The Associated Press is reporting that the plug has temporarily been pulled on the next Pirates of the Caribbean sequel…yes! This doesn’t mean the film won’t be made (and it probably will), but who out there doesn’t feel at least slightly elated that there’s chance (at least that!) there might be one less corporate-funded super-pollutant affecting U.S. film culture? The AP story says that the 7.10.15 release date for the fifth installment in the film series has been removed from Disney’s distribution schedule. Pirates Of the Caribbean 5: Tickle Our Balls With A Feather was expected to begin production next year under Kon-Tiki co-directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg.
HE Stands With Billington
Firstshowing.net‘s Alex Billington struck a blow for serious film devotees last night by raising a huge ruckus over some dickweed texting during a press & industry screening of Ti West‘s The Sacrament. Billington complained to TIFF volunteers, who threw up their hands. Then he bolted out of the theatre and, in an act of absurdist role-playing, dialed 911 — a call reportedly laughed off by authorities. Then he went on Twitter to lambast the Toronto Film Festival for (allegedly) officially permitting texting during films. I was going to call this a Hollywood Elsewhere-styled emotional reaction, but calling 911 goes beyond anything I would have done. Serious gonzo! (Wells to Anthony Breznican: I’ll give you $1000 if Billington’s 911 call interfered with the response time to any genuine emergency.) Despite having been a texting offender in the past, I take my hat off to Billington for his passion and his moxie. Texting should absolutely not be permitted during any screenings, and shame on TIFF if it’s true about them officially allowing this. Any journalist who texts during a p & i screening should be prevented from getting TIFF press accreditation for a minimum of three years.
Red Family
Toward the end of this redband trailer for Luc Besson‘s The Family (Relativity, 9.13), Robert De Niro‘s character quotes Al Capone, to wit: “It’s better to be polite with a gun in your hand that to just be polite.” That’s not quite it, according to BrainyQuote.com. They’re claiming that Capone said “You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” Just saying.
Full-Sized Shane
I never said what I really thought when I finally saw the Shane Bluray. As good as it looks, last April’s big-screen projection of this restored 1953 classic at the TCM Classic Film Festival looked so much grander and riper and ultra-detailed…it was really and truly the shit. “I wasn’t just delighted by how good Shane looked last night,” I wrote on 4.28. “I was spellbound if not close to shocked. It was drop-to-your-knees — the most beautiful rendering I’ve ever seen of this 1953 classic. It was like seeing it new and fresh all over again. My eyes were going ‘wow,’ ‘wow’ and ‘double-wow.’”
Hold That Middle Ground
It takes an awful lot of energy to sustain negative feelings (hate, resentment, lust for revenge) over the years. It’s much healthier to let it go and move on. But at the same time I don’t understand why people who have clearly suffered due to another person’s cruel or sadistic behavior need to forgive the perpetrator in order to flush it all out. Why does it have to be an either/or (i.e., keep the hate going or forgive the tormentor/torturer?). What about a middle road in which the former victim says, “The guy who made my life hell when I was younger was a vile, vicious fuck at the time. He might feel badly about this now due to maturity and mellowing and that’s fine, but there’s no way I’m giving him a ‘go with God’ card. Which isn’t to say I don’t believe in a ‘be here now’ lifestyle. I’m living in the present and the past is the past, but the guy who tortured me is going to have to deal with his karma on his own dime. He’ll get no backrubs from me. And if he dies of ass cancer sometime soon? C’est la vie.”
Dusty Oklahoma Mood
Adriano Goldman‘s distinctive cinematography for August: Osage County is one of the reasons that the film generally worked for me (except for that Julia Roberts-driving-around-in-a-pickup-truck ending). The images inside the Weston home are amberish and shadowed and melancholy and yet piercing, and the exteriors have a kind of dusty and muted and sort of windblown-looking vibe. It fits the mood of the film, and the framings never seem obvious or defaultish — you can sense a superior visualist at work. Goldman’s previous dp credits include Closed Circuit, The Company You Keep, Jane Eyre and Sin Nombre.
I Did That, Yeah…But There Was A Reason
This clip from Alex Gibney‘s The Armstrong Lie is highly intriguing because (a) it doesn’t tell you anything and yet it suggests there’s information about Lance Armstrong‘s doping history that you might want to know, and (b) it reminds you that Armstrong is an articulate, reasonably open-minded, seemingly non-sociopathic guy who simply committed the sin of going down the wrong rabbit hole (which people do from time to time) and then compartmentalizing that journey by putting it in a box that he kept locked shut…until he was outed. I didn’t want to see this doc before because I was asking myself “why do I want to go through the whole Armstrong doping scandal again?” — and now I do.
I Ask Again
Early last May I pointed out a simple but curious fact, which is that the house in the August: Osage County poster and the one seen/used in the film are different structures that don’t even resemble each other. The actual house has a huge, four-sided, two-story porch/veranda, and the poster version doesn’t. Why? I ran a photo of the home, a.k.a. “the historic Boulanger home north of Pawhuska, Oklahoma” — last March.
Knockout Perfs In Highly Respectable Osage County
WARNING — IF YOU LIVE IN A CAVE AND READ BY CANDLELIGHT A PLOT SPOLER IS CONTAINED HEREIN: The Weinstein Co’s August: Osage County, which screened early this evening at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, feels a tiny bit abbreviated and doesn’t deliver quite as much of a full-on emotional wallop as Tracy Letts‘ Tony Award-winning stage play, but it’s strong and direct and satisfying enough to give the play’s admirers what they’re looking for. I was intrigued and attuned from start to finish. And the film certainly delivers at least four…make that five top-notch performances — first and foremost Meryl Streep as the bitchy matriarch Violet Weston (an all-but-guaranteed Best Actress nominee), Julia Roberts as her angry daughter Barbara, Margo Martindale as Mattie Fae Aiken, Julianne Nicholson as Ivy Weston and Juliette Lewis as Karen Weston.
Forgiveness Doesn’t Fly
Stephen Frears‘ Philomena is basically a gentle, tender-hearted, intelligently written film about an elderly Irish mother named Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) looking for a son she was forced to surrender for a blind adoption back in the mid ’50s, and about the fiendish Irish nuns who, consumed by the belief that Philomena was an unfit mother due to becoming pregnant out of wedlock, arranged to sell the boy to American parents. On top of which they kept his origins a secret, even when he returned to Ireland as a grown AIDS-afflicted gay man, trying to find his biological mom. The nuns, based in a convent near Limerick, refused to tell him anything.
Philomena had likewise been unsuccessful in learning any facts about her son (whose adopted name was Michael Hess) and didn’t come to the truth until she hooked up with author and former government guy Martin Sixsmtih (Steve Coogan), whose book, “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee,” is the basis of Coogan and co-writer Jeff Pope‘s screenplay.
Hendrix Wasn’t Born To Be 70
I sometimes think that Jimi Hendrix was put on the planet to be that guy and do that thing that he uncorked so phenomenally between 1966 (the launch days in England) and mid ’68, and that maybe on some level he allowed himself to slip out because he knew deep down that he’d hit such a peak during that period that he’d never be able to repeat or recharge it. In any event there’s an upcoming two-hour American Masters doc called “Jimi Hendrix — Hear My Train A Comin'” (11.5.13), and it might be a little something better or extra because those awful Jimi Hendrix Estate people (who’ve blocked every Hendrix biopic ever attempted or so I’ve read) have cooperated fully.
Clueless
I saw this on my way over to last night’s Warner Bros./Gravity party on King Street. Anyone who would wear these shoes in a sincere, non-ironic way is seriously screwed up in an aesthetic fashion or style sense. I’ve been around and acquired a thousand distastes (which is the basis of taste) and I know what looks half-decent vs. not so hot vs. classic vs. something wild and these shoes are dead fucking atrocious. I mean, I’m tempted to call them a metaphor for the coming Apocalypse. And look at that dork wearing them…God! John Varvatos is…I don’t what he’s doing but I can guess.
