World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is convinced that politicized quota thinking strongly influenced the BFI’s 2022 Sight & Sound poll. I don’t see how anyone can argue otherwise. It’s my personal suspicion (as well as Sasha Stone‘s) that the progressive clique got together and decided to catapult Chantal Akerman‘s widely respected 1975 film into the top position.
Harrison Ford‘s digital de-aging looks pretty good, I must say. It certainly looks better than Robert De Niro‘s de-aging in The Irishman.
Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny sounds like a game show.
The 2022 Sight & Sound poll popped earlier this afternoon, and we all knew what the results would reflect, right? Not so much with films directed by older white guys (especially OWG directors with a somewhat dicey or shady reputation), and up with films directed by women and POCS. And so Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxel, a 201-minute film about duty, survival, sex working, regimentation and repetition, and which ends with a “john” getting stabbed in the throat with a pair of scissors, was named #1.
In other words, (a) down with the insensitive asshole patriarchy, (b) up with chopped onions carefully mashed into ground beef, and (c) hooray for Delphine Seyrig finally having an orgasm.
In 2012 Jeanne Dielman ranked #36 on the BFI list…fine. But how did it manage to suddenly vault up to the #1 position? Admired films tend to move up gradually, no? It feels to some of us like Dielman won because of an organized campaign among feminist-minded critics. If Dielman had landed in the 10th or 12th spot in the 2012 poll, today’s win would have seemed more of a natural thing. But to go from 36th place a decade ago to #1 in ’22? It seems to me like the fix was in.
You can’t argue or complain with the BFI critics, who are primarily a bunch of highbrow snoots trying to out-snoot each other.
If you ask me the BFI Directors Greatest Films of All Time list is a lot more grounded and sensible.
So 60th-ranked Moonlight has edged out Casablanca (#61), Goodfellas (#62) and The Third Man (#63). I’ve seen all four, and I’m telling you straight from the shoulder that there’s no way Moonlight deserves, deliberately or haphazardly, to be ranked above the other three…NO WAY ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH.
Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo is now ranked second, and I honestly thought it would take a bigger hit than that. I figured the legend of Hitch having allegedly made Tippi Hedren‘s life hell during the making of The Birds and especially Marnie…okay, let’s drop it, but I’m slightly surprised.
Three indisputably great 20th Century films about conflicted white males dealing with disillusionment and corruption — David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (’62), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (’74) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (’69) — were booted off the critics’ list of the top 100. Polanski had to pay for his sexual indiscretions of the ’70s and ’80s, I suppose, and Peckinpah had to be banned for his notorious misogyny. But why did the saga of T.E. Lawrence get the shaft? What exactly did Lean or Lawrence do to earn the heave-ho? Was it the old arrogant British imperialism thing, or the fact that women are barely seen and certainly not heard seen in that classic desert epic?
1. “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxel” (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
2. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
3. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. “Tokyo Story” (Ozu Yasujiro, 1953)
5. “In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai, 2001)
6. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. “Beau travail” (Claire Denis, 1998)
8. “Mulholland Dr.” (David Lynch, 2001)
9. “Man with a Movie Camera” (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
10. “Singin’ in the Rain” (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1951)
A large Tyrannosaurus Rex might be be able to smash a cheaply-made bedroom door by shattering the door frame, but a big bear wouldn’t be able to do that…sorry. So right away the credibility is out the window. Plus the CG stinks. If only Werner Herzog had written and directed this…seriously.
Cocaine Bear (Universal, 2.23) stands ready to fling damp fecal matter upon our cinematic temple and lower the levels of cultural discourse. It’s the new Snakes on a Plane, and that piece of cheap exploitation blew chunks to begin with.
The tone, obviously, is one of absurdist action humor of the lowest possible order.
There’s clearly no opportunity to buy into the fantasy — every shot in this trailer says “don’t believe this crap!…are you a moron because only stoned morons would derive the slightest enjoyment from a film this idiotic and ludicrous. I mean, it’s not even good enough to be called perverse.”
Universal Pictures, director Elizabeth Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden aren’t the core problem here. They’re just looking to make a buck and pay the bills. The skeevy, scurvy, bottom-of-the-barrel chumps out there in megaplexland who find this live action-meets-Wile E. Coyote-type humor funny or even slightly amusing…they’re the problem.
An actual Georgia-residing bear (a guiltless creature of basic instinct and no ulterior motives) died of self-ingested cocaine poisoning in 1985, and 37 years later a movie company has made a dark comedy out of this…A COMEDY!! If this isn’t a searing indictment of a thoroughly rancid and morally corrupted lower-middle-class culture, I don’t know what could be.
You know who’s going to like this film and tweet about it endlessly? Trumpies!
I’ve changed my mind — Banks and Warden need to answer for this. After Cocaine Bear is released and streaming to great profitability, they’ll need to check themselves into a moral rehab facility.