The National Society of Film Critics announced their 2022 film awards today, and there’s really only one way to interpret the Best Director trophy going to Aftersun‘s Charlotte Wells.

Aftersun is my idea of a spacey, ethereal mood-trip film. I’m not the only one who feels that it’s just not gripping or engrossing enough to warrant this kind of honor (ask any honest critic). This indicates that Aftersun‘s NSFC supporters voted for Wells as a gesture for feminist recognition and gender tokenism.

Like almost all major-outlet critics, the NSFC is composed of members who live in their own secular little world. In my opinion they’re residents of (a) the Planet Uranus or (b) the Abbey of St. Martin, where they live on chickens, raw lettuce, goat’s milk and goat cheese, and wear brown robes and sandals. As far as the Wells vote is concerned, they are absolutely not of this earth.

It could be argued, in fact, that Aftersun is a borderline infuriating space-out film. This is certainly my own personal opinion, I can tell you.

If Aftersun had been directed by a male, it most certainly wouldn’t have won anything. The NSFC critics know the truth of this, and of course they won’t admit it.

Best Picture / TÁR (61), Aftersun (49), No Bears (32) — HE strongly approves.

Best Director / Charlotte Wells, Aftersun (60), Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave (47), Jafar Panahi, No Bears (36) — HE strongly disapproves.

Best Actor / Colin Farrell, After Yang & The Banshees of Inisherin (71); Paul Mescal, Aftersun…WHAT??; Bill Nighy, Living (33) — HE approves of Farrell winning.

Best Actress — Cate Blanchett, TÁR (59); Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once (38), (tie) Tilda Swinton – The Eternal Daughter / Michelle Williams – The Fabelmans (27) — HE approves of the Blanchett win.

Best Supporting Actor — Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once (45); Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway (35 — bending-over-backwards tokenism); Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin (27) — HE doesn’t approve of any of these performances.

Best Supporting Actress / Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin (57); Nina Hoss, TÁR (43); Dolly de Leon, Triangle of Sadness (35) — HE heartily approves of Condon’s win.

By HE standards Owen Roizman, who passed today at age 86, was and always will be one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers, certainly within the zeitgeist of the ’70s and ’80s. God, the streak Roizman was on between ’71 and ’78 alone! The French Connection, Play It Again, The Heartbreak Kid, The Exorcist, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Three Days of the Condor, Network, Straight Time. Not to mention True Confessions, Tootsie, Havana, Grand Canyon, Wyatt Earp, etc.

Special credit should be given to Roizman for stepping into that surreal episode when a William Friedkin-approved Bluray of The French Connection came out in ’09. Roizman didn’t tippy-toe around the obvious, which was that the ’09 Bluray’s bizarre color scheme (bleachy, desaturated, high contrasty) was an outright desecration. Three years later a properly remastered, Roizman-approved version was issued on a subsequent Bluray, and thank God for gloriously happy endings.

Posted on 3.8.12: “The new, Owen Roizman-approved French Connection Bluray is a blessing…a pure celluloid capturing of a great New York film experience, some of it luscious, some of it spotty and grainy but all it looking true and right. Some of it looks more lab-fresh than I’ve ever seen. Punchy red neons and such. Other parts look…well, the way they did at Leows’ 86th Street when it opened in the fall of ’71, I’m guessing. Raw, wham-bam, high-impact footage all the way.

“No more bluish bleach. No more splotchy colors and monochrome, high-contrast crap. No more creepy-perverse digital fuckwad action. The guy who mucked up the notorious 2009 Bluray version, director William Friedkin, has come to his senses and re-done his masterwork under Roizman’s influience.

“’The nation’s three-year-long, Freidkin-incited French Connection Bluray nightmare is over,’ I tweeted. ‘The bleachy, splotchy ’09 version has been replaced.’

“On 2.24.09 Roizman spoke to Aaron Aradillas on a blog-radio show called “Back By Midnight,” and he called the transfer “atrocious,” “emasculated” and “horrifying.” He said that he “wasn’t consulted” by Freidkin and he “certainly wants to wash my hands of having had anything to do with [it].”

HE’s Manwe Sulimo on BAFTA long lists:

West Coast Friendo:

From HE’s 7.20.22 review of Jordan Peele‘s Nope: “No discipline, this fucking film. It’s ‘imaginative,’ if you want to call it that. As slow and talky and stodgy as Cleopatra was, it at least made sense. Which is more than you can say for Nope. So Cleopatra is better.

“Say it again — when Gordy the monkey appears, the film comes alive. What Gordy has to do with the dumbshit rascal white-oppressor aliens is anyone’s guess.

“Steven Yeun costars in Nope, and I couldn’t understand why he was in it. Yes, he has something to do with Gordy (I won’t say) and he wears a red suit and a big white cowboy hat in one scene, but he has NOTHING to do with anything.

“I need to re-watch this movie with subtitles some day.

“Why the hell is Kaluuya’s character named ‘OJ,’ of all things?

“If Dore Schary had somehow returned from the dead and become the producer on this film, before filming began he would have invited Peele to lunch and said, ‘Look, I’m just a Jewish white-guy producer and I don’t know much about African Americans or horse ranches or Fry’s Electronics, but WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MOVIE ABOUT?? You don’t know, do you? You’re just farting around with spooky alien visitors and trying to cook up something different and trippy, but THIS MOVIE IS BULLSHIT, JORDAN…you know it and I know it.’

“And Peele would reply, ‘It’s a metaphor about white people’s oppression of BIPOCs.’ And Schary would reply, ‘What are BIPOCs?’ And Peele would say, ‘Don’t worry about it, bruh…I got this.’

“No white-ass producer would dare say ‘bullshit’ to Peele, of course, lest he/she be accused of harboring racist attitudes. Which is why Nope turned out this way…a crazy, impressionistic, Jasper Johns-like mess. Peele was apparently given carte blanche control, and this is what happens.”

Following up yesterday’s Hospital post, “Love From Older Dude Perspective“:

Posted on 3.22.06: “I came across two dialogue files by accident this morning — two clips from Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Hospital (1971), and it hit me all over again how wonderfully particular and penetrating and needle-sharp these soliloquies are.

“George C. Scott‘s confession to a colleague about what a wreck his middle-aged life has become is about as masterful and genuine-sounding as this sort of thing gets, and I love the the cadence he brings to some of the lines. (The almost imperceptible pause he inserts between the words “pushing” and “drugs” is sheer genius.) And the “murder by irony” confession by wacko doctor-patient Barnard Hughes is a wow, particularly at the end when he recites a litany of medical ailments (one after another after another…no end to it) that comprise, metaphorically or otherwise, “the whole wounded madhouse of our times.”

“There’s always a fair amount of good dialogue at any given time, but the super-pungent, intellectually flamboyant stuff that Chayefsky used to write — a little show-offy at times but pleasurable as hell — has…well, maybe it’s out there and I’m just not running into it. Or maybe it’s just gone.”

(More…)

A day rarely passes when I don’t watch a couple of “Idiots in Cars” videos. Enormously pleasing. All my life I’ve found the automative misfortunes of bad drivers hilarious. And I’m mostly an LQTM-er — I rarely laugh out loud.