Day: February 18, 2020

There are ten upcoming 2020 releases that smell like possible Best Picture material. To me anyway. David Fincher‘s Mank, Aaron Sorkin‘s Trial of the Chicago 7, Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel, Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater, Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, Joel Coen‘s Macbeth, Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, Leos Carax’s Annette, Paul Greengrass’s News of the World and Terrence Malick‘s The Last Planet. (10)

I know that Carax’s film…actually I know nothing except it’s a musical and Carax is crazy in a good way. I’m sensing that post-Parasite things suddenly feel a lot less constrained as far as Best Picture criteria are concerned. I know that Malick doesn’t do Oscar-aspiring films, but Planet is some kind of Jesus of Nazareth saga. (Almost certainly not geared for the Mel Gibson crowd.) I have a 12-year-old draft of Sorkin’s film — just received it today. I’ve read Mank, but I’d also love to read Blonde, Stillwater and News of the World.

Ana de Armas in Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde.

The somewhat-less-likelies include Chris Nolan‘s Tenet, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks, Denis Villenueve’s Dune, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, Edgar Wright’s Last Night In Soho, Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk, Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water and Liesl Tommy‘s Respect. (11)

Not to mention Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island. (4)

That’s 25 head-turners for starters. What am I missing, cream of the crop-wise?

Earlier this month I repeated a matter of common industry knowledge about Ben Affleck and Gavin O’Connor‘s The Way Back (Warner Bros., 3.6). Affleck has been famously struggling with alcohol issues for years, and so (in the realm of the film) is “Jack Cunningham”, a former basketball star who bends the elbow. The film is therefore self-portraiture to some extent.

Today a N.Y. Times profile of Affleck, written by Brooks Barnes, acknowledges the obvious and offers Affleck a forum by which to admit his past sins and express regrets.

The photos reveal that Affleck is no longer the “fat bearded boozer” he plays in O’Connor’s film. He’s sober (for now), shaven and relatively slender. Then again, as Barnes’ piece reports, Affleck has had three stints in rehab (in ’01, ’17 and ’18) and then he relapsed last fall.

Affleck admission #1: “I drank relatively normally for a long time. What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.

Affleck admission #2: “It’s not particularly healthy for me to obsess over the failures — the relapses — and beat myself up. I have certainly made mistakes. I have certainly done things that I regret. But you’ve got to pick yourself up, learn from it, learn some more, try to move forward.”

Affleck admission #3: “People with compulsive behavior, and I am one, have this kind of basic discomfort all the time…[they’re] trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can’t break. That’s at least what happened to me.”

Affleck admission #4: “Relapse is embarrassing, obviously. I wish it didn’t happen. I really wish it wasn’t on the internet for my kids to see. Jen and I did our best to address it and be honest.”

The Way Back opens two and a half weeks hence, but nobody I know has seen it.

Note: If I’m not mistaken the N.Y. Times used to capitalize the “i” in internet – no longer.

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