Month: October 2023

…on top of everything else.

Prior to yesterday’s announcement about the passing of Burt Young, I was honestly under a vague impression that he had passed 10 or 15 years ago.

I’m not saying this disrespectfully — I had just come to believe that Young, 83, had breathed his last during the Obama administration, or even before that. Somehow that driving-and-coughing death scene in that Sopranos episode (he played Bobby Baccalieri‘s cancer-ridden dad) had lodged in my memory as the real thing, or an omen of same.

Oh, and Young’s Chinatown character (“Curly”) wasn’t a “rotten client” of Jack Nicholson “Jake Gittes”, as THR’s Mike Barnes described him yesterday. Curly was actually a decent schlubby guy from Long Beach who helped Jake out in a pinch.

Young’s second most vivid performance was as “Bed Bug Eddie” in The Pope of Greenwich Village (‘84).

I know he played “Paulie” in all those Rocky movies, of course, but those were mostly paycheck gigs. Okay, the first one (in the 1976 John Avildsen-directed original) wasn’t — Young actually derived a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination out of that effort.

Young passed on 10.8, or a week and a half ago.

When Scott Feinberg assesses the strength of Best Picture Oscar contenders, he starts by breaking them down into three categories — frontrunners, major threats and possibilities.

There are always two or three generous inclusions in the frontrunner group, but it’s always a good thing to be in this fraternity. Your film’s standing or status is regarded as healthy and at least semi-hopeful. But if your film is listed among the other two categories, it means you’re in some kind of trouble. Especially if you’re among the possibilities, which pretty much means “no way, Jose” or “you might as well throw in the towel.”

In a 10.17 article titled “First Post-New York Film Festival Read of the Race,” Feinberg has chosen ten frontrunners, seven major threats and eight possibilities.

Herewith are my own assessments of the top ten, title by title, blow by blow. HE favorites are signified by boldface BINGO.

In HE’s estimation there are currently four keepers among the ten — Barbie, Oppenheimer, Poor Things and The Holdovers.

FEINBERG FRONTRUNNERS:

1 American Fiction / HE sez: Haven’t seen it yet.

2. Oppenheimer / HE sez: Hauntingly brilliant but at the same time increasingly dense and airless and almost oppressively talky, and Cillian Murphy‘s zombie-from-Betelguese performance drains the sand out of your soul. BINGO.

3. Barbie / HE sez: The buoyant energy, dynamic visual scheme, tongue-in-cheek social satire plus the massive commercial success factor obviously locks it in tight, but imagine the howls of derision if a male Greta Gerwig had created a reverse-engineered satire that replaced Barbie‘s misandry with misogyny. A mixed BINGO.

4. Killers of the Flower Moon / HE sez: Sprawling mixed-bag, Satanic-paleface, poor-Osage period saga with no strong point of view. Excellent tech elements. Woke sentimentalists aside, nobody is going to feel all that excited about this. It’s certainly no BINGO.

5. Poor Things / HE sez: Roughly the same kind of feminist fantasy as Barbie, only sexier, crazier and more imaginatively out there. Seriously stand-outish. BINGO.

6. Past Lives / HE sez: Forget it…too delicate, too hesitant, too prolonged, no romantic payoff.

7. Maestro / HE sez: Haven’t seen it. Word on the street is that it’s no BINGO.

8. The Holdovers / HE sez: Sublime craftsmanship pays off like a slot machine…an emotionally fulfilling, character-driven Christmas holiday flick…back-to-the-’70s and then some…perfectly acted, wonderfully written, easily the most audience friendly of the finalists. BINGO.

9. The Zone of Interest / HE sez: Brilliant, austere, chilly…an exercise in minimalism that doesn’t leave you with much at the end.

10. All of Us Strangers / HE sez: The gay beard-stubble factor is off the charts. If Paul Mescal bothers you half as much as he does me, this movie will certainly present problems.

Wait, am I allowed to say that Galloway seems to know whereof he speaks? Being a gay guy and all?

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Glenn Kenny on this morning’s “Don’t Hand Me That Crap” rant: “Wells is being unfair, maybe, and also maybe comparing apples to oranges. But he’s not wrong in certain respects.

“Joni Mitchell sure knows a lot of fancy chords that Swift wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, and her lyrics have a more overtly literary edge than Swift’s. Joni made Hejira at age 33, and Taylor…made this movie.

“And Taylor will never work with the present-day equivalent of Weather Report, not least because they’re ain’t any. Which speak as much to Swift’s audience, and to the way pop music audiences have shifted, as it does to anything else. (Also to the contemporary condition of extended adolescence.)

“As popular as Mitchell was, she never achieved Swift’s pop-phenom level. There’s little real point in comparing them. But the fact that Swift was once floated to play Mitchell in a biopic (a bad idea that will not, one hopes, ever be resurrected) makes the analogies not quite irresistible but certainly understandable.”

Woody Allen‘s well-reviewed Coup de Chance opened in Paris cinemas only three weeks ago (Wednesday, 9.27), and yet, according to veteran critic Marshall Fine, who just arrived in Paris a day or so ago with his wife, Allen’s film isn’t playing anywhere in town.

I’m informed that the film is actually playing in four Paris theatres as we speak, but perhaps not for much longer.

I checked earlier and found it wasn’t even playing at the Left Banke repertory houses in the Sorbonne/Pantheon district (Le Champo, Studio Galande, Le Studio Luxembourg, Les 3 Luxembourg?

And it’s not streaming on JustWatch either. Odd.

“I can confirm that an analysis of the IDF operational system indicates that the barrage of rockets in Gaza, passing in close proximity to the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza at the time it was hit…intelligence from [a] few sources that we have in our hands indicates that the Islamic Jihad is responsible for the failed rocket launch which hit the hospital in Gaza” — Israeli military spoikesperson.

From N.Y. Times reporters Julian E. Barnes, Adam Entous and Helene Cooper: “American officials say they have multiple strands of intelligence — including infrared satellite data — indicating that the deadly blast at a Gaza hospital on Tuesday was caused by an armed Palestinian group.

“The intelligence includes satellite and other infrared data showing a launch of a rocket or missile from Palestinian fighter positions within Gaza. American intelligence agencies have also analyzed open-source video of the launch showing that it did not come from the direction of Israeli military positions, the officials said.”

In yesterday’s “Week-Long Ear Bug” riff, I shared the following observation: “Taylor Swift does what she does very well or least very successfully, but Joni Mitchell’s eclectic mode of expression (or a facsimile) just isn’t in her. She’ll never get there. Mitchell’s stuff is alluring, sexy, sophisticated, nectary, lasting — Swift songs are candy.”

In response to which the often annoying Michael DeGregorio wrote that “since Jeff Wells, a noted music critic who is intimately knowledgeable about song writing and lyric writing, has deemed it so it must be so.”

And then the equally annoying Glenn Runciter added this: “It’s not really a surprise that everyone who really values music will hold tight to the music of their youth and decouple from contemporary music when they reach a certain age. It’s not always a ‘get off my lawn’ kind of thing, but go on a music forum and you’ll see this writ large. Zero sum attitudes about music is such a waste of time.”

HE to Runciter: “How DARE you try to characterize my Mitchell-over-Swift preference as a ‘music of my youth’ thing? How fucking rote or lazy or lethargic do you have to be to default to a cliche like that?

“I’ve been listening to (for lack of a better term) crème de la crème music all my life. Most of what’s been recorded or live-performed over the last century is okay, approvable, marginal or negligible — finding the really and truly awesome, aspirational, soul-touching stuff is a needle-in-a-haystack exercise or adventure or both. How many tens of thousands of rock songs and Broadway musical tunes and serious orchestral compositions and live performances and choice recordings (including Chumbawamba, Bernard Herrmann, Django Reinhardt, Devo, The Who, George Gershwin, The Feelies, Patti Smith, Hank Williams, the Troggs, Caribbean island music, the Irish Chieftains, Graham Parsons, Gustav Mahler, Blondie, Television, Stephen Sondheim, Lou Reed, David Johansen, Miklos Rozsa, Godly the Ruler and the great Mose Allison) and movie-score tracks do you have to fucking listen to over the decades to acquire a trustworthy sense of what’s mostly good and what’s mostly crap?

I sat through an hour’s worth of Swift’s concert film last Thursday evening. Her songs aren’t even catchy and are pretty much on the level of Good ‘n’ Plenty; Mitchell’s are pricey and succulent Swiss chocolate. There’s really no debating this.

If you’re living in one of these soulless, pencil-thin glass towers on Central Park South, you are definitely suffering from a serious aesthetic deficiency — a condition some would call the wealthy Shallow Hal syndrome.