Day: September 3, 2024

Within the past 24 hours Variety’s Clayton Davis, the well-known, DEI-brand columnist who’s always keeping close tabs…a day ago Clayton wrote (and then tweeted) that the three biggest Oscar contenders to ignite at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival were (1) Sean Baker’s Anora (true), (2) Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez (also true) and (3) Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night (probably not outside of the writing, Best Supporting Actress and production design categories).

The forehead-slapper isn’t what Clayton chose but what he omitted —- Edward Berger’s Conclave, easily the most highly favored 2024 Best Picture Oscar contender as we speak…no question, hands down.

And yet Clayton declined to mention it in his Telluride triumvirate piece. I know that ignoring Conclave at this stage of the game is total wackadoo. There must be a Clayton reason that makes sense. Some slight or resentment, some political consideration.

I suspect it’s not the “too many white guys” complaint because Lucian Msamati, a British-Tanzanian actor of color, plays a senior supporting character, Cardinal Adeyemi, plus there’s a very woke-friendly plot revelation that puts a certain kick into the narrative.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s Venice Film Festival review of Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer:

“Daniel Craig, shifting about a dozen gears from James Bond, doesn’t make the mistake of impersonating the older William Burroughs who became a punk icon in the ’80s: the dry voice, the beady-eyed stare of hostility. Craig gives us a pinch of that glowering Burroughs DNA, but the trick of his performance, which is bold and funny and alive, is that he’s playing the younger Burroughs (at the time, the author was around 40), before he’d passed through the looking glass of cultivated insanity to write his visionary novel of American chaos, ‘Naked Lunch.’

“This is Burroughs before he got famous, when he was just…a man, pursuing what his instincts told him to. Craig makes him a nasty, witty literary dog laced with vulnerability. Pounding back shots of tequila, spitting out winding assertions like ‘Your generation has never learned the pleasures that a tutored palate confers on a magnificent few,’ he’s a troublemaker, an abrasive soul. But he is also, deep in that bitter heart of his, a romantic. He tries to maintain power in every situation, but as soon as he meets Eugene, we see that the desire for love has supreme power over him.”

When I began driving north from Albuquerque last Wednesday afternoon, the left-front tire on my Alamo rental car (a black Hyundai Elantra) had a weak tire pressure reading. I was pressed for time so I just drove on. But on my journey back to Albuquerque, which began yesterday in the mid afternoon, the tire pressure was down to 19. And then 15 and 14, and then 10 and 9. I stopped twice to inject compressed air (in the Colorado towns of Rico and Dolores) but the pressure stayed low.

I called an Alamo rep to report the problem. She suggested that I drive to Durango La Plata airport and exchange my Elantra for another car. There was one chubby 20something woman manning the desk for not just Alamo but also National and Enterprise, and after serving several just-arrived customers for an hour she told me there were no available cars to exchange.

By the time I arrived in Farmington the tire pressure was near zero. Call it flat. It took several infuriating, late-night calls with a variety of undereducated Alamo 20somethings with a minimal command of English to finally arrange for a tow-truck guy to drop by the Journey Inn motel and change the tire. (It didn’t happen until this morning.) Except they wanted me to pay $75 for the service.

HE: “It’s your car and your flat tire, and you want me to pay the local tow-truck guy?”

The guy removed the empty tire and replaced it with one of those baby tires…fine. Except the baby tire has a glued-on warning that says in bold letters that I shouldn’t drive faster than 50 mph or 80 kph.

HE to tow-truck guy: “So I can’t drive to Albuquerque with this thing?” Tow-truck guy: “I wouldn’t.”

I guess the only responsible thing is to buy a decent tire somewhere in Farmington and have it put on and then work out the expenses with Alamo back at Albuquerque Sunport. But before I do this I want assurances from the Alamo guys that they’ll deduct this cost from my six-day rental fee of $377. Excerpt I’ve called them five times this morning and they won’t pick up, and I can’t leave a voicemail message.

I also hated the way the out-sourced Alamo reps asked me if I’m calling “from a safe location.” One of them actually asked me if I was “feeling safe” at the end of one of the calls. This is a Millennial thing…”are you feeling safe, oh my little squishy weenies?”

HE to Alamo Millennials: “Nobody wants to feel threatened or uncertain or insecure…nobody wants to be Janet Leigh in that motel room scene in Touch of Evil…but my feelings of safety and assurance have nothing to do with you or your level of barely-there, nodding-out service.”

Culturally speaking, New Mexico is not what most of us would call a vibrant, aspirational society. It certainly doesn’t feel that way.

Like most places New Mexico is seemingly well developed. It has its rich, elite communities and the exuding of at least a semblance of educated awareness, but generally speaking I’m not feeling much in the way of upscale vibes. I’m sensing a certain current of grunty lowlife attitude…a feeling of resignation.

I’ve been staying at a downmarket motel in Farmington (about three hours north of Albuquerque) and watched a couple of anti-Kamala Harris ads last night…vicious stuff.

Emerson has Harris polling at 52% vs. Trump’s 42%. All I’m saying is that I can really feel the bumblefuck vibe in this corner of the state.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the mysterious black monolith that suddenly appears before the tribe of lesser “Dawn of Man” apes (i.e., the ones who lost access to the water pond because a tribe of tougher, snarlier apes kicked them out)…the monolith is a cosmic blessing, a civilization-saver…a bringer of deliverance, transcendence, possibility.

Now hear this: the monolith is basically conducting a massive scientific experiment by attempting to spawn intelligence on our planet…it’s a bringer of intelligent initiative and awareness and technological potential…an explorational sentinel sent by aliens of incalculable intelligence, the purpose being to trigger and awaken the lesser apes to evolutionary advancement and put them on the road to eventually becoming intelligent human beings.

In the 21st Century present, the very same monolith (or a close cousin of the one that fiddled with the apes) has been found buried under the surface of the moon. Once sunlight hits it, a piercing radio signal is generated…a signal aimed at the hugely insubstantial gas planet of Jupiter, easily one of the most disappointing planets in our solar system.

Light hitting the no-longer-buried monolith informs the super-intelligent aliens that humans have advanced to a certain noteworthy point in their evolution.

All the HAL vs. Dave and Frank stuff aboard the Discovery is the only plotty part of the film, and was basically generated by Stanley-the-misanthrope…all about how artificial intelligence is just as capable of hubris and ruthlessness and self-destruction as the humans who created it.

The finale is wonderful, of course, and the basic thing that Keir Dullea‘s Dave Bowman seems to know deep down is that the glorious monolith represents damn near everything…it’s the fountain of eternity and the central engine of life…continuity, God, essence, worship, wonder and infinite expansion.

Luca Guadagnino during Venice Film Festival Queer press conference: “Guys, let’s be adults in the room for a second. There is no way around the fact that nobody would ever know [what] James Bond desires.”