Killer Farber Quote #1: “Ashes In The Snow is a bit too somber and unrelentingly bleak to draw much of an audience beyond the festival circuit, but it does showcase a number of talented actors and filmmakers.”
Killer Farber Quote #2: “The film is heartfelt and often powerful, but sometimes too sluggish to carry maximum impact.”
Killer Farber Quote #3: “Ashes In The Snow [is] punishing rather than dramatically gripping. There is not enough variety in the scenes of torment to keep us fully engaged, and the pacing sometimes flags. It is admittedly a challenge to execute this kind of story of brutalization without leaving the audience feeling somewhat brutalized as well. The history is very much worth retelling, but the film might have benefited from a touch of poetry along with the misery.”
I couldn’t find MaggieMay on Facebook, but she’s right. Allow me to blend mine with hers. Yesterday’s Viggo Mortensen pile-on was a “meaningless” expression of “progress-hindering semantic” crap by a bunch of p.c. nellies. Viggo was making “a very good point.” Whiteys “said the word back then while perpetrating racism…now they do the same racist shit while avoiding the word, playing at being non-racist because the slur isn’t uttered.” Viggo has been duly scolded but that’ll do for now. Everyone needs to ease up and stop shouting long enough to consider how gentle he’s always been and what he actually meant. And if that’s not enough, remind yourself that everyone makes mistakes.
HE-plus went live today. It will be a free, all-access, wide-open site for about three weeks, or until 10.15. Then the paywall will launch and HE-plus access will be yours for a small monthly fee or a single annual payment of $49. The usual HE output is roughly six stories (or riffs or reviews) per day. From here on I will post three stories on Hollywood Elsewhere and three HE-plus stories, and occasionally a bit more or less.
If you don’t want to buy access to HE:plus, fine. And if you want to pay for it, fine. Either way the daily content will be split half and half between the two sites. There’s no turning back now.
The other contributors I’ve spoken to (including WorldofReel‘s Jordan Ruimy) will either step forward and start filing or they won’t. If some don’t feel like going forward, fine. I’ll just scratch them off and no harm done.
Please excuse the changing shape of the front page section — the integrity of the framework isn’t holding firm, and is shifting and squeeze-boxing depending on how small or large you make the browser window. I’ll probably have this fixed in a day or two.
And for whatever reason the front-page openings of each story aren’t displaying the html coding (italics, boldface, underline) that appears when you click through to the whole story.
Every new site has glitches that need refining, but HE-plus is in good enough shape to start rolling now. I’ve only been preparing it for six months. I was initially terrified at the idea of having to fill two columns per day, but if I split this three-and-three (or four and three or whatever) I’ll be okay.
Author and historian Neal Gabler, currently writing a biography of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, has penned a dismissive N.Y. Times article about John Curran‘s Chappaquidick, which opens today. The film delivers a reasonably frank account of Kennedy’s July 1969 car accident that resulted in the death of campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne. Gabler’s piece is titled “How Chappaquiddick Distorts a Tragedy,” but it doesn’t explain this in any detail.
Gabler merely states that Joseph P. Kennedy was too incapacitated by a stroke to mutter “alibi,” that “many scenes cross from dramatic interpretation to outright character assassination,” and that that Kennedy, whose “first words after the accident are ‘I’m not going to be president’,” is portrayed as “callow, cunning, cowardly and self-interested yet moronic.”
Maybe, but for an essay that promises to explain how Curran and screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan have distorted history, Gabler offers few specifics.
He basically concludes that the film is “not factual,” “fake history,” that it “eviscerates” Kennedy “for narrow voyeuristic aims.”
Gabler excerpt #1: “Let’s set aside the fact that, despite the film’s advertisements claiming to tell the “untold true story” of a “cover up,” the story has been told plenty, and no one but the most lunatic conspiracy theorists see this as anything but a tragic accident in which nothing much was covered up.”
Gabler excerpt #2: “Contrary to the film’s implications, Kennedy immediately and forever after felt deep remorse and responsibility for the accident; it haunted him. By the end of his life, however, the then white-maned senator had managed to transcend celebrity and emotional paralysis and become what he had long aspired to be: an indispensable legislator whose achievements included the 18-year-old vote, the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Colin Firth has told the Guardian that he “wouldn’t” work with Woody Allen again, blah blah. So Moses Farrow is lying…right, Colin? The bottom line is that Firth, like Timothy Chalamet and other character-challenged thesps, is simply too scared to say anything else. In a 1.19.18 Guardian piece, Los Angeles p.r. crisis expert Danny Deraney says that working with Allen now would be “extremely toxic, and why would you want to surround yourself and your career with potential damaging consequences? I don’t think your performance will be taken seriously. Everyone will be [asking] why did you do it?” We’re living through bad times, scoundrel times.
You have to play it carefully when you talk with Joe Wright, the 45 year-old director of Darkest Hour. You want to be respectful, of course, but you don’t want say the wrong thing. Because for seven-plus years (’05 through ’12) Wright was a knockout, high-style director with all kinds of exciting, mad-thrust energy, and then, all of sudden, he seemed to lose his vision or his footing or you-tell-me.
So you don’t want to ask him, “Uhm, have you gotten that magic-crazy thing back, or are you still recalculating and figuring out the next move?” Because that would sound insulting.
You can’t say what a audacious, flirting-with-genius talent he seemed to be during that seven-year period when he made Pride and Prejudice (’05), Atonement (’07), Hanna (’11) and the drop-to-your-knees Anna Karenina, which I found brilliant and dazzling and everything in between. Because telling him how great he seemed during this period would sound like an allusion to the disappointment his fans felt when he made Pan (’15), a costly, poorly-reviewed kids fantasy flick that lost money.
It follows that you wouldn’t want to ask him, as I did during a quickie interview two or three weeks ago, why he made Pan in the first place. Because he’ll just say, “Well, let’s just that one go.”
And you can’t express a hope that he’ll make another high-style work of genius in the vein of Anna Karenina because that would sound like “so what’s happened to you since Anna Karenina?”
And if you’re the last on a long list you can’t suggest doing a video interview because he’ll probably say, “I’m a little tired…I don’t know.” Okay, forget it.
What I said to Joe, whom I regard as a very important director in the realm of James Cameron and David Fincher, was that he obviously “shot the hell” out of Darkest Hour. But that wound up sounding as if “shooting the hell out of it” was Wright’s way of compensating for a relatively rote, somewhat conventional biopic, which Darkest Hour is to a certain extent. And that’s fine. It is what it is.
Darkest Hour reminds us that would-be tyrants like Adolf Hitler are still around, and that we could all use more fellows with the steel backbone of a Winston Churchill to stand up to them and inspire the old fighting spirit.
I admired and enjoyed Darkest Hour, and I respect the visual energy that Wright used to punch it up as best he could. But I still want the old Wright back. I can’t help myself. I’m fine with Darkest Hour, but I want a return of Joe, the gifted madman.
“Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (Focus Features, 11.16.12) will have its detractors (in my screening today five or six people were actually chuckling at it during a high-emotion scene in the late second act) but for me it’s a serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a disciple of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.
“You either go with the proscenium-arch grandiosity of a film like Anna Karenina or you don’t (and I was just talking in the Bell Lightbox lobby with a critic who didn’t care for it) but if you ask me it has all the essential ingredients of a bold-as-brass Best Picture contender — an excitingly original approach, cliff-leaping audacity, complex choreography, the balls to go classic and crazy at the same time, a wild mixture of theatricality and romantic realism, a superbly tight and expressive script by Tom Stoppard and wowser operatic acting with a special hat-tip to Keira Knightley as Anna — a Best Actress performance if I’ve ever seen one.
I was briefly stunned to read about Ed Douglas’s suspension from the Tracking Board earlier today because this seemed to indicate, at least for a moment, that something he might’ve done years ago had caught up with him. But no — Douglas was attacked by a Twitter mob yesterday after he went on an epic non-p.c. rant about various sexual assault accusers who have come forward in recent days. The veteran critic should have thought twice before saying what he said, but this is an example of how easily you can get yourself in big trouble these days if you aren’t careful. Again — Douglas hasn’t been canned, just suspended. The situation will be evaluated tomorrow during a chat with Tracking Board honcho Jeff Sneider. “I also have a staff full of women to worry about, including a survivor of sexual assault,” Sneider explained this afternoon. “Ed is fine with the decision so case closed. We’re moving on, and he’ll be back when he’s back.”
Right now the iron is hot and strikable for Kate McKinnon, and if she’s smart she’ll snag a dramatic role in a high-end, well-reviewed prestige drama of some kind. That will plant her flag and kick things up to a higher level. If she continues to be the SNL funny lady who makes unsubtle dumbshit movies on the side, she’ll be done in three or four years. She has to make her mark as a serious actress. Last November’s performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” told me she has the gravitas.
Leave women athletes alone. Don’t go there. They have their own realm, and it is what it is. Don’t try and crash it with an unfair comparison. Yes, Serena Williams might not measure up to a lot of young male tennis players today….so? Note to McEnroe: You’re only 57, dude. You could stand a little touch-up work, the kind no one would notice. Just saying.
Now that Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant has more or less tanked domestically (a pathetic $67 million so far), will any of the learned fanboys who creamed in their pants when reviews popped in early May admit that they over-sold it to their trusting readers, and that they basically didn’t have the balls to call a spade a spade?
Of course not, but 71% of the Rotten Tomatoes gang gave it a thumbs-up. For whatever fickle reasons ticket buyers didn’t agree for the most part. Could this have been because this 20th Century Fox release more or less blows? I was looking like an outlier when I called it crap on 5.7.17, but it’s fair to say I’m looking a bit more sage now.
“I didn’t dislike Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant — I hated it,” I wrote. “And I’m not saying that out of some lazy-wrath instinct or pissy posturing or what-have-you. I’m talking about serious stomach-acid sensations here. Then again I mostly despised Prometheus so it didn’t take a great deal of effort to come to this.
“If Prometheus rang your hate bell, you’re going to despise this one also. For Alien: Covenant, which runs 121 minutes but feels like 150, is truly a spawn of that awful 2012 film.
“Is it ‘better’ than Prometheus? All right, yeah, I suppose it is. Is it therefore worth seeing? Maybe, but only if you like watching films that make you resent everything on the face of the planet including yourself. I’m not going to tap out the usual story, character and actor rundown. All you need to know is that I didn’t give a damn about any of Alien: Covenant. Nothing. I was muttering ‘Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou’ the whole time.”
In a nutshell, Sean Spicer‘s Hitler gaffe was a claim that Nazi Germany’s immortal monster “was not using the gas on his own people” like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad “was doing…[not] in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down [on] innocents…in the middle of town.” Remember that everyone is calling this much-apologized-for statement a gaffe — an accidental, inappropriate slip of the tongue that either reveals something truthful or (in this case) the mindset of the speaker. For what Spicer meant (and is now very, very sorry for having said) is that European Jews were not Hitler’s people, that they were the subversive, non-patriotic “other”, as Hitler and his Third Reich henchmen repeatedly described them in the ’30s. This indicates that Spicer himself, speaking from his 2017 Trumpian perspective, has bought into the same notion about European Jewry not being real Germans. He can apologize, but he can’t un-say what he said.