I initially assumed that the beautiful mountaintop avalanche that Leonardo DiCaprio witnesses during the final third of The Revenant was digitally created. Then I read in a 12.22 N.Y Times interview with director Alejandro G. Inarritu that it was entirely real. David Segal writes that Inarritu “is known for exasperatingly high standards and fiendishly complex stagings, which in this movie included a helicopter-induced avalanche that had to be perfectly timed with several actors and a horse.” Not quite — just Leo and a single horse share the shot. A helicopter triggers an avalanche, one presumes, by hovering over virgin snow at the top of a mountain and thereby pushing loads of the stuff off a cliff. Another way to have done it would have been to fly a physical effects guy to the peak and have him detonate an explosive. A seriously impressive feat by any standard or measuring stick.

Read more

A 12.25 N.Y. Daily News story reported that this 12.20 video of an Indiana woman, Eva Goeb, experiencing an emotional meltdown upon catching sight of Lily, a newly-adopted granddaughter, had attracted almost 4 million viewers. Right now the count is at 4,464,053.

The occasion was a surprise holiday visit by Goeb’s son Donny, a military officer stationed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickham, and his wife Miranda.  The couple hadn’t told Goeb they’d managed to adopt and decided “hey, let’s surprise her!”  I’ll never understand people who go to all lengths just so they can watch friends or family members go into shock when the big moment happens. Donny obviously succeeded in this regard, and perhaps with a secondary motive. The YouTube page announces that Donny is looking for gofundme assistance to get through “over $30,000” in adoption costs.

HE reaction: It’s very nice that an infant girl has been adopted by good parents and that grandma is overwhelmed, etc. But my first reaction was to feel sympathy for Lily. Imagine her feelings of shock and perhaps fear as Goeb, obviously a practiced emotional showboater, shrieks and slobbers. In my eyes Goeb is the kind of gunboat mom who will suffocate you with affection and attention, and who will always insist that her feelings be exhibited to the max and therefore known to the world (or at least to the neighbors).

Read more

“The Revenant is an experience I’ve never had before. It’s totally its own beast. This is not a movie for sissies. It’s beautiful, fierce, immersive, delirious. Submerged in ice, arctic air, brutality and a kind of artful oppression. An ordeal of blood, agony, survival, snow, ice water, wounds and steaming horse guts. Great cinema is not always easy to absorb because it often challenges. It can sometimes feel hard or difficult, gnarly, awesome, almost too much…but it almost always sticks with you.”

This was my first reaction, posted 32 days ago, to Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s immersive masterpiece. The word is out on this puppy — great but no day at the beach — so I wonder how many will be going to see it today. It’s certainly no Christmas heartwarmer. But cineastes will go, of course, especially those who have as little affection for Christmas as I do. Please share your reactions and report about how crowded the room was, and what the vibe felt like on the way out.

From Alan Scherstuhl’s Village Voice review: “What’s been missing for years in Hollywood’s adventure films? Verisimilitude. Correspondent with the rise of computers and the ability to show us any place that filmmakers can imagine, has been the fall of immersiveness — that sense that the actors are in a place you can’t go yourself, rather than just standing against a digitized mock-up of one.

Read more

I’m not coughing as much today — that’s something. And I don’t feel as achey. But it’s still a struggle to get up and get some water out of the fridge. I’ll try to eat something but then I’ll lose interest. A friend told me to order a couple of quarts of chicken soup, but I haven’t touched it since it was delivered last night. I slept for 12 hours straight, if you want to call it that. Illness is a jailer. It’s incredibly boring to just lie here, but at the same time I can’t seem to make myself do anything else. Even watching a film seems too demanding.

On top of everything else the thought of not posting anything is terrifying. My whole life rests upon this daily endeavor.

The last time I felt this weak and poisoned was when I caught a fever during Sundance ’08, and it took a major Herculean effort to force myself to sit up and write something about the death of poor Heath Ledger, whom I knew very slightly. 

“So sorry you’re ill,” a friend has written. “Drink gallons of water. Try and get high alkaline water. It kills bacteria in the system. Whole Foods will have Essence water 9.5 or Essentia water 10. Pavilions has Alkaline water 8.5. And in the mainstream Fiji is the best high alkaline at about 7.5. It will cleanse, purify and clean out your entire system. Gallons! (At least buy distilled water if you can’t get alkaline.)

Read more

I tried to watch Orson Welles‘ Chimes at Midnight in a Manhattan repertory cinema (the Carnegie Hall Cinema? The Thalia?) in the late ’70s. But the black-and-white photography looked like shit, and the sound — poorly recorded and not even synched at times — drove me crazy. And Welles’ performance as Falstaff struck me as overly boisterous and taken with largeness (cackly voice, exaggerated gestures). This plus the fast, crazy-quilt cutting and the feeling of this splotchy, under-budgeted film having been stuck together with chewing gum…it was just too much.

About 30 minutes in I decided Chimes at Midnight was the second most unpleasant Shakespearean film I’d ever sat through (the champion being Peter Brook‘s black-and-white King Lear with Paul Scofield), and so I bailed. “Good riddance,” I told myself.

But I’m certainly willing to give it another go when a restored, properly sound-synched version, courtesy of Janus Film and the Criterion guys, appears on Bluray sometime in ’16. On second thought I can’t see buying the Bluray (my initial experience was too irritating) but I’d go if Chimes plays at a niche venue in Los Angeles. The film will screen at NYC’s Film Forum January 1st through 12th.

Read more

The illness continues. Hacking cough, a hint of fever (aching muscles), some chest congestion but not too much, mostly half-sleeping the sleep of the disturbed.  Exhausted, agitated — in the grip of a kind of lazy, languid paralysis. Late yesterday afternoon I picked up some antibiotic pills, an inhaler and prescription cough syrup so things might improve in a day or two.  But not presently.  I waited two or three hours this morning to swallow my second antibiotic pill — the thought of getting up seemed way too strenuous. All I want to do is hibernate. Even watching a movie all the way through takes too much effort. Last night I was watching The Limey on my Macbook Pro but I fell asleep at the 45-minute mark.

Email #1 from film critic pally: “Definitely have that cough looked at, and ask the doc about possibly getting an inhaler along with the antibiotic pills. Sounds like you have exactly what I had, which hit me the day after TIFF ended. Eventually became bronchitis verging on pneumonia, which settled so deeply in my chest, it took two bouts of antibiotics and two sets of inhalers (first time in my life I’ve used them) to finally knock it out. Didn’t feel terrible, just had a really nagging cough.”

Email #2 from film critic pally: “I hope you saw a doctor today and got things analyzed. Two years ago I picked up something on the plane back from New York. It progressed exactly the way you described and I finally went to see my doctor (I hardly ever get sick either). It was initially a bronchial thing but by this time had progressed to something worse. The doctor said if I hadn’t come to see him and do something about it, who knows what would have happened. It was the most debilitating condition I’ve ever experienced. Took weeks to feel 100% again.”

“The old Most Dangerous Game/The Naked Prey man-stalking format is uncomfortably imposed on a Mexican immigrant narrative in Desierto, a sharply made but simplistic second feature from writer-director Jonas Cuaron. Psychology and motivation don’t concern director Cuaron here, just the physical spectacle of the hunter and the hunted. If the story is meant to represent a microcosm of the immigration problem, it’s woefully reductive. If it’s meant to be first and foremost an action thriller, it does have a few nice moves to offer, especially in the climactic mano a mano between the two men on large rock outcroppings that involve risky maneuvers, precarious positions and long drops.” — from Todd McCarthy‘s Hollywood Reporter review, posted on 9.13.15.

I was sent a bunch of Black List scripts yesterday, and the first one I read really works: Terry Clyne‘s I Believe in America — an authentic-sounding, tightly written, 117-page saga of the making of The Godfather. It’s told mostly from the perspective of then-Paramount chief Robert Evans and secondarily the POVs of director Francis Coppola, senior Paramount production executive Peter Bart, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, Ali McGraw, Mario Puzo, Gulf & Western’s Charles Bluhdorn, Diane Keaton, Sidney Korshak and just about everyone else who had anything significant to do with this landmark 1972 film. I began reading it on my iPhone when I was in Manhattan last night, and then I got on a Brooklyn-bound C train somewhere around page 35. I had finished it by the time I hit Nostrand Ave. I flew right through it. I was hooked from the get-go.

Clyne’s script (Darrell Easton is a pen name) is quite the demimonde of neurotic, obsessive Hollywood power players, and I’m telling you it feels as realistic and trustworthy in giving voice to these characters as The Godfather felt like a Real McCoy portrayal of an Italian-American crime family. We’ve all read accounts about the making of this American classic but it’s very satisfying to find them told so smoothly and believably in such a well-honed, fat-free screenplay.

I know Robert Evans personally (or used to know him back in the ’90s and early aughts) and Cline has totally nailed his manner, speaking style, way of thinking. Coppola sounds like Coppola, Pacino sounds like Pacino…everyone and everything sounds genuine and solid, and the story moves along in a way that feels throughly disciplined and engrossing.

Read more

I don’t get sick as a rule as I’m pretty much made of iron. Seriously. Once every couple of years I’ll catch a fever and be delirious on the couch for 36 or 48 hours, but that’s about it. Famous last words. A few weeks ago I began coping with a tickle-throat cough. I knew I should do something about it but I didn’t. Maladies always go away so I wasn’t worried, but this began to be different. I was about to hit a clinic before I left last Wednesday for my annual Christmas visit to New York/Connecticut (which I’m still in the middle of) but I kept putting it off. Over the last three or four days it’s gotten much worse. I’ve tried Dayquil and Robotussin and antihistamines…nothing. No fever yet, but it’s turned into some kind of chronic bronchial thing with a threat of pneumonia. An hour or two from now I’ll be visiting a local doctor and demanding antibiotics. Not good. It was so bad last night I couldn’t sleep.

In ’06 I passed along a story of drunken teenage vomiting during a long-ago weekend party at a New Jersey shore vacation home. It belonged to the parents of Barry, a nice-enough guy I knew and occasionally hung with during my mid-teen years when I lived in Westfield, New Jersey. A bunch of us had driven down there and partied without anyone’s parents knowing, especially Barry’s. No girls, no music to speak of — just a lot of beer and ale and vodka and everyone stumbling around.

There was something grotesque about the guys I was hanging with back then because somebody was always getting picked on. It was a kind of hazing ritual, the idea being to put someone’s feet to the fire and…what, see how they stood up? I never understood this damn game, but mockery, isolation and occasional de-pantsing (a gang of guys would literally hold a victim down and pull his pants off and leave him to walk home that way) were par for the course. It was a social standards peer-pressure thing with the group having decided the latest victim had been acting in a too different or too peculiar way, or had otherwise transgressed the fluctuating standards of Westfield cool. Almost no one was safe. You could be one of the de-pantsing brutes and then the next weekend you’d be “it.”

During this particular New Jersey weekend a big, dark-haired guy named Richard Harris had been chosen as the latest victim. He had thrown up on the floor of Barry’s beach home, and so he had to be punished. Much later that night (around 1 am) we found a dead mouse in a mouse trap, so we threw the corpse into a pot of boiling water and put it under the sheets of a bed Harris was sleeping in. He woke up five or ten seconds later and bellowed “get the fuck outta here!” A half-hour later we went outside and shifted Harris’s Chevrolet into neutral and pushed the car down the neighborhood street about three or four blocks. We were all sitting around the next morning and Harris walked in through the pantry door, glaring like a gladiator and saying “where’s my fucking car?”

Read more

From Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review of Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul: “There is no way in which the film (or a hundred films) could represent the breadth of the communal suffering in the [Auschwitz-Birkenau death] camp. All we can hope for is that the experience — the literal viewpoint — of a single witness can be added to the record. By homing in on Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), and on the range of response in his dark eyes, we are made so aware of the monstrosities around him that we do not need to have them spelled out. Bare dead bodies are glimpsed, often fleetingly, at the sides of the frame. The newcomers, who are told that hot soup and a shower await them, and who are then stripped and herded toward the gas chambers, with the help of the Sonderkommando, are seldom in focus, and the same is true of the corpses borne to the furnaces. This strikes me as merciful and right. The question is not one of taste but of imaginative modesty; to watch most feature films — as opposed to documentaries — about the Holocaust, even those as expert as Schindler’s List, is to be left with a lasting moral queasiness about the limits of dramatic reconstruction. Just because you can attempt a thorough depiction of a death camp doesn’t mean that you should; if your audience goes away convinced that it now knows what went on at Auschwitz, you’ve done something wrong. That is why I admire the judiciousness of Nemes. He gives us only shards.”