Yesterday was a near-total loss due to a huge effort to get my apartment back into shape after it was turned into a wreck by the 20something guy I subletted to during my absence at Telluride, Toronto and New York (8.28 to 9.26). I always sublet during festival sojourns and have done so for 15-plus years without an issue, but my luck ran out when I okayed the smiling, mild-mannered Sajan Patel. I spoke to his boss as a reference, but this guy was a dog with fleas. He flat-out murdered 60% of my plants, killed my 50-inch Vizio plasma (it’s been stricken with some kind of fatal ailment), starved my cats (although my obese Siamese cat Mouse having lost 2 or 3 pounds is actually a good thing) and made the place look like a cyclone had blown through it. I asked this fine young fellow why he’d destroyed most of the plants and he actually replied, “They are not my responsibility as this is is not my home — I was only here for a month.” I gave him $100 bucks to cover his previously paid rent and immediately kicked his ass out. I had to buy a new TV last night, and will have to fork over $300 to $400 to replace the dead plants.
Jason Bateman‘s Bad Words, a tartly ascerbic spelling-bee comedy aimed at the diminishing ranks of non-moronic moviegoers, went over extremely well at the Ryerson last night. It’s a kind of Rushmore-meets-Bad Santa piece about a pissed-off, close-cropped 40something guy (Bateman) who takes advantage of a loophole to compete against kids in the National Quill Spelling Bee competition, and in so doing bonds/warms up to/gets down with a reporter (Kathryn Hahn) and a 10 year-old Indian kid (Rohan Chand) as he seeks a kind of satisfaction that has nothing to do with winning the $50,000 first prize. Dry, subdued, bordering-on-perverse performances + Andrew Dodge‘s witty-ass, occasionally scatalogical screenplay resulted in much laughter with some in the audience wondering if the film goes “too far,” as one questioner inquired. Trust me, the “too far” stuff is one of the main reasons the film went over so well.
At Toronto’s Ryerson theatre last night following screening of Bad Words (l. ro r.) director-star Jason Bateman, costars Rohan Chand, Kathryn Hand.
I missed the first five minutes of the 11:30 am screening of Roger Michell‘s Le Week-End, and I’m sorry but I bailed after an hour. I found it slow, meandering, uninvolving. Then I ducked into Ralph Fiennes‘ The Invisible Woman just to get a feel for Felicity Jones‘ performance as Kelly Ternan, the young woman who was Charles Dickens‘ secret (or certainly unacknowledged) lover for several years. She handles herself well enough — her performance is earnest and grounded — but despite Variety‘s Scott Foundas calling it “revelatory” I didn’t see any reason to do cartwheels in the foyer. I bailed after 30 minutes — sorry. Then I attended a public screening of Teller‘s Tim’s Vermeer, which I saw start to finish. It’s a delightful, fascinating, highly intelligent, inventive and spirit-lifting film for everyone — the Telluride praise was well earned. Then I slipped into Iram Haq‘s not-bad I Am Yours but I couldn’t stay — sorry. It’s now 5:30 pm. At 6pm I’ll be seeing Jonathan Teplitzsky‘s The Railway Man at Roy Thomson Hall, and then it’s a toss-up between a 9:30 pm screening of Peter Landesman‘s Parkland and Jason Bateman‘s Bad Words, a spelling-bee movie, at the Ryerson at 9:30 pm. I don’t know what to do. I’m leaning toward seeing the Bateman tomorrow instead…sorry, no offense.
With the the major U.S. studios doubling down on bullshit CG comic-book fantasy destruction porn, it’s a glorious thing to be facing a Toronto Film Festival that will be showing roughly 62 intelligent, quality-calibre films aimed at people like myself. I’m not exaggerating — I’ve scanned the final list and that’s how many films I’d like to see up there. As usual I won’t be able to fit in much more than 30, and more likely 25 or so. I will have seen at least a few of these at Telluride when Toronto begins, but if I wasn’t doing Telluride the following would be my early picks with unmissable powershot films in bold italic:
Gala Presentations (9): The Art of the Steal (d: Jonathan Sobol); August: Osage County (d: John Wells); The Fifth Estate (d: Bill Condon), Life of Crime (d: Daniel Schecter); Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom (d: Peter Chadwick); Parkland (d: Peter Landesman); The Railway Man (d: Jonathan Teplitzky); Rush (d: Ron Howard); Words and Pictures (d: Fred Schepisi).
I either knew or half-suspected that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity, John Wells‘ August: Osage County, Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Justin Chadwick‘s Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Bill Condon‘s The Fifth Estate, Ron Howard‘s Rush, Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyer’s Club and Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day would turn up at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival. I didn’t predict this, of course, but I was secretly presuming. And yet for whatever reason I never had it in my head that Peter Landesman‘s Parkland (script reviewed by yours truly on 2.9.13) would be shown there. But it will be apparently.
Last night I saw Luca Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes‘ Challengers (Amazon, 4.26), and as far as “tennis pros engaged in romantic triangle” flicks go it’s fairly out there, man.
Challengers hasn’t been written and shot in my preferred style (like King Richard, my all-time favorite tennis movie) but I respect and admire the fact that Guadagnino, the director, has made a jumpy, flourishy, time-skotching, impressionistic, mostly hetero but also vaguely homoerotic film that…what’s the term, broadens your horizons? Challenges you and wakes you up? Makes a dent in your psyche?
It doesn’t do the usual thing and certainly pushes a few boundaries, but I like that for the most part. I certainly prefer films that try different strategies over ones that adhere to predictable ones.
So, putting this carefully, I didn’t love everything about it (which puts me in a minority) but I loved the verve, the effort, the invention, the ballsiness. I was irked here and there but I certainly wasn’t bored. All in all the audacity and impulsiveness of Challengers makes it Guadagnino’s best film since Call Me By Your Name. Really.
One of the less predictable aspects…,okay, a vaguely annoying thing is the hopping-around timeline, which I lost patience with around the halfway mark.
Another unusual thing is that the three main characters — Zendaya‘s Tashi Duncan, Mike Faist‘s Art Donaldson and Josh O’Connor‘s Patrick Zweig — aren’t especially charming or likable or even attractive. Not to me, at least.
Compelling or intriguing actors are supposed to turn you on or at least engage your interest or empathy. Or arouse your blood.
If you’re a straight male you should either want to be like a straight-male protagonist or two on the screen, and you should be thinking about possibly fucking the lead actress. I had no such thoughts during Challengers (sorry), but others may feel differently. It takes all sorts, etc.
The story is a little confusing but here goes: Duncan, a former tennis player sidelined by injury, is now coaching Donaldson, her husband of a few years and a hotshot tennis star who’s on some kind of losing streak. Duncan met Donaldson and Zweig 11 or 12 years earlier and was attracted to them both, which led to some heated hotel-room smooching all around. (No — the dudes didn’t fuck each other.) Duncan married Donaldson but now Zweig is back in the arena and looking to beat Donaldson in a big match, and so Duncan is looking to somehow influence Zweig’s attitude or psychology or something…shit, I’m losing the thread.
Zweig is a bad boy with an impulsive, unstructured approach to everything outside of tennis…a guy who likes to fuck for fucking’s sake and otherwise enjoys poking at situational hornet’s nests. I didn’t “like” Zweig but O’Connor, a sinewy, dark-haired sweat beast who played Prince Charles in The Crown, has something…he’s the best of the bunch.
Challengers also the sweatiest film I’ve seen ever. I felt dampened by Faist’s sweat droplets.
Will dudes shrug at Wicked costars Ariana Grande and Cynthia “witchy greenskin” Erivo and thereby bring about a somewhat muted reception?
Filing from Cinemacon, Jeff Sneider isn’t predicting a shortfall — he’s just saying Wicked (Universal, 11.27) is no Barbie.
Sneider’s quote: “I struggle to see men showing up in droves for this movie.”
At least Sneider’s gender generalization was about XY and not double-X. For if he had posted a gut hunch about potential female responses to Jon Chu’s two-part musical fantasy, he might have been clubbed, stabbed, skinned and all but decapitated.
That’s what happened to me eight and a half years ago when I posted four bad words about Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s The Revenant — “Forget women seeing this.” Never generalize about any gender in any context!
Martin Scorsese has committed to producing The Saints, an eight-part, faith-based docuseries about eight saints. The bad part is that he’s doing this for Fox Nation, the conservative streaming channel.
I’m not saying this is like Scorsese injecting political cancer cells into his veins, but it sorta kinda feels like he might be doing that. Am I wrong?
The episodes will be directed by Elizabeth Chomko (What They Had). They’re being written by Kent Jones (Letter to Elia, Hitchcock-Truffaut).
So we’re talking about pious Marty here…the Marty who made Silence…the Marty who worships saints who went through all kinds of pain.
The eight saints are Joan of Arc (burned at the stake), Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist (head chopped off), Thomas Becket (head chopped off), Mary Magdalene, Moses the Black, Saint Sebastian (shot with arrows! clubbed to death!) and Maximillian Kolbe (starved nearly to death, injected with carbolic acid).
Scorsese: “I’ve lived with the stories of the saints for most of my life, thinking about their words and actions, imagining the worlds they inhabited, the choices they faced, the examples they set. These are stories of eight very different men and women, each of them living through vastly different periods of history and struggling to follow the way of love revealed to them and to us by Jesus’ words in the gospels. I’m so excited that this project is underway, and that I’m working with so many trusted and talented collaborators.”
The first four episodes of The Saints will debut on Sunday, 11.16.24, on Fox Nation. The other four will come out the following May.
Episode #3 of “The Misfits” features Jeffrey Wells, Glenn Kenny (“The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface“), Jeff Sneider (i.e., Hollywood’s most fearless journalist”) & “Talking Movies” co-host Bill McCuddy (recorded on Monday, 3.11, at 1 pm).
Profuse apologies for being too much of a klutz to have correctly posted the pod early last evening.
I’m not a total idiot with this stuff — I did manage to organize and record the Zoom video and then down-convert via Handbrake (with help from Glenn Kenny) and then incorrectly post it on Substack. So I’m getting there. But I’ll never be a whiz kid at this stuff.
Enormous thanks to the great Sasha Stone for helping me correct my errors.
During the pod I mentioned the likelihood that John Cena wore a “sock” during his nude moment at the Oscars. Nobody bit (one or two of my colleagues vaguely shuddered) so the subject fell by the wayside. But The Hollywood Reporter‘s Beatrice Verhoeven has done the reporting.
Just like my having also mentioned the advisability of Lily Gladstone returning to the way she looked three years ago while filming Killers of the Flower Moon. (She looks different today.) Lily will never be Emma Stone, but elemental logic tells us she’d be more suitable for a wider range of parts if she could adopt a somewhat leaner profile. But no — only a “bad” person (and I mean someone deserving of condemnation if not a Julius Caesar-like stabbing) would bring this up in casual conversation.
Does anyone think Amy Schumer could have played the lead in Trainwreck at her current proportions?
Directors, casting agents and casting directors don’t tiptoe around this topic (or dodge it) when they talk turkey with each other. Tom Hanks didn’t dodge it when he mentioned a few years back that some actors have diminished their careers by bulking up. Everyone understands that Brendan Fraser lost his star luminosity when he became the “new” version of himself. Just saying.
Again, the link.
Hulu intends to produce an eight-episode series about the wrongful prosecution and incarceration of femme fatale Amanda Knox, who will be played by Margaret Qualley.
The problem is that Qualley is too old for the part. Knox was 20 when Italian authorities in Perugia became convinced that she might have murdered her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in late ’07 — Knox was a foxy young flower back then, freshly bloomed. The attractive Qualley is 30 and looks it — she might have passed for 20 five years ago, but she’s no spring chicken now.
On top of which the Knox story has been thoroughly mined and explored over the last 13 years or so. How many times can average Joe and Janes be expected to show interest?
In 2011 saw the release of a negligible Lifetime TV movie, Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy. Two years later came “Waiting To Be Heard”, a Knox-authored memoir. In 2014 Michael Winterbottom‘s not-so-hot Face Of An Angel opened. In 2016 a Netflix documentary, Amanda Knox, appeared. And then, of course, came Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater (’21), which is largely based on the Knox saga.
The Hulu series is basically about Knox and husband Chris Robinson, who felt exploited by Stillwater, wanting to make some dough. They’re exec producing along with Qualley, Warren Littlefield, Lisa Harrison, Ann Johnson and Graham Littlefield. Monica Lewinsky is also exec producing.
“Knox vs. McCarthy Again,” posted on 8.8.21:
In an 8.6 HE riff titled “McCarthy Coolly Dismisses Knox Beef,” I linked to Janelle Riley’s 8.4 Variety interview with Stillwater director-cowriter Tom McCarthy.
McCarthy responded to the gist of Amanda Knox‘s complaint about Stillwater being fundamentally based on her 2008 murder conviction and subsequent exoneration, and her not having been consulted prior to filming. McCarthy also mentioned that her statements were somewhat undermined by the fact that she hadn’t yet seen the film.
Yesterday Knox posted a series of tweets about the McCarthy interview [excerpts after the jump], and made some reasonable points. However, she also tweeted the following:
HE response to friendo: “Seeing Stillwater would not be an ‘ideal date night’ and that’s why she still hasn’t seen it yet? But she would be amenable to seeing it, she said earlier, if Focus would invite her to a screening. The date night remark was playful, but she invites skepticism.”
Friendo to HE: “You have to admit that it’s hilarious when, in being asked at the outset in the new interview what his inspiration for the movie was, McCarthy says, ‘One inspiration was a relative of mine who had a fractious relationship with her father. I asked if she minded talking to me about it.” This after previously not being afraid to openly and preemptively acknowledge the Knox case was a springboard, before he had to worry [that Knox might be] endangering his Oscar campaign. Now Knox is incidental, he claims, while asserting that he was inspired by a friend. That kind of covering-one’s-ass (publicly and badly) is the hallmark of a really insubstantial person, or a scaredy-cat on the run.”
I’ll always be a fan of action flicks and suspense thrillers that end hard, clean and decisively and no fooling around, like the last minute or so of John Frankenheimer‘s French Connection 2 (’75).
But I’m an even bigger fan of edgy pulse-pounders that end with great denouements. Denouements are meditative wind-down sessions…summary scenes that provide a nice breather as both the main characters and the audience are given a chance to consider what’s happened, sort out some of the loose ends and maybe imagine what’s to come.
My all-time favorite denouement is the second-to-last scene in Three Days of the Condor (’75) — a nice dialogue scene between Robert Redford‘s “Turner” and Max Von Sydow‘s “Joubert”, standing outside of Leonard Atwood‘s suburban Virginia home at the break of dawn.
Another fave is the final scene in The Social Network, a let’s-get-real moment between Jessie Eisenberg‘s Mark Zuckerberg and Rashida Jones‘ junior attorney at a law office in Palo Alto…early evening.
There could have been an Apocalypse Now denouement that might have mirrored the ending of Joseph Conrad‘s “Heart of Darkness,” which Francis Coppola‘s 1979 Vietnam film is based upon. Martin Sheen‘s Cpt. Willard could have visited the Long Island home of the widow of Marlon Brando‘s Colonel Kutz, whose last words are “the horror! The horror!” When she asks about Kurtz’s final moment of life, Willard tells her that he wept as he called out her name. A good denouement, but Coppola felt that leaving Vietnam and transitioning to Great Neck or Oyster Bay would have been too much of a shock to the system.
Is the final scene in Red River (“You’ve earned it”) an apt and satisfying denouement or a forced and even silly ending that doesn’t quite work? (I’ve always liked it but that’s me.)
The famous Psycho denouement, in which a sandpaper-voiced psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) explains how Norman Bates killed his mother and her lover and thereafter stole her corpse and decided to become his mother in spirit — to “give half his life to her, so to speak” — feels a bit labored by today’s standards. It does, however, set up the final scene between Anthony Perkins and that fly, which is dead perfect.
Please name some other great ones.
It wouldn’t be fair to write about Derek Magyar‘s Flying Lessons, which opened the Santa Barbara Film Festival last night (2.4.10). I watched the first few minutes, but I had to leave to buy some cough syrup and spray. For some reason a slight cough caused by a throat tickle blew up into something worse yesterday. It was awful. So I got the damn cough syrup, came back, watched the film for another 20 or 25 minutes. And then I gave up.
I don’t have to watch a film for a half hour or 15 minutes, even, to know it’s not working. I can tell within two or three minutes. I knew Flying Lessons was in trouble within seconds. It’s one of those “who am I really?,” “I’ve made some mistakes,” “maybe I should wake up?” meditative dramas that makes you want to get a stiff drink — make that several drinks. Except I don’t like stiff drinks any more. A glass or two of wine is my limit. [Note: HE embraced sobriety on 3.20.12.]
But I needed to escape so I did, and I went across the street to a first-class Argentinian restaurant. Beautifully designed place, old Spanish flavor, etc.. And there, sitting at a small table with a friend, was Derek Magyar. And there I was my my press badge, so I didn’t say hello. Magyar is a youngish actor. Flying Lessons is his first stab at directing. The screenwriter is Thomas Kuehl. I know how difficult it can be to make a film even half-succeed, and I didn’t want to say or do anything that would seem harsh or cruel.
So I kept my distance from Magyar and ordered my Pinot Grigio. I sat down at a table and struck up a conversation with a Swedish blonde who was wearing a long fur coat. And then a local friend, Rochelle Rose, dropped by and joined us.
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