I don’t know how many tens of thousands are into occasionally aging their iPhone snaps and videos with vintage effects, but I got the bug earlier this year. There’s something delicious about making high-def 1080 video look like crappy video from the ’80s. Or, better yet, like speckly 8mm film from the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s. Not to mention the option of choosing varying aspect ratios, but at the same time keeping the high-quality sound.

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Consider The Root‘s Michael Harriot properly bitchslapped and cut down to size in the wake of yesterday’s bizarre criticism of Pete Buttigieg. The Atlantic‘s John McWhorter has posted a response that’s half logical schooling and half WTF forehead-slapping.

I finally caught up with Jan Komasa‘s Corpus Christi four or five nights ago. I apologize for not mentioning it earlier because it’s a very fine, self-aware film with a poignant spiritual current.

It’s about a kind of spiritual impostor, a 20 year-old just released from a juvenile detention camp who pretends to be a priest when he arrives in a rural Polish village.

The irony is that this blue-eyed kid with a violent past (played by Bartosz Bielenia) gradually becomes the real thing — a comforting presence who stands up for decency, compassion and forgiveness, and whose influence seems to make a real difference to the local townspeople, especially in the matter of a recent DWI car accident that took the lives of several high-school-age youths.

Corpus Christi is basically saying that profound spiritual currents can manifest in almost anyone, and that some people have the God thing inside and some don’t. In this sense it’s a thoughtful discovery drama that stays with you.

Komasa’s film is the Polish entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. It premiered to positive reviews at the recent 2019 Venice Film Festival. It also played Toronto.

Corpus Christi reminds me of two English-language films with a vaguely similar stamp — Lawrence Kasdan‘s Mumford (99), about a popular small-town psychologist (Loren Dean) who’s gradually exposed as a fraud, and Bryan Forbes‘ Whistle Down The Wind (’61), about a young small-town girl (Hayley Mills) coming to believe that a bearded criminal hiding in her father’s barn (Alan Bates) is a reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

Corpus Christi is inspired by real events, but I don’t see how that matters one way or the other. It is what it is on its own terms.

Last weekend’s screening happened at San Vicente Bungalows. Producer Laura Bickford (Traffic, Che, Duplicity, Arbitrage) arranged it. I took the below photo during the after-party. (l. to r.) Cinematographer Piotr Sobocinski, Jr., director Jan Komasa, producer Aneta Hickinbotham.

Note: My “Komasa” spelling is correct.

Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite is his best film ever — no disputes. (Not even from this corner.) And it will almost certainly be Best Picture-nominated, partly because of the crafty, whipsmart direction but mainly because it addresses drastic income disparity, which is a major concern these days. A film that rides this horse makes the SJW crowd cream in their pants.

But when push comes to shove during Phase 2, Parasite won’t clear the final hurdle because of the five arguments I have with it, and which I posted on 10.14.19. [Posted after the jump.]

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Galloway is all cranked up about the Parasite possibility, but the odds of it winning the Best Picture Oscar…well, I’ve said it.

Best paragraph: “Voters must be convinced that a foreign-language film has a legitimate chance to win the Best Picture Oscar. Netflix may have shaken the walls with its Roma campaign, says one strategist. ‘It allowed people to consider this could be done‘ — that a foreign entry could become a key contender for best picture.’ Now Parasite must publicize its critical raves and audience exit scores to prove it’s no ordinary film.”

Here we go with another riff about Ana de Armas‘ Marta, the central character in Rian Johnson‘s Knives Out. No one needs to “address” the fact that she’s wearing the kind of pricey hipster pants (cuffs three or inches above the shoe line) that only upmarket, cutting-edge Millennial women and style-enslaved actresses wear. But it’s worth mentioning for good measure.

Given that Marta lives with her family in a smallish apartment, I think it’s fair to presume that she probably shops at Target or maybe Saks Fifth Off, and that even if she wanted to wear those pants they would be out of her budget range.

The bottom line, I’m presuming, is that de Armas wanted to look cool despite who Marta was and what her fashion tastes probably were and that Johnson, juggling 200 or 300 other things in his head as he prepared for principal photography…Johnson figured “sure, fine, why not?”

It’s not a crime that he approved these pants. Nobody in the world is complaining about them except me — I get that. Monica Castillo probably never even thought about them. But stuff like this sticks in my craw from time to time. It is what it is.

The Masterful Irishman is now HD streaming on Netflix. I’m sorry to acknowledge that the theatrical thing is more or less over, but happy to say I saw it three times in a first-rate theatre (Netflix screening room, the main Chinese, Westside Pavillion). Tens of millions who couldn’t drag their ass out to a theatre over the last three and a half weeks are finally having a looksee.

Critic Monica Castillo has penned a N.Y. Times opinion piece about how Knives Out, which everyone regards as a diverting whodunit in an Agatha Christie vein, made her feel rattled and vaguely threatened.

This is because Castillo felt a tribal kinship with Ana de Armas‘ Marta character, a South American immigrant who had worked as an assistant and care-giver for Christopher Plummer‘s rich paterfamilias (i.e., author Harlan Thrombey) before his apparent murder. Over the course of the investigation into his death, Marta has to fend off various needles and provocations that Castillo found upsetting.

The piece complains that Johnson was insensitive for subjecting Marta to certain snooty, aloof attitudes from various members of the wealthy Thrombey family. Castillo describes them as “the micro-aggressions [that] working-class immigrants face daily.” Which is a way of saying that Knives Out isn’t (ahem) woke enough.

Castillo blames Johnson, the “white and American-born” director-writer, for presenting Marta as an outsider standing on cultural eggshells, and suggests that if he were a nicer, gentler fellow he would have tried to infuse Knives Out with the woke-ier mindset of Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s Take Out and Jim McKay’s En el Séptimo Día, a pair of films that take a fuller measure of their immigrant characters.

Is Castillo saying that Johnson is using the Thrombey family members as spokespersons for his own belittling and/or dismissive attitudes about Latino immigrants? No, not exactly, but she seems to vaguely hint at this. Either way Johnson created the Thrombeys and their attitudes, she’s more or less saying, and must deal with the blowback.

How exactly has Johnson sinned?

He fails to specify Marta’s ethnic identity, for one. Because the Thrombeys are uncertain which South American country Marta is from, Johnson is passing along Anglo attitudes that “deny Marta a part of her cultural identity,” Castillo says, and in so doing “perpetuate the myth of Latino homogeneity, that our countries and customs are interchangeable, mashed together to fit neatly into a census box.”

The film also “takes pains to cast Marta as an outsider in other discomforting ways,” Castillo notes. “During a family argument, the youngest in the family, an alt-right troll, calls Marta an ethnic slur. In another scene, she’s called upon to clarify whether her family came to the United States legally, or ‘the right way,’ as one of the Thrombeys puts it. Another member of the family hints that he could have her mother deported because she’s undocumented. Several family members assert, patronizingly, to Marta that they have ‘always taken care of’ her.”