“If you, Mr. Trump, fail to take the Russian threat seriously, if you do not disentangle yourself from your business interests, if you promote corrupt or conflicted advisers and cabinet members, if you fail to understand the gravity of the foreign policy crisis you face, if you deprive millions of health care without an alternative, if you fail to act on the global threat of climate change, if you pit Americans against each other by race, gender, and religion, if you undermine science and reason…there will be an asterisk next to your name” — From a 1.15 post by Dan Rather on Facebook.
8:01 pm: Moonlight, to my surprise, beats Manchester By The Sea for Best Picture, Drama. I respect Moonlight but I politely and respectfully disagree with this decision. But this is America, folks. We like what we like and love what we love. Barry Jenkins: “Tell a friend, tell a friend, tell a friend.”
7:58 pm: Isabelle Huppert wins Best Actress, Drama — the second big upset of the night! (The other being Mahershala Ali‘s shutdown.) What happened to the Natalie Portman movement or groundswell or whatever? Best Actress Oscar Advantage: Emma Stone.
7:51 pm: Manchester By The Sea‘s Casey Affleck takes Best Actor, Drama…of course. Carved in stone, foretold by the Gods. And they’re playing him off! Casey rambled a bit, but he kept it real. The Fox party is totally in chit-chat, wallah-wallah, have-another-drink mode. Nobody except for myself, Variety‘s Kris Tapley and maybe seven or eight others are actually watching the show. They’re all checking Twitter for the latest.
7:45 pm: Six Golden Globe awards for La La Land with the winning of Best Comedy or Musical Feature, or whatever it’s called. Non-Dramatic bing bang hoo-hah.
Apologies for the cruddy resolution of the below video, but the absence of wifi in the Fox tent means I can’t upload a high-quality version.
Renowned cinematographer and HE wifi-provider Svetlana Cvetko.
7:35 pm: Emma Stone wins Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy…of course! I’ll listen to her acceptance speech later! Because I’m surrounded by champagne-buzzed, dressed-to-the-nines 30somethings going “yap yap yap yop yap yap yap yap….who won? Oh, Emmma Stone, whatever…yap yap yap yop yap yap yap.”
7:22: La La Land‘s Damien Chazelle wins for Best Director. Everything falls perfectly into line. Donald Glover, the Atlanta guy, wins for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical Series. Four Globe awards for La La Land so far — zip for Manchester (wait for Casey) and Moonlight.
7:11 pm: Four well-dressed 30somethings are standing five or six feet away and laughing and cackling and barking at each other (“Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!”) and totally ignoring Meryl Streep‘s remarks. They’re also preventing me from hearing what she’s saying. You guys…you’re so funny! And so well-dressed! Meryl’s against mixed martial arts? I’ll have to watch it on YouTube tonight. Missing most of the speeches and repartee mildly sucks.
7:00 pm: I’ll be able to appreciate the finer points of Viola Davis‘s shpiel when I see the re-broadcast. The sound is too sharp, too thin, too barky. I just heard her say the word “encapsulate.” I watch the flat screen, hear random words, recognize the famous and then check Twitter to see what just happened or what the punch line was. Oh, I see — she’s introducing Meryl Streep and her Cecil B, DeMille award. I’m really hoping Meryl lays into Trump in one way or another. Impressive clip reel.
6:50 pm: Claire Foy, whom I don’t know or, to be perfectly honest, have a lot of room in my head for, has just won a Best Actress award for The Crown, which I’ll probably never see. Just being honest. The Crown just won another award for Best TV Series, Drama. Okay, maybe I’ll give it a looksee when I get a break.
6:48 pm: The Night Manager‘s Tom Hiddleston beats The People vs. O.J. Simpson‘s Courtney Vance for Best Actor in a Limited Series, etc. Hiddleston is quite good in this Netflix series, which I didn’t frankly get around to watching until just recently, but every time I see him I think of that basketball T-shirt he wore with the words “I Love Taylor Swift” visible from a distance.
6:36 pm: Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle wins Best Foreign Language Film Award. HE approves! I can’t even remember if I predicted this, but I believe I might have.
The basic thing about cigarettes is that during the days when they were regarded as an attractive way to flirt with ill health (i.e., back in the ’70s or ’80s), each one was your little friend. You would buy a pack of 20 little buddies who would provide comfort and make you feel fairly cool as you sat at a cafe or walked down a street or whatever, particularly in the evenings. It follows that the brand names of cigarettes had to sound either friendly or fraternal or enobling on some level. They had to sound like a club you’d want to join. The Loyal Order of Camels or Galouises. The Chesterfield or Davidoff club. All to say that in the old days, no way would a cigarette company have created a brand called Drome.
I’ve been hinting for months that an element in the general marketing push for Morten Tyldum‘s Passengers (Sony, 12.21) has been misleading. The trailers have understandably been hiding The Big Secret (i.e., the fact that only Chris Pratt‘s character is accidentally woken up from hibernation) plus the fact that Pratt and costar Jennifer Lawrence have been flat-out lying about the basic set-up.
And I mean especially with the Telegraph having asked its readers to take part in a Passengers poll, to wit: “If you were faced with living out your life alone on a cruise ship in space, would you wake up another passenger?”
SPOILER: This is what Pratt’s character does after a mechanical malfunction rouses him from hibernation after 30 years of slumber, and he realizes he can’t go back to sleep. The rest of his life will be spent completely alone on a huge space cruiser. (Except for the empty company of a robot bartender, played by Michael Sheen.) After a year he decides he can’t take the loneliness, and so he wakes up Lawrence’s character, a New York journalist.
In so doing Pratt condemns Lawrence to the same life-imprisonment terms, and an absolute certainty of death in space — no more terra firma, no more oceans or lakes or streams, no more community, no more internet, nothing except hanging with Pratt on a corporate luxury cruiser for the next 60 or 70 years, depending on the breaks.
When she learns the truth Lawrence exclaims that what Pratt has done is “murder,” and it is. But guess what? As of this afternoon only 41% of the Telegraph readers who’ve voted in the Passenger polls agree with her, or at least have a problem with Pratt waking her up. 33% think it’s okay to wake someone up on such a voyage (“Yes, why not?), and 26% have said it’s okay but “only if I really, really fancied them (and if I’d stalked them a bit first).”
A certain percentage are probably goofing on the Telegraph, but 59% have nonetheless stated for whatever reason that Pratt’s hibernation wake-up isn’t so bad given the lifetime of loneliness he’s looking at. In short, “murder” is okay.
It’s about a young hot-dogger named Junior Jackson (Jeff Bridges) who’s more or less content to smuggle illegal hooch until he gets pinched and his soul-weary dad (Art Lund) persuades him to think twice. Jackson eventually uses his car-racing skills to break into stock-car racing. Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ed Lauter, Gary Busey and Valerie Perrine costar.
Hero was widely admired (nearly all the serious film critics got behind it, especially Pauline Kael). And its influence in Hollywood circles seems hard to deny, its commercial failure aside, for the simple fact that it was the only backwoods-moonshine movie at the time that was seriously respected for what it was, as opposed to being (nominally) respected for what it earned.
I’ve been in a state of quiet, suppressed worry over Warren Beatty‘s Rules Don’t Apply (20th Century Fox, 11.23) for nearly four weeks. As noted I’ve been chatting enjoyably with Beatty for a quarter-century and I feel real affection for the guy (and I always will), but I can’t wiggle around the fact that while the movie is certainly its own bird and reps a strong vision, it’s mainly a spotty, in-and-out thing.
I recognize that several critics are fans and I’m happy for that, and I’ve heard it’s definitely popular among certain Academy types — cool. I hope Rules does well commercially and that Warren lands a Best Actor nomination for his trouble, although I think he and his strategists should have gone for a Best Supporting Actor nom instead. Just my opinion.
(l. to r.) Lilly Collins, Alden Ehrenreich and Warren Beatty on the red carpet at Thursday’s AFI Fest premiere of Rules Don’t Apply.
Beatty has been telling everyone that Rules Don’t Apply isn’t a Howard Hughes biopic, and that it’s primarily a love story between a pair of 20something Hughes employees — Marla Mabrey, a virginal would-be actress played by Lily Collins, and Frank Forbes, a driver-assistant played by Alden Ehrenreich — who want each other but feel constrained by the sexual puritanism of the ’50s. But the film is a Howard Hughes film, no question, and Beatty’s performance as the eccentric billionaire is by far the strongest element.
You come away thinking about Beatty’s performance — he’s got the charisma, conviction, weirdness, authority — but hardly at all about Collins or Ehrenreich’s, due to their characters feeling thin and under-written and muffled. And while the movie feels like it’s using the conventions of farce to keep things peppy and funny, at the same time it seems a little afraid of playing it straight and plain.
But Rules is engaging here and there and at times even approaches a kind of brilliance by way of a klutzy, off-center mentality. Which is to say…I don’t know how to put it. I’m scratching my head as I write this.
Rules Don’t Apply isn’t so much a “dramedy” as an arch, dialed-down farce that feels inspired here and there and at other times like a movie that never really takes flight. It’s a mix of conflicted and conflicting impulses and cross purposes, and yet is all of a curious piece. I saw it for a second time two nights ago, and I’m afraid I felt the same as I did after the first viewing in mid-October, which was “hmmm….in and out, not bad here and there, Warren is good, maybe Academy members will like it, crazy movie, some good scenes,” etc.
It feels turgid and constricted in some ways, and yet has a silly, loose and fuck-all tone at other times. A bent, tightly-sprung attitude.
It’s been edited like a sonuvabitch — cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Many scenes during the first 25% or one-third feel a bit choppy and abbreviated. Yes, that’s the way farces are usually paced. It reminded me at times of Ernst Lubitsch‘s Design for Living (that’s good) and at other times like Charlie Chaplin‘s The Countess From Hong Kong (don’t ask). And yes, I recognize that it’s personal to some degree in that Warren came from a somewhat repressed religious culture in the ’50s.
Early this morning HE commenter “Bad Hat Harry” addressed big-city liberal-progressive types about last night’s election result: “I hope you’ve set aside a health does of hate for yourself because you share AT LEAST as much blame for President Trump as anyone who voted for him — your party and policies created the necessary conditions for his ascendency. But of course instead of rational self-examination and reflection, you’ll demonize your opponents and call them names and misrepresent their motives. Easier to let yourself off the hook that way.”
To which I responded: “This is what some voices were saying in the wake of the ’00 and ’04 elections — respect the Bubba vote, respect their motives and concerns. On top of which Bush is a nicer, more personable guy than Gore or Kerry — a guy you can have a beer with. And he’ll stand up to terrorism!
“I was never super-delighted with Hillary Clinton either, but my God…what have they done? The bumblefucks have just taken a giant, self-pitying, anti-progressive shit on this country. They have guaranteed the continuance of Citizen’s United, hastened the demise of the planet through climate change, ensured the rightwing leanings of the Supreme Court and all but stabbed the progressive movement in the heart. They can’t see beyond their own myopic mythology, their own chosen blindness. May their lives only get worse. Much, much worse. May fresh poison flow through their veins. If I could clap my hands three times to ensure this, I would clap my hands three times.”
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.”
Hillary Clinton presented a better, more Presidential persona — calm, factual, measured, poised — than Donald Trump last night, but Trump’s Putin-like authoritarianism (i.e., threatening to prosecute and jail Hillary if he wins) plus his hovering stage posturing and general bluster wasn’t a total loss for him. I don’t think the needle was moved at all, but Trump didn’t blow it any worse than usual. He blustered and glowered and seethed his way through it — the hulking orange ape — but the word around the internet is that he at least placated his base, and that he may have given the independent fence-sitters pause or at least stopped the general pussy-tape bleeding. Maybe.
But the coke sniffing! After sniffing all through the first debate, surely Trump would take measures, I thought, to avoid doing the same in the second. But he didn’t. Who doesn’t know from antihistamines?
What kind of person could possibly be undecided at this point? I’ll tell you what kind of person. A person who’s leaning toward Trump but is holding back for some tweedly-deedly reason. A voter like Kenneth Bone, the cartoonish fat guy with the Santa Claus sweater and the dorky moustache who asked about energy issues last night. Who dresses like that? If Bone had access to a time machine he could’ve played one of the Italian fascists in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Conformist. If I saw Bone walking towards me from 100 feet away I’d cross the street.
I felt irritated by Hillary’s failure to zing-zing him with more panache. She wouldn’t or couldn’t land a good impulse punch. She sounded sensible and seasoned, of course, but time and again she relied on familiar HRC talking points — the kind of thing that most people hate. No Aaron Sorkin lines. The only off-the-cuff remark I can recall: “Okay, Donald. I know you’re into big diversion tonight, anything to avoid talking about your campaign and the way it’s exploding and the way Republicans are leaving you.”
Trump’s pussy tape will never go away and it’s entirely possible that more off-camera, hot-mike comments will break in the coming days, and I think most of us understand he can’t win now. (Nate Silver claims Trump was five or six points down before the pussy tape — do the math.) What Trump is trying to do right now, many suspect, is preserve, fortify and burnish his bully-boy brand so that post-election he and Roger Ailes can launch Trump TV — the new Fox News.
Moderators Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz did a good job — they were fast and fleet and sharp. They were determined not to repeat Lester Holt‘s handling of the first debate, and they didn’t.
Before last night’s appearance of Kenneth Bone, I had never even contemplated a real-life person having such a name. Keep in mind that Cary Grant felt insulted when Katharine Hepburn gave him a temporary fake name of “Mr. Bone” in Bringing Up Baby (’38).
Amazon and Bleecker have decided to wait another three months — 12.28 — to open Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson. So cool your jets and bide your time. But know this: Paterson is one of those films that improve upon reflection. It doesn’t seem to be doing a hell of a lot while you’re watching it, but then it begins to expand. The next day you’re saying “yeah, still thinking about it…good film.” A week later you’re saying “wow, that was a really good film.”
“Paterson is about a lanky young bus driver (Adam Driver) and his Iranian wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) who live with a subversive prick dog named Marvin in a small dumpy house in Paterson, New Jersey and generally follow routines of almost astounding modesty — not hanging with friends, not partying, not doing Manhattan clubs on weekends…none of that.
“Well, maybe Laura would like a little fun and frolic but Driver’s guy, who of course is also named Paterson, doesn’t even own a smart phone. All he wants is to write poetry in a little composing book. During work breaks, evenings in the cellar. Not to become ‘famous’ but to one day write one-half or even one-third as well as famed Paterson poet William Carlos Williams.
“The quiet writing life and a general reverence for poetry becomes more and more of a thing as the film develops. Paterson itself is trying to be a kind of small, minimalist poem.
I caught Peter Berg‘s Deepwater Horizon (Lionsgate/Summit, 9.30) a few hours ago. It’s not subtle but not too difficult to sit through, and at least it’s over in 107 minutes. It’s an FX-driven fireball thing, mostly predictable in terms of story beats and cloying emotion. Call it a blend of Godzilla, Backdraft and The Towering Inferno. And based, of course, on a true story many of us know backwards and forwards — the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion. Yes, just the explosion and how all those oil-rig workers in red jumpsuits managed to escape the resulting inferno, and then a little postscript info over the closing credits.
The film isn’t interested in the massive oil spill and the environmental catastrophe that followed. Sorry, that’s for your earth-friendly lefties. Deepwater Horizon is a megaplex movie for pizza-eating Americans.
The reason Berg has directed this film and not J.C. Chandor (who was canned off the project in early ’15) is because the Lionsgate/Summit guys wanted it kept simple and popcorny. Who cares about that boring ecological stuff? All the popcorn-munchers and Coke-slurpers want are those oil-rig inferno effects (crash-bam-BOOM!) plus a few hero-saves-the-day moves by Mark Wahlberg as real-life survivor and truth-teller Mike Williams…right? And that’s what this is — one of those event films that leave your head and become vapor 90 seconds after you leave the theatre.
But like many Hollywood films about complex subjects, Deepwater Horizon requires two immersions — one, the watching of the film and two, researching the facts online. Because the film is mainly for the grunts (morons, lazybrains, teenagers, under-educated 20 somethings, viewers from the People’s Republic of China) who want their boilerplate elements — explosions, fireballs, mud, grease, good-guy workers, asinine BP execs, guys screaming and groaning, etc.
Being a huge fan of Damian Chazelle‘s La La Land, I was heartened last weekend by Tom Hanks‘ expressions of enthusiasm during the Telluride Film Festival. I also more or less agreed with his remark, uttered last Saturday during a Sully q & a session, that La La Land‘s commercial debut on 12.2 “is going to be a test of the broader national audience.” Hanks’ kicker was that “if the audience doesn’t go and embrace something as wonderful as this then we are all doomed.”
I was therefore irked when HE commenter Bobby Peru stated in an HE comment thread that La La Land will probably not be embraced by mainstreamers with any real enthusiasm. I have my own suspicions about what may happen when La La Land opens (all of them rooted in the plague-like manifestation of shallow ADD tastes and cultural degradation that we see everywhere), but I asked Peru to explain his thinking. If you weren’t reading last weekend, what he said is worth kicking around.
Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone in Damien Chazewllle’s La La Land.
“This isn’t my opinion as much as a series of what I believe to be sad facts,” Peru wrote. “However, first we need to agree on whether you are suggesting that (1) it will find an art-house audience (it will), or (2) it will find mainstream success (i.e., $$$) with Joe and Jane Popcorn, to use your lexicon.
“1. While a film version of Hamilton could change the rules, movie musicals just do not make bank today, particularly not ones that resolutely don’t cater to the whims of pop music (unless they are Fox TV revivals of Grease featuring Vanessa Hudgens and company). Even something as quality-driven as Love & Mercy is a marketing struggle, and that movie had a built-in audience. We’ll see if Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga can change that with A Star Is Born. The current crop of ticket buyers driving today’s hits have very specific musical tastes — see last week’s VMA awards if you’re unsure what I’m talking about. Hamilton would work. Something called La La Land? Hmmm.
“2. Neither Ryan Gosling nor Emma Stone is any kind of box office draw for the average moviegoer, and wherever either has had a hit film it hasn’t been because of either. They have actually had more busts. If you asked the average person (again, the question being whether the film is going to draw a sizable Saturday night crowd in Tallahassee) to name a film that either of them has been in, they’d be very hard pressed. So there’s that.