Day: December 29, 2014

“Misery in Abderrahmane Sissako‘s Timbuktu, which is set in the Timbuktu region of Mali, a mostly barren African nation that few people in this country have heard of, is very hard-core. Shot in Mauritania, it’s about the 2012 occupation of Timbuktu by Ansar Dine, a relentlessly purist, wacked-out Islamic militia dedicated to enforcing Sharia law and order. The film was partly inspired by a public stoning of an unmarried couple in Aguelhok, in eastern Mali, but that’s just another pebble in the pond. I think we all know about the pitch-black souls of nutter Islamics by now.

“Timbuktu is in no way boring. Sissako knows how to tell a riveting tale and keep you engrossed, but good God. This is a film about dirt-poor hardscrabble types living in various states of misery and deprivation, powerless, at times terrified and always subject to rigid judgments and brutalities. An awful way to live. If there’s an uglier, crueler, more inhumane, more rancid belief system or culture than Islamic fundamentalism, I’d like to know what it is. The earth needs to be absolutely cleansed of this scourge. Welcome, western audiences, to life in one of the worst ideological desert prison camps ever created.” — from my 11.18 review, titled :Hell In The Desert.”

I’ve always regarded Lyndon Johnson with mixed emotions. He ruined his legacy with his horribly misguided Vietnam policies, of course. But domestically he wanted to be a benevolent Big Daddy — a compassionate liberal whose instincts found fruition with his Great Society programs along with his support of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I know that Johnson’s rural-type manner always reminded me of my paternal grandfather, an earthy guy who hailed from Kentucky and spoke with a drawl. LBJ was also known to be crude in certain ways and I suspect that deep down he probably had less than fully enlightened attitudes toward blacks. But I’ve never believed he was a patronizing racist who didn’t take blacks all that seriously and who pushed for the Voting Right Acts only when he was politically forced to. But that’s how Johnson is more or less portrayed in Ava DuVernay‘s Selma. Tom Wilkinson‘s LBJ offers a few shadings and nuances, but mainly you remember his disagreements with Martin Luther King (i.e., David Oyelowo) and his saying “not now” and dismissively patting King’s shoulder in the Oval Office.

Last Friday (12.26) a Washington Post op-ed piece by Joseph Califano, Jr., President Johnson’s top liaison for domestic affairs from 1965 to 1969, called bullshit on Selma‘s portrayal of Johnson. “The film falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself,” Califano wrote. “In fact, [the] Selma [demonstration] was LBJ’s idea, he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted — and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him.”

I’m no LBJ scholar but I was surprised to see Wilkinson’s Johnson tell J. Edgar Hoover to use the MLK sex tapes to pressure King into backing off. I know that Hoover told Johnson about King’s philandering (and that he might have played portions of the tapes for him) but I’ve never read that LBJ used them to make things uncomfortable for King, and I frankly doubt that he did that.

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The consensus that 2014 had been, relatively speaking, a weak year will not be repeated in 2015. Entertainment Weekly‘s 2015 preview barely has a clue, but the coming year, above and beyond of the locust plague of franchise films, will be good in terms of quality-level, Hollywood Elsewhere-supported fare. Over the last 24 hours I’ve done a bit more research and am now looking at what will almost certainly be the top Best Picture candidates 12 months from now. You almost don’t need to see them to “know.” All you need are the basic elements — filmmakers, budget, story, theme — and the aroma. I don’t know very much but nine…okay, eight times out of ten my instincts are correct. And they’re telling me that Steve Jobs, Truth, St. James Place, The Walk and Collision are probably going to be at the top of the heap after it all shakes out.

What do I actually know about these films? Next to nothing, but I have a pretty good nose for this stuff. The more comments, the better. This needs to be kicked around.

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Posted eight years ago: “I’d say ‘Happy New Year’ to everyone, but…all right, ‘Happy New Year.’ But I’ve always hated those words. Nothing’s ‘happy’ by way of hope. Happy is discovered, earned, lucked into. At best, people are content or…you know, joyously turned on for the moment or laughing or telling a funny story or a good joke. Placated, relaxed, enthused, generous of heart…but ‘happy’? Clams are happy. There’s only the hum. Either you hear it or you don’t.

Posted in 2010: “Nothing fills me with such spiritual satisfaction as my annual naysaying of this idiotic celebration of absolutely nothing.

“I love clinking glasses with cool people at cool parties as much as anyone else, but celebrating renewal by way of the hands of a clock and especially in the company of party animals making a big whoop-dee-doo has always felt like a huge humiliation.

“Only idiots believe in the idea of a of a midnight renewal. Renewal is a constant. Every minute marks the potential start of something beautiful and cleansing, and perhaps even transforming. So why hang back and celebrate a rite that denies this 24/7 theology, and in a kind of idiot-monkey way with party hats and noisemakers?

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Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

By all that is right, fair and profound, a film that wins the Best Picture Oscar should pass the “wow!” test. Agreed, many past winners haven’t lived up to this standard. Time and again Academy voters have rewarded films that comfort or affirm basic truths or remind us, movingly, how things are. Or how we’d like them to be. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Well, now and then there is. Within the last 12 years the Best Picture Oscar has been handed to Chicago, Crash, The King’s Speech and The Artist, or what I call The Four Embarrassments. But in the hearts and minds of those who watch over this town and this industry, Best Picture winners should turn heads, open doors, make history, raise a few eyebrows and rock the rafters on some level or another. They should make you say “Wow, I just saw something!” And they should at least make you want to watch them a second time, if not a third or fourth.

A few days ago I watched Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman for the fifth time, on a 55-inch TV with friends who hadn’t seen it before, and I swear to God it hadn’t diminished. It still pops and chortles and lurches around and slides into home plate like a champ. Lord knows I’m not saying it’s a “better” film than Boyhood or Selma or The Imitation Game, its three biggest competitors. (What does that mean anyway?) But it’s the only film that melts into itself like music and which flies above Tin Pan Alley and reminds that the spirit of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 is alive and well in the 21st Century. And it’s one of the few comedies I’ve seen in my life that could be called sad or autumnal or…what’s the word, whiplashy? Or which foregoes the mere telling of jokes or eliciting of laughter for what you might call withering God’s-eye humor.

Is “God” capable of laughing at anything? Can He/She even be bothered? Perhaps not, but if He/She has the slightest interest in our struttings and frettings, Birdman suggests that He/She might have a sardonic attitude. Certainly when it comes to the spectacle of an older, used-to-be-hot actor who mocks Twitter and doesn’t even have a Facebook page…a guy with problems and demons trying to re-float his boat in choppy seas…a guy who isn’t hip enough to understand that nobody wears white Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear…a guy who’s trying to make it all come out right despite the fact he’s scared shitless and wondering what the hell…a guy who’s teetering like a bowling pin…a guy who certainly could use and for the most part deserves heavenly compassion (i.e., a break) but is forced to do without it for most of Birdman’s running time.

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