Hollywood Elsewhere respectfully disagrees with the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle for having given their Best Film of 2020 prize to George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. A sturdy adaptation of August Wilson‘s play, lively performances, social realism, authentic 1920s milieu, etc. But it doesn’t transcend its theatrical origin.
I would have gone with Nomadland, The Trial of the Chicago 7 or Sound of Metal. Philly crickets also chose Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods as their Best Picture runner-up.
Last year the PFCC handed its Best Picture trophy to Knives Out, so they’re obviously into wearing eccentricity on their sleeve. They went for Roma in 2018 (fine) and the absurdly over-praised Get Out in 2017.
I approve of Nomadland‘s Chloe Zhao winning for Best Director, and definitely Mank‘s Amanda Seyfried winning for Best Supporting Actress. Here are some of the other winners:
Best Actress: Viola Davis, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Runners-up: Aubrey Plaza, Black Bear, Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman (tie.)
Best Actor: Delroy Lindo, Da 5 Bloods. Runner-up: Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
Best Supporting Actor: Chadwick Boseman, Da 5 Bloods. Runner-up: Leslie Odom, Jr., One Night in Miami.
Best Animated Film: Soul, directed by Pete Doctor and Kemp Powers. Runner-up: Wolfwalkers, directed by Tom Moore and Ross Stewart.
Best Documentary: Time, directed by Garrett Bradley. Runner-up: Dick Johnson is Dead, directed by Kirsten Johnson.
Best Cinematography: Nomadland (Joshua James Richards) Runner-up: First Cow (Chris Blauvelt).
Best Breakthrough Performance: Sidney Flanigan, Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Runner-up: Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
Industry Friendo: What do you think about Promising Young Woman, Carey Mulligan and her chances? To me her Promising turn is easily the performance of the year. Much more interesting than the others, including Frances McDormand‘s in Nomadland, Pieces of a Woman‘s Vanessa Kirby and Ma Rainey‘s Viola Davis.
HE: Mulligan is one of our greatest actresses, of course. But as I said on 12.24.20, she was much better in Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette than she is in Emerald Fennell‘s revenge film. (Revenge as in “a dish best served cold.”) Promising Young Woman is a stiletto between the ribs of all the insensitive slobbering assholes out there. It isn’t saying that most of the young horndog clubbers out there are animals — it says ALL of them are. Except for the older guys (Alfred Molina) who can’t shake their middle-aged guilt. But the young ones are impossible. That’s what it’s saying, and it’s a very ballsy film because it doesn’t back off from that viewpoint. I respect that.
Industry Friendo: Are you betting on Frances then?
HE: No, I think the general tide is drifting in Mulligan’s favor now. I’ve been thinking all along it’s going to be McDormand but nobody votes just for expert acting chops or believability…they also vote for the character and who he/she seems to convey or represent in a cultural political sense. There’s obviously something resigned and opaque and oddly obstinate about FM’s Nomadland character, and I don’t think people are in the mood for that.
Mulligan is much more of a stand-out character — a character and an attitude that cuts like a blade. She’s not delivering my idea of a world-class, heart-and-soul performance, but Promising Young Woman has begun to connect like Joker did a year ago, I think. So politically, she’s got the wind at her back. So yeah, she might win.
I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone thinks Ma Rainey‘s Viola Davis performance, which is basically about bluster and sardonicism, is a top contender. It’s between Carey, Pieces of a Woman‘s Vanessa Kirby and Frances. People need to disassociate Kirby from the Shia Labeouf thing — her performance is her performance, and that’s all.
McDormand’s lead with critics awards has been shrinking as Mulligan gains momentum.
At first McDormand had 7 wins to Mulligan’s one. A week ago it was 9-4. Now it’s 11-7.
Friendo: I just finished Glenn Kenny’s “Made Men“. Despite some issues here and there, it was solid.
HE: I agree. It delivers everything you could possibly want to know about the making of Martin Scorsese‘s 1990 classic. Fully researched, well ordered, cleanly written.
Friendo: This led to me to Melissa Maerz‘s “Alright Alright Alright,” the new oral history of the making of DazedandConfused. Great book. Everyone interviewed is well used. The dead producer sounds like a Harvey in the making.
HE: What dead producer? Thoughts and prayers.
Friendo: This led me to others. Sam Wasson’s recent book about Chinatown. Books about The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca. Julie Salamon‘s “The Devil’s Candy,” about the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities. I recall reading one about Rebel Without A Cause. The Eleanor CoppolaApocalypse Now diaries. What other great books about the making of a single film are there?
HE: I’d love to read about the making of David Fincher‘s Se7en. And about the whole saga about the developing, making and releasing of Zero Dark Thirty, including the idiotic liberal takedown of that film over alleged endorsing of CIA torture policies during Oscar season. But let’s ask the HE commentariat…
From Luke Mogelson‘s “A Reporter’s Footage from Inside the Capitol Siege,” posted in The New Yorker on 1.17.21. Here’s Mogelson’s “Among the Insurrectionists“, a 1.15 essay with the following subhead: “The Capitol was breached by Trump supporters who had been declaring, at rally after rally, that they would go to violent lengths to keep the President in power. A chronicle of an attack foretold.”
Observation #1: Watch these psychos as they invade the Senate chamber (including the “QAnon Shaman”) and listen to them…they’re really and truly children, idiots, submental sociopaths.
Observation #2: When the QAnon Shaman takes his bison horn helmet off and then his green skullcap, we can see that he’s a baldy.
From “The Inevitable,” a Michelle Goldberg column in the N.Y. Times, 1.17.21: “The far right took heart from the president’s winks and nods, retweets and outright displays of support.
“Donald Trump, ever since his campaign, throughout his four years in office, has done nothing but pander to these people,” Daryl Johnson, a former senior intelligence analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, told me.
“Now a private security consultant, Johnson was caught in a political tempest during the Obama administration, when, at D.H.S., he wrote a report warning of a ‘resurgence in right-wing extremist recruitment and radicalization activity,’ including efforts to recruit veterans. Republicans were apoplectic, seeing the report as an effort to brand conservatives as potential terrorists. Johnson’s unit was disbanded and he left government.
“Under Trump, political pressure on federal law enforcement to ignore the far right would only grow. After a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, Dave Gomez, a former F.B.I. supervisor overseeing terrorism cases, told The Washington Post that the agency was ‘hamstrung’ in trying to investigate white nationalists. ‘There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base,’ said Gomez.
Phil Spector, the once-great music producer and guilty-as-charged murderer of Lana Clarkson, is dead of Covid at age 81. In a prison hospital, but basically in prison. Convicted of Clarkson’s ’03 murder in ’09, Spector would have been eligible for parole in 2024.
Most of the obits are going to repeat the standard line about Spector having been a brute and a fiend — an appropriate description, yes, for anyone who maliciously ends the life of another human being outside of armed combat.
But we’re all a blend of good and not-so-good elements, angels and goblins and all kinds of in-between, and I’m sorry but Spector wasn’t all fiend. (Just ask Greta Gerwig, who once told me she’s a big fan of Spector’s classic-era music.) Because for a certain period in his life, despite the fact that he was regarded as a bizarre permutation and an aloof prick by nearly everyone for decades…for a certain period he was touched by God. Or was God’s conduit…whichever.
Spector was the first maestro-level rock music producer, the creator of the famous “wall of sound” jukebox signature that peaked between 1960 and ’64, and was occasionally imitated by Brian Wilson and several others (Spectorco–produced George Harrison‘s All Things Must Pass) for years following — “Be My Baby”, “Chapel of Love”, “Just Once in My Life”, “There’s No Other (Like My Baby)”, “Then He Kissed Me”, “Talk to Me”, “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love”, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'”, “Da Doo Ron Ron”, “I Can Hear Music”, and “This Could Be the Night”.
Please, please watch Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector, which has been on YouTube for nearly a decade. I wish it could be seen in HD. I would buy a copy if it was. It’s one of the best documentaries about a music industry superstar ever made — perhaps the best ever.
Here’s a piece I wrote about it on 6.28.10 — “Dark Star“:
I’m into Spector more than most people in my realm. Jayanti’s doc is what got me there. I’ve known Spector’s musical signature all my life — that “wall of sound” thing that gave such ecstatic echo-phonic oomph to all those early to mid ’60s hits (“Be My Baby”, “Walkin In The Rain“, “River Deep, Mountain High”) and Beatle songs he produced a few years later. But I’d never heard Spector speak or gotten to “know” him until I saw Jayanti’s doc.
Spector is a fascinating man — there’s no getting around that. A brilliant, oddball X-factor “character” of the first order. I’ve known a few guys like Spector. They’re egotists and half-crazy and it’s always about them, but they’re a trip to talk to and share stories with. If you love show business, you can’t help but love how these guys are always sharp as a tack and don’t miss a trick and are always blah-blahing about their genius and their importance.
Except Spector’s blah is backed up by truth. He really did shape and inspire rock ‘n’ roll in its infancy, and touched heaven a few times in the process.
Yes, he probably shot Clarkson, a 40 year-old, financially struggling actress, on 2.3.03 when she was visiting his home. Or maybe he threatened to shoot her and the gun accidentally went off. Or whatever. And maybe Spector telling a Daily Telegraph reporter two months before the shooting that “he had bipolar disorder and that he considered himself ‘relatively insane'” was a factor. And maybe he deserves to be in jail for 19 years. The guy is obviously immodest and intemperate with demons galore.
But you can tell from listening to Spector that he’s some kind of bent genius — that he’s brilliant, exceptional, perceptive — and that it’s a monumental tragedy that these qualities co-exist alongside so much weirdness inside the man — all kinds of strutting-egoist behavior and his having threatened women with guns and all of that “leave me alone because I’m very special” hiding-behind-bodyguards crap. Because life is short and the kind of vision and talent that Spector has (or at least had) is incredibly rare and world-class.
That’s why Jayanti’s film is so absorbing, and why the title is exactly right. Why do so many gifted people always seem to be susceptible to baser impulses? Why do they allow bizarre psychological currents to influence their lives? What kind of a malignant asshole waves guns around in the first place?
I’ll tell you what kind of guy does that. A guy who never got over hurtful traumatic stuff that happened in his childhood (like his father committing suicide), and who decided early on that he wouldn’t deal with it, and so it metastasized.
It’s another tragedy that this BBC doc, originally aired in England in 2008, is only viewable on YouTube, and in such cruddy (480p) condition.
Spector’s story encompasses so much and connects to so many musical echoes and currents that people (okay, older people) carry around inside, and the way this history keeps colliding with what Spector probably did (despite his earnest claims to Jayanti that he’s innocent) and the Court TV footage and the evidence against him and the thought of a woman’s life being snuffed out…it’s just shattering.
Phil Spector and the Ronettes during a 1963 Gold Star recording session in Los Angeles.
I’ve seen Jayanti’s doc twice now and I could probably go another couple of times. Anyone who cares about ’60s pop music and understands Spector’s importance in the scheme of that decade needs to see this thing. It’s a touchstone trip and an extreme lesson about how good and evil things can exist in people at the same time.
90% of the doc alternates between interviews with the hermetic Spector, taped between his first and second murder trials, and the Court TV footage. But the arguments and testimony are often pushed aside on the soundtrack by the hits that Spector produced with the Ronettes, the Righteous Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner, the Crystals, Darlene Love, John Lennon, George Harrison, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans (that rendition they and Spector recorded of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” in ’63). It’s the constant back and forth of beauty and darkness, beauty and rage, beauty and warped emotion — repeated over and over and over.
I never knew that the title of Spector’s “To Know Him Is To Love Him” (which he wrote and performed with the Teddy Bears in ’58) was taken from his father’s gravestone. I’d forgottten that he wrote “Spanish Harlem” — an exceptionally soulful ballad for the 1960 pop market. I never gave much thought to what “Da Doo Ron Ron” meant — I never thought it meant anything in particular — but Spector says it’s a metaphor for slurpy kisses and handjobs and fingerings at the end of a teenage date. Spector also had a good deal to do, he says, with the writing of Lennon’s “Woman Is Nigger of the World.”
There are two curious wrongos. Spector mentions that his father committed suicide when he was “five or six” — he was actually nine when that happened. (How could he not be clear on that?) Spector also mentions that line about John Lennon having thanked him for “keeping rock ‘n’ roll alive for the two years when Elvis went into the Army” when in fact Spector’s big period began just after Elvis got out of the Army, starting around ’60 or thereabouts.
Spector mentions that if people like you they don’t say bad things about you, but it’s clear that if he hadn’t been such a hermit and hadn’t acted like a dick for so many years, and if he hadn’t been photographed with that ridiculous finger-in-the-wall-socket electric hairdo, and if he’d just gotten out and charmed people the way he does in the interview footage with Jayanti then…well, who knows? Maybe things might have turned out differently.
