Day: January 14, 2023

Posted on 2.21.12: A movie that nobody of any consequence really loves is going to win seven Oscars on Sunday, in the view of Hollywood Reporter forecaster Scott Feinberg. How can this be? There’s a solid current of like for this agreeable little film, and that’s about it.

No one who knows or cares about Film Catholicism truly respects The Artist as a work of striking originality or spirit or technique or anything. All through the season people haven’t voted for The Artist — they’ve defaulted to it.

I’m trying not to pay too much attention to this or give it too much weight, but when I do I get a little bit sick. It’s 1953 all over again, and we’re about to give the Best Picture Oscar to The Greatest Show on Earth.

Who are the gelatinous AMPAS members who are voting for it? Are they feeling at least a twinge of regret or inner conflict as they mark their ballots? Because — this is the truth — I haven’t spoken to a single person who’s been really knocked flat by The Artist…not one.

That euphoric current that many of us felt when Roman Polanski‘s The Pianist won for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor? That electric-jolt feeling that says “wow, amazing…the good guys are winning for a change”? That was one of the biggest Oscar highs I’ve ever felt. Who in the world is going to really be jumping for joy when The Artist starts sweeping the table? Most of us are going to be feeling the opposite — resignation, melancholia, puzzlement. This pastiche is the best we could do? This hodgepodge of imitation?

The Artist is a 2011 version of That’s Entertainment! in a silent, black-and-white mode with a strong narrative assist from A Star Is Born and Singin’ in the Rain.

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I first saw Laurent Bouzereau‘s The Making of ‘Jaws’, an extra feature on the Jaws laserdisc, in ’95. 27 and 1/2 years ago. It’s since been included on the DVD, Bluray and 4K Bluray editions. It runs two hours and six minutes or something close to that. I was instantly gobsmacked by how honest and thorough and meticulous it was. Every significant chapter, every step of the journey. And a lot of it is funny. And everyone looks so young!

Almost everyone took part except for poor Robert Shaw, who passed in ’78, and the late Murray Hamilton, who departed in ’86. Spielberg, Zanuck and Brown, Sid Sheinberg, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, book author Peter Benchley, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, Roy Scheider, dp Bill Butler, edtitor Verna Fields, John Williams, shark specialists Ron and Valerie Taylor, etc.

It’s absolutely the definitive account of how Steven Spielberg, Richard Zanuck and David Brown‘s 1975 thriller came to be. The doc is significantly better, it goes without saying, than Eric Hollander‘s The Shark Is Still Working (’12), which I caught a few years ago. Decent, approvable.

I re-watched Bouzereau’s doc last night, and it’s still transporting. I know the saga backwards and forwards and I loved every minute. The only thing it needs is someone acknowledging at the very end that the enormous success of Jaws yielded a mixed legacy. For Jaws and Star Wars basically brought about the end of the Hollywood’s greatest chapter (the late ’60s to late ’70s) by ushering in the era of the blockbuster. Nobody so much as mentions this in Bouzereau’s film….astonishing.

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Brendan Fraser was never going to prevail, but he did himself no favors by blowing off the Golden Globes. Okay, so ex-HFPA president Phillip Berk may have patted his ass back in ’03…so what? What’s that got to do with the price of rice in 2023?

I’m also scratching my head about the seemingly scripted Andrea Riseborough Best Actress campaign for her performance in To Leslie. Her performance as an all-but-hopeless drunk who takes forever to hit bottom is…well, the first term that comes to mind is “whew!” Yes, she’s raw, real, scalding — you can’t help but say “wow, Andrea really went for it…I mean, she doesn’t care if the audience likes her character or not.”

Except an actor isn’t going to get Oscar-nominated just for craft and honesty alone. He/she has to deliver a performance that has at least some degree of empathy. If you’re playing a drunk the audience has to be able to least tolerate the character in question. There has to be, you know, a certain palatable sadness or sympathy factor or dark charm.

For the first hour of To Leslie, Riseborough — an excellent actress — is so committed to the psychology of a pathetic, lying, disreputable drunk that you can’t stand her. Or at least I couldn’t. She’s “great”, yes, but Jesus, man…

“And She Drinks A Little,” posted on 3.20.22 — an ironic date for me as I embraced sobriety exactly ten years earlier (3.20.12).

Having dealt with an alcoholic dad and coped with my own boozing issues until I embraced sobriety on 3.20.12, I’m not especially interested in films about alcoholics. Even without that history movies about drunks have always seemed more or less the same to me.

In Michael Morris‘s To Leslie, which recently screened at South by Southwest, Andrea Riseborough plays the 40ish Leslie, an all-but-hopeless drunk who’s nothing but rat poison to everyone she’s ever known or been close to, including her son.

The first 50 minutes or so are pure hell to get through, and then Leslie finally falls in with a couple of low-rent guys who run a 2nd-class motel. One of them, an amiable, low-key dude named Sweeney, is played by Marc Maron, and right away you’re asking yourself “is Sweeney a fucking idiot? Why has he offered Leslie a job as the motel’s maid? Why did he give her a chance? She’s obviously a lost cause and nothing but trouble.”

But he gives her a chance anyway, and after another relapse or two Leslie finally pulls out of the long downward spiral. But there’s so much ugliness in this film. I mean it’s really and truly awful.

Remember the opening scene in Bruce Beresford‘s Tender Mercies (’83), when Robert Duvall‘s Mac Sledge, a semi-retired country singer, is shouting and slugging someone and generally behaving like an abusive drunk? The ugly happens in one brief scene, and then Mac is on the mend for the rest of the film. But in To Leslie, Riseborough does the ugly for a whole damn hour before she starts to self-reflect and turn a corner. It struck me as too much to bear.

Riseborough’s performance is raw and scalding and frankly dispiriting. I believed her in every scene, but I also wanted to see her get hit by a truck. I didn’t believe Maron — I thought he was just laying on the charm with a shitkicker accent. But high marks for the other costars — Allison Janney, Andre Royo, Stephen Root, Owen Teague, etc.

…but if a noteworthy paleface was to say the same thing today on Real Time with Bill Maher or The Joe Rogan Experience, he/she would be dead in a matter of hours, certainly days.

It was the cat. It’s always been the cat. The cat had to be in Dylan’s lap and looking at the lens.

Sally Grossman passed on 5.11.21 at age 81. She led an engaged life as honcho of Bearsville Records following the 1986 death of husband Albert Grossman, but nothing she did or said after the April ‘65 release of Bringing It All Back Home could rival the iconic power of that red pants suit, lit cigarette and neutral-bordering-on-chilly expression.

Joyce Carol Oates, author of “Blonde: A Novel”, isn’t altogether wrong about Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, and there’s no arguing that in terms of delivering a tough, unsparing biopic within an artful impressionistic realm, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is a lot more probing and less inclined to turn the other cheek. But almost everyone dislikes Dominik’s film for its heartlessness, and that’s always the bottom line. Heart always wins.

Posted on 10.7.22: