So Robert Downey, Jr. decided to pay for the kid’s bionic arm, right? Or is he just publicizing it? Either way it was bequeathed “at no cost to the family.” Downey says the bionic 3D printed arm is “affordable.” It’s from Albert Manero, the founder of Limbitless. A 3.13 Washington Post story by Leah Polakoff says the arm is 3-D printed on a Stratasys printer, [and] takes approximately 40 to 50 hours to manufacture. The average prosthetic limb costs around $40 K, but Manero’s “Iron Man” arm cost less than $350 in materials not counting labor, research and development time.
Last Tuesday I spoke with Ondi Timoner, director of Brand: A Second Coming, a fascinating, motor-mouthed portrait of actor-comedian-social activist Russell Brand. It will open Austin’s South by Southwest film festival this evening. Timoner’s doc (partly shot by HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko) is one of the most unusual and impressive documentary portraits of a famous person I’ve ever seen because of…well, its eagerness to step out of the standard function of a documentary and take the proverbial ride. It’s a film that transcends itself and becomes something else by embracing the attitude and temperament of its subject. Just as Brand has begun moving the focus of his life beyond fame and wealth and the lowest form of humor (i.e., simply making people laugh), Brand: A Second Coming is about seeing and transcending and turning a page. It’s about breaking out of the Wachowski’s Matrix by way of comic irreverence, manic energy and a massive ego.
Ondi Timoner, director of Brand: A Second Coming.
Russell Brand
Brand is partly advocating a kind of Iceland-styled social revolution by way of consciousness raising and neighborhood organizing and more compassion for drug addicts and fierce resistance to most of the goals and systems of 1% corporate dominance, and partly calling for the debunking of conservative myths about individual fulfillment through the acquisition of power, money, sex, property, etc. Brand is rich so who’s he to talk, right? His response is to swear over and over that he’s been to the very top and gotten drunk on luxury and debauch and that none of the spoils are particularly fulfilling. He genuinely sees himself as a kind of change agent in the vague tradition of Malcolm X, Jesus of Nazareth, Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara. I realize this will rub some the wrong way, but what’s wrong with choosing these fellows as heroes and wanting to follow in their path? Brand’s obviously an eccentric, but he has the aura of a guy who’s really seen through the bullshit.
Born in June 1975, Brand first gained fame as a nervy, drug-addicted stand-up comedian, award-show m.c. and televized provocateur. He became sober in ’04 and got into transcendental meditation but continued to provoke and challenge and piss people off. His first big American-fame injection came, of course, from starring roles in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him To The Greek and Arthur. But gradually the focus of his comedy became more and more political, and Timoner’s film comes alive when this phase, which kicked in sometime around 2012, takes over. We’re speaking of a phase in which Brand has more or less forsaken narcissism in and of itself (well, mostly) and has resolved to be, as he explained during a relatively recent q & a, “the people’s narcissist.”
The new Esquire cover is ballsy in a modest, cautious sort of way. If Esquire, Nick Offerman and Chelsea Handler had really wanted to recreate the spirit of John Lennon and Yoko Ono‘s Two Virgins album photos they would’ve gone full-frontal. To stay within newstand distribution standards Esquire could’ve attached a peel-off sticky on top of the unfortunate truth of things. That would have rocked the world and sent people running and screaming for the exits like nothing before. Lennon allegedly said that the Two Virgins uproar “seemed to have less to do with the explicit nudity, and more to do with the fact that the pair were rather unattractive; [he] described it as a picture of ‘two slightly overweight ex-junkies.'” Offerman/Handler don’t look like druggies but, to be fair and honest about it, they look like most normal 40ish people here, which is to say not…well, not “unappealing” but at the same time not hugely attractive in a raw, biological, photo-studio context. But it’s okay. It could’ve been worse. The monochrome helps.
Russell Brand is an exceptionally brilliant, wise, cosmically plugged-in fellow — funny, relentlessly narcissistic, socially utopian and beholden to truth. I’m serious — he’s a lightning bolt and a major exception to the rule of celebrity and especially modern comedy. He has to be one of the least attention-averse people in the world. It therefore seems odd…make that extremely odd that he’s decided to not attend tonight’s South by Southwest premiere of Ondi Timoner‘s Brand: A Second Coming, which I’ve seen and, trust me, is nothing to be sheepish about — it’s quite the crackling, electric, transcendent experience.
In a statement on his website Brand says that “you’d think a narcissist would like nothing more than talking about themselves and their…story but actually, it felt like, to me, my life was hard enough the first time round and going through it again was painful and sad. For me watching [the film] was very uncomfortable.” In a just-posted interview with Indiewire‘s Nigel M. Smith, Timoner agrees that Brand “had a hard time…[a] really hard time with it.”
I wouldn’t mind seeing John Schlesinger‘s Far From The Madding Crowd (’67) as a warm-up for Thomas Vinterberg’s version, which Fox Searchlight is finally opening on May 1st. But that seems unlikely as I can’t attend the upcoming London theatrical showing and the new British Bluray won’t pop until 6.1.15. If Fox Searchlight wanted to be clever about it, they would offer a screening of the 168-minute Schlesinger version to critics on both coasts. That effort, scripted by Frederic Raphael, shot by Nicholas Roeg and and starring Julie Christie, was regarded as a failure during its time. I have a recollection of it being handsome but dirge-like. If nothing else critics seeing (or re-seeing) it would probably emerge with a finer appreciation for Vinterberg’s film, as it runs almost a full 40 minutes shorter.
In a way I’ve always regarded Ben Stiller‘s Zoolander as a kind of 9/11 film. The fashion-realm satire, largely based in Manhattan, opened only 17 days after that slaughter, and Stiller’s film, which is quite funny and actually inspired at times, just seems fused to that end-of-an-era feeling, that sense of shock that descended upon Manhattan in mid to late September of ’01. That was 13 and 1/2 years ago, and yet that recently released footage of Stiller and costar Owen Wilson walking the runway in footage for Zoolander 2 (Paramount, 2.12.16) indicates they haven’t aged a day. Justin Theroux‘s script is set in Europe; much of the filming will happen at Rome’s Cinecitta. Will Ferrell‘s “Mugatu” character (another holdover from ’01) is part of the new mix. Penelope Cruz and Christine Taylor costar. Four years ago Stiller said it’s basically about Derek and Hansel’s “lives [having] changed…they’re not really relevant anymore…it’s a new world for them.” If you define “relevance” as directly influencing or at least contributing to the shaping or flavoring of a given culture, what percentage of the population qualifies? At any point in time over 99.5% of humanity is along for the ride.
Last Monday I went back again to the Hollywood DMV office on Cole, this time to get my regular Class C driver’s license. I had flunked the motorcycle driver’s written test for the sixth time three days earlier, and I just couldn’t stand the feeling of failure any longer. I hadn’t felt that badly about myself since I was flunking history and science exams in high school. (I’ll try to get the motorcycle license again after I return from Europe next June.) Anyway I was waiting for my number to be called when a guy who looked a lot like Richard Benjamin walked in. He seemed older than I expected (wanted?) him to look and a wee bit haggard, but it was Benjamin, all right. I checked his Wiki bio and realized he’s now 76.
The last time I had spoken with Benjamin was during a 1982 New York press event for My Favorite Year, which was the first film Benjamin directed and which is still arguably his best ever. During our chat I remember telling him that I liked his performance in Paul Sylbert‘s The Steagle (’71), which was kind of a wipe-out but which had, at the time at least, a certain cult following.
Benjamin walked right in front of me on his way to the DMV bathroom, and on the way back I was seized by a very slight impulse to say “Yo! The Steagle!” but I suppressed it, thank God. A voice told me this wasn’t the right moment. The DMV is not for socializing. It’s for sitting around and filling out forms and feeling grim.
Benjamin had a hot run as a leading actor between ’69 and ’75 — Goodbye, Columbus (’69), Catch-22 (’70), Diary of a Mad Housewife (’70), The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (’71), The Steagle, Portnoy’s Complaint (’72 — the peak), The Last of Sheila (’73), Westworld (’73) and The Sunshine Boys (’75). During this time Benjamin was the proverbial “interesting guy” or more particularly one of the main “Jew Wave” guys along with Dustin Hoffman, Elliot Gould and George Segal before the Italian-Americans moved in. Donald Sutherland was also on a roll back then.
If I was Alex Gibney and I was filming this interview footage with Bob Belleville, former director of engineering at MacIntosh from 1982 to ’85 under Steve Jobs, I would stopped and said “cut” after he started to weep a little bit. I then would have said to him, “Look, I feel the same things about people and experiences from the past, things that I loved…we all do. But from a dramatic point of view it’s much better to muffle or suppress emotion. You can let it leak out a bit but only a bit. Okay? It’s very human of you to feel what you’re feeling and I totally respect your history with Jobs, but I need you to read this again without the whimpering. Fair enough?” I wouldn’t tell Belleville what I’m really thinking, which is that whimpering sounds awful. I hate it when people start to cry while trying to talk. Do one or the other, but not both. Suppression is the thing. Walter Cronkite as he officially announced the death of JFK at 2:38 pm Eastern…that’s what I’m talking about.
I’ve spoken with several name-brand comedians in my time, and I’ve never felt the slightest trace of silly, goofy, slap-happy vibes from any of them. From each and every one I detected caution, guardedness and a general sense of gloom. (Especially from Billy Crystal.) One would presume, therefore, that Kevin Pollak’s Misery Loves Comedy, a doc about what comedians are really like deep down and whether they’re all in fact depressives, might be…well, at least somewhat interesting in this regard. Unusual. Revelatory. Not the usual joking around but perhaps some musings and reflections that, say, the ghost of Fyodor Dostoyevsky might relate to.
I would have been off that bridge faster than any four-legged animal. Okay, if there had been preparation and rehearsal I might have helped to throw the bed over the side, but quickly. It would have been clearly understood that if and when a train comes along and there’s any question about personal safety, the bed is toast. Incidentally: It was needlessly exploitive and hurtful of The Hollywood Reporter to have published autopsy results of what happened to poor Sarah Jones when she was hit by the death train, and now they’ve deleted the grisly portion of the story.
Last skeletal remnants of “Benedict mansion” in Marfa, Texas. Set was built in 1955 for filming of George Stevens’ Giant.
Amy Schumer is saying “I’m a party girl, maybe a drunk…don’t stop me now, I have another gulp or two to get down!” and Bill Hader is saying…what exactly? “Oh…Amy’s a reckless bundle of alcoholic fuckall energy and here I am popping my eyes and going ‘oh!'”
I’m not of the opinion that Jaume Collet-Serra‘s Run All Night (Warner Bros., 3.13) is second-rate crap — it is second-rate crap. Just as I knew that Collet-Serra’s Non-Stop was a second-rate airborne thriller, and that Scott Frank‘s A Walk Among The Tombstones was and is pretty close to gold-standard urban noir. Each of these films stars Liam “back to being a paycheck whore” Neeson, and you can bet that Neeson recognizes, along with most discriminating movie fans, that Frank’s film is far superior to the other two. I toughed it out during last night’s Grove screening until almost the very end, and then I said “fuck this” and got up and walked into a nearby book store. I had to. I was feeling icky and soiled and exhausted.
I hate the darting-and-swooping videogame CG shots that Collet-Sera uses to roam around New York City with, and I despise his atrocious disregard for action logic, particularly during an idiotic, flim-flammy, speeding-bumper-car scene in Brooklyn that totally alienated me. I also hate the faithless, Philistine way Collet-Saura directs fight scenes, particularly how he never actually shows anyone getting punched (he always cuts away a half-second before the moment of impact) and the way his guys always groan each and every time they get slugged. (Will you take a punch like a man just once?) There wasn’t anywhere near as much action in J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year, but when it happened you believed each and every frame of it. It was glorious for that.
A work-in-progress version of Judd Apatow‘s Trainwreck (Universal, 7.17) will screen at South by Southwest late Sunday afternoon. And if a tweet posted this morning by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitch is any indication, spiritually deep people with wonderfully wise and enlightened perceptions are going to lob hate grenades in my direction all over again. The “leave poor Amy Schumer alone and die, you rancid asshole” thing has been going on for 30 days now — an eternity in today’s ADD realm. I tried saying I’m sorry for the piece that posted on 2.11 but the haters wouldn’t have it. I said Schumer is obviously a first-class talent who deserves more respect than what I gave her, and the haters said “oh, yeah? Well, you’re demonic and fuck you!” I wrote that I could have played this one with a little more delicacy and diplomacy, and I might as well have poured kerosene on the fire.
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