With all due respect for Park Chan-wook’s smoothly masterful filmmaking chops (no one has ever disputed this) and the unbridled passion that his cultish film critic fans have expressed time and again...
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How could there be negative reactions to this trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One? It looks great, especially the footage of Tom Cruise riding on horseback through sand dunes, dressed in Middle-Eastern commando garb?
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In a 5.22 chat with Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro, Armageddon Time director-writer James Gray delivered a neat assessment of the stink factor in mainstream gladiator cinema.
He basically said that CG comic-book spectacle films are systematically draining the poetry, music and gravitas out of the moviegoing experience.
Once in a blue moon a big franchise film will hit the magic button and deliver something transcendent. One example was last December’s SpiderMan: No Way Home, which I said over and over should be Best Picture-nominated. But mostly they don’t do this. Mostly they just make money.
Gray argues that the big studios “should be willing to lose money for a couple of years on art film divisions, and in the end they will be happier.”
In less extremist terms, Gray is suggesting that the big boys should consider reverting to the ’90s and early aughts system in which specialty divisions made smaller films — films that weren’t expected to bring in huge profits but didn’t necessarily lose money. Which means, of course, that above-the-title talent would have to accept lower fees for making these films. (And there’s the rub.)
HE version: The studios should at least be willing to make smarthouse flicks with a reasonable shot at breaking even or becoming modestly profitable.
Francois Truffaut once said that when one of the films produced by his company, Les Films du Carrosse, reached break even he and his colleagues would pop open a bottle of champagne.
#Cannes2022 ‘Armageddon Time’ Director James Gray On Why Studios Should Be Able To Lose Money On Art Specialty Divisions https://t.co/SgodYB80uM pic.twitter.com/Zno5g6uVQz
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) May 22, 2022
Brett Morgan‘s David Bowie doc seems innately exciting (and how could it not be?); Park Chan-Wook‘s Decision to Leave looks and sounds exactly like a PCW film. Those actors generating those oppressive actorish expressions…God!
So far the 2022 Cannes Film Festival has felt weak. Okay, pretty good but not good enough. A pair of triples (R.M.N., the first half of Triangle of Sadness) but in terms of terms of excellence or ambition or primal goading madness, no homers or grand slams.
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Come hell or high water, Hollywood Elsewhere intends to see the following films today (Monday, 5.23): (a) Park Chan- Wook‘s Decision to Leave (Salle Debussy, 4:30 pm); (b) David Cronenberg‘s Crimes of the Future (Salle Debussy, 9:45 pm), and (c) Brett Morgen‘s Moonage Daydream (David Bowie doc, 12 midnight, Grand Lumiere).
Don’t kid yourself — Park Chan-Wook has always been a high-style genre wallower. I was willing to play along with Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, but Stoker is where I drew the line and said “all right, that’s it!…no more!” By the time The Handmaiden came along I was too alienated to respond.
For years I’ve been hoping that PCW would stop playing to the gallery (i.e., sensation-mongers, fans of visual-for-visual’s-sake) and cut the shit and calm down and use his considerable skills to make a real, serious-minded adult film. But year in and year out, he’s refused. He’s now 58 years old — what’s he gonna do, change?
Set 21 years ago in Masshad, Iran, Ali Abassi’s Holy Spider is a disturbing (to put it mildly), fact-based drama about Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani), a serial killer of prostitutes.
The murders are ghastly enough, but a double-down comes when, post-capture, Hanaei is bizarrely supported by fanatical zealots who believe he has done Allah’s bidding.
The first half is pretty much a straightforward crime drama. After graphically depicting two of Hanaei’s grisly killings, it follows an intrepid female reporter (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi) who risks life and limb to bring about his arrest.
I can’t call this section any more than decent — efficient and good enough, but not exactly brimming with style or suspense or cinematic flair.
The diseased social reaction among his fans in the second half is what grabs you. You’re left thinking “really?…a sizable contingent of Mashhad citizens cheered a serial killer because he was helping to rid the streets of streetcorner hookers? Who thinks like that? What kind of diseased culture?,” etc.
But then of course, this is Iran and the Masshad faithful were the country’s chief bumblefucks.
The meaning of the title of R.M.N., the latest film by the great Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu, is never revealed, or it wasn't to me during last night's Salle Debussy screening.
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During this morning’s Triangle of Sadness presser, director Ruben Ostlund and costar Woody Harrelson announced they’ll reunite for a film called The Entertainment System Is Down. Great news, but there’s a better title to be discovered.
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Cannes critics have lost their minds over Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, a laid-back, edge-of-boredom, fly-on-the-wall father-daughter vacation flick, set in Turkey sometime in the late ‘90s. I didn’t mind it and it’s not a painful endurance test, but it’s certainly lethargic as fuck.
Where’s the pulse? Where’s the intrigue or story tension or the proverbial second-act pivot or any of that stuff? Sorry, Jose.
11 year old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her young-looking, divorced dad (Paul Mescal) are staying (bonding) at a midrange coastal hotel. Swimming pool, video games, camcorder footage, puppy love, golden sunlight, distant hazy forests, dad grinning like an idiot. etc.
A dozen or so little things “happen” (including a curious weeping scene and a mystifying moment when Sophie succumbs to the romantic advances of an overweight gamer) or are more precisely observed. but the whole time you’re thinking “Guy Lodge and Carlos Aguilar did backwards somersaults over this?“
Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness is often wickedly funny — there’s no denying that. Now and then the press crowd at the Salle Debussy was chortling, guffawing and even howling. Even I, a confirmed LQTM-er, laughed out loud five or six times.
The 140-minute Triangle turns broad after the first hour or so, and that’s when it starts to lose the satiric mojo. (But not entirely.) But until that tonal shift it struck me as the funniest, scalpel-like social comedy I’ve seen since…well, now that I think of it, Ostlund’s The Square (’17), which sliced and diced your elite, politically terrified, museum-culture wokesters.
When the capsule synopsis for Sadness appeared online a couple of years everyone immediately recognized the similarity to Lina Wertmuller‘s Swept Away (’74), a Marxist comedy about a luxury yacht sinking and leaving a rich bitch (Mariangela Melato) and a common crewman (Giancarlo Giannini) stranded on a desert island.
Once their class-based loathing of each other fades away, Melato and Giannini fall in love and the social dynamic reverses itself — Melato swooning with desire for the primitive Giannini and vice versa. But when they’re finally rescued Melato reverts to haughty form, leaving Giannini heartbroken.
But strictly speaking the resemblance applies only to Triangle of Sadness‘s third act, titled “The Island.” And it’s different from the Wertmuller (a two-hander) in that Ostlund’s is an ensemble piece.
The first act, focusing on a young, beautiful, somewhat conflicted couple living on modelling and social-influencer income (Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean), is titled “Carl and Yaya”.
The film’s best scene occurs early on. It involves a dispute Carl and Yaya have about who will pay for dinner in a pricey restaurant. Yeah, I know — what kind of dude is Carl if he’s expecting Yaya to play the traditional man’s role? But Yaya, who makes a good deal more money than Carl, pledged the night before that she’d cover it, only to blithely ignore the check when the waiter places it on their table. Carl wants them to be equals, he complains, and not submit to standard gender roles. Yaya replies that it’s “unsexy” to talk about money. Manipulation translation: She wants him to get the check anyway.
The second best scene is the opener — a cattle call for a group of shirtless male models (Carl among them) who are asked at one point to show their Balenciaga face (cold, indifferent) and their H&M “happy” face.
In the second act, “The Yacht”, Carl and Yaya are guests on a swanky, first-class vessel (actually Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy‘s Christina O), and about halfway through this section Triangle of Sadness tips over into coarse slapstick with a healthy serving of gross-out humor a la Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
The vomit scene is when the movie changes its game, and while the remainder of the film is amusing in fits and starts, it never qui recovers.
But half of a brilliant comedy (complemented by a reasonably decent one in the second half) is enough for me.
The abundantly wealthy passengers on the cruise (Vicki Berlin, Henrik Dorsin, Jean-Christophe Folly, Iris Berben, Dolly De Leon, Sunnyi Melles) are all vulgar exploiters of one stripe or another. The most amusing tuns are from Woody Harrelson as the ship’s captain — a droll, Marxist-slogan-spouting alcoholic — and Zlatko Burić, a fat Russian fertilizer tycoon (“I sell shit”).
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