Day: June 28, 2023

In a 6.28 letter, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences has announced it is inviting 398 artists and executives to join. Below are the actors who’ve been invited.

If you subscribe to the view that invitations should be based upon the value and importance that artists bring to the Academy and not flash-in-the-pan topicality, HE has boldfaced the invitees who seem to really and truly deserve the honor.

Everyone knows Brooke Smith, right? First-rate character actress — Silence of the Lambs, Random Hearts, Melinda and Melinda, In Her Shoes. Her name was recently forwarded to the Academy for membership, but they zotzed her.

Friendo: “Smith is representative of what the Academy used to be. She’s just a reliable, hard-working character actress. Whatever the Academy is now, it’s lost or sacrificed that expert class prestige it used to have. And maybe they think that ethnic criteria makes it more modern and fresh and maybe it does…who knows?”

Zar Amir-Ebrahimi – “Holy Spider,” “Bride Price vs. Democracy”
Sakura Ando – “A Man,” “Shoplifters”
Selma Blair – “Hellboy,” “Legally Blonde”
Marsha Stephanie Blake – “I’m Your Woman,” “Luce”
Austin Butler – “Elvis,” “Once upon a Time…in Hollywood”
Raúl Castillo – “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” “The Inspection”
Chang Chen – “The Soul,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”
Ram Charan – “RRR,” “Magadheera”
Kerry Condon – “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Gold”
Robert John Davi – “Licence to Kill,” “The Goonies”
Dolly De Leon – “Triangle of Sadness,” “Verdict”
Martina Gedeck – “The Lives of Others,” “Mostly Martha”
Bill Hader – “Trainwreck,” “The Skeleton Twins”
Nicholas Hoult – “The Favourite,” “Mad Max: Fury Road”
Stephanie Hsu – “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”
Tin Lok Koo – “A Witness out of the Blue,” “Paradox”
Vicky Krieps – “Corsage,” “Phantom Thread”
Joanna Kulig – “Cold War,” “Elles”
Lashana Lynch – “The Woman King,” “No Time to Die”
A Martinez – “Ambulance,” “Powwow Highway”
Noémie Merlant – “Tár,” “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”
Paul Mescal – “Aftersun,” “The Lost Daughter”
Richard Mofe-Damijo – “Oloibiri,” “30 Days in Atlanta”
Keke Palmer – “Nope,” “Hustlers”
Park Hae-il – “Decision to Leave,” “Memories of Murder”
Ke Huy Quan – “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”
NT Rama Rao Jr. – “RRR,” “Nannaku Prematho”
Paul Reiser – “Whiplash,” “Aliens”
Rosa Salazar – “Alita: Battle Angel,” “The Kindergarten Teacher”

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Posted this morning around 8 am: “To a modest degree Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One has a varied cast (the half-Korean Pom Klementieff and the cappuccino Greg Tarzan Davis are the ethnic standouts) but it’s not annoyingly diverse in a Barbie-ish, check-all-the-right-boxes way.

“It was seemingly produced within an alternate reality membrane, welcomely and even gloriously immune to the woke convulsions of the last six years…no conspicuous LGBTQ or trans characters, no Jabbas. Strange as it may sound and as confounding as it jay seem to some, MI:7 isn’t particularly focused on matters of race, gender and sexuality…good heavens!

Contentious Friendo: “One reason that superhero movies dig in harder on diversity and whatever other shit bothers you is because they’re (ostensibly) aspirational, as teenagers have all kinds of identity issues and sensitivities and whatnot.

“Honestly [Hollywood’s woke fetish is] not THAT different from what comics, especially Marvel Comics, did in the ‘60s, introducing Black Panther and the native American character Wyatt Wingfoot.And they were pretty ahead of the curve in gay ‘representation”’ in the ‘80s. It didn’t hurt that X-Men writer Chris Claremont was a bondage enthusiast whose off-hours lifestyle closely resembled what you see in Friedkin’s Cruising.” [HE insertion: “Oooohh, a bondage enthiusiast!”] And then DC got in on the fun with very earnest Social Issue plots, like Green Lantern/Green Arrow fighting the scourge of drug addiction.

“With the basics of the franchise now almost thirty years established, the Mission: Impossible franchise isn’t teen-oriented. Ethan Hunt’s a sexually abstemious James Bond and that’s enough to earn him a pass through woke world, or maybe Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise are hell-bent on making sure what they do isn’t ‘relevant’ to the larger world, and jusy serveing up a lot of suspenseful escapism.

“I know you’re consumed by the topic but there is honestly nothing more boring to me than thinking about it. Hollywood ‘ideology’ has always been provisional and ultimately insincere in any event.”

As a huge fan of Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu, which I praised a few weeks ago during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, I was heartbroken to learn that it’s been acquired by IFC Films and Sapan Studios.

The Pot au Feu (aka The Passion of Doudin Bouffant) could become a major adult-market hit (it’s the greatest foodie flick of the 21st Century) and perhaps a major contender for Best International Feature Oscar, depending on whether or not France officially submits it.

Forgive my prejudiced viewpoint, but I’ve long believed that an IFC Films distribution deal is almost tantamount to a kiss of death. It’s certainly a guarantee that a first-rate, ecstatically reviewed European film will not be vigorously publicized and hooplah-ed. What IFC Films seems to do, in fact, is acquire exciting, critically hailed titles only to bury them.

History tells us that whenever a terrific Cannes movie is acquired by IFC Films, it is (a) never promoted for Oscar consideration (too costly for a cash-strapped distributor) and is (b) always released to low or non-existent buzz several months after the initial Cannes or Venice Film Festival breakout.

They certainly buried Kent Jones‘ Diane (’18) or at least the Best Actress prospects for Mary Kay Place, who won Best Actress trophies from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress. They buried the hell out of Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, which exploded in Cannes in 2016 only to limp its way to an anemic box-office opening in March 2017. God’s Country, an IFC Films acquisition, whiffed when it opened on 9.12.22. IFC had a nice little charmer in Stephen Frears‘ The Lost King (HE-reviewed on 3.24.23), and it barely made a ripple.

People see what they want to see, of course, but it always seems as if excellent movies under-perform when IFC Films is at the helm.

Will IFC Films (which currently has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating) at least offer to screen The Pot au Feu in Telluride and Toronto? This movie is a hit waiting to happen, at least among over-40 types.

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Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon‘s Full Circle (Max, 7.13) is a six-part botched-kidnapping drama, set in New York City and Guyana.

The complex tale was inspired by Akira Kurosawa‘s High and Low (’63), a similar kidnapping drama which isn’t as good as its reputation. We’ve all been instructed to drop to our knees in admiration because of the Kurosawa brand, but I saw it for the first time about a year ago and wasn’t impressed. I’m sorry but I hated the grainy, bleachy cinematography by Asakazu Nakai and Takao Saito.

I am therefore less than fully interested in Full Circle, which is about an affluent Manhattan couple (Claire Danes, Timothy Olyphant) grappling with whether to pay a ransom for a kid they don’t know; some kind of insurance scheme provides a further wrinkle. No thanks.

Maximillian Schell (1930 – 2014) was such a brilliant, inquisitive, well-cultured smoothie, not just during his prime years (late ’50s to mid ’80s) but throughout his life. I love how he constantly turns things around and throws questions back during this Dick Cavett interview segment. Very few interview subjects do this. They want to seem interesting and alluring and so they play along; they almost always never say “wait, what do you mean?”

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