Hollywood Elsewhere arrived at the Park City Regency last evening around 6 pm. I shuttled right down to Fresh Farms (formerly Albertson’s) for groceries, went back to the pad to unload, and then hitched a lift to Main Street for dinner with HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko and David Scott Smith. After which the trouble started. Well, not “trouble” but certainly the first disappointment of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
Before Tuesday night’s screening of Hail Caesar!Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn told me about a little kickoff gathering on Woodside, which I naturally assumed was happening last night (i.e., Wednesday) as the festival’s first screenings — Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing‘s Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You and Chris Kelly‘s Other People — will happen at 5:30 and 9 pm, respectively.
On top of which Wednesday night is the only “free” social night for serious Sundance go-getters, many if not most of whom arrive on Wednesday so they can unpack, get groceries, get a good night’s sleep and hit the ground running on Thursday morning, which is what I’m doing as we speak.
I do the same kind of easy-default Sundance Film Festival spitballing every December. I checkmark the titles, directors and actors I know or trust on some level and work outward from there. Per longstanding tradition, I’ll be able to see around 20 to 25 films during my nine days in Park City, depending on stamina and whatnot. (The festival runs from 1.21 to 1.31.) I’m naturally looking for tips from anyone who knows anything about potentially cool obscuros. So here goes with the boldfacing primes vs. shoulder-shruggers — so far I’ve got 20 prime titles, and that’s not including any Dramatic Competition titles:
PRIME PREMIERES:
Ali & Nino / United Kingdom (Director: Asif Kapadia, Screenwriter: Christopher Hampton) — Muslim prince Ali and Georgian aristocrat Nino have grown up in the Russian province of Azerbaijan. Their tragic love story sees the outbreak of the First World War and the world’s struggle for Baku’s oil. Ultimately they must choose to fight for their country’s independence or for each other. Cast: Adam Bakri, Maria Valverde, Mandy Patinkin, Connie Nielsen, Riccardo Scamarcio, Homayoun Ershadi. World Premiere.
Certain Women / U.S.A. (Director: Kelly Reichardt, Screenwriter: Kelly Reichardt based on stories by Maile Meloy) — The lives of three woman intersect in small-town America, where each is imperfectly blazing a trail. Cast: Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, James Le Gros, Jared Harris, Lily Gladstone. World Premiere.
Complete Unknown / U.S.A. (Director: Joshua Marston, Screenwriters: Joshua Marston, Julian Sheppard) — When Tom and his wife host a dinner party to celebrate his birthday, one of their friends brings a date named Alice. Tom is convinced he knows her, but she’s going by a different name and a different biography—and she’s not acknowledging that she knows him. Cast: Rachel Weisz, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates, Danny Glover. World Premiere.
Frank & Lola / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Matthew Ross) — A psychosexual noir love story—set in Las Vegas and Paris—about love, obsession, sex, betrayal, revenge and, ultimately, the search for redemption. Cast: Michael Shannon, Imogen Poots, Michael Nyqvist, Justin Long, Emmanuelle Devos, Rosanna Arquette. World Premiere.
The Producers Guild of America (PGA) announced their feature film and long-form TV nominees about an hour ago, and most of their ten movie noms are right-on. They actually included the brilliant but heavily besieged Wolf of Wall Street! Cojones! But there’s a problem with (a) Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis being blown off and (b) Saving Mr. Banks being included.
Banks is a corporate-fellating, pro-Disney propaganda fantasy piece that maligns the memory of P.L. Travers by mis-portraying her as a clenched and joyless scold. And Davis is a note-perfect, multi-layered (if melancholy) period art film of the absolute highest order.
Why did the PGA wave it off? One theory is that the struggle of a somewhat asshole-ian artist to survive is not exactly a relatable subject. Producers have never been fans of sardonic despair — they believe in go-go-go. Remember, also, that the only producer type in the whole film is F. Murray Abraham‘s Bud Grossman (based on Bob Dylan‘s real-life manager Albert Grossman), a blunt and somewhat chilly-mannered sort. I’m not saying this is the whole magilla, but on some level I suspect that the PGA didn’t vote against Inside Llewyn Davis as much as vote against this sort of characterization, which reiterates the cliche that producers and managers and money men are basically pricks. Okay, “practical-minded businesspersons” who don’t bullshit around, but not exactly radiators of warmth.
Politico‘s Jeff Ressner has posted a roster of ten younger Hollywood heavyweights (i.e., younger than old-guard Hollywood liberals like David Geffen, Mike Ovitz, Stanley Sheinbaum, Norman Lear, etc.) who constitute a “newer army of Hollywood political heavyweights… mostly unknown showbiz executives in Los Angeles [who are] working behind the scenes in left-leaning politics: hosting Democratic Party fundraisers, sponsoring anti-war rallies, organizing abortion rights events, backing environmental legislation or producing message movies that promote peace, love and understanding.”
The “Tinseltown Ten,” he proclaims, are (1) Sony Pictures chairman and CEO Michael Lynton; (2) Wild Brain CEO Charles Rivkin, (3) Star Trek director and Cloverfield producer J.J. Abrams; (4) Rhino Records co-founder Richard Foos; (5) producer Lawrence Bender; (6) producer and “viral video campaign” orchestrator Julie Bergman; (7) Marvel Enterprises COO and Brave New Films co-founder Rick Jacobs; (8) Participant Media’s Jeff Skoll; (9) agent Ari Emanuel; and (10) former actress, philanthropist and networker Heather Thomas.
I linked yesterday to a Robert Novak story about Steven Spielberg back-assing away from a perception that he’s more or less behind Sen. Barack Obama in order to sidestep into an open-minded posture about Hilary Clinton, etc. According to Slate‘s Kim Masters, a suspicion in the Obama faction is that the story (which Masters ridicules) “came from the Clinton camp, eager to put a stop to the ‘Hillary Hemorrhages Hollywood Support‘ stories.
“In a recent visit to town, Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe conveyed the notion that folks should pick sides now. Most aren’t. In fact, McAuliffe’s admonishment prompted Norman Lear, who, like many, is contributing to multiple candidates, to ask a Los Angeles Times reporter, ‘What’s Hillary going to do? Jail me?'”
Merissa Marr‘s Wall Street Journal piece about how Tom Cruise has lost his footing with women fans (and what his people are doing to tryin and get some of it back) echoes what the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell told me a while back, which is that women went cold on Cruise last summer, which was perhaps due more to his attack on Brooke Shields over post-partum depression issues. “At that moment, he moved from the realm of acceptable eccentricity to something scary and cruel,” comments Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center, in Marr’s piece. “It’s easier to forgive his joking about placenta than what is perceived to be an attack on a vulnerable woman’s real problem.” Marr comes to more or less the same conclusion I came to in an earlier piece about Cruise’s image problems, which is that they aren’t bad enough to hurt Mission: Impossible III in a serious way, but they may be bad enough to shave at the profit margins. Enough so that Paramount number-crunchers may slide their glasses down to the bridge of their nose and go, “Hmmmmm…yeah.”
Two or three nights ago I watched Judd Apatow‘s Trainwreck again. God, what a cleverly written and affectingly acted hip romcom…loved it for the fourth or fifth time!
AmySchumer is wickedly hilarious and a total pistolero, and that she also shifts into downshift mode and opens herself up emotionally in ways that truly floored me. I love how you can read each and every flickering emotion and thought that passes through her lightning-fast brain — all at the drop of a hat.
Schumer tears up and touches bottom and whacks the ball just as hard and long as Jennifer Lawrence did in Silver Linings Playbook, and we all know what happened there. She’s delivering something brand new (obviously based on her standup persona and whomever she is deep down) but at the same time channelling the freshness of Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon during his peak period in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
Trainwreck is dryly hilarious and smoothly brilliant and damn near perfect. It’s the finest, funniest, most confident, emotionally open-hearted and skillful film Apatow has ever made, hands down. I was feeling the chills plus a wonderful sense of comfort and assurance less than five minutes in. Wow, this is good…no, it’s better…God, what a relief…no moaning or leaning forward or covering my face with my hands…pleasure cruise.
Yeah, I know — I should wait until next year (mid July of ’25) to do a “looking back at my beloved decade-old Trainwreck” piece.
Judd Apatow‘s film premiered big-time at South by Southwest on 3.15.15 (just shy of nine years ago) and opened commercially on 7.17.15.
But in my mind Trainwreck is actually ten years old now, as it was in pre-production in the late winter and spring of ’14, and began principal photography on 5.19.14 in New York City. So let’s celebrate the 10-year anniversary today…pull up a chair.
A good comedy is just as story-savvy, character-rich and well-motivated as a good drama. Good comedies and dramas both need strong third-act payoffs. Take away the jokes, the broad business and the giggly schtick, and a successful comedy will still hold water in dramatic terms.
And yet most comedic writers, it seems, start with an amusing premise, then add the laugh material, and then, almost as an afterthought, weave in a semblance of a story along with some motivation and a third-act crescendo that feels a little half-assed.
Remember Amy Schumer‘s eulogy at her dad’s funeral in Trainwreck? That was a great scene, and it was part of an excellent comedy.
Posted on 6.30.15: Trainwreck is dryly hilarious and smoothly brilliant and damn near perfect. It’s the finest, funniest, most confident, emotionally open-hearted and skillful film Apatow has ever made, hands down. I was feeling the chills plus a wonderful sense of comfort and assurance less than five minutes in. Wow, this is good…no, it’s better…God, what a relief…no moaning or leaning forward or covering my face with my hands…pleasure cruise.
I went to the Arclight hoping and praying that Trainwreck would at least be good enough so I could write “hey, Schumer’s not bad and the film is relatively decent.” Well, it’s much better than that, and Schumer’s performance is not only a revelation but an instant, locked-in Best Actress contender. I’m dead serious, and if the other know-it-alls don’t wake up to this they’re going to be strenuously argued with. Don’t even start in with the tiresome refrain of “oh, comedic performances never merit award-season attention.” Shut up. Great performances demand respect, applause and serious salutes…period.
I still think Schumer is a 7.5 or an 8 but it doesn’t matter because (and I know how ludicrous this is going to sound given my history) I fell in love in a sense — I saw past or through all that and the crap that’s still floating around even now. For it became more and more clear as I watched that Schumer’s personality and performance constitute a kind of cultural breakthrough — no actress has ever delivered this kind of attitude and energy before in a well-written, emotionally affecting comedy, and I really don’t see how anyone can argue that Schumer isn’t in the derby at this point. (A columnist friend doesn’t agree but said that Schumer’s Trainwreck screenplay is a surefire contender for Best Original Screenplay.)
Subhead: “Recovering from an overdose-induced crisis that nearly killed her and forced her to relearn how to speak, the actress looks back on her life and career: ‘Weird shit happened. It kind of went in the wrong direction to happiness.'”
I prefer to sidestep the biological reality of Ryan O’Neal being 78, and to think of him as the guy he was in the early to mid ’70s, when things were as good as they would ever get for him.
I had two minor run-ins with O’Neal in the ’80s. The first was after an evening screening of the re-issued Rear Window** at West L.A.’s Picwood theatre (corner of Pico and Westwood) in late ’83. As the crowd spilled onto Pico O’Neal and his date (probably Farrah Fawcett) were walking right behind me, and I heard O’Neal say “that was sooo good!” Being a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan, this sparked a feeling of kinship.
Four years later I was a Cannon publicity guy and charged with writing the press kit for Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which didn’t turn out so well. I for one liked Mailer’s perverse sense of humor.
I did an hour-long phoner with O’Neal, and my opening remark was that he was becoming a really interesting actor now that he was in his mid 40s with creased features. He was too good looking when younger, I meant, and so his being 46 added character and gravitas. O’Neal was skeptical of my assessment but went along — what the hell.
In fact O’Neal’s career had been declining for a good five or six years at that point. He knew it, I knew it — we were doing a press-kit-interview dance because there was nothing else to say or do.
O’Neal’s last hit film had been Howard Zeiff and Gail Parent‘s The Main Event (’79), which critics panned but was popular with audiences. He had starred in four mezzo-mezzos before that — Peter Bogdanovich‘s Nickelodeon (’76), Richard Attenbrough‘s A Bridge Too Far (’77), Walter Hill‘s The Driver (’78) and John Korty‘s Oliver’s Story.
O’Neal’s career peak lasted for five years (’70 to ’75) and was fortified by a mere four films — Arthur Hiller‘s Love Story (’70), Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? (’72) and Paper Moon (’73), and Stanley Kubrick‘s BarryLyndon (’75). (The Wild Rovers and The Thief Who Came to Dinner, which O’Neal also made in the early ’70s, were regarded as mostly negligible and therefore didn’t count.)
O’Neal has said for decades that his career never really recovered from Barry Lyndon — Kubrick had changed the film entirely in editing, and had made him look like a clueless and opportunistic Shallow Hal of the 18th Century. Plus the film had lost money.
Jordan Peele‘s Nope opens seven days hence (7.22), and there’s no buzz at all. Donut. The first critics screenings begin next week. This doesn’t necessarily “mean” anything as distribs often screen horror films at the last minute.
Peele has made three features (Get Out, Us, Nope), has had two massive hits and become a brand, and many (including the absolutely relentless Bob Strauss) still swear by Get Out.
“It’s not Rosemary’s Baby but what is?,” a friend says. “But it’s infinitely better than The Stepford Wives.”
Peele, I replied, is a commercial filmmaker working in the thriller-horror-spooker field. He is what he is, but he’s not a 21st Century Rod Serling or Roald Dahl or Ira Levin.
Friendo: “The jury’s out, I think, on where he’s going.”
HE: “Strictly a genre tickler.
Friendo: “I think he’s very gifted. If he’s smart, he’ll make Nope his last horror film for a while.”
HE: “Due respect but I don’t think he knows how to do anything more than try to be the black Rod Serling. Except he never wrote anything like Patterns or Requiem for a Heavyweight.”
Friendo: “You think Get Out is decent but overrated, overly praised because of the woke factor, etc. I think it’s singular and gripping. Us didn’t quite work, but I think Get Out makes its mark.”
HE: “You know that story about Jordan having shot Get Out as a horror film AND as a comedy, and that he wasn’t sure which way to go but he finally figured it out in editing…right? This helps explain why Lil Rel Howery is clearly a character with comic attitude — the guy delivering comic relief.
Friendo: “That’s interesting. That would make it a rival to Ralph Rosenblum’s great story of how Annie Hall found its narrative form, its vibe, and its very identity as a romantic comedy through his editing of it. Of course, the thing about horror and comedy is that they’ve always gone together. The three greatest horror movies of the last 65 years — Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — are all, on some level, horror comedies.”
HE: “That’s a very sophisticated (as in highly perverse) viewpoint, calling Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby comedies. I’ll allow that if you stretch the idea of ‘comedy’ to its breaking point, you could say that these two films are flavored with exceedingly dry comedy here and there. They’re basically low-key, naturalistic horror films flecked with dry humor here and there, but they hardly qualify as comedies.
During the first 45 to 50 minutes of The Woman in the Window (Netflix, now streaming) I was saying to myself “hey, this isn’t all that bad…it’s smart, absorbing, carefully composed, shot and cut in fine style and generally kinda nifty.”
Right from the get-go you can feel the presence of Joe Wright, the clever British director who also delivered the audacious Anna Karenina, along with the propulsion of what seems at first like a well-jiggered script, mostly written by Tracy Letts and later tweaked by Tony Gilroy.
There’s also a delicate but highly charged lead performance by Amy Adams, and a dishy one-scene cameo by Julianne Moore. Plus the Hitchcockian references (Rear Window, Spellbound) and hallucinatory flickerings. It’s really quite the package. Until it changes into something else.
I was troubled, I admit, by a weird early scene in which Adams, a wine-sipping, pill-popping, 40something agoraphobic therapist named Anna who lives in a three-story townhouse, is visited by a troubled teenager, Ethan (Fred Heichinger).
Ethan is the son of a bickering, tempestuous couple, Alistair and Jane Russell (Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore), who’ve just moved in across the street, and Anna watches them rant and rave right through their undraped windows. Once Ethan, bearing a small gift from his mom, introduces himself and starts talking jibber-jabbering with Anna, you’re asking himself “is this kid some kind of psycho nutjob? Why’s he so fucking hyper? There’s something Norman Batesy about this guy.”
You’re also asking yourself why Moore is (seemingly) playing a character named Jane Russell. Is there another across-the-street neighbor named Gary Cooper and one around the block named Bob Mitchum? Letts plays Anna’s therapist…what’s his name, Cary Grant?
Spoilers: Anyway I sat up in my seat and began to imagine that the critically panned WomanintheWindow might have been misjudged and was actually kinda trippy, as it is during the first 45 or 50.
But then it falls through a trap door when everyone gangs up on Anna/Adams and she folds and confesses to being a delusional fantasist. Another way of putting it is that TheWomanintheWindow suddenly jumps off a cliff. It goes NUTS. And the climactic third-act scene when a steely-eyed Ethan returns with a knife is CRAY-CRAY.
The problem, in short, is not how Joe Wright directed it — it’s the crazilyshiftingscript. I know Gilroy’s work fairly well, and I know he’s fairly incapable of writing cray-cray so I guess he was stuck between a rock and a hard place and had no choice. It must have been rough on the poor guy.
