Month: September 2022

Don McLean’s “The Day The Academy Died”

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An article by a veteran Academy member has appeared on The Ankler, and it says something that The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield, due respect, wouldn’t dare post himself.

As you might expect the piece in question has been written by a guy “who has asked to remain anonymous.” (But of course!) It’s titled “Notes From An Oscar Meeting Gone Wrong“, and the author is a self-admitted white middle-aged male…brrrnnggg!

What the article says, boiled down, is that over the last six or seven years the Academy has not only bent over backwards to address inclusion and equity in the ranks, but has totally lost sight of the fairy-dust factor, which has now all but evaporated.

Yes, the pandemic and streaming did a lot to kill exhibition. But that doesn’t change the fact that over the last seven years (basically since #OscarsSoWhite) the Academy and the industry, hand in hand, have put progressive politics above the creation and celebration of movie magic.

“Wolfe Reminds, History Repeats, posted on 3.22.21: “Generally the making of cinematic art, like canvas art of the ’30s, has been largely called off in favor of serving the industry’s social justice revolution.

Just ask the curators at the Academy Museum (aka “Woke House“) — they’ll tell you all about it.

“The result has been a new form of enlightened propaganda cinema — movies that basically say ‘this is what should be‘ rather than ‘this is what is.’

White Middle-Aged Ankler Male: “To be clear, yes, I am a white male, and I believe in diversity and inclusion. But the way the Academy has gone about trying to meet the moment — both in those aspects and in the fight for relevancy — makes no sense.

“I personally can’t point to the exact moment the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences died for me, only because there are so many to choose from.

“Was it January 15, 2015 when media strategist and lawyer (but not Hollywood filmmaker) April Reign tweeted #OscarsSoWhite after none of the 20 acting nominations that year included people of color?

“Maybe it was June 19, 2016, when the Board of Governors panicked under Twitter pressure and rushed to invite 819 members, fully 20 percent of the then-current members to join — many of whom existing members did not believe were admitted based on merit?

“How about April 17, 2018 when Bill Mechanic, the former head of Fox who co-produced a great Oscar ceremony in 2010 and was nominated as a producer for Best Picture, resigned from the Board of Governors with his letter including this line: “We have settled on numeric answers to the problem of inclusion, barely recognizing that this is the Industry’s problem far, far more than it is the Academy’s. Instead we react to pressure.”

“Or July 21, 2020 when producer Michael Shamberg (Erin Brockovich, The Big Chill) filed suit against the Academy because it did not want to listen to his constructive initiatives to move the organization into the modern era?

“Was it April 25, 2021, when the Academy produced the lowest-rated Oscar ceremony in the history of the awards? True, it was a pandemic event, but the lack of film choices did not require a lack of entertainment value.”

HE comment: The Soderbergh Oscar telecast was the most despairing, spiritually enervated, bad-acid-trip Oscars in Hollywood history. In no small part because Anthony Hopkins had the temerity to to snatch the Best Actor Oscar that the late Chadwick Boseman was supposed to win…Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister was especially upset by this.

“Certainly the Oscars were already on life support by March 27 of this year when Will Smith, snot dripping from his nose, smacked comedian Chris Rock for a stupid joke (he is a comedian, I said) that Smith didn’t like. No one in charge of the Academy was actually in charge. Smith, guilty of assault, was very soon after feted with a standing ovation by those assembled as he won the Best Actor award — for playing an abusive father.”

Once More With “Empire”

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Yesterday I tried to elaborate upon my positive Telluride reaction to Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light (Searchlight, 12.9).  Toward the end of the comment thread Rosso Veneziano replied as follows:  “I respect your take but the general consensus is that the movie is bad. 58 on Metacritic, 47% on Rotten Tomatoes…and that means rotten. It’s not just critics at Telluride — the TIFF reviews were even worse.”

HE response:  You first have to remember that many if not most of the critical elite are not standing on the same terra firma as the rest of us.  In more ways than one they’re living on their own frilly planet.  Every consensus opinion that emanates from this bunch has to be filtered through this basic reality.  Most of them are not of this earth.

Trust me — they’re dismissing Empire of Light because they’re unable to buy the curious but ultimately poignant romantic bond between the two leads, played by Michael Ward and Olivia Colman.  (If Ward’s Stephen character was played by a non-POC, the reactions would be quite different.)  I myself was skeptical of this dynamic going in, but the fine writing, acting and overall period swoon effect, which is partly if not largely due to excellent production design plus Roger Deakins‘ handsome cinematography…all of this won me over.

Filmmakers are generally required to depict POCs with a paintbrush of presentism these days (i.e., presenting them according to contemporary sensibilities), and many critics, knowing this, will get all riled when a Black character is presented “incorrectly” within a period film. Many elite critics see themselves as white-knight figures whose task is to bestow dignity or even majesty upon characters of color.

Ward’s performance will never be criticized, of course, but there’s no dodging the fact that he’s a handsome actor of considerable poise and charisma playing a decades-old period character in a film written and directed by an older white man. (Not unlike Mahershala Ali in Green Book.)

And there’s a fascinating violent moment in this film, by the way, that I haven’t mentioned. Racist skinhead goons are lurking on the fringes of this story, and early on a few of them are taunting Stephen on a sidewalk, and one strikes him with a head slap. And what does Stephen do? He does the smart thing by ignoring the attacker as he continues to walk away. He knows these animals are looking for an excuse to beat him senseless, and he doesn’t give them that.

A violent moment such as this runs against the presentism aesthetic. A Black man of today would never ignore or cower from an attack of this nature if it was depicted in a present-tense film.  Our post-George Floyd mythology demands a greater measure of defiance and dignity.  And yet Mendes, adhering to the ugly reality of things in rural 1980 England as much as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza was truthfully immersed in the Los Angeles culture of the ‘70s, does the stand-up thing.  I know that the instant I noticed Stephen’s reaction to the head slap, I went “wow…that’s unusual but then again that’s Mendes.”

Iron Lady in White

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The most interesting aspects of Louise Fletcher‘s performance as Nurse Ratched in Milos Forman‘s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, which I honestly never liked all that much (and this is from a guy who played Dr. Spivey in a Connecticut stage version of Ken Kesey‘s play): (1) Instead of being butch-bossy, she was subdued and icy; (2) the combination of those hazel eyes and that slightly opened mouth had a macabre effect; (c) the 1940s Ann Sheridan hair style said more about Ratched than anything she said or did in that film.

Fletcher died yesterday (9.23) at her home in Montdurausse, France, at age 88. That’s an out-of-the-way town, and I wonder how she ended up there. I’d like to hear that story.

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Nightmare at Village Market

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Last night I ran into an old friend who’s no longer a friend because he’s more or less turned into a wokester fanatic. Yes, the viral insanity has even permeated the exurban, tree-shrouded hamlet where I now hang my hat. I won’t name names but the words between us were (mostly on his end) awful.

It happened inside Wilton’s Village Market sometime around dinner hour, and it started when I saw him poking around the exotic cheese section. He was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a fall jacket, a smallish hat and a black mask. No point in ducking the guy so I walked over and offered a greeting. Small talk followed.

Then I asked what was up with the mask, and stated in moderate but plain terms that the pandemic is over, and then asked how many booster shots he’d had, etc. I told him I’ve had four, and that I succumbed to the Omicron virus late last year. One of the reasons he wears a mask, he said, was to wind up people like me. And then we were off to the races.

He began ranting about the anti-woke assholes who refused to be vaccinated last year, and I agreed, I said, that the anti-vaxxers didn’t help matters at all, especially those who refused to mask up. Then he expanded the topic to include all anti-woke people of whatever persuasion, and I said, “Well, that’s me…I’m an anti-wokester because of the shrill lunatic attitudes of the woke left.”

And then the subject drifted over to my deluded enemies in the #MeToo congregation, which mainly stems from that unfortunate March ’21 episode in which I posted a friend’s Oscar-related opinion about how the horrific Atlanta massage parlor shootings (which the left tried to characterize as a racial hate crime until the facts began to dispute that) might blow favoring winds in the direction of Chloe Zhao.

I took the sentence-long comment down after a brief Twitter flare-up, but the haters were on a rampage and before you knew it I was being blamed for everything including the burning of the Reichstag, even though I’d actually done zip. As in Z-I-P. I had written dead fucking nothing.

Then he looked me in the eye and said I deserved all the rain that had fallen on my head since that episode, and said — this was classic — that I was just as deplorable of a human being as Harvey Weinstein. I gulped. “You can’t be saying that…you can’t be,” I replied. But he was. He’s King Lear with three Millennial daughters, you see, and they’re all wokesters and he feels he owes them his allegiance. So we’d basically entered cuckoo-bird territory.

I’ve known this guy since high school, and have regarded him for decades as one of the best and brightest, a guy whose views and judgments I’ve always felt were wise and on-target…I could have never imagined that this guy, of all people, would look me in the eye and essentially call me a piece of shit who deserved to die.

It was like speaking to Tom Courtenay’s “Strelnikov” character in Dr. Zhivago during that train-car scene with Omar Sharif. It was as if this former friend had been taken over by a woke pod person from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Decades of trust and affection and mutual respect, and this guy had chucked it all over a moronic woke-vs.-anti-woke, Hatfield vs. McCoys blood feud.

I wrote him a couple of hours later. “You’re aware that 70-plus years ago a hardcore cabal of allegedly patriotic rightwing Americans devoted themselves to punishing people who’d sympathized with Communism in the ‘30s,” I said. “Careers and lives ruined because righties were trying to purify America and cleanse it of Communism.

“Has it occurred to you and your fanatical spawn that you’re trying to do exactly the same thing now? You and your woke Robespierres are looking to cleanse the country of the wily anti-woke pathan. You’re doing the same damn thing, man. And you know what? People hate who you are, and what you’re about. I just can’t believe that you’ve turned into a woke seed pod. It’s scary.”

I whined about this supermarket trauma to a friend, and the friend decided to write Strelnikov and share a few thoughts.

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Insensitive Reply

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At least Christopher Walken‘s Dwayne, the brother of Diane Keaton‘s Annie Hall in Woody Allen‘s same titled film, was polite about it. Before sharing his shattered glass, car-crash death fantasy, he asked Alvy Singer, the stand-up comedian played by Allen, if he could confess something. By sitting down Alvy was saying “sure, Dwayne…shoot.”

If I’d been Alvy I wouldn’t have said “excuse me, Dwayne, but I have to be back on planet earth.” I would have said that I’ve also channeled a few brief death fantasies, and they’re not that big of a deal (or they don’t need to be that big of a deal) because they’re mainly about feelings of drifting and helplessness and career panic.

These feelings fester inside lots of young guys, i would have said, and especially those who are feeling pressured by society or parents or their own sense of guilt to get out there and achieve something. It’s just a signal, Dwayne, that you need to face whatever your challenge may be head-on. Life can be terrifying, but it’s even worse if you don’t man up and do something about what’s rattling you.

In short, Dwayne, you need to move out of your parents’ home and start fending for yourself. You need to start wrestling with the rough-and-tumble of life rather than hiding behind secure walls.

In my mid 20s I twice experienced a death dream that wasn’t too different from Dwayne’s. I was inside a commercial jet that had lost power, and it was tumbling downward through the clouds, going faster and faster. I could hear the fuselage skeleton groaning and cracking as the plane fell. I was a dead man. A flaming inferno death was only 25 or 30 seconds away, if that. And then I’d wake up.

Race, Tribes, Ethnicity

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In a comment thread about Ken Burns‘, Lynn Novick and Sara Botstein‘s The U.S. and the Holocaust (PBS), the six-hour doc about the prevalence of anti-Semitism in this country during the 1930s and ’40s, HE comment guy “bentrane” explained something:

“Let’s be correct here [and understand that] Jews are not a race,” he wrote. “They are members of the Jewish religion, which has members of many colors. If we are talking about prejudice against the Jewish people, we are talking about anti-Semitism, not racism.”

To which I replied: “But Woody Allen’s depictions of his Brooklyn-based Jewish family in Annie Hall and Radio Days and Crimes and Misdemeanors made it fairly clear that they were defined by a lot more than a nominal, going-through-the-motions investment in attending Jewish services at their local temple on Saturdays. They were a colorful ethnic tribe, outspoken and passionate and a bit coarse at times. Don’t forget how Allen made their appearances and behaviors seem especially pronounced when, in Annie Hall, he compared his family with Diane Keaton’s midwestern white-bread family (which included a ‘classic Jew-hating’ grandmother).”

Bentrane to HE: “Ethnicity is not race. And not all Brooklyn Jewish families are alike. My mother was a Brooklyn-raised Jew, and her family was solidly middle class, totally secular.”

HE to bentrane: “Speaking as a New Jersey and Connecticut-raised paleface, I can assure you that WASPs are as much of a tribe as Japanese-Americans or any other ethnic group living in this country and having bonded geographically for cultural reasons. You’re saying there’s no such thing as a racial component in U.S. whitebread culture (descendants of European tribes from England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Germany, Russia, Italy)? Are you saying race is purely a matter of skin shade? This country is bursting with tribes. Zoomers are a tribe, etc.”

Holdupski on Mendes’ “Empire”

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This morning “Rosso Veneziano” dismissed Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light as a “panned” film, at least in terms of its award-season potential.

HE response: “Empire of Light is my idea of a sublime and deeply moving yesteryear film, and is exceptionally well acted. There was no question in my mind that it was an authentic, emotionally fine-tuned masterwork after I saw it at the Herzog. It seemed “just right” in so many ways.

“As a study of a few characters living smallish lives in a somewhat isolated English coastal village in 1980 and ‘81, it recalls the complex textures of another tale of small-town characters, some of them grappling with sexual matters and with a certain movie theatre occupying an iconic space in their lives — Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (‘71).

“A few wokester fanatics panning Empire of Light in Telluride (vigilant defenders of Black identity and dignity, they didn’t care for the curious but affecting inter-racial romantic rapport between Olivia Colman and Michael Ward’s characters) doesn’t mean shit.

“Critics are truiy their own species these days, living on their own politically-attuned planet. Eternally fickle and excitably hair-trigger, they often seem divorced from and in some cases contemptuous of Average Joe perceptions about this or that film, and particularly those, it seems, that have explored racial situations or narratives. (2018’s Green Book being another example.)

More than any other time in cinema history, today’s elite critics are, to a large extent, living for and within their own realm.

“There are noteworthy exceptions and honorable outliers, thank God, and I’m not saying the elite critic cabal is entirely untrustworthy, but in the matter of films that either touch upon or seriously explore the holy woke covenant (race, gender, sexuality and whitey-very-bad), they’re never been more unreliable than today.”

Friendo: “I dunno. I’ve spoken to folks who don’t like it, and they didn’t seem to be coming from a woke perspective.”

HE to friendo: “They’re not ‘wrong’ but they’ve allowed themselves to be triggered by the romantic inter-racial dynamic. If Michael Ward’s character (who is only slightly older than Mendes’ age was in ‘80) had been white, the same know-it-alls you’ve spoken to would be much more accommodating. Then again the film wouldn’t stand out as much, of course, if Ward’s character had been a pale-faced Mendes stand-in.”

Bottom line: If you’re dealing with a Black lead character, a director-writer has to play his/her cards in exactly the right way or the elite critics will scold to no end.

Mendes casting Ward as a generational stand-in for himself seemed, at first, like a fashionably woke gambit before I saw it. But the writing and the acting and the overall quality factor won me over. I melted. And Ward is so charming and good-looking.

1942 Ethical Standards

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We can assume that “not suitable for general exhibition” was roughly equivalent to what an R rating means today. (Or used to mean). What in Casablanca could have given moral guardians this level of concern? Probably the allusion to sexual relations outside the bonds of marriage between Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman). What else could it be?

Shame

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I’ve seen two-thirds of The U.S. and the Holocaust, the six-hour Ken Burns doc that focuses on anti-Semitism in this country during the 1930s and ’40s. It’s a stunning indictment of the way this country used to be, or certainly the way it used to think. And of course, it stirs thoughts of other forms of racial and ethnic prejudice that have permeated U.S. society since the Eisenhower era. I can honestly say that these four hours made me more fully aware of the degree of heartlessness in this country between 75 and 90 years ago. You sit there and listen to Peter Coyote‘s narration and you just feel more and more numb and forlorn. I’ll watch Part 3 sometime this weekend.

Dorkiest-Looking Pop Group

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With The Association‘s “Cherish” being used prominently in the The Greatest Beer Run Ever, I’m reminded of how this mid-to-late ’60s pop group didn’t fit the mold. ’60s pop groups had to have reasonably good-looking guys — that was the standard set by the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, etc.

And then along came The Association — a six member group that had two handsome guys and four with the oddest, most homely-looking faces in pop-music history.

The dorkiest was Terry Kirkman, who could have been cast as a college-aged serial killer. Next came Larry Ramos (died in 2014 at age 72), a chubby guy who looked like a typical member of an A.V. Squad. The thick-featured Brian Cole (who passed in ’72 at age 30) looked like a bouncer or a rugby player. Russ Giguere was semi-presentable but couldn’t pass the dishy-pop-star test — too geeky, granny glasses, thin moustache.

Jim Yester and Ted Bluechel were the only ones you could honestly call “good looking.”

Note: I posted something similar three or four years ago but I can’t find it.

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