I wouldn’t see A Great Wall with a knife at my back. I wouldn’t attend any press screenings or see it in theatres, and I damn sure won’t watch it on Bluray or streaming or even on a plane. I wouldn’t sit through it if they threatened to kill my cats. Okay, I’d save the cats but I would watch it in a state of total, stomach-acid cynicism, repulsion and disconnection. Check the HE boxes: (a) Chinese director…85% likelihood of a problem outside of guys like Lou Ye; (b) CG-driven monster crap, (c) tailored for dumbshit Chinese fantasy-spectacle market. I hate what Chinese money has done to megaplex movies in general. Fuck all of you…fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. No offense but suffer, die, rot in hell.
20th Century Fox will open Matthew Vaughn‘s Kingsman: The Golden Circle on Friday, 9.22. The sight of Taron Egerton…don’t ask. Costarring Colin Firth, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, Pedro Pascal, Sophie Cookson, Mark Strong, Michael Gambon and (best wishes for a speedy recovery) Elton John.
From my 2.12.15 review of Kingsman: The Secret Service: “Many of the geekboy genre zombies who didn’t approve of Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire are giving a pass to the cynically disconnected, utterly rancid Kingsman: The Secret Service (20th Century Fox, 2.13). I get what the scheme is but it’s not funny, exciting or the least bit intriguing…a waste of my time and a ton of money down the well…why?
“The point of Matthew Vaughn‘s 007 genre spoof, in the tradition of many God-awful action flicks made over the last 20-plus years, is to levitate outside itself and in fact outside the trust or belief system that all good cinema depends upon, and to deliver cretinous action cartoon riffs. Kingsman, trust me, is pitched to the absolute lowest caste of fanboy plebians, and is incidentally delighted by the many ways that adversaries as well as bystanders can be sliced, hatcheted, drilled, shot, bludgeoned, stabbed and vivisected. Oh, right…that’s part of the attitude humor. Marvellous stuff!
For years I’ve been moaning and groaning about the James Gray cabal — a fraternity of elite critics, cultureburg foo-foos and film festival staffers who’ve sworn by Gray‘s films for years, and for reasons that to me have always seemed thin or specious. It’s not Gray’s films that have gotten in my craw as much as the constant overpraise.
James Gray (safari hat, beard, earphones) directing The Lost City of Z with Charlie Hunnam. Why isn’t Gray rocking the short sleeve T-shirted look that the crew guy is wearing? He looks like a tourist who’s been asked to step off the Jungle Safari boat in Disneyland, especially with that fanny pack and those long khaki sleeves. If you’re going to wear a safari hat you need to go cowboy style (i.e., Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now). And if not that, a standard-issue director’s baseball cap.
I was actually okay with (i.e., not disturbed or offended by) Gray’s New York-centric films for nearly 20 years — Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own The Night, Two Lovers and Blood Ties (a fraternal crime thriller written by Gray but directed by Guillaume Canet).
But The Immigrant was mostly a drag (“A well-made, respectably authentic period drama, but the pace is slow and the story ho-hums…I must have looked at my watch six or seven times”) and The Lost City Of Z was, I felt, all but impossible. I wanted to escape less than 30 minutes in but I was with a paying audience at Alice Tully Hall and felt I had to stick it out. It was hell.
Yesterday MCN’s David Poland filed a piece largely in league with my views, not just about his frustrations with Gray but also the cabal.
Excerpt #1: “I don’t get it. And now, six features into James Gray’s directing career, I think I am done apologizing for it. My experience of Gray’s films has been, consistently, ‘great acting…why doesn’t the story work?’ And yet, some of the smartest critics I know are true devotees of everything Gray does. They must be hip to something that I’m not seeing, right?”
“If the ending to [the 2016 presidential campaign] story were anything other than Donald Trump being elected president, Shattered would be an awesome comedy, like a Kafka novel — a lunatic bureaucracy devouring itself. But since the ending is the opposite of funny, it will likely be consumed as a cautionary tale. Shattered is what happens when political parties become too disconnected from their voters. Even if you think the election was stolen, any Democrat who reads this book will come away believing he or she belongs to a party stuck in a profound identity crisis. Trump or no Trump, the Democrats need therapy — and soon.” — from Matt Taibbi‘s Rolling Stone review of Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes‘ “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.”
Bill Maher: “I don’t know who writes these speeches…the problem isn’t so much the policy as the personality…Teleprompter Trump doesn’t really match off-the-cuff Trump…you can’t have somebody who is diagnosable as a narcissist and all the rest and think that it’s going to come out well for us…we’re living in Cuckoo Cloudland and this is what he believes…you can see he doesn’t know anything…it’s all well and good to elect this guy who’s going to be the bull in the china shop, but the china being broken is your china…the disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality…his fans don’t believe in facts, mostly, and certainly not fact-checking…all this talk about the forgotten little man…tell me one thing he’s done for [that guy].” Or has even announced intentions along these lines.
A little more than 11 years ago I wrote a piece about how three or four well-reviewed, high-toned, emotionally engaging films didn’t appear, from my November ’05 perspective, to be on their way to attracting what seemed to me like just commercial desserts.
As it turned out two films that I mentioned — Craig Brewer‘s Hustle & Flow (which ended up making $22 million and change) and Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes ($32 million) — did reasonably okay, or at least enough so that no one called them shortfallers. But they didn’t really connect, or not like they should have. You should’ve been there when Hustle & Flow first played at Sundance — it was huge. And when In Her Shoes played the ’05 Toronto Film Festival…wow.
But everything falls away in the end. Who out there has streamed Hustle & Flow or In Her Shoes over the last decade? Even I haven’t, and I can’t really explain why, not even to myself. Hanson died last September, and whatever happened to Brewer? His last feature was a 2011 Footloose remake. Everything disintegrates, particles exploding into space.
Posted on 11.2.05:
An impassioned, extremely well-made film with a sincere emotional current (i.e., one that actually makes you feel something with an application of professional finesse rather than hokey button-pushing) opens after being acclaimed by critics or film festival audiences or both…and what happens?
The public doesn’t respond with much enthusiasm. The movie opens in third or fourth or fifth place, or it opens okay but not as strongly as it should have, and then it’s dead by the second or third weekend, if not sooner.
From Geoff Berkshire’s 11.12 Variety review: “Robert De Niro’s fans may be hoping for a spiritual successor to his classic Martin Scorsese dark comedy The King of Comedy, but The Comedian falls much closer to actor’s forgettable showbiz satire also penned by writer-producer Art Linson, What Just Happened? In fact, that’s a question viewers may ask themselves almost any time De Niro’s character, Jackie Berkowitz, grabs a mic.
“There’s a strange disconnect between the scenes of Jackie awkwardly performing comedy routines, which play like De Niro gamely reading material on Saturday Night Live, and the more authentic moments of Jackie going about his life as a seventysomething man who still has a lot left to prove. Even though De Niro never quite sells the stand-up, the movie still may have worked if it surrounded him with characters worthy of the actors playing them.”
“Walking away from last night’s Manchester by the Sea screening, I could really only think about Casey Affleck’s face. We all assess the pain of others by studying their faces. How badly are they hurt? How withered have they become? For Affleck’s character, Lee Chandler, what he wants and needs is to be alone in his heartache, but that’s the one thing he can’t have because he’s connected to people who rely on him.
“To go where Affleck goes in Manchester by the Sea is unthinkable. To watch someone endure something most of us could not — the most horrible thing anyone could ever imagine — is not easy. This is a film about the remnants of accidental, sudden loss and how we find people we can count on to help save whatever is left in the wake of it.
“Manchester by the Sea, as you already know from what’s been said about it, is one of the best films of the year. It’s easily Affleck and Kenneth Lonergan’s best work.
“What I saw in Affleck’s face, finally, is what I discovered when I looked and looked. What I saw in my mind when I walked away from it and tried to sleep was Affleck himself imagining that kind of loss. He knows what I know, what any person who has raised a child knows: that there is nothing else you are put on earth to do except take care of that child, or those children. A primal urge and a divine directive. And one that can’t be undone unless you are someone disconnected from it. This is not a film about someone disconnected from it.
Now that everyone has seen Suicide Squad, what of the majority critical view that David Ayer‘s film exudes soullessness and suckage? I don’t mean the first 40 to 45 minutes — I mean the rest of it. I ask this knowing that over-25s with a semblance of taste and a marketable skill will almost certainly agree that it’s putrid for the most part, and those under 25…well, we know what they’ll say.
What did the room feel like as you left the theatre? Were fellow moviegoers looking ill, stricken, ashen-faced? Did they seem to be questioning their lives or at least their willingness to sit through another piece of shit from the Warner Bros./D.C. Comics kingpins?
“There’s a major disconnect with what the critics are saying and the audience is seeing,” Warner Bros. distribution vp Jeff Goldstein told Variety‘s Brent Lang. “We’re resonating with a younger audience. The younger the audience, the higher the score.”
Lang reports, however, that Suicide Squad dropped 41% between Friday and Saturday, which is a much steeper decline than Captain America: Civil War or Deadpool experienced. It seems likely that Squad will drop around 70% next weekend, which is what the similarly-loathed Batman v Superman managed to do.
Keep in mind the N.Y. Times estimate that Suicide Squad cost at least $325 million to make and market, which means it has to pull down $650 million to move into profit.
I know that disconnecting is a path to a better, more spiritual life, but I can’t do that. More to the point, I honestly don’t want to. What am I gonna do with “time off”? This is the happiest period of my life, and all due to my daily 14-hour enslavement to Hollywood Elsewhere. HE is the fountain that brings joy and security and washes all wounds. You can call that a no-life life, but it doesn’t feel that way. Really. And it’s not like I never disengage. I have hiking time, hanging-with-friends time, cat love at odd hours, weekend biking, Pavillions time, West Hollywood Wonton-slurping time, evening screening time, Bluray time, motorcycling-along-Mulholland time plus the travel, the festivals, New York, Europe, Vietnam, etc. Plus I get lucky once in a while. Sorry.
From “Another Hurtin’ Sundance Cancer Drama,” filed on 1.22.16: “Chris Kelly‘s Other People (Vertical, 9.9.16) struck me as deftly written and persuasively well-acted but fraught with self-pity and a little too glum. Wading through and meditating upon cancer death will have that affect. But it’s delicate and restrained and absorbing as far as it goes. And occasionally amusing. But…I don’t know what else to say. I felt respect more than affection.
“Some in the Eccles audience were reportedly choking up; not this horse. After the show I spoke to two or three guys (i.e., writers) who were partly critical; one was outright dismissive. I later saw on Twitter that others (but not all) were putting it down.
“Relatively few will pay to see this in theatres but it’s really not half bad, especially in terms of the acting. I never pulled back or disconnected; I always felt engaged. There’s already a consensus that Molly Shannon, who plays a spirited suburban mom dying of leiomyosarcoma, will be Best Actress-nominated for a Spirit or a Gotham Award. And that the low-key, somewhat pudgy, ginger-haired Jesse Plemons scores also as her son, a gay showbiz writer grappling with more than just the immediate tragedy at hand.
I’m still not sure if Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (TriStar, 11.16) has been entirely or partially shot in 6K at 120 frames-per-second. Let’s assume “entirely” until someone in authority states otherwise. I for one am tingling with anticipation at watching an Iraq War Catch-22-like satire at 120 fps all in. Even if the process is just being used for the battle scenes, I’m there with bells on.
Collider‘s Steve Weintraub recently spoke with Billy Lynn (and Equals) costar Kristen Stewart about Lee’s process. Her answer suggested that Billy Lynn‘s HFR will be a different deal than the 48 fps projection that Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbit (Warner Bros., 12.14) was projected at in some venues, and which was met with scorn.
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“The way Ang described it is he feels so disconnected from movies that he watches that he just wants to feel like he’s closer, and that he’s done this with Billy Lynn. He’s somehow achieved that, so I can’t wait to see it,” Stewart said. “Usually if you do that without whatever process he’s doing — [and] I have no idea [what that is]– it makes it look like reality TV, it makes it crisp in a way that actually detaches you. [But] he messes with depth of field. Usually the way a lens works, you control where the focal point is, [but] in this case everything’s in focus. So when you watch the movie you can decide, almost as if you’re there in person, what you want to look at, which has just never been seen before on film.”
Every person on the planet with functioning eyes, even those wearing high-magnification lenses, is processing life at 120 fps. That’s how our eyes make reality look. But replicate a semblance of this in a feature film, as Peter Jackson did with The Hobbit, and people freak out. They want the familiar bath of 24 fps. I loved the Hobbit‘s 48 fps process, if only because it relieved me of having to pay attention to the plot and the performance.
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