An apparition standing in grassy weeds on the other side of a river. No words, movement, gestures. Like a mannequin, and in bright sunlight yet. And then she’s gone.
All my life I’ve felt vaguely creeped out by this scene in Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (’61). Alas, your typical horror fan wouldn’t so much as raise an eyebrow if a director had the nerve (or the foolishness) to insert something like this in a contemporary fright flick.
“Quietly unnerving” lost its currency a long time ago, I’m afraid. I’m not sure it ever had any real currency to begin with. Today’s elevated horror genre (Personal Shopper, Hereditary, A Quiet Place, The Babadook) demands bigger jolts. The only recent films that operated close to this level were Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse and The Witch, and even they dealt crazier cards than Clayton did.
The woman in the weeds (i.e., “Miss Jessel”) was played by Clytie Jessop.
There’s also a moment or two with Quint at the window. He was portrayed by Peter Wyngarde, who died two years ago.
My 3.9 flight to Austin meant missing the Los Angeles all-media for The Hunt. I’ll post a review of this Craig Zobel-Damon Lindelof collaboration after catching it locally tomorrow night. Here’s a response from veteran movie guy and L.A. Times contributor Lewis Beale:
“I just saw this supposedly controversial movie. The main costars are Betty Gilpin and Hillary Swank. It’s basically a straight-to-video exploitation picture — very bloody — given a thin veneer of relevance with some political content. Featuring a bunch of TV actors and other folk — Sturgill Simpson as a rapper! — who obviously did it for the paycheck (a small one, since most are onscreen for only a short period before they’re knocked off).
“It’s about how a bad joke on the part of some wokester liberals about killing Trumpsters metastasizes into a ‘thing’ with deplorable conspiracy types. This forces the liberals to act on their joke and hunt the rightwingers a la The Most Dangerous Game.
“I found it watchable but nothing more, aided in no small part by a 90-minute running time. It portrays both sides of the political equation as jerks, but any controversial content is basically non-existent. The reviews will most likely be brutal.”
“A gory, hard-R exploitation movie masquerading as political satire, one that takes unseemly delight in dispatching yahoos on both ends of the spectrum via shotgun, crossbow, hand grenade and all manner of hastily improvised weapons.
“The words ‘trigger warning’ may not have been invented with The Hunt in mind, but they’ve seldom seemed more apt in describing a film that stops just shy of fomenting civil war as it pits Left against Right, Blue (bloods) against Red (necks) in a bloody battle royale that reduces both sides to ridiculous caricatures.
“As the umpteenth variation on Richard Connell’s ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ The Hunt is [nonetheless] one of the most effective executions yet (it surpasses the Cannes-laureled Bacarau, but drags along too much baggage to best last year’s Ready or Not).
“Regardless of one’s personal political affiliations, it’s hard not to root for the victims here, and one quickly distinguishes herself from the pack of Deliverance-style caricatures: Crystal May Creesy (Gilpin), a MacGyver-skilled veteran who served in Afghanistan and whose distrust of any and everyone makes her uniquely suited for a final showdown with Athena.
At the end of each year there are always 20 to 25 films that qualify as excellent, very good or good. The creme de la creme is usually between five and ten, but the final tally of approvables is always around 20, and 25 if you want to be liberal about it. But 1962 was different. By my count nearly 50 films that anyone would rank as praiseworthy or seriously noteworthy were released that year. Roughly double the average. The HE rundown is below.
I’ve riffed off and on about the ’62 roster over the last 15 or so years, but now there’s a new book that celebrates this mid-Kennedy administration chapter — Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan‘s “Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies” (Rutgers University Press). The pub date is 3.13.
For many years the general consensus has been that the greatest movie years were 1939, ’62, ’71 and ’99. Which others?
Excerpt: “Most conventional film histories dismiss the early 1960s as a pallid era, a downtime between the heights of the classic studio system and the rise of New Hollywood directors like Scorsese and Altman in the 1970s. It seemed to be a moment when the movie industry was floundering as the popularity of television caused a downturn in cinema attendance.
On the contrary, “Cinema ’62′ asserts that 1962 “was a peak year for film, with a high standard of quality that has not been equaled since.”
A decade or so ago I wrote about a BAM retrospective on 1962 films. NYFCC chairman Armond White, the apparent architect of the series, wrote at the time that 1962 “was equal to Hollywood’s fabled 1939 so we welcome this great opportunity to learn and revise film history.”
Here’s my updated rundown of 1962 worthies: David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia, John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Sam Peckinpah‘s Ride The High Country, Robert Aldrich‘s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Bryan Forbes‘ The L-Shaped Room, Howard Hawks‘ Hatari, Francois Truffaut‘s Shoot The Piano Player, Francois Truffaut‘s Jules and Jim, Agnes Varda‘s Cleo From 5 to 7, Luis Bunuel‘s The Exterminating Angel (10)
Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd, the John Frankenheimer trio of Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate and All Fall Down, J. Lee Thompson‘s Cape Fear, George Seaton‘s The Counterfeit Traitor, Frank Perry‘s David and Lisa, the Blake Edwards‘ duo of Experiment in Terror and Days of Wine and Roses, Pietro Germi‘s Divorce, Italian Style. (10)
Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita, the great Kirk Douglas western Lonely are the Brave, John Schlesinger‘s A Kind of Loving, Roman Polanski‘s Knife in the Water (released in the U.S. in ’63), Alain Resnais‘ Last Year at Marienbad, Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’eclisse, Sidney Lumet‘s version of Eugene O’Neil’sLong Day’s Journey into Night, Otto Preminger‘s Advise and Consent, Terence Young‘s Dr. No, John Huston‘s Freud. (10)
I’m very sorry that Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost, which had been scheduled to debut at South by Southwest on 3.14 with a follow-up on 3.17, has taken a COV-19 torpedo along with the whole SXSW ship. Yes, Rod and I are friendly but this is nonetheless a strong, vital and worthy film, and it would have been suitably launched had things gone off as planned. Life is unfair.
Early last November I caught a not-quite-finished version. A U.S. forces-vs.-the-Taliban war flick based on Jake Tapper’s book, it’s a rousing, highly emotional drill into another tough battle that actually happened, and another example of the kind of combat flick to which we’ve all become accustomed — one in which the U.S. forces get their asses kicked and barely survive.
Tapper’s same-titled book, published in 2013, is about the ordeal of U.S. troops defending Combat Outpost Keating. Located at the bottom of a steep canyon and absurdly vulnerable to shooters in the surrounding hills, the outpost was brutally attacked by Taliban forces on 10.3.09. For a while there it was very touch-and-go. The base was nearly overrun. Eight Americans and four Afghans defenders were killed.
Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha and Specialist Ty Michael Carter (respectively played in Lurie’s film by Scott Eastwood and Caleb Landry Jones) were awarded the Medal of Honor.
The Outpost starts off, naturally enough, with a subdued queasy feeling of “okay, how long before the bad stuff starts?” What happens is that things start to go wrong vaguely, gradually, in small measures. Then it upshifts into unsettling (a name-brand actor buys it) and then bad to worse, and then worse than that. And then the bracing, teeth-rattling 30- to 40-minute finale.
Lone Survivor, Hamburger Hill, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, In The Valley of Elah, Platoon, We Were Soldiers, Pork Chop Hill — American forces go to war for questionable or dubious reasons and the troops engaged get shot and pounded all to hell. Those who barely survive are shattered, exhausted, gutted. War is bad karma.
It just occured to me that one of the things I loved about Zero Dark Thirty, which is not about the military but the intelligence community, is that it ends with a feeling of modest satisfaction — bad guy smoked, mission accomplished, all is well.
I know I was expected to feel a similar kind of satisfaction from Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge, but I didn’t.
Variety‘s Steven Gaydos, posted last November: “Thanks for calling attention to this terrific film that packs a wallop. Really an edge of the seat experience from start to finish and deeply moving as well. Very Charge of the Light Brigade in that ‘military intelligence’ once again proves oxymoronic and brave young souls are left to figure a way to save each other from catastrophe. Heroes.”
The USA as many of us have known it will be set on the road to ruin tonight. Because a Bernie Sanders victory in New Hampshire (followed by a Bernie-Biden victory in South Carolina on 2.19 — thanks, POCs!) will seriously harm the sensible-liberal-moderate Pete Buttigieg brand, which is the only brand that can beat Trump in November, and therefore a Trump victory will be locked down because Bernie can’t beat him.
Typewriter Joe might be able to defeat The Beast, but after tonight he’ll be all but finished. Michael Bloomberg is the only hope right now because you know he’ll keep spending and pushing — he’s indefatigable. But I’m really not kidding. The transformation of the US of A (as many of us have known it) into Trump Nation between January ’21 and January ’25 will be ruinous beyond words. And the journey begins tonight.
If Pete can nudge aside Bernie in N.H. (which he probably can’t manage), there’s at least a chance. But he won’t. All hail the spirit and precedent of Jeremy Corbyn and Gregg Stillson! The bad guys have this! And I’m not just talking about Bernie bruhs and Trump-worshipping bumblefucks, but also Khmer Rouge wokesters and cancel culture fanatics. Together they comprise a perfect storm of catastrophe.
If Bloomberg can’t manage the next-to-impossible, the only way out is for Trump to drop dead of a heart attack or a stroke. Or for fate to (ahem) otherwise intervene. Who would be honestly sorry to see that animal breathe his last?
I might have a couple of free hours at the end of tomorrow (i.e., Thursday), depending on how the column goes. Perhaps I can rumble down to the Grove around 5 or 6 pm and pay nearly $20 to see Cathy Yan‘s Birds of Prey? I missed the all-media screening so I have to see it, right? Sounds like a plan.
From Owen Gleiberman’s 2.5 Variety review: “Coming after the stand-alone phenomenon of Joker, Birds of Prey is a comic-book movie that isn’t pretending, for a single moment, to cast a spell of poetic awe. Yet it’s still a compellingly novel popcorn jamboree. Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel were female-superhero movies that offered the empowerment of earnest fantasy. Birds of Prey offers the empowerment of utter irresponsibility. The women in this movie look badder than those previous heroines did because, for the most part, they just don’t give a fuck.”
Gleiberman finishes this paragraph with one of the saddest declarative statements I’ve read in recent years: “With any luck, that should all translate into a major hit.”
So in other words Birds of Prey (aka The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is about enraged fuck-all nihilism and, in a certain social-undercurrent way, anti-brute-male revenge porn. I don’t know about the HE community, but I think it’s is so cool when this sort of material is delivered with a savage wink, and with ten times the necessary emphasis!
Perhaps one day Birds of Prey will play alongside Emerald Fennell and Carey Mulligan‘s Promising Young Woman, the Sundance ’20 entry which, according to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, is drawing from the same well.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘restrained’ when describing Promising Young Woman,” he says. “There’s nothing subtle about this movie, and it’s not realism at all. It’s a post-#MeToo fantasy, a feminist version of Death Wish…a justifiably angry woman (Carey Mulligan) punishing filthy men. Mulligan is depicted as heroic without any real-life consequences or police investigations or social media gotchas. It gives you a lot to chew on and talk about post-screening — in a sense it’s right at the forefront of the post-#MeToo conversation — but then again it’s not saying anything new. And it’s definitely a world apart. It charges into extreme realms.”
The possible problem with female revenge porn, it seems, isn’t the justified anger that propels these films, but the broad-brush overkill that’s been deployed. To go by Ruimy and Gleiberman, I mean.
Coralie Fargeat‘s Revenge (’17), a rape-and-revenge action horror flick, was cut from a similar cloth.
In my judgment there’s been only one commendable (if not quite excellent) female-revenge film so far — Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale. I believed and admired that 2018 film start to finish, despite Kent allowing the story tension to dissipate during the last 15% or 20%.
Apart from rousing receptions given to Taylor Swift and Hillary Clinton and apart from Hulu’s curious $17,500,999.69 cent purchase of Palm Springs, “the reception to [Sundance ’20] movies was much colder.
“As Sundance crawls into its closing days, a majority of the 100-something titles thatscreenedinthesnowytheatersofPark Cityare still actively seeking distribution.
“Many agreed that the narrative features that played were not as strong as they had been in other years, nor as powerful as they need to be to break through the hurdle of getting moviegoers to buy a theater ticket.” — From Brent Lang and Ramin Setoodeh‘s “Taylor and Hillary Were Rock Stars at Sundance, but What About the Movies?”:
In other words, the festival for the most part didn’t cut it, and most of the films shown over the last 10 days probably won’t charm Joe and Jane Popcorn when they start streaming or, in certain rare instances, playing theatrically.
Like I’ve said a few times, Sundance has more or less woked itself into a corner, and now it’s pretty much stuck with that brand or identity badge and can’t hope to free itself. The wokeness has been strident and persistent. The die is cast.
I’ve no idea how much jail time, if any, Harvey Weinstein will wind up serving for the multiple alleged instances of rape and sexual assault he’s currently being prosecuted for. But after yesterday’s grotesque anatomical testimony by alleged sexual assault victim Jessica Mann, Weinstein has certainly gotten a taste of the sexual humiliation that he’s been accused of handing out during his heyday.
Mann, who alleges that Weinstein raped and sexually assaulted her on multiple occasions in 2013, claimed that the first time she saw Harvey buck naked she thought he was (a) “deformed and intersex,” (b) didn’t appear to have testicles, and (c) seemed to have a vagina. She added that he “smelled like shit” and “had a lot of blackheads” on his back. Her description, put bluntly, is that of a deformed and repugnant Uriah Heep.
Mann’s testimony suggests that Harvey may have had an undescended testicle or two, or a condition that resembles what Adolf Hitler reportedly suffered from. I know something about this as I had to have surgery when I was 10 years old to correct a one-ball condition. Without this I wouldn’t be able to have children, my parents were told.
In “Hitler’s Last Day: Minute by Minute”, historians Jonathan Mayo and Emma Craigiewrote that “Hitler [was] believed to have had two forms of genital abnormality: an undescended testicle and a rare condition called penile hypospadias in which the urethra opens on the under side of the penis.”
Life and biology are unfair and some of us are dealt bad cards. The sad fact is that there are hundreds of thousands of people on this planet, perhaps millions, who are regarded as ugly. I myself have never used that word — a decision that came from watching Charles Laughton‘s performance in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (’39) when I was eight or nine.
But most or many people do use it. They regard certain people, fearfully, as deformed or abnormal or otherwise grotesque. Cruel or unfair as this sounds, these unfortunate people arguably have an obligation to prevent others from contemplating or, God forbid, being physically intimate with their biological misfortune. It follows that they should never even think about attempting sexual congress with other people. Better that way.
Think of all the anguish and bruisings that could have been avoided if Harvey had decided that he had no choice but to be sexually inactive in a normal social sense. Without a sex drive he’d probably still be a swaggering film industry hotshot of some kind. All he had to do was accept his biological fate and conclude that onanism, prostitutes and love dolls were his only allowable outlets.
But no — he had to have his way with actresses. And thereby ruined not only his own life but left many of his alleged victims permanently bruised and/or traumatized.
“Because you love movies,” the latest Once Upon A Time in Hollywood ad says. This is a positive coded message. It means that serious fans of Quentin Tarantino‘s ninth film are relaxed and sophisticated enough to see past aspirational, vaguely academic notions about “cinema” and the learned attitudes they connote — they’re down with confident, engaging, cool-as-shit flicks.
In part because they know (and this is a sophisticated idea that’s been brewing since the Cahiers du Cinema days of future director Jean-Luc Godard) that some of the greatest and most satisfying big-screen experiences, not to mention those that have delivered great and lasting art, were made with the initial idea of being audience-friendly entertainments.
In short, a film doesn’t have to be artistically “serious” or pretentious to be worthy of critical admiration, and perhaps even win a Best Picture Oscar.
As I mentioned earlier this month, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood winning the big prize would be a unique historical achievement. It would be the first time in Hollywood history that an amiable, relatively plot-free, character-driven, laid-back attitude flick wins the big prize.
To put it more simply and given the fact that Tarantino’s film is a celebration of the B-movie realm of 1969 Hollywood, it would be the first “drive-in movie” to win this honor. A more on-point description would be “hangoutmovie“. In the vein, say, of Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (’98), which, until OUATIH came along, is arguably his finest and most engaging film of the last 20 years.
Perhaps the most precise analogy of all is Howard Hawks‘ Rio Bravo (’59), which Tarantino has described as “the ultimate hangout movie” and which he’s been enthusing about for decades.
You could actually call Once Upon A Time in Hollywood a kind of Rio Bravo tribute. The parallels aren’t abundant, but they’re evident.
Rio Bravo‘s two main characters are John Wayne‘s “John T. Chance”, a gruff, mince-no-words Texas sheriff, and Dean Martin‘s “Dude”, the town drunk who used to be good with a gun. In Tarantino’s film Brad Pitt‘s Cliff Booth is a vaguely Wayne-like stunt man, driver and gopher — laid-back, steady, confident — and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Rick Dalton is certainly a “Dude”-like actor — formerly a big TV western star with a top-rated series (Bounty Law), now beset with career worries and an alcohol problem.
The Rio Bravo villains are the ranching Burdette brothers (Nathan and Joe) and their gang; the baddies in Tarantino’s film, of course, are the Manson family and particularly Tex Watson, Susan Atkins (aka “Sadie”), Linda Kasabian (“Flower Child”) and Patricia Krenwinkel (“Katie”).
Rio Bravo concludes with the drilling of the Burdettte gang by John T. and Dude (aided by Walter Brennan‘s “Stumpy” and Ricky Nelson‘s “Colorado”), while OUATIH ends with the walloping, face-mashing, pitbull-chewing and flame-throwing incineration of the Manson ogres by Cliff and Rick.
And both films are mainly about…well, talking shit and sizing up the situation and to some extent dealing with kindly Mexican fellows (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez‘s “Carlos” in Rio Bravo + the car attendants at Musso & Frank whom Cliff tells Rick not to cry in front of) and wondering what’ll happen down the road. Basically marking time with sweat and anxiety mixed with occasional fraternal chillin’ and the mopping of brows. Plus Dude and Rick fretting over their respective alcohol issues.
A 1.21 Lacey Rose piece in The Hollywood Reporter passes along two bombshell quotes from Nanette Burstein‘s Hillary, a four-part Hulu docuseries that will debut at Sundance 2020 and stream in March. One conveys Clinton’s negative view of Bernie Sanders, and another passes along President Obama‘s opinion of The Beast.
Hillary tells the cameras that Sanders “was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
In a THR interview Clinton is asked is the Bernie assessment still holds. “Yes, it does,” she says.
THR: “If he gets the nomination, will you endorse and campaign for him?” Clinton: “I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.
“I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you’re just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that’s a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions.”
In the doc Clinton vp running mate Tim Kaine is heard confiding that President Obama called the night before a debate and said, “Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist…you’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.”
In today’s Guardian (1.13) is a brilliant Jessa Crispin piece that basically says that critics have become so political-minded and have chugged so much virtue-signalling Kool-Aid that they’re not only opposed to telling the truth about films as a rule but are pretty much incapable of doing so.
The piece is called “Is politics getting in the way of assessing which films are actually good?”
Excerpt #1: “This was…the year media outlets like the New York Times and Vanity Fair insisted Little Women was mandatoryviewing to proveyou’renotamisogynist. Even GQ ran a piece implying how important it was men ‘support women’ by watching this film about some white ladies having a hard time during the civil war.
“Men’s supposed lack of interest in Little Women became the dominant narrative of the movie, implying it reveals the (alleged) lack of interest men have, in the words of the New York Times, in ‘see[ing] women as human beings’.
“It couldn’t possibly be that Little Women is just a bad movie — although it is. Little Women is one of those books that has been over-adapted, with five previous film adaptations, plus a miniseries, plus a theatrical production, plus an anime version, and on and on.”
Excerpt #2: “But if you insist that a movie is important, you don’t really have to deal with whether or not it’s good. You can shamepeopleintoseeingit as a political statement, rather than as an entertainment or cultural selection.
“Same with the ‘dangerous’ or ‘disturbing’ moniker, which got used on everything from Joker to the latest Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was marked down for everything from not giving its female costar Margot Robbie enough lines to its gratuitous violence against a female would-be murderer to its filming of women’s feet (fetishes are now dangerous, I guess).
“If a critic doesn’t like a film, labeling it as dangerous — and implying you might get killed if you go see it — is an attempt to keep people away.”
Excerpt #3: “Part of this language is the result of our commenting culture choosing to see everything through a politicallens. There must be a political reason for Tarantino giving so few lines to a female actor in his latest film, and that political reason must be he does not respect or have any interest in women. There must be a political reason this movie doesn’t have the correct number of roles given to actors of color, and that reason must be that the director is racist.
HE has frequently condemned people who throw their heads back and laugh loudly in restaurants and bars. I’ve also frowned upon the conversational use of the words “genius”, “oh my God” and, most recently, “amazing.” Today’s prohibition is about the expression “you have no idea.”
People who say “you have no idea” are sloppy communicators, or at the very least given to inexactitude. When people say “you have no idea” about this or that, they actually mean you don’t have enough of a grasp of a certain topic or situation or your knowledge in this realm or field is limited. In other words, they don’t actually mean “you have no idea.”
People who say what they don’t actually mean are utterly worthless. On top of which Samuel L. Jackson has said “you have no idea” in too many films. So from here on and forevermore, nobody can say this four-letter phrase ever again. Well, they can but…