It’s Day Eight of our experiment, and by now maybe you know the routine. I am going to share some things I thought were cool, or just thought about today. And you can comment on my thoughts, or share your own! I would love to know what you’re thinking. Unless you think I’m a big dummy. I hear enough from people who think that. They’re never as interesting as the ones who think nice things about me, to be honest, although surely I’m biased.
BILL MURRAY!
Bill Murray went on The Howard Stern Show to promote THE FRIEND, and talked about all kinds of things. This is of particular interest to me since it involves another long-term creative hero of mine, Clint Eastwood. Amazed at the chutzpah of 1980 Bill Murray to say no to 1980 Clint Eastwood, but that’s part of the legend of Bill Murray. Give it a listen.
DAN AYKROYD!
This is Dan Rather interviewing Dan Aykroyd about John Belushi. It’s a tragedy and a loss and I’m touched by how much Dan Aykroyd loved John Belushi. The older I get, the more that I realize that this kind of friendship is rare.
DANNY McBRIDE!
A much happier clip is Conan O’Brien talking to Danny McBride, who is making the rounds for the final season (sad face) of The Righteous Gemstones. It’s a good day for comic geniuses, what can I say.
AL PACINO!
Here’s a trailer (or a teaser trailer, maybe) for THE RITUAL, in which Al Pacino teams up with Dan Stevens to bust ghosts exorcise demons in a nunnery. When they say the film is “based on a true story,” what they mean is Pacino is playing a guy named Theophilus Riesinger, a Capuchin friar who performed an exorcism back in 1928. So in case you were wondering (like I was), that’s a German accent he’s doing. If you were to ask me, “What could be better than Russell Crowe doing an accent while doing exorcisms?” I might be inclined to say, “Not much! But maybe Al Pacino doing accents and exorcisms has a shot. Especially with Dan Stevens as a bonus priest with an bonus accent.”
SNOW WHITE IS CURSED! EVIL IS WINNING! OR LOSING! DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK
Variety has a piece on SNOW WHITE and how and “why” it’s supposedly a bomb that is rapidly exploding in front of our eyes. This is one of those live-action remakes of classic Disney animated features, but it’s a huge deal because SNOW WHITE & THE SEVEN DWARFS in 1937 was the first animated film in the U.S. and Walt Disney’s first huge hit. Even though Disney features like BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and THE LION KING have more of a cultural footprint (in part because they’re relatively more recent), for Disney, SNOW WHITE is a huge deal.
This new version stars Rachel Zegler from Spielberg’s WEST SIDE STORY (because everything is remakes) as Snow White, costarring Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. Gadot is someone who everyone loved in 2017, when she was Wonder Woman, and then not as much in 2020, when the second WONDER WOMAN movie wasn’t as good, and even less now, because she is Israeli and once served in the IDF (as is customary in that country). But it’s Zegler who Variety appears to be centering on, which seems unfair and also very cruel to do to a kid in her earliest twenties.
Zegler is being incinerated for having said “Free Palestine” on social media and for saying on Instagram that Trump supporters ought never to know peace. First of all, I have to ask: Where are the lies? Do Trump supporters truly believe they deserve peace? When have they ever offered any? But also, I don’t think mainstream audiences are necessarily online that much. It’s possible that people are seeing all the right-wing trolls who are attacking her, but that depends on the algorithm: If you’re someone predisposed to watch videos from right-wing trolls, then that’s what you’ll see. But if you’re more of a lefty, then you might see Gadot as more the toxic presence. I’m not entirely sure that’s fair either. It’s like blaming Americans for all the terrible things our rulers do. At least half of us are strongly against them! Is Gadot pro-genocide? (I’m sincerely asking. Haven’t found any recent statements from her that are strongly supporting Israel. But I’m not actually online that much either, and she also hasn’t denounced their war crimes either, far as I can tell, so I’m not defending her.)
The truth is that this project was besieged from the start. Peter Dinklage hit it early on for featuring dwarfs, arguing the story itself is archaic, which is reasonable. But Disney’s solution wasn’t to remove dwarfs from the story. What they did is create CGI dwarfs, mo-capped by actors including Martin Klebba, who is a dwarf. Your mileage may vary, but to my eyes, what resulted is horrifying.
And I understand that there are adults with emotional problems who need these movies to be shot-for-shot remakes of the originals, but not everything that works in animation can work in live-action, by which I mean to say that nobody on Earth can make this haircut work.
There are lots of reasons why movies don’t hit. Sometimes it’s as simple as a bad haircut. Sometimes it’s a combination of factors. Sometimes it’s just the wrong movie at the wrong time.
I haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t have a dog in the fight, but the reasons I am avoiding it personally, which are the only reasons I can speak to with authority, have nothing to do with what Rachel Zegler does on social media. However, I have heard that Gal Gadot sings in SNOW WHITE, and I do remember the last time I heard Gal Gadot sing, and I am not looking to ever revisit that, let alone for two hours. Is it possible that audiences are avoiding the movie for reasons that have little to do with whatever political positions Gal Gadot and Rachel Zegler may or may not have? Is it at all possible that audiences are tired of this trend of remaking animated films? That trend can’t die fast enough as far as I’m concerned, but no doubt the truth can still be somewhere outside the theories I’m presenting. No matter what is the why, I just don’t think it’s fair to pin this on a young actor who is barely out of school age.
MOVIES ARE DYING!
Oh, don’t worry. Movies will never die. The art of cinema will never die. But the state of moviegoing as we used to know it is an endangered species. Reporting on a study that considers consumer viewing habits, the Hollywood Reporter tells us something that I’m sure you and I had a sense of already, at least subconsciously, that younger people are spending more time with social media and “content creators” and “influencers” than on going to movie theaters to watch professional movie stars. I think kids are still enjoying movies, but maybe not as much as my generation did.
I drive my niece to school every day, and I was telling her about seeing DEATH OF A UNICORN lately. She is totally aware of who Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega are, and she likes them, and she seemed to enjoy hearing about the movie, but I’m also pretty sure she checked TikTok while I was talking to her. It’s okay. Maybe it’s okay. I accept it. I don’t love it, but who am I to make a big thing about it?
There’s an addictive quality to social media, to quick hits, and it’s easier to invest in moments rather than two-hour experiences. The world is increasingly stressful, and this is how people escape now. I guess better this than vaping. Obviously I think it’s a terrible trend that people don’t know how to sit and watch movies anymore. (Don’t get me started on the guy who sat through DEATH OF A UNICORN scrolling, despite having paid twenty bucks for a ticket.) I remember the excitement of finding out about a movie that looked great, and running to the theater at the first chance to see it, and feeling anticipation as the movie started to roll, and getting lost in the story and then chattering with my pals about it when the lights came up. It’s sad that kids today aren’t getting that experience, or if they are, it’s not as often as my friends and I liked to have it. But I also understand that the phrase “kids today” is one that many generations of clueless geezers have used without understanding that life is change and maybe there are joys in the new ways that I’m not seeing.
Maybe it’s okay that I liked what I liked, and that younger generations are finding their own preferred methods of expression. Or! Maybe this is all part of the downward slide, and everything is terrible and only getting worse. In a few decades, I won’t be here to worry about it and I’ve got a lot of movies to see, books to read, stories to tell, drawings to draw, and walks to take before I’m gone. I’ve got to get to work doing all those things, and doing good where I can do good, and hoping for the best for the younger generations. I don’t have all that much time left to complain, although hey, complaining can be fun too.
- [THE BIG QUESTION] WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE FEMALE ENSEMBLE IN MOVIES? - July 22, 2016
- [IN THEATERS NOW] THE BOY (2016) - January 24, 2016
- Cult Movie Mania Releases Lucio Fulci Limited Edition VHS Sets - January 5, 2016
Tags: Al Pacino, bill murray, Bombs, clint eastwood, Columns, Conan O’Brien, daily grindhouse, Dan Aykroyd, Dan Rather, Dan Stevens, Danny McBride, Gal Gadot, Howard Stern, John Belushi, Jon Abrams, Movies, Walt Disney, Walton Goggins
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