Day: August 16, 2023

The good news is that IFC Films and Sapan Studios, U.S. distributors of Tran Anh Hung‘s The Pot au Feu, have committed to a prestige Oscar campaign for the French foodie masterpiece, not just for Best International Feature (if and when it’s selected by France as its official nominee) but in all categories, including Best Picture.

This means it’ll open this year and not, as feared by HE, in the winter or early spring of ’24. From my perspective this is wonderful and gratifying news, as The Pot-au-Feu is still HE’s hands-down favorite film of the year.

For several weeks I’ve been sharing concerns that IFC and Saban might, God forbid, give The Pot au Feu the bum’s rush by opening it in the doldrums of early ’24, which is what IFC has done in the past with promising titles.

It is extremely heartening, to say the least, to learn otherwise, and that this Cannes-praised film might….do we dare to dream? …play Telluride and one or two other prestigious fall festivals…who knows?

I apologize for airing my pessimistic concerns, and I congratulate IFC and Saban for doing the right thing.

The bad news is that Tran Anh Hung‘s film has been retitled, according to Variety‘s Clayton Davis, as The Taste of Things. HE’s gut reaction: gaaahh!

IFC and Saban’s concern, obviously, is that U.S. audiences might find the original French title, which basically means meat and vegetable stew, meaningless or overly obscure.

The Taste of Things isn’t an awful title, but it sounds vaguely antiseptic and blanded down….like something that a whitebread PTA committee might have decided upon. It’s flat, lacking in flavor and aroma. It no longer sounds or feels like a film simmering in French culture, but like a gourmet cookbook that might have been written by the owner of a suburban restaurant in northern New Jersey or Westchester County.’
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But overall this is excellent news, at least as far as IFC & Saban’s Oscar determinations are concerned.

Danny Wu‘s American: An Odyssey to 1947, a documentary that’s mostly but not entirely about the experience of genius filmmaker Orson Welles during the mid 1940s, will be released by Gravitas Ventures on 9.12.23.

A Wellesnet announcement, dated 8.4.23, says that the doc “follows the rise and fall of Welles while interweaving stories of diverse individuals amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression, World War II and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb.”

Synopsis: “Director Orson Welles navigated his meteoric Hollywood rise beginning in the early ’40s. As WWII begins a Japanese American boy visits abroad, and an African American soldier enlists in the U.S. Army. As the story advances, each character follows their own ambitions in search of their American identity. The doc’s first half is about the romantic rise of a great American director, and the second half transitioning into the realities of race and life in the Jim Crow era.”

I haven’t seen the film, but the title feels like a stopper….ungrammatical, inelegant. How does an odyssey go “to” a given year without mentioning the year of origin or the beginning of the arc? But let’s not dismiss or mischaracterize. I’m looking forward to it. Really.

Earlier today, however, I was struck by a remark from critic and author Joe McBride, a renowned Hollywood historian and Welles biographer who probably knows more about the late filmmaker (who died in ’85) than anyone else.

McBride: “Welles did a couple of shameful radio shows right after the Hiroshima bombing on 8.6.45, praising the dropping of it. I wonder if this film will ignore them.”

Shameful?

I replied to McBride as follows:

“Joe — The lives of tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen who would have been ordered to invade Japan were spared because of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings.

“What’s so shameful about Welles praising Truman’s decision to bomb Japan on 8.6.45 and 8.9.45?

“I am here and alive and breathing (ditto my sons Jett and Dylan and my granddaughter Sutton) because my Marine lieutenant dad, Jim Wells, wasn’t ordered to invade Japan. The odds of his surviving that assault were relatively low, or so he and his Marine comrades believed.

“Japanese leaders started the war, and despite their growing inability to prevail against U.S. forces during the final two years of the war, they refused to consider surrender when it was proposed in ‘45. They made their own fanatical bed.

“The A-bomb murders of roughly 200,000 Japanese citizens were beyond horrific, of course, but savage cruelty is in the basic DNA…the basic nature of war.

“So if Orson Welles praising the atomic bombings of Japan was shameful, as you’ve said, would it have been better for the U.S. to invade Japan and thereby invite a mass slaughter of U.S. troops? Is that what you’re saying?

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Here are HE’s finest films of the first eight months of ’23 — two thirds gone, four months to go.

I’ve given no consideration at all to box-office performance — the rankings are strictly about how successful and satisfying each film is according to its own game and rules, and how thematically fulfilled it feels when all is said and done.

A special demerit system applies in the case of otherwise commendable, first-rate films that delivered (a) manosphere pissnado or (b) caused my soul and knees to ache due to slow pacing and density of dialogue.

1. Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu
2. Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant
3. Cruise & McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023)
4. Christian Mungiu‘s RMN
5. Eric Gravel‘s Full Time
6. Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer — first-rate film but I groaned at the one-hour mark, knowing there were two full hours to go…my soul cried out.
7. Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie [manosphere pissnado demerit]
8. Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest
9. Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon
10. Matt Johnson‘s Blackberry
11. Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid
12. Ben Affleck‘s Air
13. Celine Song‘s Past Lives
14. Jean-Stephen Sauvaire’s Black Flies.
15. Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance
16. Nicole Holofcener‘s You Hurt My Feelings
16. Kelly Fremon Craig‘s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

No offense but I still haven’t seen How To Blow Up A Pipeline.

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