A good portion of the usual political discourse seems to have downshifted over the last couple of days. As if everyone is storing their energy for Big Tuesday. Not that anything final will be decided by 11.3 (or by the wee hours of 11.4), but it’ll be hugely exciting. As in historic, jubilant, appalling, melodramatic, enraging, glorious…possibly all at the same time.

Significant pushback from good people (i.e., friends) and bad has prompted me to junk HE’s proposed Straight Shooters Oscar handicap chart.

All I was suggesting was a forum that would predict Oscar contenders without the woke filter, as woke filters are everywhere. But nope, bad idea, can’t do that, will only make things worse. Okay, fine. I wasn’t married to the idea — just tossing it out there.

But full steam ahead on HE’s “I Just Ran Out of Bullshit.”

Journo pally: “To me, you’ve never written one thing in this era that is illegitimate. But then neither did Andrew Sullivan. Despite the wokeness (it sounds like the title of a Stephen King novel: ‘The Wokeness’), he seemed to be thriving at New York magazine. And then…no. They wanted him out. For the crime of having been fearlessly honest. Sometimes that’s all it takes now.

“Not sure what you should do, to be honest. Don’t neuter yourself, that’s for sure.”

After catching Mank in the late afternoon to early evening, I streamed Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari (A24, early ’21). I’d asked around and heard some mildly approving reactions. A Sundance-stamped, indie-level thing that works, they said. To my slight but welcome surprise it seemed better than that.

A hard-knocks family drama about a South Korean family trying to succeed at subsistence farming in 1980s Arkansas, it qualifies as a “modest” Spirit Awards thing. But something about Steven Yeun’s complex character (i.e., Jacob) and performance really got to me.

I’m speaking of a proud, obstinate man determined to make a stand and not be pushed around by bad luck. In moments of stress and self-doubt he’s clearly weighing two ways of responding to the situation. He may have chosen the wrong path, but he’s determined to stick to it regardless. That makes him a possibly tragic figure and definitely an interesting one.

I’m not sure if Yeun’s touching performance will yield a Best Actor nomination, but it could.

A while ago Variety‘s Clayton Davis was all excited about the possibility of Yeun possibly becoming the first Asian actor to be Oscar nominated for a lead role. That’s the wrong emphasis. Yeun has given a very strong and sad performance in a pretty good film, and he might snag a Best Actor nom for his trouble. But his South Korean heritage should be anecdotal, not a cornerstone of his campaign. Wokesters see it differently, of course.

I loved the grandmother (Youn Yuh-Jung) and the two kids (Alan Kim, Noel Kate Cho). Especially the little boy. And Paul (Will Patton), a flaky but good-hearted Jesus freak whom the somewhat insensitive Yeun doesn’t sufficiently respect. I dislike Christians for their evangelical leanings and support of Donald Trump, but if I was acquainted with one and he/she offered to pray for me, I would respond with respect and gratitude. Because such a gesture would mean a lot to them.

Jacob’s wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) is a good person but not exactly a portrait of steadfast marital support. She has this shitty, dismissive “I don’t like this” attitude from the get-go. They’re in a bad marriage.

I didn’t get the water situation. Jacob has bought (or rented?) a place with no water supply or sewage system? Isn’t is super-expensive to install your own sewage system and septic tank? Jacob presumably buys his own water heater, but in one scene he doesn’t have $500 to pay a professional well digger? Jaconb has drilled his own well with Patton’s assistance, but the water supply is limited — not enough nourish the crop and also provide shower water, kitchen water and whatnot.

For whatever reason my Apple TV mirroring system wasn’t working last night, and so I was forced to watch David Fincher‘s Mank — a film I’ve been looking forward to for many months, and particularly Eric Messerschmidt‘s silver-toned cinematography — on a 15-inch Macbook Pro. I’ve very sorry this happened. I’ve been hoping all along to catch it at a select theatrical venue of some kind (11.13), but with infections recently spiking that seems unlikely.

But at least I saw it, and for that I’m very grateful. Mank is obviously a brilliant, highly accomplished virtuoso act, and totally locked for several Oscar noms — Picture, Director (Fincher), Best Actor (Gary Oldman), Best Supporting Actress (Amanda Seyfried), Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, etc.

It hopscotches all around in a non-linear way, which of course is a tribute to the Citizen Kane scheme. I adored the use of clackety-clack scene descriptions dropping into the frame. And I loved re-hearing the line “it’s not the heat, it’s the humanity.” (Which apparently wasn’t written by Herman J. Mankiewicz but Alan Jay Lerner for Brigadoon.)

Mank is a very fine exercise in smarthouse entertainment. The nutritional value of the dialogue alone (written by Fincher’s late dad, Jack, in the mid ’90s, and then rewritten by his son and Eric Roth) should not be under-celebrated. Altogether the film didn’t quite levitate me off the ground, it did put me into a kind of subdued swoon mode — a certain form of aesthetic rapture that leaves you quietly stirred and pacified. That’s a fairly rare thing.

What’s the basic Mank arc? Basically that even for a self-destructive boozer like Herman J. Mankiewicz, life took a turn for the better when Orson Welles came calling. And that despite the political intrigues and whatnot, things worked out very nicely for an all-too-brief period. And at the end of the path came a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

Boozing issues aside, Mank is depicted in each and every scene as a humanist and a good guy — a man who sides with the weak and unlucky, with the less fortunate and downtrodden. He’s good company.

Oldman is wonderful. I was initially not looking forward to spending over two hours with a pot-bellied drunk, and the fact that he looks like a bloated 62 year old rather than a plump, dessicated 43 year-old didn’t thrill me. But Oldman’s charm and particularly that thin, raspy little voice tossing off one witticism after another…he simply won me over. I just fell for the whirling patter and verbal derring-do.

It would be wonderful if Mank winds up winning the Best Picture Oscar. HE personally approves of this scenario. And yet even the staunchest admirers will have to admit it’s not exactly audience-friendly in the buttered-popcorn sense of that term. Unless, of course, sharp direction, whipsmart writing, superb production design and immaculate performances top to bottom get to you on a primal level. (As they do me.) In which case Mank is about as audience friendly as a classic Hollywood film could possibly be.

First and foremost Mank has been made by and for film monks — smartypants types, devotional cineastes, those with a general sense of X-factor sophistication. That probably leaves out a certain portion of the community who will bestow earnest praise for its technical accomplishments. We all know what that means.

Mank is not just about the writing of the Citizen Kane script, which the film definitely credits Mankiewicz with the lion’s share of the credit. Welles pruned and streamlined, it says, and of course directed the film magnificently.

Earlier today an industry pally asked if I’d be weighing in on Jodie Turner Smith playing Anne Boleyn. I shrugged and muttered to myself, “What’s the point?” Then a producer chum wrote about this and urged “just ignore it…it probably won’t work anyway.”

This may come as a shock to some, but there used to be a kind of standardized approach when it came to making historical films. The idea (and I know it sounds eccentric by today’s standards) was that depictions of this or that era would strive not just for historical accuracy in the usual ways but (are you sitting down?) to some extent culturally, atmospherically and psychologically exotic. That is to say different from our own. And when I say “different,” I mean insufficiently evolved.

There’s no avoiding what might be called the projection syndrome, or depicting historical realms so they resonãte with contemporary audiences. No historical film has ever been purely submissive to recorded history. Hollywood’s been allowing present-tense attitudes to seep into historical flicks for over a century now. But once upon a time certain aspiring filmmakers used to at least try to convince you that characters in their films probably looked and talked like their real-life counterparts did back in the day.

I’m not talking about Michael Curtiz‘s Robin Hood or Richard Thorpe‘s phoney-baloney Ivanhoe, of course, or Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Sign of the Cross or Samson and Delilah or Rudolph Mate‘s The Black Shield of Falworth or Dick Powell‘s The Conqueror, all of which were applications of broadly winking kitsch.

But some films have at least appeared to try for seemingly realistic presentations of this or that historical time period. Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon (’75), for one. Or Fred Zinneman‘s A Man For All Seasons. Or Philip Borsos‘ The Grey Fox (’82).

Recent exceptions like The Favourite aside, the Kubrick approach has pretty much been thrown out the window. Multicultural, color-blind, Hamilton-styled casting has been embedded for the last five or six years now, and for the most part there’s just no interest in doing anything other than to re-imagine history according to current standards and aspirations.

The main idea is to not just recreate history but progressively correct it, and thereby make things safe for future generations.

Plus the style of acting (i.e., behaving) and speaking in whatever role and by whichever actor is all 21st Century these days. Very few, it seems, will even attempt to sound “period”, and those that do don’t have the chops to make it work. I’m happy to say Ethan Hawke is not one of them. The other night I finally caught episode #1 of Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird, and his John Brown is worth the price.

I knew that Michael Mann‘s Last of the Mohicans had been given a certain cultural spin, but the historical authority was brilliant and Daniel Day Lewis Hawkeye was magnificent. Did the actual Marcus Brutus look and sound at all like James Mason in Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Julius Caesar? Highly doubtful, but I bought the performance for the skill and discipline that Mason deployed. Did Henry II sound like Peter O’Toole‘s versions in Becket and The Lion in Winter? Perhaps Probably not, but there was no trouble believing that O’Toole had immersed himself in Jean Anouilh and 12th Century England and obtained a certain command of the realm.

That kind of RADA + force-of-personality command is hard to come by these days. All I know is that I’m feeling a kind of instinctual, across-the-board dismissal of any historical film directed, written by and/or starring Millennials or Zoomers. Because I know going in that I won’t believe it.

“Hunter Biden is a fallen man at this point. I knew Hunter Biden fairly well. We lived near each other in Washington for quite some time. And his wife, who’s an absolutely outstanding person…a good person. I never thought Hunter Biden was a bad person. I thought he had demons, but [during] the time I knew him he kept them mostly under control. At some point he lost control of those demons, and the world knows that now. He’s now humiliated and alone. It’s probably too strong to say that I feel sorry for Hunter Biden, but the point is [this]: Pounding on a man…jumping on, piling on when he’s already down is something we don’t want to be involved in.” — Tucker Carlson last night.

Tucker Carlson, who has spent the past two weeks obsessing on the Hunter Biden emails, now says it’s time to leave Hunter alone:

“The point is pounding on a man, jumping on, and piling on when he’s already down is not something we want to be involved in.” pic.twitter.com/25bwCBiSiN

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 30, 2020

I’d like to share a few words about one of my favorite Soviet films, Vladimir Bortko‘s Heart of a Dog (’88). I will also try to explain you what Russian Intelligentsia means.

The film is based on Mikhail Bulgakov‘s same-titled novella, which was written in 1925. But the manuscript was confiscated during a search in the apartment. Bulgakov became a persona non grata among the Bolsheviks for his critical views of the perversions of power and his commitment to Tsarist Russia. “Heart of a Dog” was published in English in 1968, and wasn’t published in the Soviet Union until 1987.

I read the book in 1988 and watched the film a year later. It was one of the rare occasions when a book and a film using the same material seemed equally accomplished.

“Heart of a Dog” is a philosophical and satirical work in which the author reflects on bolshevism, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie and human nature.

I re-watched Bortko’s film yesterday, and was reminded that one can repeatedly watch deep and powerful films and discover something new with each viewing.

The setting is 1924 Moscow. A frosty winter. A homeless dog, Sharik, wanders around in search of food. Men beat him with sticks, douse him with boiling water, chased him from everywhere. But one day Sharik meets Professor Preobrazhensky, who takes him to his place.

Preobrazhensky is a world-class scientist. Together with his assistant Bormenthal, he transplants hypophysis and seminal glands from a criminal guy (who was killed in an accident) into Sharik’s body. The dog gradually turns into a human. The sensational news instantly spreads across Moscow and brings the professor another portion of recognition.

However, the joy turns out to be short-lived, and very soon Professor Preobrazhensky comes to regret his scientific experiment. For after all, the ignorant Sharikov turns their life into a living hell.

Using Sharikov’s example, we observe what happens to a Russian person when he suddenly becomes a Soviet person. He throws his strength and devotion to following imposed ideas. But are they close to him?

Click here for remainder of column at tatiana-pravda.