Do The Right Thing -- Stand Up For Excellence
September 25, 2024
I Would Have Preferred A More Challenging...Okay, A More Insulting Tone
September 25, 2024
Opposite Peas in Polish Travel Pod
September 25, 2024
It is my considered belief, supported by many years of arduous viewing, that Guy Ritchie is a highly skilled but superficial-minded hack. I’m not using the term “soulless whore,” but if someone were to accuse Ritchie of same I wouldn’t argue strenuously against this. And yet…
In the view of Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, The Covenant (MGM, 4.21) is proof that “against all odds, Guy Ritchie has become one of the best directors working.”
This Afghanistan war thriller “isn’t another Ritchie underworld caper,” Gleiberman claims. “He has put his confectionary flamboyance on hold. [For] The Covenant unveils something new: Ritchie the contempo classicist. We’re seeing a born-again filmmaker.
“The Covenant is a superbly crafted drama, [and] yet the most eyebrow-raising aspect of the movie, in light of Ritchie’s career, is the bone-deep humanity that animates the story. This is a war film dotted with heroism but dunked in despair.
“As a rescue thriller, it’s tinglingly suspenseful and real. What gives the film its power is the way that its climactic final act grows out of an organic metaphor for the flawed vision of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. We came in with the best of intentions, but got too lost in the quagmire to follow through on our promise to the Afghan people. And so we stranded them.
“In The Covenant, Ritchie tells a story of two men, but he’s really giving this war that never succeeded a kind of closure. He uses the power of movies to coax out the heart that fueled our actions, and that made our loss so hard to bear.”
It would have been heavenly if Dominion Voting Systems' defamation lawsuit against Fox News had gone to trial. "Money is accountability," of course, but the courtroom drama aspect is gone. Dominion had accused Fox of airing relentless bullshit charges about Dominion having allegedly fixed the results of the 2020 presidential election in Joe Biden's favor, and the case looked terrible for Fox and, by extension, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell and all the other fantasists who had insisted all along that the charges against Dominion had merit.
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This is a fairly absurd hypothetical, but let's imagine that somehow the raw, abrasive verite cop genre (Serpico, Report to the Commissioner, Busting, Prince of the City) never manifested in force during in the '70s and '80s, and that The French Connection was an explosive new film in 2023. Same style, same story, younger cast. Would it have a chance of winning the Best Picture Oscar, or would it be dismissed as impossibly racist and coarse and insensitive, etc.?
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Update: At long last IFC films has finally invited media members to a couple of BlackBerry screenings. The highest profile one is also open to the public -- a 7 pm screening at the IFC center on Thursday, May 4th. Director, cowriter and costar Matt Johnson will sit for a post-screening q & a. Pic opens on 5.12.23.
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Despite what happened in Chicago’s Loop district last weekend, which was basically sporadic violent chaos by roving mobs of urban youths, nobody’s allowed to sound too angry or draconian. Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson warned against demonizing the hordes who smashed car and store windows, beat people up, started bonfires, clashed with cops, etc.
“In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend,” Johnson said. “It is unacceptable and has no place in our city, [but] it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
Translation: “Many non-white Chicago kids have been leading difficult lives and are understandably hot-tempered and economically frustrated, so we don’t want to racially simplify matters if they trash the Loop district and bust a few heads. We can’t tolerate this kind of thing, but at the same time we need to try and turn the other cheek because decades of political white power structure oppression have had an unfortunate effect.”
Everyone understands that they’re not allowed to say anything that even vaguely resembles alarmist sentiments heard in early April of 2010 after incidents of “wilding” in Times Square, and certainly nothing that resembles what Orange Plague and other riled-up, short-tempered Manhattanites said about the Central Park Five incident (and the wilding that preceded it) in 1989.
The 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination will be upon us before we know it (concurrent, by the way, with the 11.22.23 opening of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon) and I’m asking myself something.
Why after all this time has no one ever suggested that Lenny Bruce may have been on to something when he suggested that Jackie Kennedy was simply, immediately terrified about being shot herself (as anyone would be) and was following a blind instinct to avoid a similar death by getting the hell away from the line of fire by climbing out of the back seat and onto the limousine trunk?
That has always seemed to me like a very natural and default kneejerk response — haul ass in order to save your own terrified, freaked-out ass.
And yet every last person who’s ever analyzed what happened during those fateful seconds in Dealey Plaza…they ALL say she was trying to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown onto the trunk. And maybeshewas, but why has no one ever suggested that Bruce’s interpretation was at the very least a reasonable possibility?
If so, Jackie wasn’t behaving in some cowardly or ignoble fashion. She’d just seen half of JFK’s head — very close, only inches away — explode into blood and skull and brain matter and vapor — soaking her gloves bright red and all that cranial flotsam spraying upon her own face. Naturally she came to a split-second realization that she might be next and immediately thought about saving herself from a similar fate and, not incidentally, staying alive in order to care for her two children.
Would that have been such a terrible instantaneous reaction?
Spike Jonze's "Pardon Our Dust" ad ('05) is great and mythical because it's about something much bigger and deeper than promoting the Gap brand. It's about rage...rage against monolithic corporate design, against corporate uniformity and control, against wealthy have-it-alls...rage in favor of freedom, anarchy and all-around madness.
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Excellent final scene. The "strap-on" thing is mentioned (i.e, set up) by Fisher Stevens' character earlier in the episode.
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I’m told that the new Fatal Attraction limited series (Paramount +, 4.30, ten episodes) doesn’t just stretch the plot of Adrian Lyne’s 1987 original by adding new twists and turns and whatnot. It sympathizes with the Alex Forrest character (currently played by Lizzy Caplan, and famously portrayed by Glenn Close 36 years ago) into a traumatized victim with a tortured history while frowning upon Dan Gallagher (played by Michael Douglas in the oldie as a flawed hero-victim, and by jowly-faced Joshua Jackson in the newbie).
Dan, you see, is an entitled white shit who deserves to suffer for catting around.
And therefore the new Fatal Attraction, “developed” by Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin J. Hynes, and directed by Silver Tree (her actual name), has been described as a woke-as-fuck saga in a #MeToo, bad-white-guy sense.
SPOILERS AHEAD: If you’re going to sympathize with Alex you can’t have a boiling bunny, and so no hares or rabbits meet their doom in the Paramount + version. In the first version of Lyne’s original film Alex killed herself (slit her throat with a carving knife) but Dan was nonetheless accused of killing her. In the second version of the ’87 film Alex was shot dead by Anne Archer.
In the new series neither of these things happen. Gallagher is arrested, though (the trailer shows him in prison) and the real murderer….okay, saying no more.
There is, I’ve been told, a whole subtext about how horrible Dan Gallagher is…he did something cruel and selfish by having a fling outside the bonds of marriage, and so he deserves to suffer, as do all older white guys.
On top of which the plot eventually advances 15 years and we learn that Dan’s grown-up daughter (remember the little girl in the ’87 film who looked like a boy, the one whom Glenn Close kidnapped and took to an amusement park?) has a complex about selfish and predatory white males.
You basically need to understand that Dan Gallagher is a bad, rotten, shithead male, and that poor Alex Forrest had been hurt terribly by her father and was just looking for special attention when she had the affair with Dan…she was hurt and crying out, which is how Glenn Close wanted her portrayed in the first place.
Except test audiences who saw the ’87 original hated the suicide ending, and so Lyne re-shot an ending in which Alex-the-witch invades the Gallagher home and is shot to death.