Month: January 2018

The Golden Globe awards will begin at 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Eastern. Never forget that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lives in its own little world, and that their picks are…well, they’re fine but not all that consequential. The only real benefit of winning a Golden Globe award is that you get to sell the fence-sitters with your acceptance speech. Remarks that are especially eloquent, confessional or heartfelt tend to enhance or underline one’s Oscar worthiness.

I’ll be posting my usual live-blog reactions to the winners as the show progresses.

Herewith are the likeliest winners according to the Gold Derby gang along with my own likes, misgivings and prejudices:

Best Film, Drama: Not a single Gold Derby-ite is predicting a win for the most beautifully woven and emotionally seductive drama of 2017 — Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name. Allow me, then, to predict this, partly because it’s the only film to vote for and partly out of spite for the herd-voting mentality. The Derby-os are mostly predicting a win for Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, which isn’t a “drama” as much as a romantic fantasy genre film –i.e., The Creature from the Love Lagoon. If Shape wins, great. But it won’t beat Lady Bird for the Best Picture Oscar.

Best Film, Comedy/Musical: The GD gang has almost unanimously predicted that Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird will win in a walk. HE agrees.

Best Director: The triumphant artist-poet who directed 2017’s finest film — Call Me By Your Name‘s Luca Guadagnino — hasn’t even been nominated by the HFPA so who cares? This is a joke. The Gold Derby-os are of the strong opinion that Guillermo del Toro will win. I for one would like to see Dunkirk‘s Christopher Nolan take it. Not would I mind if All The Money in the World‘s Ridley Scott wins as a gesture of respect for his last-minute nine-day re-shoot with Christopher Plummer.

Best Actor, Drama: There are more Gee Dees predicting a Gary Oldman win for his Winston Churchill than a triumph for Call Me By Your Name‘s Timothee Chalamet. I’d like to think that the relatively small group of HFPA voters might step outside the box and give the award to the younger contender. There really is no comparison between what the 22 year-old Chalamet pulls off in Luca Guadagnino‘s film vs. Oldman’s hammy, heavily-made-up performance in Darkest Hour. I’m predicting Chalamet, but I’m not confident that he’ll win.

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I’m personally sad that the Fox Searchlight people have removed me from their Golden Globe viewing-party invite list, but I guess it’s not that much of a tragedy. Because I’ll be watching the show from home (5 pm to 8 pm), I’ll actually be able to hear what the presenters and winners will say. Last year the less-than-brilliant sound system inside the Fox Pavilion and the wallah-wallah from the guests, especially during the final 40 minutes or so, resulted in my missing 80% of the material.

Now I’ll have to hike over to Century Park West at 8:15 pm and wait in some long, snaky line for the slow-ass shuttles, and then the shuttles will creep down Santa Monica Blvd. at a snail’s pace, and then we’ll all get dropped off, blah blah.

I was there in the Hilton lobby just after the show ended last year. There was a horrible, mile-long line in the Hilton lobby just to get into the Amazon-bound elevators. [Video after the jump.] But Hollywood Elsewhere and the loyal and resourceful Svetlana Cvetko are not line-waiters. We knew what to do! Picked up our wristbands, found a staircase, took a deep breath and walked up the eight flights (i.e., 16 staircases divided by a landing). Ingenuity, lung power, determination, aching calf and thigh muscles.

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Before delivering his opening monologue at tonight’s Golden Globe awards telecast, the joyously judgmental, ironically smart-assed Seth Meyers had better wise up. Because his faux-ironic, nyah-nyah, finger-pointing bullshit is about to get old.

I’m saying this because attitudes have suddenly shifted about the #MeToo beheadings, and about Meyers, whose “Closer Look” essays on Late Night with Seth Meyers have revealed a guy who’s been having the time of his life with the Robespierre-like terror of the last several weeks. Let no one doubt that Meyers has been chowing down on this big-time, and has never indicated the slightest hint of a conflicted attitude about it.

But now he has to indicate this. Even if it pains him. Because the needle on the cultural richter scale has been ever-so-slightly moved by Daphne Merkin‘s 1.5 N.Y. Times op-ed piece, titled “Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings.”

The preying showbiz fiends who’ve made life miserable for so many women for so many years have been disciplined big-time, and there can be no response other than relief that the world is now becoming a kinder, more compassionate and less oppressive place. Predatory dino behavior hasn’t been permanently cancelled, but the perps are scared and hooray for that specific effect.

But other counter-disturbances have happened, and Merkin has put her finger on them.

“You can be sure that this weekend at the Golden Globes, Hollywood celebrities, not exactly known for their independent thinking, will turn the red carpet into a #MeToo moment replete with designer duds,” Merkin begins. “Many have promised to wear black dresses to protest the stream of allegations against industry moguls and actors. Perhaps Meryl Streep will get grilled — again — about what she knew about Harvey Weinstein. The rest of us will diligently follow along on Twitter, sharing hashtags and suitably pious opprobrium.

“But privately, I suspect, many of us, including many longstanding feminists, will be rolling our eyes, having had it with the reflexive and unnuanced sense of outrage that has accompanied this cause from its inception, turning a bona fide moment of moral accountability into a series of ad hoc and sometimes unproven accusations.

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In its review of Arrow’s The Apartment Bluray, DVD Beaver has posted some comparison images between it and MGM’s 2012 Apartment Bluray.

I’ve always noticed that the MGM Bluray is very slightly horizontally compressed or squeezed from the sides — faces are just a tad narrower than they should be. One comparison looks at a shot of an office lobby with a kind of global sphere on a pedestal. Obviously spheres are supposed be perfectly round, but the sphere in the MGM Bluray is clearly oblong.

(l.) Office lobby “sphere” (i.e., obviously oblong) as it appears in MGM’s 2012 Apartment Bluray; (r.) same sphere (not perfect circle but closer than MGM version) as it appears in Arrow’s new Apartment Bluray.

An essay called “Season of Assumption” was posted earlier today (1.6) by MCN’s David Poland. He begins by saying that “there has never been less plain talk in an Oscar season,” and then he dribbles the basketball for 19 or 20 paragraphs until he finally scores at the end.

“With ‘white movies,’ 10 or so crash and that leaves 30 in play,” Poland says. “In ‘POC movies’ you lose one and you’re down to three. Detroit gets waylaid and you’re down to two. Mudbound gets Netflix-sidebarred and then there’s only Get Out. And suddenly, the entire issue of race at the Academy comes down to a horror-comedy-thriller from a first-time director.

“That’s crazy. No matter how much you love Get Out or see the social discussion as the focus of the film…whether it gets nominated or not…crazy. It’s also crazy to argue that if Get Out isn’t included in the Best Picture nominees that racism is primarily responsible.”

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Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that his vocabulary is roughly that of a 15 year-old who gets poor grades. That plus his compulsive boasting bullshit is the primary reason why his patter often sounds so pathetic.

“Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he tweeted early this morning. He claimed to be a “VERY successful businessman” and TV star who’d won the White House on his first attempt. “I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius…and a very stable genius at that!”

If Trump had said “unusually intuitive” instead of “like, really smart”, he wouldn’t have been half-wrong. However destructive or demonic they may be, Trump’s intuitive perceptions about political trends and tweet-currents have connected with and inflamed his dumbshit base (i.e., the lower 30%). He does seem to have an intuitive understanding of how to manipulate topics and blood-level prejudices in this particular arena.

Alas, the words “intuition” and “intuitive” didn’t occur when he tweeted the above, and now he’s once again reminded tens of millions what a true-blue moron sounds like.

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Three hours ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitchposted a q & a with “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff. The topic, naturally, is Wolff’s response to the oolah-boolah of the last 72 hours. Unlike Trump, Wolff sounds as if he’s dealing with the hailstorm in a reasonably adult fashion.

The excerpt that caught everyone’s attention concerned the all-but-inevitable movie or miniseries adaptation. Abramovitch: “What’s the situation with the movie and TV rights to the book?” Wolff: “Let me not answer that at the moment. I can say at this point no deal, but lots of things happening.”

I will fall over backwards in my chair if the Fire and Fury movie doesn’t turn out to be a Jay Roach-Danny Strong collaboration for HBO….please! And the sooner the better.

The just-right quality of Roach and Strong’s Game Change (HBO 2012), an expert, carefully measured saga of the Sarah Palin campaign meltdown of ’08 with note-perfect performances from Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson (as John McCain‘s campaign manager Steve Schmidt), not to mention Recount (HBO, 2008), Roach and Strong’s brilliant distilling of the 2000 Florida recount calamity, make this a mandatory scenario.

Getting the right actor to play Trump will obviously be crucial. The performance will have to be delivered with an absolute aversion to broad caricature. He’ll have to look and sound right, but the acting will have to be on the level of Anthony Hopkins‘ wounded-wildebeest portrayal in Oliver Stone‘s Nixon or Jason Robards‘ performance as Ben Bradlee in All The President’s Men. A flailing orangutan in a constant crisis mode, of course, but with an undertow of little-boy panic and matter-of-fact sadness. An American tragedy inflated into an epic-scaled calamity.

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Two days ago I re-posted my 9.3.17 review of Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water. I hadn’t mentioned the Oscar-tipped Fox Searchlight release since it opened on 12.8, and it was time to hear some reactions.

Same deal now with Aaron Sorkin‘s Molly’s Game, which opened on 12.25.17 or 11 days ago. I posted a slapshot Toronto Film Festival “review” on 9.8.17, or three and half months before anyone had seen it. So here it is again. Those who’ve seen this motormouthed legal drama are invited to weigh in.

Tweeted on 9.8.17 at 9:30 pm: “Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game is an edgy, brutally complex, hard-driving motormouth thing with some excellent scenes, but the only people I cared about were Idris Elba‘s attorney (i.e., defending Jessica Chastain‘s Molly Bloom on illegal gambling charges), Elba’s pretty daughter and Kevin Costner’s dad character during a third-act park-bench scene with Chastain.

“I didn’t care about anyone else, and I basically found the whole thing, despite the very brainy writing, extremely fleet editing, the scrupulous attention paid to character shading plus that little sapling sticking out of the snow (a metaphor for unfair or random fate)…I found this whipsmart film demanding, not very nourishing and finally exhausting and soul-draining.”

Morning after #1:  Remember that high-velocity, rat-a-tat breakup scene beteeen Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara in The Social Network, which Sorkin also wrote? Molly’s Game is like that all the way through.  You can feel yourself start to wilt.

Morning after #2:  Chastain is so arch, clipped and super-brittle (this is more or less Miss Sloane 2), you just give up after a while.  Elba has a great rhetorical sum-up scene with prosecutors near the end, but is otherwise trapped in a game of verbal ping-pong.  And the various high-rollers who populate the gambling scenes (movie stars, heirs, hedge-fund guys, Russian mobsters) inspire one emotion — loathing.  I hate guys like this, and I have to spend two hours with a whole string of them?

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Michael Wolff‘s “Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House” went on sale this morning at 9 am Pacific. I wanted a hardbound copy to have and hold, but I had this idea that others had the same thought and there’d be a line of 30 or 40 people outside Book Soup on Sunset. So I arrived at 8:30 am, and I was the third guy there. By the time the door opened there were eight or nine of us. No biggie.

I haven’t had time to sink into it, but I did a little skimming over breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien. I found a sentence with a missing word on page 3. “This was the job Bannon a week later” should read “”This was the job Bannon had a week later.”

It’s a fast, easy read — 310 pages — and it feels light when you pick it up. I don’t know where I got the idea that it would run 500 or 600 pages. Wolff got what he got from 200 interviews, and it only represents about 11 months in the saga — Election Day to October ’17 or thereabouts. It’s basically the Steve Bannon story, and the portions I’ve read are…I don’t want to use the word “hilarious” but so much of it is WTF-level.

It ends as follows: “Trump, in Bannon’s view, was a chapter, or even a detour, in the Trump revolution, which had always been about weaknesses in the two parties. The Trump presidency — however long it lasted — had created the opening that would provide true outsiders their opportunity. Trump was just the beginning.”

The Book Soup site is announcing that they’ve sold out of “Fire and Fury,” and that more copies will arrive in Monday, 1.8.

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Barack Obama will be the first guest on David Letterman‘s new six-episode Netflix series, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. The hour-long Obama episode will begin streaming on Friday, 1.12. The remaining five episodes will appear over the next five months.

My first reactions to the Obama booking? I really don’t think he’s doing the country any favors with his light-dab, almost hands-offy comments about the ongoing psychodrama at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Just like he avoided mentioning the Russian intel situation in the weeks before the ’16 election. He’ll probably skirt it again with Letterman, and that’ll be a shame. There’s a madman in the White House so enough with the cheerful smoothie thing, the “I’m not President any more so I can kick back now and relax” routine.

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