French helmer Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, Rust and Bone, Dheepan) has never embraced a jaded, fuck-around attitude — he’s always been a fairly solemn, straightforward filmmaker. But he’s adopted a jaunty, mock-ironic, Coen-esque approach for The Sisters Brothers (Annapurna), a western set during the California Gold Rush. John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as Eli and Charlie Sisters; costarring Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rutger Hauer and Carol Kane. Pic will open sometime in October or November.
“If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick DeWitt’s bloody, darkly funny westernThe Sisters Brothers…[DeWitt has] a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages.” — Los Angeles Times blurb about the 2011 source novel.
Palme d’Or: Shoplifters, Hirokazu Kore-eda. HE comment: Why did they give the top prize to a film I didn’t get around to seeing? I resent that. My sense was that Shoplifters had drawn a respectful response but nobody was doing cartwheels. Nobody grabbed me by the collar and said, “Oh my God…you absolutely must see Shoplifters! The cartwheel winners were Cold War, Capernaum and Happy As Lazzaro.
Grand Prix: BlacKkKlansman, d: Spike Lee. HE comment: The Grand Prix being equivalent to second prize, I find it odd that Lee’s film, an engaging ’70s undercover-cop caper film but far from great art, came away with a more prestigious trophy than the one Cold War earned (i.e., Best Director for Pawlilowski) or Nadine Labaki‘s Capermnaum, which took third prize or Jury Prize.
Jury Prize: Capernaum, d: Nadine Labaki. HE comment: At least it took one of the three top awards.
Best Actress: Samal Yeslyamova, Akya. HE comment: Didn’t see it. My money was on Cold War‘s Joanna Kulig.
Best Actor: Marcello Fonte, Dogman. HE comment: Fine performance, mostly unsatisfying film, not my cup of tea.
Best Director: Pawel Pawlikowski, Cold War. HE comment: Approved.
Best Screenplay (tie): Alice Rohrwacher, Happy as Lazzaro & Jafar Panahi and Nader Saeivar, Three Faces.
John F. Kelly began serving as Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff on 7.31.17. He’s unlikely to last a year. With four separate sources telling NBC that he’s called Trump an “idiot”, Kelly is obviously on the way out. Perhaps not imminently, but surely within a month or two. Posted earlier today by NBC’s Carol E. Lee, Courtney Kube, Kristen Welker and Stephanie Ruhle: “Kelly [has portrayed] himself to Trump administration aides as the lone bulwark against catastrophe, curbing the erratic urges of a president who has a questionable grasp on policy issues and the functions of government. He has referred to Trump as ‘an idiot’ multiple times to underscore his point, according to four officials who say they’ve witnessed the comments.” Wolf is claiming the “idiot” comments are “total b.s.” — I kinda doubt that.
Last July former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson allegedly called President Trump “a moron” in private, and when the remark was reported over four months later Tillerson didn’t directly address or deny it, saying only, “I’m not going to deal with petty stuff like that.”
I concluded then and there that Tillerson was toast — it would just be a matter of how much distance Trump wanted to put between the “moron” quote and Tillerson’s dismissal. If I’d been in Trump’s shoes I would probably have said to myself, “Gee, maybe Rex is right…hell, he probably is right…I am kind of a moron asshole narcissist sociopath. Maybe for the good of the country I should resign?” But that’s me. Okay, that’s not me but whatever.
Nonetheless the white-haired Tillerson, whose deep, Texas-accented voice and Raymond Burr-like girth always suggested a lifelong Big & Tall patronage despite the fact that he’s only 5’10”, lasted until today.
I’m glad he’s gone — now what about the rest of the cabinet? And Trump’s long-overdue resignation for that matter? Throw Mike Pence into a pit filled with starving wolves, but let him die with a sword in his hand like Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings.
What defines a really successful comedy? Being funny, of course, and preferably in a way that’s not too coarse or lowbrow. Clever, witty, feel-goody. You want it to be accessible enough for Joe and Jane Popcorn to have a good time with it, but you also want film critics to stand up and salute. And you definitely want it to turn a healthy profit. Some comedies do well with critics but not so much at the box-office. Or vice versa. And some fizzle all around the track — cruddy reviews, low grosses, unpopular with popcorn munchers, etc. Very few comedies hit it on all four burners.
Not everyone realizes that Amazon’s The Big Sick, which opened on 6.23.17 after debuting at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, has done exactly that. And this, by any fair standard, drops it into the Best Picture realm.
A dryly amusing indie comedy about ethnic issues affecting a relationship between Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani), a laid-back Pakistani comic, and Emily (Zoe Kazan), a spunky, willful white girl, The Big Sick managed a 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating and sold a shitload of tickets to Average Joes. It cost $5 million to make and earned $55 million worldwide, excluding ancillary revenue. Even if you throw in the “Hollywood bookkeeping” factor, you’ll still be well in the black.
The Big Sick has even become a top award contender in recent weeks. Holly Hunter‘s performance as Kazan’s mom has snagged several Best Supporting Actress nominations (the Independent Spirit Awards, several critics groups); ditto the screenplay (co-written by Nanjiani and wife Emily V. Gordon, and based on their actual romantic history) as well as the film itself being Best Picture-nominated by the Critics Choice Awards, the Satellite Awards and the Producers Guild of America.
Four burners plus the awards action makes five. Do I hear six?
I’ve seen The Big Sick three times, and each time it’s felt fresh and natural and sharp as a tack. It gains. After seeing it in Park City I called it droll humor for smarties and hipsters as well as dry and diverting. You never really know where it’s going, and that’s just how I like it. I loved the terrorist jokes (no, seriously), and it really does come together emotionally during the last 25%.
Nanjiani embroiders with a unique tone and sensibility, certainly within the realm of a modern American love story. He and Kazan hold things together for the first 40%, but it’s Hunter and Ray Romano (as Kazan’s dad) who bring it home.
The flagrantly political instinct to over-praise and over-celebrate Get Out — one of the most confounding and surreal episodes of mass derangement in any award season in memory — has caught fire among regional critics groups. Slightly less than a third of 33 regional critics groups have handed Jordan Peele‘s horror-satire their Best Picture prize.
We’re talking about some kind of mind virus, propelled online and delivered through smartphones — a mass decision by younger Academy voters and the identity-politics crowd to radically up-end Best Picture criteria by supporting a film that no sane critic or prognosticator would have gotten behind ten or even five years ago.
“If you’re looking for more reasons to deplore the Get Out pack, the film was just named Best Picture, and Jordan Peele best director and screenwriter, by the North Carolina Film Critics Association, of which I am a member,” a friend just wrote me.
“I am with you on the whole Get Out issue. A good film but not even close to being a great one, advanced by p.c. critics. As my grandmom would say, ‘Feh!'”
For sensible-minded regional critics, this reality-defying, Wayne Fontana and Mindbenders movement is partly about regional wokers wanting to demonstrate solidarity with big-city brethren (“We get it, guys…we’re with you in spirit”).
The Get Out-ers are massing under a political conviction that never enjoyed overwhelming currency during the Obama or Dubya administrations, but which, in today’s highly charged political climate (and especially within ardent liberal circles), is absolutely paramount in their eyes: Best Picture awards should no longer go to the best or boldest or most affecting artistic achievement but to films that (a) are most deserving of Hollywood’s political-social merit badge award, and (b) reflect favorably on the critics’ own progressive convictions.
As I wrote a couple of days ago, the “Get Out deserves to win Best Picture” thing is mainly about (a) extending the #OscarsSoWhite guilt complex by supporting a politically “woke” film, (b) industry POCs doing their usual identity-politics bonding and (c) GenX and Millenial coolios wanting to crown a horror-satire genre film for generational-solidarity reasons (“We’re the new crowd and we have different standards for Best Picture achievement!”) as well as sheer perversity’s sake, largely because Get Out doesn’t begin to exude Best Picture criteria.
Marcel Proust‘s answers to a series of questions about personality and values were originally recorded in 1890, when Proust was 21 or thereabouts. The Wikipage says the name and popularity of the Proust questionnaire is “owed to the responses given by Proust.” Vanity Fair publishes a one-page Proust Questionnaire at the back of each issue. (Why is “n” used twice in Questionnaire?) What follows is a selective HE run-through with variations.
Your greatest source of emotional comfort?: Being with my wife when she’s in a good mood. Walking around Rome or Paris or Hanoi without purpose. A warm, not-too-crowded cafe with lightning-fast wifi in the late afternoon. The way I feel after getting nine or ten hours of sleep, which happens maybe once a month, if that. The time I spend with my cats, Anya and Yanna, as I’m waking up from a nap.
Your proudest virtues?: Diligence, doggedness when it comes to writing. A general willingness to admit fault in many (though not all) instances. Excellent taste in clothing, particularly footwear, socks, jackets and T-shirts.
Your idea of perfect happiness?: There’s no “perfect” anything. Everything ebbs and flows. Impermanence is the only thing you can count on. It follows that the only perfect happiness one can hope to embrace is to constantly wander the globe with a flush guaranteed income and the freedom to visit here and there and then move on when the mood strikes. With the option of returning to favorite locales from time to time.
Source of your greatest irritation among mixed company?: Loud, vulgar people of all shapes and manners. People who throw their heads back and shriek with laughter in bars and cafes. People who lean their seats back too far in coach.
Which living persons do you most admire?: Presently speaking I admire hundreds of people. My list would change on a daily basis, starting today with Patti Smith. I admire adventurous and quick-witted people the most. I generally admire smart, considerate people who’ve been around the block and accomplished things under pressure, especially if they have a good sense of humor.
What dead persons would you most like to meet and hang with?: Stanley Kubrick, Cary Grant, Jesus of Nazareth, John Lennon, Honore de Balzac, Carole Lombard, Julius Caesar, Jim Morrison, Abraham Lincoln, Jimi Hendrix, Howard Hawks.
Your greatest regret? Allowing my anger at my father to determine the course of my life for too many years. Not getting my life into gear sooner. Not being a better father with my younger son, Dylan. Stupidly and fearfully beating the shell of a turtle with a piece of wood when I was five or six years old (I thought it was a snapping turtle that might bite my finger off).
If you were forced to choose exile to a single country with a reasonable guaranteed income…? Italy.
I took this shot of a huge black-and-white fashion poster (possibly for Calvin Klein jeans) seven or eight years ago. It was right on Fifth Avenue around 53rd Street, give or take. Right smack dab in the middle of tourist-ville, and nobody said anything because the aesthetic was gayish without being queer. Last weekend artist Carolina Falkholt painted a huge red johnson on the side of a building on Soho’s Broome St., but it was soon painted over due to neighborhood complaints. I understand why Falkholt went there (she had the Robert Mapplethorpe precedent to consider, and she had to at least out-provoke Calvin Klein) but nobody likes queer art interfering with the general urban neutrality. That includes me.
A friend who lives overseas wrote the following earlier today: “I’m really suffering, and I feel really alone and broken. The closest people to me have all betrayed me in the last days. Go figure. The truth is that this world is not good, and people are afraid of the things they truly crave. I try so hard to be so good and give to so many, but receive so little of that care or kindness or closeness in return. And it hurts the most when it’s on a day like today, on Christmas. Yes, I know, just a random holiday but still.”
HE response #1: “If we were sitting in a cafe somewhere and you said ‘the closest people to me have all betrayed me in the last days,’ I would naturally say ‘whaddaya mean…betrayed you how?’ I’m presuming that at least one of these betrayals had to do with a woman hurting your feelings. Well, you don’t need me to tell you that this is sadly and eternally par for the course. Ask Frank Sinatra. Lovers ignore, pull back, occasionally bruise, cause hurt, sometimes even draw blood. Obviously not all the time but often enough for what I’ve just written to be a cliche. Quelle surprise!”
HE response #2: “What can I tell you? People mainly look after themselves. I don’t think that rule of existence is going to change any time soon. My grandparents used to have a green candy-serving bowl in their living room, and I distinctly recall chuckling as a nine or ten year-old at the slogan painted upon it: ‘People are no are no damn good.’ Ever since I’ve been measuring human behavior against this somber assessment, and my considered opinion today is that more than a few people (especially those blessed with good genes and decent educations and non-traumatic upbringings) are actually quite ‘good’ as far as kindly, considerate behavior goes.
“But you’ll never find a center of happiness if you’re looking for others to do it for you — to offer love and respect and care for you in the right ways — to provide that balm, those hugs, that emotional support system that we all want and need. That was probably what my grandparents were irked about, and they had several friends and a large extended family to hang out with from time to time. Friends and lovers are blessings but not solutions, and they never will be. Take yourself off that treadmill, get shut of it. Here comes another cliche: ‘Happiness and sadness are illusions — opposite sides of the same coin.’ We’re all part of a single, spherical, immaculate universe of chance and destiny. Buy a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, listen to Van Morrison on vinyl, sail into the mystic.”
HE response #3: “Or get hold of the Bluray of Brian Desmond Hurt‘s A Christmas Carol.”
The year’s first holiday-vibe moment happened last night at the Smoke House, where Tatyana and I went after the 7pm Disney lot screening of The Last Jedi. Nice-smelling wreaths, soft amber lighting, twinkly Christmas lights, carols playing softly, friendly vibes.
French champagne received today from friends at Amazon…thanks!
Holiday greetings from Pete and Madelyn Hammond.
Tatyana and I have fallen in love with these little amber-tinted table lamps at Smoke House.
This is going to sound tiresome to the hipster-cynics out there, but there’s only one (1) Christmas flick that really and truly serves the spirit of that once-blessed holiday — the 1951, British-made A Christmas Carol (titled Scrooge in England) with Alastair Sim. Period. Other films have tried and nearly gotten there, but Brian Desmond Hurst‘s black-and-white classic comes from the same cultural fibre that sired and inspired Charles Dickens himself. Every time I’ve watched it (at least a couple of dozen times) it summons memories of family and community values that may have once existed, at least in my heart, and melts me right the fuck down.
And you’re gonna throw Bruce Willis and his bloody, glass-cut feet into the same bullpen?
If you want to put on your perversely ironic elf cap and cackle your ass off as you slam back a double-rum-shot egg nog, you can call Die Hard a Xmas flick…sure, heh-heh, why not?, fuck it. But in so doing you’ll be compounding the perversity and adding yet another layer of crust and cynical remove from a holiday that used to actually occasion a brief spiritual sea-change in people…a teaspoon of extra kindness that would sink in and lift all boats.
One of the many reasons that Christmas has felt more and more like a lesser thing has been the corroded, loathsomely insincere mindset that has allowed (wink-wink, fuck-all, who gives a shit?) for “Die Hard is a Xmas movie” to gain a semi-serious foothold in the cultural conversation.
And you know what? For all my feelings of pious denunciation, I have, all on my own, Alastair Sim notwithstanding, long associated this merrily calculating 1988 John McTiernan flick with (heh-heh) “the holidays.” Really. But in so doing all these years, I’ve said to myself “is the part of you that used to wear a semblance of true Christmas spirit on your sleeve…has that spiritual spark been completely narcotized?” The answer, of course, is ”well, not entirely but yeah, for the most part.”
And this is who we are and what we’ve become, Mr. Dickens. Sorry, brah, but it’s true. And so I say “Merry Christmas, Mr. Silver, Mr. Willis, Mr. McTiernan, Mr. De Souza!!…in keeping with the situation.” I’ve walked the London streets during the early Christmas season (37 years ago, to be exactly, when I was there to interview Peter O’Toole for GQ magazine.) And the Brits really know from Christmas spirit, trust me, just as surely as plastic American mall-fuck consciousness has been shitting all over the spirit of the occasion since the dawn of Reagan.
The only good thing is that I don’t drink egg nog any more.
It sounds unkind if not cruel to say this, but the invisible subtitle of Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel, which I saw this morning, is “I got nothin’ left to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway.”
It’s not a substandard or dismissable film, but it’s not grade-A either. It’s basically a thrown-together stew of familiar Allen-esque elements and influences — a little Chekhov-Seagull action, a little re-frying of Blue Jasmine desperation mixed with A Streetcar Named Desire, a dash of Mary Beth Hurt‘s “Joey” character in Interiors, some gangster seasoning from Bullets over Broadway plus some onions, garlic, celery and sauteed peppers and a little Crimes and Misdemeanors.
But it has some magnificent cinematography by the great Vittorio Storaro. It’s totally worth seeing for this alone.
Wonder Wheel is basically a gloomy stage play — don’t trust any reviewer who calls it a “dramedy” — about a love triangle that ends in doom and despair. For my money it felt too stagey, too “written”, too theatrical. Every doomed character seems to be saying lines, and I just didn’t believe it. I never stopped saying to myself “the writing hasn’t been sufficiently finessed.”
Wonder Wheel‘s tragic figure is poor Ginny (Kate Winslet), a 39 year-old might-have-been actress on her second marriage, living in a Santo Loquasto-designed Coney Island apartment with a pot-bellied lunkhead named Humpty (Jim Belushi), miserable as fuck with a waitress gig at a local clam house and coping with a strange pyromaniac son whom I didn’t care for and wanted to see drowned.
There are two wild cards — a Trigorin-like would-be playwright/lifeguard named Mickey Rubin (Justin Timberlake), and Carolina (Juno Temple), Humpty’s unstable daughter who shows up in scene #1, looking to hide out after yapping to the FBI about her gangster ex-husband and concerned that friends of her ex might want to hurt her.
Early on Ginny falls for Mickey and vice versa to a certain extent. The problem is that Ginny starts to imagine that Mickey can somehow help her escape from her miserable life. But Mickey is just looking for writerly experience and not interested in being anyone’s savior, except perhaps his own.
The second problem is that soon after meeting Carolina Mickey starts to think about easing out of his affair with Ginny and maybe….no, he doesn’t want to be a two-timing shit so he puts it out of his mind, but you know what they say about Mr. Happy. He wants what he wants.
Wonder Wheel is a lament for life’s unhappy losers — for those marginally talented people who never quite made it artistically, or who made one or two big mistakes and never recovered, and who are stuck in a dead-end job or marriage that is making them more and more miserable. It starts out saying “these people are not only unhappy, but nothing they can do can free them from the mud of misery.” It ends up saying “you thought these folks couldn’t be less happy? Well, we figured a way!”