You have to play it carefully when you talk with Joe Wright, the 45 year-old director of Darkest Hour. You want to be respectful, of course, but you don’t want say the wrong thing. Because for seven-plus years (’05 through ’12) Wright was a knockout, high-style director with all kinds of exciting, mad-thrust energy, and then, all of sudden, he seemed to lose his vision or his footing or you-tell-me.

So you don’t want to ask him, “Uhm, have you gotten that magic-crazy thing back, or are you still recalculating and figuring out the next move?” Because that would sound insulting.

You can’t say what a audacious, flirting-with-genius talent he seemed to be during that seven-year period when he made Pride and Prejudice (’05), Atonement (’07), Hanna (’11) and the drop-to-your-knees Anna Karenina, which I found brilliant and dazzling and everything in between. Because telling him how great he seemed during this period would sound like an allusion to the disappointment his fans felt when he made Pan (’15), a costly, poorly-reviewed kids fantasy flick that lost money.

It follows that you wouldn’t want to ask him, as I did during a quickie interview two or three weeks ago, why he made Pan in the first place. Because he’ll just say, “Well, let’s just that one go.”

And you can’t express a hope that he’ll make another high-style work of genius in the vein of Anna Karenina because that would sound like “so what’s happened to you since Anna Karenina?”

And if you’re the last on a long list you can’t suggest doing a video interview because he’ll probably say, “I’m a little tired…I don’t know.” Okay, forget it.

What I said to Joe, whom I regard as a very important director in the realm of James Cameron and David Fincher, was that he obviously “shot the hell” out of Darkest Hour. But that wound up sounding as if “shooting the hell out of it” was Wright’s way of compensating for a relatively rote, somewhat conventional biopic, which Darkest Hour is to a certain extent. And that’s fine. It is what it is.

Darkest Hour reminds us that would-be tyrants like Adolf Hitler are still around, and that we could all use more fellows with the steel backbone of a Winston Churchill to stand up to them and inspire the old fighting spirit.

I admired and enjoyed Darkest Hour, and I respect the visual energy that Wright used to punch it up as best he could. But I still want the old Wright back. I can’t help myself. I’m fine with Darkest Hour, but I want a return of Joe, the gifted madman.

Here’s a portion of first review of Anna Karenina, which I posted on 9.6.12:

“Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (Focus Features, 11.16.12) will have its detractors (in my screening today five or six people were actually chuckling at it during a high-emotion scene in the late second act) but for me it’s a serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a disciple of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.

“You either go with the proscenium-arch grandiosity of a film like Anna Karenina or you don’t (and I was just talking in the Bell Lightbox lobby with a critic who didn’t care for it) but if you ask me it has all the essential ingredients of a bold-as-brass Best Picture contender — an excitingly original approach, cliff-leaping audacity, complex choreography, the balls to go classic and crazy at the same time, a wild mixture of theatricality and romantic realism, a superbly tight and expressive script by Tom Stoppard and wowser operatic acting with a special hat-tip to Keira Knightley as Anna — a Best Actress performance if I’ve ever seen one.

I have to drive all the way up to Santa Barbara’s Bacara Resort & Spa for a special Kirk Douglas Award Ceremony honoring Dame Judi Dench for Excellence, and particularly for her stirring performance in Victoria and Abdul. The ceremony is being thrown by the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival and particularly by HE’s own Roger Durling. And I’m late as it is. I’ll probably get there by 6:45 pm or thereabouts. And then I’ll have to drive all the way back at 10 pm.

6:05 pm, somewhere near Chesebro Canyon.

Update: Bust! I left West Hollywood at 4:05 pm. Two hours later I was on the 101 in Calabassas, a little past Malibu Canyon and stuck in “accident” traffic. Even without the bumper-to-bumper I would be looking at a minimum of 100 minutes to get to the Bacara Resort & Spa in Goleta, which is maybe 20 minutes past Santa Barbara. But the traffic jam wouldn’t quit. I sat there. I edged forward a few feet and sat here some more. “To hell with it,” I said out loud. I got off the freeway and turned around. I stopped at a Malibu Canyon Starbucks to wait out the commuter traffic. I apologized to Roger, telling him things were impossible. He’ll send me photos and video tomorrow. Cheers to Judi Dench and every Los Angeles-based journo who, unlike myself, was smart enough to leave by 2:30 or 3 pm.

Four major awards-giving groups have recently announced their top pics, and so far the leading hottie is Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name. That is, if you go by the top prize given by Gotham Awards plus the six Spirit Award nominations earned by the CMBYN team. No guarantees, but with six nominations the odds favor Guadagnino taking the Spirits’ Best Feature trophy.

On the other hand the New York Film Critics Circle have just chosen Lady Bird as 2017’s Best Film, but the winners of that award and the Best Picture Oscar champs have only occasionally overlapped. Two days ago the more mainstream-minded National Board of Review gave their top award to Steven Spielberg‘s The Post. This may or may not indicate the voting preferences of Academy and guild members next month, although it probably will.

There’s no disputing, however, that over the last few years the winners of the Spirit and Gotham awards have mostly gone on to win the Best Picture Oscar. In five of the past six years, in fact, winners of the Spirit Best Feature prize have gone on to win five Best Picture Oscars — 2011’s The Artist, 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, 2014’s Birdman, 2015’s Spotlight and 2016’s Moonlight.

It would seem at this stage that any half-attuned Oscar prognosticator would identify Call Me By Your Name as a leading Best Picture contender. And yet when six Oscar experts were recently polled by the L.A. Times (“From Dunkirk to Coco: The 2018 Oscars Buzzmeter”), their six biggest favorites didn’t include the Guadagnino.

Instead they chose Lady Bird (smart call), Darkest Hour (which hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of winning Best Picture — Best Actor shoo-in Gary Oldman is Focus Features’ only competitive pony), Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (a respected film that was shut out in the Spirit Award noms and by the Gothams), Dunkirk (total shut-out among NYFCC and NBR voters), Get Out (Spirit nominee, Gotham winner + Best First Film award from NYFCC) and The Shape of Water (shunned by Spirits, blanked by NBR and NYFCC).

Most of these six films could theoretically win the 2017 Best Picture Oscar, but what could Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, Vanity Fair‘s Nicole Sperling, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, The Envelope‘s Glenn Whipp and L.A. Times critics Justin Chang and Kenneth Turan have been thinking to have not selected Guadagnino’s film as at least a hot contender? How could they possibly size up the field and go “naaah, don’t think so” when it came to the one film in the 2017 Best Picture constellation that many have called a masterpiece and a classic slow-burn love story?

In fact Chang, Turan, Whipp, Sperling and O’Neil picked Call Me By Your Name as a leading Best Picture contender, but the other six films ranked higher.

It’s odd, man. Really odd.

If you go strictly by Metacritic and Rotten Tomato ratings, Call Me By Your Name is the second highest with a 95% and 98% rating, respectively for an average of 96.5%. How could that esteem possibly translate into six other films being ranked as hotter contenders?

Darkest Hour is the lowest rated of all with 73% Metacritic and 85% Rotten Tomatoes tallies. Lady Bird has the highest ratings with a Metacritic 94% and a Rotten Tomatoes 100%. Dunkirk has a 94% Metacritic vs. 92% Rotten Tomatoes. Get Out has an 84% Metacritic vs. a Rotten Tomatoes 99%. Three Billboards has an 87% Metacritic vs. 94% Rotten Tomatoes. The Shape of Water has a 95% Rotten Tomatoes vs. an 86% Metacritic.

It doesn’t matter to me if Garth Davis‘s Mary Magdelene, which is slated to open domestically on 3.30.18, goes out as a Weinstein Co. or Focus Features release. The movie’s the thang, not the distributor. (There’s no Weinstein Co. logo at the end of this trailer, but a Focus Features logo does appear.) Davis’s film is presumably a feminist slant on the New Testament legend, written by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett, with Rooney Mara playing the reformed harlot Mary Magdalene.

It’s also a slightly revisionist take with Jesus Christ, who died at age 33, being portrayed by a 43 year-old Joaquin Phoenix, who actually looks like he’s 54.

It’s fascinating to contemplate a scene in which Jesus and Mary Magdelene (Rooney Mara) are chatting on a hilly Italian coastline (pic was shot in Matera, the Puglia region, Napoli and Sicily) and looking out at the Mediterranean. On top of which you can’t hear the dialogue. I defy HE readers to tell me what Mara and Pheonix are saying to each other starting at the 56-second mark. Mara: “Pisahtla minnup-minnupah kaht?” Phoenix (at 1:00 minute mark): “Nuhnwah sinkdat bad pitnyah puhtohit.”

Costarring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Apostle Peter and Tahar Rahim as Judas Iscariot. Pic will probably be released on 3.30.18.

A three-day-old Buzzfeed article by Julie Gerstein has briefly revived the “Is Die Hard is a Christmas flick?” debate. This morning I addressed the topic on Facebook:

This is going to sound tiresome to the hipster-cynics out there, but there’s only one (1) Christmas flick that really and truly serves the spirit of that once-blessed holiday — the 1951, British-made A Christmas Carol (titled Scrooge in England) with Alastair Sim. Period. Other films have tried and nearly gotten there, but Brian Desmond Hurst‘s black-and-white classic comes from the same cultural fibre that sired and inspired Charles Dickens himself. Every time I’ve watched it (at least a couple of dozen times) it summons memories of family and community values that may have once existed, at least in my heart, and melts me right the fuck down.

And you’re gonna throw Bruce Willis and his bloody, glass-cut feet into the same bullpen?

If you want to put on your perversely ironic elf cap and cackle your ass off as you slam back a double-rum-shot egg nog, you can call Die Hard a Xmas flick…sure, heh-heh, why not?, fuck it. But in so doing you’ll be compounding the perversity and adding yet another layer of crust and cynical remove from a holiday that used to actually occasion a brief spiritual sea-change in people…a teaspoon of extra kindness that would sink in and lift all boats.

One of the many reasons that Christmas has felt more and more like a lesser thing has been the corroded, loathsomely insincere mindset that has allowed (wink-wink, fuck-all, who gives a shit?) for “Die Hard is a Xmas movie” to gain a semi-serious foothold in the cultural conversation.

And you know what? For all my feelings of pious denunciation, I have, all on my own, Alastair Sim notwithstanding, long associated this merrily calculating 1988 John McTiernan flick with (heh-heh) “the holidays.” Really. But in so doing all these years, I’ve said to myself “is the part of you that used to wear a semblance of true Christmas spirit on your sleeve…has that spiritual spark been completely narcotized?” The answer, of course, is ”well, not entirely but yeah, for the most part.”

And this is who we are and what we’ve become, Mr. Dickens. Sorry, brah, but it’s true. And so I say “Merry Christmas, Mr. Silver, Mr. Willis, Mr. McTiernan, Mr. De Souza!!…in keeping with the situation.” I’ve walked the London streets during the early Christmas season (37 years ago, to be exactly, when I was there to interview Peter O’Toole for GQ magazine.) And the Brits really know from Christmas spirit, trust me, just as surely as plastic American mall-fuck consciousness has been shitting all over the spirit of the occasion since the dawn of Reagan.

The only good thing is that I don’t drink egg nog any more.

The winners from the New York Film Critics Circle, who voted this morning:

Best Film: Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird. HE comment: No argument as Lady Bird is one of the HE’s Big Four along with Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk and The Post. Obviously a huge boost for this A24 release along with Gerwig, Ronan and (in a roundabout pushback way) the unfairly overlooked Laurie Metcalf.

Best Director: Sean Baker for The Florida Project. HE comment: Due respect to Baker, but his fine Orlando accomplishment did not produce a greater, grander film than Call Me By Your Name or Lady Bird. This is fetishy contrarianism for its own sake. The spirit of the LAFCA Lox & Bagels & Red Onions Food Appreciation Group has invaded the NYFCC.

Best Actor: Timothee Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name. HE comment: Yup, you betcha. Does this indicate a Best Picture win for Luca Guadagnino‘s film?

Best Actress: Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird. HE comment: 110% agreement.

Best Screenplay: Phantom Thread by Paul Thomas Anderson. HE comment: You think so? I need to think this one over.

Best Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project. HE comment: Although my personal preference is for Michael Stuhlbarg‘s performance as the supportive dad in Call Me By Your Name, Dafoe is very good as the Orlando flophouse manager. I respect his work enormously. If he takes the Oscar, c’est la vie.

Best Supporting Actress: Tiffany Haddish in Girls Trip. HE comment: WHAT? Lady Bird‘s Laurie Metcalf shoulda won it. Or, failing that, I, Tonya‘s Allison Janney.

Best First Film: Get Out (d: Jordan Peele). HE comment: Great, whatever, fine.

Best Foreign Language Film: BPM (Beats Per Minute) (d: Robin Campillo). HE comment: Strongly disagree. Andrej Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless is a more formidable accomplishment — masterful chops, compassionate, humanist. In my Cannes Film Festival review (which was titled “Punch Me In The Face“), I called Campillo‘s film” a strident, oppressively didactic period film…a tough, well-made thumbs-upper, okay, but at the same time the relentless political-talking-points dialogue gradually numbs you out, and then drains you of your will to live.”

Best Non-Fiction Film: Faces Places (d: Agnes Varda). HE comment: Didn’t see it.

Best Animated Film: Coco (d: Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina). HE comment: I don’t do animated.

Best Cinematography: Mudbound (dp: Rachel Morrison). HE comment: Sure, no problem, fine work.