Three days ago I reiterated what feels to me like an absolute certainty, which is that Greta Gerwig — star, producer and co-writer (with director and boyfriend Noah Baumbach) of Mistress America (Fox Searchlight, 8.14) — is radiating a fairly unique comic attitude, which led me to describe her as “a 21st Century Carole Lombard.” A “funnier, flakier and taller Lena Dunham” without the chubs, I added. Gerwig is not a finely honed performer as much as an unbridled force, and that force has produced a kind of acting and writing that to my mind is breaking fresh ground. She’s creating a new kind of comedic personality — “unfocused” and yet laser-focused on whatever thought or current or insight may pop into her head and, with some exceptions, mostly unconcerned with how it may be received. She’s a nouveau screwball — an oddly charming mixture of absolute certainty, anxiety, exuberance and vulnerability.

A few days earlier I said that my initial analogy for Mistress America, which I came up with when I saw it seven months ago in Sundance, “was His Girl Friday. Which wasn’t quite right. It’s not as formulaic as that 1940 farce, which of course is a remake of The Front Page. Mistress America is more like Holiday meets My Man Godfrey meets The Twentieth Century without the train or any slamming doors.”

This morning Intelligent Life‘s Tom Shone expressed similar impressions. Here’s an edited excerpt: “Gerwig has had same liberating effect for Noah Baumbach what Diane Keaton had for Woody Allen: she has opened him up, lending his films a giddy sense of release. Frances Ha, Baumbach’s first film with Gerwig in 2012, about a young woman trying to find her footing in Manhattan, inhaled deeply of the French nouvelle vague — with it’s black and white cinematography, Georges Delerue on the soundtrack — and outlined in sketch form, a new type of screen heroine, a sort of Annie Hall for millenials: absent-minded, free-spirited and a little dizzy, half in love with her own failures, lolloping from one humiliation to the next as if they confirmed her refusal to join the adult world.

Read more

Yesterday Anne Thompson and the “hole in the wall” Indiewire gang — Ryan Lattanzio, John Anderson, Matt Brennan, Susan Wloszczyna and guest contributor Richard Brody (a.k.a. “tinyfrontrow“) — posted a list of what they believe to be the top 25 Alfred Hitchcock films. I hit the roof when I saw Marnie listed at #13, or ahead of To Catch A Thief, The Lady Vanishes, Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent (this is already ridiculous!), Blackmail, Dial M for Murder, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Saboteur, The Wrong Man, Frenzy, Lifeboat and The Paradine Case. The Marnie favoritism is basically about the group deferring to (or not wanting to challenge) Brody, whose worship of this 1964 film is one of the cornerstones of his critical reputation. Marnie is arguably (and in my view almost certainly) Hitchcock’s worst film. Hitch himself called it a “failure.”

Indiewire‘s top 25 Hitchcock films (in this order): Notorious, Vertigo, Psycho, Rear Window, The Birds, Strangers on a Train, Spellbound, Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Rebecca, The 39 Steps, North by Northwest, Marnie, To Catch A Thief, The Lady Vanishes, Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent, Blackmail, Dial M for Murder, The Man Who Knew Too Much (’56 version), Saboteur, The Wrong Man, Frenzy, Lifeboat, The Paradine Case.

HE’s top 20 Hitchcock films (in this order): Notorious, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, Lifeboat, Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo, I Confess, Shadow of a Doubt, The Birds, Foreign Correspondent, Rebecca, To Catch A Thief, Saboteur, Suspicion, Dial M for Murder, The Man Who Knew Too Much (’56 version), The Lady Vanishes, Spellbound, Rope, The 39 Steps, The Wrong Man, The Paradine Case, Frenzy, Torn Curtain.

Hollywood Elsewhere has been sent a few images from the forthcoming Bluray of Universal Home Video’s restored Spartacus (10.6) vs. identical images from the discredited 2010 “shiny” version. The new version, a harvesting of Russell Metty‘s original 70mm Technirama photography, reveals much more detail than the DNR’d “shiny” version, but the only images that really show the difference in Hollywood Elsewhere’s format (460 pixels wide jpegs) are facial closeups. If I can figure some other way to present the differences later on, I will. The more reddish images belong to the 2010 Bluray; the new images are sharper, less forced. Update: I was informed late this afternoon that the restoration specialist on the new restored Spartacus Bluray was in fact Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. Until I hear differently HE’s new Spartacus mantra is “Robert who?” 8.16 Update: I’m informed that the forthcoming Spartacus Bluray shall henceforth be referred to as the “2015 Universal/Harris restoration.”

From 2015 Universal/Harris Spartacus restoration.

From 2010 “shiny” Bluray.

2015 Universal/Harris restoration harvest.

2010 “shiny.”

Read more

I’m thinking twice about attending the 2015 NY Film Festival (9.25 — 10.11). The big NYFF films that won’t have been shown previously — The Walk, Bridge of Spies, Miles Ahead — will most likely be screened concurrently for West Coast press, and missing the rest won’t be immediately fatal. Zero interest, Saw or Ignored in Cannes: Hou Hsiao Hsien‘s The Assassin, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Lobster, Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s Cemetery of Splendour, Nanni Moretti‘s Mia Madre. Telluride/Toronto So What Do I Need New York For?: Michael Moore‘s Where to Invade Next, Nick Hornsby‘s Brooklyn. Marginal interest: Thomas Bidegain‘s Les Cowboys, Michael Almereyda‘s Experimenter, Laura Israel‘s Don’t Blink: Robert Frank, Philippe Garrel’s In the Shadow of Women, Arnaud Desplechin‘s My Golden Days, et. al.

Daniel Barber‘s The Keeping Room (Eagle/Lionsgate, 9.25) “is basically a cabin in the woods horror-violence flick about evil, almost-foaming-at-the-mouth Union soldiers trying to defile and murder three Southern women (Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld, Muna Otaru). Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn bought into it but I didn’t. There isn’t the slightest trace of half-sensible motivation or recognizable humanity driving the bad guys (Sam Worthington, Ned Dennehy) — they’re doing the old Jason Voorhees thing with a couple of rapes thrown in plus some personality sauce, period clothing, old rifles and so on. Brit Marling delivers the most substantial performance but that’s almost damning with faint praise in this context. I hate, hate, hate ‘evil’ behavior that lacks a semi-discernible motive. Cut away the art-film pretensions and it’s clear that The Keeping Room is pandering to the slobs who like their exploitation tropes the way low-rent Los Angelenos like their pickles and mayonnaise at Fatburger.” — from a 9.11.14 Toronto Film Festival review.

Read more

How willing am I to buddy up with Bradley Cooper as a hotshot chef trying to make a comeback? I’m honestly not sure. Originally titled Chef, then re-titled to Adam Jones last year to avoid confusion with Jon Favreau’s film of the same title; now it’s called Burnt. Directed by John Wells (August: Osage County) and with an impressive supporting cast — Sienna Miller, Omar Sy, Daniel Bruhl, Emma Thompson, Lily James, Matthew Rhys, Alicia Vikander and Uma Thurman. Opening on 10.23.

“A closer look at the polls shows that Bernie Sanders is simply not within striking distance of winning the nomination,” writes N.Y. Times analyst Nate Cohn in a piece posted today. “His support has run into a wall: women, blacks and Hispanics continue to support Mrs. Clinton by a wide margin, as do white moderate and conservative Democrats.

Sanders, Cohn explains, “has become the favorite of one of the Democratic Party’s most important factions: the overwhelmingly white, progressive left. These voters are plentiful in the well-educated, more secular enclaves where journalists roam. This voting support is enough for him to compete in Iowa; New Hampshire and elsewhere in New England; the Northwest; and many Western caucuses. But it is not a viable electoral coalition in a Democratic Party that is more moderate and diverse” — read: burdened, slow to wake up, not well-read or well-educated — “than his supporters seem to recognize.”

“Yeah, we need to vote for somebody who can appeal to under-informed none-too-brights with little or no college education. That’s what’ll save America! Those damned, deluded educated progressives…what do they know?

Read more

I felt next to nothing last night as I watched Guy Ritchie‘s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (Warner Bros., 8.7) with a crowd of second-string, all-media loser types at the Arclight. I didn’t “hate” it and I’ll admit that I chuckled two or three times, but I mostly felt anesthetized — suspended in the tepid depths of the thing. The screenplay (written by Ritchie and Lionel Wigram) delivers a form of dry meta-comedy mixed with the same old running-around-Europe action spy stuff, but I have to acknowledge that stylistically and attitudinally it’s up something that’s lightly skewed — an aloof cool-cat vibe that sets it apart from the usual usual. The problem is that this stuff doesn’t kick in very often.

(l. to r.) Alicia Vikander, Army Hammer, Henry Cavill in Guy Ritchie’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

About halfway through I was thinking about hitting the head but I talked myself out of it for fear of missing something (a good joke, a clever bit). If you put off a bathroom break it doesn’t mean that a film is necessarily stupendous, but it does suggest it might be doing something half-right.

And yet U.N.C.L.E. is a kind of light genre comedy with a split personality. On one hand it seems to despise action-flick conventions by ironically satirizing them and making dry little jokes, and on the other it subjects the audience to the same formulaic bullshit that you’ve seen in a hundred spy movies.

I was also telling myself that I like Henry Cavill‘s Napoleon Solo. He’s cool to hang with for his good looks and take-it-easy vibe, but mainly because of his droll, meta-blase way of saying his lines. He’s adapting to the basic meta attitude, of course, but I felt relaxed when he was in the room. I also admired Cavill’s performance in Man of Steel, despite having despised the film. I was saying to myself, “We need more guys like Cavill in movies and fewer schlumpies and dumpies.” Cavill just has to be careful to avoid that flirting-with-Ernest-Borgnine look that he exhibited last year at ComicCon.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. contains three scenes that exude an amusingly detached “humor” element. The quotes mean “not exactly funny but enough to make you grin slightly.”

Read more

Update: I earlier wrote that Anton Corbin‘s Life more or less bombed with critics at last Feburary’s Berlinale. What I should have said, more fairly and accurately, is that the reaction was on the mixed or lukewarm side. Pic opens in France on September 9th, and then in Belgium on 9.21, in Germany on 9.24, and in England on 9.25. Cinedigm will reportedly release Life sometime in the fall.

This is an overworked thread but three or four days ago Cinemaholic‘s Amal Singh posted a list of the worst films by ten top-tier directors. Here’s Singh’s list along with my own choices or disputes, followed by a few career-worsties of my own. My heart isn’t really in this but I thought I’d post it out of boredom.

1. Oliver Stone‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Alexander. HE disputes: Savages, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Heaven and Earth.
2. Tim Burton‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Planet of the Apes. HE disputes: Agree on Planet of the Apes but also Alice in Wonderland.
3. Steven Spielberg‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: 1941. HE dispute: Always, The Terminal.
4. Ridley Scott’s‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Exodus: Gods and Kings. HE dispute: Prometheus, G.I. Jane
5. Coen brothers‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: The Ladykillers. HE agrees.
6. David Fincher‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Alien 3. HE agrees.
7. Clint Eastwood‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Hereafter. HE dispute: Firefox.
8. David Lynch‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Dune. HE agrees.
9. Woody Allen‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Scoop. HE agrees but feels Curse of the Jade Scorpion is just as bad.
10. Francis Coppola‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Dracula. HE disputes: Jack.

Read more

Tom Hiddleston seems to offer a near-perfect physical reincarnation of the late Hank Williams in Marc Abraham‘s I Saw the Light (Sony Pictures Classics, 11.27). He’ll most likely be impressive in other respects. Directed, written and produced by Abraham and based on “Hank Williams: The Biography” by Colin Escott, George Merritt and Bill MacEwen. The question is when & where will I Saw The Light start to be seen…Telluride, Toronto or you-tell-me?

Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams in Marc Abraham’s I Saw The Light (SPC, 11.27)

Hank Williams sometime in the late ’40s.

Read more