Paul Schrader: “This year’s Sight & Sound poll reflects not a historical continuum, but a politically correct rejiggering.”

From HE’s”Sight & Sound Highbrows Lean Wokey,” posted on 12.1.22:

Todd Field‘s TAR was won the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Film trophy — fine. But the Best Director prize has gone to RRR‘s S. S. Rajamouli, which is somewhere between a taunt and absolute lunacy.

Earlier: The sometimes nutty-as-a-fruitcake New York Film Critics Circle, the once-esteemed org that used to award each and every award based upon merit, has handed its Best Supporting Actress trophy to Nope‘s Keke Palmer**.

The Banshees of Inisherin‘s Kerry Condon is easily the most deserving contender in this category.

And the NYFCC’s Best Supporting Actor award has gone to Ke Huy Quan (aka “Short Round”) of Everything Everywhere All at Once. HE approves of the Best Cinematography award going to Claudio Miranda, the dp of Top Gun: Maverick. Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin has won for Best Screenplay — HE approves of the dialogue but not the bloody finger stubs.

Breaking at 1 pm eastern: Colin Farrell has won the NYFCC’s Best Actor award, a decision that I’m totally fine with. And the brilliant Cate Blanchett has won Best Actress trophy for TAR. Okay, the NYFCC is awarding for merit after all, Palmer and Rajamouli aside.

** Not a single Gold Derby handicapper has even mentioned Palmer’s performance, which was basically about projecting her Millennial Diva personality.

[Initially posted on 6.20.12] Ever since seeing my first image of the Matterhorn when I was eight or nine I’ve wanted to stand in its shadow and just go “whoa.” So yesterday the guys and I drove the wrong way (i.e., four hours over winding mountain roads) from Lauterbrunnen to Zermatt, the affluent ski town that lies at the base of it.

The trip turned out to be mostly a disaster. Because of an innocent mistake I almost got slammed with a 350 Swiss franc traffic ticket — thank God I was able to talk my way out of it.

The signs on the long and winding approach to Zermatt fail to explicitly point out a basic fact — you can’t drive into town unless you’re a resident or a cab driver or a city worker. You have to park in Tasch, an ugly little settlement about six kilometers north of Zermatt, and take a train or a taxi in. Fine, no problem, but there are no signs that clearly say this, and certainly none in English.

When I see a sign that says “park here,” I say to myself, “Okay, that’s an option, fine. It’s not something I necessarily intend to do as I am the sole master of my fate, but it’s nice to know it’s there.”

HE suggestion to municipal Zermatt brainiacs: The words “Non-resident passenger vehicles are not allowed in Zermatt” would definitely be understood if you said as much on a road sign. Or how about an image of a car with a big red X or a circle slash across it?

A well-fed Zermatt cop in his 30s pulled me over and explained the rules. He asked how I could have missed the sign that explains about parking in Tasch and taking the train or a cab, etc.? I didn’t want to argue by telling him that the traffic-sign people are imbeciles so I just said I’d made an innocent mistake. “You have to pay a fine of 350 francs for this!,” he declared in English. I held myself in check, took a breath and said, “Well, I don’t think that’s very fair. I don’t read German very well and while I fully accept and respect the laws here, I just didn’t realize that driving into Zermatt was 100% verboten…really, honest mistake.”

The cop could have said “tough shit” and fined me anyway, but for some reason he took pity and let me skate…whew.

The guys and I felt so turned off this episode that we decided to just flush that awful town out of our systems and drive to Bern instead.

Did Jimmy Fallon call White Noise “a super fun movie”? Or something close to that? It’s not. Okay the A&P “dancing in the aisles” finale is fun, but that’s it.

Artists Equity , a Ben Affleck-Matt Damon production company, was annnounced a few days ago, but HE has its own schedule.

Affleck-Damon are to be congratulated for planning to make five ’90s-style movies a year — appealing to semi-smart people, hopefully no guilt or virtue signalling, no kneejerk woke shit, etc. Excellent!

The flaw in the plan, of course, is that the audience stupidity factor is so overwhelming that it could choke several horses per day. Given a choice between Cocaine Bear and Artists Equity’s first film, an ’80s flick about Nike and Air Jordans, most people would probably choose the former. Am I wrong? I wish I was.

Artists Equity sounds like a 21st Century version of United Artists, which was founded in 1919 by D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford in the pursuit of artistic independence, and First Artists (’69 to ’80), which made films for Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen.

Affleck: “I see no differentiation between commercial and quality. You ask [Netflix CEO] Reed Hastings, ‘Hey well, we went for quantity.’ I’m sure that established a footprint, I’m sure there’s some wisdom in that, and I’m sure they had a great strategy, but I would have said, ‘How do you make 50 good movies a year?’ How is that possible? There is no committee big enough. You just can’t do it. It’s a thing that requires attention and dedication and work and it resists the sort of assembly line process.”

“There’s just so much to see [these days]. There’s a lot of investment that’s gone into a lot of people my age, around that age. My wife, who’s 53, the most famous, admired, spectacular woman in the world, there weren’t 53-year-old stars in the 1940s and ’50s. That was it. And there weren’t really for men [either]. Paul Newman was kind of old at 37. You read about Newman at 37, 38 and they were like, ‘Well, as you move into the sunset of your life, Paul, after Towering Inferno….’ And now people are much more familiar with this group of people. They’ve kept that name recognition in a marketplace that is so diffuse where it’s more and more and more valuable to be able to attract eyeballs, to be ab

What’s up with Affleck’s voice? I know his precise tone and timbre, and it sounds like he’s recovering from strep throat.

In the wake of Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (’75) topping the BFI Sight & Sound poll, I had to give it another shot. So I watched it on the Criterion Channel, on my Macbook Air. Most of it, I should say. I made it through the first 90 minutes the hard way (i.e., without cheating), but then something inside me began to wither and crumple, and I began to watch ten-minute portions. But I missed nothing.

Jeannie Diulman is a statement, all right. Three hours and 21 minutes of torpor, tedium and depression. Such a sad, suffocating and listless film. (Yes, that’s the point but c’mon.) It’s about a life of a prim and proper sex worker (Day of the Jackal’s Delphine Seyrig) that’s mainly about servitude and the renunciation of joy and the suppression of the spirit. A film about regimented motherhood and the raising of a dull, homely, tragically obedient son whose life is doomed to the same kind of repetition, the same dutiful stiflings and silences and submissions.

Seyrig is Spartacus in the kitchen — a sex-hating sex gladiator without a sword. A slave who endlessly prepares meals and adheres to regularity, regularity and more regularity. She never breaks out of Capua, so to speak, and we never see her having sex except at the very end, and in an odd, ugly and curious way at that. But we do see her prepare many dinners.

Duty, diligence and desperation, partly due to very little money and partly due to having nothing inside. A film about being numb and experiencing a form of daily resignation and death. A woman who owns no record player and hardly ever listens to music on her shitty radio and of course never sings or even hums along. The film simulates emptiness, nothingness, endless mediocrity. A woman who’s obviously smart and discerning and disciplined enough to hold down a decent job but has decided instead on a life of miserable prostitution and sporadic infant care.

Grunting pig that I am, I found the chaste bathtub scene (and Seyrig’s glorious, half-glimpsed nudity and the slight, tantalizing ripples of middle-aged flab) the only respite, and thank God for that and Delphine Seyrig in general! But I came to deeply despise Seyrig / Dielman’s son, whose stifled life is so dull and deflated that he’s almost a figure of evil. I wanted to reach into the screen and give this wimp a good slap across the chops.

The second-to-last scene is the only one that shows Seyrig having it off with one of her homely, pathetic johns. It concludes with a sudden, impulsive and unconvincingly depicted murder of a certain ugly fellow — a scissor stabbing in the neck. Followed by a final scene in which Seyrig meditates about her life and this murder and the certainty of being freed from her agonizing life by being sentenced to prison (or, if she’s lucky, to life in a mental hospital).

So after submitting the viewer to a form of torture for three hours, Seyrig / Dielman finally “breaks out of Capua,” but she never revolts in a full, satisfying or expressive way. For Jeanne Dielman is the anti-Belle du Jour. A flatline version. Such a tragic meditation, but despite what the film’s many admirers seem to believe, it’s not a profound (much less an illuminating or transcendent) thing to subject viewers to this much pique and boredom.