Day: September 18, 2016

I filed my quickie review of Derek Cianfrance‘s The Light Between Oceans on the evening of 8.31, and then forgot about it, consumed as I was by the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals over the next 17 days. The 1920s-era soap opera opened on 9.2.   The reviews weren’t great, and after 16 days it’s made a lousy $11,169,776. Did anyone see it? It seems as if no one cared very much but maybe I’m wrong. Anyone?

“An impressive first hour or so,” I wrote. “A bit morose but well-rendered. And then the film goes full-hurt crazy, the wrong move, tears streaming or held back, stunned, swallowed up, ‘oh what to do’? A guilt-and-suffer opera.

“Michael Fassbender is fine (grim, fully committed, extra-solemn) but he’s still Fassbender. A heaving, pull-out-the-stops performance by Alicia Vikander that makes you want to cower at times. Rachel Weitz‘s performance is all-in but measured. She never turns the spigot on full blast.

“The mesmerizing cinematography by Adam Arkapaw and the fleet editing by Jim Helton and Ron Patane are the two finest elements. You could just watch this thing without listening to it, and you wouldn’t have the slightest trouble following the story. That’s a sign of strong cinema, no?

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In what ways am I wrong? What am I missing? I want to be strong and clear in my choices, which is to say choices based on my own gut instincts and judgments. It pains me to go along with groupthink.

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Of course I’m going to buy Criterion’s Bluray of John Huston‘s The Asphalt Jungle (12.13.). Of course I’m looking forward to a “new 2K digital restoration with uncompressed monaural soundtrack.” But I want a significant “bump” from this. I want that feeling, that special feeling you get when you’re watching a film you’ve seen 18 or 19 times and yet the image quality just blows you away. I had that experience when I saw Criterion’s In A Lonely Place Bluray, but not with Warner Home Video’s The Big Sleep Bluray. Just saying…

La La Land, Arrival, Jackie, Moonlight, Nocturnal Animals, Barry, Free Fire, Toni Erdmann, Neruda, Paterson, Amanda Knox, Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, Snowden, Lady Macbeth, The Salesman — these, according to most media hotshots, were the absolute cream of the 2016 Toronto Film Festival.

I asked a lot of people during the festival and everyone mentioned these films. Sum-up articles by Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and Stephen Galloway and Rolling Stone‘s Charles Bramesco and David Fear include the above titles. Feinberg’s list included Lion, which wasn’t acclaimed by anyone I spoke to.

Many of these films had previously played Cannes (Salesman, Toni Erdmann, Paterson, Neruda), Venice (La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival, Nocturnal Animals) and Telluride, but the hotshots nonetheless categorized them as Toronto films.

There’s just one little thing that bothers me. The absolute best film of the year thus far, a little masterpiece called Manchester By The Sea, also played in Toronto. Several times in fact, and it floored many critics and Average Joes. (I took a Toronto friend to see it at a public screening and I felt the room, trust me.) But many if not most of the hotshots have totally ignored Kenneth Lonergan‘s film in their Toronto summaries.

By their own standards the fact that Manchester played a couple of weeks ago in Telluride couldn’t have been a disqualifier. So what did seem to disqualify it? My best guess is that the hotshots ignored Manchester because it had its world premiere at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.

I’m telling you that it blows away nearly every other 2016 Best Picture contender in terms of emotional impact, knockout performances and drillbit dramaturgy. The only film that delivers on a similar level of feeling and expertise is La La land, which has won, by the way, the top TIFF audience prize, which makes it, to go by precedent, the leading Big Cowabunga Kahuna in the Best Picture race.

There’s no question about Manchester‘s powerhouse chops, but in the minds of Gleiberman, Debruge, Feinberg, Galloway, Bramesco and Fear, this Amazon/Roadside release is an “oh, yeah, we forgot to mention it” flick.

Sorry to point this out, guys, but your collective decision to treat Manchester as an invisible Toronto film is derelict.

Note: Feinberg has pointed out that THR‘s Toronto sum-up article excludes films seen at Telluride, and yet it doesn’t exclude films shown in Cannes like Toni Erdmann and Ken Loach‘s I, Daniel Blake, both of which are praised in the body of the THR piece. Again, Manchester by the Sea was a major, major presence in Toronto, and yet it isn’t even mentioned in Feinberg and Galloway’s article.

Jimmy Fallon‘s talk-show brand is, to him, naturally, a prime consideration. That cheerful, easy, let’s-have-fun vibe. Play games, sing songs, fool around. Fallon will never challenge a guest with even a whiff of contentious political chatter. So when Orange Hitler came on, he had to keep that thing going. He presumably despises Orange Hitler, but he had to maintain that Jimmy Fallon vibe. He had to lighten the mood and massage this orangutan’s head and make Trump seem to God knows how many millions like a somewhat more palatable guy than what the news media has been reporting and portraying.

I’m back in Los Angeles now, and I’ve just watched the clip (the Toronto Film Festival pushed a lot of stuff aside) and it’s quite obvious that under the right circumstances and with the right guest, Jimmy Fallon is ready and willing to give evil a friendly back-pat. Jimmy has a popular show and a beaming alpha attitude, but…I don’t want to sound too rash here. I’m not saying he’s Joseph Goebbels or anyone in that realm, but…well, maybe I am. Because in his own way he’s not averse to boosting an agent of a potential apocalypse in terms of climate change, Supreme Court appointments, rank ignorance, 1%-favoring taxes, a shoot-from-the-hip foreign policy, etc. Which is a way of saying that in a roundabout, nice-guy way, there’s an aspect of Jimmy Fallon that reflects or…you know, summons associations with THE DEVIL.