….if you love and care for your kids or your pets. That’s your rote kind of good…the natural, vaguely banal, no-sweat easy kind. Jospeh Goebbels loved his daughters, Hildegard and Helga, until he poisoned them on 5.1.45.

A 12.6.23 N.Y. Times piece about the dissolve, a classic but all but abandoned cinematic transition device, was posted a couple of days ago by M.D. Rodrigues. The article mainly focuses on Alexander Payne‘s elegant and artful dissolves in The Holdovers.

“Each dissolve is a dawdling ellipsis,” Rodrigues explains. “Over its course, feelings develop or disperse; life happens or doesn’t. With its slow, valedictory air, a long enough dissolve evokes the momentum of real experience.”

“One thing is going away, another thing is coming in,” Payne has observed. “I can’t explain it, but there’s something poetic and melancholy about it.”

But near the start of Hal Ashby‘s The Last Detail, however, a dissolve is used for comic effect. I chuckle each time I watch it.

Otis Young‘s “Mule”, an in-transit sailor, is ordered to report to the master-at-arms (i.e., top sergeant). “Tell the M.A.A. you couldn’t find me,” Mule tells the lower-ranked messenger. “”He knows where you are,” the seaman replies. “Oh yeah?….when you’re in the Navy, shirtbird, and in transit, nobody knows where the fuck you are so go tell that F.A.A. to go fuck himself, I ain’t goin’ on no shit detail.”

What’s funny is how Ashby starts the slow dissolve before Mule has fully delivered his rant. It begins as Mule says “so tell that F.A.A. to go fuck himself,” as if Ashby is saying to the audience “this isn’t worth your time…he’s just blowing off the usual steam…just another pissed-off sailor…blah blah.”

“Don’t let that no-good, candy-ass, numb-nuts, twinkletoes crybaby back in here.” — Harry S. Truman.

I remain semi-mystified why the fix has been in on Justine Triet‘s Anatony of a Fall. It won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last May, the momentum kept building after the early fall fall festivals, and now it’s swept the European Film Awards in Berlin, taking Best European Film, Director, Screenplay and actress for Sandra Hüller.

It’s an approvable film within its own realm, but it’s not earth-shattering. It’s been overpraised from the get-go. Sometimes you can just tell that critics and industry voices decided to give a certain film is getting a pass because it exudes the right kind of social bonafides, and that’s that. A strong feminist imprimatur.

Take this line from an Anatomy of a Fall review by Film Yap‘s Nate Richards (posted on 10.26). The subhead calls Justine Triet’s murder investigation drama “one of the most gripping and memorable movies that you’ll see this year”…that’s a 100% decisive nope.

Anatomy of a Fall is a thorough, exacting and meticulous (read: exhausting) “what really happened?” exercise by way of a courtoom procedural, and is certainly smart and interesting as far as it goes but let’s not get carried away…please.

Sandra Huller is excellent as a bisexual writer accused of murdering her angry, pain-in-the-ass French husband (Samuel Theis), but the film goes on for 152 minutes, and the cloying kid playing Huhler’s half-blind son (Milo Machado-Graner) lays it on too thick, and the loud and relentless playing of an instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” drove me fucking nuts. The more I heard it, the more angry I felt…”Why is Triet making me listen to this over-loud track over and over?”

Another highly dubious declaration from Richards: “What makes Anatomy of a Fall so compelling is that Triet and Arthur Harari’s script has you constantly battle with yourself over whether or not you believe in Sandra’s innocence.” Not so! No battle! I was never even faintly persuaded that Huller might be a murderer…not for a minute.

“We knew a [movie villain] of old by his Black Hat or his Black Moustache; and today by his white skin.” — a passage from David Manet’s “Everywhere An Oink–Oink.”

From Mark Athikatis’s Washington Post 12.7.23 review:

A just-released Wall Street Journal presidential preference poll has Nikki Haley running 17 points ahead of President Biden — 51% to 34%. That’s not a huge margin but the thundering rumble of mighty horses.

The Beast is also beating Gurgly Joe, but only by 47% to 43%. Biden and DeSantis are running even, 45% to 45%.

THR’s Scott Feinberg surely understands in the depths of his soul that he’s deeply disappointed (angered?) the Movie Godz by placing the three most admired, exciting and deserving Best Picture contenders — Poor Things, Maestro, The Holdovers — in the #5, #7 and #8 slots in his latest Oscar prediction column.

I realize that Variety’s Clayton Davis doesn’t approve, but American Fiction, as much as I adore the first 45 to 50 minutes and agree that it’s among the year’s finest, is not happening as a frontrunner. Pundit-wise it simply hasn’t caught on like some of us thought it might..

Take away the guilt + identity factors and nobody really loves Killers of the Flower Moon — it’s a long hair shirt movie with a tiresome lead character. And Barbie has been showered with more than enough accolades, thanks.

The latest Gold Derby rankings are more accurate.

Jordan Ruimy: “GD-wise I honestly think The Holdovers should be #3. Ahead of Poor Things. Joe and Jane LOVE The Holdovers. Every non-critic I speak to cannot stop raving about it.”

One of the reasons that enthusiasm levels for Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders have been diminished all along is Austin Butler’s relentless, extremely off-putting chain-smoking. Nothing looks cheaper or pollutes an actor’s presence like smelly nicotine sticks. Marlon Brando knew this territory like the back of his hand, and never lit up in The Wild One.

HE to Butler: Never, ever go there again.

Note: “Austin Tucker” was a political consultant of an assisted liberal politician in The Parallax View (‘74).