Hollywood’s Summer 2019 edition is in progress and the Darwinian dictum that says Eat or Be Eaten has never been more apparent.
There is always, or almost always, a critics’ favorite that is ignored or, more precisely, rejected by the paying public that prompts hand-wringing, moans and depression. Hand-wringing by pundits who can’t understand, simply cannot UNDERSTAND! why their beloved picture has been cold shouldered. We’re talking here, of course, about Olivia Wilde’s well received directing debut ‘Booksmart’ which charts the friendship of two brainy high school grads along with a subplot highlighting a lesbian romance. First, does this sound commercial? It doesn’t have the hook of being a contempo version of a 19th century classic (think ‘Clueless’), it doesn’t have the novelty of something new (think how tired mean girls are now that ‘Mean Girls’ has become a hit Broadway musical). It does have smart casting, it’s funny if never outrageously so, and it has a (bittersweet) heart.
Who’s depressed over the film’s failure? Most likely those that will feel the immediate impact: its principal players, the director and the studio exec who pushed the film forward and thought opening it on 2,200 odd screens was a really good idea.
If you think about it, it really is a kind of magic when a movie becomes a hit – and yes, a lot of that elusive status happens with a critical boost and buzz on social media. But it makes me wonder why a movie I love so often disappears in two weeks. Or why a horror comedy like this past weekend’s ‘Ma’ with a sensational Octavia Spencer as an increasingly deranged vet assistant becomes a love it or hate it exercise, dividing not uniting moviegoers.
Then you have the really bad movies, like ‘Godzilla King of the Monsters’ that still manage a mighty chomp at box-office revenue simply because, like the monolith in Kubrick’s ‘2001,’ they’re there.
What in the coming months look to be smash hits? Disney’s ’live action’ ‘The Lion King’ easily leads the pack. It’s expected to rival ‘Avengers: End Game’ as the year’s biggest box-office picture. ‘Spider-Man Far From Home’ will have no trouble keeping this franchise hot-hot. Not with Tom Holland’s return after being turned into dust in an Avengers film and especially since the animated ‘Spider-Man’ last year proved so popular. I think it’s safe to say when you team two legends, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, in a Quentin Tarantino visit to a dreamlike 1960s Hollywood, which is ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,’ people are going to come. This is star power at its best. Then there is our reigning box-office champ Dwayne Johnson, back in the ‘Fast & Furious’ mode with ‘Hobbs & Shaw,’ which teams him not with Kevin Hart this outing but Jason Statham. Finally, I believe the firepower-fireworks of teaming Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss will be irresistible and make ‘The Kitchen,’ a gritty, violent, Scorsese-style Mob story based, as they like to say, ‘on real events,’ Must See viewing.
Finally, another Rule of Summer that never changes: There WILL be one sleeper hit, a movie that comes with few expectations and really pops – putting an emphatically definitive stamp on the Films of Summer 2019 as if Kong himself did the stamp stomping.
Magnificent Murdered Pasolini
Filmmaker, poet, homosexual, provocateur, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) was a key player in Italy’s mid-century cinematic dominance. Notoriously, brutally murdered (due to the outrage his leftist political beliefs incurred?), his writing – fiction and nonfiction – from 1950 to ’66 is collected in ‘Stories from the City of God’ ($16.99, Other Press paperback). An incisive look at postwar Italy’s transformations, these pieces, published primarily in newspapers and magazines, begin semi-autobiographically with his arrival in Rome – ‘the city of God.’ They often cover the underclass, particularly the street boys that became his obsession. He shows sympathy for the destitute and as he ages his style changes, from lyricism to neo-realism. Pasolini’s most influential films are: ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew,’ ‘Teorama,’ ‘Medea’ with the legendary Maria Callas. His final, most provocative film, the anti-fascist WWII-set ‘Salo: Or the 120 Days of Sodom’ is a horrific X-rated adaptation which aroused such fury it might have prompted right wing extremists to organize his assassination. Translated by The New Yorker writer Marina Harss and edited by Walter Siti.
NEW DVDs:
How many Bunches of Brady can you take?! That might be one reaction to the awesomely comprehensive ‘The Brady-est BRADY BUNCH TV & Movie Collection’ ever (DVD, 10 episodes, 26 discs, CBS DVD – Paramount Home Entertainment, Ratings vary). Here in one gloriously nostalgic package are all FIVE ‘Brady Bunch’ movies!!!!! They include the landmark ‘The Brady Bunch Movie’ (’95) with Shelley Long and its 1996 sequel, ‘A Very Brady Sequel.’ Here too are 2 TV series, ‘The Brady Brides’ and ‘The Bradys,’ in their first-ever DVD release. Of course, on 20 discs there is ‘The Brady Bunch’ original series which ran from 1969-74. There is also the 3 disc set of ‘The Brady Kids’ animated series. Even Marcia couldn’t complain about this extravaganza, this cornucopia of Brady-ness.
Roman Polanski’s 1992 ‘Bitter Moon’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, R) is a riveting, sexually-driven shipboard study of two couples. Polanski had hoped that ‘Bitter Moon,’ an adaptation of Pascal Bruckner’s novel, be a cinematic reunion with his ‘Chinatown’ star Jack Nicholson. Yes, Peter Coyote, who frequently narrates Ken Burns’ massive historical series, is a diminished replacement but as compensation there’s a ridiculously youthful Hugh Grant along with elegant Kristen Scott-Thomas, four years before her breakthrough in the Oscar-winning ‘The English Patient.’ Most significantly, at the center of the delirious desirous longings is Polanski’s muse (and wife) Emmanuelle Seigner (she has starred in Polanski’s ‘Frantic,’ ‘The Ninth Gate,’ ‘Venus in Fur’). No one could better define her destructive sexual force as a paraplegic’s wife who ensnares a dazzled timid Grant. It’s nasty, intentionally funny, the wildest of cruises on very rocky seas. Bonus: Film critic Troy Howarth’s audio commentary and a Coyote interview.
‘South Park: The Complete Twenty-Second Season’ (Blu-ray, 10 episodes, 2 discs, Comedy Central Home Entertainment, Not Rated) Like ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘South Park’ endures – and for obvious reasons – it remains as sharply satirical and outrageously funny as it was so very many years ago when it all began. Blu-ray Extras: #SocialCommentary on all episodes, deleted scenes.
Racism remains horribly persistent, nakedly visible during a national discourse. Which is why Alan Paton’s 1948 debut novel about racial oppression ‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ continues to be sadly relevant. ‘Lost in the Stars’ (Blu-ray, Kino Classics, Not Rated) is the ambitious 1949 Broadway musicalization of Paton’s novel adapted by Maxwell Anderson, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright (‘Knickerbocker Holiday,’ ‘The Bad Seed’), and composer Kurt Weill, the illustrious German émigré who frequently partnered with his fellow German Jewish exile Bertolt Brecht (‘Threepenny Opera’). In 1974 ‘Lost in the Stars’ was filmed for posterity in the American Film Theatre project. Directed by Daniel Mann (he helmed ‘Come Back Little Sheba,’ which won Shirley Booth her Best Actress Oscar, ‘BUtterfield 8’ which won Elizabeth Taylor her first Best Actress Oscar and ‘The Rose Tattoo’ which won Anna Magnani her Best Actress Academy Award), ‘Lost’ has an impressive cast led by Brock Peters (‘To Kill a Mockingbird’), Melba Moore and Raymond St. Jacques.
There’s a reason Lynda La Plante is a monumental figure in English television, the ‘UK Shonda Rhimes’ if you will. While she will forever be celebrated for her groundbreaking, feminist-tinged Scotland Yard procedural ‘Prime Suspect’ which made Helen Mirren an international star, La Plante prodigiously produced and wrote many successful British crime series, beginning in the ‘80s, La Plante series often charted the upward mobility of women in hide-bound British institutions – prisons, politics, medicine. La Plante’s ‘Trial & Retribution: The Complete Collection’ (DVD, 22 full length mysteries, 18 discs, AcornTV, Not Rated) is her (superior) version of ‘Law and Order’ and ran from 1997 to 2008. ‘Trial’ illustrates with mesmerizing intensity her ability to be direct, familiar yet enlightening. The cases, begun as the police investigate a crime to the courthouse and its aftermath, are in two parts and run over 3 hours each. The very first episode is especially devastating because you think, quite wrongly as it turns out, that you can guess what’s going to happen. La Plante also has a real-world bedrock where, often, the detectives get it wrong – they can only take the evidence they have and they are people first whose biases may not be conscious. Not surprisingly with material this compelling, the guest stars are true world-class luminaries: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Helen McCrory, Fiona Shaw, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Andrew Garfield and Iain Glen (whose satanic murderer is unforgettably chilling) to name a few. Bonus: Behind the scenes 45 minute documentary; La Plante, Hayman, Victoria Smurfit and Colin Salmon interviews, plus a half-hour of behind the scenes footage. ONE CAVEAT: The early seasons of ‘Trial & Retribution’ were filmed in the boxy standard dimensions of last century TV (think of ‘Murder, She Wrote’); those episodes should be seen in that ratio. You have to reset your TV to see it this way because those episodes when presented in wide-screen make everyone look a bit wider than they are.
For the kids, ‘Wonder Park’ (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital, Paramount Home Entertainment, PG) boasts a starry vocal cast, ‘tons’ of bonus extras and a fantasy storyline that enchants as little June finds her dream has come true when her imaginary amusement park comes to life – and then needs a gang of heroes to save it from destruction. Jennifer Garner, Matthew Broderick, Mila Kunis and Kenan Thompson are among the vocal talents and the extras include a Sing-Along with June, How to Draw Boomer and the Wonder Chimps, Gus the Yodeling Beaver. And more!!
Not for the kids: Jacques Rivette’s now-classic, once scandalous 1965 French drama ‘The Nun’ (Blu-ray, Kino Classics, Not Rated). Initially banned in France (for alleged blasphemy?) and not released in the US until ’71, ‘The Nun’ stars Godard muse and ex-wife Anna Karina as Suzanne, a young woman forced into a convent. Over time as she is transferred, a trio of Mother Superiors treat her in radically different ways, from her sadistic, prison-like initial convent to maternal caring and finally lesbian desire. Rivette, a lion of the French New Wave (‘La Belle Noiseuse,’ ‘Celine and Julie Go Boating’), adapted 18th century Enlightenment author Diderot’s bitter screed at religious abuses. This new 4K restoration boasts an audio commentary, Dennis Lim’s booklet essay and a new ‘Making of’ documentary. In French with English subtitles.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/06/03/hollywood-mine-looking-ahead-for-summertime-blockbusters/
2019-06-03 15:48:24Z
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