A friend asked about what kind of gifts and goodies had arrived over the past few weeks to promote the various award-season films. He mentioned the pink stuffed Okja pig as an example. My response: “The Okja stuffed pig wasn’t graft. It wasn’t a gift. It was a pink nightmare. It was repulsion and indigestion. I had one thought when I unpacked this ugly beast, and that was “aackkhh!….into the dumpster”! What a grotesque thing to have lying around your home or apartment. Tatyana loved it, wanted to keep it. I threw it out the moment she wasn’t looking. She hasn’t asked since but if she does I’ll just say to her ‘what pig?’ And she’ll say, ‘The cute pink pig…I liked it so much!’ ‘Oh, right,’ I’ll say. And then I’ll say, ‘Uhm, I spilled coffee on it last week and it looked really bad so I threw it out. The spotless pink perfection thing was ruined…sorry.'”
Posted by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large, earlier today — Friday, 12.1: “The guilty plea by MichaelFlynn is different — and more serious — than the charges against one-time Trump campaign chairman PaulManafort. Manafort was a part of Trump’s inner orbit for a handful of months during the spring and summer of 2016. But he was long gone by the time Trump won the White House. And the charges against Manafort have to do with money laundering and the Ukraine, not Russia.
“It’s also impossible for Trump to dismiss the role Flynn played in his campaign and White House as he did with George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about interactions with foreign officials close to the Russian government.
“The Flynn guilty plea comes from someone who, until the day he was reluctantly fired by Trump as national security adviser, sat at the absolute epicenter of Trumpworld. And, unlike Manafort, Flynn’s charge deals directly with his interactions with the Russian ambassador — and goes to the very core of Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and any possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
“The following things are facts:
“Mueller was appointed as special counsel by Trump Justice Department deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Flynn was an extremely close and influential adviser to Trump as a candidate and as president. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
“There’s no ‘fake news’ media in either of those three sentences. Or Democrats. Or hoaxes. Or witch hunts.
“And, with the Flynn guilty plea, there is absolutely no thinking person who could possibly believe that Trump’s presidency is not in some level of peril now.
Traffic on the 101 freeway killed me last night, and so I gave up trying to attend last night’s Judi Dench tribute fundraiser at the Ritz Carlton Bacara. The event was organized by Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling. It turned out that in all of her 82 years Dench had never been to Santa Barbara before last night. Really. With all her activity and connections in Los Angeles for so many years.
Judi Dench, Santa Barbara Film festival director Roger Durling during red-carpet portion of last night’s Kirk Douglas Award festivities.
(l. to r.) Armie Hammer, Roger Durling, Jeff Bridges, Judi Dench, Ali Fazal.
The main focus was on Dench’s Oscar-hopeful performance as Queen Victoria in Victoria and Abdul, which may or may not be part of the 2017 Best Actress Derby. Dench was nominated 20 years ago, of course, for playing the same monarch in Mrs. Brown (’97). My three favorite Dench performances were in Mrs. Brown, Shakespeare in Love (in which she played Elizabeth I) and Notes On A Scandal, in which she more or less lusted after costar Cate Blanchett.
I never responded all that heartily to her performances as M in all those 007 films — they’re a blur.
Ali Fazal (who plays Abdul Karim in Victoria and Abdul), Santa Barbara mainstay Jeff Bridges and Call My By Your Name‘s Armie Hammer attended the Dench tribute.
Received this morning: “As the nominations for Critics’ Choice are upon us, [please] consider the unforgettable performance Bill Skarsgard gave as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in Andres Muschietti’s reimagining of IT. Skarsgard gave a genuinely unsettling and transformative performance that transcended the hair and makeup. As the centerpiece of IT, Skarsgard’s performance won high praise. We hope you will consider him for Best Supporting Actor.” I’m sorry but I felt that Skarsgaard pushed the demonic evil button way too hard. The point of the opening rain-gutter scene was that Pennywise was supposed to be disarming Georgie so he would trust this evil clown enough to reach in and retrieve his paper boat. Except Pennywise’s voice and expressions were completely threatening (those yellow cat eyes, that cackling purr), and so the scene was about what a complete idiot George was. Honestly? I enjoyed Tim Curry’s Pennywise in the 1990 TV miniseries a lot more.
Yesterday I posted a piece called “Strange Avoidance Mechanism.” It questioned a group decision by six contributors to an 11.29 L.A. Times Oscar Buzzmeter piece (Anne Thompson, Tom O’Neil, Glenn Whipp, Kenny Turan, Justin Chang, Nicole Sperling) to name six films — Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Shape of Water, Dunkirk, Darkest Hour, Get Out and Lady Bird — most likely to “lead this year’s Oscar race.”
What was wrong with that? Oh, nothing except for the fact that a very likely Best Picture nominee and, to go by the Oscar fortunes of Gotham and Spirit Award winners over the last five or six years, a likely Best Picture winner was more or less ignored — Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name. In fact Chang, Turan, Whipp, Sperling and O’Neil picked Call Me By Your Name as a leading Best Picture contender. But Anne Thompson didn’t, and so the other six films ranked higher.
I should have just written Thompson, but I wrote them all a letter instead. “I don’t think I went off the handle at all with this piece,” it began. “It was a measured, carefully phrased analysis that concluded with a head-scratcher. I simply pointed out the likelihood, given the pattern of the last few years, of a Gotham or Spirit Award winner ending up as Best Picture Oscar winner. It’s not an unreasonable presumption as it’s based upon statistical fact. And yet somehow you guys, in the aggregate, managed to exclude Call Me By Your Name from your list of the six most likely Best Picture contenders or winners. (“…which movies will lead this year’s Oscar race.”)
Can I ask something? Who among you is predicting with a straight face that Darkest Hour might “lead” the pack or win a Best Picture Oscar? It might be nominated, sure, but winning? C’mon.
Not only that, you also managed to avoid naming The Post, which is easily locked as a Best Picture nominee and, given the present political current, a likely winner — it’s safe, steady, boomer-friendly (Tom and Meryl), well-written, staunchly liberal, and it really, really doesn’t like Trump. Hello?
You have to play it carefully when you talk with Joe Wright, the 45 year-old director of Darkest Hour. You want to be respectful, of course, but you don’t want say the wrong thing. Because for seven-plus years (’05 through ’12) Wright was a knockout, high-style director with all kinds of exciting, mad-thrust energy, and then, all of sudden, he seemed to lose his vision or his footing or you-tell-me.
So you don’t want to ask him, “Uhm, have you gotten that magic-crazy thing back, or are you still recalculating and figuring out the next move?” Because that would sound insulting.
You can’t say what a audacious, flirting-with-genius talent he seemed to be during that seven-year period when he made Pride and Prejudice (’05), Atonement (’07), Hanna (’11) and the drop-to-your-knees Anna Karenina, which I found brilliant and dazzling and everything in between. Because telling him how great he seemed during this period would sound like an allusion to the disappointment his fans felt when he made Pan (’15), a costly, poorly-reviewed kids fantasy flick that lost money.
It follows that you wouldn’t want to ask him, as I did during a quickie interview two or three weeks ago, why he made Pan in the first place. Because he’ll just say, “Well, let’s just that one go.”
And you can’t express a hope that he’ll make another high-style work of genius in the vein of Anna Karenina because that would sound like “so what’s happened to you since Anna Karenina?”
And if you’re the last on a long list you can’t suggest doing a video interview because he’ll probably say, “I’m a little tired…I don’t know.” Okay, forget it.
What I said to Joe, whom I regard as a very important director in the realm of James Cameron and David Fincher, was that he obviously “shot the hell” out of Darkest Hour. But that wound up sounding as if “shooting the hell out of it” was Wright’s way of compensating for a relatively rote, somewhat conventional biopic, which Darkest Hour is to a certain extent. And that’s fine. It is what it is.
Darkest Hour reminds us that would-be tyrants like Adolf Hitler are still around, and that we could all use more fellows with the steel backbone of a Winston Churchill to stand up to them and inspire the old fighting spirit.
I admired and enjoyed Darkest Hour, and I respect the visual energy that Wright used to punch it up as best he could. But I still want the old Wright back. I can’t help myself. I’m fine with Darkest Hour, but I want a return of Joe, the gifted madman.
“Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (Focus Features, 11.16.12) will have its detractors (in my screening today five or six people were actually chuckling at it during a high-emotion scene in the late second act) but for me it’s a serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a disciple of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.
“You either go with the proscenium-arch grandiosity of a film like Anna Karenina or you don’t (and I was just talking in the Bell Lightbox lobby with a critic who didn’t care for it) but if you ask me it has all the essential ingredients of a bold-as-brass Best Picture contender — an excitingly original approach, cliff-leaping audacity, complex choreography, the balls to go classic and crazy at the same time, a wild mixture of theatricality and romantic realism, a superbly tight and expressive script by Tom Stoppard and wowser operatic acting with a special hat-tip to Keira Knightley as Anna — a Best Actress performance if I’ve ever seen one.
I have to drive all the way up to Santa Barbara’s Bacara Resort & Spa for a special Kirk Douglas Award Ceremony honoring Dame Judi Dench for Excellence, and particularly for her stirring performance in Victoria and Abdul. The ceremony is being thrown by the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival and particularly by HE’s own Roger Durling. And I’m late as it is. I’ll probably get there by 6:45 pm or thereabouts. And then I’ll have to drive all the way back at 10 pm.
6:05 pm, somewhere near Chesebro Canyon.
Update: Bust! I left West Hollywood at 4:05 pm. Two hours later I was on the 101 in Calabassas, a little past Malibu Canyon and stuck in “accident” traffic. Even without the bumper-to-bumper I would be looking at a minimum of 100 minutes to get to the Bacara Resort & Spa in Goleta, which is maybe 20 minutes past Santa Barbara. But the traffic jam wouldn’t quit. I sat there. I edged forward a few feet and sat here some more. “To hell with it,” I said out loud. I got off the freeway and turned around. I stopped at a Malibu Canyon Starbucks to wait out the commuter traffic. I apologized to Roger, telling him things were impossible. He’ll send me photos and video tomorrow. Cheers to Judi Dench and every Los Angeles-based journo who, unlike myself, was smart enough to leave by 2:30 or 3 pm.
Four major awards-giving groups have recently announced their top pics, and so far the leading hottie is Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name. That is, if you go by the top prize given by Gotham Awards plus the six Spirit Award nominations earned by the CMBYN team. No guarantees, but with six nominations the odds favor Guadagnino taking the Spirits’ Best Feature trophy.
On the other hand the New York Film Critics Circle have just chosen Lady Bird as 2017’s Best Film, but the winners of that award and the Best Picture Oscar champs have only occasionally overlapped. Two days ago the more mainstream-minded National Board of Review gave their top award to Steven Spielberg‘s The Post. This may or may not indicate the voting preferences of Academy and guild members next month, although it probably will.
There’s no disputing, however, that over the last few years the winners of the Spirit and Gotham awards have mostly gone on to win the Best Picture Oscar. In five of the past six years, in fact, winners of the Spirit Best Feature prize have gone on to win five Best Picture Oscars — 2011’s The Artist, 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, 2014’s Birdman, 2015’s Spotlight and 2016’s Moonlight.
It would seem at this stage that any half-attuned Oscar prognosticator would identify Call Me By Your Name as a leading Best Picture contender. And yet when six Oscar experts were recently polled by the L.A. Times (“From Dunkirk to Coco: The 2018 Oscars Buzzmeter”), their six biggest favorites didn’t include the Guadagnino.
Instead they chose Lady Bird (smart call), Darkest Hour (which hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of winning Best Picture — Best Actor shoo-in Gary Oldman is Focus Features’ only competitive pony), Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (a respected film that was shut out in the Spirit Award noms and by the Gothams), Dunkirk (total shut-out among NYFCC and NBR voters), Get Out (Spirit nominee, Gotham winner + Best First Film award from NYFCC) and The Shape of Water (shunned by Spirits, blanked by NBR and NYFCC).
Most of these six films could theoretically win the 2017 Best Picture Oscar, but what could Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, Vanity Fair‘s Nicole Sperling, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, The Envelope‘s Glenn Whipp and L.A. Times critics Justin Chang and Kenneth Turan have been thinking to have not selected Guadagnino’s film as at least a hot contender? How could they possibly size up the field and go “naaah, don’t think so” when it came to the one film in the 2017 Best Picture constellation that many have called a masterpiece and a classic slow-burn love story?
In fact Chang, Turan, Whipp, Sperling and O’Neil picked Call Me By Your Name as a leading Best Picture contender, but the other six films ranked higher.
It’s odd, man. Really odd.
If you go strictly by Metacritic and Rotten Tomato ratings, Call Me By Your Name is the second highest with a 95% and 98% rating, respectively for an average of 96.5%. How could that esteem possibly translate into six other films being ranked as hotter contenders?
It doesn’t matter to me if Garth Davis‘s Mary Magdelene, which is slated to open domestically on 3.30.18, goes out as a Weinstein Co. or Focus Features release. The movie’s the thang, not the distributor. (There’s no Weinstein Co. logo at the end of this trailer, but a Focus Features logo does appear.) Davis’s film is presumably a feminist slant on the New Testament legend, written by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett, with Rooney Mara playing the reformed harlot Mary Magdalene.
It’s also a slightly revisionist take with Jesus Christ, who died at age 33, being portrayed by a 43 year-old Joaquin Phoenix, who actually looks like he’s 54.
It’s fascinating to contemplate a scene in which Jesus and Mary Magdelene (Rooney Mara) are chatting on a hilly Italian coastline (pic was shot in Matera, the Puglia region, Napoli and Sicily) and looking out at the Mediterranean. On top of which you can’t hear the dialogue. I defy HE readers to tell me what Mara and Pheonix are saying to each other starting at the 56-second mark. Mara: “Pisahtla minnup-minnupah kaht?” Phoenix (at 1:00 minute mark): “Nuhnwah sinkdat bad pitnyah puhtohit.”
Costarring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Apostle Peter and Tahar Rahim as Judas Iscariot. Pic will probably be released on 3.30.18.
This is going to sound tiresome to the hipster-cynics out there, but there’s only one (1) Christmas flick that really and truly serves the spirit of that once-blessed holiday — the 1951, British-made A Christmas Carol (titled Scrooge in England) with Alastair Sim. Period. Other films have tried and nearly gotten there, but Brian Desmond Hurst‘s black-and-white classic comes from the same cultural fibre that sired and inspired Charles Dickens himself. Every time I’ve watched it (at least a couple of dozen times) it summons memories of family and community values that may have once existed, at least in my heart, and melts me right the fuck down.
And you’re gonna throw Bruce Willis and his bloody, glass-cut feet into the same bullpen?
If you want to put on your perversely ironic elf cap and cackle your ass off as you slam back a double-rum-shot egg nog, you can call Die Hard a Xmas flick…sure, heh-heh, why not?, fuck it. But in so doing you’ll be compounding the perversity and adding yet another layer of crust and cynical remove from a holiday that used to actually occasion a brief spiritual sea-change in people…a teaspoon of extra kindness that would sink in and lift all boats.
One of the many reasons that Christmas has felt more and more like a lesser thing has been the corroded, loathsomely insincere mindset that has allowed (wink-wink, fuck-all, who gives a shit?) for “Die Hard is a Xmas movie” to gain a semi-serious foothold in the cultural conversation.
And you know what? For all my feelings of pious denunciation, I have, all on my own, Alastair Sim notwithstanding, long associated this merrily calculating 1988 John McTiernan flick with (heh-heh) “the holidays.” Really. But in so doing all these years, I’ve said to myself “is the part of you that used to wear a semblance of true Christmas spirit on your sleeve…has that spiritual spark been completely narcotized?” The answer, of course, is ”well, not entirely but yeah, for the most part.”
And this is who we are and what we’ve become, Mr. Dickens. Sorry, brah, but it’s true. And so I say “Merry Christmas, Mr. Silver, Mr. Willis, Mr. McTiernan, Mr. De Souza!!…in keeping with the situation.” I’ve walked the London streets during the early Christmas season (37 years ago, to be exactly, when I was there to interview Peter O’Toole for GQ magazine.) And the Brits really know from Christmas spirit, trust me, just as surely as plastic American mall-fuck consciousness has been shitting all over the spirit of the occasion since the dawn of Reagan.
The only good thing is that I don’t drink egg nog any more.
Best Film: Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird. HE comment: No argument as Lady Bird is one of the HE’s Big Four along with Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk and The Post. Obviously a huge boost for this A24 release along with Gerwig, Ronan and (in a roundabout pushback way) the unfairly overlooked Laurie Metcalf.
Best Director: Sean Baker for The Florida Project. HE comment: Due respect to Baker, but his fine Orlando accomplishment did not produce a greater, grander film than Call Me By Your Name or Lady Bird. This is fetishy contrarianism for its own sake. The spirit of the LAFCA Lox & Bagels & Red Onions Food Appreciation Group has invaded the NYFCC.
Best Actor: Timothee Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name. HE comment: Yup, you betcha. Does this indicate a Best Picture win for Luca Guadagnino‘s film?
Best Actress: Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird. HE comment: 110% agreement.
Best Screenplay: Phantom Thread by Paul Thomas Anderson. HE comment: You think so? I need to think this one over.
Best Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project. HE comment: Although my personal preference is for Michael Stuhlbarg‘s performance as the supportive dad in Call Me By Your Name, Dafoe is very good as the Orlando flophouse manager. I respect his work enormously. If he takes the Oscar, c’est la vie.
Best Supporting Actress: Tiffany Haddish in Girls Trip. HE comment: WHAT? Lady Bird‘s Laurie Metcalf shoulda won it. Or, failing that, I, Tonya‘s Allison Janney.
Best First Film: Get Out (d: Jordan Peele). HE comment: Great, whatever, fine.
Best Foreign Language Film: BPM (Beats Per Minute) (d: Robin Campillo). HE comment: Strongly disagree. Andrej Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless is a more formidable accomplishment — masterful chops, compassionate, humanist. In my Cannes Film Festival review (which was titled “Punch Me In The Face“), I called Campillo‘s film” a strident, oppressively didactic period film…a tough, well-made thumbs-upper, okay, but at the same time the relentless political-talking-points dialogue gradually numbs you out, and then drains you of your will to live.”
Best Non-Fiction Film: Faces Places (d: Agnes Varda). HE comment: Didn’t see it.
Best Animated Film: Coco (d: Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina). HE comment: I don’t do animated.
Best Cinematography: Mudbound (dp: Rachel Morrison). HE comment: Sure, no problem, fine work.
