The National Board of Review will announce its film awards soon (i.e., this morning), and then tomorrow (Friday, 12.3) the eccentric New York Film Critics Circle will announce their own. By this I mean you can pretty much count on two or three of the NYFCC’s major-category awards being a little fruit-loopy — i.e., far more concerned with pushing the necessary progressive political buttons (gender-wise, ethnic-wise, LGBTQ-wise) than adhering to what some of us might call classic or broad-based quality standards.

11:20 am prediction: The NBR will almost certainly gives its Best Picture award to Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story — the tide right now is simply too strong to resist, especially with the recent passing of WSS lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

11:35 am prediction: It’s conceivable that the the woke-minded NYFCC could also wind up saluting the Spielberg (which caters to woke sensibilities), but today’s NYFCC** almost always prefers to endorse identity politics over general craft and emotionality so who knows? The Power of the Dog‘s Jane Campion will win their Best Director trophy, of course, but a significant percentage will want Dog to win Best Picture also. On the other hand I wouldn’t put it past them to give their Best Picture award to Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Lost Daughter. I really wouldn’t. Or even Licorice Pizza.

The NYFCC loves to pick winners from a fickle, highly oddball perspective. This has been indicated a few times over recent years. For decades an occasionally offbeat NYFCC trophy signified something highly valued — a fully considered saluting of a worthy achievement by serious pros. But today’s NYFCC brand is something else. It used to be that the Los Angeles Film Critics Association was the loopiest, most against-the-grain award-giving group in the nation — the NYFCC has now overtaken them in this regard, and without halting their voting for a one-hour food break. In the realm of film critic awards-givers, the NYFCC has become Woke Central. If winning a NYFCC award used to signify serious cred, today’s NYFCC winners have an asterisk by their names.

…and then weigh in right here with insta-thoughts, considered reactions, Oscar chances, etc.

The Power of the Dog (Netflix, 12.1) is a chilly and perverse cattle–ranch drama that insists over and over that it’s a very bad thing for toxic males to suppress their homosexuality. (HE agrees.) Jane Campion is a top-tier filmmaker and there’s no disputing that this is a quality-level effort, but Dog‘s milieu is grim and stifling and melancholy, like the dark side of the moon.

Yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as the enraged and closeted Phil — a variation on Daniel Day Lewis‘s “Bill the Butcher” in Gangs of New York or “Daniel Plainview” in There Will Be Blood. The older-looking Kirsten Dunst, 39, delivers the second best performance. The fleshy, rotund, moon-faced Jesse Plemons plays Cumberbatch’s gentler, kinder brother. And don’t overlook Kodi-Smith McPhee as Dunst’s delicate teenaged son.

Campion’s film is an interesting, respectable smarthouse effort. Intelligent, solemn, very well acted (especially by Cumberbatch)…an at times fascinating period drama. More than a bit doleful, somewhat irksome at times but altogether first-rate.

No fist fights, no gunshots, etc. And clearly the work of a gifted filmmaker. But it wasn’t for me. I knew that within minutes.

Cumberbatch is really quite the self-torturing closet case, but he and Jesse Plemons are cast as brothers, and there’s really no way to believe this. They’re both red-haired (Plemons is more of a lighter carrot shade) but there the vague resemblance ends. The common genetic heritage simply isn’t there. Was one adopted?

As the film begins the Burbank brothers (Phil and George) share a bedroom in their mansion-sized home…curious.

Plemons is bulkier than Phillip Seymour Hoffman in The Master and slightly less ample than John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. He’s playing a wealthy cattle broker, but there’s no believing that plump Plemons could be part of any aspect of the cattle business. The trust factor goes right out the window.

The older-looking Kirsten Dunst, 39, delivers the second best performance, right after Cumberbatch.

To me watching this felt like work; it made me feel vaguely trapped. I walked out scratching my head and muttering “what?” I wrote three friends who’ve seen it to try and clarify a third-act plot element.

The Manhattan cool kidz are catching Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley this evening at Alice Tully Hall, but HE won’t have a looksee until tomorrow evening…sorry.

Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24, 12.25) will screen for free on Sunday, 12.5, at numerous theatres around the country. Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman is reporting that star Denzel Washington will not be part of the post-screening discussion. The local screening that day happens at the Lincoln Square 13 at 4 pm. I’d love to see it on a big screen, but the idea of standing on a frigid Manhattan sidewalk for God knows how long…? In the words of David Mamet, “I say no to that.”

Howard Hughes and Josef von Sternberg‘s Jet Pilot allegedly began filming in 1949, and finished sometime in ’53. Von Sternberg and his dp, Winton C. Hoch, composed and shot this allegedly not-very-good film within a 1.37:1 aspect ratio, and yet there are some who actually prefer to watch a cleavered 1.85:1 version — a ridiculous notion if I ever heard one.

Earlier today a N.Y. Times story reported that “after two hours of sometimes tense exchanges in one of the most significant abortion cases in years, [a majority of justices on the Supreme Court] appeared poised to uphold the [Mississippi] state law, which bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.”

I’ve mentioned before that something happened inside me several months ago, back when Jett and Cait‘s daughter, the recently born Sutton, was growing inside Cait. Suddenly the idea of terminating a fetus’s life was no longer an abstraction. I was especially disturbed by the idea of terminating a fetus at 24 weeks, which suddenly seemed wrong on some primal level. The Roe v. Wade law stipulated 24 weeks because that’s the point at which fetuses become viable, yes, but why so long into the pregnancy? Why not 18 or 20 weeks?

The Mississippi law says no abortions after 15 weeks, or a couple of weeks shy of four months. Given reports that many or most women don’t even realize they’re pregnant until the fifth or sixth week, what is so difficult about deciding what to do about a pregnancy within a nine- or ten-week period?

However, the following sentence in the Times story bothered me: “Should Roe be overturned, at least 20 states will immediately or in short order make almost all abortions unlawful, forcing women who can afford it to travel long distances to obtain the procedure.” Why would these 20 states do that? Why not allow pregnant women to terminate pregnancies within the 15-week period?

Social media mavens who’ve seen Peter Jackson‘s Get Back doc have expressed boundless delight over Paul McCartney roughing out a semi-primitive version of “Get Back,” and Michael Lindsay Hogg‘s cameras capturing the moment of creation.

It’s fascinating, yes, but let’s not get too excited because “Get Back” is basically just a rhythmic chugga-chugger about dead fucking nothing. The lyrics are on the level of “Old McDonald had a farm, eeyii-eeyii-yo” — nonsense hokum about returning to your roots and beginnings. This is not on the level of McCartney’s “For No One” or “Eleanor Rigby” or Stephen Sondheim creating “Move On” from Sunday in the Park with George. The clip is cool but calm down.

Oh, it’s just Paul McCartney composing GET BACK out of thin air at 26 years old. He takes a few minutes but then when he hits it, the other Beatles spontaneously start playing, too. Incredible. https://t.co/n0iVjE0TPB

— Kelli Maroney (@Kellimaroney) December 1, 2021

Daily Beast update, posted at 5:22 pm: “The shooter who allegedly killed four students and injured seven, including a teacher, at Michigan’s Oxford High School on Tuesday was previously flagged by administrators for ‘behavior in the classroom that they felt was concerning,’ Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said Wednesday.

“Authorities have identified the suspect as 15-year-old sophomore Ethan Crumbley. His parents had been brought into the school the morning of the shooting for a face-to-face meeting about their son’s behavior, according to Bouchard. He wouldn’t say what the behavior was, and police weren’t informed about any potential issues prior to the tragic event.”

Previously: Fact #1: Tuesday’s high-school shooting in Michigan is the 28th school shooting of 2021. Repeating: over the last 11 months similar high-school shootings have happened in this country 28 effing times. What does that tell you?

Fact #2: It’s also the 651st incident this year in which at least four people were shot, whether fatally or not, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings. What does this tell you?

Fact #3: The 15 year-old shooter who murdered four fellow students at Oxford High School in Oakland County (45 minutes northwest of Detroit) “was shooting people at close range, often times toward the head or chest,” according to Sheriff Michael Bouchard.

Likely presumption #1: The assailant was almost certainly motivated by some form of acute angst and probable hatred for the cool kids. Most (all?) high-school shootings are about gun-toting nerds, creeps, loners and outsiders taking revenge upon the popular smoothies who galavant around and bully and/or look down their nose at their social lessers.

Fact #4: Bouchard reportedly said “the suspect’s father bought the gun [last] Friday” and that “the suspect appeared to post images of the gun online days before the shooting.” The father buys the Sig Sauer, and then the kid uses it to kill his fellow students four days later? What does this tell you, HE readers?

Question #1: So far the media isn’t reporting diddly squat about the kid’s identity — no last name, no social media info, nothing at all. Apart from the fact that he’s a minor, the reason for all the secrecy is what again?

Fact #5: “Undersheriff Michael McCabe acknowledged there were rumors about warning signs and said that they were being investigated. At least one parent told the Associated Press that her son was not in school over fears something could happen. “He was not in school today,” Robin Redding, who has a 12th-grade son, told the Associated Press. “He just said that ‘Ma, I don’t feel comfortable. None of the kids that we go to school with are going today.'”

George Stephanopoulos: “It wasn’t in the script for the trigger to be pulled.”
Alec Baldwin: “The trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger.”
Stephanopoulos: “So you never pulled the trigger?”
Baldwin: “No no no. I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger. Never.”

Asked by @GStephanopoulos how a real bullet got on the "Rust" set, Alec Baldwin says: “I have no idea. Someone put a live bullet in a gun. A bullet that wasn’t even supposed to be on the property.”

Watch TOMORROW 8pm ET on ABC and stream later on @hulu. https://t.co/fJQly1za1T pic.twitter.com/OnpDuYERiC

— ABC News (@ABC) December 1, 2021

Seasoned critic, scholar and documentarian Marshall Fine has written an assured and comprehensive take on the streaming takeover of (nearly) all things Hollywood. It’s in a forthcoming issue of Cigar Aficionado (i.e., Brian Cox on the cover). I have two or three quotes in it; Cinetic Media’s John Sloss, Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, Christian Science Monitor critic and LAFCA member Peter Rainer, and five or six others also chime in.

At last night’s West Side Story premiere at Lincoln Center, costar Ansel Elgort (who is quite confident and kind of Brando-ish as Tony — don’t listen to the haters) was, no offense, wearing the wrong haircut. With his traditional black tux and tall, slender frame, Elgort needed to look less like Jared Kushner and more like a slightly scruffy street shuffler of some kind….more like a daydreamer who sometimes forgets to visit the barber shop. A family-of-Trump vibe isn’t the right thing to rock in this particular climate.