Month: December 2021

The Northman poster looks like a standee you might see in the Cannes marketplace in the basement of the Palais. Whatever Robert Eggers‘ forthcoming film may turn out to be, I hate the “sell” of it, which is aimed at the knuckle-dragging Games of Thrones crowd. The film is violent, yes, but it’s based on the story of classic medieval saga of Amleth (Hamlet), and the Focus Features marketers are trying to de-Shakespeare-ize it by aiming at the commoners. Come and get your mythical lone warrior revenge saga buffet…Jesus, it’s like a medieval Revenant mixed with a Mel Gibson movie. Bashings, howlings, bruisings, helmets, swords, axes, beheadings, amber-lit interiors, snowfalls, mud, grimness…blood in, blood out. What happened to the arthouse version of Eggers?

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has posted several research screening reactions.

Tatiana Antropova:

1. A Hero

2. The Power of the Dog

3. Drive My Car

4. Parallel Mothers

5. King Richard

6. Cyrano

7. The Worst Person in the World

8. Bergman Island

9. House of Gucci

10. The Card Counter

By “top” I mean the most nurturing, the most pleasurable, the most exciting…the 2021 films I felt best about having seen. Note: I’ve been shifting and second-guessing the order since yesterday afternoon (Sunday, 12.19). But I’ve pretty much stopped fiddling around.

I realize that putting Spider-Man: No Way Home in my fourth-place position is an odd call, given that I felt exasperated by the first 65 or 70 minutes. But the final 45 to 50 minutes really pay off, and I have to acknowledge what a bull’s-eye that felt like when I saw it two or three days ago with a cheering crowd.

I can’t honestly say that I felt “good” about having seen The Power of the Dog, although the high level of craft from director Jane Campion is obvious. Same deal with Red Rocket — didn’t enjoy watching it, knew all the while that director-writer Sean Baker knew what he was doing. I can’t say I felt “good” about CODA but I appreciated what it was trying to do and didn’t mind the effort.

I put Peter Jackson‘s 468-minute The Beatles: Get Back in ninth place because it’s really stayed with me.

Update: The disparaging remarks about King Richard and my possibly whimsical decision to put it at the top of the list are duly noted. It’s a sports saga, yes, but mainly a character piece — a study of a gnarly, obstinate fellow who was no day at the beach, and an examination of how character, determination and especially discipline can really make a difference in anyone’s life. I found it inspirational — a film of real value. It made me feel good, and if it didn’t make you feel good…well, okay.

1. King Richard
2. Parallel Mothers
3. West Side Story
4. Spider-Man: No Way Home
5. The Worst Person in the World
6. A Hero (Amazon)
7. Riders of Justice
8. No Time To Die
9. The Beatles: Get Back
10. Zola

11. Cyrano
12. Licorice Pizza
13. The Card Counter
14. In The Heights
15. The Last Duel

16. No Sudden Move
17. Titane
18. The Tragedy of Macbeth
19. Drive My Car
20. Summer of Soul

21. Being The Ricardos
22. Bergman Island
23. House of Gucci
24. Pig
25. Eyes of Tammy Faye
26. Nightmare Alley
27. The Power of the Dog
28. Red Rocket
29. CODA
30. Don’t Look Up

Critically hailed, grueling sits, films that made me feel drained or awful or sleepy: Belfast, Dune, C’mon, Cmon, Spencer, Annette, The Green Knight (and it breaks my heart to say this) The French Dispatch.

Still haven’t seen ’em: The Lost Daughter, Jockey

I haven’t seen Matrix: Resurrections but “I’ve got a feeling.”

Quo Vadis, Aida opened last March, but I regard regard it as a 2020 film.

I listen to this comfort album now and then. Recorded 29 years ago — I don’t care if it dates me. I’d forgotten that it won three Grammies in 1993. It became not only Eric Clapton‘s best-selling album (26 million copies) but the best-selling live album of all time.

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All his life Alan Ladd was said to be unhappy about his 5’6″ height. He was supposed to be a strapping leading man and heroic figure, and almost every film he made (including Shane) he had to stand on boxes. He felt like a shrimp. Then again James Cagney was only 5’5″, a perfect illustration of the maxim that it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, etc.

If your reputation precedes you, people tend to assume that you’re larger than life on some level, and that corresponds to an assumption that you might be physically larger than you actually are.

Look at Elizabeth Taylor as she walks out to greet Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon on 2.21.92. She’s so tiny that she complains right away that her feet can’t touch the floor when she sits in the guest chair. She was actually 5’2″ — the same height as the hobbit-sized Mickey Rooney and Debbie Reynolds**. Reynolds’ husband Eddie Fisher left her for Taylor in ’58, and Fisher…good God, he was only 5’5″! Same as Cagney, shorter than Ladd. Taylor gave Fisher the heave-ho when she began her affair with Richard Burton during the filming of Cleopatra in ’62: RB towered over both of them at 5’10” — eight inches taller than Taylor, five over Fisher.

Fisher to Taylor on the set of Cleopatra: “Who’s that big guy?” Taylor to Fisher: “What’s wrong with you…that’s Richard Burton!” Fisher to Taylor: “Oh.”

** Carrie Fisher was 5’1″.

WATCH: Kamala Harris staffer attempts to shut down interview after Harris is asked a question she doesn’t like.

“They’re acting like they can’t hear me,” says the interviewer. pic.twitter.com/jLWG57db3E

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 18, 2021

My problem with Eyes Wide Shut was that I was constantly frustrated — bored — by Tom Cruise’s overly formal, generally repressed behavior as Dr. Bill Harford. I didn’t have the slightest interest in the well-being of his marriage to Nicole Kidman’s Alice, and I never believed for a second that Bill and Alice (whose dialogue was so slowly spoken and excruciatingly banal at every turn) had any kind of hot sex life going. So the final lines in the film, spoken by Alice, didn’t land.

I believed that Bill was upset by Alice’s story about a sexual dalliance with a sailor, and I believed he was curious enough about exotic sexuality to sniff around here and there, but I didn’t believe he experienced even a semblance of hormonal arousal during all his nocturnal wanderings. Bill was a prig and a stiff, and Stanley Kubrick’s film, while mesmerizing and perfectly composed, used way too much starch.

I like two scenes in the whole thing — the third-act, cut-the-bullshit, pool-table discussion between Bill and Sydney Pollack’s rich guy, and Bill’s chat with Alan Cumming’s gay hotel clerk.

…that Omicron is kind of a paper tiger that brings mild symptoms and could mainly be described as more of a pain in the ass than any kind of worrisome affliction. Am I missing something?

Hollywood CEO to The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield:

Yesterday Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman called Joe Wright‘s The Woman in the Window one of the worst films of the year. The fifth worst, to be exact. I agree for the most part, although I did find the first 45 minutes fairly engaging. Poor Tony Gilroy — producer Scott Rudin brought him in to rewrite portions and try and save the film, but at the end of the day critics blamed Gilroy as much as the others.

Anyway, re-reading my review triggered a nearly 40 year-old memory. Sometime in the late summer of ‘82 I was heading uptown on the IND and somehow missed my 96th street stop. I was daydreaming. I got off at 116th street and went up top and crossed the street to go back downtown. Almost immediately I was challenged by a youngish dude of color who angrily wanted to know what I was doing in that neck of the woods, or, as he put it, in “our” neighborhood. I shrugged and kept walking.

Racial climate-wise the ’80s were a bit flinchy. Plus that part of town wasn’t as attractive. Today the Central Park West and 110th street neighborhood has its own this-and-that flavor. At the same time it feels less traditionally Manhattan-esque. Columbus and Amsterdam avenues aren’t as sexy and boutique-y in that region, especially with those towering project-style apartment buildings. Ditto 125th Street, but even 125th (which I visited a couple of weeks ago) feels a bit lacking in terms of cultured Manhattan coolness.

The general thing these days is that you can’t have mixed opinions about any West Side nabe north of 100th street. If you do you’re a racist. Residence-fantasy-wise, my favorite Manhattan nabes are still West Village / Soho / Tribeca, Chelsea, East Village, Murray Hill and the Madison Square Park region. Just like the old days.

The Woman in the Window begins with Amy Adams, Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman living in nice brownstone apartments on West 124th Street — apartments that face each other. But even with Harlem gentrification having begun around 15 or 20 years ago (much to native dwellers’ discontent) I simply didn’t believe that those three would live on West 124th.

The Harlem thing struck me as “woke precious” — playing it politically safe, Wright and Gilroy and Rudin performing for their woke colleagues in the film industry, etc.

I’ve mentioned this minor point before, but HE continues to regret Kino Lorber’s decision not to re-think the aspect ratio of its forthcoming 4K UHD version of Some Like It Hot. This will be the first time that Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic has been released in this format (3840p x 2160p). Standard Bluray resolution is 1920p x1080p, of course.

The Kino transfer will be the same beautiful version that Criterion released in November 2018, complete with their perverse decision to needlessly and nihilistically slice off the tops and bottoms of the SLIH image, which has been 1.66 since the beginning of time.

Before the handsome Criterion Bluray version came along the entire civilized world had agreed that Some Like It Hot is a 1.66 film. That included Kino Lorber itself, which released a Some Like It Hot Bluray with a 1.66:1 a.r. in May 2011.

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After being under-valued, barely acknowledged and even ignored by too many film critics and pundits, Twitter forecasters, Joe Popcorn industry veterans, award-bestowing critics groups and award-season prognosticators (not to mention the less-than-prescient Critics Choice Association), Parellel Mothers‘ Penelope Cruz has been awarded LAFCA’s Best Actress trophy.

A reputable critics group has finally stood up for the finest female performance of 2021.

Hollywood Elsewhere insists upon taking partial credit for Cruz’s LAFCA win — no other columnist-critic has pushed Cruz as hard as I have over the last several weeks…nobody. You can’t say that Hollywood Elsewhere’s never-say-die advocacy didn’t help to move the needle a little bit in Cruz’s favor.

A little more than three months ago Cruz’s Parallel performance also won the Venice Film Festival’s Volpi Cup for Best Actress.

The Worst Person in the World‘s Renate Reinsve was voted the first Best Actress runner-up in the LAFCA voting.

LAFCA has given Drive My Car their Best Picture award.

3:35 pm: Otherwise the other LAFCA foodie winners fell into right line with the “living in a separate universe” aesthetic. The Best Picture winner hasn’t been announced as we speak but…

With few exceptions every non-comedic or non-surrealistic movie that tells a story, however fantastical or familiar or outlandish or brilliant or self-subverting or satirical, sticks to or “lives in” its own self-regulated realm. The laws and limits of this realm are described in the “Dramatic Integrity Rulebook“, which is published and updated every year (usually in late March or early April). All the guilds have been signatories for decades.

Decade after decade and era after era, the creators of almost every non-comedic or non-surrealistic movie have stated the following to their audiences: “This is a world of our own making and design…we’re at liberty to throw in any kind of unexpected twist or shocking surprise or any kind of bullshit…we can use any kind of holy-shit element or imaginative leap that we want because we built this private asylum and we make the rules.”

At the same time (and this is written in an introductory essay in the 2021 edition) filmmakers also agree that they can’t throw out the Dramatic Integrity Rulebook (DIR) entirely because at the end of the day the DIR is the terra firma upon which filmmakers and their creations stand.

Surreal put-on comedies like Blazing Saddles can go hog wild and double-back and break the fourth wall, yes, but not superhero flicks, dramas, sci-fi programmers, thrillers, action adventures, romantic comedies, etc. They can’t suddenly say “the hell with it” and step out of their own realm and ignore their own rules. They have to carry the ball on the playing field until the clock runs out. They can’t just…whatever, jump into a mini-helicopter and fly out of the football stadium and take a private jet down to Turks and Caicos — they have a game to play and they have to finish it, and all players are required to wear a helmet with face guard, shoulder pads, a jersey, etc.

If No Time To Die‘s Daniel Craig had suddenly been assisted at a crucial moment by the 32 year-old Sean Connery as he appeared in Dr. No, and if The Spy Loved Me‘s youngish Roger Moore had stepped in a few minutes later…if there had suddenly been three Bonds on the same team, it would have been mind-blowing, psychedelic, giddy, stunning, fall over backwards, somebody pinch me, etc. But at the same time No Time To Die would’ve stopped being a movie.

You can knock audiences for any kind of loop you care to, but you can’t bring in time-warp guest stars for the hell of it. Well, you can but once you start playing the multiverse game all bets are off.

On the other hand once you’ve committed to multi-verse concepts and storylines, the possibilities are pretty crazy.