“The Family Fang [is] a sharply drawn portrait of a dysfunctional, tortured artistic family that speaks affectingly to the troubled legacy that all parents inevitably bequeath to their children. Following his raucous and foul-mouthed Bad Words, director-star Jason Bateman shows marked progress and deepening maturity as a filmmaker with this cleverly structured but never arch or mechanical adaptation of Kevin Wilson’s 2011 comic novel, with Bateman and Nicole Kidman nicely inhabiting one of the more tender and persuasive brother-sister relationships in recent movie memory.” — from Justin Chang‘s Toronto Film Festival review, posted 9.14.15.

“You think we damaged you? You have kids, you’re gonna damage them. That’s what parents do. So what?”

Chris Walken‘s line is obviously meant to zing and appall, but it’s not untrue. One way or another parents are going to get it wrong, screw up, fail to show enough love…you name it. When I was nine or ten I used to have furious debates with myself about who was worse, my dad or my mom. There was no doubt in my mind that they were abusers who lacked insight and kindness, and were beyond uncool. Guess what? I still think that, but having made mistakes of my own as a dad and having gradually come to appreciate my parents as people and personalities above and beyond their parental shortcomings, I forgave them a long time ago. Sooner or later every kid has to stand up and say, “Okay, that happened but here I am now, the captain of my own ship.”

ESPN’s seven-hour O.J.: Made in America was screened over an entire day at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, but there was no way to swing that. A follow-up press screening or two between now and the mid-June air dates would be good. On Saturday, 6.11 ESPN Films will debut the first episode on ABC. The opener will then re-air it on ESPN along with four subsequent segments starting on Tuesday, 6.14.

Variety‘s Brian Lowry, filed from Park Cty on 1.22.16: “O.J.: Made in America takes its title to heart, adding rich contextual layers to the case, including a dive into the history of Los Angeles race relations that played such a central role in his acquittal.

“Writer-director Ezra Edelman has been provided an enormous canvas, one that allows him to cut back and forth between the football star’s seemingly charmed life and the world that surrounded him.

There was some kind of junket press screening last night for Anthony and Joe Russo‘s Captain America: Civil War (Marvel/Disney, 5.6). To go by Twitter, the general response has been ecstatic. I would have loved to attend, being an ardent Russo-brothers fan and all, but this was for people doing interviews. Pic has a running time of 2 hours and 27 minutes, apparently the longest Marvel flick to date.

For the time being Kino Lorber is keeping mum about their forthcoming Bluray of Carl Reiner‘s Where’s Poppa (’70), which will pop on 7.19. I haven’t seen this bizarre, occasionally hilarious Jewish-guilt comedy in eons, and I know it hasn’t had any kind of upgrade since it appeared as an MGM/UA DVD 14 years ago. As it’s out of print, a new copy of the DVD will set you back $60 so the cheaper Bluray will make sense.

Nervy for its time, Where’s Poppa? is coarse and extreme and way beyond the current limits of politically acceptable humor.

Robert Klane‘s screenplay is about a 30ish Manhattan-residing attorney (George Segal) who wants to put his highly eccentric, bordering-on-senile mother (Ruth Gordon) in an old-folks home but feels hamstrung by a pledge made to his dying dad that he’d never do that. His married brother Sid (a non-toupee’d Ron Leibman) made the same pledge and guilt-trips Segal along these lines. The issue is forced when Segal falls in love with a nurse (Trish Van Devere) whom he hires to take care of Gordon.

There’s a running gag about a trio of black Central Park muggers (one of them played by SNL‘s Garrett Morris) accosting Leibman and stealing his clothes and later forcing him into taking part in a half-rape. I remember one of the muggers saying to Leibman, “Lookie, man…everybody’s gotta make a buck, right? So how’re we supposed to make a buck when you walk across Central Park but you don’t bring any bread?”

I also seem to recall Van Devere telling Segal about some guy she’d gone out with who “went ca-ca” on the bed.

The Guardian‘s David Smith has posted a 4.9 piece about how residents of Chappaqua, the leafy, well-tended hamlet 45 minutes north of New York City, feel about Bill and Hillary Clinton, who moved there after leaving the White House in January 2000.

Excerpt: “Stan Amberg, 81, a retired lawyer, recalled sitting with his coffee and newspaper at Lange’s Little Store, a deli where the Clintons often take breakfast away in brown paper bags, and where the former President introduced himself one day.

“He came over and said, ‘My name’s Bill, mind if have coffee with you?’ He’s very approachable and he loves kids. He gets down on his knees and talks eye to eye with them. She can’t do that. She has this issue with engaging. I don’t know if it’s an inherent problem with her personality.'”

Smith re-posts a recent Hillary quote: “I am not a natural politician, in case you haven’t noticed, like my husband or President Obama.”

I don’t know (or care to know) the address of the Clinton abode but you know what’s odd? Consult Google Maps and you’ll see a highlighted designation that says U.S. Secret Services along with an address (480 Bedford Road, Chappaqua, NY 10514). You’d think the Secret Service guys who shadow the Clintons would want to keep things on the down low, no?

To fix HE’s Sony 4K sound-synch problem all I have to do is buy and apply the following items: (1) Catchin’ Synch, a sound-synch testing app that can be installed on any half-decent audio-visual receiver ($14), (2) a Marantz NR15065 Audio/Video Surround Receiver with Bluetooth and Wifi ($500) and (3) an Oppo BDP-103 player, which allows the viewer to adjust sound-synch issues backward or forward ($500). Never in my life have I been fleeced like this, and the nightmare isn’t even over. I’m in hell.

I hope to never again hear of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side Of The Wind. Nor will I ever again speak of Filip Jan Rymsza or Oja Kodar or Sasha Welles or anyone else involved in this infuriating, godforsaken project. Okay, I’ll discuss/mention Peter Bogdanovich or Frank Marshall or any other peripheral players who have distinguished themselves in some other realm but the movie, which has never existed in any kind of coherent, showable, arresting form and may never in fact attain that condition, no longer exists for me.

If The Other Side Of The Wind ever appears on streaming or Bluray or in theatres I will strenuously ignore it. I’m sick of it. I’m off the boat. If anyone comes up to me and says “I will give you a thousand tax-free dollars if you’ll just sit down and watch The Other Side of The Wind,” I will look them straight in the eye like Ted Cruz does when he’s talking to TV reporters, smile, gently place my hand on their shoulder and politely refuse.

I donated $100 of my hard-earned money to help get this scattered, disjointed mess of a would-be film restored and assembled but that was then and this is now. I’ve washed my hands of it, and I’m urging everyone else to think about making a similar pledge. All together now, “To hell with The Other Side Of The Wind!

I’m all tapped out as a result of another horrible day in which I’ve tried to solve the myriad 4K sound-synch problems as far as the Oppo BD-93 Bluray and 4K Roku apps are concerned and more particularly have suffered yet another Direct TV technician miscommunication. I’m in the deepest and hottest cavern of hell right now, but I have to least say that Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation is one of the creepiest and most bizarrely chilling yuppie dinner party flicks of my lifetime. It’s not just a thriller but a conveyer of seriously demonic vibes. All my life I’ve secretly hated guys who smile as they raise wine glasses at parties and talk about how everyone should enjoy themselves as they celebrate their good fortune, and The Invitation reacquainted me with that. People who try to instruct you how to feel or who urge you to feel a certain way about this or that are, I’ve found, generally evil. That’s all I’ll say in this context. No specifics, no plot elements, no hints — they’ll only get in the way. Just see The Invitation any way you can this weekend (it’s viewable on Amazon and iTunes as well as select theatres) before the word gets out. I’m telling you it’s a stand-out. It’s also shot to the top of my Best of ’16 list. I’m so burnt from today’s head-pounding misfortunes that I’m quitting for the day and going on a long walk to flush my head out. But see this film.

Following last night’s Arclight screening of Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation, Kusama sat for a q & a with actress Kathryn Hahn.

We’ve all felt susceptible to certain dubious filmmakers, actors or genres. Movies that aren’t good for you and will only stunt your growth, but you watch them anyway. For some people it’s mid ’40s to mid ’50s big-studio musicals. For others it’s Asian martial-arts cinema. Some have a thing for lavishly made, large-format period-spectacle flicks (Quo Vadis to The Fall of the Roman Empire). For guys like Quentin Tarantino it’s ’70s grindhouse flicks with a special nod to blacksploitation. My Bluray weaknesses are for (a) film noir and (b) pre-1970 films that have almost no grain like Criterion’s Sweet Smell of Success (or which have been tastefully DNR’ed a la Universal’s Psycho and Cape Fear) and have been mastered at 1.66:1. I’ll buy almost (I say “almost)) any Bluray that fits those criteria regardless of quality. What other bad habits have you in their grip?

Recapping: Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Demolition (Fox Searchlight, 4.8) “is about a youngish, day-dreamy investment banker (Jake Gyllenhaal) succumbing to all kinds of weird, self-absorbed behavior as a way of dealing with his wife’s car-crash death. He doesn’t grieve as much go inward. He ignores his job, grows a stubble beard, becomes enamored of fixing machinery and then tearing things down.

“In so doing he begin to increasingly mystify and then piss off his father-in-law (Chris Cooper). He also slides into a nonsexual but connected relationship with a customer service rep (Naomi Watts) for a vending machine company. She has a somewhat alienated son (Judah Lewis) and a big, suspicious, more-than-a-little-angry live-in boyfriend.

“A lot of stuff gets taken apart and trashed and sledge-hammered in a kind of acted-out, fuck-it-all, let-it-fall-down way, but there’s one demolition scene that really didn’t go down very well with me, and which prompted some in the audience to groan and cry out.

“It happens when Gyllenhaal and Lewis completely wreck everything in his super-expensive home in the New York-area suburbs — furniture, walls, kitchen, music system, 70” flatscreen. “What kind of shit is this?,” I said to the screen. ‘Who wrecks a house like this? If Jake does’t want to live there, sublet it or sell it or whatever. But don’t destroy a perfectly nice house for some petty emotional reason…fuck is wrong with you, man?’

Today Filip Jan Rymsza, the tight-lipped, publicity-averse organizer of an attempt to restore Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind (upon which work has never seemingly begun) issued a bizarre non-statement. He did so in response to Ray Kelly‘s 4.4 piece on wellesnet.com that stated (a) Netflix has been negotiating to come aboard for the last few months but that (b) Welles’ longtime squeeze and partner Oka Kodar is still making trouble and delaying things by demanding this and that. (I riffed on Kelly’s article last Tuesday.)

Rymsza declined to mention the possible Netflix deal (“Naturally our conversations with potential partners have been confidential”) but says “we have been very close, at times a week or weeks away, but, through no fault of our own ” — i.e., because of that Croatian banshee Oja Kodar — “those weeks turned into months.”

Then he said “we are working tirelessly to finish the film”, which sounds questionable as he doesn’t seem to have the money to even halfway complete, much less finish, the process.

Kelly’s piece stated that Rymsza has spent $70K in legal fees and has squandered $40K on Sasha Welles‘ 11-week stay in Los Angeles in early ’15 that yielded nothing. Subtract this $110K from the $406K raised by the OSOTW Indiegogo campaign, and there’s less than $300K remaining. This against a $1.695 million pre-Netflix budget to compete the film means that Rymsza is $1.4 million in the hole.