You can tell right away that Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased (Focus Features, 11.2) is well acted, especially by Lucas Hedges (Manchester By The Sea, Lady Bird) as the real-life Garrard Conley, whose experience with Christian gay-conversion therapy was the subject of his 2016 novel, “Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family.” Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman also quote good, it appears, as Hedges’ hardcore Christian parents. It also seems as if Edgerton is suitably abrasive and obnoxious as Hedges’ conversion therapist. You sense strong emotional currents. Obviously an awards-bait film, but how will the New Academy Kidz respond?
Initially posted on 11.27.15: The best thing about this photo, which was shot somewhere on the Lower West Side during the spring of ’77, are the folds in the woman’s stockings. That and the eye contact between us and my no-worries expression. And the cigarette. I wasn’t a constant smoker (I would guiltily indulge from time to time and then quit again) but I was definitely stinking of tobacco and nicotine when this shot was taken, and it didn’t seem like a problem. I was half-miserable at the time, but approaching an even more miserable chapter, which was my first three years in NYC (’78, ’79 and ’80) — restaurant jobs, freelance assignments for next to no money, a cockroach-infested apartment on Sullivan Street and then a one-room misery studio on West 4th Street near Jane, bad food (next to no vegetables, tons of sugar), getting half-bombed every other night, typewriter ribbons and white-out, a ghetto blaster and a couple of dozen cassettes for music. And yet for all the fretting and struggling and my particular form of weltschmerz, I was batting somewhere between .333 and .400 with the ladies.
Two dramas about gay teenagers subjected to the ravages of conversion therapy will open soon. The presumed award-season contender is Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased (Focus Features, 11.2), based on Garrard Conley‘s true-life memoir. It costars Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea) as the 19-year-old Conley, Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe as his rigidly conventional parents, and Edgerton as a gay conversion therapist. Opening three months earlier is The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Film Rise/Vertigo, 8.3), set in 1993 and based on Emily M. Danforth’s 2012 novel. It’s about the teenaged Cameron Post (Chloe Grace Moretz) being sent to a Christian gay-conversion camp in Montana. Costarring Sasha Lane, John Gallagher Jr., Forrest Goodluck and Jennifer Ehle. Post won a Grand Jury Prize at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.
Here’s a list of not-yet-released, not-yet-produced, possibly top-drawer scripts that a friend is looking to get his mitts on. Remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels with a light sprinkling of original storylines. I’ve put asterisks next to my favorites, but tell me which ones stir some level of intrigue or at least mild interest. I’ve typed an X next to those I’m reluctant to even glance at, much less read or even skim. Please send PDFs of all asterisk scripts to gruver1@gmail.com.
If Irving Thalberg returned to the earth in the body of a young script reader working for Warner Bros., he would take one look at this list and hang himself:
6 Underground by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese X
24-7 by Sarah Rothschild
355 by Theresa Rebeck
Aladdin by John August
Alita: Battle Angel by Laeta Kalogridis and James Cameron X
The American by Michael Mitnick * (“authentically GREAT,” a filmmaker friend says)
Aquaman by Will Beall, James Wan
Archer & Armstrong by Terry Rossio
The Art of Fielding Mellish by Tripper Clancy
Baby Nurse by Austin Winberg
Bad Times at the El Royale by Drew Goddard
Battle of Britain by Matthew Orton X
The Beauty inside by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber
Between the Earth and Sky by Veena Sud
The Book of Luke by Craig A. Williams X (awful title)
The Bride of Frankenstein (Dark Universe Remake) by David Koepp *
Bumblebee by Christina Hodson
Cannonball Run by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant *
Charlie’s Angels (remake) by David Auburn
Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Justin Haythe
Champion by Gary Scott Thompson, rewrite by Brad Ingelsby
Cointelpro by Leon Hendrix and Ajani Jackson
Coming to America 2 X
Commando (remake) by David Ayer X
Cowboy Ninja Viking Samurai Street Fighter Fucknose Bare-Knuckled Stud by Chad Stahelski and David Leitch
Creature from the Black Lagoon (Dark Universe Remake) by Will Beall, Jeff Pinkner (Son of Shape of Water?)
Creed 2 by Sylvester Stallone X
Cumulus by Matt Silverman
Detective Pikachu by Nicole Perlman and Alex Hirsch X
The Devil Has A Name by Rob McEveety
Devil’s Night by Leo Benvenuti
Die Hard (prequel) by the Hayes Brothers (young John McLane, rookie detective…get outta here!) X
Domino by Petter Skavlan
Dumbo by Ehren Krueger X (blend of CG and live-action, right?)
Empty High-Velocity Popcorn Jizz-Whizz Jasper Johns Paint Splatter by Clyde Barrow and Glenn Bunkowski *
Fast and Furious 9 by Chris Morgan X
The Favourite by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara
The Force by David Mamet *
Fire Me by Jacob Meszaros and Zach Taylor *
Five Feet Apart by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis
The Girl in the Spider’s Web by Steven Knight X
Glass by M. Night Shayamalan
Grant by David James Kelly
Godzilla: King of the Monsters by Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields
Godzilla vs Kong X
Goosebumps 2
Directed by the “visionary” Panos Cosmatos**, Mandy (RLJE, 9.14) allegedly contains an epic Nicolas Cage performance. I say “allegedly” because I ducked this film during the recent Sundance and Cannes festivals. It just didn’t seem important enough to see at the expense of stuff I wanted to see more. But I’ll get there. Allegedly essential. Currently brandishing a 97% RT rating.
“As if its sole goal was to take the heavyweight title of Nicolas Cage’s Craziest Movie Ever, Mandy exhibits what Shakespeare called ‘vaulting ambition’ in producing the nuttiest ways for Cage to get into one phantasmagorical showdown after the next. Cosmatos’ full-out stylization complements it all, the director’s interest in scope and detailed production design leading to costumes, weapons and locations that elicit their own sense of wonder. Mandy shows an actor in his element and a director growing into his own, and we merely bask in this union in all of its cuckoo crazy glory.” — from Nick Allen’s Sundance review, filed on 1.20.18.
** 44 year-old son of the late George Cosmatos),
I know I’ve listed these films several times, and that a good portion probably won’t matter in the long run, and that some may not even open this year, but I’ve listed them anyway. Which ones would you describe as pulse-quickening and which sound meh or dismissable?
1. Damien Chazelle‘s First Man (Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke).
2. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma (Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Yalitza Aparicio, Daniela Demesa, Enoc Leaño, Daniel Valtierra).
3. Adam McKay‘s Backseat (w/ Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell).
4. Cold War (d: Pawel Pawlikowski) (Joanna Kulig, Agata Kulesza, Borys Szyc, Tomasz Kot, Adam Ferency).
5. Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife (Glenn Close‘s Best Actress campaign + Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Annie Starke. Max Irons).
6. Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born (w/ Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott, Andrew Dice Clay and Dave Chappelle).
7. Jonah Hill‘s Mid ’90s (Sunny Suljic, Katherine Waterston, Lucas Hedges, Alexa Demie).
8. Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On The Basis of Sex.
9. Mary, Queen of Scots (Saoirse Ronan, Margot Robbie, David Tennant, Jack Lowden, Guy Pearce);
10. David Lowery‘s The Old Man and the Gun (Robert Redford, Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tika Sumpter, Tom Waits, Elisabeth Moss).
What a wonderful week it’s been. The applicable term is Ongoing Traumatic Stress Disorder. A constant bombardment by SJW mortars and grenades, first from the wolverines and then from a platoon of Outraged Millennials who wanted me dead and disemboweled because I said that Kyle Buchanan‘s description of Brie Larson‘s The Unicorn Store (which I didn’t see during last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and which has no distribution as we speak) sounded “worrisome.”
I actually said it “might” sound worrisome “in some circles,” which obviously allows that other circles might be cool with it. Yup, that’s all it took to inspire a stoning from the zealots. Buchanan’s words: “A charming, colorful, unabashedly girly coming-of-age movie.”
It was the “unabashedly girly” that prompted the “uh-oh.” But it was really the idea of any film unabashedly catering to the sensibilities of any specific group or perspective. I have concerns about any movie that sounds lopsided, excessively focused on a certain mindset or persuasion, or lacking a certain God’s-eye neutrality. I would be just as reluctant to see a film that’s been described as “unabashedly alpha-male” or “unabashedly septugenarian” or “unabashedly red-state.”
Yesterday’s comment from “Downtown Vibe” came to mind: “This is [a result of] having been taught within their groupthink bubbles that anyone with a different opinion is part of an establishment which exists only to be dismantled, and those who challenge their orthodoxy are to be any combination of ignored, dismissed or demonized.”
Roger Thornhill to Phillip Van Damm: “I don’t suppose it would do any good to show you a wallet full of liberal-progressive articles and essays…lamenting the pro-franchise, pro-remake scheme of today’s corporate overlords…singing the praises of anything and everything that’s actually good…being trashed for panning The Birth of a Nation after its first Sundance screening…pleading for David Jones and Harold Pinter‘s Betrayal to be streamed after being a home video no-show of over 30 years…celebrating the glories of Hanoi, Paris, Rome, Prague and Shreveport…singling out the X-factor brilliance of Jonah Hill…tirelessly advocating for the 1.37 version of Shane and persuading Woody Allen to support this…celebrations of the greatest 160 films…praising First Reformed…standing up to Prometheus…worshipping action films that actually adhere to the laws of physics…lamenting Chicago, The King’s Speech, The Artist…championing Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men…worshipping Guillermo Del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth, The Orphanage, Mama, The Devil’s Backbone…worshipping straight-friendly gay films like Brokeback Mountain and Call Me By Your Name.”
Van Damm to Thornhill: “You are a symbol of everything that’s vile and corroded about Hollywood journalism, and sooner or later my legions will pull you off your horse, chop you into pieces and feed your entrails to the dogs.”
The basic import of Susanna Nicchiarelli‘s Nico, 1988 (Magnolia, 7.4) is that the legendary ice-cool Nico — deep-voiced, stone-faced, Teutonic doom-chanter — was a greater artist in her heroin-habit decline period (late ’70s to late ’80s) than she was in her breakout period (mid ’60s to early ’70s). And that’s fine — a valid analysis of her songwriting and performing career.
But the film itself is slow, irksome, repetitive, sometimes vague and too often dull. Nicchiarelli makes her points, but the beat-by-beat watching of this 93-minute film is mostly unsatisfying. To me anyway. I checked my watch four or five times.
Everything I’ve always loved about Nico, musically-speaking, was the stuff she was unhappy with. She said over and over that her true musical identity and vision came into being only after her late ’60s Velvet Underground phase (“Femme Fatale”, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, “I’ll Be Your Mirror”) and after “Chelsea Girl“, which she hated the arrangements for.
Heroin-habit Nico in 1985.
So fine — Nico only came into her own when she started writing and performing her own gloom-rock material. I’m sure that was true. Except I’ve never listened to her gothy downswirl stuff, but I love “Chelsea Girl” and the 1967 banana album. Does that make me a serf or an asshole? I don’t think so.
Last September the Venice Film Festival elite creamed over Nico, 1988, but what else is new? You can’t trust critics when it comes to personal-vision indie cinema because they almost always give films like Nico, 1988 a pass, in part because they don’t want to be the naysaying stand-out. Maybe you can’t trust Hollywood Elsewhere either, but at least I deal straight cards.
Nico, 1988 is more into moods and atmospheres than particulars and specifics, and so the first thing you do after it’s over is go online to learn what actually happened on a chapter-by-chapter basis. That’s what I did after it ended. Only after I read everything about Nico’s declining years did the film start to come together in my head.
There’s a short scene in which Nico and her band visit the site of the Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg but Nicchiarelli doesn’t want to identify the location because that would be tedious and unhip, and so it becomes a scene about the band visiting an old concrete stadium of some kind…who cares? The whole movie is like that. You can feel or least sense what’s happening, but Nicchiarelli often declines to fill in the blanks.
Nico’s life ended in ’88 while staying in Ibiza. She suffered a heart attack, fell off a bicycle, hit her head and died of a cerebral hemmorhage. Nichiarelli doesn’t depict this, of course, but you can’t help but wonder “well, why not?”
The film tells us that Nico’s son Ari (his father was Alain Delon) tried to kill himself while the band was on tour. Ari had a heroin problem of his own, but the film provides no hint as to why he would try to off himself, and there’s nothing online that mentions a suicide attempt. It just happens and then he recovers. So why did…forget it, sorry I asked.
Yesterday MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace asked whether First Lady Melania Trump and First Daughter Ivanka Trump were “dead inside,” given their support and submission to arguably the worst sexist dog to occupy the Oval Office in the nation’s history, not to mention the most craven, selfish and sociopathic.
The answer, obviously, is that they adore the material comfort aspects of their lives and so they’ve figured a way to “live with” or otherwise ignore the horrendous and malicious Trump policies, not to mention the Caligula-like appetites that would, at the very least, offend any wife or daughter to the very core of their beings.
It’s the same kind of accommodation that money whores the world over have adjusted themselves to for untold centuries. The humiliation that Julius Caesar‘s wife Calpurnia felt when her husband took up with Cleopatra was nothing compared to what Melania is dealing with.
I was gifted this morning with a two-year-old draft of Suspiria. The framework of Luca Gudagnino‘s upcoming film, it was authored by Dave Kajganich and based on the original 1977 film by Dario Argento, which was written by Argento and Daria Nicolodi. Guadagnino’s film is set in “the Berlin” that same year. I love the Joseph Goebbels quote, and can say that a certain World War II history is woven into the narrative.
Topliners: 1. Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, a space drama about NASA’s Duke of Dullness, Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke); 2. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma (Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Yalitza Aparicio, Daniela Demesa, Enoc Leaño, Daniel Valtierra); 3. Adam McKay‘s Backseat (w. Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell); 4. Terrence Malick‘s Radegund (August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Michael Nyqvist, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jürgen Prochnow, Bruno Ganz); 5. Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife (Glenn Close‘s Best Actress campaign + Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Annie Starke. Max Irons).
6. Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born, w/ Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott, Andrew Dice Clay, and Dave Chappelle. 7. Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy with Steve Carell and Timothy Chalamet; 8. Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On The Basis of Sex; 9. Saoirse Ronan in Mary, Queen of Scots (w/ Margot Robbie, David Tennant, Jack Lowden, Guy Pearce); 10. David Lowery‘s The Old Man and the Gun w/ Robert Redford, Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tika Sumpter, Tom Waits, Elisabeth Moss.
11. Steve McQueen‘s Widows (Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Andre Holland, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell); 12. Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk (Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Teyonah Parris, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Brian Tyree Henry, Diego Luna, Dave Franco); 13. Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody (15-year period from the formation of Queen and lead singer Freddie Mercury up to their performance at Live Aid in 1985) w/ Rami Malek, Ben Hardy, Gwilym Lee, Joseph Mazzello, Allen Leech, Lucy Boynton. (20th Century Fox, 12.25.18); 14. Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria (Dakota Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth); 15. Xavier Dolan‘s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates).
16. Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman (John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Corey Hawkins — Focus Features); 17. Stefanio Solluima‘s Soldado (Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Catherine Keener (Columbia, 6.29.18); 18. Asghar Farhadi‘s Todos lo saben (Spanish-language drama w/ Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Barbara Lennie, Ricardo Darin, Inma Cuesta, Eduard Fernandez Javier Camara); 19. James Gray‘s Ad Astra, w/ Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland, Jamie Kennedy; 20. Benh Zeitlin‘s Wendy (was filming in March ’17, should be released by late ’18).
Although I’ve been an Alfred Hitchcock fan since childhood, I’ve avoided seeing Under Capricorn (’50), an early 19th Century drama set in Australia, all my life. Despite knowing there are always elements in a Hitchcock film that are worth seeing. Despite the legendary Jack Cardiff (Black Narcissus, The African Queen) having shot it in Technicolor, and despite Hitchcock having reportedly used ten-minute-long takes. Despite the stellar cast — Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Michael Wilding, et. al. The forthcoming Kino Lorber Bluray (out on 6.19) is a 4K restoration, and I still won’t touch it. Because Hitch himself never hesitated to call it one of his worst films. Plus it was a box-office stinker — cost $3 million, made $1.5 million.
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