Jeffrey Wells

THR’s Scott Feinberg knows full well that by posting the following paragraph in his latest (1.17.25) Oscar predictions piece…

…that this statement will activate a monkey-brain impulse among Academy members to show support for The Brutalist and Emilia Perez (not only right now but over the next few weeks) and thereby instill a feeling of…I don’t know, a feeling of belonging or vague job security or something.

Feinberg knows he’s aiding and abetting the Oscar fortunes of two big-swing movies that either aren’t loved (Perez ‘s RT Joe Popcorn score is 37%) or are determined to make viewers feel morose and under the weather.

Scott knows he’s contributing to an awful feeling within industry circles…a notion that the Hollywood community is contributing to its own sense of isolation from Average Joes and self-destruction by celebrating mediocre wokeism and/or pretentious show-off films that nobody really likes (except for the phonies).

Here’s how Scott rationalizes what he’s doing:

HE to Academy: Wake up, don’t do this and offer hugs to the genuinely well-liked, obviously well-crafted Conclave, Anora and A Complete Unknown.

Last night HE commenter “Nerf” wrote the following about the late, great David Lynch:

For the most part, “things just got repetitive” is a four-word description of what every auteur-level filmmaker tends to go through over the course of a decades-long career.

That is to say that he / she winds up making the same film or certainly the same KIND of thematically-driven film (i.e., drawn from the same inner soul pool or creative wellspring) over and over. They just emerge in this or that varying form, in some instances with greater degrees of refinement.

“A director only makes one film in his life, and then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again” — Jean Renoir.

Because despite whatever annoyance or discomfort this state of affairs may provoke in guys like Bob Hightower (“stop talking about peak periods!”) the artist has only a finite amount of psychic essence to draw from.

And that’s primarily why creative peak periods (the full, robust and unfettered emergence of creative servings or statements or heavy-cat formulations) tend to manifest most often when the artist has gotten the trial-and-error or youthful indulgence stuff out of the way and has begun to develop serious command over what he / she has inside, usually starting during his / her late 20s or early 30s.

And then it all starts to wind down during his / her early 60s. Or a bit sooner or later. Ask Pedro Almodovar about this. Ask Alfred Hitchcock, for whom the tank mostly ran dry after The Birds. (No, Frenzy wasn’t a creative rebirth — it was an opportunity for Hitch to get more sexually graphic while re-connecting with some of that old London energy.) Ask Oliver Stone, whose creative powers began to dissipate after Any Given Sunday (‘99).

If only this could’ve happened to poor Buster Keaton, whose creative glory period ENDED around age 34 or 35, when sound came in during the late 1920s.

Exceptions will sometimes occur, as Paul Schrader once pointed out, when a film artist experiences a growth spurt due to some kind of tragedy or trauma (i.e., George Stevens or James Stewart’s experiences in Europe during World War II). In which case the psychic essence trove is reenergized or freshly reflected upon.

Obviously (a) variations abound and (b) this formula doesn’t generally apply to big-time rock musicians like Bob Dylan or David Bowie or Paul McCartney, all of whom were cooking with gas beginning in their early 20s if not younger.

In 2014 Lynch, then in his late 60s, was asked when a new feature film might emerge, and he said something along the lines of “I’ve got shards and slivers and segments in my head, but I don’t have THE BIG IDEA…I just don’t have that yet.”’

Surely Lynch knew deep down that big ideas are generally not ripe for plucking when artists are in their late autumnal years. It just doesn’t work that way.

The 1.10.25 death of Sam Moore somehow led me to re-watch John Landis’s The Blues Brothers (6.20.80). Yeah, I know…weak linkage, only in white-guy land.

Initially posted on 5.14.12:

The Blues Brothers (6.20.80) was about John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd having dry, sardonic fun with the “white musicians looking to generate authenticity by performing the Chicago blues” concept.

This kind of thing was originally personified with utter sincerity by the scowling, grittily-posed, Rayban-wearing Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

The Blues Brothers act was nervy and funny when I first saw Belushi-Aykroyd perform it on Saturday Night Live in April 1978. They doubled down on this when I saw them live at Carnegie Hall later that year (or was it sometime in ’79?).

But the coolness went all to hell with the release of John Landis‘s Blues Brothers flick.

What was it about this Universal release that obliterated and suffocated? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that it was an unfunny, over-emphatic, overproduced super-whale that was made on cocaine (or so the legend went)?

I asked Landis about this wildly inflated, pushing-too-hard aspect when I interviewed him in ’82 for an American Werewolf in London piece.

It was over breakfast at an Upper East Side hotel (Landis was hungrily wolfing down a plate of scrambled eggs and home fries), and I said that the “enormity” of The Blues Brothers seemed “somewhat incongruous with the humble origins of the Chicago Blues.”

That hit a nerve. “It wasn’t supposed to be a documentary about the humble origins of the Chicago Blues!” Landis replied. But the essence of the Chicago blues wasn’t about flamboyant energy and huge lavish musical numbers and car chases or mad slapstick, I said to myself. And your movie seemed to take that Paul Butterfield pose and amplify it beyond all measure or reason.

I didn’t literally say this to Landis, of course, but he knew what I meant. Nor was I impolitic enough to call it “a cocaine movie” but that’s what it damn sure felt like.

As Landis argued with me the Universal publicist sitting at the table started making “no, no” faces, indicating that I should tone it down.

In any case I mostly hated The Blues Brothers from the get-go, and here it is 45 years later and after giving it a fresh re-watch last night, I’m still not a fan.

Why didn’t Sam and Dave have a cameo? Everyone else did.

HE reply: Outside of the super-wealthy, the blissfully ignorant and the simply-lacking-sufficient-brain-cells crowd, life itself is a kind of misery index. If you’re living an examined one, I mean.

That old Annie Hall joke about human experience being categorized by the horrible for some (afflicted with ghastly disease, suffering in concentration camps) and the miserable for everyone else? It got a big laugh when I first saw Woody Allen’s classic film in the spring of ‘77.

Life is occasionally punctuated with deeply satisfying accomplishment breathers or mountain-peak highs or blissful peace-outs (family dinners, silent communings with nature, pet affection, great music, early-morning airport arrivals in Europe) or fizzy champagne cocktail moments (and who doesn’t love these?) but otherwise is mostly about pushing the plow through rocky soil and slogging through as best we can. I wish it were otherwise, but then again misery and anxiety and sore shoulder muscles build character.

Control: “And uhm…how do you feel about him?”

Leamas: “Feel?”

Control: “Yes.”

Leamas: “He’s a bastard.”

Control: “Quite.”

Actual strip of 70mm celluloid Lawrence, sitting atop bedroom bureau:

Remember Scott Feinberg’s enthusiastic Angelina Jolie promotions? All the gush? Well, none of that panned out. No SAG or BAFTA noms…sorry. That’s because of the horrible recriminations against Brad Pitt by Jolie and the kids. It’s called karma.

In the comment thread for HE’s Best Films of 1986 piece (posted late last night), it was argued that Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge and Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me, dual ‘86 releases about kids finding a dead body and debating what to do about it, are of equal classic stature.

River’s Edge technically isn’t a 1986 film but I let that slide. Shot between January and March of ‘86, it premiered at the 1986 Toronto Film Festival (9.10.86 — a month after Reiner’s film appeared in theatres) but didn’t commercially open until May ‘87.

Hunter’s film is far more haunting, not to mention realistic and mature — a major, deeply unsettling arthouse film about a zombie virus that had begun to permeate stoner teen culture (it’s based upon a 1981 murder that happened in Milpitas) in the early Reagan era. A couple of critics described it as a kind of moral horror film.

Based on a 1982 Stephen King novella, Stand By Me is basically a sentimental flick about adolescent friendship and the veil of nostalgia. I hated, hated, HATED the title (the revered 1961 Ben E. King song has NOTHING to do with the plot), and I sorta kinda despised the presence and performance of chubby-ass Jerry O’Connell, who was 11 or so during filming.

No offense but Reiner’s film, which I regard as no more than decent as it is pure popcorn, shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath with Hunter’s.

Will a BAFTA Best Picture win lock in Conclave’s frontrunner status and finally put an end to sick, delusional stateside fantasies that Wicked or Emilia Perez or, God forbid, The Brutalist might snag the golden Oscar ring?

The Brutalist, which received nine BAFTA noms this morning, is a film designed to make viewers feel awful. This is not a strongly contested opinion. I would feel differently if (this is an absurd fantasy) A24 had offered complimentary snorts of high-grade heroin to select viewers in order to lessen the glum mood, but that’s water under the bridge.

Conclave’s 12 BAFTA nominations have affirmed its leading heavyweight status, at least for now. And yet nipping at the heels of Edward Berger’s Vatican drama is Jacques Audiard’s diverting-but-not-good-enough Emilia Perez, which has landed 11 BAFTA noms…will you guys please stop this? Put a cap on it.

Both the Movie Godz and the Joe and Jane Popcorn community have spoken, and the time has come to put a respectful halt to the Perez hoopla.

There’s no questioning that it’s an audaciously conceived film (Mexican trans drug cartel musical) but without the second word in that five-word description there’s no way it would be a Best Picture headliner (voting for it makes people feel safer), and we all know this.

Not to mention those underwhelming RT scores (both critics and ticket buyers).

Queer’s Daniel Craig getting edged out of a Best Actor nomination by Heretic’s Hugh Grant is absolutely not right and certainly not cool. Craig’s performance as the William S. Burroughs-like lead character in Luca Guadagnino’s film is shattering.

And congrats to The Apprentice ‘s Sebastian Stan for landing a BAFTA Best Actor nom for his spot-on, half-sympathetic-during-the-first-half performance as Donald whack-ass Trump. Hooray also for Stan’s costar, Jeremy Strong, snagging a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

Time and again guys with abusive tendencies have seemingly tried to immolate themselves — almost trying to taunt #MeToo women as an exercise in self-destruction. Please vent about my appalling sexual behavior on social media…please! This is how I want to die.

I’m fairly certain this famous Pauline Kael quote is from her New Yorker review of Barry Levinson’s Diner (‘82), although it could’ve been sparked by a scene in Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (‘81) in which Rourke, initially glimpsed lip-synching to Bob Seger’s “Feel Like A Number”, played a soft-voiced, settled-down felon who’d begun to think twice about…everything.

Rourke seemed to be in a state of charmed, almost magical ascendancy back then. I could go on and on about what happened or didn’t happen, but the glow had begun to fade by the late ‘80s. His last truly alluring performance that decade was in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (‘87). Then came the early ’90s and boxing.

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Five months after THR published Rebecca Keegan’s 8.14.24 hit piece on Sasha Stone, which I described and commented on the very same day, Racket News’ respected reporter Matt Taibbi has jumped into the fray. Which is fine — better late than never.

I’m not going to recap Taibbi’s article chapter and verse, but he covers the whole messy affair, deftly and dryly and without using the terms “woke Stasi” or “woke terror” or anything in that general realm.

He basically trashes Keegan and her THR bosses for behaving like cloddish dickhead assassins…for whacking Sasha like some dude on The Sopranos by disingenuously pretending to take her facetious “white power!” tweet seriously, and then by calling around and basically poisoning her brand among distributors and award-season marketers and ad-buyers, and essentially assuring that her $200K annual income would be whittled down to almost nothing.

Taibbi:

Stone:

Here’s some of what I posted on 8.14.24:

…and which is mercifully drawing to a close as we speak. Again, better late than never.

Does anyone remember the infuriating 1970 Bob Dylan album, “Self Portrait”?

For me the loathing began with the album cover — Dylan’s grotesque, flagrantly crude painting of his face. That ridiculous nose, which looked like a moldy banana that had been run over by a car, and those cherry-red “Clutch Cargo” lips. You just knew the album would try your patience at the very least.

From “Ten Times Bob Dylan Was The Most Insufferable Man in Rock”, a 1.9.25 Telegraph article by James Hall:

From “Self Portrait” Wiki page: