N.Y. Times critic Glenn Kennyapproves of Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost. He wasn’t obliged either way, of course, but fine. Ands yet his review runs only five paragraphs, and the first two are about the sons of famous guys (the established Scott Eastwood and the wet-behind-the-ears Milo Gibson, James Jagger, Will Attenborough) “who have made their own war films.”
Only paragraphs #3 and #5 offer critical judgments — how an initially commonplace approach evolves into “something more complex and illuminating” and how “two members of the ensemble who are not sons of celebs, Orlando Bloom as a determined commander and Caleb Landry Jones as a wound-up specialist, also deliver near-career-high performances.”
I’m blaming Kenny’s editor. Kenny has never shied from perceptive analysis or expanding on odd critical tangents, so the editor must have said “sorry, Glenn, but we’re short on print space and have to cut it down to five graphs.
Best sentence: “James Jagger’s father, Mick, while more a stage than screen figure, sometimes still sings of riding a tank and holding a general’s rank.” Not to mention “while the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank.”
A teaser for Respect, the Liesl Tommy-directed biopic with Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin, popped on 12.20.19. At the time (pre-COVID) the theatrical release date was 10.9.20.
Now it’s 12.25 — six months from now and, if they’re honest, largely a matter of wishful thinking. Three days ago a Respect “trailer” appeared, but it’s basically a teaser-plus. Same you-go-girl message as before with added paint dabs of character. The real trailer will probably surface in September or October.
“Instant Best Actress Nominee,” also posted on 12.20.19: “Signed, sealed, delivered, done — Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin for Best Actress. Unless, you know, Respect (United Artists, 10.9) turns out to be on the same level as Kasi Lemmons‘ Harriet and is more or less dismissed. But if it turns out to be even half-decent, Hudson is a lock — Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles all over again.
“Respect will presumably include a depiction of how the recording of ‘I’ve Never Loved A Man’ came together at Alabama’s Muscle Shoals recording studio. The savior was session man Spooner Oldham, who came up with the Wurlitzer riff that made that song work from the get-go. If Respect doesn’t have this scene, forget it. The episode was passed along in Magnolia Pictures’ Muscle Shoals, a 2013 documentary.”
On the 16th anniversary of the passing of Marlon Brando, here’s a riff that I posted on 2.25.05: “You never cared about this stuff, and you really couldn’t care less from wherever you might be now, but I’m profoundly pissed that the Oscar show producers (Gil Cates and Lou Horvitz) didn’t give you a special tribute reel of your own last night.
“Pissed and ashamed and a little bit disgusted, to be honest.
“There’s no question you were the most influential actor of the 20th Century. No one had the same impact-grenade effect…nobody. You’ve been among the deity of reigning pop icons for as long as I can remember (along with Humphrey Bogart, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, et. al.), and you’ll still be there 50 years from now. You rewrote the damn book.
Marlon Brando / 1924-2004
“But you were a bad (indifferent?) politician and a bit of a self-loather, and you let your unresolved, screwed-up stuff define too much of your life and image over the last 40-plus years.
“On the other hand Johnny Carson, whose departure happened just recently, was better liked by the industry and public, and he was a sublime Oscar host all those years. And so the Oscar guys decided to pay a special extended tribute to Carson and not you. They took, in short, the politically easy road and revealed their personal colors, not to mention the industry’s basic value system.
“Cates and Horvitz lumped the great Marlon Brando in with all the other dear and departed during last night’s ‘In Memoriam’ tribute…all right, they gave you the last slot at the end of the montage and used four stills instead of one or two…but it was still like someone saying matter-of-factly, minus any sense of sufficient sadness or reverence, that Marlon Brando is merely dead.
“The Brando tribute reel that Cates and Horvitz didn’t show (and probably never even cut together) should have proclaimed — trumpeted — that Marlon Brando lived. He lived and screamed and wept and re-ordered the universe as people knew it in 1947 in New York City, and then rocked Hollywood in the early to mid ’50s, and left them both in a state of permanent shakedown and reexamination by the time of his effective departure from creative myth-making in 1954 or ’55….and then shook things up again when he briefly re-emerged as The Man in the early ’70s (The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris).
“And all the Academy could muster was a more-or-less rote acknowledgement that you left the room in 7.1.04. Sorry, Bud, but you knew a long time ago what this town is basically about.”
Jon Stewart‘s Irresistible opened last Friday. On 6.23 I gave it a pass on the basis of it being lightly amusing and easily digestible. Money passage: “It’s not a bother to watch it. It doesn’t irritate or piss you off. It just does the old soft shoe and wraps things up (credits included) within 102 minutes.”
Presumably a portion of the HE community has had a looksee. Thoughts, disputes, side issues?
Shia LaBeouf‘s “Creeper”: “I’m supposed to terrorize the herd…that’s my function.”
Okay, but as the cast appears to be largely Latino/Mexican is Shia playing a white guy? Or is Creeper a Mexican character? I’m asking because Shia seems to be speaking with an accent. Are white guys allowed to play brown these days?
Directed, written and produced by David Ayer, The Tax Collector (RLJE, 8.7) is described as an “American” crime thriller. It costars Bobby Soto, Cinthya Carmona, George Lopez.
In The Towering Inferno, Richard Chamberlain‘s sinister son-in-law character died for his sins. He was selfish and cowardly, and so he had to fall 138 stories to his death, screaming all the way down. But disaster films are also expected to serve some cruel sadism, and so a couple of innocents (played by Jennifer Jones and Susan Flannery) also slammed into the pavement. Satisfaction all around.
One of the reasons I disliked Jack Smight‘s Airport ’75 is that none of the passengers (some of whom were played by Gloria Swanson, Helen Reddy, Linda Blair, Sid Ceasar, Myrna Loy, Jerry Stiller, Normal Fell, Nancy Olson and Martha Scott) were killed. They just sat in their seats and grimaced and occasionally screamed.
Airport ’75 is basically about Dana Andrews’ small private plane crashing into the windshield of a commercial 747. Three professional guys die as a result — Andrews, co-pilot Roy Thinnes and attempted replacement pilot Ed Nelson. The latter, tethered to a cord, is lowered from a rescue plane in front of the wounded jet. Unfortunately his harness becomes caught in the jagged material surrounding the hole in the cockpit, and Nelson flies out. I wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t want Nelson to fall 20,000 feet to his death — I wanted Swanson, Reddy, Loy or Stiller to suffer that fate.
In his 1.19.74 N.Y. Times review, Vincent Canby said that Airport ’75 suffers from “a total lack of awareness of how comic it is when it’s attempting to be most serious.”
If I’d been in charge of the script and direction, I would have included MCU footage of the terrified Nelson as he falls to his doom above the snow-covered Wasatch Mountains. (Imagine Martin Balsam‘s close-up as he’s falling backwards down the stairs in Psycho — something in that realm.) Then I would have cut to a young couple enjoying some cross-country skiing near a large frozen lake. They would look up as they hear a strange hissing sound. Behind them we see a blurry, human-shaped missile slam into the ice and disappear. The couple turns. They take off their skis and walk out to the area of impact. They come upon a perfect body-shape hole (arms, legs, head) in the ice.
Too sadistic? Maybe, but be honest — this is the kind of Colisseum-style spectacle that ’70s disaster movies were selling, certainly by implication. I realize that the film was financially successful (cost $3 million, made $50 million worldwide) but it wasn’t bloodthirsty enough.
I’ve had a second look at Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost (Screen Media, 7.3). The version I saw last fall has been tweeked and refined and I wanted to savor the final final, so I watched it on the 65-incher, slouching on the couch.
HE verdict: This fact-based, highly adrenalized Afghanistan war pic not only holds but upticks. The 40-minute battle sequence (which starts around the 75-minute mark) is not only riveting but a work of serious beauty, if that’s the right term. It’s really spellbinding — there’s no looking away from it, and it’s hard to breathe while it lasts. It might even help you lose weight.
Lurie and Jake Tapper’s book aside, special commendation goes to cinematographer Lorenzo Senatore and editor Michael J. Duthie.
Crisp military salutes are hereby offered to the mostly all-male cast but especially to co-leads Scott Eastwood (his snarly, tough-as-nails staff sergeant performance is a breakthrough) and Caleb Landry Jones, who has finally stopped mumbling and planted his feet and told the truth like a man. HE to CLJ: You deserve a Best Supporting Actor nom, bruh, but don’t ever mumble again. I’m serious.
And don’t forget the sound design, especially the zing-zing bullets slamming into terra firma, humvee metal, helmets, bone, flesh.
Unfortunately Gov. Gavin Newsom has closed all indoor California theatres for at least three weeks, so there goes the big-screen immersive effect that a film like this needs. The only large-screen experience this weekend is at the Vineland Drive-In, which is located in the industrial shithole known as the City of Industry.
A U.S. forces-vs.-Taliban war flick based on Tapper’s reporting, The Outpost is a rousing plunge into another tough battle that actually happened, and is another example of the kind of combat flick to which we’ve all become accustomed — one in which the U.S. forces get their asses kicked and barely survive.
Lone Survivor, Hamburger Hill, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, In The Valley of Elah, Platoon, We Were Soldiers, Pork Chop Hill — American forces go to war for questionable or dubious reasons and the troops engaged get shot and pounded all to hell. Those who barely survive are shattered, exhausted, gutted. War is bad karma.
Lurie isn’t trying for anything more than an expert reality-capturing. He’s done his best to replicate a military tragedy that happened 11 years ago, and in so doing is telling his audience, “Take it or leave it but this is it…this is the truth of what happened.”
Tapper’s same-titled book, published in 2013, is about the ordeal of U.S. troops defending Combat Outpost Keating. Located at the bottom of a steep canyon and absurdly vulnerable to shooters in the surrounding hills, the outpost was attacked by Taliban forces on 10.3.09.
“It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, ‘American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.’ When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, ‘I know…everyone wants to talk to you right now!’
“White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?
“DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory.
“White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.
“If your category is ‘white,’ bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (‘Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities…whiteness has always been predicated on blackness’), which naturally means ‘a positive white identity is an impossible goal.’
“DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except ‘strive to be less white.’ To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as ‘leaving the stress-inducing situation’ — is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the ‘ordeal by water’ (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.
“DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices.”
A little less than five years ago I badly wanted to catch Lin Manuel Miranda‘s Hamilton on Broadway. It had opened at the Richard Rodgers theatre in August 2015, and for a good year or so I kept reminding myself to somehow catch it during one of my NYC visits. But I was also repelled by the absurdly high ticket prices, and I gradually convinced myself that it wasn’t worth the candle.
I then told myself that I’d catch a roadshow version or at the very least a video-captured version on cable or streaming. But neither scenario happened. The cable/streaming thing stalled because the producers felt this would cut into roadshow revenues.
And so gradually the Hamilton moment — the late-Obama-era, fresh-out-of-the-box excitement — began to wear off.
Now the Hamilton “movie” is finally about to stream on the Disney channel (starting on 7.3). Obviously a good thing for millions who never saw it. But honestly? As brilliant and universally applauded as the stage show was (and to go by reviews of the streaming version), it’s no longer a thing with special vitality.
Hamilton doesn’t seem to have opened five years ago (it actually began at the Public Theatre on 2.17.15) but more like a decade ago, given everything that’s happened since that first electric moment. And it’s always been my feeling that movies don’t just connect because they’re exceptional but because of the timing — because they’ve opened at just the right time and have struck when the iron is hot.
A Hamilton press screener has been sitting in my inbox for a couple of days, and I’m thinking of catching it tonight. Why didn’t I watch it immediately? Because it’s an old show now.
Last night I finally watched episode #2 of HBO’s Perry Mason series. It continued, of course, with that smokey, gunky, grimly desaturated, grimey thing. But I finally figured out what’s really bothering me about this show, and here it is:
Matthew Rhys, who plays the titular lawyer-investigator, is too long of tooth to be playing a World War I veteran in 1931.
Combat soldiers are generally 18, 19 or 20, so let’s bend over backwards and say Mason was 20 when he fought against the Germans in 1918. That would make him 33 in 1931. Except by any biological yardstick Rhys looks at least 12 or 14 years older than that. He’s currently 45, but with his creased Elmer’s Glue-All complexion and facial features starting to sag he might as well be 47 or even 48. (Remember how Cary Grant looked in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House? He was 44 or thereabouts, but he looked 38 or 39 at the oldest.) And if Rhys looks 47 or 48 he might as well be 49 or 50.
It just doesn’t work to watch a guy who’s well into middle-age try to figure out if he wants to be a private-eye bottom-feeder or not. Professional identity crises are something you go through in your mid to late 20s or, at the very latest, your early 30s. I for one don’t want to watch a 45 year-old guy trying to figure out who and what he is. He should handled that shit 15 or 20 years ago. So there it is — my basic problem with Perry Mason.
