The author of Roma‘s transporting black-and-white imagery, captured on Alexa 65 digital, is director Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity, Children of Man, Y Tu Mama Tambien). The music is just right but I can’t find the composer’s name. Set in early ’70s Mexico City, Roma is basically Cuaron’s Amarcord — the story of his family, youth and history, culminating in the horrific Corpus Christi Massacre of 6.10.71. Team Roma (led by the Netflix-based Lisa Taback) will be launching a balls-out, take-no-prisoners Best Picture campaign, as well as (I’m hearing) a Best Supporting Actress campaign for Marina De Tavira, a 44 year-old actress who apparently plays the maternal heart and soul of said middle-class family. I’ve also heard that Yalitza Aparicio gives a knockout performance. Venice, Telluride, Toronto, New York.
If there’s one thing film twitter wants you to abandon, it’s your comfort zone. Be brave, step over the fence and experience the exotic, uncertain, challenging realms that exist outside of your little piddly backyard. Of course! Hollywood Elsewhere agrees that people who refuse to step outside of their c.z. are missing so much and absorbing so little in the way of life-giving nutrients or eye-opening realizations. I’ve been in rooms with people who don’t want to see what they don’t want to see, and it’s not pretty. The wrong kind of vibe.
On the other hand I’ve always defined “comfort zone” in a different way.
To me a comfort movie is one that presents three basic things. One, semi-recognizable human behavior (i.e., bearing at least some resemblance to that which you’ve observed in your own life, including your own something-to-be-desired, occasionally less-than-noble reactions to this or that challenge). Two, some kind of half-believable story in which various behaviors are subjected to various forms of emotional or psychological stress and strain. (This should naturally include presentations of inner human psychology, of course, as most people tend to hide what they’re really thinking or scheming to attain.) And three, action that adheres to the universal laws of physics — i.e., rules that each and every life form has been forced to submit to since the beginning of time.
The physics thing basically means that I can enjoy or at least roll with superhero fantasy popcorn fare, but on the other hand these films have a way of delivering a form of profound irritation and even depression if you watch enough of them.
There are, in short, many ways of telling stories that (a) contain recognizable human behavior, (b) engaging stories and (c) adhere to basic laws of gravity, inertia and molecular density. I’m talking about tens of thousands of square miles of human territory, and movies that include Her, Solaris, Boyhood, Betrayal, Children of Men, Leviathan, Thelma and Louise, Superbad, Cold War, Across 110th Street, Shoot the Piano Player, Them!, A Separation, The Silence, Se7en, Holy Motors, Silver Linings Playbook, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Hold That Ghost, The Miracle Worker, The Wolf Man, Ikiru, Crossfire, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Duck Soup, Moonlighting, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, the better screwball comedies of the ’30s, The Blob, First Reformed, Ichi the Killer, The Equalizer 2, Adaptation, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, Punch Drunk Love, Out Of the Past, Danton, Some Like It Hot, The Big Sky and God knows how many hundreds or thousands of others.
But if a movie presents human behavior that I regard as completely unrecognizable or nonsensical, that insists on ignoring the way things are out there (or “in” there), I tune out. And if you don’t like that, tough.
I’ve relentlessly shared enthusiasm for the idea of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, which will almost certainly debut at the Venice and Telluride festivals, or about ten weeks hence. (As well as Toronto in mid-September.)
Roma is Cuaron’s first film since Gravity, which debuted six years ago. The only 2018 film that even begins to sound like serious Best Picture rocket fuel, as in allegedly “beyond great” (i.e., a second-hand quote from a publicist who saw it). A Spanish-language film, yes, and digitally shot in radiant black-and-white. A year in the life of a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s, more specifically about the Corpus Christi Massacre of 6.10.71.
Team Roma will launch a balls-out, take-no-prisoners Best Picture campaign, as well as (I’m hearing) a Best Supporting Actress campaign for Marina De Tavira, a 44 year-old actress who apparently plays the maternal heart and soul of said middle-class family.
Will the Netflix factor (i.e., the company’s reluctance to commit to a serious theatrical exposure prior to streaming) get in the way? Ask the Mudbound people who managed four Oscar noms last year (Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Song). So probably not.
What about the foreign-language factor? Michael Haneke‘s Amour was Best Picture nominated six years ago so why not Roma? I’m presuming that, like Amour, Roma will aim for simultaneous Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Feature noms.
Very few remember and even fewer have seen Separate Tables, the 1958 parlor drama with Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Deborah Kerr and Wendy Hiller. And yet this constipated, dialogue-driven film, directed by Delbert Mann (Marty) and based on a pair of one-act plays by Terence Rattigan, was nominated for seven Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actress (Kerr), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Black and White), and Best Dramatic or Comedy Score) and won two (Niven for Best Actor, Hiller for Best Supporting Actress).
Separate Tables is exactly the kind of solemn, stiff-necked talkfest that was often regarded as Oscar bait in the mid-to-late ’50s. Decorum and public appearances undermined by dark secrets and notions of perverse sexuality, etc. Shudder! Erections and dampenings that dare not speak their name, or words to that effect.
Talk about “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” etc. Two years before Separate Tables appeared a creepy, low-budget sci-fi thriller called Invasion of the Body Snatchers opened and was promptly ignored by the highbrows. Four years earlier (in ’54) The Creature From The Black Lagoon was greeted with similar indifference if not disdain. Today a pair of direct descendants, Get Out and The Shape of Water, are Best Picture nominees, and there’s a better-than-even (though admittedly dwindling) chance that Shape will take the Big Prize.
Yesterday I received a hilarious, spot-on essay by the great David Thomson — about Separate Tables initially, but also about how the appeal and some of the “Academy inflation” of this 60-year-old film are echoed in I, Tonya and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Consider this excerpt especially: “About fifteen minutes into I Tonya, on being bowled over by the vicious hangdog look of Allison Janney’s mother, the toxic lines slipping like smoke from the fag on her lips, I was ready to give her the supporting actress Oscar on the spot. Twenty minutes later I was bored with her because she was still doing the same bitter schtick. She’s an act, a show-stopper, the sort of hag who would get a round of applause as she appears on-stage, severing any prospect of dramatic truth.
“It’s not that Janney is less than skilled, or hasn’t paid her dues for decades. She’s a clever old pro so give her the Oscar. But let’s abandon the myth that she is presenting a real ‘deplorable’ instead of saying, ‘Aren’t deplorables a riot?'”
Here’s the whole brilliant piece (the first 17 paragraphs about Separate Tables, and the rest about Janney and Margot Robbie in I, Tonya and McDormand in Three Billboards):
“I found myself watching Separate Tables on Turner Classic Movies. There it was, offered with the seemingly unassailable claim that it had been nominated for Best Picture in 1958 along with six other nominations. It even had two wins, and I remembered that one of them was for David Niven playing a bogus Major. I had seen the film in 1958 and flinched at it even then (the bogus business was all fusspot), in a year that included Vertigo, Touch of Evil, Bonjour Tristesse, Man of the West, The Tarnished Angels and many others that still seem of value.
In the old days the notion of an old man in a wheelchair pawing a young nurse was regarded as a comic cliche. This behavior is actually glimpsed during a scene in a Mar Vista retirement home in Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown…oh, wait! But in today’s environment, such behavior falls under the heading of sexual assault, and is therefore regarded with gravity and alarm, especially when the dirty old man in question is former President George H.W. Bush, who’s now 93.
Yesterday Heather Lind, a 34 year-old actress, reported that Bush, 90 at the time, “touched” her twice during a 2014 photo op. “He didn’t shake my hand,” Lind wrote in an now-deleted Instagram post. “He touched me from behind from his wheelchair with his wife Barbara Bush by his side. He told me a dirty joke. And then, all the while being photographed, touched me again. Barbara rolled her eyes as if to say ‘not again.’ His security guard told me I shouldn’t have stood next to him for the photo.”
A Bush spokesperson apologized for the former Commander in Chief while adding that Bush “would never, under any circumstance, intentionally cause anyone distress.” The word “intentionally” was apparently used because Bush 41 allegedly suffers from Vascular Parkinsonism, a condition which “often necessitates use of Levadopa/carbidopa, a drug with side-effects that include gambling addiction, sexual misconduct, and other impulse control issues.” I don’t know how reliable this information is, but it appears on Lind’s Wikipedia page.
On Facebook this morning Rod Lurie posted a lamentably familiar Joe Popcorn view about Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk. Lurie basically said that (a) it’s too brilliant not to be nominated for Best Picture but (b) it can’t win because the SAG contingent will find it too Olympian, too studied and not character-driven enough. Pretty much the same complaints could have been levelled at Barry Lyndon, right?
Dunkirk, of course, is much grabbier and more commercial than Lyndon ever had a hope of being, but the sons and daughters of the peons who spoke dismissively of Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 masterpiece are just as vocal today, sad to say.
“Yes, Dunkirk is a masterpiece,” Lurie wrote. “One of the great war films of our time, maybe one of the greats period. It’s an auteur’s work. Celluloid Beethoven. I saw it for a second time last night on IMAX — and the experience was different. Immersive. Ethereal. Especially in the ‘air’ segments where we were so in the sky that I feared running out of oxygen. And yet… and yet…Dunkirk will not win the Best Picture Oscar.
“Nolan likely gets the directing statue, so brazenly original a movie it is, so arduous an exercise it might have been, but it’s not getting the top award.
“Best Picture Oscars go to character-driven films. Pretty much every time they go to movies that are humanly driven and not necessarily creatively driven. Maybe that’s because ‘human’ movies are actor-dependent and actors are the plurality of the Academy.
Late this afternoon I attended an Alfonso Cuaron Masterclass in the Salle Bunuel, which was basically the renowned director of Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men and Gravity sitting for an 85-minute interview with French film critic and author Michel Ciment. [A full recording is at the bottom of this page.] They discussed Cuaron’s career — chapter by chapter, film by film — and showed clips. Fine.
And yet Cuaron’s upcoming Spanish-language Roma, which he shot last fall and is basically about a year in the life of a middle-class, Mexico City family in the early ’70s, wasn’t even mentioned. Which disappointed me. I attended this interview not to hear Alfonso talk about Y Tu Mama Tambien or that fucking Harry Potter film or Sandra Bullock or the blood splatter on the lens in Children of Men for the 47th time, but to hear Cuaron speak about Roma at least a little bit…c’mon! Would it have killed him to discuss what it is and what he’s going for, to allude to the story a bit and maybe discuss the tone, themes and whatnot?
I asked Alfonso if there’s any chance of Roma coming out by the end of ’17, and he said “noahh…I didn’t make it.” Maybe it’ll show up at next year’s Cannes Film Festival (an especially good place to launch any quality-propelled, non-English-speaking film), he allowed. Or maybe a year from next fall….who knows? But what a drag that he didn’t even allude to it.
Why don’t technically-sophisticated, state-of-the-art space vehicles in recent space flicks (Life, Passengers, Gravity) have the ability to track oncoming objects and/or debris and alter their flight path in order to avoid collisions? Remember the oncoming-Russian-missile sequence in Dr. Strangelove (“confirmed…definite missile track…continue evasive action”) and how Slim Pickens‘ B-52 banked and swerved and did all it could to avoid the missile? And how they managed to see the missile coming with this amazing technology called “radar”? Why can’t these space vehicles, 1000 times more technically advanced than an early ’60s B52, detect an approaching threat and commence evasive action (ducking, dodging, swerving) to steer clear of harm’s way? I’ll tell you why they can’t. Because the filmmakers like collisions. The rule in these films is that if an object or a debris field of some kind is coming your way, YOUR SPACE VEHICLE IS GOING TO TAKE A BIG HIT, period. No radar, no escape…it’s a demolition derby up there.
The 1984 Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim, James Lapine, Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters’ Sunday in the Park with George melted me down. And now a new production at the Hudson Theatre, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as George and Annaleigh Ashford as Dot/Mariem has opened to rave reviews.
It will run until 4.23, and if I had the surplus dough I would fly back to New York sometime in mid March to catch it. Experiencing the right kind of emotion and exaltation is all but priceless. You only live once, right? Cheers to Jake for reportedly nailing it — for the passion it took to invest himself 110% and enhance his vocal game, for allegedly matching Patinkin note for note and heartbeat for heartbeat.
From Ben Brantley’s N.Y. Times review: “Mr. Gyllenhaal translates the intensity that has characterized his most memorable screen appearances (including Brokeback Mountain and Nightcrawler) into a searing theatrical presence, in which his eyes are his center of gravity. He embodies one of Seurat’s favorite artistic dictums, ‘concentrate,’ with an unwavering focus that seems to consume and illuminate the dark.
“Mr. Gyllenhaal invests every note he sings with the rapt determination of someone trying to capture and pin down the elusive. Watch Seurat at work, dabbing specks of color on his canvas, and listen to the vigor (and rigor) with which he invests the repetition of those colors’ names.”
Beginning of Brantley’s review: “He is a thorny soul, a man neither happy nor particularly kind, and not someone you’d be likely to befriend. But when the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat, reincarnated in the solitary flesh by a laser-focused Jake Gyllenhaal, demands that you look at the world as he does, it’s impossible not to fall in love.
“If you, Mr. Trump, fail to take the Russian threat seriously, if you do not disentangle yourself from your business interests, if you promote corrupt or conflicted advisers and cabinet members, if you fail to understand the gravity of the foreign policy crisis you face, if you deprive millions of health care without an alternative, if you fail to act on the global threat of climate change, if you pit Americans against each other by race, gender, and religion, if you undermine science and reason…there will be an asterisk next to your name” — From a 1.15 post by Dan Rather on Facebook.
Jimmy Fallon, who will emcee tomorrow night’s Golden Globes award telecast, will be on Hollywood Elsewhere’s shit list for the foreseeable future (forever?), and I’ve mentioned him in this context so many times I don’t think I need to explain it again.
Suffice that I agree with a 1.7 Toronto Star article by columnist Vinay Menon, titled “Frat Boy Jimmy Fallon’s Bland Charm Is Rapidly Wearing Thin“:
“[Perhaps] you already know what to expect [tomorrow night]: a star-studded opening number with ambitious tracking shots, singing, dancing, costumes, impressions, fawning odes to the nominees, silly audience play, and scattershot jokes in which the punch lines are never more than gentle pokes.
“This instinct is coded inside Fallon’s DNA. He’s the host of NBC’s The Tonight Show. He’s the ratings leader. He’s a television star in his own right. But more than anything, he is Hollywood’s No. 1 fan, a man-boy saddled with a pop culture obsession who believes life is a karaoke machine inside a frat house where everything is awesome and everyone plays board games before pounding back midnight shots from the fountain of youth and declaring mad love for one another.
“In this cloud of arrested development, Fallon is the affable ringleader. He hugs. He high-fives. He giggles. He claps like a trained seal. He never offends.
I have a built-in weakness as far as listing the most deplorable films of 2016 (or any year) goes because I tend to avoid the shit sandwiches, and so I didn’t even see Miracles From Heaven, Nina, The Brothers Grimsby, Alice Through The Looking Glass, Warcraft, Yoga Hosers, Bad Moms, Divergent: Allegiant, Inferno, Independence Day: Resurgence, Bad Santa 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dirty Grandpa or Zoolander 2, which others have placed on their Worst of ’16 lists.
But I saw at least a few awful-awfuls, and the two that have tied for HE’s Worst Film of the Year prize, hands down, are David Frankel‘s Collateral Beauty (which I despised so much that I left a little before the one-hour mark) and Timur Bekmambetov‘s Ben-Hur.
If you want to disqualify my Collateral Beauty judgment because I bailed halfway through, you’d have to concude that Ben-Hur is HE’s worst because at least I watched it start to finish.
In my 8.19 review I called Ben-Hur “one of the lowest, cheesiest, scurviest, lemme-outta-here films made or distributed by a major U.S. studio, ever. Almost everything about it stinks of mediocrity — the tedious writing, the grayish color scheme, the C-grade cast delivering soap-opera performances, the low-budget vibe despite a reported $100 million having been spent.
“It’s like a 1987 Golan-Globus version of Ben-Hur starring Michael Dudikoff as Judah and Chuck Norris as Messala. It’s third-tier shit, shit, shit, shit, shit on almost every level.”
Significant stinkers that I actually suffered through: Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, London Has Fallen, Man Down, Sea Of Trees, Suicide Squad, The Hollars, The Girl on the Train, etc.
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