Two Lovers - james Gray - should i stay or should i go?

David Ehrlich last fall:

If not for the ineffably modern hollowness of Charlie Hunnam’s speaking voice, or the distinct rind of 21st century celebrity that still clings to co-star Robert Pattinson like the dying traces of yesterday’s cologne, someone could easily be fooled into thinking that “The Lost City of Z” was shot 40 years ago. In fact, that might be the greatest compliment a viewer could pay writer-director James Gray (“The Immigrant”), a man who seems increasingly determined to revive the glory days of our national cinema, when movies were pictures and auteurs were mavericks. Gray pulls from the past as liberally as Quentin Tarantino, but without the ego — he doesn’t try to process his influences through the slaughterhouse of his own fetishes, he simply wants to Make American Movies Great Again.

http://www.indiewire.com/2016/10/the-lost-city-of-z-review-robert-pattinson-james-gray-nyff-2016-1201737045/

oh hey, 35mm sneak in NYC, JG attending (Apr 12)

http://metrograph.com/series/series/81/james-gray

The film is opening the MSPIFF, and I'm torqued.

shd prob start a general Gray thread

NYC "event" tix for Lost City 35mm now on sale

http://metrograph.com/events/

I liked this one pretty well, maybe second to Two Lovers or even better -- very different films. He suggested he was trying to make a 'woke' David Lean film, and he succeeded at least partly. My chief gripe might be i couldn't understand 20-30% of what Hunnam and Pattinson were saying. Has one of the best WWI trench warfare sequences i can recall, at least since Kubrick.

Gray was characteristically hilarious in the Q&A, doing impressions of everyone from Darius Khondji to stars-that got-away Cumberbatch and Pitt (the latter: "Jimmy Jam! I can't wait anymore") to a woman on the MPAA appeal panel ("This REEEalistic violence worries us as PEERents").

https://thefilmstage.com/features/james-gray-on-ad-astra-cannes-woes-harvey-weinstein-and-the-only-way-cinema-can-be-reinvented/

He seems like a nice fellow. I like his refusal to state the merits of his own movies.