Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk (TriStar, 10.2), the scripted, line-speaking version of James Marsh‘s Man on Wire with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, will open the 53rd annual New York Film Festival on 9.25. It makes sense for a movie about a legendary New York event (i.e., Petit’s tightwire walk between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974) to debut in New York — let it go at that. But I have to acknowledge that last December’s teaser trailer worried me somewhat.

“Man on Wire for Megaplex Idiots,” posted on 12.10.14: “The opening shot of this teaser tells you everything you need to know about the Hollywood-ization of a really great story that doesn’t need any Hollywood-ization…unless you’re looking to sell it to the morons. That ascending high-speed elevator shot of the Word Trade Center’s South Tower is pure Chris Nolan, pure Batman. Ditto Joseph Gordon-Levitt walking out on a metal beam and balancing himself on one foot…showoff crap.

Read more

It’s been nearly 20 days since legendary film scholar and Orson Welles biographer F.X. Feeney posted this essay about an ambitious, insufficiently celebrated interior scene in Touch of Evil, but what’s two or three weeks in the general scheme? Feeney is drawing upon research for his recently published Orson Welles: Power, Heart & Soul (Critical Press). Nobody has more respect for Welles’ films than myself, particularly the audacity and sophistication evident in every shot and scene. But his performances have always struck me as a bit too self-regarding. Whatever the role Welles always seems to be focused on letting us know what a brilliant and erudite fellow he is/was. He never seems to look his fellow actors in the eye — at best he allows them to react to his dominance. And I still find it amazing to consider that Welles was only 42 years old when he played the obese Hank Quinlan. He looks a good 20 if not 25 years older, and what did that physical condition achieve in terms of his performance or the film? Answer: Nothing. Quinlan walks into a room and everyone is thinking the same thing — i.e., what has this guy been drinking and eating over the last few years besides bourbon, pasta and ice cream? Where does he find trousers with a big enough waist size to accommodate that gut?

I’d heard during Cannes that the Toronto Film Festival was going to back away from last year’s get-tough-with-Telluride policy, and now the change is confirmed with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg reporting that “in a major reversal” Toronto has more or less folded that tent. Last year’s Toronto policy stipulated that hot-ticket films which had premiered at the smallish but influential Telluride Film Festival, which always happens over Labor Day weekend or a few days before Toronto starts, couldn’t be screened in Toronto during the first four days. As this policy pissed off some indie-level/arthouse distributors, it can be presumed that Toronto figured the hard-ass posture was more trouble than it was worth. Boiled down, the new policy stipulates that films which have played Telluride will be eligible to screen during Toronto’s opening weekend, but not at any of the city’s three super-deluxe venues — the Elgin Theatre, the Princess of Wales theatre and Roy Thomson Hall. Which is fine. Toronto has decent venues besides these (Bell Lightbox, Scotiabank, Ryerson) plus the sound at the Princess of Wales theatre was awful last year so this is actually a partial plus. Deadline‘s Pete Hammond: “Clever TIFF. You managed to get some press saying you have ‘reversed’ this policy when in fact you’ve simply told a lot of players…that they can premiere whenever they want in Toronto but they may have to settle for going coach, not first class.” More precisely: “Telluride first? Fine, but you’ll have to ride coach in Toronto during the first four days.” Private TIFF Translation: “Sorry but our sense of Canadian pride insists on this policy. We’re still peeved about Telluride-first premieres and try as we might we can’t — won’t! — just roll over and play along like we used to do. We must apply a certain degree of punishment for Telluride-firsters. Besides the new deal isn’t that bad. They can live with those secondary venues.”

Five days after opening and tanking last weekend, Aloha is already a withered flower, pressed between the pages of history — essentially dead and buried and conversationally a non-starter. I can’t imagine anyone at this stage having the slightest interest in director-writer Cameron Crowe having apologized yesterday (6.2) about his having miscast Emma Stone as Allison Ng, a fighter pilot said to be one-quarter Asian-Hawaiian…who cares? I was in Prague for the cycle and missed the whole thing, period. But I’m 100% committed to seeing it sometime tomorrow in Los Angeles. (I’m writing this on a JFK-to-LAX Virgin America flight, around 3:40 pm Pacific.) I’m in fact looking forward to what I presume will…okay, could feel like something more than a run-of-the-mill disaster. Disaster mixed with goofy tunes or mushrooms or mescaline, something seriously bent and over-the-cliff. I’m probably the last guy in the world who has an interest in seeing this thing, much less a sense of intrigue about it.

Where does this feeling come from? Why, from a 5.29 review by Film Drunk‘s Vince Mancini — easily the funniest I’ve read so far.

Read more

Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig‘s Mistress America (Fox Searchlight, 8.14) is “a delightfully whipsmart, acrid, His Girl Friday-like comedy. Comedy is hard to begin with but making the fast, rat-a-tat-tat kind is, I’m guessing, all the more difficult, especially when you’ve managed to fortify it with serious character shadings and a touch of pathos. And it’s not some remote exercise — it’s tethered to an obsessive Type-A female personality (i.e., Gerwig’s) who feels relatively fresh and certainly unpredictable, and to any number of neurotic obsessions and distractions of the moment, or at least as they’ve manifested over the last two or three years in New York City and all the other hip burghs. I’ve loved almost everything that Gerwig’s done in recent years, each and every time — no exception here.” — filed from Sundance Film Festival on 1.25.15.

From my 9.2.14 Telluride Film Festival review of Ramin Bahrani‘s 99 Homes (Broad Green, 9.25): “It’s obvious from the get-go that Andrew Garfield, known for his sensitive, doe-eyed expressions and an apparent preference for playing alpha good guys who would rather be fucked over than vice versa, is going to rebel against Michael Shannon‘s foreclosure shark and the surrounding venality. This is what people do in films like this — they stand up and cleanse their souls. It’s a cliche that is telegraphed, trust me, from the get-go.

“But the worst moment of all comes when mom Laura Dern and son Noah Lomax find out what Garfield’s job is, and they shun him. This is when I really bailed on this film. Dern: ‘My God…you have no morals! I can’t live with you…I’m going to move in with someone else!’ Lomax: ‘How could you take a job that makes people like us miserable, dad? That’s so awful! I’m going to sit on the couch and avoid eye contact with you!’

“Again, only in the realm of manipulative bullshit.

Read more

I for one don’t believe that the Caitlin Jenner hoopla (Vanity Fair cover, reality show) is a metaphor for the fall for the Roman empire, as some righties have been saying. It’s a major media parable about acceptance, compassion, personal dignity and equality. It’s obvious, however, that she was seriously impressed by the improvements brought about by a makeup person who helped her prepare for the Vanity Fair shoot, and in that light…I’m losing steam here. This is what life in Malibu is like a lot of the time. Maybe I should keep a certain distance from the Caitlin thing for a while. I’m starting to shake my head a bit. How would Caitlin fare if her jeep broke down in the middle of the Sonoran desert?

Read more

Last night a friend asked how I might play my Love & Mercy cards if I was Roadside Attractions and looking for a little award-season traction. Specifically who would I push for Best Actor — Paul Dano, who plays the genius-exploding Brian Wilson in the mid ’60, or John Cusack, who plays the 40ish, somewhat unsteady Wilson in a kind of health-recovery mode but suffering under a harsh psychological regimen imposed by Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) but is then gradually saved from this by his future wife, Linda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks).

young Brian Wilson, Paul Dano in Love & Mercy.

40ish Brian, John Cusack.

My basic response was that Cusack and Dano give a single astonishing performance comprised of two parts — it’s not a question of one over the other but a unified effort…a complementary twosome with equal screen time, equal weight, equal value. Brothers.

Here’s how I put it this morning: “Dano vs. Cusack? Does it have to be an either/or? It’s a tough one, almost as tough as how to campaign the two completely equal leads of Carol. The truth is that Rooney Mara‘s performance is completely equal to Cate Blanchett‘s and is arguably more central and a bit more commanding and plot-driving, even though you’re inclined to believe at the beginning that Blanchett is the lead because she’s playing the titular character and all.

“Determining the answer to the Dano-Cusack problem is no less thorny.

Read more

“What are you gonna do? Lock us all up? We’re in every home. We’re half the human race. You can’t stop us all.” Do you love Carey Mulligan‘s working-class accent or what? She’s playing Maud, a working mother who becomes a convert to the women’s suffrage cause with Meryl Streep playing what looks to be a distinctive supporting role as “outlaw fugitive” Emmeline Pankhurst. But to really rate with the cool kidz Suffragette has to do more than just tell “the story of a movement.” It has to achieve a little more than what last year’s voting rights struggle film (i.e., Selma) did.

Read more

Is it okay if I post my review of Doug Ellin‘s Entourage (Warner Bros., 6.3) tomorrow morning? It’s a total throwaway — a theatrical release that behaves like an Entourage episode with a few more boobs and famous-face cameos. Obviously nobody cared when they made it. Well, they wanted the film to make money, of course, but there’s so much in this thing that feels surface-skimmy and smug and lightweight. I didn’t hate it but it’s lazy and diddly and too delighted with material abundance, and I have no room in my life for a movie that can’t be bothered to sweat out the difficulty of being good or at least interesting. At no time was I under the impression that anyone involved in the making had sweated or given any kind of serious thought to anything. I just sat there with my luggage in the row ahead of me (I’d come right from JFK on the A train — 50 minutes from Howard Beach to 8th Avenue and 34th Street) and waited for it to end. The boobs are healthy and bouncy like only early 20something boobs can be, but they didn’t do anything for me because their carriers (i.e., the women) lacked intrigue and complexity…sorry. Hooray for Ellin and producer Mark Wahlberg and Adrian Grenier and the other cast members making more dough off this thing, and to everyone else who collected a nice paycheck during production or in post. I’ll get into it a bit more tomorrow morning. My flight to Los Angeles leaves in the late afternoon so there’s plenty of time.

I’ll be celebrating Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy (Roadside, 6.5) for the third time today at a 6 pm screening at Manhattan’s Dolby 88. My first viewing was at the Toronto Film Festival (here’s my 9.8.14 review) and the second time was in late April at L.A.’s Wilshire Screening Room.

Anyway today I read a superbly written review by Los Angeles magazine’s Steve Erickson, and I was struck by two sentences in particular. One in which Erickson describes Brian Wilson‘s post-Pet Sounds, Smile-era comedown in which “the celestial sounds in his head turned on him, and became the screams of angels falling from heaven.” The second alludes to Wilson’s music-creating process: “Great artists create in circles, not lines, in the ever-bending curl of the wave rather than in its rush to the shore’s conclusion.”

vs. “Screams of Angels Falling From Heaven”

Los Angeles magazine illustration by Andre Carrilho.

Read more

Yes, Caitlyn Jenner looks a little like Jessica Lange. But again, why the effort? Why the big, attention-seeking Vanity Fair projection of a glammy, sexy woman? She told Diane Sawyer during that 4.24.15 interview that she’s “not gay…I’ve never been with a guy” and that while he/she’s been attracted to women all his/her life, that’s no longer the case — “I’m asexual.” And yet she’s obviously projecting a sexual aura. If she’s decided to be sexual, fine, but what’s the point of the VF cover if sexuality isn’t on the table? Why can’t Caitlyn just be womanly, nurturing and compassionate and let it go at that? That aside, a question that all hetero males (including Eddie Murphy types) are probably asking themselves is “would you hit that?” Answer: No, I wouldn’t because her shoulders are too broad, her feet are way too big and Jenner is 6′ 2″.

Read more