Month: December 2019

From yesterday’s “BOFCA Showoffs” comment thread, posted last night: “The scolds on this thread are aware of the fact that prominent genre-level performances (i.e., leads in rowdy-dude comedies, CG space fantasies, heist flicks, randy romcoms, rowdy-girl comedies, whodunits, police-vs.-corrupt politician thrillers, Marvel or D.C. superhero sausage, action adventure spectacles, elevated horror films, zombie and monster flicks) are almost never singled out for year-end acting awards.

“Every now and then this kind of performance will win an Oscar (Gene Hackman in The French Connection) but for the most part it doesn’t. Remember that Joker is not a run-of-the-mill D.C. film but a moody portrait of urban nihilism and despair, so if Joaquin Phoenix wins it won’t count.

“There’s a reason, of course, why Oscar and critic-awards trophies are rarely given for genre-level performances. That’s because these performances are almost never about exposing the underbelly or parting the clouds or shedding light on some aspect of the human condition or experience, and are almost always about merely serving genre requirements or expectations. Because that’s all the scripts usually allow them to do.

“This is what Lupita Nyongo’s Us performance, however unusual or inventive, essentially does. It’s a stand-out, agreed, but it operates within a restricted arena.

“The scolds know this, but they have to play their games.”

Bobby Peru replies: “Absolutely not. It’s a parting of the clouds performance. Let me explain it to you:

“It is about the human tendency to push down our demons until they threaten to overtake us; to subvert our secret selves. It is about how the past always comes back to reclaim us if we do not deal with it. It is about reconciling our dark sides and figuring out which parts are really us. It is about overcoming those demons, however painful they may be.

“It is a hell of a performance and [a hell of a] character. That’s why it’s winning while you sit there stamping your feet. I can’t believe that you missed all of the above and are still determined to tell the rest of us there’s nothing there.”

HE to Peru: “I’m not saying there’s ‘nothing there.’ I’m saying (a) it’s basically a genre performance, (b) that Lupita’s zombie doppelganger is mainly about bugging her eyes out and speaking in a choked, raspy voice, (c) that Jordan Peele‘s script is more creatively noteworthy, and (d) that maybe some of you might want to come up for some air.”

It looks as if Terrence Malick‘s A Hidden Life (Fox Searchlight, 12.13) is dead, dead, dead all over. I’m sorry that it doesn’t appear likely to hang on a bit longer, but I’m not surprised. Malick has been burning his once–loyal (or at the very least intrigued) audience for years. And yet attention ought to be paid. For the eye-bath cinematography if nothing else. A little award-season action would help, but nothing’s happening. Tough deal, cold cards.

From “Malick’s ‘Hidden Life’ — Same Old Wackadoodle,” posted from Cannes on 5.19.19:

“The idea, then, was that A Hidden Life might represent a return to a kind of filmmaking that Malick hadn’t really embraced since these two films (respectively 14 and 20 years old), or perhaps even since Days of Heaven, which was shot 43 years ago and released in the fall of ’78.

“Because over the last decade (and I wish this were not so) Malick has made and released four story-less, mapped-out but improvised dandelion-fuzz movies — The Tree of Life (’10), To The Wonder (’12), Knight of Cups (’15) and Song to Song (’17).

“The fact that The Tree of Life was widely regarded as the first and best of Malick’s dandelion fuzzies (the principal traits being a meditative, interior-dreamscape current plus whispered narration, no “dialogue” to speak of and Emmanuel Lubezski cinematography that captures the wondrous natural beauty of God’s kingdom)…the fact that The Tree of Life was the finest of these doesn’t change what it basically is.

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To Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, the reason Clint Eastwood made Richard Jewell “couldn’t be more obvious: to demonize the same forces Donald Trump is now in the business of demonizing.

“Richard Jewell is a drama that piggybacks on Trump’s demagoguery. The movie says that the mainstream media can’t be trusted, and that even the government’s top law enforcement agency will railroad you. And Jewell himself is the pudgy-soul-of-the-heartland, ordinary American white-guy yokel who gets used and abused by these corrupt institutions, with no one to look out for him.

“The movie treats him as a symbolic Trump supporter. Yet Eastwood, pretending to be a crusader for justice, would never come close to applying the same standard of truth and honor to the institutions that defend Donald Trump.

“The chief lesson of the Jewell saga should be that rumor, innuendo, and accusation without evidence are egregious — and that what matters, more than anything, is the truth.

Gleiberman wonders “how does [Eastwood] feel about Trump’s daily distortions of the truth? Trump’s lies about his own misbehavior? The baseless accusations he hurls at others? Should the Atlanta Journal-Constitution be vilified for its honest mistakes in judgment during the Jewell case, and Trump — or his chief propaganda organ, Fox News — be given a free ride? Why isn’t noble, straight-as-an-oak-tree Clint Eastwood making a movie about that?”

Hollywood Elsewhere returned to Mexico today, specifically to the Baja Oral Center in Tijuana. My first-rate dentist, Dr. Luis Garcia, gave me a great-looking crown. (BTW he likes The Irishman and Parasite, hasn’t seen Dolor y Gloria, and was a tiny bit meh on Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.) West Hollywood to TJ took a bit more than three hours; Mexican authorities just wave you through sans passport. Although my appointment was at 12 noon, I arrived at 11:20 am. I then faced a grueling four-hour drive back (1 to 5 pm). If I’d caught the southbound Amtrak Surfliner at Union Station I could’ve gotten some work done.

The Boston Online Films Critics Association (BOFCA) has awarded its Best Actor trophy to Uncut Gems‘ Adam Sandler…brave, brazen, approved. They’ve also handed their Best Actress prize to Us‘s Lupita Nyong’o…this is just a cool kidz pile-on now.

What happened to Diane‘s Mary Kay Place, fellas? A film shot in your own backyard and you forgot?

Little Women‘s Florence Pugh is 2019’s Best Supporting Actress? In what galaxy?

They’ve also declared in their ten best of 2019 list that Uncut Gems is a better or at least more noteworthy film than The Irishman…ludicrous. The BOFCA gang is just looking for attention.

HE to BOFCA: Show some Parasite restraint, fellas. Did you happen to see Les Miserables, by any chance? A more resonant, more sanely plotted foreign-language film than Parasite, in case you’re wondering. But of course you’re not.

The beast-destroyer who will protect all bumblefucks and erase all libtards. Team Trump’s message isn’t unambiguously perverse as much as…surreal? They’ve taken the message well beyond the realm of that legendary wolf-and-sheep New Yorker cartoon.

On 2.4.20 Kino Lorber will issue a 4K restoration Bluray of Russell Rouse‘s The Oscar (’66). I tried watching it once, but A couldn’t get past the first hour. It’s basically a Joseph E. Levine horror flick about a ruthless actor (Stephen Boyd‘s Frankie Fane) who claws his way to the top, etc. The dialogue and especially the performances are drop-dead awful. Some enjoy watching bottom-of-the-barrel films, but not me. A director friend says the commentary track by Josh Olson and Patton Oswalt “promises to be one for the ages.” Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson provide another commentary track.

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Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables (Amazon, 1.10.20) is the official French nominee for the 2020 Best International Feature Oscar, having nudged aside Celine Sciamma‘s much-admired Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It was my favorite film at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, and the film I’d most like to see win the foreign Oscar on 2.9.20.

I know Parasite has it in the bag but Ladj Ly‘s film is just as socially incisive as Bong Joon-ho‘s, and it has no insane story-logic issues. And a much better ending. It would be a major miscarriage of artistic justice if Les Miserables doesn’t at least emerge as one of the Best International Feature Oscar nominees.

The other day I stopped by West Hollywood’s Sunset Marquis for a brief sit-down with Ladj Ly. Or rather with the non-English-speaking Ladj and his interpreter. Two on the couch, one (me) on a nearby chair.

Ladj struck me as a sea of calm. Settled, unhurried, matter of fact, good eye contact. Reluctant to smile too quickly or easily, but when he smiles it counts. His English sucks as badly as my French, which naturally put me at ease.

So we had a nice, easygoing chat but I never got a quote as good as the one Ladj gave the N.Y. Times the other day, so here it is: “I was inspired by my own history. Everything in the film comes from my life, from beginning to end. It’s a sort of autobiography, and a witnessing. I tried to make a film that resembles [the community that I live in]. To live in these towers — it’s violent, it’s degrading.”

Set in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, a poor but tightly-knit African Muslim community (where Ladj grew up and still lives), it offers a jolting contemporary echo of the cruelty, harassment and oppression that ignited Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel, this time rooted in police brutality and racial animus.

Written by Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and brilliantly shot by Julien Poupard, Les Miserables feels like a rough-and-tumble Antoine Fuqua film, using the basic dynamic of Training Day (but with three cops instead of two) plus a Little Do The Right Thing plus a constant stream of anxious urban energy. And with an open-ended existential ending that resembles the finale of Danis Tanovic‘s No Man’s Land. Or, if you will, the last two or three minutes of Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation.

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4K, 60 frames per second…watch this full screen or better yet mirrored on your 4K big-screen. I’ve been to this region of Switzerland twice and have driven this exact same road (Grundelwald to Lauterbrunnen and beyond) and have gotten misty-eyed both times. If you’re at all receptive to God’s architecture this video will put you into state of a meditative awe. I love that no one has narrated with the usual rambling blah-blah.