HE is about to watch Coming 2 America. Sorry for being the slow guy. I was going to watch it last night, and then…you don’t want to know. It’s streaming worldwide. I wasn’t a fan of the original 1988 film because I felt it was too wealth-porny, and I guess I’m not feeling today’s current because the C2A trailer makes it feel like more or less the same.
I was a huge fan of early, extra-nervy Eddie Murphy. Mr. T in a gay bar, that line of country. In ’81 or thereabouts I caught him live at the old Catch A Rising Star (1st Avenue between 77th and 78th). I saw him again at the Universal Amphitheatre in ’83…blew the roof off. His Rudy Moore in 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name was obviously a huge, historic comeback. but Craig Brewer’s film was as far away from wealth porn qs it could get.
You’ve got your lean cuisine and fatty, high-calorie meals, some nutritional and some less so, and then your salads and fruits and fine desserts, and finally the icing and sugar fizz and whipped cream. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa‘s Focus, a superficially alluring but dismissable February programmer about a couple of con artist thieves (Will Smith, Margot Robbie) with a marginal interest in sex when the greed impulse ebbs, is almost all sugar fizz. The lady I saw it with last night gave it a 4 out of 10 but at the same time insisted she had an okay time. There’s a place in the world, she believes, for gliding emptiness and sexy time-wasting.
I’ll tell you what there’s no place for, not in my head at least, and that’s a climactic scene in which…nope, not going there. But I almost did out of spite. I can at least tell you that the Focus finale (i.e. the last 15 minutes) delivers the exact opposite feeling you had when you experienced the finale of The Sting for the first time. Everyone in the theatre was silently going “They’re kidding, right? This is how they’re ending it?”
The game behind all con-artist movies is, of course, to try and fake the audience out, which is naturally difficult with everyone constantly looking for the card trick. And so you have to resort to extreme if not absurd bait-and-switch tactics that defy belief. The audience naturally assumes that Smith and Robbie are constantly lying or conning or hiding some key piece of information and that Ficarra and Rerqua are doing the same thing so nobody trusts anyone or anything. So why am I watching this damn thing?
Focus is basically selling two ideas. One, the life of a professional thief can be cool and smoothly attractive if that life is happening within the realm of phony Hollywood escapism, which of course isn’t serious escapism if the director-writers insist on reminding you how fake and fraudulent it is, which this film does in spades. And two, the relatively recent premise that U.S. moviegoers will pay to immerse themselves in this kind of emptiness if it’s a January, February or March release. They know Hollywood always saves the costliest escapism for the summer and the quality stuff for the fall and holiday periods, etc.
To me Focus is mainly an advertisement for wealth-porn lifestyles. Which is more or less what Fifty Shades of Grey was. The wealth-porn aesthetic is an atmospheric, quarter-inch-deep mood drug that has become the end-all and be-all among the clueless classes when they go on vacations and stay in Cancun or Vegas or wherever. Easily impressed, marginally educated, Taylor Swift-worshipping peons, I mean, who seem to want nothing more than to immerse themselves in faux-opulence to the exclusion of all other experiences and environments, and who wouldn’t know old-world class or gentility or a moment of quiet spiritual serenity if it snuck up and bit them in the ass.
The wealth-porn aesthetic is spreading like a virus across much of the culture these days. It has all but engulfed the travel industry. (When they travel to Mexico or the Greek islands or Phuket, faux-sophsticates want nothing more than to stay in the exact same kind of upscale McDonalds five-star hotels.) And it’s certainly defining cheap-gloss glamour rides like Focus. Somebody tell Dooley Wilson — the fundamental things no longer apply.
There are three main locations in Focus — New York, New Orleans and Buenos Aires. And they all feel pretty much the same. Okay, you’ll notice some atmospheric touches in the South American sections (Spanish-language store signs, a low-rent bar with an ancient TV showing a sports event) but it’s all about living flush and flash.
It’s also about the fact that I can’t relax with Will Smith. He’s such a con-artist actor in the first place, such a slick salesman. He walks into a room and right away my guard goes up. No way I’m suspending my disbelief. I started giving up on the guy after he made Independence Day. The last time I was half-engaged was when he costarred in Enemy of the State. And I have to say that Margot Robbie’s Wolf of Wall Street allure is fading after this and Z for Zachariah. I’m starting to realize that she doesn’t have a lot of moves.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy has written that Focus “is no Trouble in Paradise, House of Games or The Grifters.” It’s also no Pickpocket but the trailers have been assuring us of that for weeks now. I’m recalling how much fun I got from David Mamet‘s Games, and at the same time gulping at the fact that it opened over 27 years ago.
The technical adviser on Focus is Apollo Robbins, a security expert and former criminal who claims to have picked the pockets of more than 250,000 victims. There’s no way anyone’s ever going to get my wallet or iPhone, I tell myself. Or maybe I’ve just been lucky. I know that my wallet and phone are always snugly tucked inside my breast pockets or, better yet, in a tight front-breast pocket. I’m extra-watchful and guarded whenever I’m in a dense crowd. If someone comes near me I duck away or elbow them aside or whatever.
Sam Taylor-Johnson and E.L James‘ Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, 2.13), which I saw last night at the Arclight in a theatre that was attended by a few media types but mostly by people you wouldn’t want to have dinner with if given a choice, is a sterile experience, to put it mildly. It’s faintly amusing and even titillating during the first hour, but it eventually narcotizes and then freezes your soul. It offers a few mildly arousing, tastefully shot sex scenes (ice cubes, lashes, blindfolds), but it lives inside its own restricted, barren, super-regulated realm. There’s no “life” in its veins. Watching it is like visiting an overly policed bondage & discipline museum with uniformed guards stationed every 15 feet…no heart, no blood, no humanity, no jazz, no off-moments. It’s a cold, ritualized girl movie about fantasy sex with a well-mannered, hot-bod billionaire who rams like a stallion and gives lots of oral.
Henry Miller would definitely not approve. He would say “perversion, okay, but where’s the heart? You need to put a little heart into sex or what’s the point?” I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is that the sense of eros coveted by and written about by Miller 80 years ago is a thing of the distant past, and that we now live in an age of Seriously Perverse Franchises, which are a manifestation of what I would call the New Sterility coupled with the New Cluelessness on the part of young, anxious, under-educated women.
If you come away delighted with Fifty Shades of Grey then you are definitely on the clueless side of the equation, but don’t let me stop you. This movie is critic-proof. The none-too-brights are going to see this thing in droves, and then they’re going to talk things out at a nearby bar and drink wine and start squealing with laughter after the second glass. And guys like me are going to look in their direction and give them the stink-eye.
Early Thursday evening I caught Guy Ritchie‘s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guuerre. Soon after I got into a tennis-match volley with a friend who likes it more than me. I’ve cut out some of our back-and-forth but here’s the gist:
Nearly 40 years ago (in ’85) Robert Towne did an uncredited rewrite of 8MillionWaystoDie (’86), which was director Hal Ashby‘s last film. According to Ashby biographer Christopher Beach, Towne wrote a scene in which JeffBridges‘ Matt Scudder shoots a suspect who’s just hit a policeman with an unlikely weapon — a rocking chair. Ashby changed the weapon from a rocking chair to a baseball bat. Towne was furious at Ashby for doing so, and they were never entirely cordial after that.
Bottom line: Either you’re the kind of filmmaker who understands that rocking chairs are far more interesting, or you’re not. Either you get that people are sick of baseball bats, or you don’t.
Ritchie’s Operation Fortune is basically a breezy formula wank…efficent but sick in the soul…an agreeable-attitude, wealth-porn, travel-porn action flick that’s amusing here and there, and is smartly written in a shallow, same-old-crap sort of way. But for all the dry snark and low-key humor it’s basically wall-to-wall baseball bats.
I enjoyed the opening Point Blank tribute, the clop-clop of footsteps with Cary Elwes. I also liked the BurtBacharach “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” thievery scene.
Otherwise it felt to me like formulaic Ritchie cynicism, and too slick by half with too many toys and too much wealth and travel porn. Yes, it’s dryly amusing here and there, but to what end? It’s not really doing or saying anything. It’s just about slick action moves and shots muffled by silencers and dry, deadpan dialogue.
Taciturn, good-natured Jason Statham drills 45 or 50 guys, and there’s really nothing going on, nothing underneath…the same old globe-hopping shite.
I didn’t hate Ruse de Guerre but it has no fresh ideas, no real convictions above and beyond a rote Bondian attitude, and certainly nothing approaching what anyone would call nutritious dialogue.
It has an agreeable sense of “fun”, yes. Hugh Grant, the billionaire bad guy, has his cheeky blase attitude. Aubrey Plaza has her cynical, eye-rolling schtick down pat. And yes, there’s a certain tonal confidence…a certain light-hearted mood. But Ritchie just cranks this shit out, y’know?
Why can’t he make an action film with a droll or anarchic political attitude like ThePresident’sAnalyst?
Good action movies shouldn’t adhere too slavishly to formula. They should exude a little beyond -the-perimeter attitude. They should try for a little something extra. Something subversive or in some way unconventional.
I appreciated the brusque dispatch…the efficiency, dryness of tone and aloof comic attitude. It wasn’t bad in some respects. But what was it really?
Again, I loved the Point Blank clop-clop tribute and the affectionate nod to Bacharach and Butch Cassidy and other throwaway touches, and I almost enjoyed the fact that Ritchie kept saying to the viewer “this is nothing times infinity…I can crank this shit out in my sleep because I’m a slick hack with a sense of fatalistic humor about myself and you guys don’t care anyway, am I right?
“Your willingness to watch this shit, dear viewers, while shrugging your shoulders…because there is no God, no chance of any feelings of love or honest anger or honest anything…no possibility of surprise or anything at all but rank fuck-all cynicism…I’m nothing and you’re nothing, but at least this movie is carried aloft by wealth porn and travel porn, and for the millionth time this is a movie that regards death as a video-game proposition!”
The relentless goons and their ugly faces and the endless bullets and shell casings and the astronomical body count and the way the movie offers glimpses of the Roman ruins near Antalya but not so much as a second’s worth of reflection about them and…did I mention the wealth and travel porn? Oh, right, I just did. But that cherry red 1965 Mustang hardtop and all those black SUVs and the neck-deep cynicism…aagghhh!
Ritchie’s cynicism is truly, deeply suffocating and draining.
I’m still deeply uncomfortable about Mike White‘s anal fixations (analingus, suitcase pooping), but last night I marched through episodes $2, #3, #4 and #5 of season #2 of The White Lotus, and I was impressed. I was vaguely irked by the wealth porn (alright already!), and Tanya McQuoid-Hunt (the wide-faced, buffalo-shaped Jennifer Coolidge, who looks like a dude in a blonde wig) is still pathetic and her husband Greg (Jon Gries) is still cruel and aloof, but otherwise I found the randy characters mostly appealing and compelling. And I thought “what a pleasure to take the measure of all these wealthy travellers…what great adult stuff.”
The 30something Ethan and Harper Spoiler (Will Sharpe, Aubrey Plaza) are easily the most miserable couple — hung-up, uptight, haunted. And their opposite number — the morally unconstrained Cameron and Daphne Sullivan (Theo James, Meghann Fahy) are the most accepting of their basic natures and seemingly happier for it. Poor Bert Di Grasso (F. Murray Abraham) laments that he’ll never see a naked woman again. His grandson Albie Di Grasso (Adam DiMarco) has a passonate fling with Lucia (Simona Tabasco), a local sex worker. Lucia’s friend Mia (Beatrice Granno), who has a great lounge-singing voice, winds up accidentally dosing the hotel’s resident piano player (a 50ish dude) with “Molly.” And the hobbit-sized Quentin (Tom Hollander) turns out to be the kindest and wisest of the bunch. It’s all good, (almost) every bit of it, and I can’t wait for the remaining episodes.
Apparently Kenneth Branagh's Death on the Nile (20th Century, 2.11) is (a) fairly mediocre but (b) not bad enough to be regarded as an albatross around Branagh's neck. It won't get in the way of his Best Picture and Best Director Oscar campaigns, I mean.
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“You are Goochee, you need to drehss the paht.” — Al Pacino‘s Aldo Gucci.
Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (UA Releasing, 11.24) seems an appropriately chilly nest-of-vipers flick along with a healthy serving of Italian wealth porn.
Craig Brewer‘s Coming 2 America (Amazon, 3.5.21) seems to have more on its mind than just a cash grab by way of Zamunda wealth porn. I have this idea — call it a conviction — that Brewer (Dolomite Is My Name, Hustle & Flow) is a lot more than just an Eddie Murphy “house” director, and that he knows how to spin this kind of material. Great cast — Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Jermaine Fowler, KiKi Layne, Leslie Jones, Shari Headley, Tracy Morgan, Wesley Snipes, James Earl Jones, et. al.
In a chat yesterday with Late Night screenwriter and costar Mindy Kaling, director Nancy Meyers (It’s Complicated, Something’s Gotta Give, Father of the Bride) struck back at critics who have taken her to task for making superficial “copper pots and white sweater” movies — i.e., wish-fulfillment romcoms about well-off women who live in swanky homes with luxurious, to-die-for kitchens.
“I don’t love [it] when a journalist or critic will pick up on that aspect, because they’re missing why it works,” Meyers complained. “It’s never done to male directors who make gorgeous movies, or where the leads live in a gorgeous house.”
As one who’s repeatedly brought up the copper-pot thing, I’ve never felt there was anything necessarily problematic about Meyers’ characters hanging out in spacious kitchens with gleaming copper frying pans, etc. The problem is that her romcoms rarely seem to rise above this fetishy focus or characteristic — they rarely dig in and climb up to the next level a la James L. Brooks in the’80s and’90s. With one exception (i.e., The Intern), her movies are primarily delivery devices for upmarket wealth porn.
Just about every Nancy Meyers movie involving a female lead of a certain age begins with Meyers saying to herself, “Wouldn’t it be wonderfully satisfying and exciting if…?”
Example: The romantic fantasy in It’s Complicated is that after a foxy older divorced woman (Meryl Streep) begins seeing an attractive new guy (Steve Martin) her re-married, somewhat girthy ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) gets the hots for her and starts cheating on his younger wife (Lake Bell) as they begin an extra-marital affair.
I didn’t buy this any more than I bought the basic plot of Meyers’ Something’s Got To Give (Jack Nicholson‘s randy music executive falling for Diane Keaton‘s affluent screenwriter as she’s courted by Keanu Reeves‘ young physician). In real life a guy like Baldwin would cheat on his new 30something wife with another young ‘un.
The point is that Meyers’ films are always about comfort — i.e., about upper-middle-class affluence, bright chatter, attractive lighting and an attractive older female lead getting to express how strong and soulful she is in the third act.
From my thumbs-up review of The Intern (9.25.15): “Meyers is just as much of a consistent and well-defined auteur as Michael Mann or John Ford or Samuel Fuller — she just makes movies that always happen within a realm of comfort, affluent insulation, alpha vibes and 40-plus romantic pangs. And so nothing rude or disturbing or creepy or traumatic happens, and you just have to accept that this is par for the course.
“A visit to Nancy Meyers Land means shutting out…what, 80% or 90% of the misery and aesthetic offenses and uncertainties and annoyances and dull horrors of real life?”
I want credit for enduring Crazy Rich Asians this afternoon. I paid, I saw, I suffocated. But it took 45 or 50 minutes before the oxygen ran out. Asians actually begins in a reasonably sharp and springy fashion. Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim‘s clever dialogue, Vanja Cernjul‘s handsome lensing, Myron Kerstein‘s fleet editing, etc. I was saying to myself “hmmm…this has a good vibe.”
It’s a satire of the aggressively shallow values of the highly insecure moneyed classes of southeast Asia, but the satire doesn’t cut very deep because the film shares these values and in fact adores them. Each and every shot is about showcasing obscenely flush, over-the-top flamboyance (clothes, homes, interior designs), and by the one-hour mark the spirit weakens and the nausea kicks in.
Henry Golding, Constance Wu in Crazy Rich Asians.
The story tries to have it both ways by having the fate of the two main characters, Constance Wu‘s Rachel Chu (the actress is 36 and no spring chicken) and Henry Golding‘s Nick Young, turn on matters of soul, substance and parental heritage. But director Jon M. Chu is more in love with grotesque abundance.
As Rachel is driven up the driveway of the mega-mansion owned by Nick’s parents, Brian Tyler‘s swelling score tells the audience that this is a huge, huge moment. It says “oh my God, look at this…Rachel is approaching heaven!” It’s like Jerry Goldsmith‘s score in Star Trek: The Motion Picture when William Shatner‘s Captain Kirk is first approaching the Enterprise and his eyes begin to moisten.
Eventually I began to telepathically beg for mercy. “Please, Jon…can we have a quiet, unfettered scene on a simple beach somewhere or maybe at an inexpensive roadside foodstand?” I whimpered. “Do you have to pour your maple-syrup wealth porn all over everything at every goddamn turn?” Answer: Yes, he does.
By the end I was hating Crazy Rich Asians as much as any of the more recent Fast and Furious sequels.