Critically Acclaimed

by J. Ryan Stradal

  Miller, who also wrote the screenplay for Outlaw Country, explains, “What Chris is saying is this is a movie that breaks the biographical mold. A lot of what you see may confuse you. Sometimes it confuses me. If you’re looking for a straight-up narrative you can sum up in a Netflix review, go watch Walk the Line. Or fuckin’ Blackthorn, Bloodheart, Crazy Mouth, I get them all mixed up myself. This ain’t that movie. This is a tribute to a man who was riding a big blue ball. He never did dream that he would fall.”

  “He’s [Miller] been doing that since we started shooting,” says producer Michael De Luca. First it was the hick accent. Then he’s directing the actors using song lyrics, mostly from Luckenbach, Texas. We were shooting the scene where Waylon storms out of the USA for Africa recording session. Waylon was played by John Hawkes in the scene. John asks Bennett what was Waylon’s motivation for you know, hightailing it. Bennett gets right up in John’s face and sings, ‘The successful life we’re livin’s got us feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys.’ And you know what? John knew exactly what he meant. It’s a fucking intense scene.”

  Wracked with guilt for thinking his words gave way to “The Day the Music Died,” Waylon turns to amphetamines to ease the burden.

  He meets Willie Nelson (James McAvoy) in a recording session, and the two become fast friends, recording several albums together in the film’s record-breaking forty-five minute montage, culminating in the 1980’s, when Willie and Waylon (now played by Ving Rhames) join forces with Kris Kristofferson (Joel Edgerton) and Johnny Cash (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as the super band The Highwaymen.

  But these moments from Waylon’s life aren’t part of a narrative flow of any kind, as Miller pointed out. The whole film, much like Waylon lived, plays like one long moment, interspersed with nuggets of truth, plenty of myth, and journeys to space.

  The astronaut scene is going to be Bennett Miller’s Tree of Life dinosaur.

  Without giving too much away, it features Val Kilmer as a bearded Waylon, floating through the big empty with a meditative glare behind his space mask as “Old Five and Dimers (Like Me)” twists our hearts like gasoline soaked rags, reminding us we’ve lost our way. The scene itself is breathtaking and, pardon me for going all wine and cheese, no one’s going to understand it.

  “No one understands why it’s there. No one. Waylon Jennings did not travel to outer space. That is a fact,” says Outlaw member Jerry Jeff Walker, who’s played by Walton Goggins.

  Parts of the film feel like someone just turned a camera on in the middle of Waylon’s life and pointed it at him.

  One scene begins with Waylon (William Zabka) flushing cocaine down the toilet as Federal agents and NYPD cops storm the recording studio.

  Cut to Waylon (Peter Stormare) backstage watching Johnny sing “Orange Blossom Special” and take two vicious pulls off his bullet.

  And each scene gives birth to the next.

  Now Waylon’s played by his real-life son, country singer Shooter Jennings, as he strolls lakeside with Shel Silverstein (Ciarán Hinds) discussing firm feeling women, diabetes, and getting old.

  Miller is saying in essence that life doesn’t contain a narrative you can squeeze into two hours, not in a way that would make any real sense. Our lives are a catalogue of moments and that’s what we think makes us who we are.

  Taking a swig from his whiskey glass, Miller strokes his long beard and says, “We all cling to this idea of ourselves. I’m this, I’m that, that’s not like me, I don’t feel like myself today. It’s all a bunch of bullshit. We ain’t anyone. Yet we are the world. We are the people. We are… Oh wait, he didn’t…he didn’t sing that song, never mind, never mind, I got confused.”

  “They should have called this movie The Day the Music Lived,” Kristofferson said on a call from his home in Santa Fe. “For a whole lot of reasons. Hasn’t been a film that understands the spirit of country since Bob Altman shot Nashville in 1974.”

  Actor Shelley Duvall, who plays Jennings’ fourth wife Jessi Colter in Outlaw Country and was also the star of Nashville, said her favorite part of the film is The Dukes of Hazzard sequence. Waylon did the theme song for the 1980’s hit TV show, as well as the narration as the balladeer. In the film, Miller recreates the making of a scene where Waylon (William Forsythe) plays “Never Could Toe the Mark” for the whole cast, including Anthony Michael Hall and Bronson Pinchot as Bo and Luke Duke, Tom Wilkinson as Uncle Jesse, Evangeline Lilly as Daisy, Brad Dourif as Roscoe, and Richard Dreyfuss as Boss Hogg. “I loved it,” Duvall said, “It’s a performance in a TV show in a movie about the man giving the performance. It’s a circle. Just like life is. And it all circles back to Waylon.”

  “It’s about identity,” said Tom Berenger, who plays the final version of Waylon walking off stage in his last performance, slow-mowing it in his leather vest and black cowboy hat, carrying his 1953 Telecaster down the hall into the blinding white lights. “And not Waylon’s identity, it’s about Bennett’s. This movie is as much about him as it is the man who left his boot print on country music forever. Look at him. Look what happened to him.”

  “Sure,” Miller said, “ain’t no doubt this guy got inside me, rearranged my soul, him and his music did that shit to me. But there are many men in me. You understand what I’m saying? It’s like this: remember the son a bitch who shot Lennon? Why’d he say he did it? Because he loved him so much he was becoming him. He had to do it. To save his own life. This movie, is the opposite of the assassination of John Lennon. We took all that love Waylon gave us and we made something.”

  Walken elucidates, “Everything he says, it’s crazy. Guy told me the other day why he chose me to play Waylon, says it’s because we both got six letters in our names. Says it’s like Jesus and Elvis. Guess that makes me the son of God.”

  When we finally asked Miller if he thought Waylon Jennings would relate to this (at best) loose interpretation of his days, he smiled, put on a black cowboy hat, and slow walked out of the interview.

  His publicist says he’s holed up in his trailer in Luckenbach, Texas, waiting for Willie and the boys.

  Directed by Jill Soloway. Written by Margaret Atwood, Shonda Rhimes, and Jill Soloway. Starring: Meryl Streep, Kerry Washington, Ellen Page, Jamie Chung, Laverne Cox, Emma Watson, Malala Yousafzai, Roxane Gay, Malia Obama, Margaret Cho, Tavi Gevinson, Lidia Yuknavitch, RuPaul, Zoe Saldana, Mindy Kaling, Gaby Hoffman, Kristen Wiig, and Oprah.

  “The men had their chance,” says Virginia Carr (Meryl Streep). “And just look at what they did. It’s time for us to rise.”

  Many an EMILY’s List member has fantasized about what it would be like to have a society led exclusively by women, but no one was brave enough to tackle it on the big screen—until now. Written and directed by Jill Soloway (Transparent, Afternoon Delight), this utopian movie answers the question that no man in a position of power has asked, like ever: WWWD? (What would women do?)

  When the corrupt, colonialist male-led United States government brings the country to its knees in 2025 after spending billions of dollars on oil-related wars and giving tax breaks to the wealthy, rolling back reproductive rights, granting personhood to corporations, and decimating social services and education systems, an underground sect of militant feminists stages a coup.

  With a non-hierarchical power structure and consensus decision making, the group, who call themselves “Pussy Power” internally and just “The Women” externally, begin recruiting on November 9, 2016. They start in the obvious hotbeds of feminist bookstores and women’s studies departments, and quickly branch out to disseminating coded messages through carpool lines at schools, on Pinterest, and in book clubs.

  The movie opens with a group of women who are preparing to go into battle by watching Beyoncé’s Lemonade. During the coup, instead of action-heavy fight sequences, we see women taking long walks while having pointed conversations with male leaders, explaining that they’re going to have to
take over now. The actresses go about their days giving direct, explicit instructions to men and having intimate conversations with their closest confidantes. The coup is a success and comes off with minimal deaths and almost no violence—mostly Gaby Hoffman kicking Steve Bannon repeatedly in the balls.

  As punishment, the deposed male leaders and white women who voted for Trump are imprisoned in a room with speakers playing Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Judith Butler, and made to study a diagram of the female reproductive system. The prisoners are not allowed to leave until they can correctly recite the tenants of intersectional feminist theory, describe how a woman’s reproductive system works, be trained in anti-racism, and explain the spectrum of sexuality and gender. (Some men are held captive for years.)

  To run the country after the coup, the position of president rotates among The Women members. The cabinet is easily established by matching members’ innate callings with the needs of the country. Malala Yousafzai leads education, Emma Watson oversees humanitarian efforts, Oprah guides economic empowerment, Kerry Washington leads strategy and damage control, Ellen Page runs intelligence services with Laverne Cox directing bullshit detection, Malia Obama and Tavi Gevinson are the youth organizers, RuPaul and Margaret Cho lead positive self-image efforts, and Roxane Gay and Lydia Yuknavitch promote literacy and literature. The first official action taken by the new government is a sincere public apology to indigenous peoples whose land we’ve settled on and the immediate upholding of all treaties made with the various indigenous nations, including the return of sacred sites.

  Problems arise when conditions for Americans improve so drastically, including a dramatic rise in both the GDP and the newly created Gross National Happiness (GNH), that male leaders from other countries start to worry that similar uprisings might take place in their own nations. Soloway has women play the likeness of several male leaders, including Kristen Wiig as Vladmir Putin, who, having thought he silenced Pussy Riot and their ilk, was heard to saying, “These bitches again?”

  This entire concept could have been pulled directly from Bill O’Reilly’s nightmares. It’s been widely reviewed elsewhere, with Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan calling it “a puzzling feminist fantasyland” and Slate’s Dana Stevens commenting: “It’s got everything—complex characters across a representative spectrum and a sense of justice being served. One commenter on the YouTube trailer with the username “clockworkorange” said: “wtf. this isn’t real, is it? everyone knows girls can’t be in charge because they go psycho during their periods.”

  Sources also reveal that Tom Junod was practically salivating to write his own review in Esquire, following up his “In Praise of 42-Year-Old Women” piece where he wrote: “In truth, it is feminism that has made forty-two-year-old women so desirable.” On Planet of the Women, he continues his theme, anointing feminists with his latest approval because “it is not popular.” He writes “The carnal appeal of this movie is that the women don’t need us, and that makes us want them even more.”

  When asked about her inspiration for the project, Soloway said: “Witnessing an orange menance get elected president in 2016, instead of the most qualified candidate we’ve had in decades whose gender seemed to infuriate people, made me feel hopeless about the direction this country was headed. I started fantasizing about how different this country would be if women were in charge, and the story came to me easily from there.”

  “When I heard Jill was writing this script, I knew I wanted in,” said Streep. “What woke woman wouldn’t want the chance to shape a country that eliminates toxic power systems instead of constantly feeling like a pawn in men’s demented ego games?”

  Though male leaders around the world attempt to block Pussy Power’s efforts to contact women in other countries, by the end of the movie we see the seeds of uprising begin to grow, mostly through Twitter.

  Let’s just say, I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole franchise begins here, and expect These Bitches Again: Planet of the Women to be in preproduction shortly.

  Directed by Woody Allen. Starring: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Jerry Stiller, Estelle Harris, Haley Joel Osment, Steve Carell, and Paul Rudd.

  When Woody Allen announced he would be remaking Rosemary’s Baby (1968) as a comedy, various heated claims that he was doing so purely out of spite for Mia Farrow were tweeted fifty-three times by his estranged son, Ronan Farrow, in less than two hours; meanwhile, Hollywood insiders wondered if the elderly director—whose earlier work was constantly punctuated by meta-aware fourth wall breaks—had taken irony too far, as he and Mia Farrow were partners for twelve years, a relationship which ended disastrously when the latter discovered photos of her then twenty-year-old adopted daughter Soon-Yi in the former’s possession.

  “My f-final c-c-comedy,” said the seventy-eight-year-old director, reappropriating his stage stutter during his acceptance speech for the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, which was met with a standing ovation. “Do you all like me that much, or is it just hemorrhoids?” The audience roared with laughter.

  After an austere late period marked by brilliant yet nefarious tales of murder and deceit (Match Point), codependence and adultery (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), and a huge nervous breakdown (Blue Jasmine), it was nice to hear Allen returning to the comedic form of his earlier farces like Love & Death, Sleeper, and Zelig. As a gesture of solidarity to the original writer, he even asked Roman Polanski—who is not known for comedy, but who notably mimicked Allen’s humor—to reimagine a zanier and more upbeat screenplay.

  Jerry Stiller and Estelle Harris reprise their Seinfeldian roles as the overbearing Costanzas, only this time as the neighboring Castevet devil worshipers. When Jerry Stiller (as Roman Castevet) barges in the apartment à la the explosive mannerisms of Seinfeld’s Kramer, Rosemary seems like a subdued pre-feminist version of the more confrontational Elaine Benes. As unbelievable the present-day Woody Allen and Mia Farrow are as the Woodhouses—and through the sheer resentment you can see in their eyes, perhaps in the Method acting of life’s disaster—there is still a faint touch of empathy, or at least resignation, in their fake address to each other. The unhappy marriage is made more surreal and disturbing by Polanski’s attempt at Allenean humor:

  GUY WOODHOUSE:

  Where’s my Viagra?

  ROSEMARY WOODHOUSE:

  I put it in the cactus, dear.

  GUY WOODHOUSE:

  Somebody call a doctor, it’s been over four hours!

  In “Letter from ‘Manhattan’” (The New York Review of Books, August 16, 1979) Joan Didion facetiously notes how the rather self-absorbed characters in his “serious” work (Annie Hall, Interiors, and Manhattan) all “seem to take long walks and go to smart restaurants only to ask one another hard questions,” which is both admittedly accurate yet sadly hypocritical if one considers Didion’s frequent preoccupation with her own intellectual bourgeois lifestyle, of which she is most critical in Allen, going so far to call his characters “faux adults.” True, in this remake of Rosemary’s Baby we do indeed meet a bickering upper-class couple, of Jew and WASP binary, arguing about where to hang the Damien Hirst dot painting; if the lobster ravioli needs more sage; if the rare orchids have been watered, among many other economically ostentatious qualms. Allen here, as a common crutch, “goes off” on Hegel, Freud, and Marx—losing himself not as Guy Woodhouse but, literally, as himself, to a stunned Rosemary holding a pregnancy test.

  Woody Allen and Roman Polanski sadly have one more thing in common, besides muse Mia Farrow. Their collaboration here, however perverse, passive-aggressive, or misogynistic, has hit mass market regardless. People magazine, for idiot populace, called it “the one movie to watch this summer.” BuzzFeed captured twenty-seven of the film’s most climactic GIFs, which, according to them, will make your head explode.

  Perhaps most frightening, as opposed to the original version in which the baby’s face was never portrayed, is Haley Joel Osmen
t as Satan’s spawn. Osment—best known for his “I see dead people” line in The Sixth Sense—is twenty-six years old now, and despite his “baby face,” not to mention some rather expensive and tedious CGI, a very horrendous-looking baby. The penultimate shot, before Rosemary faints and punctures her colostomy bag with a broken hip, is a lone zoom in on Osment in heavy goth makeup trying to facialize the embodiment of evil. Some laughed, others gasped, a few gagged.

  Cameos by Steve Carell and Paul Rudd as the gay neighbors raised lips a little, but ultimately Polanski should not be writing dick jokes. The Victorian Gothic interiors were indeed stunning, but Allen’s camera seems more loyal to the product placements (Depend, Preparation H, Sensodyne, Welch’s Prune juice, etc). The Woodhouses’ geriatric gait never quite matches up to the snappy cadence of the jazz soundtrack, which continuously blows its cacophonous horns into laugh tracks inserted by a director clearly at the end of his game. Maybe this is a horror film after all.

  Directed by Social Media. Length: 1440 minutes. Starring: the general public.

  Two Thousand and Fourteen is a genre-bending, logic-defying, not-to-be-missed, nearly-impossible-to-watch moviegoing experience released by a third-party team of anonymous programmers at Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Officially directed by a location-based randomized search engine, Two Thousand and Fourteen can only be seen in theaters, and will never be released on video.

  Much has been written about Two Thousand and Fourteen (TTAF), and even months before its release, it was hotly debated in the highest-minded critic circles. Let’s get the specifics out of the way, on the highly improbable off-chance that you have not been made aware of this moviegoing juggernaut. TTAF is a twenty-four-hour-long film with a list of demands attached to the ticket. Audience members must arrive on time, sit through the entirety of the film, and only use the allotted prearranged bathroom breaks. They may not sleep and must be fully engaged for the entirety of the twenty-four hours. The film consists of the six top-grossing films of 2014 interspersed with the bottom-grossing yet highly acclaimed movies of 2014. The film will be accompanied by written commentary on the individual movies compiled from Google searches, email and messaging content, Facebook commentary and private messages, and Twitter scrapes, all culled from a fifty-mile radius of the theater. In essence, TTAF will be a totally different experience based on where in the country the film is being watched. It is the most important experience of our time.1