty and sullen sister, Ali (Abby Quinn).
In the meantime the pater familias, John Tuturro‘s Alan Jacobs, is secretly boffing a middle-aged blonde, or actually not so secretly since his wife Pat (Edie Falco) gets wind about halfway through the film.
I just found the whole cast tedious and tiresome and flat-out dislikable. I can’t stand married characters who ask each other if they’re about to come — that’s one thing — and I despise any husband who offers to urinate on his wife’s upper leg in the shower in order to fend off poison ivy. It felt to me like the kind of typical Sundance indie that gives me a headache. I wanted to escape but I felt it would be unprofessional to do so. On top of which Tatyana was enjoying it (Landline being more or less a woman’s film) so I was stuck.
Tatyana: “I liked the movie, at least in part because it reminded me of my relationship with my slightly older sister and with my mother, who also dealt with infidelity early in her marriage. Excellent acting, very realistic, very truthful. I could feel the characters’ inner anxieties and emotions and longings. Love, infidelity, remorse, disillusion.”
Back in the Eisenhower era tail fins were de rigueur on luxury cars. Before their heyday the only kind of fins you’d see anywhere were shark fins (or more welcomely dolphin fins) while you swam at the beach (Jersey to Florida back east, San Luis Obispo to Mexico in California). Nowadays the only fins that are commercially available in any form are the plastic surfboard or boogie-board kind. I know because I was thinking about buying a pair for my recently purchased Morey boogey board, which I just bought a special leash for down at Rider Shack. I’m mentioning this because I’ve found it extremely bothersome that when you research boogey board fins online you mostly get listings for what I’ve always called flippers — i.e., simulated frog-foot slip-ons. The second problem is that if you check retail boogie-board fins cost a bit more than $100 plus labor costs to install them. I don’t think that a dilletante like myself needs them anyway.
Yesterday Deadline‘s Mike Flemingreported that Baby Driver‘s Ansel Elgort will play John F. Kennedy in a new version of P.T. 109, titled Mayday 109. I immediately rolled my eyes. Elgort would have made a note-perfect Han Solo — he’s got the slightly brash attitude, the smug assurance and the guy-ness. Han Solo directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord, not to mention producer Kathy Kennedy and the Disney brass, were dead blind not to see this. (Instead they hired a 5′ 9″, beady-eyed Rabbinical student with a gloomy countenance.) But as JFK? Probably not.
No one can play the 35th President and emerge fully unscathed. They either don’t look right or they overdo the accent or both. Elgort’s main advantage is that he’s matinee-idol handsome and slender like Kennedy, although he’s slightly disadvantaged by being too tall at 6′ 3″, or three inches higher than the Real McCoy. On top of which no one has ever quite gotten the voice, and I doubt if anyone ever will. The only way to do it properly is to (a) digitally edit and reconstitute audio recordings so that JFK himself “speaks” the dialogue or (b) hire a gifted JFK mimic to dub Elgort a la Vincent D’Onofrio‘s as Orson Welles in Ed Wood.
Why does anyone want to remake P.T. 109 in the first place? The story isn’t that riveting, for one thing. It’s just about an accidental WWII collision (Kennedy’s P.T. boat getting sliced in half by a larger Japanese ship in the dead of night) followed by some marathon swimming and then carving out an S.O.S. message on a coconut shell, blah blah. By current action-thriller standards it has next to no juice. It even seemed tepid and low-energy by the standards of 1963, which is when the original Cliff Robertson version was released. Jack L. Warner presumed it would be commercial due to JFK’s Oval Office occupancy, but who the hell cares now except for long-of-tooth boomers?
As a title, Baby Driver is definitely too literal-minded. It would have been cool if Ansel Elgort‘s character wasn’t literally called “Baby” and if he wasn’t a gifted getaway driver, but this is precisely the case in Edgar Wright‘s film. Baby Driver isn’t quite on the painful level of John Singleton‘s Poetic Justice (’93), but it’s close.
The tendency to literalize or de-poeticize movie titles hit me for the first time in ’84 when Taylor Hackford decided to drop the original Out of The Past title by calling his remake Against All Odds. Out of the Past stirs and haunts; Against All Odds promises some kind of pitched battle or macho grudge match. If only Witness had been titled Amish Hide-Out: Be Careful Among The English or One-Eyed Jacks had been called Rio Settles Score.
Today’s assignments: (a) Name other titles that have embraced explicit references rather than metaphors or allusions and (b) name titles that were too metaphorical or vague, and could have used simpler, plainer terminology.
