Day: December 11, 2016

All three of the rumored Star Wars, Episode VIII titles blow chunks. (1) Star Wars VIII: Forces of Destiny…what the hell does that mean? Every particle of matter in the universe has some kind of destiny caused by something. The idea that certain forces guide the destiny of this or that is about as interesting as the notion that sunlight is good for flowers; (2) Star Wars VIII: Tales of the Jedi Temple….who wants to hang out in a temple? Stars Wars fans want to hang out on Endor, Tatooine, the latest Death Star and the ice planet of Hoth…places like that; (3) Stars Wars VIII: The Order of the Dark Side…another loser title. Who or what is thinking up these things? A software program?

Imagine that this guy, who’s about 30, has been seen in a couple of highly regarded indie films and has just been cast as the second lead in a new HBO longform. Does he have that X factor thing? Could he make it in our realm? Or was he the kind of actor who could’ve only broken into Hollywood back in the mid ’40s?

I kind of hate peanut butter. I tend to eat it guiltily. I usually hate myself, in fact, after eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I hate the after-odor. But I really despise the gloopy, syrupy kind of peanut butter that they sell for double the price at high-end health food stores. You can almost drink the stuff. The only peanut butter I can half-stand is Skippy chunky.

Holiday trimmings on the Paramount lot — taken after my second viewing of Fences three or four nights ago.

With the conclusion of the Venice-Telluride-Toronto cycle I began to be convinced that La La Land‘s Emma Stone was the Best Actress contender to beat. I believed that she had easily delivered the strongest, most achey-breaky female performance of the year. Due respect to Stone’s competitors, but I settled into this belief more and more as the season progressed. And I still think that now. But so far, no one except for the relatively small fraternity represented by the Gold Derby-ites and Gurus of Goldies seems to be agreeing with me. On the journalistic side, I mean. Obviously the industry has yet to be heard from.

I’ve been told over and over that critics awards and Academy/guild awards don’t overlap, but I couldn’t help but feel at least a little surprised when Elle‘s Isabelle Huppert (who is wholly riveting in Paul Verhoeven‘s film) kept winning in the early cycle, and with no wins for Stone. So far Huppert has won with the New York Film Critics Circle, the Gotham Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and two or three other groups.

And then tonight, something big happened — Jackie‘s Natalie Portman (who has also given an excellent performance) won a Best Actress award from the Broadcast Film Critics Association.

Portman’s BFCA win is significant because for the last several years overlaps in voting patterns between the Academy and the BFCA have happened more often than overlaps between the Academy and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (i.e., the Golden Globe awards). At the very least tonight’s Portman win suggests that she may have more heat than Stone…maybe. This doesn’t mean Stone isn’t going to pull off a late-cycle surge or that Huppert isn’t going to start winning again. A liberal interpretation of the Best Actress race at this point says it’s a three-way between Stone, Portman and Huppert, but the question has to be asked — when is Stone going to win something? Anything?

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Mark Pellington‘s The Last Word is obviously a mainstream commercial thing, but the writing sounds half-decent. Shirley MacLaine playing yet another variation of her patented headstrong woman that goes all the way back to Terms of Endearment. Amanda Seyfried, Thomas Sadoski, AnnJewel Lee Dixon, Philip Baker Hall, Tom Everett Scott, Alanna Ubach and Gedde Watanabe. Debuting at Park City’s Eccles at next month’s Sundance Film Festival. Opening on 3.10.17.

Lily Gladstone, the somewhat surprising winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Best Supporting Actress award for her lovestruck Certain Women performance, has triumphed again. The Boston Society of Film Critics, which just finished voting, has given her the same trophy.

Best Picture: La La Land
Best Director: Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Best Actor: Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Best Actress: Isabelle Huppert, Elle and Things to Come
Best Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Best Supporting Actress, Lily Gladstone, Certain Women
Best Screenplay: Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Best Documentary: O. J.: Made in America

If you really value movie craft in all its guises, you can celebrate George Roy Hill‘s The Sting as much as Martin Scorsese‘s Silence, Samuel Fuller‘s Forty Guns, Robert Bresson‘s Au Hasard Balthazar, Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight or Asghar Farhadi‘s The Salesman. A great film is a great film.

The snobs will never admit this in certain cases, of course. That’s the cave they live in. They hate movies that feel good. Today’s assignment: Name some really good films that the snooties have always spat upon, or at least that were critically loathed when they first opened only to be given their critical due years later. But no comic-book CG superhero films.

A little over four years ago I ran a piece about The Sting. It was basically an answer to a question that Pauline Kael posed 43 years ago: “What is this movie about anyway?” Answer: Emotional comfort in the form of assured professional craft. It’s about conning people into caring about a shallow story with no themes or subcurrents whatsoever. It’s about keeping them intrigued even though the good-guy con artists have the upper hand all the way.

I once called the Chicago Limited poker-game scene “the most satisfyingly shot and performed scene of its type in Hollywood history because it’s not about poker, but about two cheats trying to out-fuck each other. Paul Newman‘s smug and rascally confidence is key, but the whole thing really depends upon Robert Shaw‘s seething rage — the scene wouldn’t play without it. It’s all about boiling blood.

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Yesterday a Crown Heights guy in his late 20s wrote me about Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie, which he’d just seen at the Alamo Drafthouse and “really liked…it’s a very skilled art film that does a good job sticking a story.” He believes that Natalie Portman is “on another level” vs. La La Land‘s Emma Stone, whose performance he respects and appreciates but doesn’t love.

“Portman’s interpretation seems absolutely spot-on,” he wrote. “She captured Jackie’s measured personality [along with] her raw human self.

“I’m just surprised Stone has the lead in the Best Actress race now,” he went on. “To me, it’s not really that close, and with the political winds and all, this film makes you feel more sadness about where we are now. Makes you mad thinking about what Melania Trump will do to the White House interior…the theme about ‘there will never be another Camelot’ resonates especially.”

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil said the other day that Academy and guild members generally don’t vote for the best but for “the most.” In a Best Actress realm that means the saddest, the hardest struggle, the most tearful, pronounced, pulled from the heart, etc. In that sense I’d say Stone and Portman are a 50-50 tossup at this stage.

I love Tom Wolfe‘s description of Jackie Kennedy in “The Right Stuff“:

“She had a certain Southern smile, which she had perhaps picked up at Foxcroft School, in Virginia, and her quiet voice, which came through her teeth, as revealed by the smile. She barely moved her lower jaw when she talked. The words seemed to slip between her teeth like exceedingly small slippery pearls.”