Showtime’s page for The Beach Boys: Making ‘Pet Sounds’ (4.7, on demand 4.8) says that the doc is “celebrating the 50th anniversary” of Brian Wilson’s landmark album. But of course it isn’t. Pet Sounds was recorded between 7.12.65 and 4.13.66, and was released on 5.16.66, so the doc might as well celebrate the 51st anniversary. I’m presuming that it happened because of Bill Pohlad‘s impressive recreations of the making of this album in Love & Mercy. It would be more interesting, I feel, to see a doc about the making of Smile — the saga of how it was recorded and then abandoned and then reborn in the 21st Century.
Showtime’s page for The Beach Boys: Making ‘Pet Sounds’ (4.7, on demand 4.8) says that the doc is “celebrating the 50th anniversary” of Brian Wilson’s landmark album. But of course it isn’t. Pet Sounds was recorded between 7.12.65 and 4.13.66, and was released on 5.16.66, so it might as well be celebrating the 51st anniversary. I’m presuming that this doc happened because of Bill Pohlad‘s impressive recreations of the making of this album in Love & Mercy. It would be more interesting, I feel, to see a doc about the making of Smile — the saga of how it was recorded and then abandoned and then reborn in the 21st Century.
Brian Wilson‘s ten-piece band made a lot of people happy tonight at Vibrato, the Beverly Glen jazz club. Journos, publicists and Academy members clapped, cheered, danced and whoo-hooed to a 40-minute set of Beach Boys hits. All were gathered to celebrate….okay, acknowledge the launch of Love & Mercy‘s award-season campaign. I was sitting at a center table with Indiewire‘s Bill Desowitz, Variety‘s Kris Tapley and producer Don Murphy. The high point came when Love & Mercy star Paul Dano walked on stage and joined the band for “You Still Believe In Me”…not an easy song to perform but he brought it home. What a night! (Note: The band sounded better than what these videos are conveying — the iPhone 6 Plus can only capture so much range.)
Yesterday the Grantland channel posted a spirited discussion between Grantland’s Bill Simmons, Wesley Morris and Chris Connelly about which summer movies will be the box-office champs on their respective weekends. But the video must have been shot at least a week earlier because they debate whether Pitch Perfect 2 or Mad Max: Fury Road (i.e., last weekend’s face-off) will come out on top. The talk is pleasant enough until the very end when Connelly sticks his fat foot in his mouth by joking about whether audiences will have any interest in “John Cusack as Brian Wilson” — i.e., a reference to Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy (Roadside, 6.5), which is one of the best rock-music biopics ever made (82% Rotten Tomatoes so far, 83% Metacritic) and the source of one of Hollywood Elsewhere’s biggest praise spewings in recent months.
Connelly then asks Morris for a reaction to “Cusack as Wilson” and Morris offers one of those blank expressions that aren’t really blank as much as “uhhm, are you serious…you’re asking me this?…nope.”
I wrote the following to Morris just now: “I was watching your recently-posted box-office predictions video with Simmons and Connelly (dated 5.21) and then near the very end Connelly takes a BIG THOUGHTLESS DUMP on one of the most engaging and sensitive movies of the year, Love & Mercy, which he refers to as “John Cusack as Brian Wilson.” And then you chime in with your dismissive bullshit two-cent expression. Nice going, guys. Cusack and Paul Dano both play Wilson, as you know, and the movie, directed by Bill Pohlad, is really moving and quite exceptional in the annals of rock-star biopics. BBC.com’s Owen Gleiberman called it “miraculous” in his Toronto Film Festival review. Your bizarrely dismissive TIFF review notwithstanding, Dano and Cusack nail their respective Wilsons (young and mid 40ish) with wide-open emotionality and extraordinary finesse.
Last night I caught Craig Gillespie‘s Dumb Money (Sony, 9.15), which had its big premiere in Toronto a few days ago.
It’s based upon Ben Mezrich‘s “The Anti-Social Network“, a 2021 non-fiction account of the GameStop short squeeze, which principally happened between January and March ’21.
The key narrative focus, of course, is class warfare.
Dumb Money is a Frank Capra-esque tale of a battle of influence between financially struggling, hand-to-mouth Average Joe stock investors vs. elite billionaires who tried to reap profits out of shorting GameStop.
The legacy of the 2008-through-2010 recession and movies like Margin Call (’11), The Wolf of Wall Street (’13) and The Big Short (’15) resulted in considerable hostility towards Wall Street hedge fund hotshots.
The venting of this anger was enabled by the ability of hand-to-mouth, small-time traders keeping up with fast market changes through social media investment sites like R/wallstreetbets.
I’m too dumb to fully understand the intricacies of the term “short squeeze**,” but I understand the broad strokes.
I didn’t love Dumb Money, but I paid attention to it. It didn’t exactly turn me on but it didn’t bore me either. I didn’t once turn on my phone. I was semi-engaged.
Paul Dano‘s performance as Keith Gill, the main stock speculator and plot-driver, is fairly compelling. The costars — Pete Davidson, American Ferrara, Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan and Shailene Woodley — deliver like pros.
I spent a fair amount of time wondering why the 39 year-old Dano is heavier now than he was as Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad‘s Love and Mercy, for which he intentionally gained weight. The real Gill is semi-slender or certainly not chubby.
Clearly Margin Call, The Big Short and The Social Network have far more pizazz and personality.
** “A short squeeze is a rapid increase in the price of a stock owing primarily to an excess of short selling of a stock rather than underlying fundamentals. A short squeeze occurs when there is a lack of supply and an excess of demand for the stock due to short sellers having to buy stocks to cover their short positions”…huh?
…I don’t want to be right.
A friend insists that yesterday’s post about Little Women and other fall hotties (“Gerwig’s Little Women Avoiding Festival Circuit?”) is “hogwash.” If he’s referring to the Little Women part, he needs to complain to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn and Anne Thompson and not me.
“I know several titles locked for Telluride,” he says, “and I don’t think you mention any of them, not even the right Netflix one. Actually there may be two.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “You’re telling me that none of the hotties I listed are going to Telluride as far as you know?”
I don’t care what this guy is saying — at least two or three of the films I mentioned (Ed Norton‘s Motherless Brooklyn, Jay Roach‘s Fair and Balanced, Kasi Lemmons‘ Harriet, Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted, Steven Soderbergh‘s The Laundromat, Gavin O’Connor‘s Torrance, Roger Michell‘s Blackbird, Rupert Goold‘s Judy, Tom Harper‘s The Aeronauts) have to be Telluride-bound…c’mon.
He also commented about Jeff Sneider‘s prediction tweet about Melina Matsoukas‘ Queen & Slim and Destin Daniel Cretton‘s Just Mercy being possible Best Picture favorites, along with my inference that admirers of these films will represent “an anti-Green Book, authentic-black-experience pushback vote.”
“The Academy is not looking to ‘make up’ for Green Book,” he says. “They strongly endorsed it and still do. Queen & Slim sounds interesting but it’s about a black couple (played by Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith) killing a white policeman and going on the lam. Universal plans to [try to] cover that up largely by selling it as a love story.”
“Warner Bros. is considering Just Mercy for an awards run but it is aimed more directly at MLK weekend. WB has so many possibilities, most notably Joker, so we’ll see. Like Green Book it’s an inspiring true story.”
Just Mercy is a variation on Call Northside 777** — a “get a convict out of jail because he’s innocent” drama. The director is Destin Daniel Cretton; the costars are Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Eva Ansley.
** Yeah, I know — Call Northside 777 who? It’s a 1948 James Stewart docudrama, based on a true story about a Chicago reporter who got an innocent guy out of jail.
I was just reading a 12.20 N.Y. Times profile of Elizabeth Banks, written and reported by former “Carpetbagger” Melena Ryzik. It explains how Banks, a once-frustrated actress, has become a multi-hyphenate — director (Pitch Perfect 2), production company chief, benefactor of female comedians and actress with her hand still very much in. But there’s a mistaken quote in the piece.
“When [Banks] arrived in Los Angeles, equipped with drama training from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, she had clear goals,” Ryzik writes. “‘I came to be Julia Roberts,’ she said. ‘And they stopped making rom-coms the minute that I got here. I have literally fallen in love exactly one time in a movie.”
Banks was referring to a dud comedy called Walk of Shame (’14). However, she did fall in love “in a movie” that very same year, and with Brian Wilson, no less. The film was called Love and Mercy, of course, and Banks gave her best performance in it, bar none.
Elizabeth Banks
I had an easy 40-minute chat today with Love & Mercy costars Paul Dano and Elizabeth Banks. Publicists always cut things off at 15 or 20 minutes these days, but I guess I rate because I’ve been cheerleading this film since September 2014. Dano’s performance as the young Brian Wilson in the mid to late ’60s and Banks’ turn as Melinda Ledbetter, who met and helped rescue Wilson from the clutches of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giammati) in the mid to late ’80s, are arguably the best of their respective careers.
Elizabeth Banks, Paul Dano in Capitol Records building — Saturday, 10.10, 12:45 pm.
I mentioned that luck is arguably a big factor in careers and that, talent and focus aside, luck seemed to smile when they landed their roles in this film. Banks disagreed and Dano was a little “well, yeah but on the other hand” about this, but I can feel it when the alchemy between a great role and the right actor just clicks into place. These guys lucked out.
You could make the argument that they’re both playing leads, but Roadside’s strategy is to run them as supporting players so what the hell. The point is that they both easily deserve nominations in their respective categories…easily. Hell, they deserve to win.
Banks’ performance is basically about Ledbetter’s tenderness and compassion. In scene after scene she gives John Cusack‘s Wilson (i.e., the 1980s 40something version) room to breathe and be himself without showing judgment. (Which Banks herself said she might have though twice about in real life.) She has two perfect moments, both of which were improvised — that Cadillac dealership scene when John Cusack‘s Wilson (i.e., the 40something version) mentions that he’s not married, and she mouths “okay,” and that moment when Cusack plays two or three bars from “Love & Mercy” on the piano while she just sits and looks and smiles.
And Dano…I shouldn’t have used the word “performance.” It’s an act of possession.
Posted on 9.8.14: “Dano‘s performance is almost spookily great. Wilson’s disturbed spirit hums and throbs in Dano, who gained 30 pounds to play the genius Beach Boy maestro in his mid ’60s blimp period. You can really feel the vibrations and sense the genius-level ferment and the off-balance emotionality. Inwardly and outwardly it’s a stunning, drop-dead transformation and the finest of Dano’s career, hands down.”
People don’t like Love & Mercy — they love it. They’ve bonded with it. They take their friends to see it. (A Candian pal told me this when I stayed at his place during the Toronto Film Festuval.). Some have seen it two or three times. The hardcores are probably watching it on Bluray as we speak.
I said farewell to Dano and Banks only temporarily as we’ll be seeing each other again on Monday on two occasions, at the Craig’s luncheon and at the Vibrato party a few hours later.
Again, the mp3.
Five and a half weeks after opening theatrically, Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy has announced its home video & streaming plans. 40 days hence (8.25) it’ll be available on Digital HD (what does that mean exactly? Amazon or Vudu or what?). And then on 9.15 it’ll arrive on Bluray, DVD and On Demand. At least more people will catch it this way, and those Academy and guild members who still haven’t watched it will receive screeners in the mail. One way or another it’ll gradually sink in that (a) this is the leading token Best Picture contender from the indie ranks, (b) Paul Dano and John Cusack are the Bobbsie Twins of the 2015 Best Actor race, (c) Pohlad deserves an attaboy Best Director nom for transitioning so successfully to the DGA ranks, and (d) Oren Moverman‘s screenplay deserves a Best Original Screenplay nom. Really.
I’ve been putting off facing the truth about Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy, which is that it’s underperforming. This despite two award-worthy performances (Paul Dano and John Cusack), great reviews and notions that it’s probably the most Best Picture–worthy 2015 release so far. After four weeks in a maximum of 481 theatres, the Roadside Attractions release has earned only $10.5 million, which feels anemic to me. It’s still playing at five L.A. plexes but the juice appears to be just about spent.
The Love & Mercy gang at 2014 Toronto Film Festival premiere screening.
I realize that indie-ish, character-driven dramas are always marginal performers but I was figuring (hoping?) that Love & Mercy would nudge its way into the high teens or even the low 20s before stalling out, and then maybe bounce back on home video when award season happens (top-ten lists, critic trophies, Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, Spirit Awards). But to barely break $10 million…wow.
This seems to indicate that the core audience for Love & Mercy, mature quality-seekers and Beach Boys fans, are relatively few in number. That or a lot of these viewers simply decided to wait for the film to start streaming. Why didn’t it catch on a bit more? Was it because of the darkish mood and (let’s be honest) the somewhat sluggish pace in the film’s second half? Is it because only boomers are interested and under-40s couldn’t care less? I know that my son Jett, 27, and his girlfriend Cait saw it early and liked it a lot, and that when they got home they both did a lot of googling about Brian Wilson, etc.
This morning Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet posted a list of nine films he believes are the most likely to emerge as 2015 Best Picture Oscar nominees. So I decided to post a list of my own. The only Brevet nommies I disagree on are Pete Docter‘s Inside Out, which will not be Best Picture nominated because it’s animated and that’s that, and Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, which I suspect will probably turn out to be a bit stodgy and time-piecey and maybe self-enshrining (you know Spielberg). In place of these two I’m betting the Academy will want to nominate one of the five big social-political films (James Vanderbilt‘s Truth, Jay Roach‘s Trumbo, Thomas McCarthy‘s Spotlight, Oliver Stone‘s Snowden, David Gordon Green‘s Our Brand Is Crisis) and perhaps even two of these….who knows?
I’m also betting/hoping that if Universal decides to platform Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Hail Caesar! in December it might well make the cut as the script happens to be brilliant and hilarious, even though it’s one of the Coen’s goofball flicks. It also goes without saying that while general assumptions seem to be that Martin Scorsese‘s Silence will probably open in 2016, the historical drama will almost certainly be a 2015 Best Picture nominee if it opens later this year (unless it turns out to be too gruesome). I realize that Love & Mercy‘s best shot is with the Spirit Awards but I’d love to see it Oscar-nominated — I think it really deserves to be.
Rope of Silicon’s 7.1 predictions (in this order of likelihood):
1. Steve Jobs (Universal, 10.9) — Danny Boyle (director), Aaron Sorkin (screenplay), Scott Rudin (producer); Cast: Michael Fassbender, Seth Rogen, Michael Stuhlbarg, Kate Winslet, Katherine Waterston.
2. The Revenant (20th Century Fox, 12.25) — Alejandro González Inarritu (director/screenplay); Mark “nobody can remember my middle initial” Smith (screenplay); Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, Domhnall Gleeson.
3. The Danish Girl — (Focus Features, 11.27) — Tom Hooper (director). Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Amber Heard, Matthias Schoenaerts.
4. Carol (Weinstein Co., 12.18) — Todd Haynes (director); Pyllis Nagy (screenplay, based on Patricia Highsmith novel); Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler. Cannes reaction: Best Picture, Best Actress/Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay (Phyllis Nagy).
5. Joy (20th Century Fox, 12.25) — David O. Russell (director/screenplay). Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Édgar Ramirez.
6. Bridge of Spies (Disney, 10.16) — Steven Spielberg (director); Matt Charman, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen (screenplay); Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda, Billy Magnussen, Eve Hewson.
7. The Walk (TriStar/ImageMovers, 9.30) — Robert Zemeckis (director/screenplay); Christopher Browne (screenplay); Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley, James Badge Dale, Charlotte Le Bon. Sony/TriStar, 10.2.
8. Inside Out (Disney/Pixar, 6.19), d: Pete Docter.
9. Brooklyn (Fox Searchlight, 11.6) — John Crowley (director), Nick Hornby (screenwriter) — Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters.
I attended last night’s Brian Wilson concert at L.A.’s Greek theatre, courtesy of the Love & Mercy team at Roadside. I went with mixed expectations. One, I’d seen Wilson and his backup band give a pleasant but not-exactly-knockout show at a UCLA venue about nine or ten years ago, and who knew if this show would be as good? It might be worse. And two, I’d been told by a friend that a typical Wilson audience these days is wall-to-wall oldsters — baldies, pot bellies, white hair, neck wattles, tent-like Hawaiian shirts — and the thought of being part of such a throng depressed me to no end. I loved the drive up to the Greek (the weather was warm and dry and the various fragrances in the air were to die for) but as I approached the main entrance I was asking myself, “Do I really want to be here?”
Well, my fears were unfounded. The crowd was definitely younger than expected (a healthy blend of people of all ages) and the show was far and away the best Beach Boys/Brian Wilson concert I’ve ever been lucky enough to savor. Paul Merten‘s tight ten-piece band (eleven counting Wilson) just knocked the shit out of 32 Wilson songs, and I’m sorry but it felt truly joyful start to finish. Nobody was cutting the band any slack — they were delivering like champs, gloriously smooth and clean and confident.
About three or four songs into the show I turned to Madelyn Hammond (there with Pete) on my right and said, “Wow, the band is really good!” She agreed 100%. Two seconds later a bewigged Paul Giamatti leaned over and said to me, “What? What did you say to Madelyn?” I looked at him and said, “It’s none of your fucking business!” I’m kidding — Giamatti wasn’t there.
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