Gotta catch this in IMAX 3D, right? Too big, loud and cool to stream. If only we lived in a Marvel world 24/7. If only we could all share in the profits! Imagine the souls of millions of moviegoers being sucked in by a giant CG Ultron vacuum machine. Imagine smashing a peach ice-cream cone into my forehead. Imagine movies without the influential virus of comic books and videogames and needing to appeal to submental Asian filmgoers. It isn’t hard to do. Imagine a world in which Marnie is rediscovered and celebrated…no, wait, scratch that one.

In a sometimes hilarious 4.17 review of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, Variety‘s Justin Chang begins with the following passage: “Nothing aired by WikiLeaks could possibly be more destructive to Sony’s reputation than the release of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 the sort of movie that goes beyond mere mediocrity to offer possible evidence of a civilization in decline.” Every now and then a Variety critic will depart from the template (make sure observations are dry and sage, focus on craft and commercial potential, mention but don’t dwell on social undercurrents) and let go with a remark like this, which is obviously out of the Hollywood Elsewhere playbook. Since this column began 10 1/2 years ago I’ve pointed over and over (some would say tediously) to indications of a grim cultural slide. I see “evidence of a civilization in decline” in all kinds of films and events on a daily/weekly basis. Anyone would. Everyone probably does. But Chang’s job description specifically forbids “going there.” Slap his palms with a ruler. Note: As we speak Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 has a zero Rotten Tomato rating.

I don’t know how I feel about posting footage of BB-8, but I guess I don’t feel too badly about it. A genuine, organic thing — a creature that was built, puppeteered and performed. I don’t know anyone who would have been happy dealing with R2D2 again. I valued his smarts and spirit  but he always bothered me.  And BB-8…well, I’m impressed.

Three days ago I nearly fell out of my chair when I noticed a Twitter dispute among some Alfred Hitchcock devotees (including occasional HE gadfly Glenn Kenny) about who had been more influential in restoring the reputation of Hitchcock’s Marnie — New Yorker contributor-columnist Richard Brody (a.k.a., tinyfrontrow) or the late Robin Wood, whose fascinating interpretations in his 1965 book “Hitchcock’s Films” did a lot to advance the belief that Hitchcock was a major mainstream artist. Given that Marnie is still a ghastly thing to sit through (I tried doing so a couple of years ago), I wasn’t aware that Marnie‘s reputation had ever been restored. But that’s the foo-foo crowd for you, encamped and gathering firewood on their own tight little island.

Read more

How much farther can Quentin Tarantino crawl up his own ass in search of material for his latest cinematic swagger dance? “Pretty much every account of last night’s performance has failed to say whether The Hateful Eight sounded good enough to be a decent movie,” I wrote after the 4.19.14 live reading of an early draft of Tarantino’s latest. “Let me state very clearly and without a shred of a doubt that it didn’t. It’s a fairly minor and almost dismissable thing — a colorful but basically mediocre Tarantino gabfest that mostly happens on a single interior set (i.e., Minnie’s Haberdashery, located somewhere near the Wyoming town of Red Rock during a fierce blizzard), and which unfolds in the vein of The Petrified Forest.

The Hateful Eight “is about a gatherin’ of several tough, mangy hombres sitting around talkin’ and yappin’ and talkin’ and yappin’. And then, just to break up the monotony, a little more talkin’ and yappin’. Along with a little shootin’ and poison-coffee drinkin’ and brutally punchin’ out a female prisoner and a few dozen uses of the word ‘nigger’ (par for the QT course) and swearin’ and talkin’ about fellatin’ and whatever else.

Read more

This is not a full-boat trailer — it’s basically another tease. I was in and out (“The force is in my family…I have it, my sister has it, you have it, my father-in-law has it, my cousin has it, my cat has it, my accountant has it”) and waiting for a taste of narrative, some hint of a story…nope. But at least it has that Uncle Festus-and-Chewy moment at the very end — “We’re home.” I’m sorry but I’m detecting too much of a geek-friendly vibe, a little too much of an attitude that seems to say “yah-hooo!” and “yeaah!…this brand-new amusement park is really cool!” J.J. Abrams presumably understands that this movie can’t fully succeed unless it appeals to cineastes who consider The Empire Strikes Back to be the most riveting and distinguished chapter in the Star Wars legend. In other words, it has to satisfy or at least reach out to guys like me. The toenail-fungus geeks are already in the tank. Just saying.

Elizabeth Warren is doing her reputation no favors by sitting out the 2016 election, as she’s said over and over that she’ll do. It doesn’t matter if she can’t beat Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. If the corporate-funded Clinton cakewalks to the nomination the entire country, from progressive liberals to rural yeehaws, will be denied the strong, opinion-shaping conversation about the increasingly one-percent-favoring economy that the 2016 Presidential election demands. Warren will be doing Clinton no favors by not running — the lack of a vigorous challenger will in fact make Clinton, who will almost certainly shoot herself in the foot more than once over the next several months, all the more vulnerable because her message will be unrefined and her campaign will be untested when she faces off against Jeb Bush. An easy-street Clinton will never talk the talk. Warren has to run in order to do that — to state and re-state the facts about how this country has fallen more and more under the control of a lopsided oligarchial system over the past 30-plus years. (Note: This video eloquently states the case, but for some reason it repeats itself starting at the 5:00 mark.)

“Costa-Gavras‘s The Confession is not, I think, a better movie than his prize-winning Z, with which it will inevitably be compared, not only by the critics but also by those members of the public who may look for a repeat performance. The earlier film was a nearly perfect topical thriller whose form pretty much defined the substance of its liberal politics.

“However, because the subject of The Confession is much more complex, much more human, I find it vastly more interesting than Z, even when one is aware of the way Costa-Gavras manipulates attention by the use of flashy cinematic devices that sometimes substitute for sustained drama. It is a horror story of the mind told almost entirely in factual and physical terms, which is something of a contradiction.

Read more

The 2015 Cannes Film Festival roster was announced in Paris this morning, and it is what it is. No surprises — all previously spitballed. I’ve been feeling a wee bit glum about what seems to me like an underserving of crackling dimensionality and serious marquee pizazz but let’s try to be optimistic. Among all of the announced (including out of competition or OOC), I feel instinctually drawn to or moderately cranked about the following, in this order: Todd Haynes‘ Carol (yes!), Woody Allen‘s Irrational Man (OOC), George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road (OOC), Denis Villeneuve‘s Sicario (sorry but I’ll always be wary of Villeneuve), Paolo Sorrentino‘s Youth, Jacques Audiard‘s Erran, Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth (Shakespeare for ADD generation?), Joachim Trier‘s Louder Than Bombs, Gus Van Sant‘s The Sea of Trees, Barbet Schroeder‘s Amnesia and Hou Hsiao-hsien‘s The Assassin (special Asian martial-arts suffering potential).

Read more

How about this for a theory? Dennis Quaid freaked about being blackballed as an unemployable nutcase after yesterday’s “Dopey the dick” video went viral. His manager called the Funny or Die guys and three hours later they were on the set and shooting this “punk” video that claims it was all staged. The more I think about it, the more likely it seems.

Until an hour ago I had never once seen a color photograph taken on the set of John Huston‘s Key Largo (’48). Humphrey Bogart was 48, close to 49, and Lauren Bacall was 23. Just before the shooting, which happened in the fall of ’47, Bogart had starred in Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which opened in January ’48. Key Largo opened in mid-July of that year.

I’m into my fourth year of sobriety now (the three-year anniversary occured almost exactly a month ago) but every so often I look back and go, “Whoa…that happened in my drinking days.” Which were only occasionally wild. Except for my vodka-and-lemonade period from ’93 to ’96, which involved two alcohol-related car collisions, I never felt as if my life was all that negatively affected by drinking. Nor did I ever decide in my 20s and 30s that things had become problematic due to pot, hallucinogens, quaaludes and cocaine toots. I saw my nocturnal adventures as purely supplemental. I never partied during work hours. I saw myself as someone who worked hard, always woke up early, killed myself to become a half-decent writer, kept myself in shape and led a more-or-less disciplined life.

Yes, I behaved erratically and irresponsibly at times, but when I was younger I believed that a life without Jack Daniels and beer and quaaludes and revelry represented a kind of death. On top of which my romantic life was fairly spectacular back then so there was that besides.

One night I was at a party in Wilton with the usual assortment of drinking buddies. I started to feel tired around 1 am or so (I had to work the next day) but the guy I came with wasn’t in the mood to leave. I went outside for whatever reason and noticed that a friend who lived about a mile from my place was preparing to leave. He began to get into his ride (an LTD Ford station wagon) with his girlfriend and two other couples. I asked for a lift and he said “Uhm, I don’t think there’s any room, Jeff.” So without telling my friend (i.e., Pete) I decided to sneak a ride on top of his car, lying spread-eagled and holding on to the luggage rack. It was a moonless, pitch-black night and I somehow managed to gently crawl on top without anyone noticing. Don’t ask me.

Read more