Tag: Hollywood

Reader’s Corner: ‘City of Blows’

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Writer / director / actor Tim Blake Nelson has done everything from play a cornpone buffoon in O Brother, Where Art Thou? to write and direct The Grey Zone, one of the most chilling stories ever made about the Holocaust.

His debut novel, City of Blows, is a gnarly satire about Hollywood, ambition, and how the combination of the two grinds most people into dust.

My review ran in the Summer 2023 print edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books:

…At multiple points, the characters in this clamorous story interlace with Nelson’s background and career; the novel is stippled with the kind of inside takes on Hollywood sausage-making that a veteran like Nelson could use to fill many more books. But City of Blows is less a warts-and-all showbiz tale than a study of what happens when sky-high expectations meet the buzzsaw of reality—albeit a reality radically distorted by an industry awash in outlandish promises, byzantine court politics, and juvenile score-settling…

Screening Room: ‘Babylon’

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Damien Chazelle’s rollicking and ridiculous epic cautionary tale, Babylon, opens next week.

My review is at PopMatters:

Babylon has buckets of frenzy and excess at a wildly uneven three hours. That is not always a bad thing. Given the mid-to-late 1920s Hollywood setting, low-key would have been a betrayal. It’s the silent era pinnacle when entrepreneurial nobodies made quicksilver fortunes by producing gauzy cinematic fantasies with hubris, moxie, and artistry. Chazelle’s Hollywood is a playground where boozing heartthrobs like Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and drugged-out bombshells like Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) put the pedal to the metal without consequence based solely on how good they look on that screen. It is also a place where a striver like Manny Torres (Diego Calva) can transform himself from gofer to director, and jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) can vault from the bandstand to stardom. As Penny Lane would say in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous’ Penny Lane would say, “It’s all happening”…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Is Gone with the Wind a Classic?’

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My article ‘Is Gone with the Wind a Classic? Or How Things Change’ went up yesterday over at Eyes Wide Open:

A couple years back, a Memphis theater decided that, because of complaints, they were not going to show Gone with the Wind again. One would imagine conservatives would appreciate a small business not wanting to anger its customers. But by definition, conservatives tend not to like change. It’s in the name…

Screening Room: ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’

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That’s Leonard DiCaprio playing a has-been 1950s Western actor in Quentin Tarantino’s latest, broadest, and potentially strangest genre mash-up.

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is playing pretty much everywhere now. My review is at PopMatters:

You might have thought Quentin Tarantino would be the last filmmaker to indulge in the lamentable trend of digitally inserting actors into scenes they were not there for…. Nevertheless, here Tarantino is in his ninth movie, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, slipping Leonardo DiCaprio into a scene from John Sturges’s 1963 film, The Great Escape. Once that line has been crossed for Tarantino, who had previously restricted himself to homage, what’s next? Uma Thurman slotted into Enter the Dragon? Maybe Bradley Cooper into Where Eagles Dare?…

Here’s the trailer (sure you’ve already seen it 10 times, check it out again, that Mamas and the Papas song is fantastic):

Quote of the Day: Terry Southern on Hollywood, Writing, “Freakishness”

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(Library of Congress)
Somewhere in Southern California (Library of Congress)

Today’s bit of perception about one of America’s most over-analyzed, unloved, and misunderstood “cities” comes courtesy of surrealist pie-thrower and comic raconteur Terry Southern (Candy, Dr. Strangelove). Interviewed at length for The Paris Review‘s occasional series on screenwriters (the interview took place in 1967 but wasn’t published until 2012) the Texas-born Southern expounded on that great Southern California sinkhole of creative energy and dashed dreams:

Hollywood, that is to say, Los Angeles, is not, of course, a city, and its sinister forces are very oblique. There’s no public transportation system whatever, so the people drive around as though they were living in Des Moines, and it has all the rest of the disadvantages of a small town, only filled with displaced persons. On the other hand, life there has an engaging surrealist quality, an almost exciting grotesqueness.

The cultural scene there in general is sped up, sort of concentrated. Southern California is a mecca for all manner of freakishness, beginning on the most middle-class level—hot-dog stands in the shape of a hot dog. If you go there, you’ll immediately see a carnival, Disneyland aspect that is different from any other place in America.

Southern also notes the differences between the ladies of Hollywood and those of the East Coast:

… girls who want to be ­writers come to the Village and girls who want to be actresses go to Hollywood.

Now Playing: ‘The Canyons’

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Lindsay Lohan and James Deen (yes, that's a stage name) confront an exhausted, post-film landscape in 'The Canyons'.
Lindsay Lohan and James Deen (yes, that’s a stage name) confront an exhausted, post-film landscape in ‘The Canyons’.

thecanyons-posterA couple of enfant terribles (Lindsay Lohan and writer Bret Easton Ellis), a director with a good grasp of the lengths people will go to in destroying themselves (Paul Schrader), a clutch of blank-faced performers, abandoned movie theater ruin-porn photography, and a bed-hopping Hollywood melodrama make up the cracked camp quasi-classic that is The Canyons.

My review’s at PopMatters; here’s part:

Everyone is exhausted in The Canyons. But even as Paul Schrader’s and Brett Easton Ellis’ wickedly unnerving satire offers the usual Southern California power games, it also shows how soul-sapping this constant contesting can be. Everyone knows the machinery is lubricated by tainted money, but this is all that anybody seems to know. Even the allure of Hollywood fame seems to have disappeared, leaving nothing in its wake. Terrified of standing still, the characters just keep pushing back the night. The frightening thing is, soon all they can see is more night…

The Canyons is playing now in very limited release, and is also available on VOD, where Schrader and company think most people will end up seeing it. The hope is that their micro-budgeted indie will get some free publicity out of Lohan’s still-considerable tabloid profile. Given that big-budget movies have crashed and burned with regularity all summer, and anything that’s not big budget can barely get released, The Canyons could serve as a harbinger for a new kind of movie future. One with a lot fewer theaters to overpay for popcorn at.

One of the many stills of closed movie theater facades that Paul Schrader scatters throughout 'The Canyons'.
One of the many stills of closed movie theater facades that Paul Schrader scatters throughout ‘The Canyons’.

 

Department of Cinematic Complaints: Perceived Biases Edition

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dinesh1It was bad enough that the semi-scholar Dinesh D’Souza put his efforts behind a particularly seamy piece of Andrew Breitbart-ish video propaganda disguised as a documentary about Barack Obama. (This still from 2016: Obama’s America shows Dinesh intrepidly scouring the globe for clues to the president’s ignominy.)

Then came this:

…the makers of the documentary 2016: Obama’s America were peeved that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ shortlist of Oscar-contending documentaries didn’t include their film. The articles notes that 2016 was a surprise hit that pulled in over $33 million, a staggering amount for a nonfiction film and more than the 15 documentaries have made combined.

My post about this “controversy” is at Short Ends & Leader.

Quote(s) of the Day: Erroll Flynn

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Besides acting in too many great films to mention—only one of which, 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, would be enough for any actor to achieve immortality—the ever-enthusiastic Erroll Flynn was also an author of sorts.

Just a few months after his death in 1959, Flynn’s “autobiography” My Wicked, Wicked Ways was published, instantly scandalizing Hollywood for its brazen cynicism and warts-and-all attitude. Of course, it’s never been out of print since. 

Crafted mostly by Earl Conrad and a team of stenographers and allegedly cribbed in parts from other sources (including even Thoreau’s Walden), the book is full of pithy declamations about the good life lived hard. Among them:

I have been in rebellion against God and Government ever since I can remember … But I had my vodka—and had faith in that. It came in cases. I got up in the morning and reached. I hawked, coughed around a while, took another drink, started the day.

And also this:

Living I have done, enormously, like a gourmand eating the world, and I don’t suppose it is egotism, but only fact, to suggest that few others alive in the present century have taken into their maw more of the world than have I.

Well, it works for some.

DVD Tuesday: ‘Clue: The Movie’

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Somewhere buried deep in an email chain that’s been slung like Spider-man’s web from producer’s office to various screenwriters to yet other producers in Hollywood right now may well reside infinite variations on this question: How do we make a movie out of the board-game Clue?

It’s extremely likely that nowhere in this abstracted committee of moviemaking has anybody suggested, “Hey, how about making it into something of a sex farce that’s also an allegory for the McCarthy era?” That’s not just because it was already done but because such an idea would never fly. Except it did, in 1985. Somehow…

The Blu-ray release of Clue: The Movie hits stores today; and yes, it includes all three endings. My full review is at PopMatters.