A serious industry guy saw Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon last night at the Grove, and has shared some observations with World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy.

The guy, a person of actual accomplishment as opposed to some pot-bellied film bum who attends research screenings in the fashion of a basement-dwelling fetishist, is calling Napoleon a “masterpiece.”

Here are some remarks:

“Running about 150 minutes, it covers the sweep of Napoleon’s life from his promotion around the time of the French revolution to the end” — a presumed refernce to Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo and subsequent exile. The guy thinks it’s “bigger, better and MORE PSYCHOLOGICAL than Scott’s epics like Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator. Also more political.”

He thinks it’s “a masterpiece, or very nearly one…the culmination of Ridley’s life’s work as a filmmaker.

“[Scott’s] staging of battle scenes on a near-cosmic scale is mind-blowing,” the guy continues. “Joaquin Phoenix gives a Marlon Brando-like performance, taking some very big risks, and at times verging on the absurd, but always taking the audience with him.

“As a movie about a nationalist in a time of chaos and disintegration who thinks in terms of pure power, it has a lot of parallels to 2022. It’s a great movie and I’ll be surprised if there is anything better released in 2023.”

Given the weakness of 2022 films so far and that recent Tatiana Siegel-reported rumor that Apple was thinking about releasing Napoleon this year, it’s a shame that Apple has pussied out.

Napoleon costars Vanessa Kirby as Empress Joséphine, with Youssef Kerkour and Tahar Rahim also starring.

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I’m imagining a chat with a Millennial-Zoomer pally about the Tudor exhibit at the current Metropolitan Museum. (The actual title is “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Rennaissance England.”) Since ’15 or thereabouts this fellow has seen features, plays and cable series set in the 19th and 18th Centuries as well as Elizabethan England, including Netflix’s Bridgerton, Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots, Lynsey Miller and Eve Hedderwick Turner‘s Anne Boleyn, B’way’s Hamilton, Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (set well before Elizabethan times) and so on. The casting of all these productions reflect the woke aesthetic known as “presentism”, and I’m telling this dude, who’ll be visiting the Met this weekend, that “The Tudors” doesn’t do the presentism thing because the paintings were actually painted back in the day. And this dude is looking at me going “wait…what do you mean?”

I saw Charlotte Wells‘ Aftersun many months ago in Cannes. Jordan Ruimy dragged me to it, and I tried, man…I really tried,. I watched and waited and gradually zoned out. My reaction was such that I didn’t write a review. I “respected” it but it didn’t turn the key. Mainly (and I know this makes me sound like a peon despite my rapt admiration for Michelangelo Antonioni”s L’Avventura and L’Eclisse) because nothing really happens.

It’s about a youngish, dopey-looking dad and his not-quite-teenaged daughter sharing a vacation at a low-key (i.e., not lavish) resort on the Turkish coast. Dad and mom have divorced and so this is a special father-and-daughter getaway. The problem is that dad is a dork who (a) smiles too much and (b) weeps in private.

Maggie and I divorced when the boys were under three, and I used to weep from time to time about not seeing them more often. But you have to suck that shit up.

I watched Aftersun to the end, and yet I can’t recall the last quarter. I know that boredom was a factor. I recall waiting for something to happen and gradually losing interest. Partly due to not liking Mescal, as I recall. Or feeling annoyed by his face. “I’m stuck with this guy?” I remember muttering to myself. I know I didn’t finish watching it in a focused sense. I floated away on some level. My eyes were watching the screen, but my head was somewhere else.

If I hadn’t sat through Aftersun six months ago and was thinking about seeing it now, I would be asking myself “what’s with the title?” I still don’t know what it means. Aftersun refers to…what, dusk? Or sundown? The way a person’s skin feels or looks like after exposure to too much sunlight? Or, in other words, sunburn? If it had been called Afterburn, I would understand. Either way the title doesn’t land.

And then there’s the “uh-oh” premise. A young girl discovers that her youngish idealistic father has another side to him that she didn’t see at first. And that other side has something to do with…uhm, the uncertainty of life? A father’s grief that comes from living apart from a young daughter? The goalie’s anxiety at the penalty kick? God’s silence?

Here’s a review from the honorable Dennis Harvey, the Variety stringer who was more or less assassinated when Carey Mulligan said that a line that he wrote about her not being hot enough to play the lead in Promising Young Woman had hurt her feelings. Here’s Harvey on Aftersun:

“Contrastingly opaque is Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, a debut feature that’s won a great deal of critical praise whose enthusiasm I can’t quite share. In the 1990s, 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) goes on a holiday with her father Calum (Paul Mescal) to a Turkish resort obviously catering to British families. He is divorced from her mother, and evidently does not see his only child often, so this is a dual sojourn both welcome and a little awkward.

“Working in a style of psychological nuance and elliptical narrative that strongly recalls Lynne Ramsay’s films, Wells does assured work, and gets very good performances from her two main actors. But while Aftersun’s plotlessness isn’t dull, it is cryptic to an exasperating extent. We find out almost nothing about these characters’ shared past, why the marriage ended, what Calum is doing now, what failures or frustrations he’s found crying over in one late scene.

“There are also strobe-cut sequences interspersed throughout that show an adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) apparently still haunted by this damaged-by-implication parental relationship…but they tell us even less. Wells does very well evoking subtle tensions. Still, 100 minutes of vaguely hinting at issues the film is far too discreet to reveal made for a slice-of-life drama more affected than affecting, in my book.”

Jason P. Frank and Rebecca Alter’s “49 True Facts About Lydia Tar” is brilliant. But in a vaguely cruel way. Okay, not cruel but certainly subversive. And yet it fits right into the film. Because it’s basically saying, humorously, that Lydia Tar’s banishment and ruination wasn’t such a bad idea.

In other words, Frank and Alter are a pair of cold icepicks who privately salivate at the idea of taking down a dynamic talent who’s long revelled in an elite celebrity orbit but who holds the wrong (i.e., politically brusque, anti-woke, vaguely amoral in the manner of many X-factor genius types) views and — this is the really damning part — has treated Columbus Ave. Joe Coffee baristas rudely.

Friendo: “This is part of why democracy is ending in America in four days. The point of that piece is: ‘We hate Lydia Tar.’ Translation: ‘Our Marxist absolutism trumps ambiguity in art.’”

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“This is a ‘it can’t happen to us’ moment, except it’s happening to us.” Basic idea: “Goodbye, Democracy.”

A friend and I were discussing Elegance Braton‘s The Inspection (A24, 11.18), a drama about homophobia in the Marine Corps. At one point I asked about the off-screen orientation of Jeremy Pope, who plays the lead character. Whoops!

“What does Pope’s sexuality have to do with anything?,” came the reply. “Who cares? He’s twice been Tony-nominated, and both noms were in the same year. And he’s spectacular in The Inspection. Plus he’ll soon be back on Broadway playing Basquiat.”

“I always want to know who’s who and what’s doing,” I said. “And, as you know, today’s rule of thumb when it comes to gay characters is that it’s inauthentic for straight actors to play them. Tom Hanks recently said that he couldn’t play his gay Philadelphia character in today’s realm, that audiences wouldn’t accept that, he said. I presumed from the get-go that Pope wouldn’t have been cast in The Inspection if he weren’t gay, but I asked nonetheless out of idle curiosity. If Pope was straight his casting would be unusual in a 2022 context, and I was wondering if anyone is defying or ignoring the basic requirements.

“The answer in this instance is ‘no — Pope’s Inspection casting went right by the book.'”

Significant Northeastern Critic: “I’m with you on this.”

Originally posted on 8.12.18: If there’s one thing film twitter wants you to abandon, it’s your comfort zone. Be brave, step over the fence and experience the exotic, uncertain, challenging realms that exist outside of your little piddly backyard. Of course! Hollywood Elsewhere agrees that people who refuse to step outside of their c.z. are missing so much and absorbing so little in the way of life-giving nutrients or eye-opening realizations. I’ve been in rooms with people who don’t want to see what they don’t want to see, and it’s not pretty. The wrong kind of vibe.

On the other hand I’ve always defined “comfort zone” in a different way.

To me a comfort movie is one that presents three basic things. One, semi-recognizable human behavior (i.e., bearing at least some resemblance to that which you’ve observed in your own life, including your own something-to-be-desired, occasionally less-than-noble reactions to this or that challenge). Two, some kind of half-believable story in which various behaviors are subjected to various forms of emotional or psychological stress and strain. (This should naturally include presentations of inner human psychology, of course, as most people tend to hide what they’re really thinking or scheming to attain.) And three, action that adheres to the universal laws of physics — i.e., rules that each and every life form has been forced to submit to since the beginning of time.

The physics thing basically means that I can enjoy or at least roll with superhero fantasy popcorn fare, but on the other hand these films have a way of delivering a form of profound irritation and even depression if you watch enough of them.

There are, in short, many ways of telling stories that (a) contain recognizable human behavior, (b) engaging stories and (c) adhere to basic laws of gravity, inertia and molecular density. I’m talking about tens of thousands of square miles of human territory, and movies that include Her, Solaris, Boyhood, Betrayal, Children of Men, Leviathan, Thelma and Louise, Superbad, Cold War, Across 110th Street, Shoot the Piano Player, Them!, A Separation, The Silence, Se7en, Holy Motors, Silver Linings Playbook, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Hold That Ghost, The Miracle Worker, The Wolf Man, Ikiru, Crossfire, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Duck Soup, Moonlighting, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, the better screwball comedies of the ’30s, The Blob, First Reformed, Ichi the Killer, The Equalizer 2, Adaptation, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, Punch Drunk Love, Out Of the Past, Danton, Some Like It Hot, The Big Sky and God knows how many hundreds or thousands of others.

But if a movie presents human behavior that I regard as completely unrecognizable or nonsensical, that insists on ignoring the way things are out there (or “in” there), I tune out. And if you don’t like that, tough.

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Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin opens today. All shrewd-minded, able-bodied Hollywood Elsewhere contributors need to see it tonight, tomorrow or Saturday and make their reactions known.

In a “reading the Oscar tea leaves” piece, IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson speculated that “the stealth candidate from wily Searchlight is Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, which could build support from the speciality-leaning and international side of the Academy.”

Translation: In a pig’s eye.

Jordan Ruimy: “Banshees is brilliant, acerbic and tinged with melancholia, but it might be a tad too artfully vague for Oscar voters tastes.

“I’ll be more than happy if my assumption turns out to be wrong and McDonagh wins the top prize, but if you’ve seen Banshees then you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a bitter film about how bitter life is.”

HE: “A film about eccentric oddballs, incomprehensible Irish nihilism and bloody fat finger stumps is NOT going to connect with a plurality of Academy voters. Forget it.”

Northeastern Hotshot Critic: “I’m with you on this.”

Walter Hill is not crazy. He’s not eccentric. He turned 80 last January, and he’s Walter “you’d better believe it” Hill, and this is how he put it:

If I could magically transform Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One into a film that I would be genuinely interested in seeing as opposed to one that I’m vaguely or robotically inclined to see out of a sense of habit or historical duty, I would make it into a film about assassinating Vladimir Putin. But an extra-clever, light-fingered hit that’s so fleet and stealthy that no one even realizes it’s a hit.

Okay, his security guys might strongly suspect that Ethan and the team were behind it, but they can’t prove anything. The ice-picking of Putin pulled off with the same efficiency that Paul Newman and Robert Redford and the gang used to fleece Robert Shaw in The Sting. I would love to see that movie.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One opens on 7.14.23. Dead Reckoning Part Two pops on 6.28.24.

…who claims to have been “violently ill.” Even if you’ve become stricken with some awful stomach virus that results in uncontrollable vomiting, say, I don’t trust that term. It sounds too rehearsed or cooked up. Like something you might say after a facetime phone chat with your publicist.

The sickest I’ve ever been happened in Marrakech in the summer of ’76. It came after eating a dish of Couscous at a rooftop restaurant. I awoke around 1 ayem, weak and whimpering. I spent the next twelve hours “making love to the toilet,” as my girlfriend of the time put it.

But there was nothing “violent” about it. It was more about laying down and surrendering to the void. Around 3 or 4 am I said to myself, “Okay, this might be it…I might die. But at least when I depart this awful nausea will stop, and I can merge with the infinite in peace.”

Posted from Santa Barbara on 1.18.20:

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