It is rude and lazy and completely unfair to say that my interest in seeing Jerome Salle‘s Zulu, a noirish South African thriller with Forest Whitaker and Orlando Bloom, is next to zilch. Sorry but that was my immediate reaction when I heard it’ll close the 66th Cannes Film Festival. I will quite possibly eat these words, and that’ll be fine. In that sense I’m looking forward to seeing it. The full list of Cannes selections will be announced on on Thursday, 4.18.
In other words, a Scottish Bad Lieutenant only a lot crazier, crossed with the sensibilities of Trainspotting‘s Irvine Welsh by way of direction and a script adaptation by Jon S. Baird and a lead performance by James McAvoy. Will the film include the dog scene in Welsh’s book?
The incontestably great Jonathan Winters has left the earth. He was much more than a comedian, and much more, I always felt, than Maude Frickert — the character that Middle America seemed to like the most. Winters was first and foremost (and I don’t think this is a word) a transportationist. He would leave his body and go into trance-states that seemed to flirt with real madness. “This guy isn’t just playing characters — he’s one-third nuts,” I told myself long ago. “He knows what it is to throw normality out the window.”
One reason for this (apart from Winters having been blessed with pure genius) is that he crashed and did two stretches in a mental hospital in ’59 and again in ’61 for manic depression. I’ve never fallen into that pit myself, but I know that guys who’ve been there and have come back are always fifteen times more interesting than mild-mannered folk. Ask any comedian who knows a thing or two. Ask Albert Brooks or Robin Williams or anyone, really, who knows what a bitch it is to be funny in a way that resonates on some level. Winters was world-class.
A Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic grade in the mid to high 60s obviously signifies substantial resistance, even if the majority of critics are with you. It also means, in strict high-school exam terms, a failing grade. This is what’s happened so far with Henry Alex Rubin‘s Disconnect — a RT 69% rating, a 65 from Metacritic.
It feels odd when a third of the critics disagree with you, but it happens. All I can say is that I have a very clear and hard-won understanding of what a failed film plays like, and Disconnect, trust me, does not deserve that label.
Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern isn’t as much of a fan as myself, but he allows that despite an element of “sheer contrivance” (which is there in a sense but doesn’t get in the way as the multiple-overlapping-plot-strand drama is a genre and as valid as any other reality-reshaping approach or film style) “the film is impressive all the same, a bleak vision of life in the internet age as an asocial network where faceless predators abound, heedless kids live secret lives, everything is phishy until proven otherwise and quests for love or intimacy lead to loneliness or grief.
“Movies about intertwined lives often suffer from the gimmick that’s supposed to sustain them: Two examples of recent years, Crash and Babel, piled on fateful connections to the point of self-parody. Disconnect suffers less in that department because the gimmickry is accompanied by a valid if familiar irony — the technological revolution that brings us together in ways that were unimaginable to previous generations also separates us by replacing face-to-face encounters with texts, tweets, webcams, emails and disembodied chats.”
Here’s how I put it on 4.3:
“Disconnect works because it delivers in the writing, direction and acting. Andrew Stern‘s screenplay feels credible and compelling and is very finely threaded, always pushed along by believable turns and real-seeming characters behaving in what they believe are their best interests. Rubin’s direction is unforced naturalism par excellence, and the result is a story that always seems steady-on-the-tracks — nothing ever feels like a stretch (except perhaps that one moment at the very end when slow-mo kicks in). And the performances are honestly inhabited and true-feeling and just about perfectly rendered.”
Those negative 42 reviews from Variety‘s Scott Foundas and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy (plus my own briefly expressed disappointment) might suggest to some that Brian Helgeland‘s film has been roundly condemned. It hasn’t. It currently has a 70% Rotten Tomatoes rating and a 60% Metacritic score. Ticket buyers traditionally don’t have a huge problem with square, on-the-nose films of this sort. I’ve no tracking information to share.
From Coed.dom’s Phil Villarreal: “While Jackie Robinson’s story is worthy of respect and admiration, director-writer Brian Helgeland shows conclusively that even a great man’s life can be incredibly repetitive and boring. “42 can find no other conflict or resolution than Robinson getting treated like crap, then proceeding to play such incredibly great baseball that it’s accompanied by extremely loud trumpet swells.
“Chadwick Boseman, as Robinson, does an excellent job of playing a man with a female name. One might argue, in fact, that Boseman does a better job of playing Robinson than Robinson himself did playing himself in The Jackie Robinson Story back in 1950.
“Harrison Ford does a solid job as Dodgers executive Branch Rickey, who, as baseball historians love to note, showed incredible bravery in bringing Robinson into the Majors. Poor Rickey had to sit there and watch as Robinson got hit in the head, spiked on the base paths and shunned in the locker room as Rickey counted mounds of cash that Robinson made him. Ford does a good job of conveying the plight of an incredibly rich old man who watches stuff happen while wearing a poker face.”
The most significant Sonoma Film Festival event last night (or so it seemed to me) was a Netflix-sponsored dinner, held under a large hospitality tent in the town square. The guests of honor were The Iceman costar Ray Liotta and director-cowriter Ariel Vromen. SIFF Exec Director and consummate host Kevin McNeely offered a hearty welcome. Thanks to SIFF p.r. rep Carol Marshall for inviting me up and seeing to the usual comforts.
Sonoma Film Festival exec director Kevin McNeely, The Iceman costar Ray Liotta during last night’s Netflix dinner.
SIFF programmer Steve Shor suggested the following films during my three-day stay here: Blackbird, You Will Be My Son, Monkey On My Shoulder, Terms and Conditions May Apply, The Deep, Souffle Chocolat, Lo Zucco: The Wine of the Son of the King of the French, Cover Story, The Teacher, Fierce Green Fire, Rebels With A Cause.
Mary Louise Parker and special HE friend Demian Bichir are also attending this weekend.
Netflix is now offering an ultra high-def service that’s as good if not slightly better than Bluray, a Netflix exec told me last night. The only problem is that Time Warner, my West Hollywood cable-internet provider, is one of the two companies who aren’t on board with this service. Netflix employs roughly 600 at its Los Gatos headquarters; the Beverly Hills office has about 100 staffers.
Sonoma’s flat typography is obviously bicycle-friendly. Temperatures in the 70s and low 80s, but the air cools down a bit in the evening.
Christopher Tookey‘s pan of Oblivion in the 4.11 Daily Mail is funny. He was clearly feeling his hate oats as he wrote it. I’ve been there. I know how it feels. A certain form of exhilaration.
But then I came upon this sentence: “[Tom Cruise‘s] performance here is even more robotic than in his last turkey, Jack Reacher, where he bravely attempted to play a tough guy 12 inches taller than himself.” That’s raw and intemperate. Jack Reacher was an absorbing, finely crafted exercise and an admirable throwback to old-fashioned, less-is-more action values. So right away I pulled back. He’s obviously not stupid but if he missed what was good about Jack Reacher what else has he missed?
Oblivion review excerpt: “As you would expect from a film of this magnitude, the scenery is spectacular. The trouble is that you’d find a good deal more excitement simply by staring into the Grand Canyon. The whole folie de grandeur is ponderous, humourless and derivative. Even the score is a rip-off of Hans Zimmer’s music for Inception.
“If you wish to see films based on similar premises, I would recommend Wall-E, the original Planet Of The Apes and particularly Moon. All are far superior to this.
“After more than two hours, I was surprised to discover that my cheeks were wet. I was, quite literally, crying with boredom.”
I was overseas when Rock of Ages opened last June and I never got around to seeing it on Bluray. But I happened to turn it on an hour ago and I have to admit something. I know the karaoke factor is a problem, but if you half-watch it and don’t concentrate too much on the particulars, it’s spirited and half-tolerable. Do we have a new category here? The kind that more or less irritates if you give it your complete attention but which succeeds as white noise?
Highway 121 heading east toward Sonoma — Thursday, 4.11, 3:55 pm.
Room #247, El Pueblo Inn, Sonoma.
$85 for four days.
A filmmaker friend told me a week or so ago that Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra would screen at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, or about a week before debuting on HBO. Now Deadline‘s Pete Hammond is dishing this also. No official confirmation but it’s happening.
Easily the coolest one-sheet for a film based on a William Shakespeare play ever designed. The Cosmo and the orange slice. You might assume that the first use of a color accent within a monochrome frame in a mainstream film happened in Schindler’s List. But the first time (or so I recall) was actually in Francis Coppola‘s Rumblefish.
Airport interiors are designed to convey a vague sense of serenity and security. Sometimes they do more than that. I’m sitting near a Starbucks alcove inside one of the San Francisco Int’l Airport terminals, and a few minutes ago I felt curiously soothed when I came upon this hanging angel sculpture. So I took a shot of it. And I’m virulently anti-religious. How’s that for a slice of essential 21st Century journalism?
Last week I said “sure, okay, fine” to a four-day visit to the 16th Sonoma International Film Festival. But now that it’s 8:48 am and I have to leave 40 minutes hence to catch an 11:30 am plane to San Francisco, I don’t feel so good. Part of me always rebels when it’s time to pack (and I haven’t even packed yet) and get going that says “God, why did I agree to this? It would be so much simpler and easier to just stay put.”
I was going to wake up at 5:30 am and write my review of Brian Helgeland‘s 42, which I saw last night. I started tapping out impressions late last night. And then I slept through the alarm and woke around 8 am.
I’ll say this much: 42 is okay if you like your entertainment simple and square and instructional, but it felt to me like a film aimed at 10 year-olds, like something the Disney people might have made in the 1950s between The Swamp Fox and The Life and Times of Elfego Baca. I was wondering if Helgeland intended 42 to evoke an old-time atmosphere (the story of Jackie Robinson‘s entry into big-league baseball happens between 1945 and ’47) by deliberately aping the style and mentality of mainstream ’40s and early ’50s films. I was thinking specifically of those three James Stewart-June Allyson flicks they made between ’49 and ’55 — The Stratton Story (another baseball yarn about overcoming adversity), The Glenn Miller Story and Strategic Air Command. Intentional or not, 42 is cut from the exact same cloth.
I also have another riff about To The Wonder in mind, but that’ll have to keep. I leave in 20 minutes. Nah, can’t happen. I’m shooting for a 9:45 am departure.
9:35 am update: I leave in ten. As I was packing the cats were giving me that hurt look — “You’re abandoning us?”
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