Tatiana and I are flying to Belize early Tuesday (6 am flight). Caye Caulker for four days and a wake-up, and then west into the muggy jungle, over the Guatamelan border to Lake Peten and Tikal and the usual Mayan meditations, and then back to Belize for whatever spontaneous adventures. Relatively inexpensive once you’re there. Haven’t been since ’91. Need to hear those howlers again. Hot temps (80s, 90s). The column never stops.
I shot a shitty 8mm western with my fifth-grade friends when I was 10 or thereabouts; possibly closer to 11. Silent, of course. I had a rough story in my head but no satisfying third act. Look at me now.
Spoilers: You can’t conclude the sixth and second-to-last episode of Mare of Easttown by pointing the guilty finger at a pathetic, self-loathing fellow (Robbie Tann‘s “Billy Ross”) who’s ready to shoot himself, and then begin the final episode by switching things around and identifying the self-loather’s older brother, Joe Tippett‘s “John Ross”, as the actual killer.
Okay, you can do that but you’re gettin’ twisty-for-the-sake-of-twisty on us.
And then you let that settle in for 25 or 30 minutes, and then you change horses again within the last 12 to 15 and reveal the actual, real-deal shooter as Cameron Mann‘s “Ryan Ross,” the son of suddenly-not-guilty-anymore John and his ex, Julianne Nicholson‘s “Lori Ross.”
Seriously?
It just didn’t work, that last switcheroo — there was just no believing it, and there was certainly no catharsis in considering the crazy impulse of a ten year old who lost his temper or whatever. It’s just a tragic waste.
What’s Ryan gonna do, suffer in juvenile detention for the next ten years or so? He made a ghastly mistake. In what way is the state’s interest served by keeping him in stir?
From TIFF spokesperson: “We’re bringing back favourite in-person experiences from last year like drive-ins, outdoor cinemas, and socially distanced indoor screenings. We’ll talk more about those in the coming weeks, but today I’m excited to share that digital film screenings will return for film lovers all across Canada.”
Yup, they’re going digital again.”
The AMC Century City looks like a grand palazzo as you approach the main entrance. And then you buy your ticket and step on the escalator, and you can’t help but feel the “thank God the nightmare is nearly over” vibes. Fun, relaxed, festive. Glad to be here.
The AMC is well-maintained and clean-smelling, but you can sense the initial sparkle sinking into the wall-to-wall carpet as you contemplate what this place is really about — the snorting of junk food and junk movies.
For this is a House of Proles — not a church of cinema worship but a folksy, rowdy, laid-back sporting atmosphere…a collection of mob-comfort stadiums.
Welcome to the thundering Century Colisseum Megalopolis, where everyone — families, couples, loners — has come to see A Quiet Place, Part II. But the first order of business is being blasted into submission by the chest-pounding, ear-shattering trailers, each squarely aimed at the ADD sensibilities of gorillas and goons and the Chinese audience…wham…WHAM!…WHAM!!
And then, at long last, John Krasinki’s decent enough sequel.
I tapped out a brief reaction last night: Yes, it’s a cut or two above. But I hated those moving head–flap, crab–leg CG monsters and their idiotic screechy howls, and I really hated Emily Blunt and her kids walking barefoot over jagged stones, leaves, branches and so on. They can’t wear flip-flops or Vans? Cillian Murphy wears lace-up boots — can anyone explain why he didn’t get the barefoot memo? Ditto the briefly seen Djimon Hounsou‘and his kids…no bare feet.
But it all feels carefully pushed and over-acted and very much like a “sequel”, and is nothing to get too excited about.
In the view of Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, the theatres vs. stream-it-at-home debate “already has the overheated dimension of a culture war. To go or not to go? To believe in the primacy of the communal, cathartic big-screen experience or to see it as a stodgy, unhip relic?
“No one thought this way about the movie theater versus VHS or DVD; the industry wasted no time transforming those technologies into ancillary markets that helped keep movies afloat. But streaming has changed the chemistry. The two radically different ways of experiencing filmed dramatic entertainment (theater vs. home) will now be competing as never before, and in some ways it’s a battle of cachet. For the moment, the TV medium has won the cool contest.
“That’s why the Memorial Day box office returns felt not just like an indicator, but an early salvo of that war.”
I can’t even begin for another hour or two, in fact. Domestic pressures. 4:25 pm update: Still futzing around? C’mon, man…
But first I have to squeeze in a late Sunday afternoon viewing of A Quiet Place II, which a sharp journo pally is calling “awful.”
“Covid-infected bats in a Wuhan wet market”? Not any longer.
Scott Gottlieb is an American physician and investor who served as the 23rd commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2017 until April 2019.
“These kinds of lab leaks happen all the time,” @ScottGottliebMD says of COVID-19 lab-leak theory. “Even here in the United States, we’ve had mishaps. In China, the last six known outbreaks of SARS-1 have been out of labs.” pic.twitter.com/NX2iWBIdBx
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 30, 2021
We all understand Martin Scorsese‘s currently-shooting Killers of the Flower Moon is based upon David Grann‘s “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI“, which was published in April 2017.
It’s about the racially motivated Osage Murders — roughly 60 wealthy Osage Native Americans killed by white supremacists over oil money — that happened between 1918 and ’31.
“The genocide by white America against Native nations during the century leading up to Grann’s period is a metaphor for humanity’s decimation of the natural world which the Natives saw as sacred,” wrote The Guardian‘s Ed Vulliamy. “Grann’s book is a timely and disturbing chapter in the original, terrible atrocity.”
I don’t know enough about Scorsese’s $200 million Apple adaptation to ask anything more than rudimentary questions. I only know the various summaries of Grann’s book, and what’s happened with the film so far, etc. I guess I know a few things, but concerns are welling inside.
I’m feeling this primal fear that Killers, when you boil it all down, is going to play like some kind of huge WHITE MEA CULPA “EXPUNGE THE EVIL” APOLOGY FILM…as in “BLM and 1619 and the woke community have been hammering home the scope of current white venality, and now we’re going to dramatize what it was like back in the 1920s…more hammering!”
In so doing the film will no doubt say (as it should) that the murderous savagery that William Hale (Robert De Niro) and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and other venals perpetrated upon the Osage Nation commmunity…what happened back then was horrific.
But is this strictly a violent history lesson, or is there a 2021 echo in this thing? Will the film simply be saying “look at the horrors that happened nearly 100 years ago” and let it go at that? Or will it be saying “it wasn’t just Hale and his murderous deeds that we’re sorry for as much as the innate evil within ourselves, for there are pieces and slivers of William Hale in all of us, God forgive ourselves and our ancestors, and so white Americans need to atone and atone and atone again.”
I, Jeffrey Wells from suburban New Jersey, may in fact be a chip off the old Devil Incarnate (or perhaps a nephew of the beast who mounted and impregnated Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby) whose ancestors brought horrific racial malice to this once-virgin land. And yes, America may in fact be the ugliest, most racially poisoned serpent’s nest of a country in the history of the globe…nobody’s arguing that.
On top of which Mark Wahlberg is looking….what’s a delicate way to put this?…older. It happens. If you were born in ’71, certain changes will kick in by ’21. A new phase.
I wanted to escape this film faster than Lou Costello wanted to escape the haunted master bedroom in Hold That Ghost. Ian Shorr‘s script has been described as Wanted meets The Matrix. Based on D. Eric Maikranz‘s “The Reincarnationist Papers.”
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