Day: February 21, 2023

I’m presuming that the film critic successor to A.O. Scott, whose decision to shift into book reviewing was announced on Tuesday (2.21), has already been decided upon by N.Y. Times management.

If not, one presumes or at least hopes that the decision will take into consideration the fact that the woke worm has turned, the crazy current is losing its strength and that the Times really needs a sensible, snappy–phrased, Bret Stephens-like cineaste, or someone who doesn’t hold with the wokester criteria that defined the Dargis–Scott Universe essays of the last three or four years.

Someone like Variety critic Owen Gleiberman, for example. A seasoned diviner of great 20th and 21st Century cinema and certainly no friend of the progressive Khmer Rouge, O.G. has always gotten the whole equation and writes entertainingly to boot.

For symbolism’s sake if nothing else, they need to hand Scott’s job to a critic who doesn’t necessarily buy into the “Woody Allen is Satan” narrative, as Scott more or less did five years ago. That article was an ignoble Times milestone, and they certainly don’t need another agenda-tied progressive like Dargis. The readership has had it with that shite.

If the decision is between Times contributors Wesley Morris and Glenn Kenny, I’d much rather see Kenny fill Scott’s shoes. As an act of defiance if nothing else. Because if Times honchos don’t hand the gig to Morris their hides will carry an R brand, right?

I know or suspect deep down that Morris will get the gig but I’ve never liked him. He’s an excellent writer but also an arch know-it-all and a somewhat fey elitist. In 2015 he chortled at the brilliant Love and Mercy. having sneered at it during the 2014 Toronto Film Festival. Like a good little woke Trotsky-ite Morris tried to kill the harmless, warm-hearted Green Book at a crucial stage in the Academy voting game. (Sorry that didn’t work out!) Instead of honorably engaging when I wrote him a few years back with a challenging opinion, Morris shrieked at the alarming fact that I had his email address. Pearl clutcher!

Ray of hope: Word around the campfire is that Morris may not want the job, as he allegedly prefers being a critic-at-large. Covering the waterfront as the Times’ co-lead film critic is a demanding task, etc.

Posted six or seven years ago: “I began my life feeling very angry at God for giving me such a miserable life in suburban New Jersey, and especially for giving me such strict, hard-nosed parents, particularly a mother who made me go to church every fecking Sunday. Then in my teens I went through a period of mocking and taunting Him. Then I reversed gears in my early 20s, embracing and worshipping Krishna as a result of my mystical LSD trips. Then I came to an existential understanding that God is, depending on how lucky or unlucky you are in terms of parental or tribal lineage and birth location, at best impartial about whether you’re living a happy or miserable life.

Then again God does give you the freedom to become whomever, depending upon your hustling abilities. If you want happiness and you’re not living under a horrible dictatorship, orchestrate your own version of it without making things worse for others.

HE / Ahab: “What nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it…what cruel, remorseless emperor commands me against all natural lovings and longings that I keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time, recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I would not so much as dare? Is Wells, Wells? Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of itself but is as an errand boy in heaven, nor one single star can revolve but by some invisible power, how then can this one small heart beat, this one small brain think thoughts unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I?”

God doesn’t care at all. He’ll shine bright sun, love you, nourish your land with rain and rich minerals, make you rich or poor, drown you, plague you, abuse you, Holocaust you, rape your cities, cut off your heads…anything that any earth-residing monster dreams up and wants to do, God will go along.

In the view of the Critical Drinker, Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania “sums up everything the MCU has become…a plot so entirely predictable and generic that it feels as if it was written by an overworked AI, basically consisting of a series of tired and played-out tropes that have been done a million times before…visuals that are so obnoxiously overdone you can barely process what you’re seeing…

“Ant Man 3 is everything that most of us have come to despise about Marvel at this point…two hours of trite, bland, corporatized, predictable, pointless, soul-destroying nothingness…what a pile of absolute shite.”

Posted on 2.17.23:

If Sonny Bono hadn’t slammed into a tree while skiiing in the Lake Tahoe region on 1.5.98 and if he’d otherwise kept himself in good health, he would have celebrated his 88th birthday five days ago (2.16.23).

Bono was 64 at the time of his death. I’m sorry he suffered through that. But he lived an interesting life with an unusual arc — at first a hippie-ish songwriter, singer and performer in the ’60s and ’70s, and then a “protect the small businessman” Republican in the ’80s and ’90s.

An early ’80s memory: I was driving west along the hilly-curvy section of Sunset Blvd. (near Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion) when I noticed Bono in his car, waiting to slip into the eastbound lane.

Two or three years later I ordered a drink at Bono, his Italian joint on Melrose near La Cienega. My immediate impression was that there were too many tables scrunched together.

I’m mentioning Bono because until this morning I somehow hadn’t read that he and Roddy Jackson co-authored “She Said ‘Yeah!’“, a fast and catchy Rolling Stones song from ‘64 or ‘65. The song is basically a horndog thing — a lust-struck guy wants to have it off with a hot girl, and to his infinite delight she’s down for it… “yeah!”**

I’d also never read that Bono co-authored “Needles and Pins,” a 1962 song that took off when a version by The Searchers charted in ’64. Bono co-penned the song with Jack Nitzsche and Jackie DeShannon, who recorded a version in ’63. The song is more commonly known as “Needles and Pinzah.”

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Philippine director Isabel Sandoval has taken issue with Roger Friedman’s Showbiz 411 report (2.20) that Pedro Almodovar’s A Strange Way of Life, a 40-minute “short”, will open the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. For what it’s worth, Sandoval has tweeted that Martin Scorsese’s 200-minute Killers of the Flower Moon will open the festival.

The fact that the L.A.-based Sandoval runs with other filmmakers suggests that she may be onto something.

On the other hand, there’s always something about an opening-night Cannes booking that says “hmmm.” Ask any filmmaker — it’s always better to play within the festival. Being the opening-nighter always seems to suggest sone sort of difficulty or softness — it sends the wrong message in some odd way. [Thanks to Jordan Ruimy for passing along.]

The obvious bottom line (apparent to anyone paying attention) is that Everything Everywhere All At Once is not just divisive but deeply loathed. It’s my personal opinion that this A24,release (and I mean this from the bottom of my heart) is nothing short of a pestilence.

…as Clayton Davis, Variety’s identity-propelled, award-season handicapper, furrows his brow.