Paul Verhoeven’s Elle is one wickedly perverse, end-of-the-world, ice-cold erotic whodunit. It’s not really a thriller as much as a fascinating character study of Isabelle Huppert‘s Michele, a 50something owner of a Parisian videogame company that creates violent rape fantasies, and how a series of assaults and shocks that befall her character are reflective of Michele’s pathology and that of the general drift of social mores these days.

So Elle is partly social criticism and partly a kind of sex comedy. Except you can’t really call it comedic or farcical. Well, you can but the humor is flavored with a chilly, amoral undertow that smothers the hah-hah. But it’s constantly amusing. And the film is sharp, direct and fat-free — the best or least problematic Verhoeven film since Basic Instinct or even Robocop. It runs 130 minutes but feels like 100, if that.

Elle is partly a kinky sex fantasia (i.e., get to know your rapist), partly a twisted tale of perverse karma stretching back decades, partly a portrait of social dysfunction and moral indifference, partly a Verhoeven-styled wicked game movie (he’s always been into kinky abandon of one kind of another), and partly a woman’s empowerment saga. I found it completely pleasurable despite the fact that the air conditioning wasn’t working in Scotiabank #2. It was awful in there.

David Birke‘s screenplay is adapted from Philippe Djian’s novel, but it really feels like Satan wrote it. Satan in a dry, whimsical, fuck-all mood.

It starts with Michele, a resident of a tony Paris suburb, being brutally raped by some guy whose face is covered by a black head mask. This being a Verhoeven film, Michelle is shocked and traumatized and perhaps a little bit turned on by the attack.

Read more

I caused a ghastly mess this morning in my friend’s condo. All in an attempt to heat water for coffee. I’ve never been very practical or handy-minded, and sometimes I do incredibly boneheaded things. But that’s me. I’m the kind of guy who calls AAA to have a tire changed. Partly because I don’t trust my abilities (I so hate changing tires that I instantly reject the idea) and partly because I don’t want to get my hands greasy. My hands must be clean at all times. Kind of a Howard Hughes-type deal.

In any event I woke up in the usual unfocused state but relatively clear of mind. I wanted some coffee. I saw a silver heating pot sitting on a pad of some kind, but I didn’t think to notice (because I’m an alien from Tralfamadore) that the pot had a plastic connector heating device on the bottom. I have an electric water-heating pot at home so I know about filling it up and then pushing a button to start the process, but in the fog of the moment I just figured “okay, no button on the pot so I’ll just fill it and heat the water on the stove.” So like a donkey I put the pot on the stove for coffee, turned the heat up halfway and took a shower.

Four minutes later (my showers never last longer than that) the place was filled with smoke, and then the fire alarm went off. The plastic on the bottom of the pot had melted onto the stove. A torrent of smoke. Melted plastic on the stove and linoleum counter, on two green bath towels, on the kitchen rug and the wooden floor — the kind of thing only a flake whose thoughts are elsewhere much of the time could manage.

Read more

Hollywood Elsewhere arrived in Toronto yesterday afternoon around 2:30 pm. The weather felt like Panama in July. I was wearing a heavy leather jacket that was perfect for those cool nighttime strolls in Telluride, but inappropriate here. Sticky and sweating and lugging three heavy bags, I picked up my press badge and other materials at the Bell Lightbox.

Armed with a new iPhone 6,Plus, I was then forced to spend two hours with the AT&T guys because my unlimited data international plan …forget it, too tedious to recount.

I’m staying at an old friend’s place at TwentyGothic, a condo complex in High Park. He met me there around 5:30 pm, and then we did dinner. And then he left for the country.

I would have been up and watching my first TIFF film — Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Commune — at 9:45 am. Alas, a small tragedy occured at 7:30 this morning. [See above.]

Five and a half years ago Deadline‘s Michael Fleming described Gold, which was then a Michael Mann project, as “a contemporary Treasure of the Sierra Madre-type treasure hunt about prospectors and speculators involved in a chase for gold.” Mann bailed in 2012, and then Spike Lee was going to direct until he quit, and then it finally became a Stephen Gaghan project. I don’t know what Gold is or what it will feel like as a feature, but the trailer [after the jump] is trying to sell a jaunty, scary-funny tale of outrageous fortune. The interest in making something in the vein of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre may have been sincere four or five years ago, but that notion has clearly gone out the window since. Matthew McConaughey (transformed), Edgar Ramirez, Bruce Dallas Howard, Corey Stoll, Toby Kebbell.

Read more

“Did you lose a child, Howard?” There’s another film opening this fall (a good one) that deals with a similar situation, but the seeming difference in tone between that unnamed film and David Frankel‘s Collateral Beauty (New Line, 12.16) is quite marked. This thing feel so precious. The metaphor of the dominoes scares me. “You’ve been given a gift” gives me the willies. I began to mutter “uh-oh” less than 20 seconds in. We all know what a movie can feel like when Will Smith is playing a guy in pain. Remember Seven Pounds? Collateral Beauty feels like a close relation. I’ll tell you who’s in pain — costar Edward Norton. His face seems to say “I’m regretting this…I think I made a mistake.”

We all knew Hiddleswift would be over before long, but I was figuring on six months, not three. A hot but brief affair should endure, in my mind, a good half year. That’s how long my last firecracker relationship (May to October of ’13) lasted. Two months of undiluted bliss, two months of things levelling out with this or that issue surfacing but good times continuing, and two months for the wind-down and someone (usually me) finally getting the heave-ho.

There’s only one way to make an affair last six months or six years, and that’s to devote yourself hook, line and sinker to giving your Type-A , high-maintenance girlfriend absolutely everything she might want plus extras. If you hook up with a beautiful headstrong narcissist you’re going to get dropped sooner or later, but the ride is usually worth it because the sex is so good it makes you weep with gratitude. I’m guessing that’s what Hiddleston is telling himself right now.

Read more

Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney: “Extraordinary in its piercing intimacy and lacerating in its sorrow, Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie is a remarkably raw portrait of an iconic American First Lady, reeling in the wake of tragedy while at the same time summoning the defiant fortitude needed to make her husband’s death meaningful, and to ensure her own survival as something more than a fashionably dressed footnote.

“Powered by an astonishing performance from a never-better Natalie Portman in the title role, this unconventional bio-drama also marks a boldly assured English-language debut for Larrain, the gifted Chilean director behind such films as No, The Club and Neruda.”

Variety‘s Guy Lodge: “Eschewing standard biopic form at every turn, this brilliantly constructed, diamond-hard character study observes as the exhausted, conflicted Jackie attempts to disentangle her own perspective, her own legacy and, perhaps hardest of all, her own grief from a tragedy shared by millions.

Read more

Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight (A24, 10.21) was the favorite Telluride flick in an Indiewire critics poll posted yesterday. Eight out of 17 critics called it their #1. The second favorite film was Damien Chazelle‘s La La Land. The Moonlight acclaim is a good thing all around — good for Barry, A24, the p.c. brigade — except for the fact that it’s a little too emphatic. Down the road it may have the same effect that Peter Sellars calling it a “masterpiece” had on my reaction last weekend.

“Moonlight didn’t destroy me or rock my soul, but I was impressed and moved,” I wrote last Saturday. “I admired it as far as it went. I just had to adjust myself to what it is as opposed to the earth-shaker that some have been describing.”

A friend asked yesterday “what Moonlight‘s prospects might be with the Academy (or lack thereof)…hearing many different perspectives on this.”

“Moonlight is a 100% respectable, commendable, finely tuned accomplishment,” I replied, “but its overwhelming popularity in the Indiewire poll indicates another p.c. circle-jerk, akin to the ecstatic reception that Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation received last January at Sundance. Get behind the cool new black helmer, the former Telluride volunteer, the guy who’s delivered an intimate, Boyhood-like exploration of black gayness…garlands for the conqueror.

Read more

My Jet Blue flight from Albuquerque arrived at JFK this morning at 5:45 am. Two hours sleep, if that. I crashed on Jett’s couch from 9 to 11 and then filed a few. I now have to head into Manhattan to replace my dead iPhone 6 Plus and then, once that’s done, walk over to a tech place on St. Marks to make sure it’s fully updated via the latest Cloud capturings. This sounds old-fashioned but I might even ask them to migrate data from the dead phone to the newbie, just to be thorough. Some dinner this evening, a touch of relaxation, more filing early tomorrow and then out to Newark at 10 ayem to catch a 12 noon Porter flight for Toronto.

I’m not expecting that Criterion’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller Bluray (10.11) will clean up or digitally improve upon that atrocious-looking fake snowstorm that dominates the finale of Robert Altman‘s 1971 western. It should be improved upon but it won’t be. Criterion never upgrades or otherwise second-guesses the composition of a film, no matter how bad it may appear by present-day standards. I just want to be clear about what I expect to see when the Bluray pops.

A few weeks back: “This candle-and-kerosene-lighted classic is already dark and smokey, and given their established tendencies the Criterion guys would probably take it even deeper into the cave.I’m fearful because I dislike their darkened-down 4K version of Only Angels Have Wings, and I’m no fan of the seemingly darker Bluray of The Player. Enough with the inky.”

Read more

I was too consumed by the Telluride Film Festival to pay attention to this 9.2 Boston Globe piece by Ty Burr, which is probably prescient. It basically reiterates that as the mass audience has become more and more ADD, ignorant and sloth-like, the culture of cool, intelligent, educated-viewer cinema, while generating steady if modest returns, is becoming a smaller and smaller aspect of the movie business — a kind of cafe-society culture.

This observation was echoed in a 9.5 Indiewire piece by Eric Kohn.

“This is where the cinema is headed as its more commercial iteration — we still call them blockbusters, although few blocks are busted nowadays — founders on creative bankruptcy and an audience that will inevitably move on to other forms of entertainment,” Burr wrote. “I called it the jazz-club metaphor in a column last week and the parallel holds: As the two-hour theatrical film falls slowly out of mainstream orbit, it becomes increasingly the province of a smaller but self-selected audience of movie-literate cognoscenti, old, young, and in between.

“The Oscar season caters to the broader end of that audience but no further: The last five best picture winners have averaged a comparatively paltry $65 million at the box office (the number falls to $47 million once you factor out Argo).

“Even those diehards are watching movies as part of a larger audio-visual diet that is in serious technological and cultural flux. I could easily say that Lemonade was the best movie I saw this spring and Stranger Things was the best movie I saw this summer, and if you reply that they’re not movies because they didn’t play in theaters or conform to a two-hour run time, I’d say you’re living in the past. The Hollywood studios still feel comfortable in that paradigm but they’re starting to look like the only ones. Maybe they’re the suicide squad.”

The National Board of Review is, of course, that small, storied organization whose annual movie-award choices dominate the conversation for three or four hours each year around the beginning of December. They are always the first to announce a Best Picture winner and so on. Last year they announced their picks on December 1, 2015, or exactly a day before the New York Film Critics Circle announced their winners on 12.2.15. This year, however, there’s a new early bird outfit in town — the Critics Choice Awards, which have been annually handed out by the Broadcast Film Critics Association (of which I am a member) for years now. On 8.18.16, however, the BFCA announced its intention to ace the influence of the Golden Globe Awards by holding the Critic Choice Awards on Sunday, 12.11. But the BFCA also announced that initial balloting would begin on the morning of 11.28.16 and end on 11.29.16, late in the day or early evening. The BFCA noms will be announced on 12.1.16. Hence, it would appear, the NBR had to advance their schedule by a day.