Reading Robbie Collin‘s recent pronouncement that The Lost City of Z (Amazon/Bleecker, 4.14) is an “instant classic” really rankled my ass. It’s a slow, tension-free dirge — a film that inspires thoughts of escape with the first 30 minutes — with a dead-fish lead performance by Charlie Hunnam. Beware of the James Gray cabal! — they live in a different world than you or I.

From my 12.22.16 review: Around the 25-minute mark I was starting to feel concerned about how much longer The Lost City of Z would last. I looked at my watch…Jesus God, almost another two hours!

“I was sitting in a rear-center seat in Alice Tully Hall, and for some wimpish reason I didn’t want to get up and risk stepping on 15 or 16 pairs of feet on the way out so I figured, ‘Stop it…be a man and stick this out…you can do it.’

“I made it to the end but it was brutal, dawg. By the time The Lost City of Z I had concluded that I really, really don’t want to watch another movie with Charlie Hunnam in the lead.

Read more

Quick wit, nice guy, open to the alpha, drawing from the well. But I’m not sensing a discerning Olympian sensibility a la Nicolas Ray, Spike Lee, Orson Welles, Samuel Fuller, Sidney Lumet, Charles Burnett or Stanley Kubrick. I’m sensing the mindset of an entertainer — a guy who’s looking to sell tickets, juice the customers, make ’em laugh. A black John Carpenter with a funny bone?

“Denzel Washington’s performance in Fences is big, bold and showy; Casey Affleck’s in Manchester by the Sea is quiet, understated and internal. Affleck had won almost all the awards until SAG chimed in. Washington’s is the kind of acting that the Academy loves to reward — when was the last time an oversized performance lost to a subtler one, or a performance as brilliantly understated as Affleck’s won? I don’t know the answer to that question, because it just doesn’t happen. Subtlety, sad to say, rarely wins acting Oscars.” — from Steve Pond‘s last and final Oscar assessment piece, posted today at 2:12 pm.

Note: I’m not going to personally fork over $20 bills to all comers if Affleck loses — you have to have a Pay Pal account.

I finally took final possession of the forest-green Mini Cooper last night around 7:30 pm. I wanted to drive it off the lot by late afternoon but the dealer needed extra time to work out registration, tags and whatnot, and the process was delayed. Which is why I wound up missing last night’s all-media screening of Get Out, which opens tomorrow night. Jordan Peele‘s horror-comedy is currently polling 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, but something tells me I might have a problem with it. Maybe. I’ll almost certainly have to catch it this weekend, and we’ll see what’s up.

Posted on 1.25.17: “The Sundance Film Festival response to Charlie McDowell‘s The Discovery (Netflix, 3.31) has been fairly dismal. Speaking as a fan of McDowell’s The One I Love, which played here three years ago, I was sorry to find that The Discovery, a dialogue-driven drama about social reactions to a scientific discovery of an afterlife, is a morose, meandering thing that never lifts off the ground. The general atmosphere of dismissal had to be a heartbreaker for McDowell, but there’s also the fact that Discovery costar Rooney Mara, whom McDowell had been in a relationship with since 2010, dumped him late last year.”

If your movie opens a film festival, it’s probably soft or inconsequential on some level – be honest. And it’s probably an even worse omen if your movie closes a film festival. You could actually double that equation if it’s closing South by Southwest, whose attendees are known for bending over backwards to celebrate geek-friendly genre movies as long as they’re seriously geeky where the rubber meets the road. I’m not saying Daniel Espinosa‘s Life is a problem, but you can tell where it’s coming from and feel the oppressive pangs of familiarity.

In a 2.22 interview with N.Y. Times reporter Dave Itzkoff, Real Time‘s Bill Maher reviews the crash-bang-boom that followed last weekend’s interview with Milo Yiannopoulos, a series of blows and exposures that led to Yiannopoulos losing his book deal and resigning from Breitbart News and more or less being banned from Planet Earth.

“What I think people saw [during the Real Time interview] was an emotionally needy Ann Coulter wannabe, trying to make a buck off of the left’s propensity for outrage. But to see him as this monster is a little crazy. You know what he is? He’s the little impish, bratty kid brother. And the liberals are his older teenager sisters who are having a sleepover and he puts a spider in their sleeping bag so he can watch them scream.”

With four days to go before the big night, we’re looking at exactly two Oscar quandaries — (1) will Denzel Washington steal the Best Actor Oscar from Casey Affleck? and (2) which awards won’t be won by Team La La? Excitement levels couldn’t be higher. On top of which Hollywood Elsewhere has been besieged by invites to hot Oscar-week parties. Well, five or six. I won’t be attending tonight’s La La Land dinner thrown by Vanity Fair and Barney’s New York; ditto the VF and Lancome party celebrating VF’s Hollywood Issue. But I’m good for JJ Abrams‘ annual Oscar Wilde bash at Bad Robot on Thursday evening and…uhhm, maybe Friday’s Hidden Figures soiree at Spago. Not to mention the big-tent Spirit Awards on Saturday, an Amazon/Manchester By The Sea viewing and after-party on Oscar night followed by a Lionsgate La La after-party at Soho House. That’s enough, I think.

“I really want you to see Moonlight in the Ozarks. Because it’s a bit of a miracle.

“The sad truth is, films like this don’t get made anymore. It is a film about a rural white boy from southern Missouri navigating his burgeoning homosexuality while simultaneously trying to overcome the perils of being raised by his conservative-minded, oxycontin-addicted single mother. It has no movie stars. It is unabashedly honest and unapologetically runs against the tide of what is commonly considered to be commercial cinema.

“It is impossible to get a movie like this made in today’s indie film ecosystem. And yet the film exists. Somehow, it got made. And thank God.

“Because this is my favorite film of the last 10 years.” — Alternative Mark Duplass letter to the Academy, contemplated and expressed in a realm that probably wouldn’t have manifested if Moonlight in the Ozarks had been made.

For the magic-hour dance scene in La La Land, choreographer Mandy Moore lifted some steps from a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers routine from Top Hat (’35). Ryan Gosling‘s dancing is spry, lithe and graceful, but I have to say (and I’m not trying to sound like an asshole) that Astaire was better at it. I love the way he briefly stops on a dime and balances on one foot, just for a second. Emma Stone and Rogers are more evenly matched.

Read more

This afternoon I was cruising through the WeHo Pavilions parking lot in search of rest. I always feel guilty about taking a full-size space as I can fit in almost anywhere, but there was nothing to be had. Just like that two spots appeared to open up. I was behind two guys. I drove past one as another swerved into a spot, and suddenly I noticed what seemed to be a third spot on the right.

I pulled in, shut the bike off.  Two or three seconds later one of the guys I had passed was honking. The honks meant “hey, I wanted that spot! It was mine — I decided that 15 seconds ago…I had dibbsees!”

Me to Angry Honker, shrugging gesture, smile: “Law of the jungle, dude. Sorry!”
Angry Honker (crew-cutted Latino guy with girlfriend/wife riding shotgun): “You’re an asshole!”
Me to Angry Honker: “Okay!”

Update from disappointed colleague (2.21, 11:30 pm): “It’s Oscar week, dude! You don’t have anything better to write about than parking at Pavilions?”

Me: “It happened, I wrote it up. But I also wrote seven article-riffs earlier today — the bludgeoning of Milo Yiannopoulos, Feud: Bette and Joan, Michael Schulman‘s New Yorker piece on the Oscar games, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Wadsworth’s forest primeval in Franklin Canyon, et. al.”

We’re all expected to despise Milo Yiannopoulos for his Breitbart-endorsed opinions and antagonistic attitude toward Lena Dunham-like feminists but — honestly? — I just couldn’t work up the animus as I watched his Bill Maher interview last weekend.

Some (many?) of his views have a cruel, obnoxious taint but Milo himself (it has to be admitted) is mildly likable. He just lost his Simon & Schuster book deal and resigned from Breitbart because of a recently surfaced video in which he said that sexual relationships between older guys and young boys occasionally have their upsides. Milo says this stuff to provoke, of course, but a big-league film director once shared the same thing with me — i.e., that he began having sex with men when he was 10 or 11, and that it wasn’t such a bad thing.

I just think that the suppression of a controversial person’s views, however odious they may seem, doesn’t reflect well on the p.c. brownshirt brigade.

From a 2.15 Publisher’s Weekly piece by Thomas Flannery, Jr.: “Milo is provocative and charismatic, which has put a huge target on his back. His book is called ‘Dangerous’ because, to many people, a gay Jew who doesn’t kowtow to the party line, jeopardizes long-held beliefs that liberals are the party of inclusion, and the other guys are the party of hatred.

“This disruption of the status quo has left many feeling threatened. When protesters try to silence Milo, when they show up to his events and physically threaten him, or scream and smear fake blood all over themselves, or riot and destroy property, they are using tactics I, as a self-described progressive, have always chided others for using. I won’t stand for it when religious groups try to silence transgender supporters, and I won’t stand for it when so-called progressives try to silence conservative voices.

Read more