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It's disturbing to me how much I *feel* like I can know where Coppola's getting his ideas from. I'd put money, for example, on his having got the idea for Wow Platinum from Sarah Michelle Gellar's apothegm-spouting ('Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted.') character in Southland Tales (2006), porn superstar and terrorist wannabe, Krysta Now. And Meg's goes-nowhere subplot about a Russian satellite falling out of orbit and crashing onto the city.... that's pasted over from Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World (1993) (where the subplot was *also* a waste of time). Coppola's semi-mystical take on the Chrysler Building and general freewheelingness is right out of Matthew Barney's triumphantly weird art-film Cremaster 3. And so on. Technically then, Meg. is a synchretic text - Francis has had the basic Metropolis-y script for 40 years, but then he's cut and pasted in ideas from every big-idea, broadly futuristic or apocalyptic movie he's seen in that period, all without addressing any of his underlying script or character problems. The deepest pools of paste-ins here are those from The Matrix and Dark City... and that's OK, a *lot* of people were inspired by the ideas and techniques of those films at the time - e.g., video games like Mirror's Edge - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzmUde_EK5Y and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjNPHmXtwx0 - but I don't see that Francis has *done* anything significant with these influences (he was just too old perhaps to 'get it'). Larry Fishburne as Cesar Catalina's driver and one of the film's narrators presides Morpheus-like over Meg. but he *does* very little and as a kind of paste-in can't solve any of the film's underlying problems. No one can take away from what Coppola achieved in the 1970s and occasionally since but Meg. is a hell of an expensive folly.
<blockquote>Its interesting about how narration and/or voiceovers can HELP a movie (Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street for Scorsese -- the narration makes everything funnier , if nothing else) or how it can look like "screenwriting narration.</blockquote>Yes, amazing isn't it? voice over can be glorious *or* terrible. As Spinal Tap famously said:
David St Hubbins: It's such a fine line between stupid, and uh...
Nigel Tufnel: Clever.
<blockquote>Aubrey Plaza</blockquote>
She wears some sexy outfits etc. in Meg. that are going to frame-grabbed for all eternity by her fans... but her character is so silly and says such silly stuff all the time (often with a 'snipping scissors' sound fx added to the soundtrack to punctuate her every sentence - madness!) that I was not amused. Note that Aubrey's character is called 'Wow Platinum' and at one point they do the obvious joke with the name: Aubrey's character rants on to Adam Driver's genius character, Cesar Catalina, and the scene ends/tails off with him walking away shaking his head, 'Wow...'
I dunno, maybe I'm the wrong person to appreciate Meg.. I'm the sort of viewer who's never been able to get on board with the resuscitation of Verhoeven's Showgirls - to me it always was and is a flatout bad movie.And recently I tried to watch the latest, supposedly purified, elevated cut of Caligula (1979). Nope, couldn't finish it. It's still terrible, incompetently shot, staged, edited, the sort of thing you can't believe for a second. It may be the best version of Caligula but that's still an amateurish embarrassment in my view. I don't doubt that Meg. has enough in it that some cult following will probably develop around it but I know enough to know I won't be joining them.
An update on the terms of Avary and QT's podcast. In its first season the episodes were roughly two hours long (and normally covered three films) - all for free. In its (just-started) second season the fully free episodes are only an hour long and comprise the discussion of just the main film each week. To get the full (normally three-film) discussion each time you have to subscribe to Roger and Qt's Patreon at either $US5 or $US10 per month levels. Sigh...I guess they didn't want to have to deal with the advertizing that most podcasts use to keep things freely available (perhaps saving advertzing-free versions for the patreon subscribers).
<blockquote>So is QT losing on his argument about "old directors in decline?"</blockquote>I've looked around online but haven't been able to find any QT remarks about Megalopolis. Having seen it now, it definitely feels like the sort of embarrassing, hopelessly out-of-touch, low-action, "Old Man's" movie that QT has a horror of and wants to forestall himself from making. That said, the script which has apparently been in process since the '80s *does* feel incredibly young, like something a couple of tripping undergrads high on Metropolis and The Matrix and bits of their Western Civ and Western Lit core classes might pull together in a weekend. All the characters are very broadly drawn, symbolic class representatives (we learn in the first scene that the Randian super-genius protagonist can literally stop time with his mind but we later learn that his girlfriend and child can also exit from time like him - symbols!), never change at all, and exist just to give speeches at and about each other (and the movie itself keeps giving speeches to us - sententious, silly voiceovers and onscreen titles abound to kind of paper over the multitudinous cracks, solve myriad transition problems. etc.). It's a script that somebody might write before he/she encounters Mamet, Pinter, Chayefsky, and so on. You feel for the actors; they must have felt like they were just doing repeated acting exercises rather than either playing real characters or telling any real story. I'm guessing that QT and Avary will discuss Meg. sometime in this season of their podcast, and assuming they feel free to crack wise about it, it could be a hoot!
I don't find woke/not-woke discussions especially productive but I was a little incredulous at the film's premise that a very small, rural community would have at least 4, similarly-aged out lesbians in it. I'd guess instead that a typical trajectory for a young LBGT person in such a small community would be to have to move to a city or a college town to find that many people like themselves.
That is, a more realistic Elliott would have 'finding same-age LBGT friends and romantic partners' as part of her explicit motivation for heading off to the University of Toronto. The film's premise thus felt a little LBGT-wish-fulfillmenty to me, which may be part of what some people call 'woke'.
Also, Lynch's Dune has the odd good idea but it looks and sounds - score by Toto! - so terrible (seriously, if you watch it right after Star Wars 1977 - which drew a lot on the Dune book for its desert/Tatooine sequences - it's like there's been this terrible recession in sfx and music so that Lynch's Dune just feels like amateur hour) that for most people it's never been so much as basically watchable. Lynch has always disowned it for a reason. Literally *nobody* thinks that it's even close to being the definitive adaptation of a long, very-hard-to-adapt, important book. *Of course* other people were eventually going to have a go at adapting it. QT's position makes no sense.
<blockquote>QT said he will never watch Denis Vellenueve's "Dune" because its a remake of the Lynch 80's version.
Denis shot back: "I don't care if sees it or not...but I see mine as an original -- an adaptation of the book."</blockquote>QT's remark is quite strange (the differences between Lynch's and Villeneuve's 2-film version of the same underlying material are so enormous that no one completely sane would think that the mere existence of Lynch's version made the latter redundant). I'm guessing that QT feels a rivalry with Villeneuve, who's only made good or excellent films so far. I didn't much care for his Blade Runner sequel but most people seem to love it, and everything else I've seen from the Dunes to Arrival (although in that case I knew and loved the award-winning sci-fi short story it was based on and felt the film was clumsy and padded out compared to it - but if you hadn't read the stpry then maybe the good-enough movie worked better) to Sicario to Prisoners to his early films like Incendies and Polytechique has been pretty immaculate. His stuff has a corporate slickness about it, like Zemeckis and Spielberg or Abrams back in the day, so that it lacks the kind of personal edge that you get with QT, Scorsese, Lynch, Hitchcock etc.. If I'm honest, Villeneuve never seems quite a top-tier talent to me, and I suspect that he'll never be *my guy*. I suspect that QT holds this lack of personality against V. but to jump from that to not even seeing stuff as painstaking and kind of magnificent as the Dunes is kerrazy.
<blockquote>Well, isn't that sort of a paywall -- you have to pay for these outlets like Apples iTunes or Spotify?</blockquote>No, they're both completely free I can assure you, unless they mange to upsell you to some fancy package (which I've always been able to resist). For what it's worth, you can also listen to all episodes directly from Quentin and Roger's own website (they'll try to upsell you to their patreon page too mind you):
http://videoarchivespodcast.com/
<blockquote>A podcast, I guess(though paywall.)</blockquote>No, QT's 'Video Archives' podcast with Roger Avary and Avary's daughter is freely available - no paywalls - from most of the major podcast outlets as far as I know. For example, I get it through Apple's iTunes store but since I use spotify I also have the option of listening to it there. As it happens, the Video Archives podcast, which has been off for about 6 months, just began its second season with an ep. on the sub-par Peter Hyams-directed Gene Hackman thriller Narrow Margin (1990), a minor, late Edward Dmytryk thriller The Human Factor (1975), and a truly obscure junker Killpoint (1984). Life's too short for stuff like this!
1986 is one of those years when *my* official best picture goes to something I didn't see until later, at least March 1987: Lynch's Blue Velvet. Other things I rate highly: The Fly, Aliens, Decline of the American Empire, The Singing Detective, Stand By Me, The Mission (with its remarkable Morricone score). The Singing Detective is notable because it was a prestige TV miniseries, one of the greatest ever that got reviewed as if it was a movie-level event. Incredibly, all its episodes are watchable on youtube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI10_bFyqig&list=PLxyYxI-hs0bAilZC2ol8OLYDxp4WNPXno&index=128&pp=gAQBiAQB
<blockquote>But, again: did such a woman ACTUALLY exist?, ACTUALLY recognize Alcala on the show?</blockquote>
Here's what Rolling Stone's fact check said about that:
'Kendrick recently told Rolling Stone that while the character of Laura [the woman in the audience] is fictional, she represents the grief and frustration of the real-life people who tried to report Alcala.
There was, however, someone who recognized Alcala on The Dating Game: a Huntington Beach, California detective investigating him for the 1979 murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, who caught a rerun of his episode on TV shortly after Alcala was named a suspect, according to a 2021 episode of ABC’s 20/20.'
<blockquote>Evidently, very little of the chit chat between Kendrick and "Bachelors Number One, Number Two and Number Three(psycho Alcala) is really what was said on that segment.</blockquote>Yes, Kendrick seems to have worked with the screenwriter to pump up the historical Cheryl Bradshaw(?) into a version of Kendrick herself, hyper-verbal, -confident, and fully versed in the next 40 years of feminist theorizing and attitudes. My understanding from reading around is that nothing like the parking lot scene or even the 'Cheryl and Alcala get drinks at the Mai Tai bar' scene happened. Rather, according to the Rolling Stone fact check I read, it seems that Cheryl met Alcala for a few minutes backstage at which point Cheryl then told the producer that "she didn’t want to go on any date because she thought he was creepy.” So the film intensified everything - making Bradshaw more modern, confident and risk-taking, and making Alcala's surface more polished than it was so he could plausibly not creep out Bradshaw and actually manage to get a semi-date with Kendrick's feminist superwoman.
Interestingly, Kendrick's character was called 'Sheryl' not 'Cheryl'. Perhaps this was done in part to signal the level of dramatic license taken.
Alternative Halloween Programming 2: The Substance. This film made a big splash at Cannes and I've been quite hyped up for it. Unfortunately, I find myself agreeing with the minority of critics who weren't that impressed (Dana Stevens at slate's review captured my initial feelings almost exactly).
The Substance is deeply indebted to things like Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) and The Thing (1982) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) as Demi Moore uses the titular goo to give birth to a 20-something version of herself (a prosthetically-enhanced Margaret Qualley) with whom she shares a consciousness on an alternating-weeks-in-each-body basis. Hijnks ensue as the consciousness in the in-demand Qualley body starts to cheat to get more time. The film's very earnest for the first 90 minutes but then some curious comic and fable tones start to predominate that made the film remind me of certain gross-out episodes of South Park and also of Peter Jackson's puppet film Meet The Feebles. The comic tones were accentuated by the film's use of both 2001 and Vertigo soundtrack pieces for strictly comic effect in the film's final Act. Writer/director Fargeat is clearly a talent but The Substance missed the mark for me. Subsequent viewings may redeem The Sub., after all The Fly and The Thing had to grow on me. But first time through The Sub. it had a clunky repetitiveness and obviousness and unresolved tone issues galore that killed it for me. A 6 out of 10 for me then.
Alternative Halloween Programming: Woman of the Hour dir. by Anna Kendrick (her debut) is a '70s-set true-ish crime story on Netflix about a prolific serial killer who was a contestant (bachelor #3) on an episode of The Dating Game. Kendrick plays the real wannabe-actress whose agent booked her in as the choosing bachelorette on that fateful show. Kendrick talks about the films that influenced her film here (she's a smartie who's dated comparable cineaste male smarties Edgar Wright and Bill Hader):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc_iSHLuI3A
Kendrick does a solid directorial job in my view but I also felt that maybe some specific ideological commitments limited her a bit. She's obviously concerned not to make anything *too* horrific and she doesn't want to make the rapist-killer at all interesting or exciting. Creepiness abounds though, and whether that's enough for people is probably a personal matter. Kendrick seems most interested in painting the world of men in the 1970s as an extremely hostile environment for women that both enables the serial killer and that the killer apotheosizes. Klute, as she discusses in the vid. above is a key influence here. Every man in the film is pretty awful, and every woman we see is either a victim or a hardened anti-victim who's incredibly aware of the veritable war zone in which she has to live. I think people's mileage with the film is going to vary a lot. I may not be the ideal viewer but suspect that, for example, my sister (who's the same 5' 2" height as Kendrick) might be. In any case, the film's worth a look, and I suspect it's going to do boffo home business for Netflix, esp. with women.
<blockquote>I think the big question coming out of the 'X" films is: Will Mia Goth become some sort of star?</blockquote>Between Pearl and Maxxxine Goth did a film directed by David Cronenberg's son Brandon: Infinity Pool. I've seen all of the younger Cronenberg's films and all of them feel like chip off his father's block - sort of body horror, sort of sci-fi, sort of intense Bergmanesque family drama. IP is his starriest, biggest budget film so far and Goth's performance in it is the one that jumps out. She's sexy but scary - unhinged and coldly smart and hateable. Goth may be slightly in danger of becoming typecast for her dark/extreme/twisted performances. There's never been an actual female *star* with that kind of profile - maybe Jennifer Jason Leigh is the closest (Karen Black and Kim Stanley are a few others). Early in her career, Goth was very fearless and naked in an art-film I actually hated, Lars von Trier's Nymphomania Vol 2 which starred Charlotte Gainsbourg. Maybe the most likely thing for Goth is that she becomes the kind of avatar of cool, director-chasing art-house darling that Gainsbourg or her mother Jane Birkin has been. Isabelle Huppert's kind of arthouse stardom is the maximal possibility perhaps. If Goth wants a broader, more ordinary Hollywood star-type career than that then I suspect she's going to have to find some warmer parts - simpler, sunnier characters - that she can live with.
<blockquote>Keaton's Beetlejuice is still quite fun</blockquote>In the light of our discussion here (and because I currently have access to Disney+ where it's streaming) I decided to rewatch Keaton's Birdman (2014) for the first time since its release.
Looking back I was a little harsh on it at the time, e.g. it didn't make my top-whatever list at the end of the year. Now it strikes me as solid end-of-year list material and probably better than things like Gone Girl and American Sniper that were previously on that list for me. Birdman won a whole host of top Oscars (Picture, Director, Orig. Splay, and Cinematography but, strangely, no acting awards given that it's a very much an acting showcase (top 4 or 5 leads all near career bests I'd say)). I'd love to know how close the votes were for Actor. I imagine that Keaton must have been ever-so-close to a win. He must have been close again for Spotlight a few year later but Birdman was surely his biggest chance. The Academy probably regrets that decision to pass him over (for Eddie Redmayne playing Stephen Hawking in a forgettable/now forgotten Oscar biopic) but it did better at recognizing Birdman's quality at the time than I did so I can't poke at the Acad. too much for that miss!
<blockquote>Senott plays her role for beauty, wit AND leadership. If there is a new star to be found in this movie, I think its her.</blockquote>Sennott's on her way to stardom already: she was the lead in a big comedy hit this year called 'Bottoms' written and directed by Emma Seligman. I didn't like Bottoms, however, and much preferred Seligman's previous film, Shiva Baby (an award-winning 2021 indie, very Jewish cringe comedy), which had Sennott in an even bigger lead role (she's in every scene). Shiva Baby was a brilliant debut that launched both Seligman and Sennott. It's worth tracking down. Good to hear that Sennott's ascent continues in Saturday Night.
This wikipedia page has a good list of all (inflation-adjusted) >$100 million loss-making films:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biggest_box-office_bombs
According to that list before 1997 there had never been a year when more than one Hollywood film lost more than $100 million in 2023 dollars. Then suddenly in 1997 there are 3, and in 1998 and 1999 there are 5 each. So *that's* when the 'Hollywood mostly just places very-big-bets' era started. Most years since then have had at least 5 >$100 million loss-making films with the worst years such as 2021 and 2022 having 7. While comparable lists of the the most profitable films don't seem to exist, for example 2021 and 2022 both had 15 films that grossed at least 300 mill worldwide and both had multiple > 1 billion grossers. If it's reasonable to guess that on-average each of the >300 mill grossers made at least 100 mill profit then it's reasonable to conclude that mega-profits outweigh mega-losses at least 2:1. So, very very roughly, that's the answer to the 'How do the Studios survive?' question. Old Hollywood, which now nets out to pre-1997! played a much lower stakes game.
<blockquote>BUT had Theroux been interesting as this jerk...BUT he wasn't. (I know he was in Mullholland Drive, but he wasn't interesting THERE either, what -- over 20 years ago?)</blockquote>I liked Theroux a lot in Mull Dr. (and he was fine as a one of Chistain Bale's finance bros in American Psycho) but he hasn't made a single positive impression with me in anything else since. I didn't know he dated or even married Aniston. Wow. He has a few screenplay co-credits on IMDb: Iron Man 2, Tropic Thunder, Zoolander 2, Rock of Ages (Tom Cruise-starring), etc.. Maybe he should concentrate on that side of things.
<blockquote>That's the weird thing for Spielberg the last few times out. Low grosses and Oscar love -- a Best Supporting Actress win for West Side Story and that's a big award.</blockquote>I recently saw WSS 2021 on a list of the biggest box office bombs of all time! so was led to check out the exact figures:
$100 mill production + $50 mill marketing = ~$300 million gross needed to break even.
Actual worldwide gross was $76 mil, so the standard calculation of its approximate loss is 150 - 76/2 = $112 million. That tracks roughly with the 'Biggest Flops' vid I saw which had it losing $104 million to become the (admittedly unadjusted for inflation) 31st worst box office loser of all time.
Note that according to the vid. what actually lost $112 million (for #24 biggest bomb ever) was a movie from 2021 that I'd never even heard of: Chaos Walking directed by Doug Liman and starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley. Good grief have there been incredible numbers of studio-threatening loss-makers recently(>$100 mill loss).