The film depicts how they “fought enemies who violated their honor, enslaved their people, and threatened to destroy everything they have lived for.”
“The Story of The Fearless Women“: “From the 18th century to late 19th century, there existed a formidable army of all-female warriors in Dahomey in the present-day Republic of Benin.
“They were called the Mino (our Mothers) or Ahosi (king’s wives) while European observers called them the Dahomey Amazons due to their similarity with the Amazons of the Greek mythology.”
The Dora Milaje in Black Panther (women who serve as special forces for the fictional African nation of Wakanda) was loosely on the Dahomey Amazons.
Superficial reaction to trailer for David O. Russell’s Amsterdam: This is a manic, half-truthful 1930s yarn — a weaving of fact and fiction that seems, at first glance, both intricate and confusing. Amsterdam is a kind of farcical crime comedy about three close friends — a pair of ex-soldiers played by Christian Twitchy-Face Bale and John David Washington, and an ex-nurse portrayed by Margot Robbie –— “who find themselves at the center of one of the most shocking secret plots in American history.” Except nobody wants to mention what the “secret plot” might be vaguely related to.
Slightly deeper analysis: I’ve watched the trailer three times, and all I can say is that Amsterdam feels to me like a hot mess. Whatever it’s actually about, Russell is (a) determined to hide the pertinent plot details, and (b) seems to have committed himself to a hyper hellzapoppin’ that involves juggling several plot threads and several characters. Has Russell bitten off more than he could chew? No idea but the trailer suggests that. It’s going to be fast and eccentric and mannered and wacky. Crazy plot, several affected characters, antsy energy and I swear to God I’ve NO FUCKING IDEA what it’s actually about.
Emmanuel Lubezski‘s warm, amber-brownish cinematography strikes me as pretty (it reminds me of Milos Forman‘s Ragtime) but a tad affected. I’m intrigued, of course, and obviously the dynamite cast will generate all kinds of pleasant distractions. (Talented people always do.) But it doesn’t feel right. Bo honest — the trailer is confusing.
What’s up with Chris Rock acting alarmed about a white guy corpse in a coffin without a top? What’s the issue? No clue. We have three woke musketeers (Bale, Robbie, Washington), fast friends whose history goes back to WWI…friends to the end in the midst of an almost totally segregated society of the 1930s, having formed a “pact” (committed to what or in search of what?).
Is the drop-dead beautiful Robbie sexual with either of them or both or none? Is there a little bit of Lubitsch’s Design for Living going on here, or not at all?
Frizzy-haired Bale says, “Do me a favor…try to be optimistic.” Okay, but optimistic about what? When Robbie says “Amsterdam,” it means what? Obviously not the Dutch city. Manhattan used to be called Amsterdam in the early days of this country, but what did it signify in the 1930s?
The trio is falsely accused of murdering somebody — the same friend of Robert DeNiro’s who was iced after witnessing something horrible. “Cuckoo”? All I know is that the trailer made me feel as if bees were buzzing around inside my head.
Question: Is this in fact the second film in which Bale has to find his false eye on the floor? A Reddit guy says the first time this happened was in The Big Short
The vulnerable-golden-hero mythology in The Natural is like maple syrup, so thick and gloopy it damn nears smothers everything. And I’m saying this as a devoted admirer of Field of Dreams. I want to see the hero prevail as much as the next guy, but not in fantasyland — his/her struggle has to happen in a shifty, scrappy, serious adult world. And I hate it when when grossly sentimental films of this sort push every button they can think of.
When Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) broke his Wonderboy bat, when the chubby bat boy gave him a newbie, when the camera saw that his abdomen was bleeding, I said to myself “this is bullshit.” When Roy slams the game-winning homer into the ballpark lights and triggers a fireworks show with lightning bolts crackling in the night sky and that triumphant bullshit Randy Newman music filling the soundtrack, I was disgusted. I was saying to myself “my God, I thought Barry Levinson was the Diner guy, but he’s made a whorish, shameless, audience-pandering piece of crap.”
I was astonished by the reactions when I first saw The Natural 39 years ago. I said to friends “you bought into this shit? The modest, all-American innocent good guy…a masculine angel from the heartland…plus the film is a total perversion of the 1952 Bernard Malamud novel.” Ten years later Forrest Gump came along and touched the hearts of this same hokey crowd.
I appreciated The Natural, but the old Paul Douglas baseball comedy, Angels in the Outfield, touched me in a more genuine place.
Keep in mind that while The Natural was popular, it wasn’t a massive hit. It cost $28 million to shoot, and earned a relatively modest $48 million.
The original theatrical version ran 138 minutes. I never saw Levinson’s 144-minute “Director’s Cut.” Did anyone? Was it significantly better?
Haggis’ lawyer Michele Laforgia to The Associated Press: Haggis “remains in Italy while prosecutors decide whether to pursue their investigation into claims that he allegedly had sex with a woman” — British, 28 years old — “without her consent over two days.”
I can’t recall if I’ve tried to launch a thread along these lines within, say, the last five or so years, but last night I was re-reading a 12.15.05 HE review of Terrence Malick‘s The New World, and I guess I’d forgotten how amazed and delighted I was with this film until the last 30% or 35%, when it betrays the audience and dies on its own vine.
I’ve pasted half of the review below, but please forward any significant films that seemed, in your judgment, to be unfolding wondrously or delightfully or thrillingly until the final act or the second half…looking good, feeling right…oh, no…wait, whoa, what’s happening?
Here’s half of my review: Much of Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, 12.25) is masterful, and I’m not just blah-blahing. It’s sensually mesmerizing and caressed with my idea of real genius. It is also, commercially speaking, a kind of kamikaze film, in part because of a certain call made by Malick regarding the love-story plotline.
We’re ten days from its Christmas Day opening and if I know anything, The New World is fixin’ to die. Plus there’s no critics-group awards to sustain interest among the cinefiles or any hope of above-the-line Oscar nominations in January. But forget all of this because The New World should absolutely be seen.
It’s the kind of half-great movie that is more than worth the ride because of it has so many wondrous elements. The photography and textures and aromas are nearly all, and for a while they’re nearly enough. The New World may leave you feeling betrayed, but you won’t feel undernourished. Endings are everything, and the final third of this film (lasting roughly 40 minutes) doesn’t make it at all. Because Malick, gifted but mule stubborn, is off in his own realm, and the task of supplying a story that you and your friends might want to see isn’t worth his heavy-cat consideration.
The New World‘s drawn-out, epilogue-like final act is, in fact, an example of abrupt story betrayal and audience abandonment. It should be picked over in filmmaking classes at USC and NYU in years to come as a lesson in what a director looking to survive in the world of commercial filmmaking should never ever do.
A few weeks ago The New World producer Sarah Green told The New York Times that “first and foremost we’ve created a love story.”
This is unmistakably true for the first 100 or so minutes, and in a near-revolutionary sense. The legendary, historically fanciful saga of British explorer John Smith (Colin Farrell) and the teenaged Pocahantas (Q’orianka Kilcher) in early 1660s Virginia feels vital and pulsing and re-imagined as a gentle culture-clash love story…largely non-verbal, visually haunting…primal atmosphere seeping out of every frame.
Green also told the Times, “We’re definitely not doing a historical piece. We try to set it properly…we try to give that background and that feeling, but we focus on the love story.”
As far as the last act is concerned, that’s a distortion. The Farrell-Kilcher love story is totally abandoned (and in a very brusque and alienating way at that) and the film pretty much sticks to the historically accepted story of Pocahantas’ life for the last third — marriage to a wealthy English tobacco grower named John Rolfe (Christian Bale), bearing a child, travelling to England to meet the King and Queen, and an early death. The failure of The New World ending is entirely due to the fact that this final section plays like a postscript.
But during those first two thirds, The New World is a truly rare animal and movie like no other…a feast of intuitive wow-level naturalism that feels as fresh and vitally alive as newly-sprouted flora. This is the forest primeval, all right…the native Americans (“naturals”) and English settlers eyeballing each other amid the murmuring pines and hemlocks and low-lying marshlands, and then prodding, spearing, shooting and finally accepting each other in an evolving, step-by-step cultural passion play.
I’ve respected Terrence Malick as a genius all of my filmgoing life. I knew that before but I was reminded once again when I sat down with this film in late November. And I’m truly glad to live in a world that gives up a Malick film every five or six years.
I’ve known a few lower-level drug dealers in my time, and apart from the idiots who got high on their own supply, my general impression was that most of them just wanted to do business with a minimum of drama. They were careful and at times a bit paranoid, but only because they feared dealing with immature fools who might rat them out to narcs.
I’m no expert on the drug-dealing world, but I’ve never once heard of anyone on the verge of a big buy trying to rip off the buyer, like this pool-room scene in Carlito’s Way or the famous chainsaw motel scene in Scarface.
The bottom line (and we all know this) is that director Brian DePalma always cared more about delivering his big, carefully choreographed set pieces with knockout camera moves than he did about capturing realistic situations and characters that you can recognize and believe in. But that’s the DePalma tradeoff. You’ll never buy a lot of the stuff that happens in his films, partly because they all seem to happen inside some kind of odd, unreal membrane, but when the big set pieces happen you’ll be wowed.
Jordan Peterson to parents [3:32]: “You have to understand that you’re a danger to your children no matter what. You can let them go out into the world and be hurt, or [like your mostly boomer and older GenX parents of Millennials] you can over-protect them and hurt them that way. That’s your choice — to allow your children to become competent and courageous, or you can make them safe. But you can’t make them safe because life isn’t safe. So if you sacrifice their courage and confidence on the altar of safety then you disarm them completely, and all they can do is pray to be protected.”
I wasn’t over-protected by my parents, or at least not in the Millennial way. I definitely encountered a lot of bruising, withering judgments from “friends” and teachers, not to mention the bumps and slapdowns any younger person gets from the general rough and tumble.
I definitely felt scolded and over-policed by my parents, but that’s a different thing. There was definitely too much “no, no, no, no” throughout my childhood — “You’re being bad again,” “Didn’t I tell you not to do that?” and so on. By the time I was 14 or 15 my general feeling was that life in the New Jersey suburbs — the day-to-day boredom, regimentation, challenges, cruelties, limitations, humiliations and horrible social pressures from the guys I hung out with and, obliquely, from the women I wanted to get to know — I felt that life as a 15 year-old really sucks, and it took me a long time to climb out of that.
But by the time I was 20 or 21 I had been toughened, so to speak, and able to handle random blows and traumas (like getting tossed into a podunk Southern jail for two days over a suspicion of murder). For all the anguish and misery that I went through in my tweener and teen years, at least I didn’t turn out like a fucking Millennial, whining about needing my safe spaces and taking offense at almost everything and cancelling people who don’t walk the walk in the right way.
Between 15 and 20 years ago (or possibly even in the Reel.com or Mr. Showbiz era of the late ’90s and very early aughts), I distinctly recall suggesting that a drinking talk show — one in which the host and guests would sip whatever and get faintly bombed as the show progressed — would be a lot of fun, and that someone should do it.
This, to me, is what defines Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcasts — Maher and his guests getting slightly ripped or “happy” and therefore talking with less restraint or inhibition than on a straight talk show.
I’m presuming that are other such podcasts; I just don’t know any off the top of my head.
What I was talking about a couple of decades ago, actually, was a movie discussion talk show with mixed drinks. That, I swear, would be something to follow.
The problem, of course, is that the vast majority of your Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic members wouldn’t have the courage or the character to do this. They’re too cautious, too guarded, too damp-finger-to-the-wind to risk any kind of public inebriation. They know that many if not most Average Joes despise them and that they generally tend to defer to a wokePlanetUranus way of processing not just movies but cultural values, and are afraid of showing their true colors.
I couldn’t do it myself because I don’t drink or get high.
From Scott Mendelson’s 7.5 Forbes review of Taika Watiti‘s Thor: Love and Thunder: “[Pic] tells a tale of a title character who has lost his drive, his purpose and his mojo. Frankly, it shares those core problems and becomes a metaphor for Marvel’s entire ‘Well, what now?’ Phase Four.
“It has the feel of a party that no one wants to be at, or a film that only exists because Marvel needed a safe sequel amid franchise starters, with the head DJ furiously shouting at the guests to dance, laugh and act like they are having a fun time.
“Like X-Men: The Last Stand, Thor 4 attempts to adapt two fan-favorite comic arcs into a single too-short (110 minutes plus credits) feature and gives both short shrift. It mistakes abstract concepts for deep-dive storytelling. It is fatally hobbled by a super heroic lead who has become cringe-inducingly incompetent since his last adventures.
“Thor: Love and Thunder is an unnecessary sequel, existing only because its predecessor was unusually well-received even by those who weren’t all-in MCU fans. Like too many of the most recent MCU projects, it only exists because Disney can’t afford to stop this train. Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson and Guns and Roses tunes aside, this fourth Thor is a real chore.”
From Promising Young Woman to Rebecca Hall‘s Passing to Resurrection, a forthcoming thriller in which a mother (Hall again) tries to protect herself and her daughter from an abusive ex-boyfriend (Tim Roth), movies today are leaning heavily on a dependable villain trope — the quietly seething, morally indifferent white guy, otherwise known as the gift that keeps on giving.
White guys who are racist, misogynist, entitled and/or corrupt…Anglo Saxons have it covered.
And who can blame filmmakers for repeatedly drawing water from this fair-skinned well? Angry, older and especially rural white guys represent the most socially incendiary douchebag element in society today — Trump supporters, reportedly ready for armed insurrection, sociopathic D.C. legislators (Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, “Gym” Jordan).
In the ’80s and ’90s the bad guys were arrogant white teens, greedy Wall Street traders, conniving yuppie scumbags (James Spader in Wolf, Paul Reiser‘s “Burke” in Aliens, Jay Mohr‘s “Bob Sugar” in Jerry Maguire).
But post-#MeToo all-purpose white-guy shitheads have taken the lead. And they don’t even have to be a bumblefucks as long as they’re palefaced. Cold-eyed whiteys of any profession or position or motivation will do….#whiteguysblowchunks.
One of the first impactful social dramas featuring ignorant white guy baddies was Mervyn LeRoy‘s They Won’t Forget (Warner Bros., 7.14.37).
But the table was mainly set between the late ’40s and the mid ’50s by three award-calibre dramas about racism, and two of these, both produced by Dore Schary, about racially-motivated killings. They were seminal films — the original racially woke trio.
First came Schary and director Edward Dmytryk‘s Crossfire (’47), about an anti-semitic murder. In Richard Brooks‘ 1945 source novel, “The Brick Foxhole“, the victim wasn’t Jewish but gay. The Crossfire killer was played by Robert Ryan; the good guy was played by Robert Young.
Next was Mark Robson and Carl Foreman‘s Home of the Brave (’49), about black-white racism among American troops in the South Pacific during World War II.
The third and arguably the most penetrating was Bad Day at Black Rock (’55), produced by Schary, directed by John Sturges and starring Spencer Tracy. The subject was a covered-up murder of a Japanese-American by a group of angry, resentful white guys, the leader of whom was played by Ryan.
Of course he did! And of course he was “quiet! Everything about the guy (especially his videos) screamed “ticking time-bomb dweeb living on his own secluded planet and probably up to no good.” Any bets on Crimo being an incel? And of course his family “noticednothingamiss.” Of course!
Plus he looks like…well, not exactly “a wrong one” (a term used by “CaliforniaCharlie” in Psycho) but certainly an oddball. My first association was Lon Chaney’s “Mr. Wu.” I was also reminded of Ethan Darbone’s “Lonnie” in RedRocket. Trust me — if I had run into Crimo in a Highland Park 7/11 I would have definitely taken a step or two backwards and muttered “whoa.”
No one will argue that films were generally better 19 years ago. They obviously were. Herewith a reminder, posted or or about 12.15.05:
Creme de la Creme: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, The Constant Gardener, A History of Violence, Hustle & Flow, In Her Shoes, Match Point, The Family Stone, Cinderella Man, The Beautiful Country, Last Days, Grizzly Man, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (13).
 70% Masterful…Merging of Lovers From Different Cultures in the Midst of a Splendorous Natural Symphony…But Goes off The Rails, Drop-Kicks the Mood and Leaves You Stranded at the 110-Minute Mark: The New World (1)
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Overly Schematic But Clearly Delineated (hasn’t aged well): Crash. (1)
Pretty Damn Good to Reasonably Good: Good Night and Good Luck, The Wedding Crashers, Syriana, Munich, The Aristocrats, Batman Begins, Broken Flowers, Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, Cache (Hidden), The Interpreter (for the bomb-on-the-bus scene alone), Nine Lives (for Robin Wright Penn alone), Cronicas, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach has an assured place at the table), The Upside of Anger (for Kevin Costner’s performance), The Thing About My Folks (for Peter Falk’s performance), Mrs. Henderson Presents, Kung Fu Hustle, Kingdom of Heaven, Rent, Broken Flowers, Brothers (for Connie Nielsen’s performance and the austere and upfront tone of Suzanne Bier’s direction), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, War of the Worlds, Casanova, My Date With Drew (a good-humored rendering of a metaphor about youthful pluck and persistence and team spirit), My Summer of Love, Paradise Now. (27)
Not Half Bad: The Producers, The Dying Gaul, The World’s Fastest Indian, Four Brothers, Layer Cake, The Great Raid, Reel Paradise, Green Street Hooligans, Everything is Illuminated, Proof, Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (13)
Gets Worse The More I Look Back Upon it: King Kong (1).
 Unquestionable Failure That Nonetheless Half-Saves Itself as It Comes to a Close: Elizabethtown (1)
Biggest Bummer (and splattered milkshakes don’t matter): The Weather Man (1)
Solid First Stab by Talented Director: Scott Caan’s Dallas 362. (1)
Grudging Approval (i.e., respect for an obviously first-rate film that I didn’t particularly enjoy watching all that much): Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 (1)
Blaaah: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, North Country, Shopgirl, Jarhead, The Libertine (5)
Tediously Acceptable: The 40 Year-Old Virgin (Catherine Keener’s fine performance helped); March of the Penguins. (2)
Crap Marginally Redeemed By…: Sin City (heavenly Nevada silver-mine black- and-white photography); House of Wax (Paris Hilton’s death and some fairly inventive pizazz shown by director Jaume Collet-Serra). (2)
Cavalcade of Crap…Moneyed, Honeyed, Sullied…an Affront to The Once Semi-Respectable Tradition of Mainstream Hollywood Filmmaking: The Dukes of Hazzard, The Island, Bewitched, Rumor Has it, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Must Love Dogs, Memoirs of a Geisha, Domino, The Legend of Zorro, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Constantine, Aeon Flux, Fantastic Four, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous. (15).
 Final Enduring Proof of George Lucas’s Mediocre Soul: Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (1)
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Best Docs (after Grizzly Man and Bob Dylan: No Direction Home): Why We Fight, Gunner Palace, Mondovino, Favela Rising, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Mad Hot Ballroom, Tell Them Who You Are, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern (for the tribute factor alone…McGovern is such a respectable man), Rize, The Last Mogul, Murderball, Occupation: Dreamland (12).
