From Ann Hornaday piece (“Lady Bird makes the case for reframing female stories as epics on a par with ‘male’ genres”) in Washington Post, posted on 11.9: “Lady Bird makes the case for reframing female stories as epics on a par with genres usually coded as male: Our heroine’s crucible might be a snug middle-class home and the sleepy streets of Sacramento, but Greta Gerwig‘s movie is just as big and canonical as a film about young men evacuating Dunkirk or the ponderous existential crisis of a blade runner in 2049 Los Angeles.”
Who knows if there will even be serious film historians 50 years hence? The culture might be so degraded by then…I don’t want to think about it. But if they’re still around one or two will probably look back upon our troubled epoch and ask “which 2017 films really conveyed what the world was like back then? Which tried to express what people were hoping for or afraid of? Which tell us the most in terms of cultural self-portraiture or self-reflection?”
I can guarantee you right now that Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! will definitely be among the few films that scholars of 2067 will study when they ponder U.S. culture during the first year of Donald Trump’s administration.
I can also assure you that no one will pay the slightest historical attention to Thor: Ragnarok or Logan or even Blade Runner 2049. These three films have earned serious box-office coin, of course, while mother! topped out at a measly $17,800,004 domestic and $25,850,098 foreign. But they won’t matter when all has been said and done and the deciders have completed their assessments. Art lasts; all diversions melt.
In the same way that the mid ‘1950s were clearly reflected by Kiss Me Deadly, Patterns, No Down Payment and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the currents of the mid to late’60s were mirrored by Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, The President’s Analyst and The Graduate, Aronofsky’s allegorical horror film burrows right into the dirt and muck of the here-and-now.
In my book mother! is either the fourth- or fifth-best film of the year, in part because it’s probably the most courageous. How did Aronofsky get Paramount to finance and release a film that Joe and Jane Popcorn reportedly hated with a passion? Whatever the back-story, the release of mother! is a proud event in the annals of American cinema because it went for something and nailed it, because it reaches right into the nightmares and agitations and self-loathings of a convulsive era and says “do you smell it…do you sense the disease and disruption? Not the chaos that you’re watching on-screen, but the real-deal horrors that are defining the world outside?”
If there are any film critics organizations out there with any balls, they’ll give Aronofsky a special artistic courage award or two next month.
I’m moving closer and closer to a firm opinion that 2017 has been a weak Oscar year, and I’m starting to think there’s a specific reason for that. In any artistic realm there’s only so much genius and excellence to go around, and the fact is that more and more talented people and good ideas are finding homes in cable and streaming these days, and that means that the movie realm, which has never been less interested in quality for quality’s sake in the history of the film industry, is no longer getting the cream of the crop and the pick of the litter in terms of talent and projects.
To rephrase, fewer dynamically talented people are trying to create high-quality movies for the theatrical realm, and more and more dynamically talented people and their passion projects are heading straight for Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and elsewhere in the streaming realm. It’s that simple.
I don’t know much about Steven Spielberg‘s The Post and Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread (and neither does anyone else), but I do know that when you look closely at the current Gold Derby favorites for Best Picture, there are are only three that deliver that X-factor wowness. Three films with that confident, fully charged, self-aware, ahead-of-the-curve, real-life-discovered quality that proclaims “this is truly one of the few.”
I’m speaking (as if regular readers didn’t know) of Dunkirk, Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird. I could extend my list to include The Big Sick and The Florida Project because they also smack of discovery and originality, a vibe and a current that tells you “this is new, this is something else, you need to really pay attention.”
In terms of dazzling precision and extraordinary visual composition alone I would add the masterful War For The Planet of the Apes, although I know there are some who insist on pigeonholing it as a technically brilliant exercise and nothing more.
I’m not dismissing or marginalizing Darkest Hour, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Shape of Water or Get Out, and I wouldn’t argue all that strongly against them if anyone tried to pick a fight. All due respect, I don’t happen to believe these four films have that tingly, levitational quality that many Best Picture Oscar nominees have possessed in years past, at least in my own estimation. That’s not to say they’re not heading for a Best Picture nomination. They may well be.
A caustic observation about Blade Runner 2049 from Michael Deeley, British-born producer of Ridley Scott’s ’82 original, appeared in a 10.30 Screen Daily interview: “I’m not looking forward to seeing it, but I will. [Blade Runner 2049] is very long. It must have been cut-able and should have been. They can’t do better [box office] because they can’t play it more than three times a day because it’s just too long, which is of course self-indulgent at the very least, arrogant probably…it’s criminal.”
Remove the epithets and Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro said more or less the same thing on 10.7: “That 163-minute running time is a killer. Forget about the fact that Blade Runner 2049 has its slow moments. Once you count the trailer pre-show, how do you ask audiences to commit four hours of their time to sit in the theater?”
Blade Runner 2049 opened three and a half weeks ago. Has it been, in fact, a financial bust? The answer appears to be “yes.”
As of 10.29 the domestic tally was $81,538,180, and the overseas earnings were $141,595,133 for a grand total of $223,133,333. The negative cost is thought to be in the range of $170 million with p & a costs around $130 million for a total of $300 million.
D’Allesandro also reported that “those affiliated with the movie have been saying that $400 million is the magic break-even number,” although that estimate was based on a lower production cost estimate of $155 million.”
Even if you accept $400 million as a break-even plateau, Blade Runner 2049 is nearly a month into its run and a bit more than $175 million short of that figure. ($400 million minus $223,133,333 — $176,866,667.)
But Warner Bros. is in the clear. It has no investment in the film and has simply collecting a distribution free of somewhere between 8% and 10%. Sony Pictures Releasing is distributing internationally and is also not looking at a painful downside. If there’s a loser in the equation it may be Alcon Entertainment.
This morning Jordan Ruimy sent along a straw poll about the “best current film directors.” Reddit was the principal launch site for the poll. Out of 24,469 votes cast as of 12:45 pm Pacific the highest rated director is…Denis Villeneuve? 1442 votes or 5.88% of the total. Weird. I was under the impression (a) that Blade Runner 2049 is admired but far from universally loved, (b) that some were as annoyed by Arrival as I was, and (c) that many viewers felt that Emily Blunt picking up some strange Latino guy in a bar and bringing him home in Sicario made no sense at all.
Villeneuve is admired — I get that — but there’s a dissenting community out there. Nonetheless Reddit readers have spoken — bow down to the new King Shit.
I’ll allow that Villeneueve is an accomplished, well-respected helmer, but should he really rate higher than (my personal preferences among the straw poll names, numbering 30 or thereabouts but not in this order) Roman Polanski, Michael Haneke, Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow (despite Detroit), James Cameron, the Coen brothers, Fernando Meirelles, Walter Salles, Tony Gilroy, Pawel Pawlikowksi, David O. Russell, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Alexander Payne, Alfonso Cuaron, David Fincher, Kenneth Lonergan, Steven Soderbergh, Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro, Matt Reeves, Bennett Miller, Cristian Mungiu, Darren Aronofsky, Phillip Noyce, Wes Anderson, Steve McQueen, Christopher Nolan, Asghar Farhadi and Cary Fukunaga?
The poll is kind of weird in a few ways. One, why aren’t the names listed alphabetically? Two, where is Call Me By Your Name‘s Luca Guadagnino? (After A Bigger Splash and with everyone waiting with bated breath for his two-and-a half-hour Suspiria remake, it’s derelict to not include him.) Three, if you’re dead you obviously can’t be among the best “current” film directors so why is Abbas Kiarostami included?
My cream-of-the-croppers again, but this time in order of preference:
1. Asghar Farhadi. 2. Luca Guadagnino. 3. Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu. 4. Cristian Mungiu. 5. Darren Aronofsky. 6. Joel and Ethan Coen. 7. David Fincher, 8. Martin Scorsese, 9. Kathryn Bigelow (despite Detroit), 10. Chris Nolan, 11. James Cameron, 12. Alfonso Cuaron, 13. Pawel Pawlikowski, 14. David O. Russell, 15. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 16. Guillermo del Toro, 17. Matt Reeves, 18. Bennett Miller, 19. Roman Polanski, 20. Michael Haneke, 21. Steve McQueen, 22. Wes Anderson, 23. Steven Soderbergh, 24. Tony Gilroy, 25. Phillip Noyce, 26. Fernando Meirelles, 27. Cary Fukunaga, 28. Kenneth Lonergan, 29. Michael Haneke, 30. Walter Salles.
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!”
A few days ago Esquire‘s Nick Schager posted his Top 25 Films of 2017. There is no correct or incorrect way to feel about any film, but what is Schager trying to get across when he calls Bong Joon-ho‘s Okja the year’s third best so far and James Gray‘s The Lost City of Z the fifth best? He also has Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant in eighth place, Chad Stahelski‘s John Wick: Chapter 2 in 13th place and Benny and Josh Safdie‘s Good Time in 15th place.
Sorry, brah, but these picks strike me as ridiculous. You can describe these films as guilty pleasures or quirky outliers, but you can’t say they’re among the top 15. Okay, you can but it seems awfully damn weird.
If you want a Best of 2017 you can take to the bank, consider HE’s tally as of 10.12.17 (and in this order): (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me My Your Name, (2) Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, (3) Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird, (4) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (5) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (6) Darren Aronofsky‘s mother!, (7) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, (8) Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, (9) Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver, (10) Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project, (11) John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick, (12) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (13) Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, (14) David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story, (15) David Gordon Green‘s Stronger, (16) David Michod and Brad Pitt‘s War Machine, (18) Joseph Kosinski‘s Only The Brave, (19) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out and (20) Denis Villneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049.
Excerpted HE reactions to Schager favorites:
Bong Joon-ho‘s Okja — “[a} dreadful, cliche-ridden, Spielbergian thing…splashy, showoffy kid-mulch.”
James Gray‘s The Lost City of Z — “I’ve never watched a film about exploring exotic realms that has had less energy, less excitement, less of a pulse. I was just watching the damn thing and hoping against hope that Charlie Hunnam would be killed by a native spear or a wild animal or by falling off a cliff into raging rapids. I knew he wouldn’t die until the end of the film, but I wanted blood all the same. I started imagining ways to kill him. Anything to take my mind off the film.”
Ridley Scott‘s Alien Covenant — “I didn’t dislike Alien: Covenant — I hated it. And I’m not saying that out of some lazy-wrath instinct or pissy posturing or what-have-you. I’m talking about serious stomach-acid sensations here. Then again I mostly despised Prometheus so it didn’t take a great deal of effort to come to this. If Prometheus rang your hate bell, you’re going to despise this one also. For Alien: Covenant, which runs 121 minutes but feels like 150, is truly a spawn of that awful 2012 film. Is it ‘better’ than Prometheus? All right, yeah, I suppose it is. Is it therefore worth seeing? Maybe, but only if you like watching films that make you resent everything on the face of the planet including yourself.”
Chad Stahelski‘s John Wick: Chapter 2: “What a drag it was last night to catch this last night at the Fiesta plex. Me and roughly 25 or 30 wage-earning lowlifes. Baggy pants, hoodies, etc. ‘What a way to live and think!’, I muttered as I sank into my seat. With all the wonder and excitement of life outside, we few have chosen to watch a shitty Keanu Reeves action flick in a crummy megaplex on a rainy Friday night…welcome to the dungeon!
“I was half-okay with the original John Wick but this thing…God. There’s a cool, efficient way to assemble programmers of this sort, but the evidence suggests that Stahelski, a former stunt man, and screenwriter Derek Kolstad just don’t have the skill or the smarts to improve upon the 2014 start-up. There’s a vapor cloud of stupidity hanging over the film at every turn. The fairly applied adjectives include ‘dull, poorly written, lazily acted, predictably plotted,’ etc.
Benny and Josh Safdie‘s Good Time: “Yesterday nearly every Cannes critic went apeshit over [this] visceral, high-crank crime drama about a couple of low-life, bank-robbing brothers, Robert Pattinson‘s Connie and Benny Safdie‘s Nick, running around Queens. Nick is basically Lenny from Of Mice and Men, and right away I was going ‘oh, Jesus, I have to hang out with some stammering…I’m sorry, challenged guy for the next 100 minutes? This guy can’t put two sentences together without sweating from the mental strain.’”
Yesterday Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman posted a piece about what he describes as obsessive fanboy worship of Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner, and how that purist fervor found its voice in Blade Runner 2049.
The key element in Scott’s 1982 original, Gleiberman argues, “is its transcendental mystique — the fact that it now plays like the sci-fi blockbuster equivalent of slow food. Its storytelling longueurs have been inflated into the very signifiers of its artistry. It has become not just a movie but a symbol: the anti-Star Wars.”
Key observation: “I remain a fan of Blade Runner, but to be in the cult of Blade Runner is to celebrate the purity of its vision, and to join in a conspiracy theory about the forces that would obliterate that purity.” Gleiberman doesn’t specifically call director Denis Villeneuve a cultist, but he kinda does.
My argument with the piece is in this passage: “[Scott’s Blade Runner was] a majestic science-fiction metaphor, beginning with its opening shot: the perpetual nightscape of Los Angeles in 2019, the smog turned to black, the fallout turned to rain, the smokestacks blasting fireballs that look downright medieval against a backdrop of obsidian blight. Blade Runner wasn’t the first — or last — image of a desiccated future, but it remains one of the only movies that lets you feel the mechanical-spiritual decay.
“There’s a touch of virtual reality to the way we experience it, sinking into those blackened textures, reveling in the details (the corporate Mayan skyscrapers, the synthetic sushi bars, the Times Square-meets-Third World technolopolis clutter), seeing an echo of our own world in every sinister facet.”
But how much of an echo? Scott’s film was a noirish ecological forecast of where we all might be headed, and I fully understand that vision-wise there’s no upside to low-balling whatever horrors the future might bring. But at the same time if you’re predicting…okay, imagining a world as horrific as Blade Runner‘s from a 1982 vantage point, or 37 years into the future back then, shouldn’t you have to pay some kind of piper if your vision has been proven to be way, way off? If what you foresaw hasn’t even begun to manifest?
Scott’s Blade Runner milieu — nightmarish, gloom-ridden, poisoned — is obviously a trip in itself and fun to wallow in, but it was set less than two years from today, in 2019, and as I said last weekend the sprawl of real-world Los Angeles has exposed that realm as absolute noir-fetish fanboy bullshit.
“Blade Runner 2049 is, of course, a prophecy of ecological run to come, and that’s where we’re definitely heading with criminals like Scott Pruitt running the EPA,” I wrote, “but BR49‘s idea of what Los Angeles will look like 32 years hence is almost surely just as ludicrous as Scott’s.
Getting eight and 1/2 hours (as opposed to the usual five or six) does wonders for your basic outlook upon life. It’s almost Halloween, November is just around the corner, and it feels like July here. The sky is radiant blue and everyone I see seems to be in a great or at least an easy mellow mood. I had the car washed this morning, and as I drove out of the lot it seemed as if all of West Hollywood was just as gleaming and squeaky clean. Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner milieu, a portrait of a poisoned Los Angeles in 2019, was absolute bullshit. Blade Runner 2049 is, of course, a prophecy of ecological run to come, and that’s where we’re definitely heading with criminals like Scott Pruitt running the EPA, but BR49‘s idea of what Los Angeles will look like 32 years hence is almost surely just as ludicrous as Scott’s.
Is she in the shower? What’s she doing, snapping her fingers or snorting cocaine out of a small spoon that we can’t see? One of the two.
I can’t say I “enjoyed” watching Blade Runner 2049 last night, but I can honestly say this morning that it’s gained upon reflection.
I’ve sat through my share of futuristic jizz-whizz fantasy flicks — nutrition-free wanks that you don’t respect the next morning. Denis Villeneuve‘s 30-years-later sequel to Ridley Scott‘s 1982 Blade Runner is no cheap-high ride — it’s a grim dystopian dream-trip, ruinously “beautiful” but soul-draining — but if you just surrender to the toxicity and allow it to pollute your system and your soul, you’ll probably realize the next morning that Villeneuve has deepened and expanded the overall tale. He’s made a serious film to which attention must be paid.
Perhaps not in a way that will matter all that much in the general realm and yes, you might feel a little sick from all those residual poisons, but a few hours later you’ll be glad you submitted. Because as much as I disliked sitting through it, Blade Runner 2049 stays with you, and that’s always a mark of something profound or at least high-fibre-ish.
It lasts an eternity — I checked my watch at least five or six times, and my muttered mantra all through it was “I don’t give a shit about any of this, I don’t give a shit about any of this, I don’t give a shit about any of this” — but it’s certainly a major vision thing. Pay your $16 dollars and sink into a thoroughly gloomy realm of super-holograms (including ones of Frank Sinatra and Vegas-era Elvis Presley), rot, ruin and industrial scrap, a toxic shithole populated with grim-faced characters you would just as soon squash as look at, a world of hair-grease and sprayed sweat and impassive, cold-death expressions, and all of it blanketed with rain, snow, sludge and chemical mud-glop.
And oh, yeah, for a story that you won’t give two shits about. A dingleberry doodle plot involving memory implants and oscured lineage and a secret no one must know (no one! just ask Jared Leto!) and a little wooden horse with a date (6.10.21) carved into the base, and some shit-hooey about original replicant creator Eldon Tyrell having given Rachael, the experimental replicant played by Sean Young in the ’82 original, the organic potential to reproduce and blah blah. And a narrative pace that will slow your own pulse and make your eyelids flutter and descend, and a growing need to escape into the outer lobby so you can order a hot dog and check your messages.
BR49 should have run two hours, not two hours and 44 minutes.
Do yourself a favor…seriously. Before seeing it this weekend, read the Wikipedia synopsis. Doing so will remove the irritating, hard-to-follow story tease and allow you to just concentrate on the visuals, which is all this thing is about anyway. It doesn’t matter anyway — nothing does, it’s all shit and distraction, you’re all just contributing to the Warner Bros. bottom line, to Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford‘s wealth while you subtract from your own. We’re all punks, fools, suckers, knaves. Warner Bros. pours a little whiskey onto the plastic floor, and like Ford’s Blade Runner wolf dog we lick it right up.
Fuck the story, fuck the lineage factor, fuck it all. Just sink into the chilly murderous vibe and Gosling’s impassive, glazed-over robot eyes, and Ford’s subtle emotional delivery (has he ever cried before on-screen?). Nobody cares and it doesn’t fucking matter if RG or Ford or Kevin Tsujihara are replicants. I’m a replicant with the capability of siring children and writing a daily column. What difference does it make if I’m an android or not, or if I dream of electric sheep? Nobody cares, nothing matters, it’s all bullshit.
What of the virtual-reality ho chick, the homicidal super-bitch and the brittle, tough-cookie supervisor played by Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks and Robin Wright? Smart women will not be pleased. (After the show a friend was listening to a whipsmart feminist deploring these characters and the phony, piss-poor writing.) For these are cardboard, non-dimensional figures (women acting like men or fulfilling men’s fantasies) who would never be hatched by a woman screenwriter. Grow some soul and awareness, Hampton Fancher and Michael Green.
How important is Gosling’s little wooden horse, and how does it feed into everything else? I’m still scratching my head about that, but I’m sure someone will explain it later today. Is Gosling’s “Joe” the replicant son of you-know-who? I didn’t give a shit. Is there any kind of emotionally satisfying undercurrent in any of this? Fuck no.
There’s one moment — one! — that made me sit up in my seat and say to myself “wait, hold on, this is semi-poignant.” But the spoiler whiners will kill me if I get specific. It involves Ford and a younger woman — I’ll leave it at that.
I knew this wouldn’t be a glorious, all-around triumph. I knew it would be brilliant but problematic. I knew not to trust those rave reviews written by balding, bespectacled and/or heavyset dweebs. If they’d written “it’s a bear to sit through and it makes you feel like shit, but it’s a masterpiece,” okay, but too many of them just wrote “it’s a masterpiece!” This is why people don’t trust critics. They live in their own world.
From A.O. Scott’s N.Y. Times review of Blade Runner 2049: “[Warner Bros.] has been unusually insistent in its pleas to critics not to reveal plot points. That’s fair enough, but it’s also evidence of how imaginatively impoverished big-budget movies have become.
“Like any great movie, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (’82) cannot be spoiled. It repays repeated viewing because its mysteries are too deep to be solved and don’t depend on the sequence of events.
“Denis Villeneuve’s film, by contrast, is a carefully engineered narrative puzzle, and its power dissipates as the pieces snap into place. As sumptuous and surprising as it is from one scene to the next, it lacks the creative excess, the intriguing opacity and the haunting residue of its predecessor.
“As such, Blade Runner 2049 stands in relation to Blade Runner almost exactly as K stands in relation to Deckard before the two meet: as a more docile, less rebellious ‘improvement,’ tweaked and retrofitted to meet consumer demand.
“But now and then — when Ryan Gosling‘s K and Harrison Ford‘s Deckard are knocking around the old gambling palace; when K visits an enigmatic mind-technician played by Mackenzie Davis — you get an inkling that something else might have been possible. Something freer, more romantic, more heroic, less determined by the corporate program.”
There are very few aspects or side-angles that elude Deadline‘s Pete Hammond when it comes to assessing a new film or, if the shoe fits, its award-season potential. At the same time he’s always had a fairly generous, big-of-heart attitude about the movie realm. (As do I on a certain level.) It’s precisely because Hammond is not a neghead Addison DeWitt type that I trust his impressions about Blade Runner 2049 much more than Jordan Hoffman‘s or David Ehrlich‘s.
Hammond observation #1: Blade Runner 2049 has “an overly long and drawn-out running time of 2 hours and 44 minutes that could have used some trimming. The storytelling takes its sweet time and quite frankly can be a bit confusing to see where it is all going, but maybe that’s the point.”
Hammond observation #2: “Even if I was submitted to waterboarding techniques I probably couldn’t reveal the details of this byzantine plot.” Wells interjection: The very mention of waterboarding obviously alludes to movie-watching torture, which was presumedly in Hammond’s mind.
Hammond observation #3: “Suffice to say this deliberately-paced film really comes alive once Harrison Ford comes on board about an hour and a half into it.” Wells interjection: It can be safely presumed that “deliberately paced” means slowly paced, leadenly paced, slightly boring, etc. In short, Blade Runner 2049 is more or less a stiff until Ford arrives.
From another critic friend: “Too much movie for how little story there was. A great looking movie; if I had the slightest interest in virtual reality (which I don’t), that’s a world I would want to walk around in. I assumed that the same climate dysfunction that caused the constant rain in LA in the first film had simply gotten worse so that, this much farther into the future, it alternately rains and snows.”
Sidebar: Hammond mentions that it snows in Blade Runner‘s futuristic Los Angeles. Which is quite the rarity as snow hasn’t fallen here since 1962. A 12.9.16 KCET.org article by Nathan Masters reports that snow once fell on the Los Angeles coastal plain with some regularity — about once per decade. Since official records were first kept in 1877, the downtown Los Angeles weather station observed measurable snowfall three times, in 1882, 1932 and 1949, and news reports recorded snowfall elsewhere in the Los Angeles Basin in 1913, 1921, 1922, 1926, 1944, 1957, 1962 — and then never again, for 54 years running.”
A draft I once read of Robert Towne‘s script for The Two Jakes, which took place in in 1948 Los Angeles, ended with a snowfall that actually happened in January ’49. I can’t remember if a snowfall appeared in Jack Nicholson‘s 1990 film version or not.
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