Never forget the golden rule of first-look screenings of ambitious CG-rich spectacles — never trust the fanboys. Always, always, always wait for the sourpusses to have their say. If the frown-liners are won over, then you can be fairly sure.
Okay, let’s admit it…it’s probably gonna win the Best Picture Oscar.
James Cameron's #AvatarTheWayOfWater is a monumental filmmaking achievement striking a great balance between technical & emotional. The 48fps 3D experience features some of the most jaw-dropping immersion I’ve ever seen. Felt like a kid again watching T2 for 1st time. Astounding. pic.twitter.com/cfiMADJzU4
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER: Yeah never bet against James Cameron. Trying to spare hyperbole, but I’ve never seen anything like this from a technical, visual standpoint. It’s overwhelming. Maybe too overwhelming. Sometimes I’d miss plot points because I’m staring at a Pandora fish
Happy to say #AvatarTheWayOfWater is phenomenal! Bigger, better & more emotional than #Avatar, the film is visually breathtaking, visceral & incredibly engrossing. The story, the spectacle, the spirituality, the beauty – this is moviemaking & storytelling at its absolute finest. pic.twitter.com/RicnpDghrx
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER introduces a new water culture on Pandora that is technically wondrous. James Cameron’s dialogue still struggles but his storytelling soars as he emotionally invests us in the new characters & creatures. A sincere, stunning epic that was worth the wait. pic.twitter.com/ZUqdJ4Nawd
While grateful to HE follower "Iain" for the amusing artwork, I've asked for three fixes. One, Capitalize the "w" in "who." Two, he's got the date wrong -- it reads "December 2021." And three, my last name is spelled Wells, not "Wellls."
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I saw episode 6 ("Abductions") of The White Lotus last night. The final episode ("Arrivederci") airs on Sunday, 12.11. And I know one thing. Somehow or some way, I want someone to slap the shit out of Will Sharpe's Ethan Spiller character. The wealthy pissant husband of Aubrey Plaza's Harper Spiller, Ethan is a downer -- always frowning or guilt-tripped or convulsed, disturbed by one thing or another, a drag to hang out with. Every time the camera gazes upon this little shit, I want to punch his lights out. Please...I'm not asking for much. Everyone wants this to happen.
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Antoine Fuqua‘s Emancipation begins streaming on Apple+ three days hence (12.9), and I’ll tell you straight and true that it didn’t make me feel miserable. Nor did I find it boring. A fair amount of it is “believable” as far as that concept goes. And Will Smith‘s performance as Peter, a Louisiana slave who escapes from a work camp by running, splashing, wading and rowing his way across endless miles of swamp, is very commendable — there isn’t a single thing that Smith does or says that feels phony or pushed or sentimentalized or…okay, Smith’s Peter is a little Hollywoody.
Smith grew (or pasted on) a chin beard and dropped several pounds to remind us that slaves were almost certainly never well-fed.
There is, however, a thing that’s missing from this 132-minute action film, and that’s any sense of surprise. Nothing happens that you don’t expect to see, or that you don’t see coming from a mile away. Each and every white slave driver (including the top-dog psychopath, played by Ben Foster) is cruel, vicious and repellent as hell. Not to mention bearded and smelly-looking and afflicted with bad teeth (and almost certainly halitosis).
A surprise would have been for one white scumbag to be a little less evil than the others, perhaps a tiny bit guilt-ridden or even briefly, momentarily decent in his treatment of the slaves. But no — every single slaver is pure reprehensible scum. Which they were, of course, but you know what I’m saying…trying for a little originality or the unexpected is always appreciated.
A film such as this (based on fact but fueled by an expected catharsis in which the runaway good guy prevails at the end) is basically about rooting for the gruesome deaths of the scurvy white guys. There’s a slave revolt moment (Spartacus rebranded) that I especially enjoyed. Ditto the third-act moment when Smith murders the black collaborator (a replay of the climactic scene in Django Unchained when Jamie Foxx kills Samuel L. Jackson‘s Uncle Tom. I was puzzled by a scene in which Smith’s left-behind wife Dodienne (Charmaine Bingwa) mutilates herself with a cotton gin, but we’ll let that go.
The basic idea behind Emancipation is “how would it be if it wasn’t Peter but the Philadelphia-born Will Smith suffering as a slave in 1860s Louisiana, and if Smith, being a hot-shot movie star in the guise of a slave, was smarter and tougher and more tenacious than anyone else in the film”…so tough and tenacious that he fights off an alligator while underwater and then kills this growling beast with a sharp knife, just like John Wayne killed that Native American warrior in the first act of Red River.”
But let’s understand that Smith’s bad-ass slave is a satisfying heroic figure — a guy you’re glad to hang with. You don’t want him to die or get captured, and you definitely want him to fight and kill the psychopathic Foster in the third act. You want him, in short, to be Sylvester Stallone in First Blood, and he occasionally rises to that occasion.
But again, there are no surprises. I decided during the film’s first third, at which point I knew that Emancipation would be rife with cliches, that Ben Foster should be attacked by a gator while taking a poop, and then dragged into deep water and drowned and then eaten. Or, failing that, if he could get bitten by a cottonmouth snake and thereby weakened by the venom, leaving him no choice but to lie down in order to gradually gather his strength and is then attacked by a gator and dragged underwater. That would wake you right up — for a venal white character to die not for the sins of racism and cruelty, but because he was unlucky in a damp and dangerous environment.
But at the end of the day I didn’t feel too much hurt from Emancipation. Lots of white-guy hate, but how can anyone say it’s not justified in this context? Justified but not that interesting. But if you watch it with your expectations suitably lowered…if you remind yourself that Fuqua is a genre guy — basically a proficient hack — and there’s no way this film is going to knock anyone out…if you watch it with these understandings, it isn’t all that bad of a sit.
Sidenote: I tried reviewing Emancipation late last week and it just wouldn’t come. I don’t think I cared enough one way or another.
I did, however, admire Robert Richardson‘s desaturated, bordering-on-monochrome color scheme. It would have been ballsier to go with straight black-and-white, of course, but Fuqua doesn’t have that kind of integrity.
I’m out of the Covid woods with a totally normal temperature, but I’m not completely clean and safe to be around (not 100%). The wiser, more sensible thing to do, obviously, is to blow off today’s Avatar 2 screening in Manhattan. (AMC 42nd Street, 1 pm.)
Two days ago my mantra was “oh, Lord, please don’t let it be a wokefest.” Now it’s “oh, Lord, please don’t let the bad guys feel too rote, and please save us from too much of a CG overlay…a semblance of organic reality is absolutely required.”
I was planning to share some off-the-cuff remarks before Monday night’s Bedford Playhouse screening of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon (Paramount, 12.23).
The special-event showing, courtesy of Paramount, kicks off Bedford Marquee, a new program that will occasionally showcase exciting new films two or three weeks before their release, and will include post-screening discussions when feasible.
Babylon began on time and all went well, but I couldn’t attend because of my Covid situation. I’m currently feeling fine with an 98.4 temperature, but it would have been cavalier to mingle. So early Monday afternoon I recorded some of the thoughts I would’ve shared live, transferred the eight minute and 45 second file to Vimeo and sent it to Bedford Playhouse bros Dan Friedman and Robert Harris.
I was told they might not be able to squeeze it in due to the fact that the film is on a specially encrypted DCP that can only be tested and played within a limited time frame. The DCP only arrived yesterday, due to bad weather and other delay factors and accompanied by bouts of anxiety and uncertainty — not unsual if you know anything about the workings of UPS and DHL.
Either way it was extremely cool of Paramount to allow us to present this herculean effort by director-writer Damien Chazelle, which I saw three or four weeks ago in Manhattan.
The next Bedford Marquee attraction will be a two-for-one deal — a mid-January screening of the recently restored Invaders From Mars (’53) along with a master-class from restoration master Scott MacQueen about the film’s exquisite visual transformation as well as a discussion of the film’s impact upon the sci-fi genre and how it reflected American culture and cold-war paranoia.
Inventively directed and impressionistically designed by the great William Cameron Menzies, Invaders From Mars is hands down the spookiest, most unsettling flying saucer film of the 1950s, due in no small measure to that eerie vocal-choir score by the unsung Mort Glickman.
Aside from the mildly distressing fact that I don’t look like I did 15 or 20 years ago, I’m okay with the video. Yes, I would prefer to wear amber-tinted shades a la Jack Nicholson but the red-frame, gray-tint ones are passable.
If while profiling a non-binary person a writer fails to use the person's correct pronouns, he/she could be (and most likely would be) attacked as some kind of bigot. So I realize that Melena Ryzik had no choice but to follow the proscribed form in her N.Y. Times profile of Emma Corrin.
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Mika Brzezinski says it straight and plain [7:25 mark]: “[Donald Trump] is a danger to our country. These are dangerous statements. He’s telling you what he wants to do. Believe him…okay? Like, how much does this country have to go through, how much division, how much hatred…how much pressure on our system…how much law enforcement…the FBI, Department of Justice, police officers…anyone in Donald Trump’s sights…how much stress on our democracy do we need to endure before we see that this man is a fascist, and that he has very, very bad intentions. And Republicans…are helping him by not stepping up and manning up and saying what is right qnd [defining] who you are.”
The first tingly, muscle-ache sensations of Covid were felt Friday morning. I went through it ayearago so I know the deal. Yesterday I took a Covid test…bingo.
It took me four days to get through it last December so I’ll probably be out of the woods by Monday evening.
Right now I feel so depleted that the mere thought of sitting up and writing something is exhausting.
12:25 am, Monday: I can feel the Covid starting to weaken, dissipate. The worst seems to be over.
9am, Monday: Digital temperature gauge reads 98.4.
This morning’s recovery made think of Keith’s “98.6.” I shouldn’t need to remind, of course, that it’s no longer acceptable to address or refer to a girlfriend as “baby.”
