Burying visual information in a shroud of unnecessary darkness is not only perverse but diseased. Willfully submitting to this kind of monochrome mud makes no sense, and yet there it is…the only possible rationale for a film-noir lover to buy the new Shout! Factory Bluray of Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (‘48).
Decades of resentment, irritation, alienation and suppressed rancor fell away today when I paid a visit to my dad’s gravesite. Hillside Cemetery, plot #1522. He’s not actually there but a veteran’s org planted the stone a few weeks after he passed.
I’ve been too critical of him over the years. He was no day at the beach but a decent human being as far as it went. A clever ad man, hard working, witty, thoughtful, well educated, responsible.
The axe-throwing wasn’t so bad. I didn’t want to do it due to fear of failure. But I managed a few decent throws, even a couple of bull’s-eyes.
There are two wood-handled axe sizes —I was happier with the smaller, less weighty one. I tended to lightly lob rather than throw hard.
The baked-in-Bloomfield atmosphere is emphatically lower-middle-class — the Montclair swells keep their distance and then some. But I shrugged it off. We’re all bumblefucks underneath our pretensions.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Guarkye (spell that last name!) approved in a slightly mixed way, but Variety’s Peter Debruge was 100% sold and the closing-night SXSW crowd was reportedly oogah–boogah and ape-crazy.
HE won’t be seeing Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Alex Convery’s Air until Wednesday evening so all good things in their immaculate time and proper proportion, but thank God something has come along to flush out that horrible EEAAO after-taste. It’s almost like the Beatles arriving in the wake of the JFK assassination.
Two days ago (3.16) I took a shot at listing 2023’s likeliest Best Picture contenders. Nine in all. No hopefuls or maybe-level contenders — strictly serious only, “safe bets,” no pikers, etc.
The following day Variety’s Clayton Davis ran his own ‘23 rundown, generously allowing (as he usually does) for any and all possibilities from the Clayton realm. and that’s fine. Then again including The Marvels, Spider–Man: Across The Spider–Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 speaks for itself.
