What Does Shape of Water’s 12.8 Release Mean?

by

Guillermo del Toro and I did breakfast at the Hotel Majestic during the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. He was serving as a juror. While our chat was off the record, I think it’s fair to mention that he said he was tiring of making big, effects-driven movies (i.e., Pacific Rim) and that he wanted to tone it down and go in a more personal vein. I took that to mean he wanted to make more films in the vein of Pans’ Labrynth, The Devil’s Backbone, Chronos, Mama, The Orphanage, etc. (The last two he produced but didn’t direct.)

I’ve been presuming all along that The Shape of Water, a period fantasy-adventure which he directed and co-wrote, would be one of these. But will it be? The fact that Fox Searchlight has announced a 12.8 release date indicates a belief in its award-season potential. Or does a December release mean all that much when we’re talking about GDT’s fantastical realm? I’m saying in the most respectful and laudatory terms that GDT doesn’t do “Oscar friendly” as a rule. I mean that as high praise.**

Read more

Last Days of Classic HE

by

HE readers need to understand…hell, I need to understand that this may be the last full week of classic Hollywood Elsewhere. Assembling the new design has been hell, but once the mock-up ads are created and put in place and I’ve sat down with Sasha Stone and learned the new WordPress scheme, the switch will be thrown. That may happen…I don’t want to predict but possibly by next Monday or Tuesday. Maybe. Advisory: The smartphone edition will be narrower than the wide-angle laptop version, which will result in some elements (like my headshot) being sliced off. HE’s classic design lasted 12 and 2/3 years — the site launched in mid-August 2004.

Read more

Image of Yeshua Has Never Sunk So Low

by

Jesus Christ has long been imagined by U.S. heartland types as a handsome, Anglo-Saxon guy with kindly brown eyes and gleaming, shoulder-length hair. Then came Jeffrey Hunter‘s blue-eyed Nazarene in Nicholas Ray‘s King of Kings (’61) and jokes about Christ being retailored to suit pop-culture tastes — “I was a teenaged Jesus.” With the ascent of the Christian right in the late ’70s Jesus became a more staunchly Anglicized figure — a vaguely conservative Orange County guy with pearly white teeth and broad shoulders, and who always wore freshly-pressed white robes. Since Donald J. Trump‘s inauguration some fringe-y conservative Christians (like Joshua Feurstein) have publicly embraced a belief that Trump’s political agenda and the spiritual tradition of Jesus Christ are more or less aligned. Did I say “fringe’y”? I meant foam-at-the-mouth insane.

Read more

Good As It Got

by

The first and only time I saw Robert Bresson‘s L’Argent was inside one of those little shoebox theatres in the old Beverly Center. It was either during the fall of ’83 or the winter of ’84. Based on Leo Tolstoy‘s “The Forged Coupon”, and Bresson’s final film. Dry, subtle, precise. Bresson never faked anything — movie-pretend wasn’t in his vocabulary. When his protagonist (Christian Patey) killed a family with an axe near the end, Bresson only suggested the killings, and chastely at that. The Criterion Bluray pops on 7.11.17.

Later that month Criterion is also releasing a Bluray of Albert Brooks’ Lost in America (’85). Will Criterion’s 2K restoration deliver the necessary “bump”? Let’s hope so. I’ll buy it for (a) the conversation between Brooks and filmmaker Robert Weide, (b) interviews with Julie Hagerty, executive producer Herb Nanas and director James L. Brooks, and (c) an essay on this seminal Reagan-era film by Scott Tobias.

Steamy Habits

by

Don’t tell Glenn Kenny but there were two hot lesbo nun movies at Sundance ’17 — Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate, which delivers a single, highly affecting erotic scene in the third act, and Jeff Baena‘s The Little Hours, which I’m told was the “real” hot lesbo nun movie to see. Obviously more bawdy than “hot”. The Boccaccio-inspired comedy stars Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Kate Micucci, Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon. It opens on 6.30.17 via Gunpowder & Sky, which bought John Sloss‘s Filmbuff last fall.

Persistence of Dance Camera West

by

Dance Camera West is an annual two-weekend Los Angeles film festival about…you’ll never guess.  Okay, the transportation of dancing.  It’s been a thing for 16 years, but I didn’t know that until this morning. Because I’m not exactly a dance enthusiast. I respect and admire great dancing (I’ll never forget a Twyla Tharp show I saw at the Winter Garden in the ’80s), but it doesn’t make me levitate as a rule. But I like it.

The Dance Camera West Film Festival, a selection of dance-themed shorts with a feature or two thrown in, kicks off on Thursday night (4.20) at Royce Hall, and will continue over the weekend at UCLA’s Fowler Museum ($12 admission). Free stuff will occur the following weekend at the Santa Monica Pier.

Tonia Barber, a friend of HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko, has been running the operation and programming the films for six years now. She’s paid a modest salary, works hard, consults with a board…the usual razmatazz. But she’s mainly doing it for love, or so it seems.

“The films we show don’t capture dance…we show films in which dance was made for the camera,” Barber says. “The festival has a certain history, a certain audience and it has to exist. It has to be out there, and I would feel really sad if it wasn’t.”

Weren’t the legendary dance numbers of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly all about integrating dance, atheleticism, camera moves and production design? Sure, she says, but “the technology of that time created that product…dance films today are more fluid and free-form, more about improv, nativism.. shot hand-held, drones, GoPro…how people have come to capture the form.”

Read more

Standing Against Marvel Tide

by

I place a lot more trust in Jeff Sneider‘s snap judgment on Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (Disney, 5.5.) than all the Marvel-fellating twitter whores combined. Do you think it’s some kind of ringing endorsement when Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn says it plays “exactly as advertised”? He’s calling it Marvel assembly-line flotsam. You have to expect a certain amount of spurious reactions from attention-seeking trolls, but you can’t dismiss Kohn and Sneider.

Ralph Bellamy (speaking to Lee Marvin about Burt Lancaster in Act One of The Professionals): “But is he trustworthy? Can he be relied upon?” Marvin: “I trust him.”

Read more

Fell Into This, Didn’t Want It To End

by

Howard Stern, Robin Quivers and Gary Busey had this conversation eons ago, but I don’t care. I love Busey’s deep-down, gravelly-voiced, glint-of-madness thing. On the other hand he’s a fucking Trump supporter and a Promise Keeper, which is more or less a rightwing character-building Jesus thing for older guys. Creepy. But I really loved this conversation, and I wish I could share in a few conversations of this type on my own. Not the aggressive aspects but the open-book, this-is-who-and-what-I-really-am stuff.

Lede Seriously Buried

by

Last Thursday (4.13) a major Guardian story (“British Spies Were First To Spot Trump Team’s Links With Russia“) about Russian-Trump collusion appeared. The 34th and final paragraph says the following: “One source suggested the official [American] investigation was making progress. ‘They now have specific concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion,’ the source said. ‘This is between people in the Trump campaign and agents of [Russian] influence relating to the use of hacked material.'” I read a hint of this on Twitter but it didn’t sink in — apologies.

Live And Die By The Sword

by

The gist of “Smartphones Are The New Cigarettes,” a 4.17 Think Global piece by Mark Manson, is that constantly eyeballing your phone screen and otherwise divorcing yourself from the life’s natural changes and currents is declasse behavior, or something that only low-lifes are succumbing to. Those with class and cultivation are dodging that stereotype with a passion, he’s saying, and if you’re still acting like a mutt you should probably reassess things.

Speak for yourself, pal. I’m well aware of the declasse aspect and am always careful not to yank my phone out in mixed company, and if so only for a minute or less. But in my own lone-wolf realm I’m a three-pack-a-day man, especially with the constant copy editing, searching for ideas and the endless twitter duelling, and that will never change. Like, ever.

Will All Movies One Day Be Watched With One Eye While Checking Twitter Feeds?

by

In a 4.17 Indiewire piece, critic David Ehrlich laments the impression that Netflix movies aren’t really movies because the only theatrical experience they’ll receive is at this or that film festival. Because once they turn up on Netflix, they’re just part of the churning digital swarm on this or that device. As Ehrlich puts it, it’s the fate of all Netflix movies to be “quietly uploaded to a computer server and added to an ever-expanding menu of content in the cloud. I saw it in a theater; you’ll see it buried somewhere between Iron Fist and Sandy Wexler.”

If I had labored hard and gone into heavy debt to make a feature film, I would be overjoyed if Netflix picked it up because at least I would be made whole and could then go on to make another film. But I would also feel a bit drained knowing that my film will never experience the slightest theatrical pulsebeat.

In the eyes of many Amazon is doing it right with their commitment (recently reiterated at Cinemacon) to give new films some kind of theatrical exposure before streaming them. In Ehrlich’s view, a Netflix acquisition means being sent to a kind of digital elephant’s graveyard.

“If a movie premieres on Netflix, is it still even a movie?,” he writes. “In an age where the word ‘film’ is often a misnomer and content is classified less by the intent of its production than by the means of its distribution, it could be said that movies — at least for the time being — are simply things that play in movie theaters. It may seem like a matter of semantics, but I think we’re talking about qualitatively different experiences.

Read more