So when they write Seth Rogen‘s obit in 2060 or thereabouts the first thing they’ll mention is that (a) he and Evan Goldberg pretty much triggered the Sony hack with their lampooning of Kim Jong-Un in The Interview and (b) after becoming a name-brand star with Knocked Up he mostly made low-rent throwaway comedies and (c) when all was said and done the only films that he could look back upon with any pride were The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Pineapple Express, 50/50 and to some extent Steve Jobs. But he made a lot of money, smoked a lot of weed and lived what most people would call a fairly happy life.
Middle-Eastern 4K Genie Hell
The 4K sound-synch issues still haven’t gone away. They keep teasing, nudging me, spitting in my ear. Things look pretty good on the Sony 930C 65″ 4K when I watch Blurays off the Oppo, but I can’t stop thinking that the dialogue is just slightly behind the lips. (Maybe a half second late.) Movies on the Roku Amazon app are definitely unsynched but things are okay when I watch them on Vudu. It’s driving me crazy. The regular Direct TV seems close to perfect but home-installer John Tillett, who dropped by Monday morning, said if I really want to dispense with these problems I need to buy and install some kind of sound facilitator (cost: $1K plus installation fee) which will allow me to adjust the sound/lips timing from each source. I said yes because I need to stop weeping and pulling my hair out.
Tillett also said if I want to erase any notion of a sound-synch problem with Direct TV I need to get a Direct TV 4K HR54 genie instead of what I had been given by a Direct TV guy a month or so ago, which was not a genie but a “slave.” So I went down to Direct TV and ordered this, and today a Direct TV installation guy with a Middle Eastern accent showed up to install what he called a plain old HD genie. “But it’s not just a genie but a 4K HR54 genie,” I said. “There’s a difference. Do you understand? I didn’t order just a boilerplate HD genie.” His face told me everything. He had an idea of what I might be talking about but not too much beyond that. We tried to exchange thoughts but his English was so impenetrable I gave up and asked to speak to his superior.
The Middle-Eastern guy (I’ve dealt with natives of Marrakech who’ve looked and sounded exactly like him) called his superior three times and finally got him, and they conversed in his native tongue (Farsi? Arabic?) for about five or six minutes. And then he hung up. “Why did you hang up?” I said to the guy. “I said I wanted to talk to your superior.” Rashad tried to explain something in his rambling-ass way but I wouldn’t have it. “Why did you hang up?” I repeated at a slightly higher volume. I don’t want to sound like Donald Trump but I won’t have a crucial piece of audio-visual equipment installed by a guy I can’t understand, much less have a discussion with. “That’s it…sorry but we’re done,” I said. I pointed to the door. “Don’t touch me,” he said as he slipped out.
McCarthy/Falcone’s The Boss Isn’t Funny, But It Deserves Respect For Being Sharp and Mean and Misanthropic Like No One’s Business
A coding error erased 80% of this review earlier today — sorry: I didn’t laugh at Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone‘s The Boss (Universal, 4.8), but I respect the conviction that informs it. Melissa McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, a self-hating, emotionally blocked, Type-A butch boss who reminded me, frankly, of two or three Hollywood-serving women I could mention, and she really owns the Lucretia McEvil. On top of which The Boss delivers almost no conventional late-in-the-second-act softening moments. Okay, Michelle grows a slight heart toward the end but only a little bitty one. Mostly she just bitches out in the ugliest way imaginable, and it’s pretty damn great for that.
This is one pissy, misanthropic, “we hate everyone and everything including our own selfish selves” diarrhea comedy. Okay, it softens up here and there (no pun intended) but you can almost ignore these portions. It suggests from time to time that little girls (particularly Ella Anderson‘s Rachel, who plays the 11 year-old daughter of Kristen Bell‘s marshmallow mom) aren’t so bad but it also says other girls are filled with just as much poison as the adults. Love it! And it romantically pairs Bell with the fat-assed Tyler Labine, a jowly Canadian comedian who would never score with a Kristen Bell-type in real life, but The Boss runs with Judd Apatow‘s schlumpies-and-dumpies aesthetic and does it anyway. Plus it delivers an extra-creepy Peter Dinklage performance…I can’t go into it, too strange to describe.
The Boss doesn’t make you laugh but it does make the case for no-laugh funny like no film since Ishtar. It has a rancid attitude and a belief system that is 100% bile and hostility, and you have to hand it to McCarthy/Falcone, seriously, for embracing this and never backing away from it, and for throwing in all kinds of perverse sexual seasonings. This movie hates you, hates God, hates itself…the only thing it doesn’t hate are the little girls but halfway through there’s a savage street rumble between a goody-two-shoes girl scout troupe and a snarly, opportunistic girl gang run by Michelle, and what results is pretty close to The Road Warrior.
Star Wars: The B Team
Boilerplate: “Set shortly before the events of A New Hope, Rogue One will center on a group of Rebel spies on a mission to steal the plans for the Galactic Empire’s new weapon, the Death Star.” Cash grab, rescramble, milk it dry. Heavy paychecks all around — Felicity Jones as Another Rey, Jiang Wen (sword stylings for Asian market!), HE’s own Ben Mendehlson as (let me guess) another bad guy. But it has Imperial Walkers — no cynical response to this. Forrest Whitaker, Diego Luna, Riz Ahmed, Mads Mikkelsen, et. al. We’re not Avis (hey, hey, we’re the Re-Treads!) so we try harder. Opens on 12.16.16.
Snap Judgment
I’ve paid $1600 for a nice two-bedroom Telluride condo (9.1 thru 9.5) at 350 South Mahoney, Telluride, CO 81435. Looking for someone with the right vibe to share. Please pass the word around — this is a very well-located, very nice place…can’t beat it for the price (you pay $750, I’ve got the rest). Why do I have to hustle this thing? If you know anything about Telluride Film Festival rentals this is as cheap as it gets.
WB Execs “Were Convinced They Had The Goods With Batman v Superman”?
Over the last decade or so I’ve been sensing chilly, corporate vibes from Warner Bros. A kind of top-down, less-personable, Death Star-meets-garrison state attitude. And now, in the wake of a disappointing performance by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, there’s talk about the studio shutting some gates and releasing fewer films. Excerpts from Kim Master‘s 4.6 Hollywood Reporter piece: (a) “Several sources say Warner Bros. executives were convinced they had the goods with BvS and were shocked when negative reviews began pouring in“; (b) “Many top industry executives believe the troubles with BvS are the latest sign of the instability created when Time Warner chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes promoted Kevin Tsujihara to the top Warners job and created a committee to run the film studio that includes president Greg Silverman and marketing and distribution chief Sue Kroll…it’s fair to say things haven’t gone so well since“; (c) “Several executives and agents say Warners seems to be greenlighting fewer homegrown movies as it focuses on silos (DC Comics, Lego and a planned franchise spun off from the Harry Potter series)”; (d) “Overall, sources say there is an understanding Warners is aiming to release fewer homegrown films…the studio still will make some movies from ‘family’ directors including Ben Affleck, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Nolan and Todd Phillips. But the emphasis is elsewhere.” (e) “A person who does extensive business at WB says ‘they were always filmmaker-driven…that might now not be the case as much…they had a bad 18 months. How could there not be some kind of reaction to that?'”; (f) Nonetheless “the studio says it will release 18 movies this year and is projected to release 19 in 2017.”
Variety’s Chang Bolts for L.A.Times
Congrats to top Variety film critic Justin Chang on being hired as a senior L.A. Times critic, presumably with a long-term eye to Chang becoming the new Kenneth Turan in a decade or so. (Turan will probably start to think about downshifting his work load sometime during the 2020s.) Chang and his wife have a kid on the way, and you know he’s getting a significant salary bump out of this. TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider has speculated as to whether Variety and Indiewire owner Jay Penske might want to shift top Indiewire editor/critic Eric Kohn into Chang’s slot. Is that what the just-announced hire of David Ehrlich was about — i.e., replacing Kohn as the new top Indiewire guy?
Possibly Appealing Jewish-Muslim Pot Comedy
You can see the formulaic scheme in an instant, and you have to wonder why it didn’t debut at a more prestigious venue than the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where it popped last July. Nonetheless something tells me it might not be half bad. Excerpt of review from guy who saw it at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival earlier this year: “Dough is a dramedy about shared values…story’s about a small baker (Jonathan Pryce) fighting a losing battle for survival against a corporate giant and how a young assistant (Jerome Holder) comes up with a solution. You’ll find yourself cheering them on….loved it!”
No Coincidence
Why have Netflix and director David Wain suddenly announced plans to make a movie based on a decade-old biography of National Lampoon co-founder/editor Doug Kenney (i.e., Josh Karp‘s “A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever“)? Doug Tirola‘s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, one of 2015’s most under-appreciated docs, is why. Wain saw it, loved it and a light went on. Obviously. Trust me — a deal to adapt Karp’s book didn’t just happen to come together ten years later. Will Forte will play Kenney (fine) and Domnhall Gleason will play Lampoon editor Henry Beard (not a shred of physical resemblance — they couldn’t at least find somebody who hails from a vaguely similar gene pool?). John Gemberling has reportedly been cast as John Belushi; ditto Joel McHale as Chevy Chase.
Those Days
The final episode of The People vs. O.J. Simpson (i.e., lead-up to and the aftermath of the “not guilty” verdict) aired last night…wham. All hail director Ryan Murphy and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewki. Each and every episode has hit the spot — no one has disputed this — and it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that a pile of Emmy nominations (especially, I’m guessing, for Sarah Paulson, Courtney B. Vance and John Travolta along with the creators) will happen.
But as much as I enjoyed and admired the finale, it couldn’t stand up to my recollections of the real thing on TV and particularly that nauseating feeling that settled in among whites when they realized that 95% of the black community cared more about sending a fuck-you message to racist police regimes than accepting the obvious in terms of Simpson’s guilt.
The jury didn’t want to find him guilty and so they didn’t. And so they embraced denial like a life preserver and freed a rich Brentwood murderer who once said “I’m not black, I’m O.J.” Brilliant, guys.
The night of the verdict (or was it the following night?) Julia Phillips and I took part in a N.O.W. candlelight parade that went from San Vicente and 26th down to the late Nicole Brown Simpson‘s condo on Bundy. And then everyone sang “Amazing Grace.”
Coming Cinemacon Scrap Over Screening Room
A couple of weeks ago Variety‘s Kris Tapley posted an intelligent opinion piece about Sean Parker and Prem Akkaraju‘s Screening Room, a start-up that would offer $50 living-room downloads of brand new films. Tapley’s view is basically that the theatrical experience has been taken over by the mongrels and that people of taste and refinement prefer to duck it as a result, and that it would probably make sense to offer Screening Room to this crowd rather than restricting them to standard multiplex degradations.
Populist, reach-out filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Peter Jackson and Ron Howard like the Screening Room concept while those who continue to cherish the notion of theatres as havens for Movie Catholic worship — Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, M. Night Shyamalan, Roland Emmerich — are against it. The issue is sure to be topic #1 during Cinemacon (4.11 thru 4.14), the annual Las Vegas exhibitor gathering that I for one will be ducking this year.
Most exhibitors believe in the revenues they’ve enjoyed in the past. Like most people they want the past to be present, the good times to continue. The past, of course, didn’t include revenue reducers or diverters like Screening Room. They will therefore express anger and opposition to Screening Room at Cinemacon.