Movie Nation

Here’s a fun read from The Hollywood Reporter, chatting with several survivors of that seminal shoot, edit and release.

The film came out on July 14, 1969.

Fonda, Toni Basil, Roger McGuinn, Henry Jaglom, Roger Corman.

Over the years I’ve interviewed most everybody in this story and many of those involved in the film. Not Jack, alas.

But at some point in the conversation, no matter what movie we were scheduled to talk about, they’d bring up “Easy Rider.” Fonda, at a little cocktail party for “Ulee’s Gold,” pondering his Hollywood rep and his “legacy” when two bikers outside in traffic, rev their engines.

He just grinned, turned to the window and held his arms open wide. THERE is his legacy.

Damn, look at the scale of this.

A manga period piece turned into an action spectacle of the sort that might normally turn up in anime form.

Not keen on the period-inappropriate music. But…

Look for this one, subtitles and all, Aug. 16

A brief box office respite before”The Lion King” remake shows up means we’ll have one more weekend dominated by “Spider Man” and “Toy Story.” Hollywood is partying like it’s 1999.

Box Office Mojo figures Spidey has another $41 million or so in him and that “Toy Story 4” is a safe bet for another $22 and change.

“Crawl” is a tight tale of terror involving gators and a hurricane. Really good reviews usually mean little in that genre, unless the picture is “A Quiet Place.” But the new one from the director of “High Tension” has decent notices, passable digital gators and could do better than the $12.5 Mojo is projecting.

A bad move–not screening it for critics. It needed the extra hype. I figure mid teens are within reach. Good turnout at the Thursday night showing in BFE that I caught.

“Stuber” WAS screened. And while it’s not awful, reviews haven’t been favorable. Dave Bautista and Kumail Nanjiani are not box office draws.

But $7.5 million seems a tad low I’m terms of projections.

“Aladdin” has another week to make bank before “Lion King” bites off many of its screens.

“Yesterday” is doing well enough to add screens and could surpass “Stuber,” and “Avengers” could but maybe won’t fall BACK out of the top ten.

The greedy bastards.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4527&p=.htm

Interesting homework from the folks at SoCal Pulse

https://socalpulse.com/blog/2019/07/03/blast-from-the-past-how-tarantinos-film-transformed-la-landmarks/

Is there nothing the man can’t do? Courtesy of The New Yorker.
.@JohnLithgow wrote a poem about about the Trump Administration’s many scandals, and he would like to read it to you now. https://t.co/PxwoXcidTH https://t.co/bJYqg9W88v https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1149443103444602881?s=17

The most emphatic proof that Ben Kingsley is one of the greatest actors who ever lived.

A 2000 classic about British mob toughs with the formidable Ray Winstone and Ian McShane, and all involved are terrified, as are we, of the guy who played Gandhi.

From The Hollywood Reporter.
The TV show will focus on the origins of the relationships portrayed in the 2000 film that starred Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley https://t.co/W9SfgZEtXS https://twitter.com/THRGlobal/status/1149486354876661762?s=17

It didn’t much urging, but Peter “Jaws” Benchley had to teach us to be afraid of sharks.

We don’t any such prompting, or hit novels or movies, to be terrified of alligators. That’s primal, primeval even.

That’s what “Crawl” has going for it, a “47 Meters Down” or “The Shallows” with alligators. Just two people, trapped in a house, flooded by a hurricane and filled with gators.

It doesn’t matter that, oh, Floridians will look at the weather radar and see Hurricane Wendy rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico, while folks in the movie talk about it heading “Due West.” And it isn’t.

That’s just what you get when you set the movie in Florida, film it in Serbia with a French director, and premiere it in Australia. This Sam Raimi-produced tale of terror is still a return to form for Alexandre Aja, who made the harrowing and so-aptly-titled “High Tension.”

And when you’re stuck with these folks, and their dog, in what passes for a Florida basement and waiting for the radio within earshot to use those scary words, “storm surge,” and there are gators in there with you — “tension” isn’t the half of it.

Haley, played by Kaya Scodelario, the British actress best known for “The Maze Runner” movies, is a University of Florida swimmer.

No, it’s not the least bit funny that the logo and the word “Gators” are on her swim cap. Nope.

She drives into the teeth of the storm to check on her estranged Dad (Barry Pepper of “True Grit” and “Saving Private Ryan”), whom she finds injured and trapped in the old family house as the storm bears down.

Thirty minutes of prologue and foreshadowing have established that A), Daddy was the one who drove her to be a great swimmer, an “apex predator” in the water, B) she hasn’t been speaking to him since her parents divorced, C) there won’t be any help coming, or shouldn’t be, with a “Category 5” storm coming, D) she made the trek in a hoodie and FLIP FLOPS, and E) she locked the door behind her as she and their dog Sugar came inside, looking for Dad.

The struggle to get out will be a harrowing 60 minute exercise in outsmarting beasts which “can’t hear out of the water,” and are slower on land. But the land is fast filling with water, their natural element.

Yeah. It’s also Haley’s.

The leads have only to register shock at their plight and a willingness to fight when facing the worst way to die imaginable. They do just that.

We can guess the ebb and flow of the action, the story beats, even most of the deaths.

The entertainment value in a straight-up genre picture like this is how fraught each new corner of peril that they turn manages to be. And there’s plenty of that.

And damned if Aja and his cast find some actual emotion in all this, too.

Who cares if the exteriors don’t quite look like Florida? They should screen this movie on TV in hurricane zones in the Southeast. You’ll never want to “ride it out” at home again.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody creature violence, and brief language

Cast:Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper

Credits: Directed by Alexandre Aja, script by Alexandre Aja, Michael Rasmussen, Shawn Rasmussen. A Paramount Pictures release.

Running time: 1:27

I spend waaaaaaaaaay too much time waiting for movies to begin for Twitter et al to ever hold my interest. I bring a book. This one’s built around social media tributes to A Bourdain. Two pages in and it’s already good. Perfect bite sized bits for our pre movie time. “Crawl” will go down easier if there’s a cabin cuisine episode with gator bites it.

Set in Florida, filmed in…Serbia?

WTHell?

We take gators SERIOUSLY here in the sunshine and surviving gator mating season (they travel a lot, turn up in unexpected places) state.

And Paramount opened this in…Australia first? More of a “crocodile” country, amIright?

In the Golden Age classic “Sullivan’s Travels,” a snobbish director of fluffy Hollwood comedies (Joel McCrea) learns the value of what he does, and does best, and accepts it after going out among the people.

In “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan,” Mr. Spock (Nimoy, of course) reminds Admiral Kirk (@WilliamShatner) that being a starship captain “was your first, best destiny.”

I’ve seen mediocre movies with Laura Marano and Noah Centineo this week — “Saving Zoë” for her, “Swiped” for him. So I needed to catch up with their April Netflix release “The Perfect Date” to remember why they keep getting work and, what their paired “first best destiny” is.

They’re great at “meeting cute.” They do the sparkling banter thing well, as when her character, rich snarky girl Celia, insults working-class Brooks about his “services” pertaining to his new “The Stand In” app. He’s paid to be “your ideal date.”

“Celia!”

“Gigolo!”

Romantic comedies are their destiny, and this one, as obvious as it is, is a showcase for their gifts to the cinema.

Centineo, of “SPF-18” and “Sierra Burgess is a Loser,” gets to turn on the offhand charm as the dreamy dreamer Brooks, a Bridgeport teen with hopes of a future enrolled at Yale. Marano, of TV’s “Girl Meets World,” gets to play smart, snappish, hard-to-get but hard to resist.

They are damned adorable together.

So it doesn’t matter that he gets his notion to have his gay BFF (Odiseas Georgiadis, cute in the part) whip up an app for being professionally charming after escorting Celia, the cousin of a rich douche of a classmate, to her private school dance.

Doesn’t matter that he is instantly smitten by her gorgeous classmate (Camila Mendes, on the nose) at that dance, and that Celia professes an interest in another boy in her school.

They can bicker a bit, and she can brush him off after he’s fulfilled his duties.

“Do not try to define her, Brooks,” her amusingly indulgent father (Joe Chrest, delightful) counsels. “It will mess up your early ’40s.”

We KNOW they’re going to end up together. The trick is inventing enough amusing obstacles to that eventuality. “Perfect Date” does. Barely.

Director Chris Nelson cooks up a lively montage of “The Stand In” app dates — a coed who needs someone to take her to an art show (he bones up on art), a woman in need of a doubles partner for a “couples” tennis tourney, a girl who wants him to play the heel so her REAL boyfriend will look good by comparison to her parents, etc.

And screenwriter Steve Bloom populates this world with characters who have just a hint of wit, or inspire it in our leads, as when Brooks’ dad (Matt Walsh) pushes the University of Connecticut over Yale.

“Dad, UConn is like the girl down the street who eats food in bed, and smells like it

Movies like this make one wonder if Netflix has found an algorithm that makes them pay off. Their track record with youth rom-coms and sex-comedies (this is the former, decidedly PG with a smattering of profanity) is stellar.

The setting and realization of this world –Bridgeport vs. tony Greenwich, the BMW i8 that Brooks is loaned to take rich girl Celia to the dance, his “uniform” of Navy blue blazer, khakis, white shirt and blue tie — is spot on.

And the banter clicks. This new app, this “full bespoke escort service” in which Brooks promises to be exactly as talkative or silent, solicitous or rude as the woman hiring him desires?

“Think of it as Grubhub. Only instead of ordering Phad Thai, they’ll be ordering you! You’re a hooker, now. Guess that makes me your pimp. High tech.”

That’s all you really want in a rom-com, and maybe a little mushy feeling in the finale.

“Perfect Date” is a perfectly acceptable entry in the genre.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Noah Centineo, Laura Marano, Camilla Mendes, Matt Walsh, Carrie Lazar, Odiseas Georgiadis

Credits: Directed by Chris Nelson, script by Steve Bloom. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30