How long have I been explaining that any would-be tentpole flick that includes a looking-down shot of the hero swan-diving off a tall building is automatically and irrevocably shit? And if you add shots of guys flying from building to building a la Crouching Tiger and/or jumping off a two-story building onto the street below the movie has dug itself into an even deeper hole. Justin Kurzel, director of Assassin’s Creed (20th Century Fox, 12.21), went there anyway. Because…you tell me. Because he’s an animal? Add Michael Fassbender to the mix and you’re talking serious toxicity. Sidenote: Poor Jeremy Irons has been doing paycheck work since the mid ’90s. His first shameless-prostitute gig was playing the creepy villain in Die Hard With A Vengeance (’95). His great big-screen run lasted about 12 years — The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Moonlighting, Betrayal, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers, Reversal of Fortune, Kafka, Damage, M. Butterfly, The House of the Spirits. In ’84 I saw Irons opposite Glenn Close in the first Broadway version of The Real Thing. He was the absolute king of the world back then.
My only opportunity to see Gavin O’Connor‘s The Accountant pre-opening was last Wednesday’s Manhattan all-media screening. I blew that off in order to have dinner with Jett in a Bed-Stuy Mexican restaurant. So I saw it last night at the Grove. But within an hour I was ready to leave. Give me credit for sticking it out until the 90-minute mark.
I was moderately intrigued by the autistic assassin idea, but the film is only interested in using that concept to sell a same-old-malarkey action franchise about another lethal, emotionally remote action hero who eliminates bad guys like he’s channel-surfing or, you know, doing what comes naturally. Because he’s a brawny, stealthy, quietly charismatic killing machine of few words…zzzzzz.
Ben Affleck‘s Christian Wolff may be an emotionally remote math wiz, but he’s still Bruce Wayne mixed with John Wick plus (as noted by Atlantic critic Chris Orr) Christian Bale’s Michael Burry character in The Big Short. Who received martial arts training as a child from a robe-wearing, bald-headed Asian instructor…Jesus! That’s when I decided to leave early. If an action film attempting to launch a franchise (and that’s really the basic game here, an origin story that might launch three or four Christian Wolff flicks) can’t create a backstory without resorting to fucking martial-arts training at a formative age, I for one won’t participate.
On top of which I really couldn’t figure out some of the plot teasings, and I really didn’t want to make the effort. I paid money to see this thing and now I have to screw my brain down and work to figure it out? Fuck that. On top of which I can never understand much of what Anna Kendrick is saying with her thin little pipsqueak vocal fry. (Everything she says is a variation on the old Minnie Mouse helium voice…beep-beepity-beep-beep.) On top of which I felt like an idiot for having paid to see this, sitting there in the front row with my fucking small popcorn and large bottle of Dasani water.
Plus The Accountant has no sense of moral order or clarity or balance. Does anyone in this film breathe ordinary oxygen? Every character except Kendrick’s is fairly full of it, side-stepping, double-dealing, lying, misrepresenting, living by some expedient ethical code, a killer or an enabler of same. Or greedy. On top of which I don’t believe that a Treasury Department employee with a soiled past (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) would have been hired in the first place without her background being discovered. Don’t even start with that shit.
Yesterday Deadline‘s Pete Hammond quoted producer Irwin Winkler saying that Martin Scorsese‘s Silence (Paramount, 12.23) is “Marty’s best movie.” Okay, fine, but what else is he going to say? “This is one of Marty’s better films…maybe not his best but definitely one of his standouts”? Or “trust me, this one out-Kundun‘s Kundun!”
Hammond allows that Winkler “is high on the film because he produced it, but [he] also produced Scorsese classics Raging Bull and Goodfellas, so this kind of praise is not to be taken lightly.” Except the exalted reputations of Raging Bull and Goodfellas are carved in stone while Silence‘s rep is yet to be determined. Winkler loses nothing at all by calling it a better film than the other two.
Winkler also told Hammond that Silence‘s running time is down to 2 hours and 39 minutes, or over 20 minutes shorter than that three-hour-plus cut everyone wrote about last August.
I went into last night’s 6 pm screening of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk with high expectations for the 120 frames-per-second, 4K 3D photography (I’ve been a general fan of HFR for decades) and a slight sense of caution and uncertainty about the basic bones of the thing, which all along had sounded to me like an Iraq War rehash of Clint Eastwood‘s Flags Of Our Fathers (the gap between hollow patriotic pageantry and the harsh realities of war) and therefore nothing new.
And then I saw it and the cards got all shuffled around. The tech aspect impressed but also underwhelmed in certain ways. My eyes became used to the hyper-clarity after a while, and as the acclimation took hold I began to search for the usual nutritional stuff, and to my surprise Billy Lynn gradually sank in and delivered — not in a rock-your-world sense but in quiet, unforced terms. The story, acting and plain-dealing emotion bring things to a mid-level boil.
It finally hits home, I’m saying. Not so much from the easy-lay observations about hollow patriotism and pageantry and the atmosphere of official delusion but from the general feeling of bonding and, yes, fraternal love between combatants. The transitions between American celebration and Iraqi desperation grow in intensity, and the peripherals recede as the fundamentals apply. Your brothers in arms are all you can count on. I’ve felt this current in dozens of war films before, but it got me again.
So as I walked through Times Square station on my way to the Brooklyn-bound R train, I told a colleague in Los Angeles that “it’s a good film…not an audaciously original, blow-your-socks-off type of thing but a modestly good film…the material is the material (i.e., Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel), and the delivery is understated and effective.
“Is it a blindingly brilliant thing?,” I said. “No, but it’s not a wipe-out or a burn, and anyone calling Billy Lynn that” — my friend had been passing along some snarly-sounding Twitter reactions — “just isn’t paying sufficient attention…they aren’t letting it in.”
Late yesterday Hollywood Reporter award-season pundits Scott Feinberg and Stephen Galloway posted one of their where-are-things-right-now? chit-chat pieces. Like many politically sensitive pulse-takers these guys tend to sand off the edges or otherwise soft-pedal what they’re sensing or hearing so I’ve (a) shortened the piece and (b) boiled the snow out of it.
Point #1: Best Picture winners “tend to reflect the larger zeitgeist,” Feinberg believes. Meaning that if Hillary Clinton wins the election (which of course she will) the Best Picture winner will not be a melancholy masterpiece like Manchester By The Sea (which Feinberg regards as too heart-breaky) but something upbeat, which means Damien Chazelle‘s La La Land, according to this tea-leaf reading, has it in the bag;
Point #2: The Birth of A Nation, already deemed a financial failure, also got the cold shoulder from industry types when it had its first AMPAS screening last weekend. Feinberg-Galloway believe that three alternative racially-themed dramas — Moonlight, Hidden Figures, Loving — will pick up the slack, but the real heavyweight in this realm, I suspect, will be Denzel’s Fences;
Point #3: Ava Duvernay‘s 13th will probably be nominated for a Best Feature Doc Oscar, but will probably be out-pointed by Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America.
Point #4: Having seen a portion of Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Feinberg says the 120 frames-per-second process in which it was partly shot is “eye-opening…there’s never been anything quite like it,” although it’s “risky” and “whether or not people will like this new look remains to be seen.” Translation: Huzzahs for the audacity but we all know what “remains to be seen” means.
You can’t even order Twilight Time’s Stardust Memories Bluray yet, but a limited run of 3000 copies will street on 12.13. I was right there with Woody on the gloom train when I first saw it. I was insecure, right on the edge of poverty, behind in my rent, certain of nothing, my head barely above water. Now I’m more or less on the champagne train with Sharon Stone. Well, kinda. (I said hi to Stone a few weeks ago at a screening of that Frank Zappa doc.) I can say with absolute confidence that I’ll never be back on the gloom train again. Or at least not the kind I was on in 1980.
It’s common knowledge that William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur (’59) was shot in Camera 65, which when correctly projected (as well as scanned for DVD and Bluray) delivered an aspect ratio of 2.76:1. (Same a.r. with Ultra Panavision 70, which The Hateful Eight was shot and projected at.) All my adult life I’ve been looking to see the full-whack, 2.76:1 Ben-Hur in a first-rate theatrical venue.
My hopes were up when I attended last night’s 7:30 pm screening of Ben-Hur at the American Cinematheque Egyptian. I was encouraged by the fact that the AC was showing a DCP, or the same digitally remastered version that constitutes the current Bluray, which delivers the full 2.76:1. But they blew it all the same. The AC aspect ratio was, at most, 2.55:1, and it was probably closer to 2.4:1. And therefore each shot felt slightly cramped and wrong.
Robert Surtees‘ 2.76:1 images on the Ben-Hur Bluray are immaculate — the framings in each and every scene are exquisitely balanced. But whack those images down to 2.4:1 and everything looks fucked. If Surtees had been with me he would have been hooting and throwing soft-drink containers at the screen.
The same aspect ratio problems manifested when I caught Ben-Hur at the New York Film Festival in 2011, to wit:
Excerpt: “The fabled 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio was not delivered. It looked to me like we were seeing roughly a 2.55 to 1 image, at best. There’s a shot with Hugh Griffith and the four white horses when Heston enters from the left and says ‘What magnificent animals’ or words to that effect. I knew right away what I saw wasn’t right because Heston was slightly cropped off as he said this line — he didn’t have any breathing room — and you NEVER crop a star.”
Antonio Campos‘ Christine (The Orchard, 10.14), which I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, is a smartly assembled if decidedly glum character study of Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall), a frustrated, chronically depressed TV news reporter who felt stymied by the then-emerging tendency among local news stations to deliver froth and diversion rather than serious news or in-depth human-interest stories. She was lonely, bitter and pissed off, and on 7.15.74 the poor woman shot herself during a live broadcast. She died 14 hours later.
Christine is a good film, but it’s about ironies compounded within a hall of mirrors. Irony #1 is that Chubbuck would be unknown today if she hadn’t shot herself (she was never going to be Judy Woodruff), and that the film wouldn’t have been made if not for her tragedy. Irony #2 is that Campos’s film wouldn’t be all that engrossing without the on-air-shooting. Take away that sadness and it’s just a story of a gloomy woman who desperately wanted to do a good job but who wasn’t brilliant, lucky or charming enough to make it in a brutally shallow racket that was just starting to understand that superficial giddiness and bubbly personalities were far more valued by viewers than in-depth reporting.
That said, Christine is a well-written, believable, reasonably engrossing thing. Hall captures the testy anger and increasing desperation that Chubbuck was apparently experiencing on a drip-by-drip basis. It’s the best performance of her career, but God, it’s a downer to hang with this woman. We know from the get-go she has nowhere to go but down, and the film, really, is about how she has to go through eight or nine dispiriting episodes before she accepts this fact herself, and we, the audience, are basically stuck with this process.
Christine is tapping into general feelings of anger and frustation that we’ve all tasted from time to time, but after 90 minutes the downswirl starts to engulf you. I found myself muttering to Hall, “Look, this isn’t going to work out…you’re too pissed off, you lack the necessary charm and you might even get canned by Tracy Letts if you don’t watch it…it’s time to do something else with your life. Become a teacher or a newspaper reporter or sail to Cuba or move to Mexico, but get off the pot and blow this popstand.”
It’s 8:57 am with a 10 am Sully screening breathing down my neck. The usual feeling of quiet Telluride desperation is running through my veins. I’m going to have to stop everything and file this afternoon from 3 to 7 pm — best I can do. Last night I saw Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight at 8 pm — a fine, affecting, three-chaptered pain-and-growth saga that, speaking personally, elicited more in the way of respect and aesthetic admiration than full-hearted passion. I haven’t finished the review but this is how Telluride is for guys like me, especially without an iPhone. I also caught Benedict Andrews‘ Una, a screen adaptation of Blackbird (which I saw off-B’way with Jeff Daniels a few years back) with Rooney Mara and HE’s own Ben Mendelsohn in the lead roles. I found it irksome and frustrating (not a minority view) but I haven’t time to go into it now.
I was hugely irked yesterday afternoon, sitting on a doorstep on Telluride’s Colorado Avenue as I berated those Booking.com bozos on a Skype line. I hadn’t eaten anything, the iPhone 6 Plus couldn’t be repaired (the thought of not being able to snap any photos during this festival distress me to no end), the iPhone rental was a no-go, and I’d missed the deadline to pick up my press pass. And then a pretty lady slowed and leaned down and patted my recently bought saddle shoes and gave me a thumbs-up as she kept walking. Thank you. And then Telluride’s press rep Shannon Goodwin Mitchell walked by and saw me sitting there all cranky and pissed off and reached into a bag and gave me my Telluride pass pass…thanks! And then Sasha Stone pulled up with my wallet, which she’d retrieved at the Dolores Mountain Inn. And then four or five hours later I was sitting in Glenn Zoller‘s big, comfortable, well-lighted kitchen and enjoying a Grateful Dead track for the first time in eons. Glenn was listening to KOTO, the local cool-cat FM station, and all of a sudden Bob Weir singing “Satisfaction” put me in the greatest mood. On the worst days the nicest things can happen out of the blue.
Telluride’s vp public relations Shannon Mitchell during last year’s rain-soaked picnic.
As expected, as you knew it would, Damian Chazelle‘s La La Land has won over Venice Film Festival-attending critics. (Along with certain elites who saw it locally.) The 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes won’t last. Metacritic is currently dispensing a 91% tally. Lift me up, lay me down, take me there…ooh, aaahh, yeah.
“Not perfect but daring, dazzling, beautiful and distinctive,” enthuses Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy. “An absolute triumph,” proclaims The PLaylist‘s Jessica Kiang. “A whole-hog recreation of a lavish neo-studio-system musical,” says Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, “replete with starry nights and street lamps lighting up the innocence of soft-shoe romance, and two people who were meant for each other literally dancing on air.”
Oh, and downplay your 1950s MGM references and think instead of the musicals of Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort) as the primary inspiration.
Variety‘s Kris Tapley, who hates the hype and phoniness of Oscar season, has called it “the easiest bet…a GOOD MOVIE [that] seizes your emotions in its final moments and sends you out of the theater on a cloud.”
It’s taken me almost a full year to fully refine my 2015 Telluride Film Festival review of Danny Boyle‘s Steve Jobs to its essence. To really boil it down, I mean, and come to a clearer understanding of what I was getting at.
Here’s how I put on 9.6.15: “Am I a hotshot columnist from West Hollywood or a Riverside County housewife who goes to movies for emotional soothings? I’m better than that and so is the exceptional, high-throttle Steve Jobs.
“Jobs is a three-act ‘talk opera’ (Sasha Stone‘s term) or ‘verbal action film’ (a guy at Universal suggested that one) or aggressive cine-theatre (my own) but also a film that, for me, feels more impressively conceived and poundingly ambitious than affecting or, truth be told, likable.
“You have to take each film by its own scheme and determinations, and with a film as aggressively verbal and drill-bitty as Steve Jobs terms like “affecting” and “likable” are almost certainly beside the point. With a film like this you either you jump on the luge and submit to the speed and the brain-cell exhilaration…or you don’t. And what would be the damn point of not submitting to it?
“I jumped on, all right, and by the end of the two-hour ride I felt tingly and throbbing and, yes, a bit drained and also a teeny bit sorry that I wasn’t as delighted as I’d expected to be. Which I fully concede is at least partly my fault as I’d fallen head-over-heels in love with Sorkin’s script two or three months ago. Dazzled by it, glad-to-be-alive contact highs, ‘this is what brilliance feels like,’ etc.
“You see a certain movie in your head when you’re reading a highly charged, original-attitude script, and then you see the film’s version and it’s like, ‘Oh…well, okay, this is how they saw it.’ It never bored me, it kept me on my toes, it delivers a kind of hammerhead contact high…but I wasn’t feeling that levitational thing.
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