Last night I rewatched Primary Colors ('98), the Mike Nichols-directed roman a clef that was adapted from Joe Klein's same-titled 1996 book about Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. It was well reviewed but Joe and Jane Popcorn recoiled and it financially flopped. Everyone was mystified but now I understand.
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After months and months of floundering around in distribution purgatory, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies has finally landed a theatrical release date — Friday, 3.29.
Except it’s now being called Asphalt City.
John Huston‘s The Asphalt Jungle (’50) was a cooler title.
Exhaustion, screeching brakes, sudden jolts and grubby walk-up apartments, sirens, raw aromas and in-your-face whatevers.
I saw Black Flies in Cannes last May (nine months ago), and have written about it three or four times since.
“Black Flies Punches Through,” posted on 5.23.23:
Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies (Open Road), a pounding, brutally realistic New York City action drama about living-on-the-ragged-edge paramedics.
It beats the shit out of you, this film, but in a way that you can’t help but admire. It’s a tough sit but a very high-quality one. The traumatized soul of lower-depths Brooklyn and the sad, ferociously angry residents who’ve been badly damaged in ways I’d rather not describe has never felt more in-your-face.
In terms of assaultive realism and gritty authenticity Black Flies matches any classic ’70s or ’80s New York City film you could mention…The French Connection, Serpico, Prince of the City, Q & A, Good Time, Across 110th Street.
And what an acting triumph for Sean Penn, who plays the caring but worn-down and throughly haunted Gene Rutkovsky, a veteran paramedic who bonds with and brings along Tye Sheridan‘s Ollie Cross, a shaken-up Colorado native who lives in a shitty Chinatown studio and is trying to get into medical school.
Rutkovsky is a great hardboiled character, and Penn has certainly taken the bull by the horns and delivered his finest performance since his Oscar-winning turns in Mystic River (’03) and Milk (’08).
And Sheridan is also damn good in this, his best film ever. His character eats more trauma and anxiety and suffers more spiritual discomfort than any rookie paramedic deserves, and you can absolutely feel everything that’s churning around inside the poor guy.
At first I thought this 120-minute film would be Bringing Out The Dead, Part 2, but Black Flies, which moves like an express A train and feels more like 90 minutes, struck me as harder and punchier than that 1999 Martin Scorsese film, which I didn’t like all that much after catching it 23 and 1/2 years ago and which I’ve never rewatched.
Over the last several weeks I’ve somehow picked up on the notion that Nikki Haley is a sensible, non-wacko Republican.
But this afternoon the N.Y Post‘s Diana Glebova, filing about a town hall meeting in North Conway, New Hampshire, reported that Haley “affirmed that she would pardon Donald Trump for any alleged offenses he’s committed ‘in the interest of the country.'”
Nine-year-old questioner to Haley: “Chris Christie thinks you’re a flip-flopper on the Donald Trump issue, and honestly, I agree with him…you’re basically the new John Kerry. How can you change your opinion like that in just eight years, and will you pardon Donald Trump?”
Haley said she would pardon that fucking animal.
And that’s it — Haley has stated in so many words that she’s an enemy of decency and sanity. To hell with her. No more mild-mannered, “hey, she’s not so bad” Haley posts.
I’ve seen Takashi Yamazaki‘s Godzilla Minus One, and I mostly agree with the praise from director Joe Dante and all the critics who’ve been swooning over this recently-released, Toho-produced, English-subtitled, Japanese import that Yamazaki made for only $15 million…amazing!
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I don’t feel an obligation to state what I’m thankful for today, just because the calendar says this is the day to put your feelings on the table. For I feel thankful 24/7/365.
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Trailers for action thrillers have to tantalize genre fans with gunplay and whatnot. I understand that. But at the same time I regret that this new Fast Charlie trailer doesn't convey more of what I liked about Phillip Noyce's film when I caught it during last May's Cannes Film Festival.
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As I noted a month ago, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall is a did-she-do-it? film — a smartly written marital mystery-slash-courtroom procedural. It’s about about whether or not a German writer named Sandra (likely Oscar nominee Sandra Huller) may be guilty of murdering her husband Vincent (Swann Arlaud) by pushing him out of a third-floor window in their Grenoble A-frame.
This is the source of the film’s tension, and what makes Anatomy a fascinating bad-marriage film.
In a 10.12 piece called “Anatomy of a Fall Is Prestige Cinema as Airport Novel,” The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody has hit upon something that I completely missed when I was writing my review. And I should have because it’s a total HE thang.
Brody observes that once the film has revealed that Huller’s character is bisexual, it is all but guaranteed that she’s innocent. Because in today’s woke-subservient climate no progressive-minded filmmaker is allowed to make a bisexual woman into a villain of any kind. It’s simply not done.
In Brody’s words: “There’s the revelation that Sandra is bisexual, which, as I watched the movie, struck me as an instant exoneration, for the simple reason that a film governed by high-minded consensus would no longer dare to posit a bisexual woman as a wanton killer.”
Todd McCarthy‘s approving review of Fast Charlie is a little too flourishy in terms of tallying the shooting victims.
Opening line: “Rasty and nasty with a cherry on top, Fast Charlie is a down-home Southern gangster yarn with a staggering body count but a sweet taste awaiting the survivors at the end of the day.”
HE exception: “Staggering”? The actual Fast Charlie body count is four on-screen and eight guys total. No offense but McCarthy’s review kinda makes it sound like it’s competitive with Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch.
In my 9.20 review, I called it “half of a laid-back, settled-down relationship drama between Pierce Brosnan‘s Charlie, a civilized, soft-drawl hitman who loves fine cooking, and Morena Baccarin‘s Marcie, a taxidermist with a world-weary, Thelma Ritter-ish attitude about things. And half of a blam-blam action thriller.”
McCarthy: “This adaptation of Victor Gischler’s 2003 novel ‘Gun Monkeys‘ is an inelegant affair that gushes hot blood all over the place but leaves enough room for an appealingly credible May-December romance to grow in the midst of the constant mayhem.”
Pierce Brosnan as low-key, gourmet-food-loving assassin in Fast Charlie.
During last night’s Mill Valley Film Festival q & a (l. to r.): Scott Allen Perry (songwriter), Fil Eisler (score composer), second-unit director Warren Thompson, book author Victor Gischler, director Phillip Noyce.
HE: I chose to focus on the Pierce Brosnan-Morena Baccarin thing because that’s where the soul and the nourishment are, and I chose to downplay the shootings because shootings are inevitably rote. Plus McCarthy didn’t mention the laundry chute sequence, Pierce’s gourmet appetites or the Morena’s freelance gig as a taxidermist…little quirks and character touches that stand out.
McCarthy: “Whereas senior movie mafia and gangster characters through the decades have tended to be revered — if only for simply having survived for decades — it nonetheless seems that Charlie Swift (Brosnan) may not get the respect he deserves from the bad-guy wannabees who populate the bayou country of Louisiana. Young hot-shot punks often think they’re better than anyone, but the fit, gray-haired Charlie knows the score much better than they do and some of the reckless show-offs don’t last very long.
“The way the first victim bites the dust immediately sets the darkly seriocomic tone for the entire film, and it’s an approach that veteran Australian director Phillip Noyce manages to more or less sustain no matter how gruesome and perverse any given situation may become.
“[The film] puts you in a position to either embrace [the violence] as fun or discard it as foolish. What tilts you in the former direction is the energy Noyce injects into the silliness as well as the kick that results from pushing the material so far. The filmmakers look to have gone all out to make something of this and it more or less pays off in its outlandish boisterousness.”
“The [Brosnan-Baccarin] scenes are nicely written. Despite the fundamentally preposterous nature of their situation, the actors invest their performances with a palatable sense of their hopes, desires and uncertainties. The result is a conclusion that seems both wish-fulfilment and not entirely implausible, even if, as Charlie admits, ‘In my line of work, it’s best not to have any long-term plans.'”
We're all familiar with a certain Howard Hawks quote, the one that says a good movie (or a formidable Best Picture contender) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”
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I don't know if anyone's noticed, but only dolts and mediocre writers used the word "shock" in any context...shocker, shocking, he/she was shocked. For my money it's used way too often by tabloid writers (British dailies, supermarket tabloids).
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It is Louis CK's opinion that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut "doesn't touch earth...it takes place in an incredibly high-up, thin-oxygen world...it's not about anyone that anyone [in the audience] knows,,,the movie has this plodding tone and plodding pace, which is what [Kubrick] does here.,..if he was a comic book artist, people would say 'this is how the guy draws.' Kubrick was a masterful filmmaker, and [when I watch Eyes Wide Shut] I just say 'this is where he was at, and what his fucked-up brain was making.'"
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“I think the Vietnam War drove a stake right through the heart of America. [And] we’ve never really moved [beyond] that…we never recovered.”
I’ve been to Vietnam three times, and would love to return. I’ve even flirted with the idea or moving there permanently. There’s never been the slightest doubt in my mind that Johnson and Nixon administration policy makers brought immense horror and unimaginable slaughter to that beautiful, once-divided country, but during my three visits I’ve never felt anything but the most tranquil vibes. Nobody has ever given me so much as a hint of a dirty look because of my heritage. The natives who fought against the Americans are, of course, in their 70s and 80s or passed on. The 45-and-unders weren’t even born during the hostilities. Nobody wants to carry that war around — we all want to live in the present.
Which is why I didn’t want to watch Ken Burns and Lynn Novick‘s The Vietnam War, a ten-part, $30 million, 17-hour doc about that tragic conflict, when it premiered on PBS almost exactly six years ago (9.17.17).
But last night…I don’t know why exactly, but I felt suddenly drawn to this miniseries. So I watched three episodes — “The River Styx” (January 1964 – December 1965), “This Is What We Do” (July 1967 – December 1967) and “Things Fall Apart” (January 1968 – July 1968). Five hours without a break. This morning I watched episodes #7, #9 and #10.
I was fascinated, fascinated, horrified, saddened, at times close to tears. What a deluge of death, delusion and horror. Immeasurable and irredeemable. The second most divisive war in U.S. history. And I couldn’t turn it off. Had to see it through. Glad I did.
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