My name is Billy Pilgrim, and I’ve become unstuck in time. I was just reading Anthony Breznican‘s EWinterview with Harrison Ford about Han Solo, The Force Awakens, that golf-course plane crash, etc. Ten minutes later I was told that a Bluray of Peter Weir‘s Witness, in which Ford gave his first lead performance that really landed, will arrive on Thursday or Friday after a long delay. And then right after that I was reminded of Bernard Girard‘s Dead Heat on a Merry-Go Round (’66), in which Ford had his first speaking part, on 12.15. And then I went back to EW and noticed that Carrie Fisher has suddenly slimmed down (serious HE respect) and no longer looks like Elton John.
I had my second viewing last night of Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul (Sony Pictures Classics, 12.18). The previous time was in Cannes seven months ago, but it packed the same punch. I noticed an hour ago that Sony Pictures Classics has no teaser or trailer up, and it seems that there should be. Some kind of acknowledgement that a major Holocaust flick is coming down the pike in January that will qualify in December and that, you know, it’s absolutely essential to deal with it.
Shot entirely in close-ups (and occasional medium close-ups), Son of Saul is a Hungarian-made, soul-drilling, boxy-framed art film about an all-but-mute fellow (Geza Rohrig) with a haunted, obliterated expression. This titular-named survivor — a walking dead man, a kind of ghost — toils in an Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp as a Sonderkommando — i.e., prisoners who assisted the Germans in exterminating their fellow inmates in order to buy themselves time.
I’ve noted before that I found Sauldevastating. “No day at the beach but one of the most searing and penetrating Holocaust films I’ve ever seen,” I wrote on 5.14.15, “and that’s obviously saying something.”
From Shia LeBeouf we expect more than eccentricity — we expect behavior that challenges conventional notions of, like, sane or sensible. We expect intensity and vulnerability. We expect tears, drunkenness, car accidents, a fine madness, paper bags, etc. We expect to see LeBeouf teetering on the precipice of a sheer cliff in a rainstorm. So I’m not sure that allowing people to watch him as he watches all his movies in reverse chronological order is nutty enough. On top of which LeBeouf has seemed sane, calm and good-humored as he’s watched Nymphomaniac, Part 1. So…why? What’s the point of boring people? I want LeBeouf to get naked, paint himself like an Amazonian native, go up to the Empire State building’s observation deck and jump off with a parachute and then shoot colored flares in the air as he floats down to 34th Street and reads poetry into a bullhorn. The AllMyMovies performance-art piece will unspool on a 24-hour basis and will last until sometime on Thursday. It’s happening live at Manhattan’s Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston Street. Anyone can drop by. Admission is free.
The second Carey Mulligan/Suffragette event in a week starts a half-hour from now at Spago, and then this evening Peter Landesman‘s Concussion screens at AFI fest. Will the Will Smith-starring drama play in a straight, forthright and comprehensive way or somewhat de-balled, as those hacked Sony emails indicated a few weeks back via that 9.2 N.Y. Times story? And will Smith acquire serious consideration (i.e., from tough guys like myself as opposed to the blogging glandhanders who say everybody’s a legit contender) for a Best Actor nomination? The answer will be on Twitter by 10:30 or 11 pm this evening.
I for one would prefer the Starbucks holiday cup from two or three years ago, the one that depicted a smiling Jesus of Nazareth and Santa Claus giving each other a bro hug and armed with high-powered rifles and riding from home to home in an airborne sleigh, hauled by eight flying reindeer with Rudolph in the lead position. Target practice, dropping smart bombs on ISIS, and protectin’ the wimmin folk from rapists and, you know, “illegal” persons of a questionable, other-than-white-bread complexion who are probably up to no good.
Anonymous Content’s Michael Sugar tossed me a little tidbit during yesterday’s Spotlight lunch at Craig’s, to wit: Within a year or so an “Academy app” will surface that will allow Academy members to watch all the films in awards contention in high-def, but one that will also be configured so that recording content will be impossible. No more DVDs, no video links…all of that trash-canned.
Some genius whose name Sugar couldn’t remember is working on the Academy app as we speak, he said, but it won’t be available until next year at this time via the new Apple TV (and presumably also via Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire and Android TV streamers).
My requests for follow-up info from Sugar haven’t born fruit so can anyone supplement this information? Has anyone heard of this app, who the developer is, when it might be available (i.e., is Sugar’s info on the money?), which streamers it might be available on (or is it strictly an Apple TV thing?), etc.
This Chasing Ice footage is almost three years old but I’d never watched it before this morning. (It was posted six days ago on Upworthy.) A Manhattan-sized glacier breaking off in one big craaahhhhck and groan and kuhr-sploosshhhh, as captured by photographer James Balog in Greenland. “That was really the smoking gun showing how far outside normal, natural variation the world has become,” Balog said in a 2012 interview with ThinkProgress. “And that’s when I started to really get the message that this was something consequential and serious and needed to be dealt with.” More Arctic landmass has melted away in the last 20 years than over the previous 10,000 years. Response from hinterland knuckle-draggers: “Drill, baby, drill!”
“Yeah, I thought Fassbender did a fine job, but Jobs came off as a prick, and no one wants to vote for a prick. Well, you can be a prick, I guess, but you need panache or some other redeeming quality. And with Jobs/Fassbender, he was just a plain old prick. This is still Leo’s award to lose. Based on what’s been leaking out about The Revenant, he’s going to have to kill a hooker the week before the Oscars or run someone over in his car to fuck this one up. It’s basically ‘Asshole who shunned his own daughter / treated others like shit’ versus ‘Guy who killed bear / survived near death to kick ass and take names’…no contest.” — posted yesterday on HE by Le Samourai.
Today I attended a press/Academy lunch at Craig’s for Spotlight director Tom McCarthy, who is literally the toast of the town right now. Received last weekend from a producer pal: “I thought it was wonderful. It may be the first time I really liked Liev Schreiber — he was amazing. Keaton amazing. Ruffalo amazing. It will definitely win the ensemble cast award from the Screen Actors Guild. A major contender for Best Picture.”) Nobody except LexG is anything less than over-the-waterfall in praise for this fact-based drama, which was produced by Steve Golin, whom I ran into recently at the Middleburg Film Festival. (The other producers are Blye Faust, Nicole Rocklin and Michael Sugar.) Also in attendance: Open Road honcho Tom Ortenberg, Spotlight award-campaign consultant Lisa Taback, Jackie Bisset, Dermot Mulroney, Nic Coster.
Spotlight director Tom McCarthy chatting with Gregg Ellwood at Craig’s — Monday, 11.9, 1:10 pm.
Last Friday attended a Musso & Frank luncheon for Kent Jones‘ Hitchcock/Truffaut (Cohen Media, 12.2), which is vying, naturally, for a Best Feature Documentary nomination. Which it fully deserves. Just as I fully deserve to eat free food occasionally. (Actually that analogy doesn’t work — scratch that.) Jones’ doc is as good and scholarly and reverential as films of this sort get. If you don’t know your Hitchcock, you will after seeing it.
I first saw Hitchcock/Truffaut in Paris last May, a week prior to its 5.19 Cannes Film Festival debut. I called it “a sublime turn-on — a deft educational primer about the work and life of Alfred Hitchcock and, not quite equally but appreciably, Francois Truffaut. Efficient, well-ordered, devotional.”
(l.) Kent Jones, director and co-writer (with Serge Toubiana) of Hitchcock/Truffaut as well as the top programming dog at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and (r.) Cohen Media’s Daniel Battsek at Musso & Frank — Friday, 11.6, 1:40 pm.
Kent was his usual cool, erudite, laid-back self. Dressed in a Stanley Kubrick-like dark blue suit.
I asked him again about getting screen-capture images of some Psycho images of Hitch shooting the Phoenix hotel room scene (Janet Leigh, John Gavin) — images I’d never seen before. Apparently they’re under some kind of copyright lock and key or whatever. Jones had nothing to tell me about these images last May, and he still doesn’t. I’ll never see these images up-close.
Hitchcock/Truffaut “didn’t tell me anything about Hitchcock or his many films or Truffaut’s renowned ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut‘ book (a feature-length q & a interspersed with frame captures from Hitch’s films) that I didn’t already know, but that’s okay — almost every detail of the book’s material was absorbed into my system decades ago.
A Bluray of the most HE-loathed movie of 2015 arrived two or three days ago. The second I opened the package the stomach acid returned. “What’s wrong is that movies like this are deathly boring and deflating and toxic to the soul. They’re anti-fun, anti-life, anti-cinema, anti-everything except paychecks. Furious 7 is odious, obnoxious corporate napalm. It is fast, flashy, thrompy crap that dispenses so much poison it feels like a kind of plague. Wan’s film is certainly a metaphor for a kind of plague that has been afflicting action films for a good 20-plus years.” — from my 3.31.15 review.
Look at what Goldfinger (’64) and Thunderball (’65) made when you adjust for inflation — $550 and $600 million domestic, which is way above the grosses of any Bond films since. From Russia With Love (’63) did better than all the Roger Moore Bonds except for The Spy Who Loved Me, and roughly as well as all the Brosnans and two out of three Craigs (Skyfall being the bang exception). But even Skyfall is dwarfed by Goldfinger/Thunderball, and is evenly matched by You Only Live Twice. Even little, new-to-the-marketplace Dr. No (’62) — the first 007 starring a relatively unknown Sean Connery — took in $150 million by 2015 standards. The lowest earners of all were the two Daltons — The Living Daylights and License to Kill.
