The Hand of the Dog signifies a pair of Netflix films that (a) sound alike, (b) are debuting at the Venice Film festival on the same day (9.2), and (c) are opening within a couple of weeks of each other stateside.
Set to debut in Venice at 4:30 pm on 9.2, Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog will hit theatres on 11.17 and begin streaming on Netflix on 12.1. Screening that same day in Venice at 7:15, 7:30 and 8:30 pm, Paolo Sorrentino‘s The Hand of God will open theatrically on 11.17 and begin Netflix streaming on 12.1.
Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up, by the way, will hit theatres on 12.10 and begin Netflix streaming on 12.24.
If you’re up to something shady, the first rule (duhhh) is don’t leave any retrievable record or evidence of any kind — don’t discuss it in a text or email, don’t discuss it on the phone, don’t write anything down, don’t allow yourself to be recorded…keep it on the down low.
Example: There exists no letter written by Vito Corleone on letterhead stationary, and addressed to one Luca Brasi, stating the following: “Dear Luca — This will formalize my request that you immediately fly out to Los Angeles, drive into Beverly Hills and cut off the head of Khartoum, a black race horse that belongs to Jack Woltz, a studio chief. You then need to put the horses’s head into the bed of the studio chief while he’s sleeping. — cordially & warmest regards, Vito Corleone — p.s. Tom Hagen, who is fully involved in this horse murder, tells me that Woltz is an early riser so act accordingly.”
Do the mild-mannered voters in this state realize that if Gavin Newsom is recalled and some rightie like Larry Elder becomes governor, that Elder could appoint a Republican Senator to the U.S. Senate if, God forbid, Sen. Diane Feinstein‘s health were to fail, and thereby tip the balance of power? I dropped my ballot off today — no recall, Newsom stays, don’t be silly.
If they’d used Laurence Harvey crazy-eyes ad art in ’62, audiences would have expected some kind of Hammer horror film. Nowadays people understand weirdness…they know that schizo wacko and subdued freak-outs are commonplace among average people, but they wouldn’t have been able to accept this in the JFK era. The only people who had done acid in ’62 were Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Cary Grant and a few others.
Remember Next Goal Wins, the Taika Watiti-directed sports drama, based on the same-titled documentary from 2014, about Dutch-American football coach Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender) turning the low-rated American Samoa national team into groovers and hot-shots?
Principal photography began in November 2019 (a year before the Trump-Biden election) and wrapped in January 2020 (ten months before same). Then the pandemic hit in March and the train ground to a halt. Then along came 2021 and the glorious vaccines, and the train still didn’t move. It now appears that Next Goal Wins will open sometime in ’22, probably in the late winter or spring.
The only films that Searchlight has coming out this year are Michael Showalter‘s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch and Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley.
Next Goal Wins costars Elisabeth Moss and…uhm, Armie Hammer.
I like a good come-from-behind sports film as much as the next guy. What’s the problem?
Ryan Reynolds is great at playing glib, lightweight characters who skip across the water like flat stones and never plant their feet. look the other guy in the eyes and tell the truth. Reynolds almost never does that**. He’s a lighten-up guy, an “I just want to make money” guy, a guy who’s terrified of substance and gravitas and real, actual life. Which is why I never even flirted with the idea of seeing Free Guy. Because I knew it would be foam, froth and fizzle.
Update: I’m wrong! A friend calls Free Guy “an enormously clever comedy brilliantly executed that merges laughs and action with romance, heart, and something to say. It crosses Frank Capra populism with the world of a violent video game. It says much about the horrendous need for corporate entertainment to demand sequels and money over all else, and stands with those who shout to the mountaintop about the need for originality and the almost impossible fight to do it. That is what this is about, using your voice and finding a way to do it against all odds.”
“Whither Reynolds,” posted 12 and 1.2 years ago: You have to do more than just sell tickets to be considered a serious heavy-hitting movie star. Every so often (i.e., every three or four years) you have to be in a really good film. And I mean a really good one — not a line-drive single or ground-rule double but a serious triple or a homer. By this standard, or even in strictly monetary terms, how can 32 year-old Ryan Reynolds be considered a star of any kind?
He’s a talented performer, obviously charming and good looking. He seems to be trying to do quality work in ambitious or unusual films. (Whatever happened to Fireflies in the Garden?). And most of his movies have been modestly profitable. And he seems (or it has seemed) as if he might eventually be Robert Redford. Maybe. But this doesn’t seem to be happening.
Where are the super-grosses, the big critical acclaim (why doesn’t he work with AAA-rated directors?), the sense of being part of some kind of special firmament in the universe? When is Reynolds going to catch a really good wave? It’s okay to flip-flop around in your 20s but you don’t hit it big in your early 30s people start to wonder.
You knew Redford was a star he came out in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at age 32, and then Downhill Racer and The Candidate two and three years later. (All parts that Reynolds could have played and done relatively well with.) You knew Dustin Hoffman had hit it big-time when he made The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy and Straw Dogs. You knew Al Pacino was destined for greatness when he turned up in The Godfather ; ditto Robert DeNiro when he starred in The Godfather, Part II. Nothing like this has happened with Reynolds. Nothing even close.
If you’re an Everly Brothers fan and you know the big ’50s tunes (’57’s “Bye Bye Love” to ’60’s “Cathy’s Clown”), you immediately think of the velvety harmonies. And you always say to yourself “one of them, a tenor, sang the melody, and the other sang the high parts.”
The tenor, for those who don’t know or never cared, was Don Everly, the dark-haired older brother who died yesterday (Saturday, 8.21) at age 84. The soprano with the lighter-colored hair and the pouty baby face was Phil Everly, who passed in 2014.
Don was a lifelong liberal who supported Hilary Clinton in ’16; Phil was an arch-conservative who almost certainly voted against Obama and probably would’ve voted for Trump. Yeesh.
But in 90% of today’s obits, it’s never plainly stated that Don was the dark-haired melody guy. Even though hundreds of thousands are muttering to themselves “was Don the deeper voiced guy or the higher-voiced one?” That’s because many obit writers are careless and asleep at the wheel. You also have to dig and dig to see which Everly was a sensible liberal and which one wasn’t. I guarantee that Don Everly was not a rabid wokester.
All the Everly Brothers songs except one were about girlfriends — longing, heartache or some other form of mild consternation. The one slight standout was “Cathy’s Clown,” which about humiliation and bitterness.
I’ve seen most of the significant Robin Hood features except one: Ken Annakin‘s The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (’52), produced by Walt Disney and starring Richard Todd, Joan Rice, Peter Finch (!), James Robertson Justice, etc.
It was reasonably well reviewed, reasonably profitable and — this is important — shotinthree–stripTechnicolor. It’s therefore odd that Disney has never produced a Bluray version or even an HD streamer.
Disney issued a Laserdisc in ’92, a VHS tape in ’94 (the Walt Disney’s Studio Film Collection) and a limited Disney Movie Club DVD in July ’06. All versions were mastered boxy — either 1.33:1 or 1.37:1.
There’s no question that the all-time best is still Michael Curtiz and Errol Flynn‘s The Adventures of Robin Hood (’38), and the absolute, all-time reprehensible worst is the most recent — Otto Bathurst‘s Robin Hood (’18) with Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx, Ben Mendelsohn, Eve Hewson, Jamie Dornan, et. al.
I’ve got Kevin Costner‘s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (’91) tied with Ridley Scott‘s Robin Hood (’10) for second place. Mel Brooks‘ Robin Hood: Men In Tights (’91) ranks third. I’ve never seen Douglas Fairbanks‘ 1922 silent version.
From Richard Rushfield’s latest “Ankler” column: “Since time immemorial, the Sunday afternoon take on the box office was always at least equal parts spin — and compliant journalists — to reality. But in this reopening era, the reports are taking on a vaguely psychedelic gloss.
“So three weeks ago The Suicide Squad, [having cost] around $150M – $200M, opens for $26.2M + (plus) it’s on streaming, and that’s a catastrophe. A week later, Free Guy, with a budget of $150M-ish, opens to $28.3M and no VOD and it’s the success that saved cinema?
“No offense to either film. Maybe they are both great successes. Or both disasters. We can tackle that another day.
“But this analysis is no longer just moving the goalposts. We’re playing a Quickfire Challenge on a Quidditch field by the rules of Parcheesi at this point.”
Question: What the hell does Patton’s speech (largely written by Francis Coppola in the late ’60s) have to do with anything going on right now?
1:47: “Americans love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost, and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”
76 years ago the U.S. and its allies won a clear, clean, unambiguous triumph over the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) at the end of World War II, but things were never quite as clear, clean and unambiguous ever again.
The Korean War (1950-1953) ended in a stalemate. The U.S. managed a strategic “win” during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, but without armed conflict. 13 years later the U.S. threw in the towel in Vietnam, starting phased withdrawals after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and with North Vietnam taking Saigon on 4.30.75. The six-week Gulf War (January-February of ’91) was a fast win. The justified response to the 9/11 attacks resulted in an eight-year conflict in Iraq and the creation of ISIS, and a 20-year war in Afghanistan that never went anywhere, and which the U.S. abandoned under Trump and Biden and now the Taliban rules.
A friend has persuaded me that going to CinemaCon for four days next week may not be the wisest course of action, all things considered. Right now I’m undergoing an agonizing reappraisal. I’m honestly leaning toward bagging it. I don’t want to flirt with danger only a few days before Telluride, which I regard as a much safer proposition.
It seems as if the infection potential will be rather high inside Caesar’s Palace, which is always jammed with Middle-American hee-haws, and I don’t want to be on pins and needles for 96 hours.
The general assessment is that Telluride will be a relatively safe and secure event (everyone has to be vaxed and needs to submit a negative CRP Covid test obtained no more than 72 hours before arriving), but not Cinemacon. How many thousands of unvaxed gamblers will I be hanging with inside Caesar’s all that time, and in a state with fairly high positivity, particularly in Clark County?
Some are going, and some have decided to bag it. Disney isn’t sending studio reps in for its portion — their plan is simply to screen Destin Daniel Cretton‘s Shang-Chi (Disney, 9.3), which I’ve read about and seen the trailer for and wouldn’t sit through with a gun at my back. I was kind of hoping that Paramount might surprise the exhibitor convention with a special advance screening of Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount, 11.19) but that’s not in the cards, I’m hearing.
Yes, attendees have to be vaxxed but breakthrough infections are happening regardless. (The vaccinated Rev. Jessie Jackson and his wife have both gotten it.) If I could somehow get a third jab before driving up on Monday morning, okay, but I won’t be eligible for my third until late September at the earliest and more likely October.
If Kenneth Branagh‘s black-and-white, semi-autobiographical Belfast (11.12) is Focus Features’ only serious Oscar contender, which is what they seem to regard it as, why would they decide to have the world premiere at the faint-pulse, seen-better-days Toronto Film Festival?
It’s nothing to be especially disturbed about — all films open in their own time and in their own way and pace. Before today I somehow hadn’t grasped that Belfast is in black-and-white.
Directed and written by Branagh and based on his Belfast childhood in the late’60s, the film has been described as “the humorous, tender and intensely personal story of one boy’s childhood during the turbulence [of this period]” — aka “the troubles.”
The costars are Jude Hill, Jamie Dornan, Judi Dench, Caitriona Balfe and Ciaran Hinds.
Branagh: “I hope that there is humor and I hope that it’s emotional. It’s a look at a people and a place in tumult through the eyes of a nine-year old movie-mad kid.
“My experience of Belfast when I was growing up was to be part of a larger extended family, one that lived nearby each other, in a world in terms of television that had three channels in black and white. We listened to radio extensively, listened to records extensively and we went to see films extensively and when we weren’t doing that, we visited each other.”
