Channeling vs. Preaching
From Owen Gleiberman’s 3.12 Variety essay, “The Oscar Best Picture Winners Have Long Been a Sign of the Times — This Year Even More So.”
“It is not the purpose of this column to predict which [Best Picture nominee has the winning edge]. But this much can be said.
“If One Battle After Another wins, it will play as an affirmation of the power of movies to tap our most traumatic social and political anxieties and elevate them to a cathartic place. There may be no Oscar winner in history that has owned the zeitgeist like One Battle After Another.”
HE correction: There may be no Oscar contender in recent history that has owned the fraught and frazzled progressive psychology under Trump authoritarianism like One Battle After Another.
Even The Gatecrashers Have Fallen For Last-Minute “Sinners” Surge
So because of the BAFTA N-word kerfuffle (or more specifically because of a string of outbursts from Tourette’s activist John Davidson, which triggered last-minute SAG voters), even the Gatecrashers are going along with the knee-jerk squishy bods.
Michael B. Jordan beating Timothee Chalamet or Ethan Hawke? Handing the trophy to Delroy Lindo rather than Stellan Skarsgard? Because of Davidson’s affliction? This is ludicrous lemming-think — self-delusion en masse.
Way The Hell Back in December of ‘82
…when I was on a few long-lead invite lists and living a fairly fast Manhattan life in most respects, especially for a guy making a relatively shitty salary…parked in a comfy, semi-spacious studio on Bank Street, hitting screenings, parties and bars three or four nights per week, occasionally training to Connecticut on weekends and batting a healthy .400…late-breaking curves, sliders, fastballs, change-ups, spitballs, knuckleballs.
Give 1986 Another Chance
14 months ago I posted HE’s top 30 films of 1986. I’ve since rewatched Bruce Beresford‘s Crimes of the Heart, and I hated it so much I turned it off after a half-hour. So I took it out and popped in John Carpenter‘s Big Trouble in Little China and Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge.
So here’s HE’s top 23 films of ’86, along with 8 good ones that were compromised by minor flaws.
It’s very hard to accept that 1986 was 40 effing years ago.
(1) Oliver Stone‘s Platoon
(2) James Cameron‘s Aliens
(3) Oliver Stone‘s Salvador
(4) David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet
(5) Jonathan Demme‘s Something Wild
(6) Michael Mann‘s Manhunter
(7) Neil Jordan‘s Mona Lisa
(8) Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters
(9) David Cronenberg’s The Fly
(10) Jim Jarmusch‘s Down By Law
(11) Mike Nichols‘ Heartburn
(12) James Ivory‘s A Room with a View
(13) Jean-Jacques Beineix‘s Betty Blue
(14) Spike Lee‘s She’s Gotta Have It
(15) Adrien Lyne‘s 9 1/2 Weeks
(16) Hal Ashby‘s 8 Million Ways to Die
(17) Randa Haines‘ Children of a Lesser God
(18) Martin Scorsese‘s The Color of Money
(19) David Anspaugh‘s Hoosiers
(20) Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge
(21) Jamie Foley’s At Close Range
(22) Sidney Lumet‘s The Morning After
(23) Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge
Generally Good but Slightly Second Tier:
(24) Roland Joffe‘s The Mission, (25) Claude Berri‘s Manon of the Spring, (26) Tony Scott‘s Top Gun, (27) Fons Rademakers‘ The Assault, (28) David Zucker‘s Ruthless People, (29) Paul Mazursky‘s Down and Out in Beverly Hills, (30) John Hughes‘ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, (31) John Carpenter‘s Big Trouble in Little China.
I Dream of Boxy “Black Rock”
According to V. Renée’s 9.2.13 post on www.nofilmschool.com, John Sturges‘ Bad Day at Black Rock (’54) was shot in two aspect ratios — old CinemaScope (2.55:1) and flat Academy (1.37:1). The MGM guys weren’t completely confident that CinemaScope would work out so they wanted a flat version as a backup alternative.
This was exactly the same thinking behind the dual-aspect-ratio filming of Daryl F. Zanuck and Henry Koster‘s The Robe (’53).
The flat versions of The Robe and Bad Day at Black Rock were never released, of course, although the boxy Robe is viewable as a PiP feature in Fox Home Video’s 2009 special edition Bluray.
I would love, love, love to see the boxy version of Bad Day at Black Rock. I’m presuming it’s been trashed or otherwise lost, but this is the kind of thing that fans of classic films on Bluray tend to wet themselves over.
’70s Metal Band Finally Gets A Pass
I didn’t like Grand Funk Railroad back in the day. Too metal, too muscular, too macho, too Michigan. But now they sound pretty good, or this signature song does at least.
Thrown by Critical Drinker Approval of “Project Hail Mary”
HE will be catching a Project Hail Mary screening tomorrow afternoon….let’s let it lay until commentary is appropriate.
Zoomer Movie Attendance is Rising…Yes!
THR‘s Pamela McLintock has posted an encouraging report about increasing movie theatre attendance among Zoomers and therefore a hopeful trend as far as the future of brick-and-mortar cinemas are concerned.
McLintock: “Zoomers had been written off as anti-moviegoing since they were the first generation to bond 24/7 with an iPhone or other device. [And yet] social media has them craving a collective experience, resulting in a rise in theatergoing among those born between 1997 and 2012.
Comscore’s Paul Degarabedian: “GenZ is ironically drawn to the classic analog experience of going to the movie theater. They are able to blend this traditional activity with their digital lives, using theater outings as fodder for social engagement.”
This is all well and good except for one teeny weeny thing: Zoomers are not only plagued with short attention spans, but are sorely undereducated as far as exposure to rich, transcendent classic cinema is concerned. They regard the ’80s as ancient history and have barely delved into the late ’60s to late ’70s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” era. And you can totally forget even a passing GenZ awareness of films made in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.
If taste is a result of a thousand distastes, as Francois Truffaut once observed, being undereducated or under-exposed to the really good stuff from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s (1986, don’t forget, was one of the greatest years ever!), it follows that Zoomers are incapable of having anything resembling good taste because they don’t know very much about what constitutes great cinema during the Mark Harris “Pictures at a Revolution” heyday. They just don’t know enough. Hell, they don’t want to know any more than what they know now.
I wouldn’t want to say that the vast majority of Zoomers, cinematically-speaking, are mentally smug chuckleheads who adore their own insularity and ignorance, but it sure seems this way.
And so they adore wank-off films like Sinners and Everything Everywhere All At Once and Deadpool & Wolverine and all the other cancer-causing shite out there. On top of which they’re wokeys, and so they believe in bullshit presentism (POCs costarring in historical European films set in the 1800s, 1700s and before).
Sidenote: The chart just below this paragraph is hilarious as boomers aren’t even tracking — their theatrical attendance is so minimal that they don’t even count any more. Dead to the world.
Risqué Terminology
Forget the N-word…forget it, forget it, forget it in any present-day context.
Andy Klein sez…
War Is Cruel, Merciless, Morally Repugnant
Innocent civilians have been in the collateral line of fire and savagely murdered throughout history. When has this never not been tragic or ghastly?
How many terrified little girls died because of the aggressive battle strategies of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, William Tecumseh Sherman, Adolf Hitler, George S. Patton, Omar Bradley and William Westmoreland?
And how many little German girls died, by the way, from bombs dropped by Lieutenant Colonel James Stewart, who was the flight leader for a massive thousand-plane attack upon Berlin, and who also helped bomb the shit out of Frankfurt, Brunswick, Bremen and Nuremberg?