By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Friday Movies: LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, SHADOW, MEETING GORBACHEV, BLAZE

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY 14Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Poetry, bliss, abandon: deep into Bi Gan’s indelible, narcotic masterpiece where a 28-year-old’s talent matches his imagination, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the movie sinks into a sinuous, unbroken take, a gravity-shunning traveling shot in 3-D that lasts an hour. The director, whose first feature, Kaili Blues (2015), was equally attentive to time and duration in its movement across his native province of Guizhou in southwest China, creates gorgeous tableaux as well, fashioning fever dreams cool to the touch. While superficially the movie, called “Last Evenings On Earth” in Chinese, is neon-dreamt, lovelorn neo-noir, it is also topographical fantasia [Read more.]

Shadow.  Chinese censors withdrew Zhang Yimou’s latest film, One Second, set during the decade of Mao Zedong’s brutal Cultural Revolution, from Berlin in February. Shadow, a wuxia martial arts film set in a much earlier and much less controversial era, is on a par with his great, kinetic films like House of Flying Daggers (2004) and his martial arts masterpiece, Hero (2002). A variation on a Jingzhou epic, “The Three Kingdoms,” Shadow draws a canvas of blacks and grays and rain and blue-grays (with intermittent dashes of explosive color) in the style of traditional ink and wash Chinese paintings. Body doubles, the director says, hark back to ancient times. [Read more.] Playing nationwide: theaters.

Meeting Gorbachev. While never reaching for the ether (or ethereal) of his many great documentaries, Herzog’s four sit-down visits with Gorbachev are filled with spiky moments and unexpected questions that make the portrait compelling.  [Read more.]

Blaze (Blu and DVD).  Ethan Hawke doesn’t come right out and say what he’s up to in “Blaze,” but it’s snaky goodness: time and space, all in mind and out of whack. Splinters assemble and disassemble perspectives on a now-gone Austin, Texas songwriter, bright but lost, frustrated at the fall of each note, each sung syllable. Hard to live with; harder to ignore. Hawke calls “Blaze” a country-western opera, and the singer-songwriter at the center, Blaze Foley, “the Snuffleupagus of the outlaw country music scene,” whom he discovered via John Prine’s cover of the song “Clay Pigeons,” “one of the best country songs I’d ever heard.” (Townes Van Zandt, also fictionalized here, wrote and played with Foley.) Not only did Hawke discover Foley’s music, but also “Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley,” the memoir of his partner, Sybil Rosen. The form of the film is the form of a song: a song sung, yes, but also a song struck; a song moaned; a song performed; a song sold; a song sundered; a song, a song as subterranean river, sometimes a trickle, sometimes a truculent rivulet, and often, so often, a waterfall of eager, needful romantic yearning. [Read more.]

 

 

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon