Debut: Burning Cane
Philip Youmans was just 17-years-old when he completed principal photography on his first feature. He finished Burning Cane before graduating from high school.
The 77-minute drama, set in rural Louisiana, is a highly compacted mix of religion, addiction and domestic violence. A multihyphenate creator, Youmans was working on a beignet stand in New Orleans when he met the inestimable Wendall Pierce (Treme, The Wire) and convinced the local actor to take on the role of an alcoholic pastor.
Youmans also took a punt on Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild), contacting him on Instagram and convincing Zeitlin to come on board as an executive producer. Youmans has cited influences from Wong Kar-wai, Terrence Malick, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Barry Jenkins and Paul Thomas Anderson. There are also touches of Robert Minervini, Charles Burnett and Zeitlin.
At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Burning Canewon Best Film (Founders Award), Best Cinematography (Youmans) and Best Actor (Pierce). Youmans’ next film is based on the New Orleans Chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Funniest dialogue: Dolemite is
Rudy and his film crew sit stony-faced in a packed cinema as the all-white audience laugh uproariously at Billy Wilder’s The Front Page:
“This shit ain’t funny”
“I don’t get it”
“The fuck they talking about?”
“Who is Herbert Hoover?”
“And it ain’t got no brothers in it, either”
Outside the cinema:
“What the fuck was that, man?”
“That was some bullshit”
“Nobody even got naked”.
“Was that even a real movie?”
“I told him let’s go see Blackenstein”
“Why do these creaky old people get to star in movies?”
“White folks get all the breaks”.
“This movie’s playing across the whole county”
“And it ain’t got no titties, no funny and no kung fu.”
Turkey: The Goldfinch
Kevin Maher in The Times writes: “The Goldfinch is the kind of movie that you want to pick up and cuddle, and stroke its befuddled head, and say: ‘There, there, it’s alright, you did your best.’”
And that’s being kind. There’s not much evidence of anyone doing their best.
A best-seller for 30 weeks on The New York Times list, Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer prize winning novel The Goldfinch (2013) has one of the best literary hooks of recent times.
Wikipedia defines the “hook” as: “the nucleus of both a film and its screenplay. It is what grabs the viewer’s attention, preferably in the first 5-10 minutes, as a reader might expect to find a literary hook in the first chapter of a novel”.
In the first 50 pages of Tartt’s 850-page novel, 13-year-old Theo and his charismatic mother set out one day in New York City for Theo’s school to discuss his recent suspension. Caught in a downpour, they detour into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and view an exhibition of Dutch Masterpieces, including the small but remarkable The Goldfinch painted by Rembrandt prodigy Carel Fabritius in 1654.
Without warning, a terrorist bomb explodes. Galleries are destroyed, many are killed, including Theo’s mother, and the 13-year-old is left concussed and in shock. Searching through the smoke and rubble for a way out, he takes a ring offered by a dying man and thinking the poor soul is also pointing to the still intact The Goldfinch, he takes the painting as well. These two objects will define Theo’s life as he grows into adulthood.
As hooks go, it’s as good as it gets. So, who had the bright idea to drop it entirely from the opening of this film version of The Goldfinch?
Fingers should probably be wagged at screenplay writer Peter Straughan, but you’d also have to hold the director John Crowley (Brooklyn) responsible along with those guardians of the purse-strings who greenlit this 149-minute travesty to the tune of $45 million.
The Met bombing does crop up in several blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments 90 minutes later, but by that time so much has gone wrong, the film is beyond hope. The casting, with a few exceptions – notably Finn Wolfhard - is atrocious. The dialogue feels like the actors are eternally self-conscious of their Pulitzer prize winning lines and the direction so devoid of momentum that Tartt’s work is reduced to little more than a series of lifeless vignettes.
Makes you feel sorry for the one genuine contributor, the estimable cinematographer Roger Deakins.
But imagine being Donna Tartt? For two-and-a-half hours she had to endure the trauma of watching this unmitigated train wreak version of her exquisite novel.
Best Third Act: Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Smart. Tarantino smart. Keyser Soze smart.
Unseen and Underrated: The Death and Life of John F Donovan
Xavier Dolan’s first English language film copped criticism at its most vitriolic. Two scathing pieces (in Variety and TheHollywood Reporter) published during the film’s debut at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, probably cost Dolan worldwide theatrical distribution. So far, DVD and Blu-ray releases only in France, Canada, Italy and, in January, the USA.
“No Worries”: the colonization continues
Wikipedia (again), this time on the spread of the Aussie ‘no worries’: “Its usage became more common in British English after increased usage in Australian soap operas that aired on television in the United Kingdom. Linguistic experts are uncertain how the phase became utilized in American English; theories include use by Steve Irwin on the television program The Crocodile Hunter and usage by the United States media during the 2000 Sydney Olympics”.
This year it cropped up in work from big names Jim Jarmusch, Xavier Dolan, Steven Soderbergh, Jed Mercurio, Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It could also be heard - or read - from countries including France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, South Korea, Canada, Poland and Turkey.
Beautiful Boy, USA; Call My Agent, Season 1, France; Cosmos, UK; The Captain, Germany; Dark Money, Season 1, UK; Derry Girls, Season 2, Ireland; The Dead Don’t Die, USA; Dogman, Italy; The Good Son (novel), You-Jeong Jeong, South Korea; Heartbeats, Canada; The Laundromat, USA; The Left Overs, Season 1, USA; Line of Duty, Season 5, UK; Luther, Season 5, UK; The Mule, USA; Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, USA; Rocketman, UK/USA/Canada (where Bernie Taupin says “no worries” in the late 1960s. I don’t think so.); The Rooster Bar (novel), John Grisham, USA; The Spy Gone North, South Korea; Squadron 333, Poland; Succession, Season 2, USA; The Virtues, Season 1, UK; The Wild Pear Tree, Turkey.
 |
| Caroline Proust, Spiral |
I excluded the SBS subtitling on Spiral 7. Too many “no worries” and “mates” to be believable from the Parisian mouths of les flics and les malfaiteurs.
Other films:
Border(Ali Abbasai), An Elephant Sitting Still (Qian Hu), Ash is the Purest White (Zhangke Jia), Burning (Chang-dong Lee), Capernaum (Nadine Lahaki), Donbass (Sergey Loznitsa), Edge of the Knife (Gwaii Edenshaw, Helen Haig-Brown), Parasite (Bong Joon Ho), The Spy Gone North (Jong-bin Yoon), Transit (Christian Petzold),Woman at War (Benedikt Erlingsson). Documentaries: The Great Hack (Karim Amer, Jehane Noujaim), Skate Kitchen (Crystal Moselle), Kedi (Ceyda Torun).
TV Series
The Bureau Season 3, Chenobyl, Derry Girls Season 2, Escape at Dannemora, I Love You Now Die, Spiral 7, Years and Years.
There was also one remarkable TV restoration. The BBC’s superb clean-up and digitization of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), arguably the proto-type for today’s ubiquitous television series. Smiley, Connie, Guillam, Esterhase, Haydon, Bland, Control, Alleline, Prideaux and Jumbo have never looked and sounded this good.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.