My first New York Film Festival was the ’77 edition. I was planning to move into a cockroach-infested Soho apartment on Sullivan Street, but in late September I was still sharing a home rental in Westport, CT. I forget how many films I saw but I definitely caught Wim Wenders‘ The American Friend (the big public screening was on 9.24.77), Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (10.1.77) and Francois Truffaut‘s The Man Who Loved Women (ditto). All three were shown at 1.66:1.
If I recall correctly New York Film Festival director Richard Roud conducted a brief post-screening interview with Truffaut following the screening.
I was in awe of Roud, whose investment in nouvelle vague French cinema was storied by that point. I loved his deep voice and moustache, the smooth and off-handed way he spoke French, his continental cool-cat fashion sense and the constant smoking of what I assumed were unfiltered Galouises.
A Cahiers du Cinema contributor in the ’50s, Roud began running the Löndon Film Festival in ’60. He co-founded the NYFF in ’63 with Amos Vogel. Roud was a huge Jean Luc Godard enthusiast from way back, and I recall Andrew Sarris telling me that at one point that in his capacity as a NYFF board member he had to tell Roud and his co-enthusiasts that he couldn’t make it with Godard when his films took on an ultra-didactic political character in the early to mid ’70s.
YouTube comment by “spb78”: “I’ll have to watch this full interview again on the Jules et Jim set, but if I’m correct in assuming there was no follow-up by the interviewer then what a wasted opportunity. Because the obvious question to Truffaut would’ve been ‘You articulated the auteur theory when you were a critic. Since becoming a filmmaker, do you still maintain this theory?’ Instead of telling Truffaut the theory is proven by his films, he should have asked Truffaut if making films validated his theory.”
Truffaut was 45 when the interview happened. He died of a brain tumor on 10.21.84 at age 52. My ex-wife Maggie and I visited his Cimitiere du Montmartre grave in January ’87.
…I thought about watching this so I could hate on it. Obviously because director-producer-writer-star Louise Linton, a Scottish actress who’s been around, has been married to Donald Trump‘s former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin for three and a half years. Then I read some reviews, thought better of it, bailed. This despite HE’s own Joel Michaely, whom I’ve known since the late ’90s, having a significant costarring role.
I’m presuming no HE regulars have had a looksee. But if they have…
According to a five-week-old analysis of Anglo Saxon racial attitudes (plus a corresponding color illustration) from Barnor Hesse, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Political Science and Sociology at Northwestern University, white people come in all shapes, sizes and moods, but too damn many of them are thorny little bitches who won’t get with the Critical Race Theory program and therefore need to be shaken and shamed and maybe slapped around.
I’ve considered where I belong on Hesse’s graph. The general urging is that wherever I might belong, I need to work on becoming a White Abolitionist. So first I need to self-identify, and then I need to look deep within, put on a hair shirt and really get down.
Is it okay if I identify as a White Contrarian, which is to say somewhere between White Benefit and White Confessional but at the same time a mild-mannered paleface who deeply resents the spreading of academic prosecutorial insanity that has wafted off campuses over the last 20 or 25 years and has led to automatic presumptions of white criminality and malevolence and the anti-racist progressive kneejerk culture of the N.Y. Times and some of the more absolutist portions of “The 1619 Project”?
Speaking as a reasonably progressive, left-center, fair-minded sort, I am respectfully refusing to fall upon the church steps and apologize for being an embodiment of absolute evil because of who my parents and grandparents were and where and how I was raised and what influences fell upon me, etc. So far I’ve lived through quite a journey and arrived at a spiritual place of my own, thanks very much. So if Barnor Hesse doesn’t like who I am or doesn’t think I’ve sufficiently progressed according to Khmer Rouge wokeness standards of 2021….well, what can I say? I can say “gee, Barnor, I humbly apologize” but somehow I feel that won’t be enough.
I just finished watching an Oscar handicap discussion between Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neill and Variety‘s Tim Gray.
I watched this discussion for one reason — to see what these four savvy insiders would say about the effect of the National Society of Film Critics condemning Variety for the Promising Young Woman apology and to what extent this influences Carey Mulligan‘s bid for a Best Actress Oscar. (I think she’s locked in all the more.) What did these four have to say about this hot-button issue? Nothing — they completely ignored it.
What I mostly got out of the back-and-forth was a refreshed Best Picture reading — i.e., Nomadland might be slowing down or even slipping while Trial of the Chicago 7 and Minari might be gaining ground. Is this true? You tell me.
Anne Thompson (Indiewire): “Nomadland is an anomalous movie, a road movie, a hybrid in which [many of] the crafts are not in there…but it’s still the strongest Best Picture contender…they love this movie. Chicago 7 is very very strong [and] a possibility…I’m not saying it will but it could take over Nomadland. Minari is moving up, totally surging…it is so strong [3 Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, 10 Critics’ Choice Movie Awards nominations, 6 Independent Spirit Award nominations + the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film]. One Night in Miami is steady as they go, and Ma Rainey too. Mank is going to be like The Irishman — a lot of nominations and we’ll see what it actually wins. Promising Young Woman is surging too.”
HE reply: No mention of Sound of Metal and Da 5 Bloods? Anne knows that Ma Rainey and One Night in Miami are mezzo-mezzo and not really going anywhere. She knows this, and yet she gives them the old college cheer. I too am sensing a slight slowing in the Nomadland force flow. It may be holding but it’s not building.
Tom O’Neill (Gold Derby) “Promising Young Woman is popping up in all kinds of places for Best Picture, [and this is] surprising us so we have to take it seriously here. It’s surging every which way.”
HE reply: “When Tom says he and his Gold Derby colleagues are surprised by the surge of Promising Young Womwn, he means that by his own sights he wouldn’t be picking it as a possible serious Best Picture contender.
Pete Hammond (Deadline): “Well, something’s gonna win. My problem with all of this…prognosticating in this very weird season and not even quite a month away from the nominations…a lot of Academy members just haven’t seen this stuff. One person said they should send a Roku box or an Apple TV device to everyone because a lot her friends are watching these movies on their computers. I’m not sure that Nomadland is a computer movie [as] it’s very deliberately paced and you have to stay with it and get enveloped by that kind of a film. A critics favorite definitely, that can help it along but not always. I think The Trial of Chicago 7 has all the [classic] ingredients that make for a Best Picture winner, particularly when we watch the news and see what’s going on and how this movie is so prescient right now. Academy members like to be on top of something important….whether that [points to] Chicago 7 or Frances McDormand stacking boxes at Amazon…I don’t know. I do think that Minari with the wind at its back from the Parasite win last year. Minari…you saw the SAG nominations and all the nominations from the Critics Choice awards…that might be the consensus choice…it gets a good amount of number one votes but it gets a whole ot numbers twos. I loved Promising Young Woman personally….I think it’s a great movie. Mank may not be a #1 choice. I just talked to an Academy member…we disagree on Mank, he said. ‘You don’t like it?’ Yeah…you don’t? ‘Not really.'”
HE reply: Pete saying that “something’s gonna win” means he’s not feeling great surges of enthusiasm anywhere, about anything.
Timothy Gray (Variety): “The below-the-line people will vote for Mank and Trial of the Chicago 7. Sacha Baron Cohen seems like a front-runner.”
Hammond: “Some people think Nomadland is a great immersive movie, and another person I spoke to was looking at his watch half the time.”
O’Neill: “Let’s discuss the speculation about Chadwick Boseman having this wrapped up. Peter Finch and Heath Ledger are the exceptions to the role. I don’t think this is a lock at all for Boseman. On the other hand he’s ahead among Gold Derby critics.”
Hammond: “Boseman might get two nominations and that’s never happened. They might want to go with Anthony Hopkins for Best Actor and Chadwick for Best Supporting. I don’t know that Da 5 Bloods has [sufficient] levels of strength among Academy voters.”
Gray: “One Academy member told me ‘all due respect but he’s dead and doesn’t need it…I’m going to vote for someone who’s still with us.'”
#BREAKING: Former President Trump surprises supporters who gathered to celebrate Presidents Day by driving by in a motorcade in West Palm Beach, Florida. pic.twitter.com/dJ22CNG7fM
Director-writer Michael Mann‘s Thief is a work of beauty for the most part, but it has two things wrong with it.
One, in the coffee shop scene James Caan explains his “this is who I am and how I operate” philosophy to Tuesday Weld. It’s basically a lesson he learned in prison — “nobody can hurt me if nothin’ means nothin’…if I don’t care about anything including myself.” It’s a variation upon Neil McCauley‘s “don’t get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”
Caan clearly isn’t lying or trying to sell Weld a bill of goods. He’s laying his soul flat on the formica table. But why would Weld want a serious home-and-kids relationship with a guy who lives by that kind of nihilist “nobody owns me” attitude? It makes no sense. He’s telling her “if anyone tries to crash my way of life I will grab a lead pipe and do the same thing I did in the joint.” This is a guy to have a casual week-to-week thing with, at most.
Two, the ending of Thief — Weld and kid sent away, destroy the house, kill Robert Prosky and his goons — fulfills Caan’s lone-wolf aesthetic, but it’s not satisfying from an audience perspective. Which is why Thief topped out theatrically at only $11.5 million instead of $20 million or higher.
Audiences knew Caan was an odd duck and a weird hardass, but they respected his craft and professionalism. The most serene and settled moment in the film is when the big extended-blow-torch safecracking job is finished and an exhausted Caan is sitting in a fold-up chair and smoking a cigarette. The film should’ve ended right there — a job well done. Ending Thief this way would have (a) qualified it as a major art film because it didn’t end on a plot point, and (b) made it more popular.
I honestly flashed on this during my very first viewing of Thief inside the old Magno Screening Room (now Dolby 88) in February of ’81. I literally said to myself at the end of the big-blowtorch scene, “This is it…end it here and it’ll be perfect,.”
Audiences didn’t want or need a resolution to the Caan-vs.-corrupt cops-and-gangsters subplot. What mattered was Caan affirming his El Supremo status as the greatest big-time thief in the Chicago area, and maybe beyond that.
I shouldn’t start the week off with this as it’s not a big deal, but at the :52 mark MSNBC’s Willie Geist gets it wrong, In the course of introducing Pennsylvania Representative Madeleine Dean, he pronounced her first name as “MahduhLEEN”. If you’ve ever seen Vertigo you know it’s pronounced Mahduhlehn. Here are two authoritativeinstructionals.
