Day: March 17, 2021

Audience vs. Critics Films

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Critic friendo, written three years ago: “An audience film immediately announces what it’s about, tells a linear story with characters who are not only easy to understand and identify with but who make you eager to root for them. Audience films invite you in, show you around and make you comfortable so that you always know where you are. The Post is a good example of a well-made audience film.

“Critics’ films make you come to them. They challenge you to essentially jump aboard an already moving train and figure out where it’s going. The best critics’ films pay off that bet for audiences who believe the critic and take the challenge; the worst critics’ films (like The Master) have champions who make you believe there’s more than meets the eye here when, in fact, it’s all in their film-theory-addled imaginations.”

The current Best Picture nominees are The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah, Mank, Minari, Nomadland, Promising Young Woman, Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Based on the above assessment, which could fairly, even-handedly be called audience films and critics films? Here’s my impression — they’re all audience films. They all pretty much come to you. None are especially difficult to jump aboard. The most complex are Judas and the Black Messiah, Mank and Sound of Metal, but that doesn’t make them critics films.

HE to Formerly Decent Person

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Email to a guy I’ve roomed with a couple of times at Sundance: “All I noted in a certain quickly-deleted conversational post was that the Atlanta shootings (by a 21 year-old white guy with stringy chin whiskers) didn’t appear to be racially motivated as much as by some kind of weird sexual addiction thing.

“I didn’t associate the Oscar race with the shootings. A person I occasionally speak to did…big deal. I just listened and thought ‘hmm, that’s an unusual angle but whatever.’

“And this person may have had a point, really, because of the way everything gets associated with everything else these days….it all mixes and swirls together in a big cultural whirlpool. Anyway it seemed like an interesting exchange at first, but then Twitter weighed in with shock and horror and I took it down.

“It’s just words and opinions, man….words and musings and associations. If you had been engaged on this particular angle or topic at a party somewhere, you would have listened and chimed in. You might have disagreed or told the person who shared this perspective that it was insensitive or whatever, and maybe you would have had a point. But because you’re a Twitter hyena, you tried to make it into a big thing.”

Actively Rooting For Eradication

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As of today, Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn is primarily known for three things. One, writing smart, sage, fair-minded assessments of films as they come along. Two, being one of the New York Film Critics Circle members who allegedly lobbied to give Best Actress trophies to Support The Girls‘ Regina Hall in 2018, and to Never Rarely Sometimes Always‘ Sidney Flanigan last December, and to bestow the NYFCC’s 2020 Best Film award to First Cow. And three, becoming possibly the first top-ranked film critic to actively push for the end of the career of a major-league filmmaker. Not saying this or that movie stinks, but “this guy needs to be erased, Goodfellas-style.”

I’m not certain if critics of past decades have advocated for this or that career to be fully and finally killed. Many looked the other way when certain screenwriters were blacklisted in the late ’40s and ’50s, of course, but that was a different thing. Maybe some influential critic of 60 or 70 years ago actually wrote “it’s time for the career of John Garfield or Abraham Polonsky or Carl Foreman to be suffocated” and I simply haven’t read about it. I’m just saying that I went “whoa” when I read the headline above Kohn’s article. Because actively lobbying for the final eradication of a filmmaker’s career…well, Kohn’s rep before today has always been that of a congenial, nebbishy, mild-mannered fellow…even-toned, comme ci comme ca, let the chips fall, roll with the tremors.

Not Necessarily A Good Idea

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I have a discreet, longstanding relationship with the Movie Godz. They’re basically spiritual remnants of once-living filmmakers who hover and contemplate the filmmaking world. There are 12 as we speak. They all have Twitter accounts, of course, and are constantly refreshing. Once a month they assemble and hash things out, and sometimes they’ll share a thought or two.

All I can say is that during last week’s meeting, some said that they feel left out of things. Nobody cares who they are or what they think. Their frustration is so great that they’re now talking about cancelling someone or something because (I’m not saying this makes a great deal of sense) if they can destroy the reputation of a film or filmmaker, they’ll somehow feel more engaged with the 21st Century world, a good portion of which is driven by terror and intimidation.

Except that, unlike Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, they don’t hold with the idea of cancelling this or that individual filmmaker or actor for perceived moral or ethical crimes. They shared great relief, for example, that they didn’t get into the brief and idiotic Ansel Elgort flare-up that happened last June.

They finally decided that the best approach would be to cancel certain films retroactively…films that the world could have done without when they were first released, and which the presently-constituted film world would be better off not watching as we speak. As in “get rid of even the memories of these movies…eliminate their existence on Bluray, no streaming, no nothing.”

I’m not saying this is a good thing (HE believes that all films should be preserved and available for new generations to watch and react to) but if you happen to agree with the Movie Godz and feel that some films should be permanently exterminated, what titles would you suggest?

Legendary Movie Homes

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Yesterday afternoon Variety‘s Clayton Davis and Jazz Tangcay began a Twitter discussion about their favorite movie houses. There’s a certain strata of younger GenX, Millennial and Zoomer movie mavens who immediately default to scary movie houses when the topic arises. Hence Clayton’s mention of….now I’m forgetting but it might have been the Amityville house, something in that vein. And then Jazz kicked in with her favorite — “the house in Mother!“…scary Darren Aronofsky!

The Psycho house, The House on Haunted Hill, the huge gothic mansion in Robert Wise‘s The Haunting…some people just think this way.

Here are Hollywood Elsewhere’s top-five favorite movie homes: (a) Phillip Van Damm‘s semi-fictionalized Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home near Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, (b) the sprawling Connecticut ranch-style home (French doors, sycamore trees) owned by Katharine Hepburn‘s wealthy mother in Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks and his wife “Slim” built a Bel Air home based on the Bringing Up Baby house, and called it “Hog Canyon”, (c) The side-by-side homes owned by Aurora Greenway and Garret Breedlove in Terms of Endearment, located on Locke Lane in Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood (which I actually visited in April 2006); (d) the Spanish-flavored Double Indemnity home, which I just visited a few days ago, (e) the elegant mountainside home owned by John Robie (Cary Grant) in Alfred Hitchcock‘s To Catch A Thief (Sasha Stone, her daughter Emma and I actually visited the Saint-Jennet home just prior to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival).

The second cluster of five (#6 thru #10): (f) The Evelyn Mulray home in Chinatown, located at 1315 South El Molino Drive in Pasadena; (f) the Leave It To Beaver-styled home in Nancy Meyers‘ Father of the Bride, which is just down the street from the Mulwray home at 843 So. El Molino; (h) Joel Goodson’s bordello home in Risky Business, located at 1258 Linden Avenue, in Highland Park, Illinois; (i) Lester Townsend‘s Glen Cove mansion (brick facade, long curved driveway) in North by Northwest, known in reality as the Old Westbury Gardens (71 Old Westbury Road, Old Westbury, New York, NY 11568); (j) Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten‘s Shadow of a Doubt home (904 McDonald Avenue, Santa Rosa).


Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine’s homes in Terms of Endearment, located on Locke Lane in the River Oaks section of Houston.

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Second Attempt

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Earlier this morning I wrote that “Asian women in three massage parlors shot = not necessarily what it sounds like. The Atlanta shootings don’t appear to have been a racial hate killing. Some kind of weird mucky-muck having to do with sexual obsession and the perpetrator wanting to cleanse himself or some such hooey. In short, another lurking loony-tune from the American underbelly.

A friend commented that “the reality doesn’t matter — woke media is playing it as a racial hate killing, so that’s what it ‘is.’”

Second Jab

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Last night Hollywood Elsewhere cruised over to the UCLA campus (one of the world’s wealthiest academic, administrative and residential communities) and received a second Pfizer stab. I’d read quite a lot about how the folow-up Covid vaccine tends to deliver more side effects than the first, including tiredness, headaches, chills, fever, nausea and muscle pain. Usually with 12 to 24 hours, and then the effects subside after 48 or so. I was therefore prepared for some kind of adverse reaction.

Well, here I am some 18 hours later and nothing even slightly adverse has manifested. Okay, a very slight soreness in the area of the jab but it’s nothing. In the past I’ve described my constitution as “all but bulletproof,” which was a way of saying it’s very strong. I’m no longer allowed to repeat what my mother told me as a child, but I was blessed at birth with good genes.