IndieWire's Eric Kohn has posted an exclusive peek at an unfortunately discarded sequence in Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
Login with Patreon to view this post
What a lotta shit this year has been so far. World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is conducting a mid-year ’22 poll, but telling respondents to keep their lists of faves to five, unranked.
Here are my seven: 1. Watcher (BEST), 2. Dog (NOT BAD, ANTI-WOKE), 3. Top Gun: Maverick (HIGHLY EFFICIENT POWER PUNCH), 4. Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood (WARM, AGREEABLE), 5. The Northman (A SLOG THAT I RESPECTED, and what about that Nicole Kidman?), 6. The Batman (HIGHLY RESPECTED, ALL OF A PIECE), 7. Crimes of the Future (DIDN’T ENJOY IT BUT IT’S “GOOD”).
Note: I deliberately haven’t seen Everything Everywhere All at Once — I refuse to pay to see it in a theatre. I have a streaming version, however, and will watch it soon. A little voice is telling me that EEAAO is going to top the list.
Metronom, the debut effort by Romanian director-writer Alexandru Belc, is a spot-on, nearly perfect political drama about a pair of Bucharest-residing lovers in their late teens (played by Mara Bugarin and Serban Lazarovici) whose relationship is tragically perverted by Romania’s secret police.
It’s not a Cannes competition entry but part of the Un Certain Regard line-up, but if it were a competition film it would be a top Palme d’Or contender, at least in my book.
Set in October 1972, Metronom doesn’t particularly resonate with our present catalogue of political horrors, but serves as a time-capsule reminder of the beastly oppression of the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime, which ran Romania from early March of 1965 until Ceaucescu’s overthrow and execution on 12.22.89.
The story is principally told in personal, emotional and intimate terms, and is focused on the ins and outs of the relationship between Ana (Bugarin) and Sorin (Lazarovici). The inciting incident scene, which doesn’t happen until roughly the 45-minute mark, is a party in which they and their high-school-age friends listen to a Radio Free Europe broadcast by rebel DJ Cornel Chiriac (1941-1975).
Chiriac’s shortwave radio show, “Metronom,” delivered uncensored news from the non-Communist west along with contemporary rock music, and thus was feared and, as much as possible, suppressed by the Securitate.
As the party kids listen they decide to write a “thank you” letter to Chiriac for providing an anti-Commie view of the world, both topically and musically. Such an act, of course, was regarded by the bad guys as subversive and criminal, and so before you know it (and I mean while the party is still going on) the goons bust in, arrest the kids and take them down to headquarters to sign confessions about the letter.
Did someone rat them out?
That’s all I’m going to say about the plot, but what happens certainly has a significant effect upon Ana and Sorin’s relationship. Let’s just say that the last 55 minutes of this 102-minute film are quite chilling. This mood is complemented by Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s shooting style, which follows the standard Romanian-cinema aesthetic — plain, unfussy, longish takes.
I’ll admit that Metronom tried my patience here and there. Some shots seem to last too long. Bugarin’s performance is hard to read at times,. During the party scene there’s an announcement by Chiriac that rock superstar Jim Morrison has died in Paris, which is a problem given that the Doors frontman passed on 7.3.71, or roughly 15 months before the party scene in question. And near the end there’s a post-interrogation scene between Ana and her best friend Roxana (Mara Vicol) that doesn’t quite stick the landing.
But otherwise Metronom is quite riveting — an emotionally relatable story of state terror that sticks to your ribs.
The relentless cigarette-smoking in Drive My Car is what finally wilted my spirit and led me to say “okay, that’s enough of that” during the last half-hour. The awful sensation of cigarette smoke and chemistry-set nicotine poisoning my lungs became too much to bear.
Behold, a just-discovered image for Drive My Car that makes my point. Thank you.
Hollywood Elsewhere is down with Al Pacino, 81, having some kind of intimate relationship with Noor Alfallah, 28. Pacino, Mick Jagger, Nicolas Berggruen — she likes “being” with older rich guys, and so what? HE does have an issue, however, with Pacino wearing whitesides. I’ve been voicing objections to those horrid-looking shoes for two or three years now. (Longer?)
Jimmy Kimmel-like excerpts from David Rooney’s THR review of Robert Eggers’ The Northman (Focus, 4.22):
Whoever cut this 26-second clip needs to be canned. Too blunt, for one thing. No warm-up, no lead-in, no integrity, no intrigue…edited with an axe. Yes, that’s Nicole Kidman‘s Queen Gudrun telling the bad guys to kill Alexander Skarsgård‘s Amleth, the “Viking warrior prince”…her son. So seven or eight guys come at him with axes and he slays them all because he’s so much faster and stronger and angrier…because righteous vengeance has tipped the scales? Oh, wait, he only kills one guy and then the clip ends.
A short clip from #TheNorthman featuring Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicole Kidman has been released. pic.twitter.com/FratexwrQ3
— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) April 8, 2022
An HE “friendo” has seen Robert Eggers’ The Northman (Focus, 4.22) and is sharing mixed-favorable impressions as far as they go.
“Never discount a true filmmaker, even with studio interference,” he remarks. “It runs 140 minutes and I was never bored, and that means something these days. It feels, obviously, very familiar, as it’s based on the legend of Amleth, which inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but it’s incredibly well–directed.
“What The Northman lacks is the artful ambiguity of Eggers’ first two films, The Witch and The Lighthouse. The influence of studio notes is apparent throughout.
“But it’s not that much of a slog, and despite a little too much CG with a climax happening at the mouth of an active volcano…two naked men fighting, not the best ending…Hollywood doesn’t really make epics of this kind any more.
“You can tell Eggers wanted a more elevated, visually-driven movie but the reshoots made it more ‘entertaining.’ Hopefully a director’s cut shows up someday, more of a pure Eggers version.
“The off-the-top influences are Hamlet, Gladiator and Games of Thrones.
“Alexander Skarsgard’s lead performance is stellar. Ethan Hawke, as Skarsgaard’s murdered king-father, is in the film for maybe 10 minutes. Nicole Kidman, Hawke’s wife-queen, has a few scenes (her screen time comes to roughly 20 minutes) that she just nails. Anya Taylor Joy cuts a vivid figure.”
How many heads are split open with axes? “I’d say about a dozen,” he responds. “The killings are extremely brutal. A fair amount of intestine spilling.”
There’s some kind of nod to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he reports, and the skull of Yorick makes an appearance.
The Northman’s review embargo lifts on April 11th.
French-dubbed trailer:
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More »Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More »Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
More »Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More »A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More »I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
More »