“Studios To Push For Early Home Release in 2019.” So read the headline of a Brent Lang Variety piece that was posted earlier today. In other words, sooner or later day-and-date home streaming of new films will be a common option.
Setting the right price will obviously be a key factor (I’m guessing it’ll be $25 or $30 for either a single day’s access or a 12-hour window) but when it happens, something crucial in the American movie experience will begin to dissipate. And the ultimate effect will be, I believe, devastating.
Here’s a conversation of President Trump apparently lying to “Fear” author Bob Woodward about how nobody ever told him Woodward wanted to talk to him for the book, etc. I would respect Trump on a certain level if he’d told Woodward something like “look, I strongly suspected your book would be a hit job no matter how I played my cards so I figured fuck it, write what you want and make all kinds of mistakes but I won’t help you.” But no — Trump claims no one ever told him that Woodward wanted an interview. He always wimps out and spreads the horse manure. All kinds of rage and bluster on Twitter, but otherwise a side-stepper and a candy-ass during one-on-one discussions.
Spittin’ cousins, queens at cross purposes. The willful, emotional, ultimately unlucky Mary Queen of Scots (Saoirse Ronan) vs. the coolly reasoned Queen Elizabeth (Margot Robbie) in the mid to late 1500s. Things don’t quite work out for Mary, but then you knew that. The Focus Features release opens on 12.4.
Yesterday I passed along praise for Ronan’s performance (“incredible, really gets to shine, a full range of emotions”). The flame-haired Robbie looks like a fright. (Cue junket-whore questions about how upsetting it was for the beautiful Robbie to ugly up for the sake of art.) The clips are handsome in a carefully-balanced, steady-as-she-goes, class-A fashion. The exquisite lighting is the work of dp John Mathiesen, a longtime Ridley Scott collaborator.
Directed by Josie Rourke, the trailer seeks to persuade that the film is primarily focused on character and conviction rather than blood and spectacle. The fact that Beau Willimon (House of Cards) wrote the screenplay suggests this. And yet the word around the campfire is that the Game of Thrones aesthetic was also an influence.
Last night I saw Steven Soderbergh‘s Unsane (Bleecker Street, 3.23), an intriguingly creepy, Shock Corridor-like psychodrama about a smart, blunt-spoken businesswoman (The Crown‘s Claire Foy) coping with a sudden, bizarre imprisonment in a private medical facility in Pennsylvania. It also has to do with stalking, delusion and what I saw as mounting insanity.
Unsane is fairly pulpy — a genre wallow — but as a spooky and claustrophobic portrait of institutional oppression and psychological upending it isn’t half bad. It’s shocking, unnerving and…I don’t know, eerily nightmarish and drearily suffocating at the same time?
As with any Soderbergh film you’re always aware of a fine intelligence behind each and every creative impulse or decision — every shot, cut and line says “smarthouse.” Ditto the oppressively dark lighting and brownish-greenish colors. And at no time are you saying to yourself “oh for God’s sake, lemme outta here, this is awful”…as I’ve said in the midst of most many horror thrillers.
There’s a place in the realm for films like Unsane. I didn’t hate it. I was mildly intrigued. It’s a tolerable sit.
But with all due respect to Soderbergh and the Bleecker Street guys, I can’t honestly say that the story — what happens to Foy’s Sawyer Valentin once she realizes she’s been imprisoned by employees of the private clinic, and what she does when she realizes that a deranged fellow (Joshua Leonard) who’s been stalking her is strangely working at this clinic and continuing with the crazy — is all that satisfying. I’m not going to reveal it, but it doesn’t leave you with much. My whispered words as Unsane ended with a freeze-frame: “That’s it?”
My basic reaction as I shuffled out of the screening room was “why did Soderbergh go to such an effort to make this film look ugly?” He shot it on an iPhone 7 Plus in 4K, but that’s no excuse — you can make an iPhone movie look like Technicolor VistaVision if you want. Start to finish Unsane looks drained and murky and heavily shadowed, almost in a shitty shot-in-the-’70s-on-16mm way. The two main colors are a muddy dispiriting brown and a kind of sickly institutional green, along with some buttermilk walls and the occasional haze of bluish gray.
I get it, I get it — Soderbergh wants you to feel as turned around and psychologically tormented and forcibly sedated as Foy, and the color scheme is intended to reflect her states of mind. But I was two or three steps ahead of Soderbergh in this respect. The bottom line is that, yes, I was feeling Foy’s pain and disorientation, but I was also coping with my own lethargy and displeasure. I respect Soderbergh’s decision to cover Unsane in brown murk, but I hated the palette. Sorry but I did.
Last month Deadline‘s Michael Flemingreported that Danny Boyle had pitched a strikingly different idea for the 25th James Bond film (i.e., 007 resigns, shaves his head, becomes a Hare Krishna devotee and embarks on a quest to crawl on his belly across the entire continent of India), and that he might actually agree to direct Hare Rama if John Hodge’s script, which should be completed next month, is good enough.
Okay, I’m lying about the Hare Krishna stuff but Boyle and Hodge are cooking up Bond 25, and maybe it’ll happen. But hold up a minute. Boyle and Hodge aren’t cinematic super-wizards — they’re just a couple of talented, hard-working guys who hit the motherlode 22 years ago and have decided that an opportunistic paycheck attitude at a relatively late stage in their careers (Boyle is 61, Hodge is 53 or 54) wouldn’t be such a bad option. And it wouldn’t be.
Boyle to himself, stuck in London traffic: “People will call me Danny ‘Paycheck’ Boyle, sure, but this is just a one-off. And then I can move on to the next legit film, whatever that might be. The elite press will understand that I had to do this. The last time I was really in the game and the groove was 127 Hours, and that was eight fucking years ago. Trance was minor except for that Rosario Dawson nude scene, Steve Jobs didn’t really work because a lot of people hated Fassbender, and nobody paid much attention to T2 Trainspotting. I have to get back in the big game and this is one way to do that.”
Five years ago Boyle was asked by Collider‘s Sheila Roberts whether he’d ever direct a Bond film. “They’re not really for me,” Boyle replied. “The budgets are too big. I’m better working at a lower level of money really because I like that discipline of not having enough money to pull off whatever it is you want to pull off. So I wouldn’t be the best person to do those…no.”
Yesterday I posted a short piece titled “When Horse Cruelty Was Common.” It was sparked by an interest in Alan K. Rode‘s just published “Michael Curtiz: A Life In Film,” a reputedly excellent biography. Yesterday I focused on allegations about the tripping of horses during a military attack sequence in Curtiz’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (Warner Bros., 10.20.36). A Wikipedia account contends that “125 horses were tripped with wires; of those, 25 were killed or had to be put down afterward.”
Unable to reach Rode yesterday afternoon, I repeated the Wiki account along with a comment about Curtiz from a critic friend.
This morning, however, I learned that the Wikipedia report, which partly stems from a tale about the Light Brigade shoot by David Niven in his book “Bring On The Empty Horses,” is exaggerated and erroneous. Rode, who got in touch this morning, calls it “a myth.” Only four horses were killed during the shoot, Rode contends, and the real bad guy in the Light Brigade horse tragedy was second-unit director “Breezy” Eason.
To explain his case Rode sent along a couple of pages from his book. He also gave permission to reprint them.
“Several horses did die during the filming of The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Rode wrote in an email, “but the stories of the mass killing of horses propagated by David Niven and other sources including Wikipedia appears to be yet another anecdote that has fossilized into the bedrock of Hollywood folklore.
“Curtiz could be quite merciless when it came to putting ‘realism’ on screen, but, as you indicated, this was in keeping with the times. The more notorious story is his alleged drowning of three extras during the filming of Noah’s Ark (’28).
“I’ve attached an extract from my unedited manuscript that discusses the Light Brigade horse situation in some detail. My research on this matter was quite thorough. All of my writing about Curtiz is traceable to a verifiable source.”
2nd unit director “Breezy” Eason (hat, beard), sometime in the 1930s.
President Trump had no moral authority or credibility after his off-the-cuff Charlottesville comments, but now he’s in the minus realm after paroling former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe “pink underwear” Arpaio. The Arizona Republiccalled Trump’s pardon “a sign of pure contempt for every American who believes in justice, human dignity and the rule of law.” The pardon is a message, of course, to others who may be facing prosecution for Trump-associated crimes or misdemeanors down the road: “Man up, zip it, don’t roll over on me when prosecutors start applying pressure. Do this and I’ll pardon you if you get sentenced.”
From Arpaio’s Wikipage: “Arpaio claimed that his requirement that inmates wear pink underwear…saved the county $70,000 in the first year the rule was in effect. Arpaio subsequently sold customized pink boxers (with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s logo and ‘Go Joe’) as a fund-raiser for Sheriff’s Posse Association. Despite allegations of misuse of funds received from these sales, Arpaio declined to provide an accounting for the money. Arpaio’s success in gaining press coverage with the pink underwear resulted in his extending the use of the color. He introduced pink handcuffs, using the event to promote his book, ‘Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes on Illegal Immigration, Drugs and Everything Else That Threatens America.’ Arpaio has said ‘I can get elected on pink underwear… I’ve done it five times.'”
Throughout my semi-adult life I’ve always admired legendary New York City columnist and novelist Jimmy Breslin. His writing, I mean. That bluntly phrased, straight-from-the-shoulder street prose that he never fancied up. A regular guy who wrote for regular guys. I was from Fairfield County, Connecticut and the son of an advertising copywriter, but I got it. The stuff Breslin wrote was always real-deal. He never tip-toed or pussied around. Well, he probably did from time to time but his legend said otherwise.
Breslin’s rep was that of a guy who could be brusque at times but was always fair and honest and respectful of the people he covered, who were usually (okay, almost always) working-class New Yorkers who never led lives of leisure, and who could never be accused of being well-educated, much less refined. And now their hinterland counterparts have given us Donald Trump. Thanks, assholes! I didn’t mean to say that — it just slipped out.
Breslin also wrote about mob guys, most famously in his 1969 book “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” a roman a clef about Joey Gallo which was made into a 1971 film. In 1970 Breslin got clobbered by Jimmy Burke, the real-life model for Robert De Niro‘s Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas. Burke was pissed about something Breslin had written, some perceived slight or whatever.
Born in ’28 or thereabouts and 88 years old when he died earlier today, Breslin was best known for his N.Y. Daily News and Newsday columns. He was New York City personified in the same way that Sidney Lumet‘s New York films delivered that bad-coffee-and-shitty-pizza attitude and aroma, that thing that they make in the five boroughs and nowhere else. I first heard of Breslin in 1969 when he ran for New York City Council president along with mayoral candidate Norman Mailer (“No more bullshit”), their main platform being that New York City could and should secede from New York State and become the 51st State in the union.
Hey, Breslin…were you down with Hollywood Elsewhere’s idea of cutting the bumblefucks loose and forcing them to form their own separate country? What about green reeducation camps? You know in your heart that the country would be better off without them. Hell, you know that in your head.
Speaking as a fan of Niki Caro’s Whale Rider and McFarland, U.S.A., I’m wondering why there’s zero buzz on The Zookeeper’s Wife (Focus Features, 3.31). I’m hearing nothing, feeling nothing — not even after the 3.8 premiere in Warsaw or a 3.12 Cinequest Film Festival showing. I’ll be attending the 3.27 premiere at the Arclight. Shot in Prague in late ’15 and based on the book by Diane Workman, pic costars Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Bruhl and an assortment of exotic animals. Based on a true story about the hiding of Jews from Nazis by Warsaw zookeepers Jan and Antonina Żabinski.
As far as interactive Oscar ballots go, the Vanity Fair guys could’ve done worse. Incidentally: I always perk up when I hear a film described as “not half bad,” because to me it means “not without an issue or two but more than I expected and a better-than-average film overall.” In other words, an honest, non-bullshitty thumbs-up. And yet I’ve NEVER seen “not half bad” on a movie poster. The marketing exec with the balls to run such a quote would become an instant legend.
I’ll be seeing only two films on this, my last full day of the 2016 Toronto Film Festival. The first will be Walter Hill‘s pulpy (Re)Assignment (formerly Tomboy), which has not only been trashed by almost every critic except for THR‘s Todd McCarthy but appears to the reigning calamity flick of the festival. The second, beginning at 9:15, will be Kelly Fremon Craig‘s The Edge of Seventeen, a teen-angst dramedy produced by James L. Brooks and costarring Hailee Steinfeld and Woody Harrelson. (A friend assures me it works.)
Challenging as it may be, Hill’s film sounds like the more interesting of the two.
Using a plot that seems to resemble Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin I Live In (’11), (Re)Assignment about a low-rent male assassin (Michelle Rodriguez) who is changed into a woman by a revenge-seeking surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) because Rodriguez has killed her brother. The controversy, of course, makes it feel like essential viewing. Most of the pans are calling it bad or inept or horribly misjudged, and of course the transgender Twitter harridans are screeching about it being politically incorrect, etc. I can’t wait.
The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee writes that (Re)Assignment has been “made with such staggering idiocy that it deserves to be studied by future generations for just how and why it ever got made.” Variety‘s Dennis Harveysays it “gracelessly mashes together hardboiled crime-melodrama cliches and an unintentionally funny ‘Oh no! I’m a chick now!’ gender-change narrative hook.”
And yet THR‘s McCarthy claims that while (Re)Assignment is “a disreputable slice of bloody sleaze, there’s also no question that Hill knows exactly what he’s doing here, wading waist-deep into Frank Miller Sin City territory and using genre tropes to explore some provocatively, even outrageously transgressive propositions.
It’s 9:20 am in Cannes, and I don’t see the final Mad Men episode on my iTunes feed. (It’ll show up sometime today.) I’m therefore in no position to talk, but so far the general reaction seems to be one of mild dismay. Nothing close to Sopranos-level befuddlement but something along the lines of “uhm…that’s it?” Yes, I’ve been watching the series all the way through and I know that Matt Weiner has never been one to whip up a story lather. It’s not in him. But most of us wanted, in the words of Eddie Felson, some kind of “nice clean pocket drop.” Was “Person to Person” that?