Put another way, we don’t want Joe Schmoe ticket buyers to feel any kind of tingly excitement when OBAA starts winning big-time.
We want them to scratch their heads and wonder what the fuck is going on here, etc.
Remember how badly most of you guys felt when Everything Everywhere All At Once won everything in ‘22? How you howled and screamed and repeatedly punched the refrigerator when Jamie Lee Curtis won for Best Supporting Actress? Well, grim up and get ready for a repeat.
Because we not only hateyou, but we want you to really, truly and fully comprehend that.
Thank God, at least, that Sinners and the dragon-fingered Cynthia Erivo will almost certainly be getting the bum’s rush.
…but it was certainly the most fun to write, and remains to this day the most fun to re-read:
Earlier this afternoon I suffered through most of Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling (Mubi) and I want credit, dammit, for toughing it out for just short of two hours. (It runs 149 minutes.)
A hellish, multi-chapter, visually dreary, narrative hop-around from the perspective of a few suffering women and young girls at different times during the 20th Century, Sound of Fallingbrings the grim and the soul-drain in the usual suffocating ways.
You could say that the soft, muddy, under-lighted cinematography is meant to inject the same shitty, misery-pit, lemme-outta-here feeling the women and girls are experiencing at every turn. Sure, I’ll buy that.
Is Schilinski an auteur — a feisty, willful, go-for-it filmmaker with a persistence of artistic vision and a stylistic stamp all her own (albeit a stamp that brings you down, down, down)? Yes, she is that.
Does her film have something to say? Yep. It’s saying that 20th Century farm women in northern Germany were miserable as fuck, and that the men were either smelly pigs or abusers or both, and that most of them smoked and a few had massive pot bellies.
Sound of Falling doesn’t make you think about dying before your time, but it does prompt thoughts of escaping the mortal coil early on.
On top of which I was sitting in the Grand Lumière balcony, scrunched between two women and with no leg room at all, and my thighs and calves were stuck in a kind of purgatory, suspended between numbness and screaming pain.
But I didn’t leave for the longest time. I wanted to but I couldn’t be the first balcony-sitter to bail. I said this to myself — “no quitting until a couple of viewers go first”.
So I hung in there with the patience of Job, waiting for some intrepid soul to man up and bolt the fuck outta there, but nobody did for the first…oh, 100 minutes or so.
And then a woman got up and walked. And then another. Thank you, sisters, and thank you, my sweet Lord…glory be to God!
I stood up with my bag and retreated to the main walkway, and then decided to watch from a standing position. And then another person threw in the towel. And then another. And then a trio of Zoomers left at the same time. Hey, we’re really livin’ here!!!
I’ve never felt such wonderful kinship with strangers as I did at that moment.
Variety’s Guy Lodge, the bespectacled king of the Cannes filmcrit dweebs, has totally raved about Schilinski’s punisher.
I respect Lodge’s willingness to drop to his knees and kowtow to a feminist filmmaker who has the chutzpah to subject viewers to a drip-drip gloom virus, but at the same time I think he’s either left the planet or had simply decided to praise this fairly infuriating film no matter what.
Average Joes and Janes, trust me, are going to hate, hate, hate this exactingly assembled, artistically pulverizing tour de force.
I knew that the Critics’ Choice bowl-lickers would deny Deliver Me From Nowhere a Best Picture nom because it flopped critically and commercially. Because they were unimpressed along with everyone else, but also (primarily?) because the CC gang knew that dismissing it would be politically safe.
I also knew they’d snub Jeremy Allen White‘s portrayal of Bruce Springsteen.
But I figured they’d at least hand Jeremy Strong a Best Supporting Actor nom for playing Springsteen manager Jon Landau, largely because it was an intelligently rendered perf and wholly believable, and because Strong is widely respected. Nope!
Anthony Zerbe: I was just reading your play. I liked a lot of it. I don’t like the main character though. This Marine. Sounds like a real jellyfish. I guess you’re supposed to like him because he’s against the Marine Corps. Is that it? Michael Moriarty: Something like that. AZ: Why doesn’t he do something? Go over the hill, refuse an order. I couldn’t sympathize with a character like that. MM: Not everyone did. AZ: The Marine in the play, that supposed to be you? MM: No. AZ: Maybe a little? MM: Maybe on some level. AZ: Uhn-huh. You know what I think, “on some level”? I think you’re the kind of wise-ass cocksucker that writes a tearjerk play against the Marines and then turns around and smuggles a shitload of heroin into this country. MM: I deny that. And no more literary conversation until I call my lawyer. AZ: You mean Ben Odell? No Commie lawyer’s gonna help you now.
An “annoyingly whimsical ditty — notable solely for its key change from D major to F sharp major”? Maybe so, but (a) it settled my soul as I listened last night in the car and (b) I dearly love that chord change!
What are the positive benefits for film culture in the Netflix-devours-Warner Bros. scenario? I’m not necessarily saying the buy is a bad or unfortunate thing. I’m just asking “what’s the upside?”
I felt the same way when 20th Century Fox was eaten by Disney.
Which senior WB employees are likely to get whacked? Maybe I should ask “who WON’T Get whacked?”
I was more or less okay with Albert Brooks‘ Defending Your Life (’91) and I’ll always adore the last 25 minutes of Warren Beatty and Buck Henry‘s Heaven Can Wait (’78). Because, deep down, I’m susceptible to this brand of romantic fantasy…fate, happenstance, eternal connections, etc.
But I would never so much as flirt with the idea of submitting myself to an afterlife romcom as obviously puerile and vomitous as Eternity (A24, 11.26).
Which youngish afterlife dead guy (Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller or Callum Turner) should the also-dead-but-reborn Elizabeth Olsen choose for her eternal afterlife partner? Jesus, man…who the hell cares?
Imagine if 2001‘s Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) had realized at the very end of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1968 classic, just he was about to transform into a cosmic star-child, that the only thing that really matters is somehow finding and hooking up with Pamela Byrge, a girl he was head-over-heels in love with in high school, etc.
It obviously required an extraordinary degree of shallowness and not even a glimmering of cosmic consciousness for cowriters Pat Cunnane and David Freyne (Freyne also directed) to dream up this crap.
I noted eight years ago that Turner has eyes like a northwestern timberwolf. This is still the case.
Just watch this short clip and tell me you don’t recoil in disgust. Olivia Nuzzi is a diabolical person. The sooner she is out of the public discourse, the better. pic.twitter.com/UsvraidmQZ
.@Timodc: "He's being nominated to HHS Secretary…You had information that you could have shared…and you didn't share anything about him. Why? Did you still love him?"@Olivianuzzi: "I don't know how to responsibly handle this on camera."
Friendo: “I don’t know what Joe Popcorn will make of Marty Supreme (A24, 12.25) but I can tell you this: the critics can’t be trusted. Generally I mean but especially regarding this Josh Safdie puppy.
“I tried to watch it last night, but I bailed after the bathtub fell through the roof and seriously harmed the old man and his dog. Two friends who were watching it with me bailed after this scene. It’s not bad, it’s just…I don’t know…frenetic, monotonous, obnoxious…kinda like Uncut Gems.”
By the way: It can at least be said that Albert Brooks‘ performance as a retiring governor (aka “Governor Bill”) in James L. Brooks‘ Ella McCay is…uhm, not too bad. A guy who’s seen it says “yeah, he’s not embarrassing. But most of the film is cringe.” The 20th Century release opens on 12.12.
Posted on 9.10.19: “Uncut Gems is a full-barrelled, deep dive into the realm of a manic, crazy-fuck gambler (Adam Sandler), and yes, it ‘feels like being locked inside the pinwheeling brain of a lunatic for more than two hours,’ as Peter Debrugewrote.
“And guess what? It’ll make your head explode and drive you fucking nuts. By the time it’s over you’ll be drooling and jabbering and gasping for air.
“And yet Uncut Gems has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In other words not one person so far feels as I do. And I’m telling you the truth, mon freres. Which is why you can’t trust “critics”, per se. Because they’re all living in their own little fickle cubbyholes while Hollywood Elsewhere is standing tall and firm with its feet planted on the sidewalk and looking dead smack at cosmic reality each and every minute of every day…no let-up.
Everyone but everyone loves Marty Supreme, but a lot of the praisers are go-along whores. It should be of some concern to the Supreme team that Time‘s Stephanie Zacharek is not a fan.
“Critics have a duty to be clear with readers,” Marshall Fine has written in a 4.12 essay. “Not to warn them, per se, because that implies something about relative merit. But to be clear or honest [when the case applies]: This is a movie in which nothing much happens. Or this is a movie in which what does happen doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or is deliberately off-putting or upsetting.”
I am one of the few critic-columnists who actually says stuff like this from time to time. But I disagree with Fine siding with the virtues of audience-friendly films, particularly when he uses Brian Helgeland‘s 42 as a sterling example.
“You know what an audience-friendly film is,” Fine writes. “It tells a story that engages you about characters you can like and root for. {And] yet movies that seek to tell a story that uplifts or inspires often get short shrift from critics. 42 is being slagged by some critics for being manipulative, [but it] happens to be a well-made and extremely involving story about an important moment in history.”
Wells response: 42 is okay if you like your movies to be tidy and primary-colored and unfettered to a fault, but it’s a very simplistic film in which every narrative or emotional point is served with the chops and stylings that I associate with 1950s Disney films. The actors conspicuously “act” every line, every emotional moment. It’s one slice of cake after another. Sugar, icing, familiar, sanctified.
One exception: that scene in which Jackie Robinson is taunted by a Philadelphia Phillies manager with racial epithets. I’m not likely to forget this scene ever. It’s extremely ugly.
Back to Fine: “The fact that 42 works on the viewer emotionally, however, is often seen as a negative by critics who aren’t comfortable with movies that deal with feelings, rather than ideas or theories.” There’s an audience, Fine allows, for nervy, brainy and complex films like To the Wonder, Upstream Color, Room 237, Holy Motors and The Master. But “all of those are not audience-friendly,” he states. “Most of them were barely watchable.
But if you read the reviews, you would find little that’s descriptive of what the movie actually looks or feels like while you’re watching it. Which, for a lot of people, was a negative experience in the case of those particular titles. “How many people saw them because of positive reviews that were misleading? How many might have thought twice if the review mentioned that, oh, well, this film is all but incomprehensible, even if you’ve read a director’s statement on what it means? Or, well, this movie has very little dialogue and takes a 20-minute break for a flashback to the beginning of time? Or this movie is about an inarticulate movie star caught in moments by himself during a movie junket?”
Wells response: I also think that critics should just say what it’s like to watch certain films. If a film is great or legendary or well worth seeing they need to say that, of course, but they also have to admit how it plays in Average-Joe terms and how it feels to actually sit through it. I’m not saying “nobody does this except me,” but who does do this? New Yorker critic David Denby strives to convey this, I think. Andy Klein does this. I’m sure there are others. But I know that it’s a clear violation of the monk-dweeb code to speak candidly about how this or that monk-worshipped, Film Society of Lincoln Center-approved film actually plays for non-dweebs or your no-account brother-in-law or the guy who works at the neighborhood pizza parlor.
Guys like Dennis Lim will never cop to this. It also needs to be said that “audience-friendly” is a somewhat flattering term. The more accurate term is audience-pandering. Pandering to the banal default emotions that the less hip, more simple-minded and certainly less adventurous portions of the paying public like to take a bath in. Because these emotions are comforting, reassuring, and above all familiar. That is what 42 does, in spades.
