Last night I finally saw James Franco‘s The Disaster Artist (A24, 12.1), which has generated pseudo-hip excitement since debuting at last March’s South by Southwest. It’s basically an amusing-but-never-hilarious thing — it never bored me but it never quite lifts off the ground either. But it’s worth catching, I’d say. It falls under the heading of “necessary viewing.”
On the other hand a lot of cognoscenti who should know better have gone apeshit over The Disaster Artist (what award-season handicapper suggested it might even be worthy of inclusion on a best-of-2017 list?), and I’m telling you right now that it’s time to calm down. It’s fine for what it is, but take it easy.
It’s basically a flat but unaffected true-life saga of the making of a notoriously awful indie-level film called The Room, which, after opening in ’03, gradually acquired a rep of being so bad it’s hilarious and perhaps even brilliant in a twisted-pretzel, ice-cream-cone-slammed-into-the-forehead kind of way.
Based on Greg Sistero‘s same-titled memoir about the making of The Room and his bromance with the film’s vampirish director-writer-star, Tommy Wiseau, The Disaster Artist is basically a curio, a diversion. It generates a kind of chuckly vibe on a scene-by-scene basis, but that’s all.
It might seem a bit funnier if you’re watching it ripped or better yet ripped with your friends during a midnight show somewhere. Or if you’re watching it ripped with producer-costar Seth Rogen and producer Evan Goldberg in a private screening room. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been high in a long time, but I bet it would help. All I can tell you is that the Academy fuddy-duds I saw it with last night at the London Hotel screening room were chortling from time to time, but no one was howling with laughter or rolling in the aisles.
The Disaster Artist is basically a one-joke thing that says over and over that having no talent and being a total moron is no hindrance to making an attention-getting film if — a really big “if” here — you’ve got a few million to throw around and you’re willing to spend it freely on production and marketing and so on. It also says that if you’re a profoundly stupid actor and generally beyond redemption in terms of knowing how to produce, direct and write it can be “funny” for people to watch you struggle and fail in your attempt to make a shitty little indie drama that no one will pay to see, etc.
But if your film turns out to be “so awful it’s astounding,” the film says, you might have a shot at a certain kind of notoriety.
It sounds unkind if not cruel to say this, but the invisible subtitle of Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel, which I saw this morning, is “I got nothin’ left to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway.”
It’s not a substandard or dismissable film, but it’s not grade-A either. It’s basically a thrown-together stew of familiar Allen-esque elements and influences — a little Chekhov-Seagull action, a little re-frying of Blue Jasmine desperation mixed with A Streetcar Named Desire, a dash of Mary Beth Hurt‘s “Joey” character in Interiors, some gangster seasoning from Bullets over Broadway plus some onions, garlic, celery and sauteed peppers and a little Crimes and Misdemeanors.
But it has some magnificent cinematography by the great Vittorio Storaro. It’s totally worth seeing for this alone.
Wonder Wheel is basically a gloomy stage play — don’t trust any reviewer who calls it a “dramedy” — about a love triangle that ends in doom and despair. For my money it felt too stagey, too “written”, too theatrical. Every doomed character seems to be saying lines, and I just didn’t believe it. I never stopped saying to myself “the writing hasn’t been sufficiently finessed.”
Wonder Wheel‘s tragic figure is poor Ginny (Kate Winslet), a 39 year-old might-have-been actress on her second marriage, living in a Santo Loquasto-designed Coney Island apartment with a pot-bellied lunkhead named Humpty (Jim Belushi), miserable as fuck with a waitress gig at a local clam house and coping with a strange pyromaniac son whom I didn’t care for and wanted to see drowned.
There are two wild cards — a Trigorin-like would-be playwright/lifeguard named Mickey Rubin (Justin Timberlake), and Carolina (Juno Temple), Humpty’s unstable daughter who shows up in scene #1, looking to hide out after yapping to the FBI about her gangster ex-husband and concerned that friends of her ex might want to hurt her.
Early on Ginny falls for Mickey and vice versa to a certain extent. The problem is that Ginny starts to imagine that Mickey can somehow help her escape from her miserable life. But Mickey is just looking for writerly experience and not interested in being anyone’s savior, except perhaps his own.
The second problem is that soon after meeting Carolina Mickey starts to think about easing out of his affair with Ginny and maybe….no, he doesn’t want to be a two-timing shit so he puts it out of his mind, but you know what they say about Mr. Happy. He wants what he wants.
Wonder Wheel is a lament for life’s unhappy losers — for those marginally talented people who never quite made it artistically, or who made one or two big mistakes and never recovered, and who are stuck in a dead-end job or marriage that is making them more and more miserable. It starts out saying “these people are not only unhappy, but nothing they can do can free them from the mud of misery.” It ends up saying “you thought these folks couldn’t be less happy? Well, we figured a way!”
Last March a research-screening guy expressed measured enthusiasm for Joseph Kosinski‘s Granite Mountain, a true-life action tragedy costarring Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch and Jennifer Connelly. At the time it was a Lionsgate film slated to open on 9.22. Then a conflict arose between Lionsgate and production company Black Label Media, and the distribution rights shifted over to Sony. It was re-titled as Only The Brave and is now slated to open on 10.20. I just saw it the day before yesterday at a Dolby screening facility on Hollywood Blvd.
The squabble suggested it might somehow be weak or insufficient on some level, but Only The Brave is actually a well-made, better-than-decent film about tough Arizona firefighters who love their demanding, dangerous work, and how some of them care more about each other more than their wives or kids (or at least are still weighing the relative merits). In movie-lore terms they’re a team of Howard Hawks hombres, or guys who measure themselves by the same macho yardstick that Cary Grant applied in Only Angels Have Wings and which John Wayne demanded of his men in Red River. “How good are you?”, “Do you have what it takes?”, “Can I depend on you when the heat comes down and the going gets tough?,” etc.
Only The Brave is about the infamous Yarnell Hill blaze — an inferno that killed 19 Prescott-based firefighters in June 2013. All of them youngish and white (Prescott is one of the whitest cities in the country) and intensely proud of being a member of the elite Granite Mountain hotshots. It was the deadliest incident of any kind for U.S. firefighters since the 9.11.01 attacks, and the sixth-deadliest American firefighter disaster of all time.
So it’s basically about a merging of the Hawks ethos and 21st Century red-state attitudes, and then served on a silver tray as a big, sad-ass tragedy from director Jospeh Kosinski (Oblivion, Tron: Legacy), who knows from smooth, clean and decisive chops.
It’s based on a 9.27.13 GQ story by Sean Flynn (“No Exit: The Granite Mountain Yarnell Fire Investigation”). The screenplay is by Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer.
The lead-up to the tragedy (i.e., the first 75% or 80%) is what sold me. This is one of those unassuming, middle-of-the-road, regular-guy, red-blooded, beer-drinking action movies that you just know is going to work out. Not for the characters but as a dramatic piece. It just makes you relax and wait for it. Well-acted, nicely written and paced and just an all-around, well-handled ensemble piece about hairy-ass firefighting.
Josh Brolin and Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller have the biggest roles and, as you might expect, deliver the strongest performances.
I was slightly bothered by the fact that these guys are all conservatives but I got past that. When the big tragedy finally hits…I wouldn’t want to lie and say I didn’t feel slightly conflicted about the fact that these 19 guys who probably would have voted for Trump if they’d lived, but I felt the sadness, for sure.
What I’m about to mention wouldn’t have been mentioned in the ’90s or even the early aughts, but we live today in a p.c. realm that pretty much insists upon a vision of multicultural plurality and progressive racial identity politics, even when such a depiction doesn’t stand up to historical fact or likelihood (such as the casting of Leslie Odom, Jr in Kenneth Branagh‘s Murder on the Orient Express.
Each and every character in Only The Brave is Wonderbread because the town is almost entirely that. Needless to add this depiction goes against the multicultural projection ethos of present-day Hollywood, which usually insists on at least one or two Hispanic or African American cast members in any ensemble. Strange as it sounds, Kosinski, Nolan and Singer actually stuck to the demographic facts. Imagine that.
According to a chart I’ve found online, Prescott is 92.93% white, only 1.27% American Indian and Alaska native and 0.5% African American, and 0.83% Asian. Suburbanstats.org claims that 8% of Prescott is Hispanic.
“Does mother! have to be explained? What about the experience of watching it? It was so tactile, so beautifully staged and acted — the subjective camera and the POV reverse angles, always in motion…the sound design, which comes at the viewer from around corners and leads you deeper and deeper into the nightmare…the unfolding of the story, which very gradually becomes more and more upsetting as the film goes forward.
“The horror, the dark comedy, the biblical elements, the cautionary fable — they’re all there, but they’re elements in the total experience, which engulfs the characters and the viewers along with them. Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture, which I’m still experiencing weeks after I saw it.
“Good films by real filmmakers aren’t made to be decoded, consumed or instantly comprehended. They’re not even made to be instantly liked. They’re just made, because the person behind the camera had to make them. And as anyone familiar with the history of movies knows all too well, there a very long list of titles — The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo and Point Blank, to name just a few — that were rejected on first release and went on to become classics. Tomatometer ratings and Cinemascore grades will be gone soon enough. [Or] maybe they’ll be muscled out by something even worse.
“Or maybe they’ll fade away and dissolve in the light of a new spirit in film literacy. Meanwhile, passionately crafted pictures like mother! will continue to grow in our minds.” — posted in The Hollywood Reporter on 10.10.
Wells to Scorsese: I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for “the light of a new spirit in film literacy”…not in this Godforsaken culture.
Yesterday Variety‘s Owen Gleibermanposted a piece about what he describes as obsessive fanboy worship of Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner, and how that purist fervor found its voice in Blade Runner 2049.
The key element in Scott’s 1982 original, Gleiberman argues, “is its transcendental mystique — the fact that it now plays like the sci-fi blockbuster equivalent of slow food. Its storytelling longueurs have been inflated into the very signifiers of its artistry. It has become not just a movie but a symbol: the anti-Star Wars.”
Key observation: “I remain a fan of Blade Runner, but to be in the cult of Blade Runner is to celebrate the purity of its vision, and to join in a conspiracy theory about the forces that would obliterate that purity.” Gleiberman doesn’t specifically call director Denis Villeneuve a cultist, but he kinda does.
My argument with the piece is in this passage: “[Scott’s Blade Runner was] a majestic science-fiction metaphor, beginning with its opening shot: the perpetual nightscape of Los Angeles in 2019, the smog turned to black, the fallout turned to rain, the smokestacks blasting fireballs that look downright medieval against a backdrop of obsidian blight. Blade Runner wasn’t the first — or last — image of a desiccated future, but it remains one of the only movies that lets you feel the mechanical-spiritual decay.
“There’s a touch of virtual reality to the way we experience it, sinking into those blackened textures, reveling in the details (the corporate Mayan skyscrapers, the synthetic sushi bars, the Times Square-meets-Third World technolopolis clutter), seeing an echo of our own world in every sinister facet.”
But how much of an echo? Scott’s film was a noirish ecological forecast of where we all might be headed, and I fully understand that vision-wise there’s no upside to low-balling whatever horrors the future might bring. But at the same time if you’re predicting…okay, imagining a world as horrific as Blade Runner‘s from a 1982 vantage point, or 37 years into the future back then, shouldn’t you have to pay some kind of piper if your vision has been proven to be way, wayoff? If what you foresaw hasn’t even begun to manifest?
Scott’s Blade Runner milieu — nightmarish, gloom-ridden, poisoned — is obviously a trip in itself and fun to wallow in, but it was set less than two years from today, in 2019, and as I said last weekend the sprawl of real-world Los Angeles has exposed that realm as absolute noir-fetish fanboy bullshit.
“Blade Runner 2049 is, of course, a prophecy of ecological run to come, and that’s where we’re definitely heading with criminals like Scott Pruitt running the EPA,” I wrote, “but BR49‘s idea of what Los Angeles will look like 32 years hence is almost surely just as ludicrous as Scott’s.
Appearances to the contrary, The Mountain Between Us (20th Century Fox, 10.6) is not Touching The Void with a love story on the side but a love story with Touching The Void on the side, except it’s not as good as Touching The Void. Plus it’s a love story from hell, or certainly one afflicted with crabby vibes
Photojournalist Alex (Kate Winslet) and Ben (Idris Elba), a mild-mannered surgeon, decide to share the cost of a chartered small plane after their commercial flight is grounded at some airport in Idaho. Their older, overweight pilot (Beau Bridges) suffers a mid-flight stroke and they wind up crashing atop a mountain. They both survive, but after two or three days it’s clear they’ll have to hike their way down to civilization. Various threats manifest (predators, foul weather, hunger, a near-fatal fall, thin ice) but you knew that going in.
The best kind of hetero love story is one in which (a) a profound connection has occured and you’re dying for the would-be lovers to make something out of it, but (b) they don’t due to some overriding expectation or previous commitment or third-act tragedy. The worst kind of love story is one in which the woman is obviously a high-strung, Type-A ballbuster (Kate) and the guy is too thick to understand what he’s run into, and then he falls for her and they fuck and so on, and your feelings for him are torn between pity and contempt.
I saw The Mountain Between Us at the Toronto Film Festival, and you could just feel the “oh, no” current in the room. Everyone knew that Idris had made the wrong move. I was telepathically screaming “fuck, dude…you have a life and an honorable profession and many responsibilities back east, and you’re becoming romantically interested in a woman who’s obviouslynodayatthebeach on top of trying to survive amid snow and icy temperatures and mountain lions?….what are you doing, man?”
I believed in Winslet as an object d’amour 20 years ago in Titanic, but that’s the glow of youth. Now she’s 42 and a bit weather-worn. She’s been through this and that with kids and a divorce and a house fire and everything else, and you can just tell by her anxious, fretful expression in those stills from Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel that she’s a stressed-out, high-maintenance handful.
I’ve seen Susan Lacy‘s Spielberg (HBO, 10.7), a two-and-a-half-hour doc about the journey and the psychology of Steven Spielberg, and I’m telling you there’s more emotional revelation and honesty and cinematic punch in this thing than in many of Spielberg’s features, certainly the ones he’s made over the last 20-plus years.
It begins with a taste of Lawrence of Arabia and then a recollection from Spielberg about how he saw it repeatedly at age 16 and how it seemed so masterful that he nearly gave up his dream of becoming a movie director. Right from the start I was saying to myself, “I love this…this is about my church, my faith and all the movie dreams I’ve carried inside for decades…I love it already and it hasn’t even begun.”
Does Lacy shamelessly brown-nose? Yup, ‘fraid so. Does she sidestep, avert her gaze, emphasize the positive and avoid tough questions at almost every turn? Yes, she does. Is Spielberg, in fact, a 150-minute blowjob? Yeah, it is. But it’s a classy and beautifully assembled one. Spielberg delivers what most of us refer to as “the goods.” It offers balance, panache, love, perspective, open hearts, insight, joie de cinema and elegant editing and…oh, just a feeling of immense comfort and familiarity and fraternal bon ami.
I kind of loved it despite Lacy’s herculean determination to avoid telling the real truth about Spielberg-the-magnificent-and-bowed-down-to, which is that he’s a truly gifted lightweight, a very clever and hugely energetic guy who knows how to shoot the hell out of anything but has come to few conclusions and has next to nothing to say about the human condition or the state of the world, but has been insanely successful and that’s all that matters to most of the people in this town so what the hell…ass-smooch!
I take back that “nothing to say” stuff — Spielberg has often expressed his sentiments about how suburban family life is the greatest thing and how moms are generally more reliable than dads and that having an inner fantasy life can save you, etc.
The best parts are about Spielberg recalling his home life in a Pheonix suburb, his early discomfort about being a supposed Jewish outsider (a mindset that he profoundly reversed with the act of making Schindler’s List), his parents’ divorce (although he never explains why), the early feelings of inadequacy, how he had no life until his first son, Max, came along, etc.
Excerpt #1: American Made, Mendelsohn writes, “had nothing to sell except Tom Cruise in a leading role.” In other words, the movie itself — a lively, better-than-decent, true-life saga of an airline pilot who got rich from hauling Columbian cartel cocaine but also landed in a heap of trouble — isn’t sellable. Why? Because it doesn’t have any brand recognition elements to attract the lowest-common-denominator dumbshits.
What kind of stinking bullshit is that? I’ll tell you what kind it is. The kind of stinking bullshit assumption that studio suits, agents and marketing executives throw at each other 24/7.
By the same token if Cruise were to star in a Michael Mann remake of The Bridge on the River Kwai, these same assholes would say “we have nothing to sell except Cruise in a leading role.” Okay, with a wooden bridge being blown up at the end, they might add, but what is that compared to the kind of eye-popping spectacle delivered by any Batman, Wonder Woman or Black Panther flick? You sickening scuzballs, I would reply — please hold still while I spit in your face.
Excerpt #2: American Made‘s $17 million represents Cruise’s “lowest wide weekend debut since the 12.21.12 debut of Jack Reacher,” which started out with $15 million but finished up with a modest but not bad $80 million. I saw and really admired Jack Reacher, and a lot of people obviously agreed with me. And yet Mendelsohn is describing it in losing terms.
Mendelsohn is also calling this weekend’s $17 million haul Cruise’s “second-lowest wide-release debut” since Jerry Maguire back in December of 1996.” Cameron Crowe‘s sports-agent drama earned $17,084,296 after opening on 12.13.96, but in 2017 terms that comes to $26,446,000 so there goes that fucking analogy. Mendelsohn acknowledges the inflation factor later in the piece, except he claims that $17,084,296 in 1996 dollars equals $34 million today.
Excerpt #3: “The mid-1990’s was a time when a well-liked Tom Cruise movie could leg it to $125 million domestic from a $15 to $20 million debut because the movie business as a whole was much less frontloaded,” Mendelsohn states. “So now instead of legging it to $100 million, a well-received, well-reviewed movie like American Made will be thrilled to crawl to $60m from a $16.5m debut.”
That’s an accurate read. Audiences are much, much dumber and more distracted today. And Cruise’s rep was more stellar and gleaming back then — for the last 17 years he’s carved a rep as the energizer bunny of action films who can never be rich enough, who won’t stop and who refuses to let age slow him down even slightly.
Excerpt #4: American Made is “Cruise’s first starring vehicle since Valkyrie that isn’t a franchise-friendly, sci-fi or hard-action extravaganza.” On top of which it’s “one of Cruise’s lowest-grossing movies in 21 years partially because it’s his first old-school star vehicle in a generation.” Translation: He’s not an energizer bunny this time — “never holds a gun, never runs and if anything spends much of the movie being played and/or in over his head.” The fact that the 55-year-old Cruise is playing a guy in his early to mid 40s with a hot-blonde wife in her early 30s doesn’t seem to cut much ice.
Except #5: So is American Made‘s $17 million opener and projected $60 million total “a disappointment,” Mendelsohn asks, “or is it a validation of Cruise’s star power when Brad Pitt‘s Allied opens with just $12.7 million, Adam Sandler is at Netflix and the likes of Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey and Harrison Ford haven’t had a hit theatrical star vehicle (outside of sequels to their former franchises) in ages?” He seems to agree that $60 million plus whatever it does overseas will be regarded as a modestly successful haul” unless it performs like Oblivion, the second Jack Reacher or The Mummy and only manifests a 2.4 multiplier, which would result in a domestic tally $40 million or thereabouts…bust.
But God, that first statement — “American Made has nothing to sell except Tom Cruise in a leading role” — burns my ass! It’s another reminder that multiplex and big-studio-release-wise, we’re living on a planet of ape-like retards — a mass audience that processes everything like a drooling ADD dumbass and thereby refuses to patronize a film that doesn’t have big, easily recognizable dumbshit elements to sell. It’s the way of the megaplex world today. The cretins are running the asylum.
As I waited for the lights to come down and Last Flag Flying to begin, I was thinking the following: “This is a 30-years-later Last Detail sequel ** without Jack Nicholson or Randy Quaid and minus the names of the original characters, so it’s obviously going to feel hand-me-downish — not just older and saggier but lacking that Nicholsonian spark. But it still needs to deliver the spirit and character-rich humor and melancholy of Hal Ashby‘s 1973 original. And if it can’t manage that, it needs to invent something else that will work just as well.”
Well, forget all that.
Directed and co-written by Richard Linklater, Last Flag Flying (Amazon / Lionsgate, 11.3) is just a moderately passable older-guy road movie — a doleful, episode-by-episode thing about three ex-servicemen and former buddies — Larry “Doc” Shepherd (Steve Carell), Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) — assessing their lives and the world around them as they escort the casket of Shepherd’s soldier son, recently killed in Iraq, from Dover, Maryland (or Norfolk, Virginia — not sure which) to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
This is nearly the same path, of course, that the original film followed when Badass Buddusky (Nicholson) and Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) escorted Larry Meadows (Quaid) to the Portsmouth brig for the crime of having stolen $40 from a polio donation box. For whatever tangled reasons Linklater and original novel author and screenplay co-writer Daryl Poniscan chose to re-name Buddusky as Nealon, Mulhall as Mueller and Meadows as Shepherd. This led to ignoring the Last Detail origin story and making the trio into Vietnam vets with a shared history.
The difference is that (a) Nealon-Buddusky, as played by Cranston, is now an intemperate, pot-bellied drunk, (b) Fishburne’s Mueller-Mulhall has become a testy, sanctimonious prig with white hair, and (c) Carell’s Shepherd-Meadows has gotten shorter with age and become a quiet, bespectacled grief monkey (and who can blame the poor guy?)
The film mopes along in a resigned, overcast-skies sort of way, and after about 30 or 40 minutes you start saying to yourself, “Jesus, this thing is going to stay on this level all the way through to the end, and I’m stuck with it.”
There are two performances that merit special praise — J. Quinton Johnson‘s as a young Marine escort, disciplined but observant, who travels with the trio to Portsmouth, and Deanna-Reed Foster‘s as Mueller’s compassionate wife.
I know I’m supposed to say that Cicely Tyson‘s walk-on part as the mother of a deceased Vietnam vet rocked my realm, but it mostly registered as a “good enough but calm down” thing.
The Last Detail was based on Ponicsan’s 1970 novel. Last Flag Flying is based on Ponicsan’s same-titled 2005 novel, the main difference being that the book used the names and history of the original characters.
Here’s what I wrote to a critic friend the day after seeing Last Flag Flying:
“My instinct is not to dismiss this too quickly or abruptly. Sometimes less can be deceptively more, I’m thinking, and so perhaps I should give this meandering little film the benefit of the doubt by thinking it through a bit longer. But I can’t find anything beneath what my initial impressions were, which is that there just isn’t much here.
“I kept waiting for something truly intriguing, significant, jarring or emotionally moving to happen, but nothing ever did. It’s just a series of modest little road-trip episodes.
“The scene that pops the most, I suppose, is the airplane hanger scene when Carell witnesses his son’s dead and disfigured body and learns the truth about what really caused his death. I started to feel hopeful after this, but the film just settled back into a kind of lazy sluggishness after this, and nothing really happened.
“A very minor film, I’m afraid. If you compare it to Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (and how can you not?), it falls short in every regard — story, dialogue, performances, flavor, humor, emotional impact.
“Remember that great marital argument scene between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Midnight? I was hoping that Linklater and Ponicsan’s energy might try to go in the same direction and that something charged and confrontational might manifest at the end, but alas…no.
“I’m not calling Last Flag Flying a ‘bad’ or ineffective film, but it’s certainly underwhelming.
“What is it really saying? That it’s tragic and unbearably sad to lose a son, that official authorities are never to be trusted, that guilt can linger for decades or a lifetime, and that loyalty among men who’ve served in the military lasts forever.
“I’m quite irritated that the Last Detail character names have been changed…VERY irritated. Coarse & boozy Sal Nealon/Buddusky calls bullshit on everyone and everything. Mulhall/Mueller hobbles around on a cane, laments Buddusky’s alcoholism, and gradually lets his real self emerge. Meadows/Larry ‘Doc’ Shepherd weeps for his son and his recently deceased wife.
“I saw it Wednesday evening at 7 pm, and the after-vibe was one of vague confusion and befuddlement. The conversational huddles I heard were along the lines of ‘uhhm, what was that? Am I missing something? Did you read the book?,’ etc.
** The events of Poniscan’s “Last Detail” book, published in ’70, were supposed to be happening in ’68 or ’69, or just shy of 50 years ago. Ashby’s Last Detail film was released in ’73, which obviously makes it 44 years old. But the Last Flag Flying story takes place in ’03, or 30 years after the movie came out, which is why I used the above shorthand description — “a 30 years-later Last Detail sequel.”
A little more than six months ago an extended trailer for Alex Garland‘s Annihilation was shown at Cinemacon. It wowed a lot of journos (myself among them) and exhibs. I’d also been reading online that at the very least it has an absolutely killer ending.
But I have to be honest and say that the trailer that popped this morning [below] isn’t as grabby or intriguing as the Cinemacon reel. My reaction last March was “wow, okay…that was something.” My reaction to today’s trailer is “uhhm, okay, yeah…why does this seem less intriguing?”
It costars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, David Gyasi and Sonoya Mizuno.
Earlier today I finally saw Jim Carrey and Chris Smith‘s Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond. It’s a 95-minute doc about Carrey’s super-intense experience in portraying put-on comic Andy Kaufman for Milos Forman‘s Man on the Moon (’99). As a “making of” saga it’s a way-above-average thing, and as a slice of intimate celebrity portraiture it’s anything but run-of-the-mill.
The film achieves specialness by way of (a) a trove of heretofore-unseen backstage footage, shot by a crew Carrey hired to stay with him throughout filming, and (b) Carrey’s talking-head narration, which I found perceptive and (to my surprise) emotionally affecting.
I was hoping for a diverting backstage thing, but Jim & Andy is much more than that.
It’s not just an essay about the craft of movie acting and the ritual of surrendering to a role, which Carrey did so completely while playing Kaufman in ’98 that he literally stopped being himself on a 24/7 basis (refusing to answer to Jim, speaking of himself in the third person). It’s also a study of the personas that we all project socially vs. the person we really are deep down. Which makes it a food-for-thought film about what social identity really boils down to, and the games that we all submit to in order to fulfill expectations and keep up appearances.
I was never not fascinated, and I loved the flavor of it. I was especially struck by an anecdote about a certain phone conversation Carrey had with Man on the Moon director Milos Forman, during which Carrey floated an idea about “firing” Kaufman and the super-contemptible TonyClifton (I was never able to tolerate this alter-ego asshole) and doing imitations instead.
I could summarize a few more highlights but I’m out of time. You’ll be better off just seeing the film and discovering them for yourself.
Mainly I felt riveted by Carrey’s commentary and Zen vibe. Sure, you can call Jim & Andy a vanity project as there are no talking heads besides the 55 year-old actor, and yet there’s something to be said for this strategy. Carrey’s relaxed, seemingly-nothing-to-hide manner of speaking (and who knows what’s real and what isn’t in terms of who he really is and what he’s chosen to pass along?) reaches out and somehow connects. His candid recollections, perceptive assessments, shoulder-shrugging charisma, seeming honesty and longish hair and gray beard, etc. — it all adds up to a package and a presentation that I trusted.
For all the media-driven perceptions about Carrey having gradually evolved over the last 10 or 15 years into something of a wiggy eccentric (Guardian critic Jordan Hoffmanwrote in his review that Carrey “comes off as an asshole”), Carrey struck me as genuine and whole. There doesn’t seem (emphasis on the “s” word) to be any lying in the guy. And the story behind his Kaufman performance is a trip.
And on that note, I have to leave for a 6:30 pm screening of The Wife at Roy Thomson Hall.
Thirteen months ago I threw some praise at a 5.11.16 draft of Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan‘s Chappaquiddick. I tore through it in no time. It’s the kind of well-finessed backroom melodrama that I love — no bullshit, subdued emotions, no tricks or games. It’s tense and well-honed, and, like I said on 8.18.16, a nightmare that had me shaking my head and muttering “Jesus H. Christ”.
Like the script, the film (which I saw this morning at 8:30 am) is a damning, no-holds-barred account of the infamous July 1969 auto accident that caused the death of Kennedy family loyalist and campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, and which nearly destroyed Sen. Edward Kennedy‘s political career save for some high-powered finagling and string-pulling that allowed the younger brother of JFK and RFK to more or less skate.
Jason Clarke as the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy in John Curran’s Chappaquiddick.
Just about every scene exudes the stench of an odious situation being suppressed and re-narrated by big-time fixers, many of whom are appalled at Ted’s behavior and character but who do what’s necessary regardless.
There’s no question that director John Curran, dp Maryse Alberti and editor Keith Fraase are dealing straight, compelling cards, and that the film has stuck to the ugly facts as most of us recall and understand them, and that by doing so it paints the late Massachusetts legislator and younger brother of JFK and RFK in a morally repugnant light, to put it mildly.
All along I’ve been hoping that Curran would just shoot the script efficiently, minus any kind of showing off or oddball strategies that might diminish what was on the page. This is exactly what he’s done. Curran has crafted an intelligent, mid-tempo melodrama about a weak man who commits a careless, horrible act, and then manages to weasel out of any serious consequences.
Chappaquiddick may not be the stuff of monumental cinema (stylistically it feels like a respectable HBO-level thing), but it’s a frank account of how power works (or worked in 1969, at least) when certain people want something done and are not averse to calling in favors. EMK evaded justice by way of ingrained subservience to the Kennedy mystique, a fair amount of ethical side-stepping and several relatively decent folks being persuaded to look the other way.