Summary: Joe Biden sounded sane, measured, calm, sensible, mature. Like always, Donald Trump deflected, denied, fantasized, etc. Barack Obama once allegedly described him as “a bullshitter” — check. What he’s always been, and incorrigible to boot.
Trump: “I do know they’re against pedophilia…they fight it very hard.” I think that might be a pull quote. Trump’s paranoid smoke about fake voting (“thousands of ballots dumped into a garbage can”) is completely unsupported by any serious reporting or known facts. Trump: “I [didn’t] want to panic this country…everybody’s going to die!” And he can’t remember when his last test was before his Covid announcement. (“I may have…”) Oh, and 85% of those who wear masks get the virus anyway. Have Trump’s views on mask-wearing changed since he himself got Covid? What about your tax debt? What about…forget it. This is a fact-free act, the usual smoke and pretense. Plus: “I’ve done a great job.” And it’s over.
Every time an allegedly exceptional, critically admired animated feature comes along, Oscar handicappers always say the same thing — “This film is so successful, so vital, so out-of-the-park engrossing and such an exception-to the rule that it deserves consideration as a Best Picture contender! It’s too good to to be confined to the Best Animated Feature category — it needs to leapfrog off that lily pad and stake its claim to Best Picture greatness!”
And every time this happens, Hollywood Elsewhere says “sorry but no…banal and simplistic as this may sound, animated features are not live action features and vice versa, and never the twain shall meet. And besides, what’s so terrible or diminishing about winning an Oscar in this category?”
This won’t stop the Soul cheering squad, but there’s really nothing further to discuss.
I’m not being derelict as far as seeing Kornél Mundruczó‘s Pieces of a Woman is concerned. Okay, I was derelict a while back as I failed to watch a limited-opportunity streaming version that I received during the Venice Film Festival. But I’ve asked Netflix to send me a link, etc.
“For 128 minutes, Vanessa Kirby has you hooked into her every move in Pieces of a Woman (Netflix, TBD). As Martha, a high-powered executive who loses her child during a harrowing home birth, Kirby mesmerizes by showcasing the human frailty and devastation that happens when tragedy comes knocking.
“Her acting tour-de-force reminded me of Gena Rowlands’ masterful work in John Cassavetes’ classic Woman Under the Influence (’74).” — from Jordan Ruimy’s 9.24 World of Reel review.
“The opening scene, shot in one 23-minute continuous take, took two days and six takes to shoot. Harrowing to watch, it sets up the stakes for the rest of the film, which flows magnificently well thanks to Mundruczo firm grasp of his narrative — his work here is a directorial high-wire act of the highest order. Kirby is an absolute Best Actress contender. Ellen Burstyn is excellent in the supporting role as well.”
The opening title appears after this scene ends, or roughly a half-hour into the film.
“Letter To You“, the first studio album by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band since High Hopes (which I frankly didn’t pay a great deal of attention to), pops on 10.23. I have the album, and have listened to…uhm, five tracks. The only one that got me excited is “Ghosts“, which was released on 9.24. A friend notes that “If I Was A Priest” and “Song For the Orphans” sound like Bob Dylan and TheBand — agreed. I’ve listened twice to an anti-Trump called “Rainmaker” — good, not great.
Herewith an elegant trailer for Francis Lee‘s Ammonite. Delicate, well-judged, nicely balanced. Lionsgate had planned to give Ammonite a limited theatrical debut on Friday, 11.13. This could happen.
Posted on 8.25.20: Observation #1: A close relation of Celine Sciamma‘s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, once again set near a beachy coastline in the distant past (Dorset in the 1840s), and once again about a lesbian love affair between tightly-corseted, socially restricted women who wear their hair in buns.
Observation #2: A bit of a May-December romance with 43 year-old Winslet (now 44) as the real-life fossil-searcher and paleontologist Mary Anning, who was born in 1799 and died in 1847. 26 year-old Saoirse Ronan (25 during filming) plays geologist Charlotte Murchison, whose husband, Roderick Impey Murchison, paid Anning to take care of her for a brief period.
Except the 1840s romance that allegedly occured wasn’t a May-December thing. Murchison was actually 11 years older than Anning, having been born on April 18, 1788. She was therefore in her early 50s and not, as the film has it, in her mid 20s. Furthermore Roderick Murchison wasn’t, as the film indicates, some kind of patronizing sexist twit who regarded his wife as a fragile emotional invalid who needed looking after. The Murchisons were actually partners in their geological studies; they travelled all over Europe together.
Charlotte Murchison lived to age 80; poor Mary Anning passed from breast cancer at age 47 or 48.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow? Raze out the written troubles of the brain? And with some sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart?
I’m not Rocky Sullivan because I haven’t done anything criminal or even “wrong” except in the minds of…I’d rather not say. But in the quiet lull before every award season…nope, can’t go there. I’ve never liked Angels With Dirty Faces (’38) because of that famous last scene. The ambiguity of it, I mean. The horror of dying yellow. I don’t know what I’m saying.
Jack Sholder and Bob Hunt‘s** The Hidden (’87) was easily the greatest and the weightiest New Line exploitation release of the ’80s. Because it had a great undercurrent. On the surface The Hidden (originally titled Hidden) was a lunatic sci-fi horror comedy about a slimey bug alien that takes over a series of human hosts, turning them into greedy heavy-metal freaks with a lust for hot cars, high speeds and ultra-violence.
What The Hidden was really serving, of course, was a greed-decade metaphor that was just as observant in terms of social portraiture as Oliver Stone‘s Wall Street (released the same year and less than two months after The Hidden opened on 10.22.87) or even for that matter Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (’13), which audiences loved for its crazy behaviors and excessive indulgences when it came along 26 years later.
Note to Quentin Tarantino and New Beverly Programmers: Wall Street and The Hidden on a double-bill someday…please.
The Hidden‘s idea was that something coarse and greedy and ravenous was spreading across the culture, but that it didn’t come from American family values or from the deregulatory capitalist free-for-all that Ronald Reagan had unleashed or from our own educational teachings or beliefs, but from an alien life form. Which of course let America off the hook…the monster made us do it! A brilliant concept that captured or reflected the current of the mid ’80s (written during the boom years and released only three days after Black Monday of 1987), and yet offered as urban escapism. Because it hid all of its social assessments and reflections inside exploitation tropes (car chases, bank robberies, shoot-outs, corrupt politicians).
This kind of slam-bang action film (“I want the car!”) comes along once in a blue moon, if that. The best horror thrillers are always the ones that try to double-track by “saying” something about the times from which they’ve come. I’m not saying this kind of film isn’t being attempted these days. Maybe they are. Examples?
