Last night I caught episode #2 of the second season of True Detective. Things started to get a little bit heavier, darker, weavier. I was hanging in there, feeling a little bit sorry for Vince Vaughn‘s Frank Semyon (who doesn’t seem like that much of a “bad guy” — he’s just into run-of-the-mill graft and corruption) and noticing that Rachel McAdams‘ Ani Bezzerides of the Ventura County Sheirff’s office and even Colin Farrell‘s Detective Ray Velcoro — a snorting alcoholic slob and bellowing animal in episode #1 — are starting to seem a little less obsessive and even a bit more personable. So things are rolling along, seeds are being planted, steam is starting to push the engine along a little faster and then…I’m not spilling or even hinting but something happens, man. A thing I wasn’t expecting at all. In the aftermath I said to myself, “Okay, now things have kicked into gear.”
For what it’s worth I’m sorry for the Amy Schumer sturm und drang of the last couple of days. She’s a first-class talent and deserves more respect than what I gave her. I know I’m not thinking wrong but I’m probably saying it wrong from time to time. ”It’s hard to grow up…it doesn’t stop when you’re 40…a hard row to hoe.” These words were shared a few nights ago by Ethan Hawke during a Charlie Rose interview, and they got to me. So I’m sorry, truly, for not dealing my cards with a little more compassion and gentility. I wasn’t incorrect in saying that social attractiveness standards have changed over the past decade or so, largely due to the creations of one Judd Apatow and those who’ve climbed aboard his ferry boat. But I could have put it a bit more delicately and diplomatically. Then again that’s not what the HE brand is about, is it?
It’s in my Hollywood Elsewhere nature or karma to get beaten up once or twice each year by the moshpit beasts of the Twitterverse. Long is the road and hard that out of darkness leads up to light — that John Milton quote has my name on it. Sobriety (my third anniversary is a month away) has bestowed a sense of peace and even serenity at times, and it has toned down or modified the ever-present anger in the belly. Which I’m not at all sorry about as anger has been the eternal fuel of my writing career, born of an alcoholic father, a bordering-on-evil public school system and the awful repression of a whitebread, middle-class suburban upbringing that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. Add to this a growing notion that I’ve learned a thing or two plus my natural inclination to shoot my mouth off first and think about it later, and wham…every now and then I poke a hornet’s nest or step on a landmine and the raptors parachute down upon Maple Street.
I know all about getting beaten up by politically correct 20somethings. I was called a vile racist and worse by a mostly younger Twitter mob after writing a piece on 12.26.13 about dealing with an obviously unstable, intellectually-challenged black guy who wouldn’t shut up during a 4:30 pm showing of The Wolf of Wall Street at Leows 34th Street. The same fascist thug mentality (or something very similar to it) was behind a recent online petition to disinvite Bill Maher from giving a December commencement address at U.C. Berkeley. “Bill Maher is a blatant bigot and racist who has no respect for the values UC Berkeley students and administration stand for,” wrote Khwaja Ahmed, a member of the Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian Coalition, in a Change.org petition titled “Stop Bill Maher from speaking at UC Berkeley’s December graduation.” Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks has blocked any chance of Maher’s invite being rescinded.
A couple of years ago I stole from Esquire by writing my own “What I’ve Learned” essay. There’s a new issue with a long piece called “84 Things A Man Should Do Before He Dies,” so here’s another ripoff: “Theatrical Movie Experiences You Should Have Before You Entirely Succumb to VOD.” Here are four indelible movie-watching recollections — three from the late ’70s, one from ’95. The concept or suggestion is that a devoted Movie Catholic should try to experience something similar in his/her lifetime.
(1) Catch An Exciting New Film In A First-Rate, Big-City Theatre On Opening Day, and In So Doing Experience Something You’ve Never Felt Or Sensed Before. The first time this happened in my 20s (teenage or tweener experiences are too impressionable) was on the afternoon of 11.6.77 at the Zeigfeld theatre — opening day for Steven Spielberg‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I’d waited in the ticket line for an hour or so in the brisk November air. I was actually knocked out several times by that film (this was more than 20 years before my Spielberg hate would begin to manifest), but the first chest-pounder happened during the opening credits. White titles on black, dead silence. And then more credits and then just a faint hint of alien-like syntho-hum on the soundtrack. As the credits ended the choral hum slowly got louder and louder, and then CRASH! An orchestral crescendo perfectly synched with the the first images of the storm-blown Sonoran desert. We can’t go home again but somehow or some way, each and every movie lover has to experience something like this. A theatrical high, couldn’t stop talking about it, saw CETK producer Michael Phillips standing in the back of the theatre and talked a him a bit.
Last weekend the Spirit Awards gang should have handed a special indie passion trophy last weekend to Jeff Lipsky‘s Adopt Films. The New York-based outfit is distributing two admired but markedly similar West Bank thrillers — Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (opening 3.7) and Hany Abu-Assad‘s Oscar-nominated Omar. Lucid, taut and suspenseful, they both regard the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a filter of double-agenting, family ties, anxiety and betrayal. And they both end in a sudden burst of violence. You have to see them both. They don’t compete with each other as much as form a greater sum.
Grantland‘s Mark Harris has ripped into yours truly in a 3.3 piece about the Oscars. In paragraph #8, to be precise. [See below] So here are replies to some of his assertions, which, summed up, basically pat the Academy on the back for a job relatively well done. Not perfectly (in part because they gave their Best Supporting Oscar to Dallas Buyer’s Club‘s Jared Leto, whose performance didn’t ring Harris’s bell) but good enough.
Harris statement #1: “Academy voters turned to a tough, sad, hard film about our own bad past made by a black Englishman and said, ‘This was the best of the year.’
Wells response: No, they didn’t do that, Mark. A relatively small portion of the membership did. Probably a third or a bit less. Nobody will ever know the exact percentage but this was almost certainly no landslide. Harris knows full well there was a very strong concern among many award-season pundits that quite a few Academy members either didn’t like 12 Years A Slave enough to vote for it or hadn’t even popped the screener in (or had skipped through the brutal parts if they had). I’m certain that Harris also suspects, like everyone else, that 12 years A Slave barely squeaked through to a win, and that if the Best Picture race had been a mano e mano between Slave and Gravity, the Academy would have definitely given the Best Picture prize to Alfonso Cuaron‘s space ride. Dollars to donuts Steve McQueen‘s film was saved because the anti-Slave vote split between Gravity, American Hustle and to a lesser extent Philomena.
I don’t know how long it’s been de rigeur for U.S. theatres to run about 20 minutes worth of trailers and ads before a film. I seem to recall that the norm was more like 10 to 12 minutes a decade ago. I know that two and half years ago I linked to Marshall Fine‘s complaint about having been subjected to 20 minutes’ worth of ads and trailers at a New York-area AMC theatre. I reported in the same piece that I sat through 27 minutes worth of trailers and consumer ads before seeing Very Bad Trip 2 at the Pathe Wepler in Paris.
The latest assessment is contained in a just-posted Hollywood Reporter story about exhibitors caling for shorter trailers. Reporter Pamela McClintock states that “it’s not uncommon for many circuits to play seven or eight trailers before a film [which] translates to 17.5 minutes to 20 minutes, on top of in-house advertising.”
Trailers are aimed at the lowest common denominator, which is why they’re generally artless, numbing and often depressing. (Intriguing trailers pop up but very infrequently.) Run-of-the-mill trailers mainly convince you not to see a film rather than vice versa. By the time you’re sat through 20 minutes of trailer torture you’re much less open and receptive to whatever the feature may hold. And you’re paying for this. You’re paying $12 to $15 a head to be turned off and numbed out.
Curtis Reeves, a 71-year-old former Tampa police officer, shot and killed a man this afternoon inside a Tampa movie theatre, reportedly over a texting argument. It happened during a showing of Lone Survivor at the Cobb Cine Bistro in a Tampa suburb called Wesley Chapel. The victim has been identified as Chad Oulson, a husband and father who reportedly had explained to Reeves that he was texting his three-year-old daughter. Oulson’s wife Nicole was also shot but only in the hand — i.e., not fatally.
A local news report includes the following (and this is the key thing): “A witness recalled seeing [Reeves] get up and leave in an apparent attempt to find a manager. When he came back alone, the argument escalated.” In other words, if a theatre manager had calmly but firmly intervened and insisted that Oulson stop texting (or that he needed to text from the lobby), it’s entirely possible that Reeves would have felt placated and wouldn’t have shot Oulson.
I blame Reeves, of course — this was obviously the act of an unstable personality. But the errant manager of the Cobb Cine Bistro, I feel, bears a portion of the responsibility.
Management never gets involved in these matters. Talkers, texters, bellowing apes…managers are always unavailable. They always chicken out, hiding in their offices, “busy,” etc. Movie theatres have become chaotic, emotionally dangerous environments to some extent. Handguns, cell phones, hair-trigger rage…it’s Dodge City out there. I know — last month I dealt with an asshole who wouldn’t shut up during a screening of The Wolf of Wall Street, and all I did was stare at the guy and he was thisclose to starting something with me.
This was a problem from the get-go because it was a generational dispute — Reeves is retired (probably in his late 60s or early 70s) and Oulson, the father of a three-year-old, was presumably fairly young — a member of the texting generation who probably had a comme ci comme ca attitude. And then along came Dirty Harry — a conservative man who undoubtedly felt that that Oulson was being unconscionably selfish and violating his rights as a moviegoer, and who couldn’t hold it together. And who was packing.
Notice how Today correspondent Gael Fashingbauer Cooper stealthily avoided dicey or inflammatory allusions in her 1.4 piece about insensitive people ruining movies for others in theatres due to talking, texting, bringing babies, etc. This is how it’s done if you want to avoid land mines. Old ladies, babies, texters, etc. Those darn rude people!
I was beaten up pretty badly on Twitter yesterday, but mainly because a lot of people out there assume that anyone using the term “ape” is throwing a racial slur. I never even glanced at that allusion. I’m so far away from that pathetic mindset that it doesn’t exist in my head, although I recognize it’s a sore point with others. So I guess I’m apologizing but on some level it almost feels chickenshit to do so. The allusion in question is so Jim Crow, so foul, so Duck Dynasty — why even acknowledge it? Why live in the primordial past by admitting that the association means something or matters to anyone with a brain?
I’ve finally seen Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem, the winner of six Ophir awards (including Best Picture) as well as Israel’s Best Foreign Language Feature submission. It’s a lucid, tightly wound thriller that regards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a filter of double-agenting and family matters and betrayal and anxiety. And then turns it all into tragedy. Bethlehem is a stand-out. Required viewing and then some. The Academy’s foreign language committee would be foolish not to pay heed.
I finally saw Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers last night. I didn’t believe a frame of it but then I’m not supposed to, right? It’s such a thoroughly cliched erotic fantasia about crazy-ass hot-bod chicks (three Tarantino-dream-fantasy sluts and one half-sensible lapsed Christian) and gun-fellating and orgiastic Fellini Satyricon boning and snorting around and Florida gangstas flashing their guns and braggin’ ’bout their “sheeyit”…I mean, like, uhhm…why? Oh, I get it. Don’t ask.
I was imagining a Godzilla-sized Charlton Heston dressed as Moses, rising hundreds of feet out of the ocean and blotting out the sun and pointing at these skanky, well-toned scumbags and bellowing “whoa unto thee…!!!” Or maybe Jim Hutton as Moses.
I wasn’t bored but I was wondering if Korine had anything in mind other than trying to create fantasies about where college-age kids are at these days in order to…I don’t know, imply something about how slippery and nihilistic it’s all become out there and or to vaguely get himself off in the vein of Larry Clark?
He clearly hasn’t the slightest interest in trying to assemble a film that might reflect how it would really be if four sociopathic lassies in their late teens or early 20s were to somehow scrape some dough together and drive down to Florida, etc. Most women I know like to pick and choose and not just drop to their knees in front of their first ape they see. As best I can tell Korine is having himself a whimsical wank, and we’re meant to get off as best we can or at least laugh along the way or whatever.
James Franco is clearly laughing at the asshole he’s playing (his character is named Anus or Asswipe or something like that), especially during that scene in which he sings a Britney Spears song. Scarface playin’ on his flatscreen in a continual loop…”mah sheeyit!” I was kidding about the name — he’s called “Alien.”
If there’s some kind of subliminal, half-sincere social commentary woven into this thing it’s suspended between “look at these impossibly stupid empty chicks and the things that really matter to them” and “look at the bods on these girls and how they’re into standing on their heads in motel hallways and how they’re all ready to swallow salami at the drop of a hat.” Or something like that.
Spring breakin’ as a lifestyle, a constancy, a never-ending place in your head, a philosophy…somewhere between a duel and a place in the sun.
At least it has one great sequence — two masked girls going into a diner and screeching and waving a gun around and taking everyone’s money, but shot from the POV of the getaway driver as the camera watches the action through windows and with the sound muted as the car slowly drives around.
Remember when 15 or 20 Columbians attacked Tony Montana‘s Miami fortress with automatics and shotguns? It was quite a battle but eventually the Montana forces lost. These days you don’t need 15 or 20 Columbians to wipe out a drug gang. All you need are two college girls with two big-ass pistols and super-size magazines just blastin’ away, expending hundreds of rounds and never catching a bullet themselves.
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