Right now (i.e., the post-Oscar season blahs) would be a great time for A24 to release Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed, which everyone went nuts for six months ago. March, April and May films have always lacked nutritional value; it would be wonderful to settle into Schrader’s best film in years right now. Alas, First Reformed won’t open until 6.22.
From my 9.1.17 review: “First Reformed, a spare, Bresson-like, thoroughly gripping piece about despair, environmental ruin, moral absolutism and sexual-emotional redemption, is completely rational and meditative and yet half crazy. But in a good way.
“On top of which it’s been shot in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, which itself is cause for modest celebration.
“I can’t over-emphasize how amazing it feels to watch a fullyfelt, disciplined, well–orderedfilm by a brilliant guy who had seemingly lost his way or gone into eclipse, only to be startled when he leaps out from behind the curtain and says ‘Hah…I never left!’
“First Reformed is so Schraderian, so moralistic in almost a Travis Bickle kind of way, so tortured and yet fully engrossing. Everyone has been calling it TaxiDriver meets DiaryofaCountryPriest with a little Hardcore and RollingThunder thrown in.
“Set in upstate New York, it’s Reverent Toller (EthanHawke), an ex-military chaplain turned small-town minister, who gradually succumbs to the idea — don’t laugh or recoil — of moral absolutism by way of becoming a suicide bomber.
8:07 pm: HE email to Call Me By Your Name‘s Luca Guadagnino: “You and your highly esteemed colleagues (Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, James Ivory, Peter Spears, Howard Rosenman, Sufjan Stevens) made the absolute finest film of 2017….hands down, no question, history will acknowledge. I will continue to say this over and over because it’s true. I love you and your facility, your gift. Onward, hugs, creations.”
8:04 pm: Barbra Streisand presenting the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Drama, and the winner is Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. Hugs and congrats all around, but I’d also love to hear from Chris Willman about this. Streisand won Best Director for Yentl 34 years ago, she reminds — the last time a woman won. Time’s up!
7:59 pm: Will Three Billboards‘ Frances McDormand or Shape of Water‘s Sally Hawkins win for Best Actress, Drama? McDormand wins! “I have a few things to say. I’m still not quite sure who the HFPA [members] are when I run into them, and they managed to elect a female president….just saying. Everybody brought their very best game to this one. The women in this room tonight are not here for the food — we are here for the work. Thank you.”
7:52 pm: Gary Oldman‘s chances of winning the Best Actor Oscar would have been down the tubes if he hadn’t won tonight, but he did. Golden Globe winner for Best Actor, Drama, and he forgot to thank director Joe Wright! And now, it seems, he’s a likely winner for the Oscar. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre. Timothy Chalamet, Oldman’s closest rival, will have many shots over the years and decades to come.
7:45 pm: The Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Comedy/Musical goes to Lady Bird…of course! Greta Gerwig ascendant! The story of her life transformed. Hollywood Elsewhere totally approves. I remember that electric moment when I first saw it in Telluride.
My Telluride email to Gerwig: “By far the best, wisest, smartest, most emotionally resonant film I’ve seen at Telluride ’17. No question. I will say as much tomorrow morning. It’s the only real break-out and pop-through. And Saoirse Ronan, of course, for Best Actress. Loveless and First Reformed were also excellent, of course. But Lady Bird was/is the best of the bunch.”
7:35 pm: Lady Bird‘s Saoirse Ronan wins Best Actress in Motion Picture, Comedy/Musical. Well earned, fully supported, enthusiastically cheered. Everyone is getting pushed off too quickly, it seems. It’s 7:37 pm — the producers want this show over by 8 pm. It’s now 7:43 pm — they’re not gonna make it.
7:28 pm: HBO’s Big Little Lies wins for Best TV Movie or Limited Series. Watched two episodes, wasn’t delighted but didn’t mind it, couldn’t stay with it. If you ask me the awards onslaught (including the 2017 Emmys) is out of proportion to how good it really is/was. Who strongly disagrees?
7:18 pm: The Shape of Water‘s Guillermo del Toro wins Best Director award! “This fable has saved my life…The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water.” Guillermo tells the band to stop playing him off: “This has taken 25 years…give me a minute, give me a minute. I thank you [and] my monsters thank you.” Obviously The Shape of Water is going to win Best Motion Picture, Drama. 8:08 pm Update: Wrong!
7:03 pm: It’s time for the big Oprah Winfrey tribute. A good, willful progressive with her priorities straight, but never forget what Winfrey said in the wake of President-Elect Donald Trump‘s visit to the Obama White House: “I just saw the two of them together, [and] I will say this: I just saw President-elect Trump with President Obama in the White House and it gave me hope. To hear President-elect Trump say that he had respect for President Obama, it felt that he had reached a moment where he was actually humbled by that experience.” This, ladies and gentlemen, is part of who and what Oprah is. Be honest. Irrefutable. That aside, Winfrey’s speech is heartfelt, show-stopping. Truth-slap to racism, paternal power and brutal men, whose “time is up.”
6:56 pm: Master of None‘s Aziz Ansari wins for Best Actor in TV Series, Musical or Comedy. Check.
6:53 pm: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Best Series, Musical/Comedy) is really doing well tonight. On my knees, I guarantee with all my heart that I’ll never, ever watch this…ever.
6:40 pm: Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade (a top Hollywood Elsewhere favorite along with Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless) wins for Best Foreign Language Film! Congrats to all concerned, and particularly Diane Kruger, who gave a world-class, drill-bit performance. Congrats to the formidable Fredel Pogodin, who handled L.A.’s In The Fade publicity and screenings.
6:37 pm: Martin McDonagh wins for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri — second setback for Lady Bird following Laurie MetCalf‘s unexpected loss to Allison Janney.
6:33 pm: Before presenting the Best Screenplay award, an out-of-the-blue tribute to Kirk Douglas, who’s 101 years old. Isn’t it great how age takes your legs away and shrinks you down to roughly half your size when you were in your prime?
6:28 pm: Allison Janney win Best Supporting Actress in I, Tonya! Second major upset of the night following Sam Rockwell win. I don’t think this means a damn thing, but credit is due. I, Tonya has its admirers, but it’s an ugly, ugly film — a wallow in a coarse social milieu.
6:22 pm: Coco wins Best Animated feature. No offense but Hollywood Elsewhere doesn’t do “animated.” But (a) congrats to all concerned, (b) takes all realms to make a world.
6:08 pm: Golden Globe for Best Actor, Comedy/Musical goes to James Franco! Like I wanted/predicted. Big hugs, applause, etc And he brings Dracula up on stage! “This was a movie about the best/worst movie ever made,” etc. Costar Dave Franco accompanies. Winner Franco getting played off. Franco brothers prevail — good one!
6:07 pm: Out of the shower. What’d I miss? Nothing.
5:57 pm: I’m sorry but I have to take a shower. If not now, when? The Golden Globe for Best Musical Score goes to Alexander Desplat for The Shape of Water. An omen of things to come? The Greatest Showman‘s “This Is Me” wins for Best Song….meh.
5:52 pm: Amusing and energetic Seth Rogen hyping The Disaster Artist at the mike. The actual Tommy Wiseau at the table. The reel runs, and before you know it we’re onto the next thing. Alexander Skarsgard wins for Best Supporting Actor, Limited Series, Big Little Lies.
5:44 pm: John Goodman is cool, of course, but isn’t Rosanne Barr a serious Trump supporter? Sterling K. Brown wins for Best Actor in a TV series, Drama, in This Is Us. The Handmaid’s Tale wins for Best TV Series, Drama.
5:32 pm: Rachel Brosnahan wins GG for Best Actress in a TV comedy, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. One of these days I’ll hear the name “Rachel Brosnahan” and go “of course!” The Handmaid’s Tale‘s Elizabeth Moss wins for Best Actress, TV Drama…great. Uhhm…Moss was excellent in Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square!
5:18 pm: Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor goes to Three Billboards‘ Sam Rockwell! Surprise, right? Slight upset. Willem Dafoe stunned. What does this mean? Probably nothing but goorah for Rockwell, and goorah for Rockwell have lost the weight he put on for Three Billboards. Rockwell gets played off…my respect for going on that long. A much more interesting acceptance speech than Kidman’s.
5:15 pm: Big Little Lies‘ Nicole Kidman wins for Best Actress in a Limited Series….blather, blather, thank you thank you, tearful nod to her husband Keith Urban, etc. God bless, thank you…zzzzz.
5:10 pm: Calling out racism, sexism, hyprocrisy…all guys are vaguely guilty and some more so, that marvellous steely glare…Seth Meyers is such a bullwhip, so whip-lashy! Clever patter, kinda hate the man!
“Good evening, ladies and remaining gentlemen. Marijuana is legal and sexual harassment finally isn’t. For the males in the audience, this will be the first time in three months that it won’t be terrifying to hear your name read out loud. If it’s any consolation, I’m a man with absolutely no power in Hollywood.”
Didn’t I read Meyers wouldn’t be telling Trump jokes? “Remember when [Seth Rogen] was the guy making trouble in North Korea?” “Hollywood…Foreign…Press..the only names that would make Trump angrier would be the Hillary Mexico Salad Association,” blah blah.
“Harvey Weinstein will be back in 20 years as the first person who was ever booed during the ‘In Memoriam’ segment.” Doesn’t the late Harry Cohn have that honor?
This morning Indiewire‘s Eric Kohnrevealed that director-writer Paul Schrader has “found a wild, unprecedented workaround” to restore or reconstitute the “mangled” theatrical cut of Dying of The Light (which I hated) and “into the movie he intended all along.”
Dark was “literally assembled out of fragments ripped from the theatrical cut and transformed into a kind of post-modern collage that’s closer to the filmed installation art of Douglas Gordon (24 Hour Psycho) than a cohesive narrative,” Kohn writes. “Originally 94 minutes, it now runs just over 70, and the climactic showdown has been replaced by an abstract light-and-color show as Nicolas Cage‘s character completes his descent into madness.”
The Twitter embargo on Steven Spielberg‘s The Post lifts on Monday, 11.27, at 9 pm Pacific; reviews can’t appear until Wednesday, 12.6 at 6 am Pacific. I can’t describe or even briskly summarize the discussions among critics so far, but the conversations next week will be lively, I can tell you. There’s a big evening screening happening on Monday, 11.27 at the DGA, complete with Spielberg and his illustrious cast attending a post-viewing discussion
Paul Schrader engineered a stunning comeback with First Reformed, which tallied a Rotten Tomato score of 95%. It delivered the kind of lean, flinty, straight-faced realism that hadn’t been seen from Schrader since….what, Light Sleeper? Or should I say Hardcore (’90)? This photo of Schrader, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig was recently taken at Minetta Tavern, and then posted on Facebook.
Hollywood Elsewhere’s Porter flight arrived in Toronto around 3 pm or thereabouts. I went straight to the Airbnb at 74 Oxford Street in the Kensington district, which may be my favorite Toronto neighborhood of all time. I picked up the press pass and other materials at the Bell Lightbox around 5 pm, and then hung in the press room until the 7 pm closing. I guess I’ll grab a salad and plan the next few days.
HE’s own Tatyana Antropova, taken as we left Telluride early Monday afternoon. The drive back to Albuquerque took five and a half hours.
Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird (A24, 11.10), which I finally saw last night after absorbing all the buzz and praise for the previous two days, is by far the pizazziest, wisest, smartest, most emotionally resonant and complete film I’ve seen at Telluride ’17. And it’s going to keep happening after it opens two months hence, and by this I mean it will stir the award-season pot.
Lady Bird vibrates with pluck, wit and smartypants energy, but it’s not some indie outlier that will peak in terms of awards recognition with a Spirit trophy or two. It’s a Best Picture contender if I ever saw one, and Saoirse Ronan‘s lead performance — essentially a portrayal of the young, Sacramento-imprisoned Gerwig at age 18 or thereabouts — is a locked-down Best Actress contender.
Lady Bird star Saoirse Ronan, director-writer Greta Gerwig during filming in Sacramento.
A comically anguished piece of self-portraiture in which the 34 year-old Gerwig recalls and reconstructs (and to some extent re-invents) her life in ’02, when she was finishing high school and dying to get the hell out of Sacramento, Lady Bird is the only serious Telluride break-out, the only film that has really cast one of those spells…an amusing, touching, smallish knockout that truly glistens and scores and pushes that special massage button.
Lady Bird is Rushmore’s Daughter — a whipsmart, girl-centric indie that deals emotionally rounded cards, a Wes Anderson-type deal (sharply disciplined, nicely stylized, just-right music tracks, grainy film-like textures) but without the twee, and with polish and English and all kinds of exacting, soulful self-exposure from director-writer Gerwig.
She’s passing along a half-funny, half-turbulent saga of high-school-senior angst, lust, parental friction, friendship, frustration, existential ambition and social longing.
Ronan’s performance is the take-home, for sure — a pushy, achey and vulnerable teen thing, almost but not quite in the Max Fischer-Jason Schwartzman mode. She’s also, of course, portraying the young Gerwig. You could say that Ronan is inhabiting Gerwig as much as Jesse Eisenberg played a generic Woody Allen-like figure in Cafe Society, only with more energy. In my book this is Ronan’s best performance yet, and that ain’t hay.
But Laurie Metcalf, as Ronan’s prickly and emotionally frustrated mom, is a stand-out also, and a likely contender for Best Supporting Actress.
For the next 12 hours I’ll be trying to catch the following Telluride Film Festival films and attractions: (1) A q & a between First Reformed director-screenwriter Paul Schrader and Indiewire’s EricKohn; (2) Chloe Zhao‘s The Rider at the Chuck Jones at 1 pm; (3) Battle of the Sexes at the Werner Herzog at 4:15 pm; and finally (4) Greta Gerwig‘s well-liked Ladybird at the Galaxy at 8 pm.
(l. to r.) Loveless producer Alexander Rodnyansky, The Shape of Water director-writer Guillermo del Toro and Loveless director Andrey Zvyagintsev prior to last night’s 11:20 pm screening of Del Toro’s film at the Palm.
I was a Paul Schrader devotee for decades, but about ten years ago he went off the rails. Dominion (that Exorcist prequel), TheWalker (WoodyHarrelson, no energy), Adam Resurrected, TheCanyons (LindsayLohan!), The Dying of the Light and especially Dog Eat Dog…what happened, brah?
But now he’s back with First Reformed, a spare, Bresson-like, thoroughly gripping piece about despair, environmental ruin, moral absolutism and sexual-emotional redemption that’s completely rational and meditative and yet half crazy. But a good kind.
On top of which it’s been shot in a 1.66 aspect ratio, which itself is cause for modest celebration.
I watched it late last night on my 15″ Macbook Pro, and I felt truly surprised and taken aback the whole way through. Well, almost the whole way as the ending doesn’t quite work. But I can’t over-emphasize how amazing it feels to watch a fullyfelt, disciplined, well–orderedfilm by a brilliant guy who had seemingly lost his way or gone into eclipse, only to be startled when he leaps out from behind the curtain and says “Hah…I never left!”
But you did leave, Paul. You really did. I was driven crazy by Dog Eat Dog, but now you’re Lazarus.
First Reformed is so Schraderian, so moralistic in almost a Travis Bickle kind of way, so tortured and yet fully engrossing. Everyone has been calling it TaxiDriver meets DiaryofaCountryPriest with a little Hardcore and RollingThunder thrown in.
Set in upstate New York, it’s Reverent Toller (EthanHawke), an ex-military chaplain turned small-town minister, who gradually succumbs to the idea — don’t laugh or recoil — of moral absolutism by way of becoming a suicide bomber.
The cause is environmental ruin, and for the agnostics or ignoramuses in the audience Schrader makes the case (as if anyone needed convincing) that what’s happening to the planet right now is a great Biblical sin, and that we can’t just sit on the sidelines and say to ourselves, “Well, maybe the seas won’t rise as fast as scientists are predicting.”
I’m not going to summarize the plot minus the final beat, like all reviewers do. I hate doing that plus I have to attend the Telluride brunch. Better to just see First Reformed and let it happen.
Here’s what I wrote this morning to a friend: “Schrader’s best since Affliction. Or maybe even since Hardcore, which opened 38 years ago.
“It’s an unmistakable echo of Taxi Driver in a way — pondering an act of moral absolutism that will ‘wipe away all of the filth off the streets’ or words to that effect.
“I was riveted all through it. You can see where it’s going early on, and it holds you in its grip. That first-act conversation with that despairing environmental activist, the bearded husband of Amanda Seyfried, is really great.
“I didn’t expect a ‘happy’ ending, one that delivers sex and redemption and a kind of Seyfried cleansing, but that’s what it does. I don’t think it works, but the sexual levitation dreamscape scene does work.
“I thought the Schrader who made this, the Schrader who made Hardcore and American Gigolo and Blue Collar, had died and left the earth. But he’s still here and just as focused and well-honed and certain of purpose.
“So lean, spare, spartan. So sure of itself, so planted. The camera never moving. I think the aspect ratio is 1.66.
“Ethan Hawke…wow. Right on it, the right mood and tone. I believed every word, every expression. And the natural, unforced way that Seyfried occupies her character and task, and CedrictheEntertainer, who was so great in the Coen brothers Uncommon Cruelty or whatever it was called, and MichaelGaston ‘s right-wing industrialist who doesn’t want politics to be part of the 250th anniversary celebration of Hawke’s First Reformed church.”
The trade rumble is that Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which appears to be more of a personal-scale Pan’s Labyrinth-type deal than anything he’s made since Pan’s Labyrinth, may be going to the Venice Film Festival. That’s good — gentle-souled Guillermo needed to step out of that realm of big-ass fanboy movies with big-ass, Comic Con-friendly production values.
I’ll admit that I was hoping that Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! would be included as a Venice/Telluride thing, even though that piece-of-my-heart JLaw poster strongly hinted that mother! is some kind of intense, high-style genre film, albeit possibly outside the box in this or that respect. Generally speaking films of this nature are rarely given a Venice/Telluride launch, although I wanted to see it happen for my own perverse reasons. The opening has been advanced from 10.13 to 9.15.
Martin McDonaugh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri may also debut in Venice, they’re saying. But as noted on 7.19, it may not stage its North American continent debut in Telluride but Toronto. The rural drama seems like a perfect Telluride thing + a nice stateside complement to a possible Venice launch, but maybe Toronto offered a big first-weekend gala. We’ll hear soon enough.
HE readers will recall that I posted a favorable research-screening response last March to George Clooney’s Suburbicon. If it’s indeed as fetching as the research-screening guy said it was, a slot at the Venice Film Festival would be in order. The two questions that follow, of course, are (a) will it go to Telluride also or (b) will Paramount be pulling a Fox Searchlight and giving it a possible Toronto debut?
Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing was previously confirmed for Venice, which also means a likely Telluride launch.
I don’t know from Andrew Haigh‘s Lean On Pete, Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama or AbdellatifKechiche‘s Mektoub Is Mektoub. Forget DenisVilleneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049 going to Venice or Tellruide — more likely Toronto. Our Souls At Night, the Robert Redford-Jane Fonda romantic reunion Netflix release, will be enjoying a “go easy” out-of-competition Venice debut.
“Some of these exhibitors who are going, they fucking deserve to go,” Tarantino said. “They have taken all the specialness out of movies anyway. Some of these chains [are] showing commercials all through it, [plus] they don’t turn the lights down [and] everything is stadium seating…plastic shit.”
Whoa, wait…what’s wrong with stadium seating? I hated those old-fashioned, slight-grade theatres in which you’d routinely have to cope with some guy’s big fat head blocking your view.
Tarantino presumably believes, as do I, that movie theatres, at their highest iteration, are churches and cathedrals — places of spiritual communion and emotional uplift. But of course, mainstream movies are no longer in the “touch your soul and persuade viewers to contemplate the deeper, finer or sometimes crazier things in life” business. That idea began to wither and die 10 or 15 years ago. (The death process really began in the ’90s and the rise of guys like Jan De Bont, but we’ll let that go for now.)
Over the last 10 or 15 years theatres have been catering more and more to your low-rent, T-shirt and flip-flop animals who’re mostly into gamer-type action fare — not to your cultivated, somewhat educated cineastes (an all but entombed culture) but to the lowest-common-denominator LexG crowd. Bottom-of-the-barrel types who love F9…bottom feeders, toads, pigs at the trough.
Paul Schrader in November 2018: “There are people who talk about the American cinema of the ‘70s as some halcyon period. It was to a degree but not because there were any more talented filmmakers. There’s probably, in fact, more talented filmmakers today than there was in the ‘70s. What there was in the ‘70s was better audiences.”
Exhibitors have simply tried to adapt to the downscaleball–scratchmongrelization of movie culture.
Tarantino: “They have been writing their own epitaph for a long time, but they assumed the business would take you along. It’s been crazy throughout my career to see how the film experience is lessened for the viewer like every five years. However, I do think boutique cinemas actually will thrive in this time. And I am not talking about the La-Z-Boy, order nachos and margaritas…I actually like the Alamo Drafthouse a lot. But I have a living room, [and sometimes] I want to go to the theater.”
Tarantino is right, however, about exhibitors who never turn the lights down all the way. I really hate that. Movies need to be absorbed in complete darkness.
On Facebook Paul Schrader asked which kissing scenes deliver the best currents. In all candor the flying-and-kissing scene between Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried in Schrader’s own FirstReformed is one of the all-time greats. I’m also thinking of that mad-hunger moment between Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis in Witness. Along with the usual-usuals.
Update; Apologies for forgetting Kyra Sedgewick’s name while posting about that “Moon River” kiss with Tom Cruise.