A new trailer for Alan Elliott‘s Amazing Grace popped earlier today. There were hopes late last year that the doc, technically directed by the late Sydney Pollack, might land a nomination for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar, but that didn’t happen. Neon plans to open it sometime during the first quarter. (I think.)
Filmed over two nights (Thursday, 1.13.72 and Friday, 1.14.72) inside L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church (So. Broadway near 87th Place), Amazing Grace became an unfinished calamity when it became clear that director Sydney Pollack and his crew shot had captured 20 hours of footage without shooting clapper boards at the start of each take, which in the analog era made the footage impossible to synch in post.
Amazing Grace is just as spirit-lifting as the early-birds have been saying. Classic rhythmic bass-throbby gospel, churning and turning and cranking it up…”Oh, my…oh, yeah! Oh, my…oh, yeah!” (That might have been my own private chorus.) I’ve been listening to Franklin’s singing all my life, but to watch her improvise and embroider and work through a song top to bottom, little beads of sweat covering her face and neck, her concentration fierce and joyous — pure flight, pure emotion, pure reach-for-the-skies.
Franklin is supported by top-tier pros…maximum energy, discipline, coordination. The barrel-chested Rev. James Cleveland (who died at age 59 in 1991) at the piano. The Southern California Community Choir, led by Alexander Hamilton. And Franklin’s superb backup band — guitarist Cornell Dupree, bassist Chuck Rainey, drummer Bernard Purdie, organist Ken Lupper, conga player Pancho Morales — is as good as it gets.
The bass-heavy soundtrack sounded analog-y. You could almost hear the tape hiss. It did wonderful things to my rib cage.
Oh, and there are two or three shots of Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts clapping along from behind the back row. Exile on Main Street had been recorded at the time, but was yet to be released. Sticky Fingers had been in circulation for eight or nine months.
Last night I caught a special little screening of Amazing Grace, the nearly 47-year-old Aretha Franklin gospel concert doc, at the Park Avenue screening room. It was hosted by producer-savior Alan Elliott and director Spike Lee, a huge fan of the doc who’s trying to generate interest in hopes of landing a nomination for a possible Best Feature Documentary Oscar.
Amazing Grace has qualified itself with two recent theatrical bookings, one in Los Angeles and another at Manhattan’s Film Forum. The latter booking is totally sold out so I’m glad I was able to attend.
Filmed over two nights (Thursday, 1.13.72 and Friday, 1.14.72) inside L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church (So. Broadway near 87th Place), Amazing Grace became an unfinished calamity when it became clear that director Sydney Pollack and his crew had captured 20 hours of footage without shooting clapper boards at the start of each take, which in the analog era made the footage impossible to synch in post.
Amazing Grace producer Alan Elliott, director Spike Lee following Thursday’s Park Ave. screening room showing.
How Pollack, who’d been directing features for six or seven years at the time, could have failed to realize that clapper-boarding was essential is oneoftheall–timegreatHollywoodmysteries. Maybe he felt it was more important to be unobtrusive — maybe he felt intimidated by the spiritual vapors and didn’t want to get in the way.
Elliott is the music-industry guy who eight or nine years ago finally synched the footage with digital technology. And yet despite this resurrection Franklin, who died from pancreatic cancer last August at age 76, was curiously opposed to letting the film be commercially released. Or even screened at film festivals. She legally prevented Telluride Film Festival showings in both 2015 and ’16.
After Franklin died her estate agreed to let the film be shown. Neon will distribute sometime in early ’19.
Amazing Grace is just as spirit-lifting as the early-birds have been saying. Classic rhythmic bass-throbby gospel, churning and turning and cranking it up…”Oh, my…oh, yeah! Oh, my…oh, yeah!” (That might have been my own private chorus.) I’ve been listening to Franklin’s singing all my life, but to watch her improvise and embroider and work through a song top to bottom, little beads of sweat covering her face and neck, her concentration fierce and unwavering — pure flight, pure emotion, pure reach-for-the-skies.
Franklin is supported by top-tier pros…maximum energy, discipline, coordination. The barrel-chested Rev. James Cleveland (who died at age 59 in 1991) at the piano. The Southern California Community Choir, led by Alexander Hamilton. And Franklin’s superb backup band — guitarist Cornell Dupree, bassist Chuck Rainey, drummer Bernard Purdie, organist Ken Lupper, conga player Pancho Morales — is as good as it gets. They were a kind of WreckingCrew-plus; Elliott said last night they were the session guys for the 1962 recording of the Four Seasons’ “Sherry.”
The bass-heavy soundtrack sounded analog-y. You could almost hear the tape hiss. It did wonderful things to my rib cage.
Oh, and there are two or three shots of Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts clapping along from behind the back row. Exile on Main Street had been recorded at the time, but was yet to be released. Sticky Fingers had been in circulation for eight or nine months.
Amazing Grace should obviously, definitely be Oscar-nominated. With a 47-years-in-the-making narrative and arriving only four months after Franklin’s death, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about this.
Elliott and Lee did a q & a after the screening. I captured about ten minutes’ worth on the iPhone.
When the subject of Oscar attention came up, Spike sounded a little bit ambivalent. He mentioned his heartbreak about Driving Miss Daisy having won the Best Picture Oscar over Do The Right Thing, “like it happened yesterday.”
After the q & a ended I asked Spike if he’s seen Green Book, which some have incorrectly said is similar to Driving Miss Daisy. He said he hadn’t.
Last week Entertainment Weekly‘s Joey Nolfi and Piya Sinha-Rpysuggested 15 Oscar contenders thus far (“Oscars 2019: From Black Panther to Hereditary“). Here they are alongside HE reactions:
1. Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman for Best Picture. HE response: A partly illogical but reasonably decent procedural about an actual undercover FBI operation again the Ku Klux Klan that happened in the ’70s. Great anti-Trump finale but it’s just not stellar enough to rank as a Best Picture contender. Not happening.
2. Ethan Hawke for Best Actor in First Reformed. HE response: Yes! Great performance, superb film, great Schrader comeback. If there’s a God, it’ll happen.
3. Glenn Close for Best Actress in The Wife. HE response: Definitely. Close’s performance stands tall on its own, but the role (gidted writer married to best-selling author) and the film synch perfectly with the #MeToo zeitgeist, and Close is totally owed after six Best Actress noms. She’s not only a Best Actress lock, but she really might win. Hell, she probably will.
4. Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther for Best Picture. HE response: It’ll be nominated, yes, but don’t forget that only the last hour of Black Panther is really good — the rest is just okay. It’ll get the nomination because of (a) the huge grosses ($699,747,193 domestic, $1,346,344,642 worldwide) and (b) the fact that representational identity politics matter to the New Academy Kidz.
5. Toni Collette for Best Actress in Hereditary. HE response: Agreed, she’s great in this, but when was the last time that the Academy nominated a performance in a horror film? This said, HE totally supports Collette and Hereditary.
6. Daveed Diggs for Best Actor in Blindspotting. HE response: Not a chance.
7. Brad Bird‘s Incredibles 2 for Best Animated Features. HE response: Probably, but it’s not as good as the original and the Academy knows this.
8. Natalie Portman for Best Actress in Annihilation. HE response: Forget it.
9. Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs for Best Animated Feature. HE response: SURE!! What does Justin Chang know?
10. RBG for Best Documentary Feature. HE response: Definitely!!
Last night George Clooney was honored as the recipient of the latest AFI Life Achievement Award. Hosannah and salutations — we all know the drill. Speaking entirely for myself and my own sense of how things ought to be, George is my idea of a good and gracious fellow, smart and savvy and entirely decent in every way that could possibly apply. He has always been nice to me, always polite and obliging. So nice that it pained me when I had to pan Monuments Men. I wanted to give it a pass but I couldn’t, and it hurt.
I consequently laughed when I read a Jimmy Kimmel anecdote in Anne Thompson’s story about the show. “Kimmel snuck in a raw note of truth when he lambasted [Clooney’s] Leatherheads and The Monuments Men,” she writes. “‘[The latter] was so bad it had me rooting for Hitler,’ Kimmel said.”
A few weeks ago I paid a secret visit to the set of George Clooney‘s Monuments Men in Germany’s Harz mountains. It wasn’t on the level of Henry Kissinger‘s secret visit to China to arrange for Richard Nixon‘s 1972 state visit, but when Sony publicity told me to keep mum until after shooting wrapped on 6.26, I gave them my word.
Yes, I’d previously told HE readers I was doing it, but then I clammed up and pretended I’d never posted such a thing. My mother called from Connecticut to ask where I was. “I can’t say, mom,” I replied, “but I can tell you this much — I’m definitely not visiting a movie set.”
Based on Robert Edsel‘s “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History,” it’s basically about a bunch of caring wiseacres in fatigues and helmets saving civilization from ruin. Literally. By doing what they can to rescue or salvage tens of thousands of art treasures — mostly paintings — that have been stolen and freighted away by the Nazis.
Enlightened warriors, if you will. Guys who know that after World War II ends the quality of life on the planet earth will be seriously diminished if the great European art treasures have been hidden or destroyed. And so they’re out to prevent that with whatever maneuvers they can think of.
Clooney plays Frank Stokes, the leader of a ragtag group of art commandos…hold on, I’m giving the wrong impression here. This is not Ocean’s 11 in olive-drab fatigues or an art-appreciating Dirty Dozen or Kelly’s Heroes. Or is it? I don’t really know because a script is only a starting point, but I also know it’s not Schindler’s List. It feels more to me like a “movie” than a “film”, but that in itself might be inaccurate. I really don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.
George Clooney on the set of Monuments Men, snapped in early May of 2013.
UCLA film professor Howard Suber gives great commentary — sage, smooth, learned, insightful. (Here are a few HE posts about the guy.) Roughly 30 years ago I was especially taken with a commentary track he recorded for a Criterion laser disc of High Noon. Suber persuaded me that this 1952 allegorical western, directed by Fred Zinneman and ghost-written by CarlForeman, was more than just a good sit or a striking reflection of Hollywood cowardice in the face of anti-Communist fervor, but one of the all-time greats.
Last night Suber announced that his High Noon commentary is now accessible (along with the film itself) on the Criterion Channel via Filmstruck. Never before offered on Bluray or DVD, and definitely worth it…trust me.
Talk to any impassioned, ahead-of-the-curve film snob about classic westerns, and he/she will probably tell you that Howard Hawks‘ Rio Bravo (1959) is a much better, more substantial film than Fred Zinneman‘s High Noon (1952). More deeply felt, they’ll say. Better shoot-em-up swagger, tastier performances, more likable, more old-west iconic. Many people I know feel this way. And now here‘s director Peter Bogdanovich saying it again in a New York Observer piece — Rio Bravo is even better than you thought, High Noon doesn’t hold up as well, etc.
Something snapped when I read Peter’s article this afternoon. Goddamn it, the Rio Bravo cult has gone on long enough. Bogdanovich calls it “a life-affirming, raucous, profound masterpiece” I’m going to respond politely and call that a reach. I admire Hawks’ movies and the whole Hawks ethos as much as the next guy, but it’s time to end this crap here and now.
High Noon may seem a bit stodgy or conventional to some and perhaps not as excitingly cinematic to the elites, but it’s a far greater film than Rio Bravo.
It’s not about the Old West, obviously — it’s a metaphor about the Hollywood climate of the early ’50s — but it walks and talks like a western, and is angry, blunt, honed and unequivocal to that end. It’s about the very worst in people, and the best in a single, anxious, far-from-perfect man. I’m speaking of screenwriter-producer Carl Foreman, who was being eyeballed by the Hollywood right for alleged Communist ties when he wrote it, and receiving a very tough lesson in human nature in the process. He wound up writing a crap-free movie that talks tough, cuts no slack and speaks with a single voice.
Although I’m not a down-on-my-knees fan of Baby Driver, it’s nonetheless an exuberant, mad-style movie that warrants applause for delivering something fresh and inspired and seriously nutso. Which is a miracle in today’s realm. I saw it again tonight at the Academy, and enjoyed the hell out of Cameron Crowe‘s post-screening interview with director-writer Edgar Wright and supervising sound editor Julian Slatter.
Another chunk of of my 6.28 review: “Baby Driver is one of the most strikingly conceived, purely enjoyable fast-car crime flicks I’ve ever seen. With Ansel Elgort as a Ryan Gosling-level getaway driver who needs the right kind of song playing in his ear buds in order to make it all come together, Baby Driver is a kind of action musical -— cray-cray car chases and ferocious gunplay synchronized with the sounds and vice versa. To some extent it reminded me of Drive, and at other times of Thief, Gone In Sixty Seconds, Bullitt…that line of country. At times undisciplined and often quite mad, but a great visionary action-and-music flick.”
(l.) Director-writer Cameron Crowe speaking with Baby Driver director-writer following Tuesday night’s Academy screening.
Most of Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver (TriStar, 6.28) is inspired — one of the most strikingly conceived, purely enjoyable fast-car crime flicks I’ve ever seen. With Ansel Elgort as a Ryan Gosling-level getaway driver who needs the right kind of song playing in his ear buds in order to make it all come together, Baby Driver is essentially a kind of action musical — cray-cray car chases and ferocious gunplay synchronized with the sounds and vice versa. To some extent it reminded me of Drive, and at times of Thief, Gone In Sixty Seconds, Bullitt….that line of country.
The four or five car chases in the film are exhilarating nutso stuff, but at the same time the action is undisciplined and show-offy and actually quite mad — Wright going for the gusto without regard to probability or (that horrid word) reality, but at the same time delivering the best squealing-rubber thrills since Gosling and Nicholas Winding Refn pooled forces, and absolutely leaving the bullshit fantasy realm of the Furious franchise in the dust.
But then Wright decides to send Baby Driver flying off the freeway around…oh, the 90-minute mark. And the last 15 or so minutes are flat-out insane and then infuriating. I was sitting there with my face contorted as I silently screamed, “What the fuck are you doing?…you fucking asshole! You really had something going there, but now you’re ruining the movie…you’re making it into some kind of bullshit Vin Diesel cum milkshake with a pop-fantasy ending made of dingleberries and drooling saliva. Why? Do you have a creative death wish?”
HE to director friend this morning: “I just saw Baby Driver last night….a wowser, near-great action musical for the first 80% or 85% followed by a ridiculously absurd, overly violent, catastrophically stupid finale that all but destroys the current and the vibe. A friend said ‘the wheels come off at the end‘ but they come off because Wright got under the car and loosened the lug nuts. Rarely have I seen a popcorn film as inspired and well-made as Baby Driver just blow itself up and shatter into pieces at the very end…a shame and a tragedy.”
I am nonetheless recommending Baby Driver for those first 90 or so minutes. But at the same time I’m telling you that any critic who’s written a gushing pass without mentioning that it destroys itself over the last 15 minutes or so…anyone who ignores this DEAD OBVIOUS FACT is a lying, jizz-whizzing whore who can never be fully trusted ever again.
A day or two ago Variety‘s Kris Tapley and Jenelle Riley posted a piece called “22 Deserving Oscar Contenders from the First Half of 2016.” I haven’t seen some of the films discussed. No excuses — I just didn’t or haven’t yet. But I feel highly enthused about two of their suggestions — Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s Weiner for Best Feature Doc (I’m ignoring the Best Picture idea) and Ralph Fiennes‘ giddy, motor-mouth performance in A Bigger Splash.
Kris and Jenelle don’t appear to be seriously suggesting that the others might actually score a nomination in their categories. They seem to be mostly saying “hey, at least keep some of these in mind for a Spirit Award.” Fine, but where they got the idea that Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman merit acting nominations for their performances in 10 Cloverfield Lane…fuhgedaboutit.
Best Picture: Kriegman and Steinberg’s Weiner. HE response: For a half-second I thought Tapley and Riley were cranked about Todd Solondz‘s Weiner Dog…whoaahhh! Kriegman and Steinberg’s doc about how “Carlos Danger” destroyed the career of former Rep. Anthony Weiner is a fascinating, appalling, sometimes amusing thing to sink into. On the other hand it’s about the suffocation of a guy’s life, an execution by media and twitter dogs, and who can laugh at this level of carnage? All the guy did was make an ass of himself online — no affair, no sexual harassment, no cruelty, just stupidity. But that’s all it takes.
Best Director: Jeremy Saulnier, Green Room. HE response: Uhhmm…haven’t seen it.
Best Actor: Ethan Hawke, Born to Be Blue. HE response: Missed it at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, haven’t had a chance since. Miles Ahead, another jazz biopic with a darkish tone, is already out on Bluray while Born To Be Blue, which is more or less a portrait of the late Chet Baker, is only on DVD plus it’s not streaming on Amazon or Vudu. Why?
Best Actress: Susan Sarandon, The Meddler. HE response: Missed this also. At least it’s streaming. Tapley-Riley are claiming Sarandon’s performance “is one of the most accurate portrayals of grief seen on film in recent years.” Bill Maher said it made him choke up. Sorry for the dereliction.
Earlier this afternoon I got into an email argument with a guy who’s heavily into predicting award-season favorites. Yes, this again. He hasn’t seen The Birth of a Nation or Manchester by the Sea, but he was saying that my views about these two films (both of which I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival) are overly passionate and biased in terms of foreseeing how they’ll be received when they open in the fall.
Me: People are going to think what they think, but there’s really nothing lower in the universe than people who turn away from obviously well written, superbly acted, reality-reflecting, fully-rooted films by muttering that they’re not feel-goody enough.
Awards guy: Not being able to see that a group can’t, won’t or doesn’t appreciate a film that you admire is exactly what I’m talking about. You have an inability to check your own bias. Plus you don’t respond well when people disagree with you and so instead of trying to convince them to your side, you get aggressive and insulting.
Me: It’s not “an inability to check my own bias.” It’s an absolute refusal to show respect for the opinions of people who want a certain kind of drug when they go to a film. Good stuff is good stuff, and I know the properties. I always have. It’s not an opinion — I know the difference between pyrite (fool’s gold) and the real material. And I couldn’t care less about predicting what the middle-of-the-road crowd is going to like or not like.
Awards guy: Oscar predicting is always a combination of zeitgeist, politics and good reviews vs. good press. Since the last two years of #OscarsSoWhite have generated some really bad press for the Academy there’s a strong chance that we’ll see an anomaly of black-centered films nominated next year. That would affect something like Manchester by the Sea vs. The Birth of a Nation.
The Sony 4K lip-synch agony that has plagued my life for roughly a month is finally over. Really — the problem has been 100% solved. The solution was to toss the Radio Shack HDMI switcher that I’d been using, and replace it with a Marantz AV Surround Receiver NR1506. I fed the cords from the four sources — Direct TV, Oppo Bluray, Sherwood Region 2 Bluray, 4K Roku player — into the Marantz, and then sent the whole package from the Marantz into the TV (Sony 930C), which has built-in speakers plus a wireless subwoofer. (I junked the Sony sound bar.) The key element is an audio-visual command in the Marantz that accelerates or slows the sound down by milliseconds. It allows me to perfectly synch sound and image if there’s even the slightest issue. I’ve never dealt with such a difficult technical challenge in my life. Agonizing.
To fix HE’s Sony 4K sound-synch problem all I have to do is buy and apply the following items: (1) Catchin’ Synch, a sound-synch testing app that can be installed on any half-decent audio-visual receiver ($14), (2) a Marantz NR15065 Audio/Video Surround Receiver with Bluetooth and Wifi ($500) and (3) an Oppo BDP-103 player, which allows the viewer to adjust sound-synch issues backward or forward ($500). Never in my life have I been fleeced like this, and the nightmare isn’t even over. I’m in hell.
I’m all tapped out as a result of another horrible day in which I’ve tried to solve the myriad 4K sound-synch problems as far as the Oppo BD-93 Bluray and 4K Roku apps are concerned and more particularly have suffered yet another Direct TV technician miscommunication. I’m in the deepest and hottest cavern of hell right now, but I have to least say that Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation is one of the creepiest and most bizarrely chilling yuppie dinner party flicks of my lifetime. It’s not just a thriller but a conveyer of seriously demonic vibes. All my life I’ve secretly hated guys who smile as they raise wine glasses at parties and talk about how everyone should enjoy themselves as they celebrate their good fortune, and The Invitation reacquainted me with that. People who try to instruct you how to feel or who urge you to feel a certain way about this or that are, I’ve found, generally evil. That’s all I’ll say in this context. No specifics, no plot elements, no hints — they’ll only get in the way. Just see The Invitation any way you can this weekend (it’s viewable on Amazon and iTunes as well as select theatres) before the word gets out. I’m telling you it’s a stand-out. It’s also shot to the top of my Best of ’16 list. I’m so burnt from today’s head-pounding misfortunes that I’m quitting for the day and going on a long walk to flush my head out. But see this film.
Following last night’s Arclight screening of Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation, Kusama sat for a q & a with actress Kathryn Hahn.
“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...
