“The only difference is that it’s all totally flipped. The fear of Communism and Communist association has become the fear of racism or racist taint or anything offensive to the Left, or even that which seems to argue with Critical Race Theory…anything in that realm. But the methods are exactly, and I mean EXACTLY the same. Except for the absence (so far) of a HUAC-like Congressional examination and indictment committee.
In a Promising Young Woman thread, I noted this morning that ’20 and early ’21 have been an especially weak year for the kind of rich undercurrent award-season films thatless–than–woke, middle–classpeople (includingX–factortypeslikemyself) tend to respond to and pay to see.
For since wokeness began to take hold in ’18 and certainly since the pandemic struck 13 months ago, the movie pipeline has been losingsteamand under-providing, to put it mildly. Nothing even approaching the level of Spotlight, Manchester by the Sea, Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, La-La Land, the long cut of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor, Zero Dark Thirty or Portrait of a Woman on Fire has come our way from domestic filmmakers. **
Above and beyond an array of pandemic suffocations, a significant reason for the strange absence of robust cinema, for this general faint-pulse feeling, is (wait for it) wokeness and political terror.
Wokeness might be good or (sadly) necessary for social change, but it’s not much of a propellant for the creation of knockout award-season flicks that really reach out and touch Joe & Jane Popcorn.
The bottom line is that the erratic pursuit of sweeping, penetrating, soul-touching art (a rare achievement but one that has occasionally manifested over the decades) has been more or less called off, it seems, because such films or aspirations, in the view of certain #MeToo and POC progressives, don’t serve the current woke-political narrative.
The passage is only two paragraphs long. Would you like to read it? Because what happened in the modern art world in the 1930s — i.e, the dominance of “social realism” — precisely mirrors what’s going on today.
For upscale, sensitive-person, social-reflection dramas have fallen under the influence of a new form of ’30s social realism and, it could certainly be argued, are being used to illustrate and argue against social ills that wokesters regard as evil and diseased. The result has been a new form of enlightened propaganda cinema. (Feel free to supply your own examples.)
For the making of cinematic art, like canvas art of the ’30s, has been more or less (or at least partly) “called off” in favor of serving the woke/thought revolution. For film artists of today, to paraphrase an old Barnett Newman observation about the ’30s, are residing “in an intellectual prison that [locks them] in tight.”
Read the following “Painted Word” passage and tell me this isn’t a dead-to-rights portrait of 2021:
Last weekend I re-watched the extended cut of Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25.13). It runs around 138 minutes, or 20 minutes longer than the theatrical cut.
I hadn’t watched the long cut in roughly seven years, and I’m telling you it’s aged beautifully — it’s a ruthlessly brilliant, ice-cold film about irrevocable fate and death by way of the Mexican drug cartels. And yet The Counselor‘s throat was cut by most critics, earning a meager 33% and 48% on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.
The Counselor Bluray includes an excellent “making of” documentary that lasts around…oh, 45 minutes or so. For whatever reason it’s not on YouTube.
Initial HE review: “I was so impressed by the profound assurance, philosophical authority and thematic clarity in Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25), which I saw last night, that I pleaded with Fox publicists to let me say a few things despite the Thursday afternoon review embargo. They gave me permission to do so.
“I was also very taken by the visually seductive stylings (the dp is Dariusz Wolski with editing by Pietro Scalia) and what I would call a bold but almost reckless indifference to conventional audience expectations for a film of this type.
“I asked to speak to Counselor producers Nick Wechsler and Steve Schwartz, and they called about an hour later and we talked for…oh, 15 minutes or so.”
“Take no notice of The Counselor‘s 34% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It simply means that a lot of reviewers found the movie unlikable or unpleasant. Or they found it too scary to handle — they had to push it away in order to go on living their lives. But shame on those reviewers who are calling it a bad or poorly made film, or that ‘everyone’s speech is awash in gaudy psycho-blather and Yoda-like observations,’ which is blind bullshit. Or that ‘you can’t believe a word of it.”
“Yes, you can. You can believe every word. You simply have to understand and accept that The Counselor is expressing a cold and clear-eyed view of the Mexican cartel drug business with a very blunt and eloquent voice. It is an undistilled visit to McCarthyland, which is to say the bleak moralistic realm of novelist and (in this instance) first-time screenwriter Cormac McCarthy. You can say “wow, that’s one cold and cruel place” and that’s fine, but you cannot call The Counselor a bad or negligible or sloppily made film. I hereby declare these viewpoints anathema and excommunicate.
“Consider instead the praise from Toronto Star critic Peter Howell and St. Louis Post-Dispatch critic Joe Williams. Or the twohosannahs I posted yesterday. Or consider the words of N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, who calls Ridley Scott‘s film “terrifying” and “implacable.”
Last night I marathoned through all four episodes of Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering‘s Allen v. Farrow (HBO Max, 2.21.). Speaking as a longtime Woody Allen admirer and defender, I found it unsettling, more than a little disturbing and, I regret to say, ahalf–persuasivehitjob. I was impressed with the chops, the craft and the sculpting, but I took notes as I watched and here’s a sampling:
“This is a hit job, probing but selectively so…a one-sided presentation, a stackeddeck…Mia’s tale is so sanitized, so chaste…beware the perverted monster…I have to admit that it feels creepy…’smothering energy, suffocating closeness‘….Woody was clearly too invested in an emotionally intense, overly touchy relationship with Dylan…directions on how to suck his thumb?…this is so FOUL…give me a break!…so the Yale-New Haven investigators were determined to exonerate Woody?…why would they go to such lengths to distort?…why would they destroy their notes?…Paul Williams was muzzled?…what about the three kids who died under Mia’s care, two of them by suicide?…this is verybadforWoody but at the same time it’s notanopenbook, warts–and–allapproach…thedocis totallyinthetank for the Mia narrative.”
All through the first three hours (the fourth is mostly wrap-up) I was…be honest…quietlyhorrified. A pit of my stomach feeling that began to spread into my spleen. A terrible sensation. As in “oh, no…”
For 29 years I never realized (and nobody ever told me) that Soon-Yi is pronounced Soon-EEE, not Soon-YEE. Five words: “Jeff, the ‘Y’ is silent.”
Allen v. Farrow is a hit job, all right, but at the same time I was persuaded that what was being presented was honest as far as it went. The doc DOES lie by omission quite a lot, but I was also persuaded that the overlyintenseaffection that Woody exhibited for Dylan was wrong. I could feel it. Diseased. Not right.
Then again Showbiz411‘s Roger Friedman might have had a point when he wrote that someone needs to give Mia a special Oscar for the performance of her life.
I just can’t understand Moses Farrow and his 5.23.18 “A Son Speaks Out” essay. What he wrote doesn’t square AT ALL with the Mia, Kirby & Amy narrative that sank into my system last night. So who’slying? Mia is obviously lyingbyomission, but so, it seems (what else am I to think?), is Moses apparently, and I feel so angry about the possibility that he might’ve led me down the garden path.
What kind of diseased dysfunction would goad Moses into blowing that much smoke? How could he write what he wrote and not mean it? I’m almost beside myself with fury.
Moses’ essay, after all, has been the cornerstone of my belief in Woody’s presumed innocence for three years now.
And really…how is it that in all of his 85 years Woody never ONCE violated or over-stepped with anyone else? It’s so baffling. One single five-minute horror episode that happened on 8.4.92 when he was 57 years old, and the rest of his life is essentially spotless. My understanding of human behavior argues with what I saw last night. At the same time there was that awful feeling…
How in God’s name did those nannies let Woody take Dylan away like that? They had been put on HIGH ALERT, for God’s sake. “Don’t let him be alone with her,” they were told. He clearly had what seemed like pervy or at the very least inappropriate inclinations, etc. What kind of sociopath nanny would let Dylan go off with him? They looked for Woody and Dylan for 20 minutes and couldn’t find them? Frog Hollow isn’t that big.
It was four months ago or mid September 2020 when I saw Michel Franco‘s New Order, a dystopian theatre-of-cruelty film that reminded me in some ways (certainly tonally) of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor.
Neon has acquired it for distribution, but they haven’t announced a release date. I know nothing but I’m guessing they’ll be holding it until the fall. I don’t think it’ll matter when it opens for this is a brilliant but absolutely dead-cold film — a certain segment of the public is going to turn away in horror while the cineastes will show respect.
From my 9.14.20 review: Set in Mexico City, it’s about a violent revolution against the wealthy elites by an army of ruthless, homicidal, working-class lefties. Director-writer Franco (After Luca, Chronic) is clearly tapping into all the insurrectionist anger out there (last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, last year’s French Yellow Vest demonstrations) and imagining the ante being raised a couple of notches.
Remember those rightwing thugs (“Los Halcones”) murdering leftists during that Mexico City demonstration in Roma? New Order is a roughly similar situation but with the lefties pulling the trigger, and with a lot more ferocity. Rage against the swells.
It struck me as a nightmare vision of what could conceivably happen if the ranks of our own wokester shitheads were to dramatically increase and anger levels were to surge even more.
New Order, trust me, is brutal, vicious and ice cold. But it’s so well made, and so unsparing in its cruelty. Franco is definitely the new Michael Haneke. He’s a very commanding and exacting director, but the film is ferocious and vicious, more so than even The Counselor (and that’s saying something).
I’m figuring that any serious fan of The Counselor would definitely be down with New Order. Especially given its Mexico City location, the fact that it deals with hostage-taking and exorbitant demands, and the fact that it has the same kind of cruel, compositional decisiveness and clarity of mind that Scott’s film had, only more so.
Franco is a very strong but, on the face of it, heartless director. Personally, I’m sure he’s personable and affable and humane and whatnot.
A filmmaker friend assures that Franco “is a nice fellow…he has a very surgical mind and his dramatic construction seems to veer towards the inexorable.”
Variety‘s Peter Debruge: New Order is “a full-on assault on our collective comfort zone while doubling down on the very thing that makes his films unwatchable for so many. Moviegoing is, by its nature, an act of empathy, as we invest in the lives of fictional strangers, trusting the narrative to repay our emotional commitment — and yet, in film after film, Franco challenges that assumption. Perversely, for those who’ve now come to expect that from him, New Order doesn’t disappoint.”
This feels like a film that knows itself and how to deal the cards. A little touch of the Coen Brothers’ True Grit (grizzled old guy looking after spirited young girl) but minus the bearded schnorring from pot-bellied Jeff Bridges and supplemented by some Tom Hanks kindness and fortitude. With bad guys and gunplay and the usual hygiene issues associated with the Old West. Directed and co-written by Paul Greengrass, based on a same-titled novel by Paulette Jiles. Lensing by the great Dariusz Wolski (The Counselor, The Martian, All the Money in the World, Sicario: Day of the Soldado). Music by James Newton Howard.
Last night I finally saw Michel Franco‘s New Order, a dystopian theatre-of-cruelty film that reminded me in some ways (certainly tonally) of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor.
New Order premiered on 9.10 at the just-wrapped Venice Film Festival, and last weekend won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize.
Set in Mexico City, it’s about a violent revolution against the wealthy elites by an army of ruthless, homicidal, working-class lefties. Director-writer Franco (After Luca, Chronic) is clearly tapping into all the insurrectionist anger out there (Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, last year’s French Yellow Vest demonstrations) and imagining the ante being raised a couple of notches.
Remember those rightwing thugs (“Los Halcones”) murdering leftists during that Mexico City demonstration in Roma? New Order is a roughly similar situation but with the lefties pulling the trigger, and with a lot more ferocity. Rage against the swells.
It struck me as a nightmare vision of what could conceivably happen if the ranks of our own wokester shitheads were to dramatically increase and anger levels were to surge even more.
New Order, trust me, is brutal, vicious and cold. But it’s so well made, and so unsparing in its cruelty. Franco is definitely the new Michael Haneke. He’s a very commanding and exacting director, but the film is ferocious and vicious, more so than even The Counselor (and that’s saying something).
I’ve sorry to admit I’ve been been derelict with Franco’s work before this. I’m going to try and catch up at the earliest opportunity.
I’m figuring that any serious fan of The Counselor would definitely be down with New Order. Especially given its Mexico City location, the fact that it deals with hostage-taking and exorbitant demands, and the fact that it has the same kind of cruel, compositional decisiveness and clarity of mind that Scott’s film had, only more so.
Franco is a very strong but, on the face of it, heartless director. Personally, I’m sure he’s personable and affable and humane and whatnot.
A filmmaker friend assures that Franco “is a nice fellow…he has a very surgical mind and his dramatic construction seems to veer towards the inexorable.”
Critic friendo: “I love those kinds of filmmakers! I feel their vision is actually quite compassionate — they’re just trying to be honest about a cruel world.”
Three and a half years ago I stated that Michael Fassbender was on the HE shit list (“Turning Against Fassbender“), and that his reign as a proverbial hot guy had begun to wind down. Fassy is still a respected working actor (his next film is Taika Waititi‘s Next Goal Wins), but he’s now regarded as a kind of perverse figure with a surly aura.
An early 2020 perspective allows an assessment of Fasbender’s hot six years (’08 to ’13) — Hunger, Fish Tank, Inglourious Basterds, Jonah Hex, X-Men: First Class, A Dangerous Method, Shame (his peak achievement), Haywire, Prometheus, 12 Years A Slave, The Counselor.
I got off the boat roughly five and a half years ago or starting in 2014 — Frank, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Slow West, Steve Jobs, Macbeth (hated it), The Light Between Oceans (meh), Assassin’s Creed, Song to Song (nothing), Alien: Covenant, The Snowman, X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
HE commenters “RossoVeneziano” and “Mr. F.,” myself, Mark David Chapman and Variety editor Steven Gaydos on the crash-and-burn scenario of Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born, a justly admired and relentlessly promoted Warner Bros. release film that is now completely finished as a Best Picture contender, and the key role that Variety‘s Kris Tapley may have arguably played in helping to bring about its demise (i.e., in a water-poisoning, long-game sense).
RossoVeneziano: “ASIB officially being out of the BP race even before nominations are announced is something no one saw coming. Whatever you think of the movie I feel sorry for Cooper — biggest loser of the season.”
Mr. F.: “Warners is now frantically working through the weekend to finish drawing up their ‘DO IT FOR BRADLEY’ campaign.”
Jeffrey Wells: “A Star Is Born’s loss is Hollywood Elsewhere’s joy, partly because many in the industry listened to (or agreed with) my sensible advice that you can’t hand a Best Picture Oscar to a well-handled but formulaic remake of a remake of a remake. Good film, made lots of money, and that was enough.
“If you ask me the other big loser in this morning-after realm is Variety’s Kris Tapley, whose ‘stand back because here comes a big multi-Oscar nominee!’ drumbeat article that ran before Toronto…if you ask me that piece poisoned the water with an aura of arrogance and entitlement — a Tapley trumpeting (WB publicists have shown me this knockout film early and I’ve been given permission to pass along the wonderful news) that proclaimed Bradley Cooper as the new king.
“Not so fast, Kris!
“HE was the only site anywhere that stood up to the WB hype machine with a piece that was bluntly headlined ‘Due Respect But ASIB Must Be Stopped.” Bobby Peru huffed and puffed, but thank God the industry mostly agreed with my view of things. Sometimes (not often but sometimes) things work out for the better.”
Steven Gaydos: “OK, let’s put this one to rest once for all. (I know, I know, in the obsessive-compulsive world of Jeff ‘Roma Man’ Wells, that never happens, but I’ll forge on anyway.) Here’s what my Variety colleague Kris Tapley ACTUALLY wrote a month before A Star is Born opened in theaters:
“‘Including best picture and director, where are we now? Nine nominations? A Star Is Born is an across-the-board Oscar contender. More than that, and assuming this is even still possible in the modern era, it has the muscle to achieve what only three films in movie history ever have: Win all five major Academy Awards (picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay.’
“If you read his observations on Awards Season, which you, like Mark Chapman studying ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and winding up in front of the Dakota, you clearly do, Kris clearly loves Roma as much as you do and he also loves Star is Born and he loves First Man and he loves Minding the Gap, etc.
“So he does what you’ve said a thousand times here that you believe should be done: he doesn’t mask his enthusiasm for the films he’s passionate about. But he also does something you should consider matching: he generally checks that passion at the door when it comes time for wisely, fairly and accurately surveying the Awards Season scene.
Last weekend Selma Blair was quoted by Metro‘s Katie Bailey saying that Cameron Diaz, who hasn’t made a film since Will Gluck‘s Annie (’14) and whose last good film was Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (’13), has more or less bailed on her film career.
“I had lunch with Cameron the other day,” Blair reportedly said. “We were reminiscing about [The Sweetest Thing]. I would have liked to do a sequel but Cameron’s retired from acting. She’s like ‘I’m done.'” Blair was presumedly screamed at that night by Diaz and her reps, and so she tweeted the following day (Monday, 3.12) that Diaz “is NOT retiring from ANYTHING.”
Today, or four days after Bailey’s Metro story, People‘s Mike Miller posted a story about how the 45 year-old Diaz “is loving her life outside the Hollywood spotlight.” Quoting “a source”, Miller writes that Diaz and her 39 year-old, tattoo-covered musician husband Beji Madden are “great” and “both very happy living the quiet life.”
Translation: Diaz’s career is in eclipse but she doesn’t want anyone thinking she’s not ready to return if the right part comes along.
Diaz’s career started to lose steam as she got older and her looks started to fade. You can’t say she didn’t appear in better films during the ’90s and early aughts. We all know that actresses often have a rougher time when they start to show mileage. Or something like that. I didn’t invent the system. I deplore it. But that’s how it goes in some cases.
The same thing happened with Brendan Fraser — career peak between ’92 and ’05, and then he began to age out.
If you ask me Diaz peaked from ’94 to ’05, or from age 22 to 33 — from her breakout debut in Chuck Russell‘s The Mask (’94) to Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes, in which she gave her career-best performance.
I saw Ridley Scott‘s All The Money in the World (Sony, 12.25) for the second time last night at a big Academy premiere — talent, producers, actors, publicists, below-the-liners, people like me, etc. Scott and some of the cast attended (Mark Wahlberg, Christoper Plummer, Michelle Williams, Charlie Plummer, Timothy Hutton), and there was a big party afterward with loads of great-tasting food by Wolfgang Puck caterers.
All The Money is about a true-life event — the 1973 Rome kidnapping of John Paul Getty III and the laborious, months-long negotiations between the kidnappers and the young Getty’s tightwad grandfather, oil baron and billionaire J. Paul Getty, that followed. Scott doesn’t fool around with the story beats, and has made a stylish, well-finessed thing, jarring and intelligent and always believable.
Prior to last night’s Academy screening of Ridley Scott’s All The Money In The World — Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Williams, Scott.
The film is actually about tycoon vs. people values — a rumination about the real price of meat in the market, about how cold things can get when a capitalist emperor like Getty Sr. (chillingly played by Plummer) has been told to cough up or else when it comes to life of one of his own (Charlie Plummer, no relation), and how thorny and malignant life can be when hard bargainers are sparring over the size of a ransom. It’s a film about icy, eyeball-to-eyeball behavior on all sides.
Except, that is, when it comes to Gail Harris (Williams), the mother of the kidnapped scion who, as you might expect, doesn’t see the situation in monetary as much as human terms. And also, come to think of it, when it comes to Cinquanta (Romain Duris), a member of the Red Brigade kidnapping gang who becomes the young Getty’s closest captor and “friend”, in a manner of speaking. At the end of the day Cinqunata is almost as much on the human side as Gail.
In the Scott canon, All The Money in the World isn’t as cruel and ruthless as The Counselor, the 2013 drug-dealing drama that is arguably Scott’s finest 21st Century film, but it operates in the same chilly ballpark. Scott isn’t commonly associated with straight-talking dramas about upfront realism, but when he decides to settle down and make films for adults (i.e., stories about how things really are out there), there’s no one better.
We’ve all been impressed, I think, by Scott’s recent herculean re-filming of all the J. Paul Getty scenes (re-performed by Plummer when it became apparent in early November that the disgraced Kevin Spacey had to be jettisoned) between 11.20 and 11.30. Scott was given a longish standing ovation when he took the stage before the show began.
I didn’t dislike Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant — I hated it. And I’m not saying that out of some lazy-wrath instinct or pissy posturing or what-have-you. I’m talking about serious stomach-acid sensations here. Then again I mostly despised Prometheus so it didn’t take a great deal of effort to come to this.
If Prometheus rang your hate bell, you’re going to despise this one also. For Alien: Covenant, which runs 121 minutes but feels like 150, is truly a spawn of that awful 2012 film. Is it “better” than Prometheus? All right, yeah, I suppose it is. Is it therefore worth seeing? Maybe, but only if you like watching films that make you resent everything on the face of the planet including yourself.
I’m not going to tap out the usual story, character and actor rundown. All you need to know is that I didn’t give a damn about any of Alien: Covenant. Nothing. I was muttering “Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou” the whole time. Ten minutes in I was going “awww, Jesus…this already feels sloppy and reachy.” Of course it has a back-burster scene. Of course it was thrown in to compete with the John Hurt chest-fever scene in the original. All I could think was “the Hurt version was set up so much better, and delivered so much more…this is just Scott hanging wallpaper.”
I hit the bathroom during the the last ten minutes. You never do this if a movie has you in its grip, but I didn’t care.
Scott’s Alien (’79) had clarity, integrity — it was simple and managable, and it didn’t make you feel as if you had hornets in your brain. Best of all it didn’t explain anything in terms of backstory or motivation. The original Alien space jockey (I will love that elephant trunk and split-open ribcage for the rest of my life) was wonderful because there was no explanation about what had happened or why. It was delightful for what it didn’t explain.
Alien: Covenant is detestable for the exact opposite reason — for all the boring and tedious backstory gruel (i.e., all in service of explaining Michael Fassbender‘s malignant creationism) that it explains and clarifies, and then elaborates upon.
The Telegraph‘s Robbie Colin, who loves this fucking thing and cheers the fact that it’s “a million miles from the crowd-pleasing Alien retread 20th Century Fox [execs] have presumably been begging Scott to make,” calls it proof of Scott “operating at the peak of his powers.”
To me Alien: Covenant is a portrait of Scott as a giver of corporate neckrubs. And it grieves me to say this about the director of The Counselor, which I not only worshipped but which will probably turn out to be Scott’s last brilliant, hard-as-nails, close-to-flawless film.