For whatever reason the Hastings Observer didn’t get around to announcing the death of actor Jon Finch, 71, until today (1.11). His body was reportedly found on 12.28 (two weeks ago!) at his Old Town home in the English coastal village of Hastings.

In my mind Finch had a two-year peak period in which he gave an absolutely brilliant lead performance in Roman Polanski‘s Macbeth (’71) and then played an unjustly prosecuted murder suspect in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Frenzy (’72), He also played a small but memorable role as a lushy gay Scottish hustler in John Schlesinger‘s Sunday Bloody Sunday, and a cuckolded husband in Robert Bolt‘s Lady Caroline Lamb (’72), which was a commercial and critical flop.

And then he turned down an offer to play James Bond (or so it’s been reported), and that was all she wrote. Finch worked enough to keep his hand in and stay afloat over the next 40 years but he never caught fire again, at least to an extent that he caught my attention.

Finch’s ex-partner Helen Drake, who lives in Cornwall, told the Hastings Observer that she and Finch “remained very close…we were like a little family and saw each other regularly in the Old Town. He had been quite unwell for a while as he suffered from diabetes and was becoming confused.

“Jon was quiet and a private person but very warm and generous. He had a fantastic sense of humor. Jon was a wonderful father to his 19-year-old daughter Holly. They got on well and always laughed, having fun together.”

The story explains that Finch moved to Hastings in 2003 “and liked to frequent the pubs in the Old Town.”

Here’s an mp3 of Finch delivering my favorite Macbeth passage:

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?”

They can rename the legendary Grauman’s Chinese theatre as the TCL Chinese Theatre if they want to, but it’ll always be Grauman’s Chinese. Always. And what’s TCL? Some Chinese tech company…something? Nobody wants to know from some Asian interloper. Nobody cares. And you know they’re going to erect some distasteful TCL sign somewhere on the grounds.

“This is one of the landmarks of North America,” said Hao Yi, vice president of TCL Group, about the re-naming. “It can be a bridge to link the cultures of China and North America.” Oh, you think so, big shot?

Message from Los Angeles film buffs who cherish the lore of this theatre to Hao Yi: Keep your distance, fella. Or better yet, kiss our collective ass. This is our theatre, our temple, that you’re looking to exploit.

There’s been a vague, half-accurate assumption for some years now that the choices made by the Broadcast Film Critics Association’s Critics Choice Awards are somehow reflective or at least similar to those made or shared by the Academy. I realize this is a “nobody knows anything” kind of year and anyone and/or anything can win, but there has been a sense of a formidable Lincoln headwind, as evidenced by yesterday morning’s 12 Oscar nominations…right? But at most I’m feeling a mild breeze.

My question is this: Are there any tea-leaf indications in the BFCA having yesterday given its Best Picture award to Argo and its Best Director trophy to Ben Affleck instead of Lincoln and/or Steven Spielberg? Obviously without the BFCA knowing (having voted on 1.7) that Affleck would be Best Director-snubbed. Was this just…what, a curious call? Or does it suggest that Lincoln doesn’t have the heat that some people think/hope it has?

I know people think I’m just out to trash Lincoln any way I can, but surely this is a legitimate question. If Kris Tapley or Pete Hammond or Anne Thompson were to ask this it would seem fair to most HE readers, I think. But they probably won’t ask it as they don’t want to be seen as Lincoln bashers or agenda-driven.

So what if anything did yesterday’s Argo wins mean? I’m really not concluding anything. Okay, I kind of am but in a Solomon-like, non-predatory way.

Pete Hammond replies: “This race is all over the map. The BFCA has a pretty good track record — not great but good — as far as reflecting Academy tastes and choices. But I didn’t really expect Lincoln to win there. The 12 Lincoln nominations mean broad-based support but Life of Pi got 11 without any acting shots. Lincoln strikes me as an Academy consensus movie, and maybe [the 12 nominations] are indicative of what the Academy thinks. But there are so many factors in play now. Affleck’s Academy snub might make Argo stronger, and he could win the DGA. The Producer’s Guild Awards (1.26) is the one to watch as far as where this race is going.”

Sasha Stone replies: “The Critics Choice voters aren’t even critics. Many of them are awards bloggers like yourself. They try to match Oscar every year because that is their claim to fame and how they get all the screeners every year. So their ballots were turned in before Oscar nominations, and at that time everyone in the film blogger community was thinking Argo would take the Oscar, and [so] Argo took the BFCA. Normally, Zero Dark Thirty would have taken it but that has the stink of controversy now so critics have jumped the ship.

“Most of the time the films with the most nominations at the BFCAs don’t win Best Picture there. So that part of it isn’t surprising. Lincoln has not won any major critics award. It may finish out the season not having won anything but the only votes that count or matter are the industry votes — the Producers, Directors, Writers, Editors Guilds — and NOT THE CRITICS. And it could turn out that voters don’t ‘like’ it enough. In any capacity, at any awards show and it will end the race with a screenplay win and nothing more. A joke but I’ve become used to how it all goes down by now, although you never really get used to it. The trick is not minding.”

Kris Tapley replies: “Argo and Zero Dark Thirty were tied for critics Best Picture prizes this year. I thought Lincoln might win last night because BFCA likes to predict in some sense, but fact is, critics have by and large gone with Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, so it was probably between the two of them. And Argo won, now having pulled ahead with critics awards:

ARGO (10)
Broadcast Film Critics Association
Southeastern Film Critics Association
St. Louis Gateway Film Critics Association
San Diego Film Critics Society
Florida Film Critics Circle
Oklahoma Film Critics Circle
Nevada Film Critics Society
Houston Film Critics Society
Online Film Critics Society
Denver Film Critics Society

ZERO DARK THIRTY (9)
New York Film Critics Circle
Boston Society of Film Critics
Chicago Film Critics Association
New York Film Critics Online
Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association
Boston Online Film Critics Association
Utah Film Critics Association
Black Film Critics Circle
Vancouver Film Critics Circle
(Also NBR, but those aren’t critics.)

LINCOLN (3)
Dallas-Ft. Worth Film Critics Association
Iowa Film Critics Association
North Texas Film Critics Association

THE MASTER (3)
San Francisco Film Critics Circle
Toronto Film Critics Association
Kansas City Film Critics Circle

AMOUR (2)
Los Angeles Film Critics Association
National Society of Film Critics

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2)
International Press Academy
Detroit Film Critics Society

LIFE OF PI (1)
Las Vegas Film Critics Society

MOONRISE KINGDOM (1)
Central Ohio Film Critics Association

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED (1)
Indiana Film Critics (1).”

If you can’t afford to feed your children healthily and regularly and expose them to good values and so on, then — hello? — don’t have them. Kids are a huge responsibility. They’re not just something to do to make you feel less lonely or more fulfilled. It’s not about you; it’s about them. I know — only Republicans talk this way, right? But people shouldn’t have children with an expectation that society will help feed them and provide medical care. Parents who can’t man up and do the right thing shouldn’t be parents.

“Chalk up this year’s nominations as a victory for the bullying power of the United States Senate and an undeserved loss for Zero Dark Thirty and director Kathryn Bigelow in particular,” L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan wrote this morning. “If ZD30 has any message about what led to Bin Laden’s location, it’s that, rather than torture, it was the slow, meticulous, painstaking gathering of information over nearly a decade…that did the trick.”

Zero Dark Thirty‘s Kathryn Bigelow explained it all again to David Letterman. “Accurate in a way a movie can be accurate,” etc. Here’s the whole 11-minute segment.

It’s been almost 19 years since the Cannes Film festival debut of Pulp Fiction, and film geeks (and makers of movies about film geeks) still reference the “Royale with cheese” scene between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. That’s bad. That put me off. But dealing with venal high-school thugs is at least reflective of the way it is in some schools today (i.e., ones attended by dregs-of-the-gene-pool types), and that’s something. I see at least one and sometimes two Slamdance movies every Sundance, so maybe.

I’ve nothing unusual to say about the hostile, dismissive tone in Quentin Tarantino‘s responses to Channel Four’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy in London yesterday. On one level I admire QT’s eat-my-ass attitude. But I’m still sick of excessive style-violence — the lurid carnage that guys like Tarantino use to elicit smirks in the name of heh-heh irony — which I believe is boring and tedious because it’s merely extreme, like someone yelling as loudly as they can or a dog that won’t stop barking.

In his ongoing quest to re-vitalize grindhouse cinema for the aughts, Tarantino has made himself into a self-regarding “exploitation filmmaker” (i.e., ironically, not really, winking) who has made Django Unchained because slavery gives him license to wail on Southern racist swine with absolute moral authority. I believe in justice and payback, but there’s a difference between that and feasting on revenge like some lowlife glutton devouring chili fries. And I’m just sick of it.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy: Let me ask you about violence. You said, you know, everyone knows you make violent movies, you like violent movies. Why do you like making violent movies?

Quentin Tarantino: Uhm… I don’t know. It’s like asking Judd Apatow, “Why do you like making comedies?”

KGM: You just get a kick out of it? Or you just enjoy it? Or…

QT: It’s… It’s… It’s a… I think… I think it’s good cinema. I consider it good cinema. You know, it’s… You sit there in a movie theatre when these cathartic, violent scenes happen… I’m talking about the cathartic violence scenes. Then there’s the cathartic violence of Django paying back blood for blood.

KGM: Is that why you think people like watching violent movies – people who are not violent people or twisted people in any way, but why it’s OK to go into a movie and enjoy the violence?

QT: Yeah, well, it’s a movie. It’s a fantasy. It’s a fantasy – it’s not real life. It’s a fantasy. You go and you watch. You know, you watch a kung-fu movie and one guy takes on 100 people in a restaurant. That’s fun!

KGM: But why are you so sure that there’s no link between enjoying movie violence and enjoying real violence?

QT: I don’t…I’m going to tell you why I’m so sure? Don’t ask me a question like that – I’m not biting. I refuse your question.

KGM: Why?

QT: Because I refuse your question. I’m not your slave and you’re not my master. You can’t make me dance to your tune. I’m not a monkey.

KGM: I can’t make you answer anything. I’m asking you interesting questions.

QT: And I’m saying… and I’m saying I refuse.

KGM: OK. I was just asking you why. That’s fine. But you see, Jamie Foxx has said: “We can’t turn our back and say that violence in films, that anything that we do…”

QT: Then you should talk to Jamie Foxx about that. And I think he’s actually here, so you can!

KGM: I’d love to, but, I mean, you know… It’s interesting that you have a different view, and I’m just trying to explore that.

QT: And I don’t want to! ‘Cause I’m here to sell my movie. This is a commercial for the movie – make no mistake.

KGM: So you don’t want to talk about anything serious?

QT: I don’t want to talk about what you want to talk about. I don’t want to talk about the implications of violence. I haven’t wanted… because… The reason I don’t want to talk about it: because I’ve said everything I have to say about it.
If anyone cares what I have to say about it, they can Google me and they can look for 20 years what I have to say. But I haven’t changed my opinion one iota.

KGM: No, but you haven’t fleshed it out.

QT: It’s not my job to flesh it out.

KGM: No, it’s my job to try and ask you to.

QT: And I’m shutting your butt down!