Day: December 3, 2022

Ladies and germs, the winner of the NYFCC’s Best Director award….

There’s no point in selecting a pretend version of the S & S ten greatest, but here goes anyway:

(1) Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty, (2) Alex Cox‘s Repo Man, (3) Michael Mann‘s Heat, (4) Howard Hawks‘ Red River, (5) Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, (6) Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman…kidding! I meant to say The Godfather, Part II, (7) Alfred Hitchcock‘s North By Northwest, (8) Wim Wenders‘ The American Friend, (9) Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, (10) Joel and Egan Coen‘s Fargo. This feels silly…

This is a very, very bad indication of where James Cameron‘s Avatar 2 may (I say “may”) be coming from. I literally gasped when I read the headline quote. I’m genuinely scared now. Testosterone in and of itself is not evil or toxic — it’s grade-A rocket fuel that gets certain characters up the hill and onto victory. Cameron is talking a woke game now but God help us if he really means this. Please God, don’t let Avatar 2 be woke…please.

And I’d visit another five or ten times if I could.

Originally posted from Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland on 6.17.12: “Early yesterday afternoon I was expecting to meet Jett and Dylan at the modest Alpine-styled cabin we’re renting in Lauterbrunnen, but they weren’t there when I arrived. So I texted them and they said they were in town and would be along. The problem was that they had the only key to the place, and I was coping with a slight call of nature. But I figured I’d wait it out.

“The minutes dragged on and they didn’t show. The little devil on my left shoulder began to think about taking care of business behind the cabin. ‘No!,’ said the angel on my right shoulder, ‘don’t be an animal!’ But Jett and Dylan were taking their time.

“I looked around and noticed a narrow driveway behind the cabin — a possible problem. But nobody had driven by in quite a while. I also considered the fact that the rear of the cabin is sheltered from view by a hilly mound. Quiet, quiet, no cars, no cars. The devil won out and I stepped behind the cabin.

“Four or five seconds later a car drove up the driveway with a family in it, and with a three-year-old staring and pointing at me from the back-seat window. Five seconds after that another car drove by with a pretty girl at the wheel. She also checked me out.

“If I hadn’t stepped behind the cabin, those two cars would have never driven by.”

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From Quentin Tarantino‘s “Cinema Speculation“: “Steve McQueen as Frank Bullitt keeps moving forward while Peter Yates, the director, follows him here and there as we, the audience, sit back and let them do our thinking for us. As pure cinema, Bullitt is one of the best directed movies ever made.”

Dozens of families were out and wandering around in Wilton Center early last night. It was cold but not too cold. There were handing out free cups of steaming alcoholic cider and hot chocolate. I could smell the campfire smoke on my overcoat when we got home.

I was ready to move past the Jeanne Dielmann / Sight & Sound thing, but then I came upon a Todd Alcott Facebook riff that completely ignored the fact that the voting was largely political and that the system was almost certainly massaged and gamed.

This notion was aroused when Jordan Ruimy posted a link to Brian Jacobson’s L.A. Review of Books piece about the S&S poll (12.2), which had a vague “smoking gun” feeling.

First Alcott, then me and then Alcott’s progressive female Facebook pallies, who seem to think that I hate Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 film (I’m not that much of a fan but I don’t hate it) or that I don’t get it because of my gender (I understand exactly what it’s about and what the strategy is).