The 21st Century version of the French terror is ebbing. Okay, weakening. Those occasional “uh-oh” expressions among the fanatical faithful tell the tale. But societal cancers don’t just evaporate overnight. So for the time being, the woke brigade still holds sway, although the whole cancelling mentality is being rethought and/or downgraded by just about everyone as we speak.

I was going to say there are three kinds of cancellations, but I’m thinking the categories may actually number four.

Category #1 is owned by Harvey Weinstein…no forgiveness, no redemption….J.J. Hunsecker to Sidney Falco, “You’re dead, son — get yourself buried.” It’s been argued that Roman Polanski is in this category, but there are some (many?) extenuating circumstances. We all know that ignoring a safe word is an awful thing to do, so Armie Hammer may belong in this slot even though he’s mainly guilty of being a sexual obsessive. He certainly didn’t eat anyone’s rib or cut off a woman’s toe and put it in his pocket.

Category #2 is for middle-range offenders for whom arguments in their favor have been made, and whom many people think got an unfair deal. In my book Woody Allen is a category #2 because it’s all over one alleged incident…one…that doesn’t really add up when you consider all the particulars. Who else in this category?

Category #3 is a soft cancel…Aziz Ansari, Louis CK. The basic thing is, you were guilty of something bad but you get to inch your way back into the swing of things after a couple of years. Others?

Category #4 is an even weaker soft cancel…for people whose careers have been hurt to some extent but who never really did anything you can point to, or whose alleged offenses were due to alcohol or substance issues but are now moot because they’ve gotten sober.

This afternoon I finally saw Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking, which has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It’s not a “bad” film — just interminable.

And yet it’s a well-written, well-acted dialogue piece about eight Mennonite women (plus the wimpy Ben Whishaw) discussing whether to leave their community because of years of suffering sexual violence from several brute beast males.

Of course they should leave! And yet they spend the whole night in a barn, debating the pros and cons. And there I was, grinding it out in row #3 at the Werner Herzog theatre.

The three best performances are delivered by Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Rooney Mara.

Every critic in Telluride loves this bleak, suffocating film, and their motivation is almost entirely political. Given the political climate in this town and in other woke regions around the globe, there is no upside to rendering a negative verdict. Play it safe, go along, keep your head down.

I kept telling myself “this isn’t interminable…it’ll be over after 100 minutes and then you can get up and move on with the rest of your life.” And that’s what happened. I’m fine. My future is before me.

If this film turns out to be Best Picture nominated, I’ll be flabbergasted. But it could happen. There are plenty of hardcore types who will push for it.

A fair number of average industry Joes & Janes, trust me, are going to hate this film. (But don’t tell David Pollick.)

If my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.

I’ve been scrambling and struggling since late Saturday afternoon, trying to understand what Todd Fields‘ Tar is conveying or not conveying (is it anti-cancel culture or is it slyly condemning Cate Blanchett‘s brilliant but callous conductor and more or less saying “well, she made her bed”?), and venting with friends about how I found Field’s decision to obliquely hint at plot developments occasionally infuriating.

Key HE passage: “This movie is so beautifully made, such an immersive pleasure, and yet so infuriating I could just punch a refrigerator.”

A friend believes that “the film’s elliptical quality is one of the things I absolutely adored about it…it kept me on the edge of my seat. And it’s what made me hungry to see it again (and I hardly feel that way about movies anymore).”

I feel the same way — I’m so upset by my negative reactions to aspects of Tar (while loving so much of it) that I want to sit through it again so I can (hopefully!) settle some of my issues.

Another friend insists that “the information you need is all there. It’s elliptical…but it’s not ambiguous. Some might disagree about this or that, but I think you’d find viewers disagreeing on what happened in many scenes in Bardo, a movie you seem to be cutting a thousand times more slack than this one, even though — sorry — it is borderline unwatchable.”

The focus in Tar is (a) the magnificent work and lifestyle of Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar — I wanted to move into this movie and live there and never come out — but primarily (b) the fanatical determination of “Millennial robots” (as Lydia calls them) to destroy careers of people they see as cruel and abusive.

It’s mainly about a faintly alluded to, stubbornly non-dramatized relationship between an ambitious student and Lydia, a powerful God-like figure in her realm, and how it went wrong and why, and how this resulted in a kind of blood feud — a deliberate act of career assassination and a form of sexual harassment.

But who rejected who exactly, and why do reasonable intelligent viewers of Tar have to argue about this hours later and still not be certain about what happened?

All kinds of exposition is deliberately left out of Tar, and it’s triggering. I’m sorry but Tar takes forever to get going (at least 45 minutes if not longer), and once it does it’s too elliptical, too fleeting, too oblique, too teasing and (I guess) too smart for its own good. It made me feel dumb, and I really hate that.

But I loved the flush world of brilliant, arrogant, confident Lydia. Not to mention the textures, the autumnal Berlin atmospheres, the perfect scarves, the dinners….I wanted to live in it forever.

The bottom line is that Field can’t be bothered to tell a story in a way that most people would find satisfying. He doesn’t show the stuff that we’d like to see and be part of, obviously because he feels that’s the most interesting way to deal the cards. But not for me. Elusive narrative games and coy hintings and teasings and dingle-dangle maneuvers…nope. Maybe if I watch it again it’ll somehow come together?

I’m terribly unhappy about how Tar played for me. It’s made me almost miserable.

A friend lucked into a screening of Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, which just premiered in Venice. Reaction #1: “It pains me to say this, but it just doesn’t work.” Reaction #2: “It’s just too stagey,” which is to say, I gathered, too visually confined, too static. But how can an adaptation of a play about a 600-pound guy who never leaves his apartment be opened up?

Let’s be fair and free — let the air and sunlight in — let’s see what develops.

Oh god it’s happening The Whale lived up and Fraser is coming pic.twitter.com/XjsaYYFi3X

— The Oscar Expert (@expert_oscar) September 3, 2022