Almost all of the Rotten Tomato and Metacritic cool kidz are in love with Sean Baker‘s Tangerine (Magnolia, opening today in NYC), and you can’t blame them. I liked it myself. Okay, I mostly liked it. And it does have a raw, on-the-fly attitude that you can’t help but admire. Spirited and alive, Tangerine is a lower-depths screwball dramedy and an instant addition to any films-about-Los-Angeles pantheon.

Can we talk? Everybody loves Tangerine because it was shot fast and cheap on an iPhone 5 and because it feeds into the current vogue for all things transgender, which the cool kidz are terrified of because they don’t want to be seen as insensitive or indifferent to the latest cultural whiff-spray. I’m terrified myself, but I also genuinely liked Tangerine‘s freshness and no-bullshit vitality, and because it balances an aura of skanky, no-hope nihilism with currents of tenderness and compassion.

The only thing I don’t like about Tangerine is having to like it because the thought of saying you don’t like it is too terrible to contemplate. Nobody wants to be on the outs with the cool kidz, nobody wants to fall under suspicion, and nobody would dare look askance at a film that was shot for dimes and quarters on an iPhone…are you kidding me?

Tangerine is about love, lust, friendship, deception and jealousy centered around a couple of Hollywood transgender ho’s — Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) — who earn what they can by…well, mostly by giving blowjobs to Johns in a kind of Rainer Werner Fassbender realm along Santa Monica Blvd. between Highland and Vermont.

Things kick off on Christmas Eve when Alexandra unintentionally tells Sin-Dee, who’s just gotten out of jail, about Chester, Sin-Dee’s drug-dealing pimp/boyfriend (James Ransome), having been unfaithful to her, and — worse!– not with another tranny but a biologically genuine, raggedy-looking white chick (Mickey O’Hagan) named Dinah. So Sin-Dee sets out looking for Dinah and Chester, determined to force the truth out of both and see what’s what.

Read more

The legendary Omar Sharif — Sherif Ali, Yuri Zhivago, Nicky Arnstein — has passed at age 83. Never just an actor but a man about town.  A European gambler for decades, quite the bon vivant and ladies man in the ’60s and ’70s. Always cast as exotic, enigmatic, well-mannered fellows with a smooth line, Sharif was on top for 13 years cruise (’62 to ’75) in a run of Hollywood films that ranged from world-class to tolerable to awful, but you have to expect a mixture. At least he had that golden six year period between ’62 and ’68.

Sharif was forever defined by his striking, career-making English-language debut as Sherif Ali ibn Kharish, a friend and ally of Peter O’Toole‘s T.E. Lawrence in David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia. And then by his lead role in Lean’s Dr. Zhivago, giving a restrained and dignified performance as a humanist physician swept along and crushed by the Russian revolution. Sharif also scored as gambler Nicky Arnstein in William Wyler‘s Funny Girl (’68) opposite Barbra Streisand.

Sharif made a lot of crap in the ’60s and early ’70s — The Yellow Rolls Royce, Genghis Khan, Marco the Magnificent, The Poppy Is Also a Flower, The Night of the Generals (a terrible decision to play a German officer in World War II, requiring heavy makeup that didn’t work), Mackenna’s Gold, Che (another big mistake that definitely compromised his Lawrence/Zhivago halo), The Horseman, Mysterious Island, The Tamarind Seed, et. al.

And then God smiled again when Sharif landed a strong supporting role as a cruise ship captain in Richard Lester‘s brilliant Juggernaut (’74). His last half-decent role in the big-time was his second performance as Arnstein (a supporting part, almost a cameo) in Funny Lady (’75).

Read more

There are at least two things wrong with the cover of Criterion’s Breaker Morant Bluray (available on 9.22). One, the climactic execution in the film involves two condemned men. Two, the victim on the Criterion cover seems to be in his teens or early 20s while the actual victims, Edward Woodward and Bryan Brown, are in their 30s. You could make it three if you consider an image from the film’s execution scene that I found a few minutes ago. Beats the illustration all to hell.

Deadline‘s Anita Busch is reporting that Federico Fellini’s estate has closed an option agreement with AMBI Group’s Andrea Iervolino and Monika Bacardi to remake La Dolce Vita, Fellini’s 1960 classic which put Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg on the map. All this means is that the rights-holders want some money. It also indicates that Iervolino and Macardi aren’t aware that La Dolce Vita was more or less remade two years ago by Paolo Sorrentino‘s La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty).

From my 5.20.13 Cannes Film Festival review: “La Grande Bellezza is not just a return to the highly stylized realm of Il Divo, but a channelling of Federico Fellini‘s 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita with perhaps a few sprinkles of Fellini Satyricon…it’s a contemporary Roman dream fantasia, familiar and picturesque and deliciously unreal. [It’s] a kind of meditation or spiritual journey piece about a 60ish good-time-Charlie journalist (Toni Servillo), a likably decadent party animal living the nocturnal high life with a crowd of elite Roman pallies cut from the same cloth as Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg and all the other decadent revellers from the Rome of 50-something years ago.”

Read more

Two or three weeks ago I finally saw John Crowley‘s Brooklyn (Fox Searchlight, 11.6), which I’d missed at Sundance. Except I saw it on a third-generation DVD dupe, and so it looked and sounded like hell. So I’m “seeing” it for the first time, in a sense, via the trailer. The raves, in any event, are fully justified. This is a solid, heartfelt, seriously romantic winner — classic and “old school” in the finest sense of that term. Best Picture prospects seem assured, and Saoirse Ronan (again — her first name is pronounced “Sersha”) is a near-lock for a Best Actress nomination. Ditto Crowley for Best Director and Nick Hornby for Best Adapted Screenplay. Here’s to seeing it again under proper theatrical circumstances.

I went into last night’s Ant-Man screening with an attitude, but it surprised the hell out of me. It’s basically a dry, highly disciplined, emotionally grounded, bang-on comedy. It doesn’t try to sell or invest in the usual Marvel fantasy fizz — it fucks with it, turns the whole thing into a joke. It’s so much better than I expected that you could call me flabbergasted. Surprising as this may sound (especially to me), Ant-Man is my favorite Marvel film yet. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy said yesterday it’s not quite as engaging as Guardians of the Galaxy; I think it’s a little bit better.

I know — I lack the authority to judge Marvel films because I’m too much of a comic-book-movie hater, right? What I really am is an Avengers and Iron Man-sequel hater, an enemy of glum superhero angst, and definitely a Robert Downey loather. All I know is that I didn’t frown or moan once last night. I grinned, chuckled, felt more or less delighted. I loved the visual roller-coastery, sudden-size-shift stuff…the swooping down from life-size to micro-size and back up again — a game that basically unfurls an entirely new micro-realm. No mood pockets, no prickly detours…pretty much all pleasure.

Yes, Ant-Man is “silly” but it embraces that. It’s sharp and fast and disciplined as a Marine. It takes itself seriously in terms of its own efficiency and (I’m serious) its own emotional undercurrents. So call me turned around and converted.

Take no notice of the piss-heads who are saying “if only original director Edgar Wright hadn’t bolted!” These guys are coming from an obsessive geek-wanker place and are not to be trusted. They’re just standing behind Edgar and against Marvel/Disney for loyalty’s sake. I realize that Wright bailed due to Marvel intransigence or Disney-level meddling. And I’ll allow that Shaun of the Dead showed that he has a flourishy attitude and a certain auteurist panache, but, unlike a few geek-influenced critics I could name, I don’t think he’s God’s gift because Scott Pilgrim vs. the World made me want to jump off a 15-story building.

Read more

An absurd story broke this morning on TMZ, about video footage of Ariana Grande and a boyfriend visiting a Lake Elsinore donut shop. An employee brought out a large tray of donuts and Grande said, “What the fuck is that? I hate Americans…I hate America.” TMZ has called the remark scandalous, “fat shaming on a national scale.” Some believe Grande may have hurt her career. Expressing disgust at obesity and the foods that cause it is, of course, sacrilege in these twisted times. Love America, love the obesity. The latest CDC figures say more than one-third of Americans are obese. And that “non-Hispanic blacks have the highest age-adjusted rates of obesity (47.8%) followed by Hispanics (42.5%), non-Hispanic whites (32.6%), and non-Hispanic Asians (10.8%).” So by all means, throw Grande to the lions and may other celebrities take heed.

There’s a Los Angeles for Bernie Facebook page but no Bernie Sanders for President storefront in Los Angeles, apparently. I wanted to pick up a few buttons and bumper stickers but no one seems to have any. So I ordered a few online. I’ll be donating $100 but I’d like to attend a rally or something. I don’t how much good I’d accomplish handing out literature in Gardena or Alhambra or El Monte.

A friend complained today that sharing my honest thoughts about Hillary Clinton was feeding right into a concerted effort by conservatives to try and goad liberals into putting her down online. “I feel for her deep down,” I replied. “I mostly agree with what she wants to do as President. I don’t want her to lose, particularly to a Bush or a Rubio, God forbid. She’ll ultimately be the best alternative, I regret to say, given the strong likelihood that Bernie can’t go the distance. But I don’t like Hillary. I never have. She doesn’t turn me on. She sort of irritates me. And I can’t not say that, given my natural inclinations.”

“If you don’t have Thor’s hammer, Hulk’s bulk, Captain America’s resolve or Iron Man’s know-how, what’s an Avenger to do? The answer provided by Ant-Man is to go small, smaller than Black Widow’s fingernail, and exude a good sense of humor, which is precisely what floats this latest addition to the Marvel firmament,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy. “The timing might even be fortuitous as far as the fan base is concerned, what with the sense of overkill emanating from the most recent Avengers installment and a mirth quotient in the new outing that, by Marvel standards, ranks behind only that of the disarming Guardians of the Galaxy last summer.

“Although the story dynamics are fundamentally silly and the family stuff, with its parallel father-daughter melodrama, is elemental button-pushing, a good cast led by a winning Paul Rudd puts the nonsense over in reasonably disarming fashion.

“The geek world, even if it approves what has finally emerged onscreen, will still always wonder what Ant-Man would have been like if, as originally intended, Edgar Wright, he of Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World cultish veneration, had directed the screenplay he wrote with Joe Cornish. Would it have been more extreme, irreverent, idiosyncratic and, in the end, less Marvel-like?

Read more

True-life tale of a 1952 rescue mission off the Cape Cod coast after two oil tankers, SS Fort Mercer and SS Pendleton, were destroyed by a collision in the midst of heavy waves. Have heaving CG seas improved since the days of The Puhrfict Stauhm? You tell me. Directed by Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl). Clearly all the actors — Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Holliday Grainger, John Ortiz, Eric Bana — attended the same New England accent school.

I was a bit surprised to read that Baltasar Kormakur‘s Everest (Universal, 9.18) will open the 72nd Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, 9.2. Out of competition, of course. I’m sure it’ll be pretty good for what it is (a tragic, fact-based disaster film), but Kormakur’s Contraband and 2 Guns made it clear that he’s more or less Renny Harlin of the early ’90s. Pretty much all the male leads die in this, right? Jake Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Sam Worthington, John Hawkes and Michael Kelly. With Keira Knightley, Emily Watson and Robin Wright fretting as sketchy reports come in. Everest will almost certainly not be a Telluride film…right?

The new British-made trailer for Steven Spielberg‘s Bridge of Spies (Disney, 10.16) is a significant improvement over last month’s teaser. It still has that trademark bluish-white Janusz Kamsinski cinematography, which I loathe with a passion, but it lays out the social and political context of the late Eisenhower era and delivers a more precise portrait of U.S. vs. Soviet tensions when the Francis Gary Powers U2 incident happened in May 1960. Spielberg and Hanks were kids when this shitstorm happened, and so there’s likely to be an extra measure of authority in the depictions of those times. Hanks’ 17th version of his man-of-character-and-infinite-patience thing, etc.