Month: December 2023

“Anatomy” Reigns Again

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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.

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Bad…Okay, Unjust Influence

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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.”

Let This Be A Warning to Butler

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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).

Ryan O’Neal In The Sky

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Ryan O’Neal has died at age 82, presumably from cancer. It feels unsettling to acknowledge (or remind ourselves of the fact) that death doesn’t fool around, and because…well, a half-century ago O’Neal was quite the hotshot with golden-amber hair and a Prince of Malibu title and all the rest of it.

On 8.4.19 I wrote that I preferred to think of O’Neal as the guy he was in the early to mid ’70s, when things were as good for him as they would ever get.

I had two minor encounters with O’Neal in the ’80s.

The first was after an evening screening of the re-issued Rear Window** at West L.A.’s Picwood theatre (corner of Pico and Westwood) in late ’83. As the crowd spilled onto Pico O’Neal and his date (probably Farrah Fawcett) were walking right behind me, and I heard O’Neal say “that was sooo good!” Being a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan, this sparked a feeling of kinship.

Four years later I was a Cannon publicity guy and charged with writing the press kit for Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which didn’t turn out so well. I for one, however, liked Mailer’s perverse sense of humor.

I did an hour-long phoner with O’Neal, and my opening remark was that he was becoming a really interesting actor now that he was in his mid 40s with creased features. He was too good looking when younger, I meant, and so his being 46 added character and gravitas. O’Neal was skeptical of my assessment but went along — what the hell.

In fact O’Neal’s career had been declining for a good five or six years at that point. He knew it, I knew it — we were doing a press-kit-interview dance because there was nothing else to say or do.

O’Neal’s last hit film had been Howard Zeiff and Gail Parent‘s The Main Event (’79), which critics panned but was popular with audiences. He had starred in four mezzo-mezzos before that — Peter Bogdanovich‘s Nickelodeon (’76), Richard Attenbrough‘s A Bridge Too Far (’77), Walter Hill‘s The Driver (’78) and John Korty‘s Oliver’s Story.

Consider this HE anecdote about some 41-year-old graffiti on an Oliver’s Story poster.

O’Neal’s career peak lasted for five years (’70 to ’75) and was fortified by a mere four films — Arthur Hiller‘s Love Story (’70), Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? (’72) and Paper Moon (’73), and Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon (’75). (The Wild Rovers and The Thief Who Came to Dinner, which O’Neal also made in the early ’70s, were regarded as mostly negligible and therefore didn’t count.)

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“Archie” Isn’t A Total Bust

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Last night I watched the first two episodes of Jeff Pope‘s Archie, a four-part Britbox miniseries about the inner turmoils and insecurities of Cary Grant. I’d read some weak reviews and didn’t expect much, and during the sit I was trying to imagine such a series looking or feeling more inauthentic.

You can really feel a certain communion —- vibes, textures, atmospheres — with ‘50s Italy in Michael Mann‘s Ferrari, for example. Archie rarely ventures beyond the banal and mundane and superficial.

Laura Aikman‘s Dyan Cannon aside, nobody even vaguely resembles the characters they’re playing. It’s almost all third-string. Pope makes no attempt to make the mid-20th Century dialogue sound like it was spoken back then — his script is riddled with 2023 slang expressions and attitudes, which is awful.

But it’s not altogether awful.

Pope’s view (shared by biographers) is basically that once Grant finally got going as a movie actor in the early 1930s, he faked it left and right and gradually came uo with the wryly debonair “Cary Grant” — an alternate personality that was mostly divorced from the anxious, insecure guy he actually was.

I like the fact that Archie adventurously time-jumps all over the place — British childhood, snowy-haired finale, 20something years, late middle age…here, there, everywhere.

The first-rate Jason Isaacs doesn’t begin to resemble Grant, but he does a half-decent job of inhabiting or recreating certain aspects of Grant’s charming but shifty nature. Most of the time you’re thinking “this is too low-budget, too sloppy and slipshod” but now and then it’s interesting.

McCuddy Fixes “May December”

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Received this morning from Bill McCuddy: “Finally caught up with Todd Haynes‘ May December last night…this after reading that Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge have it on their Top Ten lists, and then I saw that Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson has it at number one.

“I’d heard it was actually bad. It’s not, but where some critics are seeing subtlety- — except for the goofy soap opera music jolts — I saw missed opportunities.

“There are definitely spoilers here so HE readers be warned.

“1. I’d have made Natalie Portman‘s character more obsessed with Julianne Moore‘s character. Parrot her more than she does. Have her dress like Moore earlier in the film.

“2. I’d have had Portman say she’s also a producer on the film and continually reassure the couple (Moore and the much-younger Bruce Melton) that they will be portrayed truthfully and sympathetically, only to have Moore find a copy of the script and realize it’s not that, and in fact borders on a sleazy takedown.

‘3. Late in the second act I would reveal that the movie Portman is supposedly making has actually been put in turnaround or cancelled altogether and Portman went to Savannah anyway. Way creepier.

“4. Instead of sleeping with Portman’s character, I would have had Melton rebuff her, fueling her anger and disillusionment.

“5. I’d have ended the film not with a scene from the real (not in my version) movie but instead from a faux-documentary about what happened when Portman’s character came down there.

“The basic idea that anyone in that Savannah-region hamlet might still gave a shit about something that happened 25 years ago (i.e., a May Kay Letourneau trauma) is a ludicrous premise. In Hayne’s version the whole family is still living with the affair. So is the whole town. They’re still buying her cakes out of sympathy 25 YEARS LATER?! Bullshit.

“The real tension in the movie should be that all the horrific attention they got 25 years ago is gonna come back. It’s long gone and over with in my version.

“Finally, and this is a small nit, but where in the hell did they get the money for that waterfront resort island house? Reading X-rays and baking Gingerbread men? Uh, no. I saw that house in the first few frames of the movie and thought ‘well, at least they sued someone like Fox News and got a lot of money’ but nope.”

Divorced-From-Reality Decision

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If you walk over and look them in the eye and ask them to please cut the crap, the AFI Sight & Sound gang will admit the truth.

They know that Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon is not one of his top-tier films. They know it’s basically a woke movie, a guilt-trip thing. They know that it has no character viewpoint other that “century-old Oklahoma white guys bad.” They know that Scorsese and Eric Roth decided to more or less abandon FBI agent Tom White, the central figure in David Grann’s 2017 book, in favor of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s dumbshit Ernest Burkhart, who isn’t worth the effort.

They know all that and voted Killers as the year’s top film regardless. Because they wanted to proclaim their belief and investment in the redemption narrative. It’s their way of saying “we get it Marty…you did your best under the circumstances and understandably felt that you couldn’t go with White as the champion…we get it and we support you and are on your side despite the fact that if we were voting on merit alone we wouldn’t have chosen Killers….you get that and so do we…plus we absolutely believe in the metaphor of Lily Gladstone‘s identity campaign for Best Actress…all hail our recognition of past sins and our attempt at absolution or at least forgiveness.”