Spiegel Stuff: Can "Last Flag Flying" Ride Accidental Timeliness to Awards Gold?

Friday, September 29, 2017

Can "Last Flag Flying" Ride Accidental Timeliness to Awards Gold?

Vanity Fair

ESSENTIAL INDUSTRY and AWARD NEWS FROM HOLLYWOOD, compiled by REBECCA KEEGAN

Friday, September 29, 2017

It's Friday, and I'm lobbying for the new tax code to treat agents as dependents.

Hello from Los Angeles, where we're eyeing the New York Film Festival, mourning the Sex and the City sequel that will never be, and listening to Jane Fonda kiss and tell.

OF FLAGS AND OSCARS

The New York Film Festival, the Upper West Side pit stop on the long road trip that is awards season, kicked off Thursday night with the premiere of Richard Linklater's Last Flag Flying at Lincoln Center. Reviews for the film, an unofficial sequel to Hal Ashby's profane and poignant 1973 dramedy The Last Detail, have been mixed-to-positive, with critics inevitably comparing Linklater's effort to Ashby's New Hollywood classic—a tough bar for even the most gifted filmmaker to reach. Adapted from a Darryl Ponicsan novel, Last Flag Flying catches up with slightly modified versions of The Last Detail's characters 30 years later, with Bryan Cranston in the troublemaking Jack Nicholson role, Steve Carell as the rube once played by Randy Quaid, and Laurence Fishburne as Otis Young's sensible navy man. Variety's Owen Gleiberman laments that the damaged veterans are reunited for a script that sees its anti-war themes "spoon-fed to the audience in a way that's surprisingly tidy and didactic." But with Donald Trump and N.F.L. players locked in an ugly dispute about the national anthem, it's certainly a fertile time for a movie that questions the meaning of the American flag. On the red carpet Thursday night, Cranston told V.F. contributor Benjamin Lindsay the he believes N.F.L. players are "exercising the perfect expression of dissent." And as V.F. critic Richard Lawson noted in his N.Y.F.F. preview, the politics of Last Flag Flying could serve the movie well with Oscar voters: "Honoring military service while questioning the motives of war," Lawson writes, could help Linklater's film "hit an Academy sweet spot, satisfying both the more conservative oldsters and the younger, leftier types."

COULDN'T HELP BUT WONDER . . .

V.F.'s Yohana Desta writes:

With one simple quote, Sarah Jessica Parker has dashed all our hopes and dreams for a third Sex and the City movie. The actress and erstwhile Carrie Bradshaw confirmed recent rumors that the cast was all set to film the sequel this fall—before clarifying that it's no longer happening. "It's over . . . we're not doing it," she told Extra, even though a "beautiful, funny, heartbreaking, joyful" script had been written for the movie. I couldn't help but wonder . . . just why did the project fall through? Gossip mills have pointed the finger at Kim Cattrall (a.k.a. Samantha Jones), who allegedly declined to sign on unless Warner Bros. would also develop some of her other projects. Cattrall, meanwhile, responded to the brouhaha with a defiant tweet indicating that she never intended to make more S.A.T.C. in the first place: "The only 'DEMAND' I ever made was that I didn't want to do a 3rd film . . . & that was back in 2016." Alas; in that case, it seems this isn't just a behind-the-scenes power play, and the franchise really will end with the horrendous Sex and the City 2 after all.

BIG MOUTH

V.F.'s Laura Bradley writes:

Netflix's new animated series, Big Mouth, is a frank, refreshing portrayal of puberty—especially for girls. In the series, a group of pre-teens endures the misadventures that come with coming of age—and deal with metaphorical creatures like the Hormone Monstress, played by Maya Rudolph. She's a sultry, furry, mercurial being who guides the show's female characters through their journey to womanhood—starting with 13-year-old Jessi, a friend of the show's two central protagonists, Nick and Andrew. In an interview, Rudolph calls the beast "one of my favorite characters I've ever played. She's the inner voice that you never get to hear, saying the things that you wish someone would say."

EARBUDS TIME

V.F.'s Katey Rich writes:

The New York Film Festival kicks off with three very different movies, Richard Linklater's Last Flag Flying, Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Collected, and Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel, which have one big thing in common. Give up? They're all distributed by streaming services (Amazon for Linklater and Allen, Netflix for Baumbach), which brings the simmering argument about the future of moviegoing to one of the oldest and best film festivals on earth. On this week's Little Gold Men podcast, Richard Lawson, Katey Rich, Joanna Robinson, and Mike Hogan look ahead to the New York Film Festival and the Oscar buzz that might come out of it, then catch up with some of the titles now in theaters, including, yes, Kingsman: The Golden Circle.

ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING

V.F.'s Hillary Busis writes:

Ahh, mature l'amour. It's the centerpiece of the new Netflix movie Our Souls at Night, starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford as they touchingly reunite for their first romantic onscreen pairing in decades. (Previously, the duo fell in love in 1966's The Chase; 1967's Barefoot in the Park; and 1979's The Electric Horseman.) The momentousness of the occasion really hit Fonda while filming a scene in which their characters check into a hotel: "We checked into the Plaza Hotel as newlyweds in Barefoot in the Park. And here we are checking into a hotel again to make love for the first time. In each movie, it was the first time that [our characters] were going to be together sexually. And I just thought that was a real kick in the ass," she tells V.F.'s Julie Miller. The Oscar winner's one complaint about the new film? She wanted her and Redford's love scene to be longer—as did Our Souls director Ritesh Batra, according to a separate conversation with Miller. When Fonda was informed of that fact, she responded with characteristic brio: "Well, if the director thought it should be longer, why didn't he let it be longer! I wanted it to be longer, for reasons that any woman would understand."

That's the news for this sunny Friday in L.A. What are you seeing out there? Send tips, comments, and Maya Rudolph's Beyonce wigs to Rebecca_Keegan@condenast.com. Follow me on Twitter @thatrebecca.