And I don’t care how amusing the intro to the trailer is (“Sorry, guys, you can’t watch this“).

And I don’t care how shitty the reviews are, to wit: “Those who find joy in 11-year-olds dropping the F-bomb, and otherwise talking smack they really don’t understand, will be in hysterics for the full hour and a half of Good Boys. Anyone looking for a little more in the way of comic inspiration is likely to be disappointed by this mediocre comedy from director Gene Stupnitsky and co-writer Lee Eisenberg” — Variety‘s Dennis Harvey.

Nothing will overtake my initial impression about Good Boys (Universal, 8.16), which was that totally moronic, p.c.-inflamed, tinted-blackface controversy that erupted for a day or two last August. The one involving Good Boys (Universal, 8.16), and which ignited after TMZ posted photos of a stand-in for 11-year-old Keith Williams wearing makeup to darken his skin color? Which resulted in producer Seth Rogen apologizing, etc.? And which Indiewire‘s Zack Sharf tried to further inflame by getting at least one cinematographer to say that the practice of applying blackface for lighting purposes was “unorthodox.”

We’re currently in the middle of a “Be Gracious to Burt Reynolds” week. The 82 year-old former superstar, who enjoyed a 13-year run at the top (’72 to ’84), has been making the interview rounds to promote The Last Movie Star (A24, 3.30), which isn’t faring all that well on Rotten Tomatoes.

I still haven’t seen it, but I will soon. Here’s an excerpt from Dennis Harvey‘s Variety review, which was posted on 1.18.18 out of the Palm Springs Film festival.

“Be kind” means you can lightly allude to Reynolds having messed up his acting career by making one arrogant, bone-headed move after another after another, etc. Those fast-car movies. Blowing his post-Boogie Nights momentum. Getting bad plastic surgery, wearing those terrible rugs. But you can’t actually mention it.

You also can’t mention how Reynolds looks really withered, poor guy. He was such a strapping good-ole-boy in his heyday. How cruel the aging process can be when so inclined.

Posted on 8.4.14: “Reynolds initiated his demise by making all those stupid shitkicker paycheck movies with the yokelish Hal Needham. Reynolds had a pretty good run at the top (’72 to ’84), and then he was done.

“Reynolds-the-actor (as opposed to Reynolds-the-box-office-attraction) was great in Deliverance, half-good in Shamus, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, At Long Last Love, regrettable in Lucky Lady and Hustle, good in Semi-Tough, very good in Starting Over, good in Sharky’s Machine and Best Friends, decent in The Man Who Loved Women…and that was it until he played an older thief in Bill Forsyth‘s Breaking In (’89). And then nothing came of that. And then along came Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Boogie Nights (’97) and Reynolds called it shit and fired his agent, etc.

Posted from Key West on 11.17.16: Burt Reynolds sat for a q & a this evening at Key West’s San Carlos Institute following a screening of Jesse Moss‘s Bandit (which isn’t half bad). Good old Burt. His usual, familiar smoothie self — cool and collected, deadpan humor, mellow vibe. But with a beard and tinted shades. The audience was laughing, applauding, in love. Burt’s legs are on the frail, shaky side but he walked out without a cane — good fellow. Here’s an mp3 of the whole thing. The interviewer was Rolling Stone critic David Fear.

“Nobody played the role of movie star in the 1970s with more confidence than Burt Reynolds. Even as his choice of vehicles grew so indiscriminate as to gradually erode his box office appeal, he still radiated swagger, that ever-present smirk suggesting he — and we — knew it was all a put-on anyway.

“Perhaps the problem was that it was just too good an act: Burt Reynolds gave such excellent ‘Burt Reynolds’ on talk shows, in interviews and other forums that the public saw little point in continuing to fork out cash money to see him do the same thing in yet another mediocre, derivative big-screen comedy or thriller. He didn’t take enough risks, and the few times he did were misfires or weren’t appreciated enough. Few stars achieved such massive popularity while retaining a sense of unrealized potential.

“It’s a bittersweet legacy that writer-director Adam Rifkin aims to pay affectionate tribute to in The Last Movie Star (A24, 3.30) which has been retitled by U.S. distributor A24 after playing initial festival dates as Dog Years.

I’ll be seeing only two films on this, my last full day of the 2016 Toronto Film Festival. The first will be Walter Hill‘s pulpy (Re)Assignment (formerly Tomboy), which has not only been trashed by almost every critic except for THR‘s Todd McCarthy but appears to the reigning calamity flick of the festival. The second, beginning at 9:15, will be Kelly Fremon Craig‘s The Edge of Seventeen, a teen-angst dramedy produced by James L. Brooks and costarring Hailee Steinfeld and Woody Harrelson. (A friend assures me it works.)

Challenging as it may be, Hill’s film sounds like the more interesting of the two.

Using a plot that seems to resemble Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin I Live In (’11), (Re)Assignment about a low-rent male assassin (Michelle Rodriguez) who is changed into a woman by a revenge-seeking surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) because Rodriguez has killed her brother. The controversy, of course, makes it feel like essential viewing. Most of the pans are calling it bad or inept or horribly misjudged, and of course the transgender Twitter harridans are screeching about it being politically incorrect, etc. I can’t wait.

The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee writes that (Re)Assignment has been “made with such staggering idiocy that it deserves to be studied by future generations for just how and why it ever got made.” Variety‘s Dennis Harvey says it “gracelessly mashes together hardboiled crime-melodrama cliches and an unintentionally funny ‘Oh no! I’m a chick now!’ gender-change narrative hook.”

And yet THR‘s McCarthy claims that while (Re)Assignment is “a disreputable slice of bloody sleaze, there’s also no question that Hill knows exactly what he’s doing here, wading waist-deep into Frank Miller Sin City territory and using genre tropes to explore some provocatively, even outrageously transgressive propositions.

Wanna guess how many Sundance reviewers of Eat That Question mentioned the boxy aspect ratio? So far I’ve counted one — a review by Variety‘s Dennis Harvey that mentions “archaic” video formats. I haven’t seen the doc so maybe there are portions shot in standard 16:9 but the trailer is all 1.37:1, and that, for me, is a deciding factor.

“Rebecca Miller’s consistently interesting films have always mixed sharp observation with a resistance to narrative formula that can sometimes feel like quirky mannerism, and that element is present in Maggie’s Plan (Sony Classics, 5.20). After moving toward romantic comedy with The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (’09). Maggie’s Plan inhabits that terrain even more assertively, albeit retaining enough offbeat qualities to avoid genre conventionality. This pleasing triangle embroils Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore in two overlapping relationships involving three children over three-plus years. The general lightness [of tone] lets it get away with content more clever and ingratiating than fully depthed.” — from Dennis Harvey‘s 9.12.15 Variety review, filed during the Toronto Film Festival.

Today Variety‘s “staff” ran a wrap-up piece about “13 break-out movies” that played at 2015 South by Southwest. Three days ago a similar N.Y. Times piece, written by Mekado Murphy, highlighted the “South by” films that were “the talk of the festival.” There were some overlaps but well over 20 films are included in the two articles, and yet neither mentions Ondi Timoner‘s BRAND: A Second Coming, a nearly two-hour doc about the transformation of Russell Brand from hyper libertine to social revolutionary.

This despite Timoner’s film having (a) opened SXSW to the usual hoopla, (b) won thoughtful praise from nearly every critic who reviewed it and (c) reportedly played to more than the usual rousing receptions at three separate showings. Several strong films played at “South by” and everyone, of course, has their special favorites, but how did these articles manage to completely ignore one of the festival’s most invigorating crowd-pleasers? Not to mention one of the most politically pointed films of that Austin gathering, and one that will likely cause a stir when it opens commercially later this year.

I can’t overstate how jolting and invigorating and even ground-shifting Ondi Timoner‘s Brand: A Second Coming plays, especially during the second viewing and especially when it hits the 40-minute mark, which is when the story of Brand’s social-political awakening kicks in. It’s a brilliant, go-for-it thing that not only portrays and engages with a brilliant artist-provocateur but matches his temperament and picks up the flag. Superb photography by Timoner (especially loved the occasional punctuation of grainy 8mm) and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko. The doc constantly pops, riffs and punches over its nearly two-hour running time. Magnificent graphics and editing, and a perfect ending.

What’s significant is that the lives of Che Guevara, Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X, whom Brand identifies with and admires, had a similar dramatic arc in that they finally “became” after floundering around — Che as a son of Argentine privelege, Jesus as a stay-at-home carpenter until he was 30, Malcolm X as a pimp and an incarcerated con until he was awakened by Elijah Muhammed, etc. Similarly Brand became truly interesting and transcendent when he stopped projecting like a hyper, swaggering, shag-crazy narcissist and became a “champagne socialist” revolutionary and began saying “look at what’s wrong here”…that‘s when he became a lightning bolt.

From Variety‘s Dennis Harvey: “Brand might look like a dissolute rock star, but take away the expletives and jokes and it’s clear that what he says is eagerly dismissed in some quarters precisely because he’s smart and provocative, and reaches a large audience with a message that is off-the-charts liberal by current standards. The reasons he gives for being fed up with the status quo are very persuasive — and delivered in such a way that they reach people who’d be bored stiff by any standard political sermonizing.”

From The Guardian‘s Alex Needham: “It’s Brand’s journey from comic to activist which is the meat of Timoner’s story: what happens when drugs, sex, fame and wealth all fail to thrill and a charismatic man decides to make the almost unprecedented transition from comic to guru. Even if you’re cynical about Brand’s motives or just think that he’s a bit of berk, the film convinces you of the almost alarming sincerity of his political mission — not least because his mother reveals that as a child Brand claimed that he was indeed the second coming.”

Harvey again: “Such self-comparisons might seem odious on the surface, and indeed they are quite odious to those who’d prefer to dismiss Brand’s concerns because they hail from an English comedian, ex-drug addict and former Mr. Katy Perry. But Brand’s motormouth eloquence and sharp if often gleefully rude intelligence certainly qualify him as much to talk about corporate greed, economic equality, climate change and other pressing issues as many professional pundits whose often dubious legitimacy is seldom questioned.”

No issues with Edgar Ramirez, a charismatic, first-rate actor who’s proved his mettle in Carlos and Zero Dark Thirty. I would simply prefer a biopic of Simon Bolivar as directed by Steven Soderbergh or Olivier Assayas. The Liberator “is a respectable, sprawling endeavor that covers nearly three decades of tumultuous events in the life of Simon Bolivar,” wrote Variety‘s Dennis Harvey. “Yet it lacks that essential spark that would turn it into a great biopic rather than a competent one, and make history seem alive rather than merely illustrated.”

Here’s a respectful but less than enthusiastic review from Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy.

I’m typing this from a table at a press-filmmaker’s luncheon on Park City’s Main Street so there’s no concentrating, but Amir Bar-Lev‘s The Tillman Story is among the four or five best films I’ve seen at Sundance 2010, and certainly the finest documentary. Here’s some ragged video I shot during last night’s post-screening q & a in which Bar-Lev and Mary Tillman (mother of the late soldier and pro football player) fielding questions.

I’m in full agreement with Dennis Harvey‘s paywall-blocked 1.27 Variety review, so here it is in full:

“Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story is a riveting account of how a soldier’s death in Afghanistan was spun into a web of public lies. When pro football star turned post-9/11 Army enlistee Pat Tillman was killed in the course of duty, the embarrassing actual circumstances were covered up and turned into a flag-waving story of heroism that the Bush administration happily — and knowingly — used for propaganda purposes.

“The Tillman family’s refusal to accept the official story led to disgraceful admissions — yet, so far, no repercussions for those who perpetrated the lie. Theatrical, broadcast and further fest exposure are assured.

“Told much more via straight reportage than Bar-Lev’s fascinating My Kid Could Paint That, The Tillman Story mixes talking heads and archival footage into a detective story of escalatingly scandalous proportions. No matter one’s political bent, the blatant misconduct by grunts, senior officers and politicos alike is terribly disturbing.

“Small (at 5’10”) by football standards, but an all-star defensive back, Tillman walked away from his multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals in May 2002, clearly feeling some moral duty yet refusing to discuss his motivations publicly. Younger brother Kevin also joined the Army Rangers, winding up in the same platoon.

“Even beyond his sports celebrity, Tillman was an unusual enlistee — a fan of Noam Chomsky, he’d excelled academically as well as athletically, hailing from a Northern California family that instilled old-school liberal values. He was outspoken yet modest — a natural leader who never bullied and enjoyed encouraging underdogs. (The only person who casts doubt on his character here is, suspiciously, the sole platoon member who still sticks by the Army’s latest official story.)

The Tillman Story Amir Bar-Lev.

“Tillman also opposed the war in Iraq, and was further disillusioned by what he saw in his first tour of duty there. Nonetheless, he refused a secret deal between the government and NFL that would have allowed an early return to football, feeling it his duty to serve the full three years signed up for. His second tour was in Afghanistan, and during a reconnaissance sweep along the Pakistan border, he was shot to death.

“The Army’s story — initially believed by the Tillman family and leapt on by the media — was that he’d heroically put himself in the line of Taliban fire to save other soldiers during an ambush.

“But even as the tale was exploited to drum up support for the war, questionable details troubled the Tillmans. His mother’s dogged pursuit of answers only raised more questions; finally, the Army admitted that Tillman might have died via accidental ‘fratricide,’ or friendly fire. It’s possible there were no enemy insurgents present at all.

“It was only when father Pat Sr. wrote a letter accusing the military of fraud that a second internal investigation was launched. As the pic notes, however, high-level officials simply found a mid-level scapegoat, then seemingly lied their way through a Congressional hearing, and excused themselves from further culpability.

“While precise circumstances may never be known. Tillman’s death appears to be the result of gross negligence at best, and perhaps far worse than that, with the most damning account relating that a fellow solder — or soldiers — shot at Tillman for up to a full minute, from a plain-sight distance of 40 yards.

“It’s an appalling story, yet at the same time somehow affirming: The unconventional Tillmans are an admirable bunch, and in choosing the wrong family to lie to, authorities wound up exposed, albeit largely unpunished.

“While no senior officers — except the one scapegoated — speak in the archival clips, most of Tillman’s fellow soldiers give damning testimony of the official story. Retired special-ops Stan Goff provides insight into how the U.S. military can use bureaucracy, language and evasion to bury uncomfortable truths.

“Assembly is first-rate. Pic was retitled just before Sundance from its awkward original, I’m Pat Fucking Tillman. That phrase constituted the subject’s last words as he yelled to identify himself to those shooting at him.”

Josh Brolin narrates.

I haven’t time to review Ruben Fleischer‘s Zombieland (opening tomorrow), but it’s better than Dennis Harvey‘s Variety review indicated. I was basically pleased, amused and never bored for the first 45 or 50 minutes, and then came the Bill Murray Beverly Hills mansion sequence and I was flat-out blown away. For this sequence alone the movie must be seen, although generally speaking it’s an engaging zombie comedy with dabs of a marginal Wes Anderson attitude-personality. All to the good. I’ll amplify later today.

“By now there have been quite enough zombie comedies to constitute a little subgenre of their own. If Zombieland doesn’t grade at the head of its class — the valedictorian still being Shaun of the Dead — this lively splatstick item is nonetheless way above the remedial likes of Zombie Strippers, to name one among many recent lower-budgeters. Benefiting from the very different but very appealing comedy styles of Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg even when the script’s wit runs thin, this should be catnip to jaded genre fans, with decent niche theatrical returns and solid long-term ancillary biz signaled.” — from Dennis Harvey‘s 9.27 Variety review.