Month: January 2023

Posted yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, written by Gary Giepel: “Here’s a new form of woke authoritarianism: a demand that you sign a loyalty oath to go to the movies.

“I attended Utah’s Sundance Film Festival before the pandemic, then started watching its offerings online. This year’s festival begins [today — 1.19], and I looked forward to seeing new, small-market films from my recliner. But when I logged in to buy tickets, I was stopped at the virtual door.

“The site wouldn’t sell me tickets unless I affirmed the festival’s ‘Community Agreement.’ Among other things, I had to promise to be ‘vigilant in the fight against the spread of COVID-19,’ to avoid ‘unwelcome sexual attention, harassment, stalking, and inappropriate physical contact of any kind,’ and to refrain from ‘abuse or intimidation including that related to race, gender, position, or wealth.'”

HE interjection: What the hell is wealth intimidation? [Sing to the tune of “Mama Don’t Allow“] “Mama don’t want no wealth intimidation ’round here…I said mama don’t want no wealth intimidation ’round here…we don’t care what mama don’t allow, gonna wealth intimidate anyhow!”

“What if I slipped up and engaged in ‘intimidation related to wealth,’ whatever that means? Someone could squeal using a ‘name-optional reporting form,’ and the complaint would be ‘taken seriously and reviewed carefully by Sundance Institute’s Safety & Belonging team.’ The team has the authority to impose ‘exclusion from Sundance Institute programs, platforms, or spaces—including a complete ban on further participation in any Institute program or event.’

“I asked if I could buy tickets without affirming the agreement and was denied via an anonymous email. The damage I might have done to someone’s sense of ‘belonging’ while watching films from my Indiana basement, 1,500 miles from Park City, Utah, apparently was too much to risk.

“As a classical liberal with conservative sensibilities, I was often challenged and sometimes offended by Sundance films. Good. Movies can open our minds and make us think—as most good art does. But this depends on the freedom to think for ourselves and question established orthodoxies without fearing anonymous informers and Orwellian enforcement teams.

“Writing in the past tense about Sundance makes me sad. But more of us — patrons, donors and especially liberal-minded board members of arts organizations — have to learn to echo Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: ‘No, not through me.’

“If we don’t, we can prepare for the Sundance loyalty oath to become the norm at cultural venues. And we should prepare our imaginations for whatever comes after that.”

I’m not suggesting there might be a connection between Netflix CEO Reed Hastings suddenly quitting the company (he’s being replaced by Netflix COO Greg Peters) and the company’s strange promotional focus upon Rian Johnson‘s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery at the apparent expense of Eric Berger‘s much more deserving All Quiet on the Western Front. I don’t actually believe that such a connection exists. But it’s nonetheless odd that Netflix seemed to not understand what they had with All Quiet, and right when everyone is realizing that Netflix miscalculated, Hastings jumps ship.

In a 1.23 piece titled “It’s Time to Destroy the Old Myth of the Sundance Breakout for a New One,” IndieWire’s Eric Kohn has posted the following: “Don’t get me started on the loaded, right-wing propagandistic implications of the word ‘woke.'”

Kohn is not given to put-on humor and is, I presume, in a dead-serious mode. He actually believes that a term which is universally understood to signify the most malicious social and political cancer since the domestic Red Scare terror of the late ’40s and ’50s…Kohn actually believes that the word smacks of “loaded, right-wing propagandistic implications,” and is therefore illegitimate and hysterical and has traction only within the rightwing media realm. He therefore believes that anyone who uses the term is some kind of Fox News wackazoid.

There’s obviously no talking to Eric on this topic, despite the fact that I’ve known him for years to be an obviously bright and genuinely decent and considerate fellow.

But good God, Eric…c’mon. To deny the legitimacy of the word “woke” is to be with the crazies. Do you actually not see the parallels between the career-destroying anti-Communist right of the ’50s and the career-cancelling woke left of today? Have you ever read about the French terror of 1793 and ’94? You’re simply too perceptive to look around and say, “Naah, there are no similarities between the current terror and what happened in this country 70 years ago…none whatsoever. And there are zero Maximilien Robespierres among the progressive left. Only nutjobs like Tucker Carlson think there are any comparisons worth making.”

I know firsthand what it is to grapple with woke terror, and I’m not a rightwing dude at all. I’m a sensible center-left moderate who voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who believes in Pete Buttigieg in ’24, who listens to excellent music while driving, who has driven rented scooters all over Rome and Paris, who wears fine Italian shoes and high-end Zara T-shirts, who dropped acid roughly 15 times in the old days and experienced satori on the third or fourth trip by way of the Bhagavad Gita, who drives a nice VW Passat (black) and owns an excellent Bluray library and loves his 14-month-old granddaughter Sutton.

The anti-woke world is full of decent fellows like myself…good God, Eric. Come up for air. Wokeism is a mental virus, a cult…a form of insanity a la China’s Great Cultural Revolution of the ’60s and early ’70s. And most of the citizens of this country despise it with every fibre of their being.

…that I don’t want to hang with a 40ish therapist (Jason Segel) dealing with severe grief. (I’ve been grieving my whole life about what a shit sandwich life often tastes like.) If you’re a therapist and you feel swamped with grief because you’ve lost your wife, you need to bury it during work hours — it’s that simple. Weep and moan and act out all you want, but only on weekends and in the evenings. When you’re at work, keep that shit to yourself.

Because you don’t want to “breach ethical barriers” by telling your patients exactly what you completely think (which is a notion borrowed from Warren Beatty‘s Bulworth). I basically don’t want to hang with a big beefy crybaby. Or, if you will, a whineybaby.

Harrison Ford seems cool, and I especially like his pale green sweater. I presume the producers paid Ford an arm and a leg to do this.

An Apple+ TV series, Shrinking will debut on released on 1.27.23. The first two episodes will debut together, and the remaining eight will stream on a weekly basis.

Ford: “Nobody gets through this life unscathed.” Wait, is that another version of “into every life, a little rain must fall“?

I know nothing but a voice is telling me “beware the three top creatives on this series — Brett Goldstein, Bill Lawrence and Jason Segel.” I can smell trouble.

Read more

Within the last couple of days Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans suffered two savage bird pecks, the combination of which may prove fatal. First, Variety‘s Clayton Davis printed a reaction to The Fabelmans from “a prominent member of the [Academy’s] producers’ branch”, to wit: “I really didn’t like it.” And secondly, the five BAFTA nominations for Best Film didn’t include The Fabelmans.

Can you feel it? Can you faintly feel it? Can you sense the velocity of the the furiously beating wings of crows flying above? Can you hear them cawing?…aahhnk! aahrrrk!

Perhaps the biggest shake-and-stir from the BAFTA noms was the 14 nominations that went to All Quiet on the Western Front.

Another noteworthy BAFTA thing was their decision to include The Woman King‘s Gina Prince-bythewood among their five nominees. She was presumably added so the BAFTAS could nominate a woman of color. The other four: All Quiet On The Western Front — Edward Berger; The Banshees Of Inisherin — Martin Mcdonagh; Decision To Leave — Park Chan-wook (FORGET IT!), Everything Everywhere All At Once — Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert (NO!) and Tar — Todd Field.

HE’s preferred winners: Field or Berger.

Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking, which all the woke critics were salivating over during Telluride ’22, had been BAFTA longlisted for director, adapted screenplay, supporting actor and original score categories. It came up totally empty-handed this morning.

HE boldface obviously indicates a preferred winner or winners:

BEST FILM:

All Quiet On The Western Front – Malte Grunert / HE
The Banshees Of Inisherin – Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, Martin Mcdonagh
Elvis – Gail Berman, Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Patrick Mccormick, Schuyler Weiss
Everything Everywhere All At Once – Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Jonathan Wang
Tar – Todd Field, Scott Lambert, Alexandra Milchan / HE

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM:

Aftersun – Charlotte Wells, Producer(S)
The Banshees Of Inisherin – Martin Mcdonagh, Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin
Brian And Charles – Jim Archer, Rupert Majendie, David Earl, Chris Hayward
Empire Of Light – Sam Mendes, Pippa Harris / HE…YES!
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande – Sophie Hyde, Debbie Gray, Adrian Politowski, Katy Brand (NOT A CHANCE!)
Living – Oliver Hermanus, Elizabeth Karlsen, Stephen Woolley, Kazuo Ishiguro
Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical – Matthew Warchus, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Jon Finn, Luke Kelly, Dennis Kelly
See How They Run – Tom George, Gina Carter, Damian Jones, Mark Chappell
The Swimmers – Sally El Hosaini, Producer(S) Tbc, Jack Thorne
The Wonder – Sebastián Lelio, Ed Guiney, Juliette Howell, Andrew Lowe, Tessa Ross, Alice Birch, Emma Donoghue

Read more

Two days ago Megyn Kelly attributed the following line to Jesse Kelly, whom I’m not a particular fan of: “I don’t mean to mock the MLK sculpture — every man wants to be remembered this way.”

In a two-day-old (1.17) Oscar assessment piece, Variety’s Clayton Davis dutifully reported what almost everyone except for guys like Bobby Peru have accepted since the ‘22 / ‘23 Oscar season began several months ago, which is that Everything Everywhere All At Once is probably too divisive (read: hated by the over-45 crowd) to prevail in the Best Picture category unless international voters come to its rescue (“rally round the flag, boys!”).

…and they told me to state my pronouns, I would write Eat / Me. Okay, that’s fairly vulgar but I’d probably feel better about that designation than He / Him, which seems overly compliant.

My life doesn’t feel quite whole and nurtured without Real Time to look forward to on Friday nights. This is how I feel.

We all know Bill Barr and Andrew Sullivan — Nancy Mace is a seemingly sensible, non-MAGA Republican Congressperson from South Carolina. On 10.21.21, Mace was one of nine House Republicans who voted to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena to appear before the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 chaois.

Read more

Would it be fair to observe that casting-wise there’s a certain diverse-centric approach on view here? A determination to virtue-signal by un-Wonder Breading the brand…right?

There are two or three fleeting glimpses of social congregations, and yes, I’ve noticed a couple of younger Millennial- or Zoomer-aged revelers who could be accused of having a problematic heritage, but otherwise the idea seems to be about playing it safe. Would that be fair to say?

For tonight’s main event, a pair of family movies that invest in and reflect upon lasting, spirit-sustaining values about family and community — Frank Capra‘s It’s A Wonderful Life (’46) vs. Francis Coppola‘s The Godfather (‘72)

The core message in Capra’s film at the end of the day: “Forget the thrill and risk of life…or, you know, don’t worry too much about it…forget the exotic climes and unfamiliar aromas and the adventure of struggle and experimentation…forget wandering around the streets of Paris or Hanoi or Venice late at night while smoking an unfiltered Gitane…forget all the faraway places…if you’re loved and treasured by your neighbors in your hometown, that’s all that matters.”

The basic Godfather conveyance is that however independently willful or curious or hungry for the nectar of life a young person might be…however strong this curiosity and longing may be, sooner or later that young person will recognize family as the most fundamental thing of all, and that down the road he/she will give his/her loyalty to it above all else.

One of the main reasons that The Godfather won the Best Picture Oscar is because of that final scene when Michael lies to Kaye about his complicity in the death of Carlo. Kaye can sense the lie, of course, and then Al Neri closes the door as she’s gazing into Michael’s office with everyone kissing his hand.

That’s the way it is (or certainly was) with a lot of marriages within a certain realm. That’s reality, and all that family jubilation and exhilaration in the finale of Capra’s film….well, it’s very nutritious
and fortifying but who really trusts it? It feels like a forced confection.

I somehow missed a four-day-old report that Barack Obama had re-issued his Best Films of 2022 list as a tribute to Andrea Riseborough‘s searing performance in To Leslie. A gesture of respect, acknowledgment. Somehow this alters everything. In my head, at least. I’d interpreted the enthusiastic and orchestrated praising of Riseborough’s performance by a long roster of actor buddies as…well, expressions of loyalty and love. But Barack joining in changes things somewhat. He’s part of the cabal. Repeating: HE endorses Riseborough’s performance despite the film’s first hour having driven me up the wall. I feel much greater enthusiasm for Olivia Colman‘s performance in Empire of Light.