Everyone presumably knows that Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville is an eight-part series about an infamous texting-suicide case that went to trial in 2017. The real-life Michelle Carter (Elle Fanning), an ice-cold sociopath, goaded her unstable teenage boyfriend, Conrad Roy (Colton Ryan), into committing suicide.
Based on Jesse Baron’s Esquire article of the same name, the series explores how and why the suicide happened and how Carter was eventually busted, prosecuted and convicted of manslaughter. She would up serving 11 months or something like that, but she’sthedevil and presumably knows it. This will be on her back for the rest of her life, and that’s a good thing.
Fanning plays Carter as such a revolting drama queen and contemptible attention whore that you can’t wait to see her get popped and cuffed, but it takes too long. I made it through two episodes before quitting. Okay, I may watch a couple more but this is a three-hour movie expanded into eight hours. It’s very well acted and all (special shout-out to Chloe Sevigny‘s performance as Conrad’s mom) but sometimes a miniseries just feels too stretched out.
I’m more interested in sitting through Erin Lee Carter‘s 143-minute I Love You, Now Die, which is on HBO Max.
Two or three days ago The Take co-host Elizabeth Wagmeister stepped out of her usual rah-rah, chipmunk-voiced enthusiasm mode to express annoyance at the endless corporate stream of IP sequels, prequels, remakes and retreads.
HE readers presumably understand that Wagmeister and The Take co-host Clayton Davis are catty, upbeat, chuckling cheerleaders…everything Hollywood does gives them an ostrich-feather ass tickle at the very least and often jump-for-joy feelings…”oh wow oh wow oh wow!”
Every thinking industry person has been lamenting IP megaplex suffocation for at least a decade, of course. But when Wagmiester complained about it I damn near fell out of my chair. It happened during a discussion of recently seen Cinemacon trailers:
Wagmeister: “What’s interesting is, we’re just talking about all these films. There’s a Part 1, there’s a Part 2, there’s a Part 10. It just feels like this trend in movies in movie theatres is that we’re seeing sequel upon sequel and franchise upon franchise. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. We do want to bring people back to theatres. But (exhales)…you know, it’s just like ‘really?'”
Davis: “It is stretching the dollar out but blah blah blah blah I love geek movies, I love franchises, I love IP superheroes, just keep it coming, I love it, I’m happy, this is what I live for…more more more plus in a couple of weeks I’m going to Europe and the Cannes Film Festival for the first time, and boy oh boy, am I going to plant a huge wet smooch on Elvis‘s ass!” [HE note: This is not an actual transcription of Davis’s response but a summary of what he meant and who he is, etc.]
“Within the last week I read a comment about Chris McQuarrie‘s Jack Reacher (Paramount, 12.21) being “a ’90s urban actioner,” which the commenter intended, I gathered, as some kind of putdown. Well, take out the negative inference and he’s dead right — Reacheris a kind of old-fashioned actioner in a ’90s or ’80s or ’70s vein (can’t decide which) but in a highly refreshing, intelligent, follow-the-clues-and-watch-your-back fashion.
“It has no digital bullshit, no explosions, and none of that top-the-last-idiot-action-movie crap. Jack Reacherbelieves in the basics, and I for one was delighted even though it doesn’t exactly re-invent the wheel.
“Honestly? I was fairly satisfied but not that blown away by the final 25%, but the first 75% plays very tight and true and together, and Tom Cruise, as the titular character, has the confidence and presence and steady-as-she-goes vibe of a hero who doesn’t have to reach or scream or emphasize anything in order to exude that steely-stud authority that we all like.
“Reacher is just a bang-around Pittsburgh dirty-cop movie with a kind of Samurai-styled outsider (Cruise) working with a sharp-eyed, straight-dope attorney (Rosamund Pike) trying to uncover who stinks and what’s wrong and who needs to be beaten or killed or whatever.
“It’s just an unpretentious, elegantly written programmer that’s nowhere near the class or depth of Witness, say, certainly not in the matter of departmental corruption and general venality, but it does move along with an agreeably lean, get-it-right attitude. I love that Cruise’s Reacher doesn’t drive a car or carry an ID or even a modest bag of clothing and toiletries. He washes his one T-shirt and one pair of socks every night in the sink.
I somehow got the idea that the Jack Reacher character, as written by Jack Grant/Lee Child, was some brawny badass who strode around and pulverized the bad guys like he was Paul Bunyan or something, largely because he was a mountain-sized 6′ 5″.
“I’ve never read a Reacher novel but the movie is not some brute kickass machismo thing but a largely cerebral whodunit that believes in dialogue and playing it slow and cool and holding back and pausing between lines and all that less-is-more stuff. It has a bit of a Sherlock Holmes thing going on between the beatings and threats and car chases.
“Jack Reacher basically delivers what urban thrillers used to deliver before John Woo came along in the early ’90s and fucked everything up with flying ballet crap and two-gun, crossed-arm blam-blam. It has a little bit of a nostalgic Walter Hill atmosphere going on, particularly in the fashion of The Driver (’78). It also reminded me of the stripped-down style and natural, unhurried pacing of John Flynn‘s The Outfit (’73), which starred Robert Duvall (who plays a small but key supporting role in Jack Reacher).
“If you know The Outfit, you know what I’m talking about.”
There are two things wrong with “Centerfold,” the 1981 J. Geils Band standard. For a song about romantic disillusionment (it’s about a 20something guy who’s shocked to discover his high school fantasy honey in a centerfold of a nudie mag), it’s way too bouncy and happy sounding. The other wrong thing is the title — the song should obviously be titled “My Blood Runs Cold.”
I feel the same way about “Sister Golden Hair,” a title I could never quite get used to. Alternate title #1: “Just Can’t Fake it.” Alternate title #2: “(Can You) Meet Me in the Middle.”
Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” should have been titled “I Get Knocked Down (But I Get Up Again)”
2:40: “You can’t win against fanatics, at least in the short term. And what we’re realizing about the woke bandwagon…these people are radicals, extremists, fanatics. They have an extraordinary set of claims, and have managed to push them, bulldoze them right into the center of our lives. And there have been no effective barricades, and six or seven years ago I don’t think people realized the scope of what was coming.
“[An oft-repeated quote is that] one day the barbarians will be at the gate, and we’ll be debating which gender pronouns to call them. It is deranging.
“People are being demanded to say things they know are not true. If you assault the things that we know to be true — like the fact that there are boys and girls, that you’re not assigned a gender at birth but you’re subjected to a sort of lottery system…there are boys and girls, of course, but if you persuade people that this is not true, that there are in fact dozens of gender permutations…you can do an awful lot afterwards. Because you’ve made people doubt things they knew to be true.
“The next stage of this is a war on the fundamentals of everything in our society. A war on our history on your past, on our past, on our foundations…and a war on white people.
“The last phrase is something people jump at, but there’s no other way to describe it now. Lots of different bigotries exist in the world but the only one that is completely tolerated, indeed encouraged in our 21st Century market, is hatred of and diminishment of people for being white.
“We wouldn’t tolerate this with any other skin color. Only with white people is this now permissible. Because white people are inheritors of the west, and must therefore pay for the sins of the west.” — Douglas Murray, author of “The War on the West.”
…when Baz Luhrmann‘s Elvis opens on 6.24.22, and particulary (for me) when it has its big premiere in Cannes in a very few weeks….from Pauline Kael‘s review of This Is Elvis:
“There an authentic mystery about Elvis: when we see footage from his early Hollywood movies, he’s only a kid of twenty-one or -two, yet he has the zonked eyes of his later years and he seems to be alive only from the waist down. He walks through his starring roles with his face somnolent and masked; you don’t have a clue what he’s thinking. (He was a terrible actor — he must have understood that he would never amount to diddly in these crum-bum movies, and been resentful and bored.)
“At twenty-three he was inducted in the Army, and the newsreel footage of him being given a G.I. haircut and during the two years of his service (1958 to 1960) shows him more open-faced than at any other time. The sneering, Greek-statue look he had in his movies disappears; he’s leaner and his smile is boyish. But as soon as he’s out of the Army and resumes his movie career, the surly overripeness is back.
“The mixture in Elvis — part artist, part exhibitionist, part good ole boy, part romantic kid, part unknown — could have only fused in pop culture, and it didn’t fuse for long.”
‘This is the first time the president attended this dinner in 6 years … We had a horrible plague, followed by 2 years of COVID’ — Pres. Biden begins his speech by firing shots at Donald Trump 👀 #WHCDpic.twitter.com/Sr8CpSghoY
We all clean house every so often, but (and I know this is familiar to every older person in this racket) it’s very emotionally difficult to toss or put aside articles from 25 and 30 years ago. You think back to the blood, sweat and tears that went into each one, and the feeling swells. A little eye moisture. We all have to refresh and let the past go, but ithurtssomuch.
Director–writer: “If you check the blacklist, as well as talk to agents and writers around town, there were a whole slew of metacomedies written for stars to play themselves, and those have since been scuttled or shifted to streaming, perhaps after UnbearableWeight tanked.
“There was one written for Mickey Rourke to play himself and there are a half dozen of these meta pieces. A few spec scripts were penned for Liam Neeson to spoof his image, now on the backburner after Lionsgate failed to open yet another comedy. The marketing over there is the worst.”
So the BeingMortalproductionshutdown happened a week and a half ago and Bill Murray (moody rambunctious boomer offender) and Keke Palmer (“Millennial Diva”) are still trying to work things out? They can’t come to a rapprochement after ten effing days? Obviously one of them has an attitude and an arched back. Thoughts?
HEtoBarbara Broccoli: Yes, it will take a long time to bring a dead man back to life. Unless, of course, the next two or three Bond films will be prequels. Then it’ll be fine. Set in the early ‘60s, let’s say.
Sidenote: Does anyone believe that Broccoli, a timid, finger-to-the-wind franchise caretaker if there ever was one, would even flirt with committing to a prequel realm?
Backtomessage: Wait, hold on…killing Daniel Craig’s 007 in NoTimetoDie was more of a metaphorical gesture to feminist #MeToo cadres than an actual dramatic death, you say? And with that gesture now part of movie history you feel free to reanimate “James Bond” except make him (or her) trans or gay or an agent of color? Is that what you have in mind?
