Day: December 8, 2016

When reps for Fences‘ Viola Davis announced that she’d be running as a Best Supporting Actress contender, there were two basic reactions: (1) If SAG and Academy members accept that she’s playing a supporting role, she’s got the Oscar in the bag but (2) will they accept this or call it category fraud, given that she’s playing the strongest female role with loads of screen time, and that she stands right up to Denzel Washington line for line, and that she won a Best Actress Tony award in 2010 for playing the exact same role? If there’s any mucky-muck about this, Manchester By The Sea‘s Michelle Williams (who totally kills within less than ten minutes of screen time) could be the surprise winner. Hidden Figures/Moonlight‘s Janelle Monae and Moonlight‘s Naomie Harris are evenly matched in third and fourth place. 20th Century Women‘s Greta Gerwig has earned a nom, for sure, but she was ten times more electric/magnetic in Frances Ha (’13) and/or Mistress America (’15).

John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, has died at age 95. He was just over 40 when the Friendship 7 capsule orbited the globe three times on 2.20.62. Glenn was elected U.S Senator from Ohio in ’74; he served in that capacity until ’99. He was portrayed by Ed Harris in Phil Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff (’83), and self-described in one scene as “Harry Hairshirt.” On 10.29.98, at age 77, Glenn flew as a payload specialist on a space shuttle mission (Discovery mission STS-95), and in so doing became the oldest person to orbit the earth. A full life, a good run. He’s looking down at the earth now like Keir Dullea‘s starchild at the end of 2001.

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“My most profound Police moment happened on the evening of December 8, 1980, in a small pub in the Stockwell section of London. Never a hardcore audiophile and even less so due to being poor, I was a little late in getting into their music. I had just bought a cassette tape of Zenyatta Mondatta maybe a month or so earlier but I hadn’t listened to it that much. I was edging my way in. Anyway there I was in London, about to do a GQ interview with Peter O’Toole, who was extra-hot at the moment off his career-reviving performance in The Stunt Man. I was crashing with a couple of ladies I knew through a journalist friend, and I was sitting at a table and drinking a pint and feeling great about being in England for the first time alone, and then somebody got up and played ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ on the jukebox. And all of a sudden I heard that song for the first time. The juke was putting out super-thrompy bass tones and it just sounded perfect, and from that moment on I was a Police fan. The next morning I awoke around 7 am to news on the radio that John Lennon had been shot and killed only a few hours earlier in New York City.” — posted on 2.27.15.

In picking their favorite 2016 films, the three N.Y. Times critics — Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott and Stephen Holden — have not strenuously argued with the notion that critics live in their own cloistered realms, processing movies in rarified terms, knowledgable and sophisticated but breathing special foo-foo oxygen.

I agree with some of their choices — Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash, Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle, Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America, Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson, Andrea Arnold‘s American Honey. I am respectfully side-stepping discussions of Moonlight except to say that it’s a good film. No mentions of Robert Eggers‘ The Witch or Gavin Hood‘s Eye in the Sky, and yet Holden included Todd Solondz‘s groan-inducing Wiener-Dog among his honorable mentions. Wiener-Dog — the scourge of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival!

The Times trio appears to have been influenced by one important consideration, which is to avoid saluting or even mentioning the top-ranked faves of the Gold Derby-ites and Gurus of Goldies. Holden included the masterful Manchester by the Sea on his top-ten roster but not Scott or Dargis. THR columnist Scott Feinberg called the trio’s refusal to include La La Land and Hell or High Water among their top-tens “unfathomable.” Dargis at least mentioned La La Land among her “other loves,” although she says that she did so “mainly for its finale.” The trio didn’t offer even limited love for Denzel Washington‘s Fences; ditto Martin Scorsese‘s Silence.

I didn’t write the above headline with any intention to offend — I was just explaining what I’ve come to realize is a fairly reliable scenario. Johnson is a comme ci comme ca Republican who’s out to make dough and keep things as vapid and formulaic as possible. An amiable baba with a ripped bod. During the Obama era Johnson became one of the biggest emblems of the constellation of multicultural superstardom; now there’s something about him that smells a little Trumpish. His shallow opportunist colors are showing all the more.

When Michael Keaton‘s Ray Kroc tells Nick Offerman‘s Rick McDonald that he’s no longer interested in maintaining a cordial partnership (“I’m through taking marching orders from you and your endless parade of no’s, constantly cowering in the face of progress”), a little man inside me went “yes!” The Founder is easily one of the most fascinating ethical dramas of this or any other season, and a brilliant character study of a guy who’s far from “good” but whose motives and actions are understandable and hard to wholly condemn. Here’s the mp3.