It’s not that I disapprove of Sergey Dvortsevoy‘s Ayka (Kazakhstan), which is ninth on the list — I just haven’t seen it.
HE strongly disapproves, however, of the Academy having blown off Lukas Dhont‘s Girl (Netflix). Winner of Un Certain Regard performance award and the Camera d’Or prize, Girl is the most finely assembled and emotionally affecting drama about a transgender person I’ve ever seen.
In his review of Vice, Variety‘s Owen Glieberman complains that Adam McKay‘s film never answers the big question, which is “who is Dick Cheney? How did he get to be the singular domineering bureaucrat-scoundrel he is? What is it that makes this scheming man tick?”
Gleiberman hasn’t been paying close attention. There’s one simple answer, not just about Cheney but all conservatives. The answer is ice-cold fear.
Fear of the dark and terrible unknown. Fear of the beast. Cheney needs to keep that bugger away from this doorstep. He woke up one day and felt the hot breath of the grizzly bear and saw that huge, terrible claw about to come down and rip half of his face off, and Cheney screamed and said “no! I won’t be destroyed! I will instead become the bear and I will snarl and smite others, and they will bow down and show obeisance before my power, and that will make me safer. Me and my fellow grizzlies. It’s a kill-or-be-killed world out there, and you simply have to decide which kind of animal you are.”
HE to Gleiberman: Now you know.
Another way of examining Cheney is that he became the bear to hold onto Lynne Vincent, a young Wyoming girl who became his wife.
N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott: “The way Vice tells it, Dick Cheney, who would go on to become the most powerful vice president in American history, started out as a young man in a hurry to nowhere in particular. After washing out of Yale, he retreated to his home state of Wyoming, pursuing his interests in booze and cigarettes and working as a utility-company lineman on the side. Dick was saved from ruin — or at least from the kind of drab destiny unlikely to result in a biopic — by the stern intervention of his fiancée, Lynne Vincent, who told her wayward beau that they were finished unless he pulled himself together.
“Her reading of the romantic riot act would have far-reaching consequences. In that pivotal moment, Dick (Christian Bale) looks Lynne (Amy Adams) in the eye and swears he’ll never disappoint her again. The thesis of this film, written and directed by Adam McKay, is that Dick kept his promise. And that everyone else — including his daughter Mary (Alison Pill), thousands of American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and just about everyone on the planet with a care for justice, democracy or simple human decency — paid the price.”
Most Americans are not, for the most part, into catching new movies at the local plex. Partly because they’re streaming films at home, okay, but mainly because they’re lazy, low-energy, heavy-lidded types.
A recent Statista chart shows that one out of five Americans will pay to visit a megaplex about once a month. These are your basic go-getters, life-gulpers, active adventurers, and vigorous content-streamers at home. People with a pulse generally watch a lot of films, read lots of books, go on hikes, go out to restaurants, visit Paris or Rome every three or four years and so on.
Put another way, one in five are awake and alive with a gleam in their eye and the rest are on life support — sleeping a lot, eating shitty foods, wearing hush puppies, taking naps on the couch and walking around with glazed-over expressions.
“A new study conducted by EY’s Quantitative Economics and Statistics group finds that people who go to movies in theaters more frequently also consume more streaming content,” Lang reports. “That flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of box office sages, who grimly ascribe flatlining theatrical attendance to the growing popularity of digital entertainment companies.
“If the study’s findings are accurate, it would appear that the two forms of entertainment consumption are more complementary than cannibalistic. The study found, for instance, that respondents who visited a movie theater nine times or more in the last 12 months consumed more streaming content than consumers who visited a movie theater only once or twice over the past year. Those who saw nine or more movies at the cinema averaged 11 hours of weekly streaming compared to the seven hours of streaming reported on average by those who saw one to two movies at the multiplexes.”
Bottom line: Most Americans are living dead-to-the-world lives, but 20% are going for the gusto. Either way Netflix isn’t discouraging movie-theatre attendance all that much.
It’s a critical cliche to praise a performance along the lines of “this isn’t acting but a channeling…a complete psychological and biological submission.” This certainly describes Christian Bale‘s must-see performance as former vice-president Dick Cheney in Adam McKay‘s Vice — no question. But I’m persuaded that even in this realm Bale has gone above and beyond.
I haven’t felt the same kind of chills since Robert De Niro‘s Oscar-winning performance as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (’80), except this time I felt a deeper recognition and…I don’t know, something extra.
Mainly because I feel I know Dick Cheney pretty well, certainly in terms of his appearance and voice and laid-back, Prince-of-Darkness attitude, and I wasn’t at all familiar with Jake La Motta when I first saw Raging Bull 38 years ago. I was deeply impressed (who wasn’t?) by De Niro’s coarse, bellowing Bronx-Italian shtick — that primal beastliness that he’d obviously drilled into, body and soul. But experiencing Bale’s Cheney was, for me, slightly more of an “oh, wow” or a “holy moley” thing.
It’s like De Niro’s La Motta was Elvis Presley in the mid ’50s, and now Bale’s Cheney is the Beatles during their first American tour, and De Niro has just sent Bale a cable saying “okay, the torch has been passed — I had a nice long run as the king of wholly transformative weight-gain performances, and now you’re the standard-bearer…hats off, due respect.”
There’s always a slight gap between knowing what a certain famous person looked, acted and sounded like and how this or that actor registers when trying to make a performance happen. There’s always that “uh-huh…yeah, pretty close, good work” kind of acknowledgment. And sometimes not so much. Every time an actor has tried to portray John F. Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood, Greg Kinnear, Cliff Robertson, William Devane, Martin Sheen, Caspar Phillipson, etc.), the chasm has been distracting if not irritating. But not in the matter of Bale-as-Cheney. Bale is up to something else.
You can say “hold on, calm down…this is the exact same current that I got from Charlize Theron‘s Aileen Wuornos in Monster, Bruno Ganz‘s Hitler in Downfall, Ben Kingsley‘s lead performance in Gandhi, Meryl Streep-as-Maggie Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Helen Mirren in The Queen,” etc.
Maybe, maybe not. All I can say is that I felt the appliance of skill and technique with each of these. Plus the presence of makeup or prosthetics. On top of which, as mentioned, I didn’t know the real-life characters as well as I do Cheney.
This Bananas scene used to be an amusing little hoot. Wait…who chuckled? I heard someone chuckling or at least tittering. Who did that? C’mon, fess up.
A few hours ago The Hollywood Reporter posted a Gary Baum-authored profile of former Woody Allen girlfriend Christina Engelhardt, and more precisely her eight-year relationship with the director-writer-actor-comedian that began in late ’76 and ended in ’84.
She was Allen’s secret sexual partner between the ages of 17 (although they first met when she was 16) and 24. No public dates, no dinners at Elaine’s — just furtive assignations at his Fifth Avenue apartment.
Engelhardt was one of two inspirations for Mariel Hemingway‘s Tracy character in Manhattan; the other was Stacey Nelkin, who hooked up with Allen when she was attending Stuyvesant High School in ’77 or thereabouts. Engelhardt tells Baum that she felt badly about how her Allen relationship came through in the film; it hurt to consider how Allen had objectified her or kept her at a distance.
But think about it — Tracy is the most centered and least neurotic or deceptive character in Manhattan.
Engelhardt’s Allen relationship was unequal and certainly exploitive on his end, but show me a relationship between any famous film-industry hotshot and any “civilian” that wasn’t similarly unfair or lopsided, especially in the context of the ’70s and ’80s when a whole different set of rules and assumptions were in effect.
Plus the Allen alliance opened a few doors. After they went their separate ways Engelhardt became a kind of half-employee and half-platonic muse for Federico Fellini. She’s currently working for producer Robert Evans and living in the Beverly Hills flats.
Baum’s article is smoothly written, carefully phrased, seemingly well-researched and for the most part fair-minded.
But at the same time a tad clueless. Because it applies a #MeToo filter to a story that happened during a time when urban upscale lah-lahs were frolicking in an almost I, Claudius-like culture that in some ways was more sexually impulsive and freewheeling and live-as-let-live than anything happening today. Which doesn’t seem quite fair.
The idea, at least on the part of Baum’s THR editor, seems to have been to “get” Allen by furthering the #MeToo-linked narrative that he used to be a manipulative and to some extent unscrupulous fellow who used his fame and power to get what he wanted from women. But Engelhardt doesn’t exactly cooperate with this goal. “I’m not attacking Woody,” she tells Baum. “This is not ‘bring down this man.’ I’m talking about my love story. This made me who I am. I have no regrets.”
Engelhardt was right in the thick of things when Allen began a somewhat committed relationship with Mia Farrow in ’80 or thereabouts. I’m using the term “somewhat” because Woody, Mia and Christine enjoyed a menage a trois thing for a while. Baum: “Despite the initial shock of jealousy, Engelhardt says she grew to like Farrow over the course of the ‘handful’ of three-way sex sessions that followed at Allen’s penthouse as they smoked joints and bonded over a shared fondness for animals.”
