Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
I’ve had a few conversations recently where I’ve had to ashamedly admit that this year has been a little thin so far when it comes to worthwhile new releases. Which is why this weekend feels so energizing, with Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” Isaiah Saxon’s “The Legend of Ochi” and David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds” all hitting theaters.
“Sinners” is Coogler’s first film since his tour through “Creed” and two “Black Panther” movies. Michael B. Jordan plays Smoke and Stack, twin brothers who return to their home in 1930s Mississippi to run a juke joint and find things have changed. Reviewing the film, Amy Nicholson writes, “What a blood rush to exit Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners’ aware that you’ve seen not merely a great movie but an eternal movie, one that will transcend today’s box office and tomorrow’s awards to live on as a forever favorite.”
Coogler and his musical collaborator, composer Ludwig Göransson, spoke about how the music-heavy storyline of the film was a new challenge for them.
“Everybody had this sense of urgency,” said Coogler. “where we all knew that this might be the last time in our lives where we could make something like this, that requires this much of ourselves.”
Carlos Aguilar wrote a fantastic deep dive into how the old-school animatronic puppetry in “Ochi” was done, bringing bizarre creatures to life.
“The goal was that it felt like it was something from nature, not something from a movie,” said director Saxon. “I want kids to accept that maybe this is a real place and maybe this is a real animal that they just haven’t discovered yet.”
Cronenberg spoke to Josh Rottenberg about “The Shrouds,” which he made in the aftermath of the death of his wife of 43 years, Carolyn Cronenberg. The film tells the story of a tech entrepreneur (Vincent Cassel) grappling with memory and grief.
Yet Cronenberg does not see the film as therapeutic.
“Art, to me, is not therapy — it’s something else,” Cronenberg said. “Even a somber movie, it’s really playtime. You’re in the sandbox. You’re putting on funny mustaches and funny voices, playing people that you aren’t. The creativity, the playfulness — that’s life-affirming. But the pain and the grief is exactly the same as it was.”
Cronenberg will be in Los Angeles this weekend for Q&As after select screenings, including one on Saturday at the Grove moderated by filmmaker Richard Kelly.
Elaine May and Jeannie Berlin ‘In the Spirit’
In what is being billed as the film’s first 35mm screening in the 35 years since its initial release in 1990, “In the Spirit” will be presented Tuesday at Brain Dead Studios by Hollywood Entertainment. The only feature directed by noted acting coach Sandra Seacat, the film was written by Jeannie Berlin and Laurie Jones and stars Berlin along with her mother, Elaine May, as well as Marlo Thomas and Peter Falk, with appearances by Jones, Olympia Dukakis and Melanie Griffith.
Jones will be there to introduce the screening and co-producer Julian Schlossberg will offer a video introduction as well.
Something of a New Age satire, the story veers into becoming a murder-mystery caper. Schlossberg recalled the project in an interview this week when he said, “A group came together who were friends who cared for one another. And we had a good time. And we had a tough time because when you make an independent movie — oh, boy, that’s one tough thing to do.”
The recent book “Miss May Does Not Exist,” written by Carrie Courogen, details how May took over postproduction of the film, overseeing a lengthy editing process. Yet Schlossberg is careful to note that May did not shadow-direct the movie during production.
“Sandra directed the movie — there’s no question,” said Schlossberg. “But in the postproduction, Elaine did come in. I asked her to come in and work with Sandra and myself. If you hire an actor who happens to be a writer-director, it’s kind of dopey not to use them if they’re willing to help.”
In her original review of the film, Sheila Benson wrote, “Households vary, but at ours there’s at least one firmly held belief: Elaine May is the funniest woman in America. To be truthful, after a richly funny start, ‘In the Spirit,’ in which she stars, crumbles around her at roughly its halfway point. To an Elaine May junkie, however, that is almost irrelevant.”
Benson added, “Berlin, co-writer of the screenplay with Laurie Jones, has her mother Elaine May’s timing, her deadpan, her enormous eyes and her briskly unforgiving slant on life. If their screenplay could keep up the pace of the movie’s first half, she and Jones would have a grand-slam home run.”
May did write and direct a short promotional film for “In the Spirit” that is extremely funny on its own. (And makes Schlossberg himself a running punchline.) As Schlossberg recalled, after May watched a few other examples of short behind-the-scenes promo films, she called him up.
“She said, I never saw such a bunch of crap,” he said. “Talk about how great everything is. It’s not great. It’s a tough thing to make a movie. If you want me to write a promo, I’m going to write a promo to say how difficult it was, and you are not going to come out great. And I said, great. Do it.”
According to Schlossberg, May is aware of Tuesday’s screening and is pleased to see the film revived. Schlossberg added that he values the trust that May has put in him for many years, allowing him to speak to some extent on her behalf.
“In the motion-picture or the show-business world, the word genius is bandied around and the word artist is bandied around. I’ve met very few geniuses and, I must say, very few artists. And Elaine May is both.”
Celebrating Philip Seymour Hoffman
The Academy Museum is playing a series, “Something Mysterious: The Art of Philip Seymour Hoffman,” that showcases the work of the Oscar-winning actor who died at age 46 in 2014.
It’s an astonishing array of performances, particularly when taken together like this. The series will feature many of Hoffman’s greatest roles, with “Magnolia,” “The Savages,” “Almost Famous,” “Jack Goes Boating,” “Love Liza,” “Owning Mahowny,” The Big Lebowski,” “Along Came Polly,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Doubt” and “Synecdoche, New York” all being presented in 35mm. Additionally, “The Master” will be screened in 70mm. Hoffman’s last starring role, in “A Most Wanted Man,” will play as well.
In a 2000 review of Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous,” Kenneth Turan called Hoffman “more and more the most gifted and inspired character actor working in film.”
Of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master,” Turan called Hoffman’s performance “impeccable” and “magnetic” while adding, “This is a superbly crafted film that’s at times intentionally opaque, as if its creator didn’t want us to see all the way into its heart of darkness. It’s a film bristling with vivid moments and unbeatable acting, but its interest is not in tidy narrative satisfactions but rather the excesses and extremes of human behavior, the interplay of troubled souls desperate to find their footing.”
In reviewing “Charlie Wilson’s War,” a political satire adapted by Aaron Sorkin that stars Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts and was the last film directed by Mike Nichols, Turan wrote, “The only actor who comes off well, as he always does, is the redoubtable Hoffman. He gets the best of Sorkin’s dialogue as Gust Avrakotos, a gruff, hot-tempered CIA career officer everyone avoids who bonds with Wilson over their mutual desire to kill as many communists as possible.”
Reviewing Charlie Kaufman’s dense, dizzying “Synecdoche, New York,”Carina Chocano wrote, “Hoffman commits himself completely to Caden’s mournfulness, to the sadness that comes with realizing, as he does in the end, as what was once ‘an exciting, mysterious future’ recedes into the past, ‘that this is everyone’s experience, every single one; that you are not special; that there is no one watching you and there never was.’ This sounds hopeless — too hopeless, even, for some of the characters in the film, who chafe at Caden’s vision.”
Points of interest
‘Pride & Prejudice’ at 20
Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” is coming back to theaters for its 20th anniversary. Starring Keira Knightley as romantic heroine Elizabeth Bennet, the film also features a then-relatively-unknown Matthew Macfadyen, pre-”Succession,” as Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth’s sisters are played by Rosamund Pike, Jena Malone, Talulah Riley and Carey Mulligan, the last in her screen debut. Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn are in the cast as well.
Reviewing the film in 2005, Carina Chocano wrote, “In Joe Wright’s exhilarating new version, the first feature film adaptation of ‘Pride & Prejudice’ in 65 years, Lizzie has been liberated from period fashion victimhood, scruffed up a little, and let loose on the wily, windy moors. So what if the style seems a touch anachronistic — it’s close enough to the spirit and the letter of the novel, and makes up for the differences in energy and fun.”
In a 2005 interview with Susan King, Wright addressed why the movie emphasized the Bennet family’s circumstances and lifestyle, surrounded by pigs and chickens and mud. “Aesthetically, I like mess. I don’t like tidiness,” Wright said. “On an emotional level, I kind of felt that Elizabeth Bennet was a very earthbound character. If she has her feet in the mud and she’s reaching for the stars, it would help dramatize the heroism of what she was doing.”
Pink Floyd returns to ‘Pompeii’
Newly restored in 4K from the original 35mm footage with remixed sound, the classic stoner concert film, renamed “Pink Floyd at Pompeii — MCMLXXII,” captures the group performing in 1971 at the ruins of an amphitheater in Pompeii, along with footage of them at work in the famed Abbey Road recording studio. Playing most widely in local theaters on the 24th and 27th, there will be other scattered showtimes in L.A., including at the mammoth TCL Chinese Imax on the 28th and 30th, where surely some audience member will discover they are in fact too high to handle it.
There is something at once elegant, epic and ludicrous about the Pompeii footage as, amid the eternal splendor of their surroundings, a quartet of stringy-haired, pasty shirtless Englishmen play their spaced-out jams. (The Beastie Boys would later pay tribute to the film with their 1992 video for “Gratitude.”)
In a 1974 review of the film, Dennis Hunt wrote, “The idea of filming a rock group performing in an ancient Pompeii arena, without an audience, is a good one. Using this unusual setting is a laudable attempt to break out of the old rock-movie formula of filming artists performing in concert halls. It is unfortunate that such a colorless group was chosen to be the focus of the project. Pink Floyd is not very exciting on stage and even duller on film … Occasionally there is a successful marriage of music and image, but most of the time the images seem irrelevant.”
‘My Dinner With Andre’
Directed by Louis Malle and written by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, the film “My Dinner With Andre” stars Gregory and Shawn playing versions of themselves, as they meet for dinner having not seen each other for a number of years. As their conversation flows freely, they move from the petty and small to bigger philosophical questions about life itself. Deceptively engaging, representing a peak of a certain kind of self-styled urbane intellectualism, the film will play on Tuesday at Vidiots, with an introduction by author and filmmaker Fred Beshid.
In reviewing the film when it first came out, Kevin Thomas said that it “completely disregards what movies are supposed to be all about.” Thomas added, “It is lots of things — one of the things it is not is a filmed play — but it is more important as an instance of two people talking their way past the neurosis that is the climactic impasse in most serious contemporary plays and films. It suggests that life may have some meaning after all — if an attempt to know is balanced with an acceptance of the unknowable.”
France’s Malle came to the film after having made “Pretty Baby” and “Atlantic City,” both also set and shot in America. In a 1981 interview with Clarke Taylor, Malle said, “In this economic structure, movies everywhere are terrible. The medium is geared to mediocrity and is a miracle when one movie is good. If anything, the American industry is more honest, because they make it clear to you right away that it’s all about money. In Europe, they pretend it’s about art.”
And lastly from LAFCA…
On Tuesday, the Egyptian will host a special 4K presentation of 1995’s “Devil in a Blue Dress,” directed by Carl Franklin, who will participate in a Q&A moderated by UCLA programmer Beandrea July. The Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a yearlong screening series singling out its winners. Don Cheadle won the group’s supporting actor recognition for his explosive turn as Mouse Alexander, opposite Denzel Washington’s Easy Rawlins.