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“Walking on Water” begins with old man in his studio, sketching with charcoal, drawing, painting and gluing together a piece of art that he promptly hangs on a wall when he finishes.

It is the artist in action.

Ah, but this is Christo. Anything he can hang on the wall is just the mock-up. This fellow is known for pieces with “SCALE.”

“Walking on Water” is about the Bulgarian artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, known to the world as “Christo,” famous for his imaginative environmental (as in out of doors) installations. These fanciful pieces are vast, site-specific, colorful and temporary works that he and partner Jean-Claude have decorated hills with umbrellas, wrapped islands and bedecked Central Park in New York with (“The Gates”) over the decades.

Now in his 80s, Christo had — the film tells us — “disappeared from public view” after the death of collaborator Jean Claude died in 2009. “Walking on Water” would mark his return to the game.

“All the projects are works of art,” he tells a class of school children. “And totally useless. We make them because we want to see them.”

“Art is not a profession. Not nine to five. You are artist and do art ALL the time.”

He talks the talk and in this case, and in every other one, he walks the walk.

The works are self-financed, ephemeral and often intrusive. For that reason, Christo and Jean-Claude were denied permission to follow through on their ideas more often than not.

“The Floating Pier” was to be a three kilometer long walkway on Lake Iseo in Italy.  In 1970, they had proposed doing this very project on the Rio de la Plata in Argentina “but we never got permission.” They tried again on Tokyo Bay decades later. Again, no dice.

But Christo never let go of the concept; a thin, fabric-covered floating walkway that would give those walking on its undulating surface the feeling of “walking on water.”

Filmmaker Andrey Paounov (“The Boy Who Would be King”) follows Christo through the months leading up to this installation in the summer of 2016.

We see an impatient, snippy and demanding artist, easily irritated — either in person or chewing out his production team via Skype.

“No No No No No! Later Later Later!”

There is no art, he suggests, without shouting.

“This ees HORROR story. HORROR story…My WAY. IDIOTS! Total idiots!”

His fixer, the guy that makes things happen, is Vladimir Yavachev. He’s the only one who gets to shout back. And as Christo pushes his idealistic idea forward — technology makes it a lot more feasible today — Vladimir is charged with making it work. Or telling him “No.”

“It’s NOT going to work…”Two kilometers of this? Chain? You might as well use rope.”

That was Christo’s idea for how to hold the chain onto the interlocking plastic floating blocks that are what make up temporary docks, piers and platforms that float in this day and age.

“Walking on Water” shows Christo selling drawings and conceptual paintings of his idea to finance it, and just what it takes to put a 50 foot wide (guessing) walkway in place, crossing two inlets on an Italian lake and surrounding a cute little island in the middle of it.

Christo pitches in, snapping the dock pieces together, shoving them in the water. It looks flimsy, his helpers tell him and we can see for ourselves.

He gives talks, meets with art collectors, pauses for a selfie with a cook and takes time off to do a commission for an African charity headed by Pope Francis.

It takes seamstresses, sewing machines, thousands and thousand of those snap-together block, a fleet of inflatable dinghies and a helicopter to put this thing together.

And on opening day, it rains.

The tantrums don’t stop when the 16 day installation debuts. The towns around the lake are flooded with people. An onslaught of paparazzi alone looks like it could sink the damned thing.

And as he watches CCTVs showing the crowd control and viewing/walking tide of onlookers, a sea of people, tens of thousands of them, Christo has another revelation.

“Eees madness. TOTAL madness! We can be sued. Can we be sued?”

He leaves it to Vladimir to deal with infamous Italian bureaucracy and its infamous practitioners.

“You are stupid,” Vladimir says, echoing his boss. “As stupid as is possible!”

But we’ve already seen what a rock star the octogenarian still is. Why is he surprised that tens of thousands have come and hundreds of thousands are expected?

Paounov’s film is so straightforward as to be the very definition of “documentary,” observing call, covering an event and what leads up to it like a dispassionate news reporter.

But “Walking on Water” not only shows the artist in action, it gets at why these gimmicky and despite what he says (“We never repeat ourselves!”) repetitive thematic artworks are so popular with the public, and have been since the 1960s.

Whimsy on this scale is hard to find.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Christo, Vladimir Yavachev”

Credits: Directed by Andrey Paounov. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:40

Looks very…digital. Impressive, but digital.

A Jonas Brother is in the cast, and Patrick Wilson and Ed Skrein, Aaron Eckhart and Luke Evans are, too.

“Midway” opens Nov. 8.

Lest we forget that Idris sings, there’s this news.

Via Entertainment Weekly

https://t.co/xr2tb1gmzO https://twitter.com/EW/status/1144218085647368192?s=17

“Spider-Man: Far from Home” is so cute you want to pinch its cheeks and remind it to wear sunscreen before it goes out to play.

It’s a super-hero movie slapped on top of a teens-take-a-trip-abroad comedy, fizzy and funny and more than a little slap-sticky — emphasis on “sticky.” That’s a great use to make of Tom Holland’s version of the web-slinger, a kid anxious to grow up and be a “real Avenger” one second, a boy who just wants to have fun with his peers and make time with the snarky Goth-girl MJ (Zendaya) the next.

Jon Watts, the director of the latest incarnations of this venerable franchise, shows his comedy roots (He worked for Onion TV, for Peter’s Sake.) even more openly in this new outing, giving us more double-takes, more Samuel L. Jackson (single) eyerolls, and a goofier name for Peter Parker’s famed “Spidey Sense,” his ability to forecast danger.

“Peter Tingle” Aunt May (the effervescent Marisa Tomei) calls it. Avengers aide de camp Happy (veteran funnyman Jon Favreau) repeats it. Because it’s funny.

Peter is ready to tell MJ “How I really feel” on this summer class trip to Venice, Paris, etc., chaperoned by a couple of clueless teachers (Martin Starr and J.B. Smoove).

Pal Ned  (Jacob Batalon) is coming. So are MJ and their high school’s blonde class TV anchor Mary (Angourie Rice).

But Nick Fury (Jackson) is calling, and Peter is “ghosting” him. Happy’s not happy about that. Imagine how angry the guy named “Fury” gets.

There’s a new menace, these elemental monsters “The Elements” — versions of wind, Earth, water and fire that “have a face.” Fury, with so many Avengers lost in the mass die-off non-Avengers now jokingly call “The Blip,” needs a replacement. Peter will have to do. Only the kid is determined to have his vacation.

There’s a possible new recruit, Beck, or “Mysterio” (Jake Gyllenhaal), who seems up to the task of taking on the monsters. But like Captain Marvel, he’s not of this world, or this version of it.

“You guys DO have ‘sarcasm’ on this Earth, right?”

Better to rely on your Friendly Neighborhood You-Know-What when the Elements start acting up . A hormonal “16 year-old from Queens” is not the best choice to put the weight of the world on, but you play the hand The Blip gave you.

The series’ ongoing bout with Peter’s sense of responsibility isn’t new. And even as the effects grow bigger, they’re kind of senses-dulling as this stage of the superhero movie onslaught.

What makes “Far from Home” a winner is its sense of play. It begins, after a noisy action prologue, with a mocking “In Memoriam” for the superheroes lost (something a tactless teenager with a TV show and Edit Pro would do) and finds its laughs in relationships, high school “types” (Tony Revolori is back as rich-dope “Flash”) and one-liners.

“Bitch, please.”

Three guesses as to who gets to say that.

The love story lacks the heat or heartbreak of the first Peter/MJ pairing, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. The only performance worth calling that, really, is Gyllenhaal’s.

The plot holds few surprises, the fan pandering so common to this genre is handled flippantly and the action is now so digital as to make one long for the more tactile effects and fights of those now-ancient Maguire/Sam Raimi  “Spider-Man” pictures.

But “Far from Home” gets that all-important “tone” just right, over-the-top silliness in which no one involved, from screenwriter and director to cast and crew, ever lets us forget that they’re in on the joke.

Maybe that’s why Spider-Man never wears out his welcome, either in his “friendly neighborhood,” or “Far from Home.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, some language and brief suggestive comments

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jake Gyllenhaal, Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, Jon Favreau and Marisa Tomei

Credits: Directed by Jon Watts, script by Chris McKenna and Erik Summers.  A Sony Pictures release.

Running time: 2:09

Some guys just have the villain’s look. Robert Davi, Dennis Farina, Henry Silva and Billy Drago are among them. Ed Begley Sr., not Jr.

Billy Drago made a great heavy. He had the right name for a bad guy. Benicio del Toro dead eyes, the perpetually sweaty look of a killer.

I am digging through my archives to figure out which film I interviewed him about, because I ALWAYS set aside profile times for the great heavies.

Maybe “Mysterious Skin,” “The Hills Have Eyes” or “Mad Dog Time.”

Drago gave us all the creeps in all the best ways.

RIP

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/untouchables-actor-bill-drago-dies-at-73-1221296

You cannot call yourself a movie buff without being a fan of the cinema’s greatest artist and original “enfant terrible” Orson Welles. It’s just not allowed.

So rather than lose my card-carrying-cinephile card, I finally got around to the last film of the director who gave us “Citizen Kane,” “Touch of Evil,” “Chimes at Midnight” and “The Trial.”

Filmed from filmed from 1970 to ’76, running out of money, time and luck all along the way, “The Other Side of the Wind” was rescued from storage and legal limbo, finished and released by Netflix in the fall of 2018.

Let’s give the proper due to the streaming service for performing this public service to the cinema, letting the world see a film that has been little more than legend and Peter Bogdanovich (and Rich Little, who appears and mentioned it to me once) cocktail party anecdotes for decades.

It is nothing short of glorious, seeing the all-stars in this “all star cast,” a movie about making a movie in the tradition of “Day for Night” or “The Stuntman.”

Here’s the ancient Edmund O’Brien (“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”) playing one last bellowing drunk, the AD/unit manager for legendary director Jake Hannaford.

There’s the late Austrian actress Lilli Palmer, listening to Welles (heard off camera as interviewer), weighing in on “Hannaford,” another version of Welles himself played by the only actor/director who rivaled Welles as “larger than life” — John Huston.

“Mr. Hannaford pretends to be ignorant,” Palmer purrs, speaking of the man she nicknamed “GF, God the Father,” resplendently made up and shot in black and white. “Men only like men.”

Yes, she could be talking about the filmmaker’s sexuality.

Welles acolyte Peter Bogdanovich narrates, his own career blowing up even as he was setting aside nights and weekends to help Welles with this one. He plays a filmmaker/producer disciple of Hannaford.

“The man is infested with disciples. I’m the Apostle!”

Huston’s Hannaford is “God the Father” in the flesh, booming, twinking, cigar at the ready, wearing his droll sarcasm like an ascot with his omni-present safari jacket wardrobe.

“I want a drink!”

Vaudevillian George Jessel toasts Hannaford on his birthday, “The Ernest Hemingway of the Cinema!” Directors Paul Mazursky, Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol and Henry Jaglom bicker over “meaning” in cinema.

And most gloriously of all, Paul Stewart, who was with Welles from his radio days on into “Citizen Kane,” strides through a backlot with Mercedes McCambridge (“Touch of Evil”), film crew in tow, boom microphone overhead, breaking down just what went wrong with “The Other Side of the Wind.”

Because something did go wrong. There was a car crash. Somebody died. The footage was abandoned. And now it’s been pieced together (there are missing bits) and presented to the world almost five decades after the project began.

The film within the film mimics the finished film we’re watching now (on Netflix) in that most important regard. And it’s a bit of a mess, too.

Here’s the familiar Wellesian banter of actors, overlapping their dialogue, talking about someone who isn’t “there” — on that backlot, in the screening room where a trusted aid is showing rushes to a moneyman who isn’t buying into this, on the drive to “The Ranch,” at the party there that follows and at a drive-in theater rented to show the movie when all other means fail.

That “Citizen Kane” (and later “Rashomon” and “The Third Man” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” trick of having EVERYbody talking about the protagonist, who isn’t in the frame, has never been more emphatically applied than here.

Max (Geoffrey Land): Jake is just making it up as he’s done before.

Billy (Norman Foster): “He’s done is before.”

The movie within the movie is an obtuse, dated dollop of pretense, Welles imitating the art cinema of the 60s — “Last Year at Marienbad” to “Zabriskie Point” — with an obscure, symbolic and largely nude coupling and existential wrestling match between a Jim Morrison look-alike (Robert Random) and the Object of Desire who Desires Him and Will Have Him, without ever saying a word. Inane.

That “character” is played by Welles’ longtime companion, the exotic, olive-skinned Oja Kadar, credited as co-writer of the script (Sure.) and nude in ways mainstream film actresses never acquiesced to in that era.

This 70th birthday party is, our narrator tells us, “the last day of (Jake’s) life,” and he is surrounded by friends, peers, fans and cineastes of the academic, biography writing, CBC documentary-filming persuasion.

The shots are fluid, everything and everyone always in near-breathless motion. There is little here one could call an “establishing shot.” We’re just stuffed into an over-crowded convertible with Jake, his “Apostle” (Bogdanovich) and a film crew frantically asking insanely inane questions.

The smoky jazz of Michel LeGrand fills the soundtrack as busloads of cast and crew (Susan Strasberg plays a much-derided “critic”) follow Jake to The Ranch.

Meanwhile, the screening of rushes continues and continues to go badly, despite the Yes Man reassurances of Billy about “when we get that shot” and “when he” (the missing leading man) comes back.

Despite the disorienting, breathless flurry of motion and the near blur of montage, Welles’ eye for screen composition and staging is evident in every single frame — candlelit or shadowed, sunlit or in a car in the decades before GoPro cameras or even Steadicams.

The parade of extreme closeups look “grabbed” as opposed to “staged,” which of course they were. The whole has the feeling of the student film of a pretentious and quite rich and well-connected grad student at USC.

Huston has the odd post-“Chinatown” pearl of wisdom.

“Hemingway? That left hook of his…was over-rated.”

Only Strasberg and Gregory Sierra, a TV actor of the day (“Barney Miller,” “Sanford & Son”) give much of what I’d call performances. Still, Palmer, McCambridge and Stewart acquit themselves with honor. And O’Brien is always a film buff’s delight, no matter how over-the-top.

Bogdanovich, who taped and taped his conversations with Welles and turned them into a good biography of his mentor, cracks about having to “abandon” his own planned biography…of Hannaford.

A telling moment, when a character notes Jake’s declining fortunes as the party empties out. He pronounced “biographer” the way Welles himself, the subject of too many such books, jokingly did.

Movies and friendship. Those are…mysteries  Jake

“Five of our best BEE-ographers have gone over to Otto Preminger!”

As if that’d ever happen.

There’s a self-awareness to “The Other Side of the Wind” that is almost funny, an editor complains to a projectionist about what’s up on the screen.

“The reels are out of order? It doesn’t matter, I suppose.”

In those rushes, the “actors” act — a “steambath” orgy, an explicit-for-its-era sex in a moving-car scene, other encounters in the buff — with Huston as Hannaford, the Voice of God whispering stage directions to his nude actors, mid performance, through a megaphone.

“”Pure Hitchcock, if you’ll pardon the language.”

It seems as if almost everybody in this fascinating artifact has a megaphone at some point, even Bogdanovich, doing his Jimmy Cagney impression, maybe a little Tennessee Williams, quoting Welles’ beloved Bard in line that gives the entire enterprise its one truly poignant moment.

“Our revels now are ended.”

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, graphic nudity and some language

Cast: John Huston, Oja Kadar, Susan Strasberg, Peter Bogdanovich, Lilli Palmer, Mercedes McCambridge, Cameron Mitchell, Edmund O’Brien, Paul Mazursky, Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol, Henry Jaglom, George Jessel, Bob Random, Gregory Sierra.

Credits: Directed by Orson Welles, script by Orson Welles and Oja Kadar. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:02

It’s theatrical release or bust for the DGA. Spielberg may not have gotten his way with The Academy, but the DGA has a huge hand in what gets nominated and what has a real shot at best picture. This is a serious pushback.

I wonder how Alfonso Cuaron and others who have been happy to make movies for Netflix, Amazon, et al, taking the easy money for projects that aren’t “commercial,” and where the measure of “success” is radically different from the Hollywood to theatrical release business and awards model, feel?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/directors-guild-will-no-longer-consider-day-date-releases-top-prize-1221184

Our July big screen vacation, Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

A winner, or another sequel too many from a summer of too many to count?

“First Impression” is an “online dating” rom-com from back when those were totally a thing. It was on BET back in 2015, and is “new” to Netflix and trending now, so I took a look.

It’s a soggy, sparkle-free/laugh-impaired comedy about the difference between one’s online “dating” identity and reality.

You shave 10 (or say, 23) years off your age, gild the lily of what you do and how rich and/or interesting you are and boom — the person you meet for that first date is just as surprised as you are.

Because they’re lying, too.

Vernon (Lamman Rucker) is newly unemployed, spending all his time tapping out a steamy, sexy crime novel, whose scenes are acted out (rather dully) in his head as he taps the keys.

The time he doesn’t spend dreaming up situations violent or sexual between Tropical Storm and Scorpion Kiss (his characters) he spends on the First Impression dating site.

He ignores his pal Julius (Kendrick Cross, not bad) and his “five phases of poverty” warnings. “Phase three, when you run out of gas all over town.”

“Wait! What was Phase 1?”

“LOSING your JOB.”

Imani (oft-employed character actress Lisa Arendell) is with Atlanta’s only African American publishing house. She, too, is trying out First Impression.

Regis Le’Bron’s script takes its sweet time throwing these two together — a montage of Imani’s disastrous first encounters with dating match-ups, Vernon’s various phases of poverty.

There’s an unnecessary and undeveloped side story about an employee of the publishing house (Tamela J. Mann) trying to get her pastor (David Mann) published as a poet and interested as a suitor.

All of which gets in the way of a perfectly charming accidental meeting between well-heeled Imani and broke-ass Vernon in the jazz club. What they don’t realize is they’ve been flirting up a storm online, already.

I like the broke tricks for how to look like you as if have a drink in a bar when you don’t have money to buy a drink in a bar.

Imani starts by picking up the tab, and is just forward enough in encouraging the guy with the late model Nissan with the racing stripes, who accidentally impresses her by bringing a Moonpie to a romantic picnic (also cheap).

She’s in Alpharetta. He’s in “the hood.” It’ll never work out, right?

The big gag here is that they’re flirting with each other in person, and unknowingly coming on to each other’s online avatars at the same time.

Cheat-flirting is totally a thing.

The locations are modestly budgeted, the gags even cheaper — a fart joke, an overly elaborate African American handshake, a “Boy? Bye!” and zingers — “Man, you sound like Forrest Gump!” — without a punchline.

‘Going ‘dutch’ on a Moonpie?”

Le’Bron seems most interested in keeping all this PG than giving it the sparks that come from having friction, an edge and script-imposed “chemistry.”

Director Arthur Muhammad is quite clumsy in introducing the Vernon’s flashes to his novel-in-progress’s character (Brad James) dealing with the same come-ons from a femme fatale (Laila Odom) Vernon is picking up on from Imani.

The leads are OK, but there’s not a lot of chemistry. The best friends scenes have potential, but are abandoned too quickly.

I’ve seen worse romantic comedies, but you’d think 500 years after Shakespeare the “rom com with mistaken identities” would have finally run its course. “First Impression” certainly makes that case.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Lisa Arrindell, Lamman Rucker, Elise Neal, Kendrick Cross, Tamala J. Mann

Credits: Directed by Arthur Muhammad, script by Regis Le’Bron.   A BET/Netflix release

Running time: 1:36

Marketing incompetence catches up with Amazon Studios.

That isn’t why they got into business with Woody Allen decades past his peak. Movies like Mike Leigh’s “Peterloo” were worthwhile, but unsellable.

The whole Oscar campaign thing they thought they’d mastered with “Manchester by the Sea” blew up on them with “Beautiful Boy,” although they managed to get “Cold War” into a few categories, if not enough theaters to break even.

They blackball me from their screenings, so how smart is that? Never ever had a studio do that. Idiots.

How are people going to know “Photograph” is even in theaters without good working relationships with critics?

Now they’re trying to figure out what they are doing wrong, flop after flop after flop. Not bad movies, typically. “Late Night” was their latest. Should have made more money than “The Hustle” or “Long Shot.” Didn’t.

Why?

“Idiots in marketing” is a good place to look. Via THR

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/amazon-studios-film-division-tumult-string-box-office-flops-1220968