Does mastery of The Force allow you to fly? Not the last time I checked. A Jedi master can move things by telekinesis and control the minds of dumb droids, but he/she can’t defy the laws of basic physics. Daisy Ridley‘s Rey therefore cannot make the kind of leap that she does in the new Rise of Skywalker trailer. I’m sorry but this is bullshit.
I’m also getting a little tired of watching Rey wear that clenched and adrenalized expression as she faces Adam Driver‘s Kylo Ren in a light-sabre battle….again.
I’m also looking at Driver and thinking, “Man, you just got divorced, you’ve sung a Stephen Sondheim song, you’re finally begun to settle into your NYC-to-LA and back routine, you’ve helped Leos Carax find his dog in Brussels, and now you’re thrown your engines into reverse and gone back to that tired old prince of evil routine? You’re contractually obligated to finish things off, I get that, but still…”
I feel the same way about The Rise of Skywalker as I did about Matrix Revolutions a month or two before it opened.
Last night I finally saw Steven Soderbergh‘s The Laundromat (Netflix, currently streaming), and was surprised to discover that the dour Rotten Tomato ratings (44% Tomatometer, 46% audience) are mostly unwarranted.
It’s a dry, brisk, fact-based satire of sorts, and quite the brilliant accomplishment when you consider what a labrynthian, all-but-impenetrable worldwide patchwork of hidden funds, shell companies and double-talking, money-laundering bullshit that Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns have boiled down into basic terms.
It’s a little splotchy and detour-y here and there, granted, but mostly I felt engrossed and diverted and never bored.
A complex saga of ducking, hiding and hoodwinking has been honed into a digestible and understandable mash that mostly focuses on a retirement-age widow (Meryl Streep) trying to figure out why an accident insurance policy is worthless in the wake of her late husband’s drowning death, and which eventually leads to…well, it’s complicated. But not uninteresting or unamusing.
It The Laundromat “uneven”? Yeah, but who could possibly expect a story this full of confusing, sidestepping narratives and tributaries to be “even”? Is it on the messy side? Yes, but how much of real life is neat and tidy?
I was basically grateful that I was comprehending most of it and was feeling more or less catered to. I took no breaks. I persevered. I chuckled from time to time.
Streep’s ultimate destination is the real-life, now-defunct law firm of Mossack-Fonseca, a Panama City film-flam operation run by Jurgen Mossack (a German-accented Gary Oldman) and Ramon Fonseca (Antonio Banderas). They basically offered thousands of well-heeled clients (some legit, some not) ways of hiding their money from taxation or detection.
Why are there so many thumbs-down assessments of The Laundromat? Because Soderbergh and Burns are basically explaining and in fact “saying” that rich people have their own way of living, operating and hiding their considerable assets, and that Average Joes have never had a clue about these tricky offshore games and never will, and that if their savings or investments happen to collide with the interests of the super-wealthy they’ll never win — that they’re basically clueless and destined to be taken to the cleaners for the rest of their lives by invisible Slick Willie types.
Soderbergh and Burns are basically delivering a wake-up call (the last shot is of Streep offering a raised fist) but the feeling you’re left with is “get used to it, you’ll never win”
It’s an intriguing, spottily entertaining 95 minutes, and at the end you’re left feeling a bit wiser about how fucked everything is (i.e, how unfair things are for working schmoes and how predatory the rich are). I basically don’t see the problem.
And I enjoyed the English-y performances delivered by the large cast — Streep, Oldman, Banderas, Sharon Stone, David Schwimmer, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeffrey Wright, James Cromwell, Melissa Rauch, Larry Wilmore, Will Forte, Chris Parnell, Robert Patrick, Rosalind Chao, et. al.
We caught Noah Baumbach‘s Marriage Story last night at…well, the Middleburg Film Festival schedule said 7:30 but it started at 8 pm. Par for the course. The second viewing played just as strongly for me as it did in Telluride six weeks ago, and Tatyana was deeply impressed. She prefers it to Kramer vs. Kramer, she said this morning.
The Best Actor competish is definitely between Adam Driver, who plays the diligent if stressed-out theatre director Charlie, and Joaquin Phoenix‘s Arthur Fleck. The latter is certainly the flashier, envelope-tearing contender while Driver’s performance is obviously more grounded in the recognizable day-to-day, and then there’s that scene where he sings Stephen Sondheim‘s “Being Alive.”
Baumbach showed up for a pre-screening bow and then returned for a q & a with John Horn.
When the death of midtown Manhattan’s Paris theatre was announced in mid June, an HE commenter suggested that Netflix could step in and turn the Paris into a prime exhibition opportunity for original Netflix features.
Lo and behold, this is precisely what has happened as Netflix has announced that Noah Baumbach‘s Marriage Story, a major Oscar pony along with Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, will begin showing at the Paris on Wednesday, 11.6. Netflix will begin streaming the Adam Driver-vs.-Scarjo divorce drama on 12.6.
Even though The Irishman will begin streaming on 11.27, it would nonetheless make sense to move the 209-minute gangster saga into the Paris after Marriage Story departs. New Yorkers should make every effort to see Scorsese’s film in a theatrical setting. It should not be experienced with bathroom, kitchen-snack, pet-feeding and take-out-the-garbage breaks — trust me. The Irishman will also play at the Belasco (111 W. 44th Street) from 11.1 through 12.1.
Concurrent with the Paris booking Marriage Story will also play at Manhattan’s Landmark 57th West, the IFC Center, and Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Prospect Park. Los Angeles will host two exhibition venues, at West L.A.’s Landmark and Silver Lake’s Vista.
Posted 4 and 2/3 years ago, on 4.1.15: Alex Gibney‘s All Or Nothing At All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), the two-part, four-hour doc on Frank Sinatra, is an intimate saga of an artist with a profound vocal gift, a legendary sense of style, a swaggering ego, an open heart when it came to friends and family, a lust for the ladies, a chip on his shoulder and a street attitude that led to certain feelings of kinship and camaraderie with mob guys.
It’s quite the loving valentine, and it makes you feel like you’re in Sinatra’s home corner every step of the way, and in this sense it’s unique — there’s never been this much love and understanding shown to Sinatra and his legend from a polished, first-class doc by a world-renowned director. It’s Gibney’s trick, of course, to make you feel that you’re not being egregiously lied to. Which of course the doc is definitely doing by omission.
What matters is that Gibney’s accumulation of lies are, at day’s end, artful. Because the doc is filled with bedrock emotional truths and echoes.
And you can’t beat the first 56 years of Sinatra’s life (’15 to ’71) for sheer emotion, Shakesperean drama, urban pizazz, ups and downs, top-of-the-world success and down-in-the-gutter career blues…a saga of an all-American, knock-around life that spanned most of the 20th Century, and one that became less and less interesting when Sinatra turned smug and gray and more-or-less Republican in the late ’60s until his death on 5.14.98 at age 82.
I was quite moved and charmed by much of it, but this is a family-approved doc that’s basically about re-igniting commercial interest in Sinatra product (CDs, films) by way of celebrating his 100th birthday, which is actually not until 12.12.15. That means it’s really friendly…a doc that is always looking to show love and understanding or at least muted affection…a highly skillful handjob as far as classy, high-end biopics go. No judgment, no impartiality…every well-known or rumored-about negative in Sinatra’s bio is finessed or explained away in some first-hand, no-big-deal fashion by Sinatra himself or by a friend, or otherwise brushed off.
In no way, shape or form does Gibney’s doc approach the tone or the attitude or the sometimes cutting observations in Gay Talese‘s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold,” a landmark 1966 profile of the then 51-year-old singer at a vaguely downish stage in his life.
And in no way does Gibney’s doc try to get into a thumbnail view of Sinatra that author Nick Tosches ascribed to Dean Martin — “A half a mozzarella who never grew up.” All or Nothing At All is about kind, understanding thoughts and contemplations. I wouldn’t even call it “forgiving” because accusations are really never heard. But it’s quite skillful and heartening and…what, calming? Gentle, intimate, stirring…always a sense of Sinatra’s sadness and vulnerability. I’m actually thinking of watching Part One all over again.
The video, which has a degraded, third- or fourth-generation digital texture, is a rightwing slaughter fantasy, rancid and hateful and brimming over with rage. However unfortunate, it’s yet another, fully consistent expression of the sentiments of the media-and-liberal-hating hinterland Trump faithful, a small number of whom, of course, have been behind racially-motivated shootings.
Borrowed from an actual church massacre scene from Matthew Vaughn‘s Kingsmen: The Secret Service, it shows a crudely digitized Donald Trump shooting, bashing and stabbing various news media reps as well as Hillary Clinton, former President Obama, Bernie Sanders (whose white hair is lit on fire), Sen. Mitt Romney, Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, Rosie O’Donnell and Rep. Maxine Waters.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted today that while President Trump has not seen the video, “based upon everything he has heard, he strongly condemns” it. An American Priority statement on its website says that “it has come to our attention that an unauthorized video was shown in a side room at #AMPFest19…the video was not approved, seen or sanctioned by the AMPFest19 organizers.”
The difference between myself and Jane Fonda as far as political protest and civil disobedience are concerned is that I’ve never been arrested and led away by the bulls. I’m too fleet of foot or, to put it more bluntly, too chickenshit. Jane is now living in Washington D.C. (temporarily) and intending to get arrested each and every Friday (“Fire Drill Friday”) in the vicinity of the Capitol steps, all in the name of climate change and the grotesque refusal of the Trump administration to even acknowledge that the clock is ticking, much less trying to do something about it.
Fallen hound and allegedly insensitive assaulter Matt Lauer has lost everything by way of termination and excommunication — the man is finished. But NBC News chief Andy Lack still has skin in the game, and Ronan Farrow’s new book has painted an equally negative portrait of Lack, his allegedly cozy relationship with Harvey Weinstein and a reluctance to move forward on Farrow’s Weinstein reporting.
Two days ago Lack stated in part, “It disappoints me to say that even with passage of time, Farrow’s account has become neither more accurate, nor more respectful of the dedicated colleagues he worked with here at NBC News. He uses a variety of tactics to paint a fundamentally untrue picture.”
This morning Farrow told George Stephanopoulos that the book speaks for itself, but that it’s hard to believe Lack’s account of what happened.
I finally saw Ang Lee‘s Gemini Man last night, and wouldn’t you know I’d pick a screening that didn’t show the 4K high-frame-rate 3D version? I saw a plain old 2D at 24 fps version, but it looked fine. And I was never in any serious pain during the 117 minute running time.
Yes, Gemini Man has a lousy 30% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I found it to be an agreeable so-whatter. It diverts, it moves along, it’s not overly irksome. Especially during the first 25 to 35 minutes.
Will Smith does a reasonably good job of playing two versions of an ace professional assassin named Henry Brogan, or more specifically his own 50 year-old self along with a digitally composed 20something version (aka “Junior”). And I like the deft way that Lee cuts away from the grisly stuff from time to time.
I didn’t “turn” on Gemini Man, exactly, but it gradually let me down, and I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into my seat. It gradually hit me, in other words, that the story was kinda routine in a flat-footed way. There were basically too many cooks working on too many drafts for too many years, and so the script feels over-written, over-honed, over-edited, ground into mush. It feels like re-heated leftovers.
The credited writers are David Benioff, Billy Ray and Darren Lemke but Andrew Niccol, David Benioff, Brian Helgeland, Jonathan Hensleigh, Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson also took whacks at it.
But the de-aging VFX are better than The Irishman‘s in one respect. In Martin Scorsese‘s world-class film the face and hair styles give to Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci are definitely younger but the bodies are their own — older, chunkier, less than athletic. Will Smith’s “Junior”, on the other hand, is slim and lean and a physique of a workout Nazi.
Dry wit and deft allusion are the chief signatures of New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, whom I’ve been reading for a quarter-century. No fastballs or croquet mallets, but curves, knuckleballs, sliders. His pans suggest that disdain, anger and even disgust reside within, but Lane is hardly an emotionally open book. He always holds himself in check.
It’s therefore interesting and significant that you can detect serious, unmitigated loathing in his 9.27 review of Joker (“Todd Phillips’ Joker Is No Laughing Matter“). Not just about the film but the hype. Joker, in short, has gotten under his skin. He’s fuming and ready to take a swing. This means something.
“Here’s the deal,” Lane explains. “Joker is not a great leap forward, or a deep dive into our collective unconscious, let alone a work of art. It’s a product. All the pre-launch rumblings, the rants and the raves, testify to a cunning provocation, and, if we yield to it, we’re not joining a debate; we’re offering our services, unpaid, to the marketing department at Warner Bros.
New Yorker illustration by Zohar Lazar.
“When Dalí and Buñuel made L’Âge d’Or (1930), they wanted to start a riot, and they succeeded, but Joker yearns for little more than a hundred op-ed pieces and a firestorm of tweets. With ticket sales, naturally, to match.
“The evidence for this daring scheme is everywhere you look, in Phillips’s film, and everywhere you listen. Nicholson’s Joker may have danced and pranced to the sound of Prince’s ‘Partyman’, but Phoenix gyrates, on a steep flight of steps, to ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Part 2’, a 1972 hit by Gary Glitter. It used to be popular with sports teams, rousing the crowds at N.F.L. and N.H.L. games, before Glitter was convicted, in 1999, of possessing child pornography, and, seven years later, of sexually abusing minors, in Vietnam. Since then, understandably, the song has tumbled out of favor.
“Do you believe that the decision to revive it, for Joker, is anything but a studied choice, nicely crafted to offend? Please. I happen to dislike the film as heartily as anything I’ve seen in the past decade, but I realize, equally, that to vent any inordinate wrath toward it is to fall straight into its trap, for outrage merely proves that our attention has been snagged. Just ask the President of the United States.”
One dispute: In today’s realm, “a firestorm of tweets” is a riot.
When I awoke yesterday morning the iPhone 8 Plus battery was just about drained, and it wouldn’t activate. It was plugged into a smallish Jackery battery, but the charging cord was one of those shitty ones they sell at gas stations. The battery icon showed that the phone was all but drained with just a little bit of red of the left side, and it wouldn’t power up.
So I tried to fix things with the assistance of a friendly but none-too-bright Apple tech assistance person. I knew she wasn’t that brilliant when she said she’d never heard of Jackery external batteries, and then was asking me over and over when was the last time I’d charged the phone straight from a wall socket, blah blah. “Never”, I said.
Then I talked to a smarter Apple person, and his advice was to submit the phone to a Genius Bar session at the Grove Apple store. He got me a 4:30 pm appointment. Thanks.
Four or five hours later I was at the store and showing the phone (still plugged into the Jackery battery with that shitty white cord) to a Genius Bar guy. He was gay and 40ish (am I allowed to describe a person this way?) and something about his speech and manner told me “be careful…he’s not Albert Einstein.” (The best Genius Bar techs are always mercurial types in their 20s and 30s.)
Gay Genius Guy tried this and that in the back room, and came back with an unusual diagnosis. The phone wasn’t turning on because a badly loaded app was keeping the mechanism from going through the necessary steps.
“A bad app? An app that hasn’t loaded correctly?” I said, giving him the side-eye. “I’ve been grappling with iPhones for 12 years now, and I’ve never once heard of problematic software preventing a phone for tuning on.” GGG said there’s always a first time for anything.
“But it’s clearly seems to be a battery issue,” I argued. “How do you know that an app is causing this?”
We went back and forth. The only safe and comprehensive solution, he maintained, was to wipe the phone of all data and reload it through iTunes, which would have been a huge pain in the ass and eaten up a lot of time. I guess I was frowning and pouting a bit, but I really didn’t like this guy or his diagnosis.
According to longtime Robert De Niro partner and Irishman producer Jane Rosenthal, Martin Scorsese‘s final gangster flick “is a slower movie. It doesn’t have the kind of intensity, the visual intensity, [of] a Casino or a Goodfellas. It is guys looking at themselves through an older perspective.”
It’s basically about “toxic masculinity” being the end-all and be-all of the life of mob hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), Rosenthal says, “and what happens when someone chooses one family over their own nuclear family, and then tries to make repairs at the end of [his life]. What happens to men who make that decision.”
The Irishman will debut at the NY Film Festival on Friday, 9.27, or four days hence.
Can you imagine any old-time, bullshit-spewing producer in the Sam Spiegel or David O. Selznick or Harvey Weinstein mode calling one of his upcoming films “slower”? Rosenthal presumably means that The Irishman is sadder or more meditative, etc. But my God, in most people’s opinion “slower” is only a step or two removed from boring.
And the term “toxic masculinity”, of course, is straight out of your basic SJW feminist handbook.
Over the years most mobster types (including the ones in the first two Godfather films, Goodfellas and The Sopranos) have been portrayed as men who lived most completely in the company of their crime family paisans, and secondarily with their nuclear families, as a kind of fallback thing.
What was the final shot of The Godfather (’72) about, when Al Neri closed that door on Diane Keaton‘s Kay Adams? It was about Kay being shut out of the inner sanctum of Michael Corleone‘s gangster life, and realizing that she’ll always be kept in a restricted zone in which she’ll never really share or know what’s going on.
Remember the definitive line that Don Corrado Prizzi (William Hickey) says to Charlie Partanna (Jack Nicholson) in Prizzi’s Honor? They’re talking about unscrupulous hitwoman Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner), whom Charlie has recently married and loves deeply. The boss, however, wants her dead. When Charlie protests, he’s told that there’s no choice because the Prizzi family is everything. “She is your wife,” Don Corrado says, “but we are your life.”
How is this any different from what Rosenthal is talking about?