Day: October 28, 2020

Those Four Years

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Earlier today Rory h asked “what’s the absolute worst film to get a Best Picture nomination since the category was expanded? Extra points for picking one that isn’t Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Forget Rory’s perimeters — what were the least and most deserving Best Picture nominees in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012?

Least Deserving 2009 Best Picture Nominees: Precious, Based On The Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire and Inglourious Basterds.
Most Deserving 2009 Best Picture Nominees: The Hurt Locker, A Serious Man, Avatar, An Education, Up In The Air.

Least Deserving 2010 Best Picture Nominees: Toy Story 3, The King’s Speech, Inception, 127 Hours.
Most Deserving 2010 Best Picture Nominees: The Social Network, Black Swan, The Kids Are All Right.

Least Deserving 2011 Best Picture Nominees: The Artist, War Horse, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Hugo, The Help.
Most Deserving 2011 Best Picture Nominees: Moneyball, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris.

Least Deserving 2012 Best Picture Nominees: Life of Pi, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Lincoln.
Most Deserving 2012 Best Picture Nominees: Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook, Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Creative Huddle

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Just a reminder that Adam Wingard‘s Godzilla vs. Kong, which wrapped almost a full year before the pandemic enfolded everything and everyone last March, is still planning to open on 5.21.21. Pic stars Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Jessica Henwick, Julian Dennison, Kyle Chandler and Demián Bichir.

Then again Dr. Fauci said today that the world probably won’t be achieving a semblance of normal until 2022. The U.S. will have a vaccine in the next few months, he said, but there’s a chance a “substantial proportion of the people” won’t be vaccinated until the second or third quarter of 2021. Remember last spring (i.e., “the good old days”) when everyone was saying the pandemic probably wouldn’t start to lift until the late fall of ’20?


On the set of 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, director Ishirō Honda confers with Shoichi Hirose (guy inside Kong suit) and Haruo Nakajima (guy inside Godzilla suit).

Where Is The Honor?

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So Neo’s wearing a tennisball cut in Lana Wachowski‘s currently filming The Matrix 4. I realize I’ve never conveyed anything in the way of specific, adult-level reasoning, but there’s just something about a tennisball coif that rubs me the wrong way. Part of my concern in this instance is the fact that Keanu Reeves‘ follicles are a little too sparse.

And why make another Matrix movie at all? After the dual debacles of The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, which opened and collapsed 17 years ago to moans of regret and embarassment, where’s the honor in dredging it all up again? What are the odds that the newbie restores even a fraction of the mystique of the original The Matrix, which opened on 3.31.99? I’ll never forget catching it for the first time at a commercial screening at the Beverly Connection plex. I came out levitating.

Keanu Reeves was 33 or 34 when The Matrix was filmed in ’98. The film suggested that he was 25 or 26, somewhere in that realm. Neo would therefore be in his mid 40s in The Matrix 4. I’ll allow that Reeves appears to be in fairly good shape these days. He’s lost that beefiness that he’s been sporting in the John Wick films. But he’s kept the scraggly whiskers.

Project Ice Cream began principal photography in San Francisco on 2.4.20. Shooting was halted on 3.16.20 due to Covid. Shooting resumed in Berlin sometime last August. The Matrix 4 is expected to open on 12.22.21.

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Straight Shooters

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There’s a movement afoot to launch a contra-Gold Derby Oscar Prediction chart, called Straight Shooters. The idea is to spitball the Oscars without the wokester filter — to resist the political stuff (or at least not to bow down in a kneejerk fashion), and to adopt a grounded and sensible ars gratia artis perspective.

Which would mean what exactly? Well, Straight Shooter members wouldn’t necessarily celebrate a film solely because it embraces POC, LGBTQ or woke female perspectives, although they might. Nor would they necessarily discount a film by an older white director or a performance by an older white actor or a film with a white-centric focus in general (i.e., Mank).

In a perfect incarnation, Straight Shooters would be about keeping wokester politics out of it, and letting the pure love of great films and exceptional film technique and world-class acting shine through.

People who may deserve to be Oscar-nominated wouldn’t be nominated strictly because of their ethnicity or gender or sexual identity. Or not be nominated for same. They would hopefully be championed or promoted because they’ve done excellent work. No one should be necessarily celebrated because of an absence of alignment with progressive causes, but at the same time a certain political ingredient or metaphor needn’t be a problem or an obstruction.

It could well turn out that most of the Straight Shooters might project Nomadland to win the Best Picture Oscar and Chloe Zhao to win Best Director. (As I currently am.) But they wouldn’t be required to support same because of Nomadland‘s subject or Zhao’s gender and ethnicity.

Straight Shooters would represent a symbolic unlocking of the handcuffs, and throwing off the politically correct ball and chain. People would be free to support who they want to support regardless of whatever p.c. points are involved. These estimations may in some instances (and perhaps more than a few) align with the predictable Oscar preferences of certain parties. Or not.

The point would be to judge films and performances as if it was 1988 or 1997 or 2005 or 2009 or 2014…to assess the best and the brightness without the demands or requirements of political correctness mucking everything up.

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“The under-40 crowd has invested Race, Gender and Sexuality with a kind of cosmic significance. It doesn’t mean a lot to them — it means everything to them. Indeed, much of their conversation and writing seems to always come back to it.” — from “New Academy Kidz Aren’t Concerned With Whole Equation”, posted on 2.26.18.

McBride on Coming “Mank” Discussion

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Received last night from Joseph McBride, author of “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career” (2006) and two other books about Welles; and cast member of The Other Side of the Wind:

“I am reserving judgment on Mank until I see it, as I always do with films. I am glad to know David Fincher and Eric Roth evidently have reworked Jack Fincher’s 1994 script, which was factually inaccurate about Orson Welles’ contribution to the screenplay of Citizen Kane.

“Film historian Robert Carringer’s research into the seven drafts of the screenplay in his 1978 Critical Inquiry essay ‘The Scripts of Citizen Kane‘ — the kind of research Pauline Kael did not bother to do — proved that the screen credit is correct: ‘Original Screen Play / Herman J. Mankiewicz / Orson Welles.’

“However, I am dismayed that Herman’s grandson Ben Mankiewicz continues to be allowed by TCM and CBS to spread lies about the script, denigrating and minimizing Welles’s contribution. I guess they don’t have fact-checkers, but then the fabled New Yorker fact-checking department fell down on the job when the magazine published Kael’s article (‘Raising Kane’) in 1971.

“[Kael] called me the day it first appeared to discuss it, and I wrote a response in Film Heritage, ‘Rough Sledding with Pauline Kael.’ Andrew Sarris wrote that I was the first scholar to study Mankiewicz’s contribution in detail, in an appendix to my essay on Kane in my 1968 book ‘Persistence of Vision: A Collection OF Film Criticism.’

“I am very, very tired of writing about this controversy over the script credit, having done so for the last 49 years, and I hope I won’t have to do it again but am concerned that I may be doing so for another 49 years.

“My role in this mishegoss has always been to try to keep the historical record accurate, as Carringer and others have also done. Perhaps the final version of Mank will handle the matter fairly; at least I hope so. In the meantime, I refer readers to my essay on the subject, ‘The Screenplay as Genre,’ in the 2009 Harvard University Press book ‘A New Literary History of America’. edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, and to Carringer’s research on the subject.

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Misses The Mark

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HE: “This satirical ad makes some fairly astute points…’some’. But some of what she’s saying is really Trump Ugly. Mailboxes have been removed, etc. It’s basically saying that there’s a certain rhyme and rationale (and reasons that are not entirely crazy) for supporting an obviously ignorant and delusional liar and sociopathic bullshitter who winks at white racism, appoints corporate-level criminals and buccaneers and wealthy-donor idiots like Betsy DeVoss to cabinet positions, and who worsened the Covid crisis tenfold.

“It’s saying that because wokesters are Orwellian ogres and blacklisters (which they most certainly are), Trump isn’t so bad. And that’s fucking CRAZY.”

Journo pally who sent me the link: “In your world, yes. Not in mine. I am truly frightened by what is about to happen at the hands of the wokester left and you should be too. You are willfully ignoring the threat.”

Repeated Behaviors

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A mentally challenged guy with a knife approaches some Philly cops, and ignores their orders to “drop the weapon.” Do they taze or otherwise overpower and cuff him? Of course not — they shoot him over ten times, sending him to God. Brilliant!

And now radical white wokesters and BLM rage hounds are back in the streets — burning cars, throwing rocks at cops, trashing small business, etc. Terrific!

If I were king I would stock and pillory the trigger-happy cops and wokester shitheads side by side, in urban neighborhoods across the country. I would also request good citizens to pelt them with rotten eggs, tomatoes and brown squishy bananas during lunch hour.

10.27 N.Y. Times story by John Hurdle: “The victim’s father, Walter Wallace Sr., urged looters to stop. ‘It will leave a bad scar on my son, with all this looting and chaos,’ Mr. Wallace said in an interview on CNN. ‘This is where we live, and it’s the only community resource we have, and if we take all the resource and burn it down, we don’t have anything.”

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