Rifkin’s Festival is definitely among Woody Allen‘s worst films. (Here’s my 2.12.21 review.) But if Allen had included a scene in which the 77-year-old Wallace Shawn is knocked down and swept along by one of those rogue waves that routinely smash against the fortified San Sebastian coastline, it would have been a whole different thing. Just the thought of Shawn and costar Elena Anaya marvelling at the choppy seas and then…WHUHSHHH! Obliterated, devoured, soaked…both of them squealing like piglets. I hated Shawn’s crabby, gnomish septugenarian, you see, so his getting all-but-destroyed by a wave would have been…kinda perfect!
The San Sebastian waves are famous. It was derelict of Allen not to include such a scene.
Joe Bidenslipped three times while boarding Air Force One, okay, but he didn’t do it like some frail nursing-home geriatric. He fell like a guy in good shape, like a marathon runner, like an old workout Nazi. He wasn’t “walking” up the stairs but almost jogging up them…springing along like an antelope or mountain goat. Then he turned and saluted. His stumble wasn’t even in the same ballpark as Gerald Ford‘s infamous Air Force One fall.
In short, it’s not if you fall (everybody slips occasionally) but how you do it…whether you fall with grace and style, and how quickly you recover.
Hollywood Elsewhere enjoys and approves of Covid altercations in which obvious sociopaths (i.e., those who inconvenience others by refusing to wear masks) are booed, jeered and wrestled to the ground when somebody takes a swing at a heckler.
It happened at Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood airport; the offenders were three women from Chicago. They were kicked off a Chicago-bound plane for not wearing face masks, according to Miami’s 7News. While being led back to the terminal by security, an angry crowd began booing and heckling and then one of the women took a swing at a heckler, and shit quickly got real.
The Critics Choice Awards group, a distinguished and influential journalist org that plays a big annual role during award season, gave me the boot today because of that post that was up for maybe an hour or so, a post that contained a discussion about the ramifications of the recent Atlanta killings and how this might tangentially stir the pot as far as Oscar considerations were concerned.
Feinberg: “Wells, who regularly sparks controversy with his riffs on Hollywood and social issues, most recently provoked widespread outrage with an article that he posted and then deleted on Wednesday, but which others screengrabbed and posted to social media. The piece featured speculation about the implications of Tuesday’s shootings at Atlanta-area Asian spas on the Oscar prospects of the Chinese director of Nomadland, Chloe Zhao, and the American film about Korean immigrants, Minari. Wells attributed those views to unnamed ‘friendos’ with whom he says he conversed.”
“To know that I won’t be getting the usual swag and DVD screeners during the ’21 and ’22 Oscar season, and not attending the Critics Choice awards show at Barker Hangar…that’s not the end of the world. Not to me, it isn’t. But dodging the slings and arrows of the woke mafia is harrowing and upsetting and quite an ugly thing to experience.
“All I did was briefly and rather stupidly post a digressive conversation, an odd tangent stemming from a terrible tragedy…a digressive dicussion that anybody might have voiced or been privy to at any social gathering, if we were having social gatherings. People in my world consider all the currents and echoes and side issues… everything swirls together. Knowledgable people consider all the angles.
“It was the wrong thing to post yesterday — I obviously got that and took it down as quickly as possible when I realized what the reaction was. But when the Twitter wolves are agitated and salivating and thirsty for blood, they copy posts and pass them around like deranged hyenas.
“Wokesters are the plague and the brain police of our time, and I just hope Michael Haneke or somebody like him makes a film about them some day. If William Burroughs were alive and well he’d have a field day with these monsters.
“Obviously I realize it was a mistake to mention something as trivial as the Oscar race in the middle of a terrible crisis, hours after the killings were first reported. I obviously understand that. I obviously made a big mistake. I realized my error very quickly and took it down as quickly as possible. Mistakes happen.
“[But] every so often I’m reminded just how extreme our culture has become in persecuting people for what they think and what they say. My mistake was obvious, but I especially erred by posting a digressive discussion at the wrong time.
“We’re living in a time in which someone can lose their job or their platform for something they write. We live with this reality every day. I’m imperfect. I run my own business. I sometimes get it wrong or cross lines. But today’s climate is horrific. Terror and intimidation is part of what we’re all living through now.”
Here’s an extra passage I wrote after Feinberg’s story had been filed: “It’s an especially hard climate for journalists these days. Are we living through Invasion of the Body Snatchers? So many journalists are afraid of losing their jobs and they all understand what they have to say and not say. They all know the woke code that they have to speak in. As do I. And there’s no percentage in not playing along for the most part. I play along a lot, but every now and then I go blurp-blurp and something else comes out.”
I only regret that THR used a photo of me from my wine-drinking days. It makes my face look rounder and softer than it is these days, and my hair looks too Walkenish.
Of the five Best Actress nominees, Carey Mulligan has the most compelling narrative — portrayed a definitive #MeToo character, has been delivering ace-level performances for over a decade, weathered the Dennis Harvey Sundance review altercation. Andra Day‘s Billie Holiday is quite commanding and lived-in, but there’s no narrative as Holiday was her first substantive role (had smallish roles in Cars 3 and Marshall before this). Frances McDormandNomadland performance is obviously top-grade, but she won her Three Billboards Oscar three years ago. Viola Davis‘s blustery Ma Rainey performance never caught on, and Vanessa Kirby‘s Pieces of a Woman performance warrants serious praise, but again — no narrative except that she kills it.
Distributor Friendo: “By today’s standards, The Father, Sound of Metal and Nomadland might as well be L’Avventura or The Seventh Seal. By calling Nomadland an “audience movie,” you almost sound like Robert Koehler and some of the others in the ascetic/pleasure-denial crowd who have basically accused Nomadland of being a sell-out version of a Kelly Reichardt movie.
“Imagine people watching these movies on streaming services, where you can easily click off after five or ten minutes if you aren’t feeling it, as opposed to seeing them in a cinema, where you’re a captive for two hours. To me, Judas and the Black Messiah and The Trial of the Chicago 7 are the closest things in the bunch to ‘audience’ movies, because they at least bring certain familiar genre trappings with them (the courtroom drama in the case of Chicago 7 and the crime drama in the case of Judas), but the rest of the Best Picture contenders? Way too ‘weird’ for most of the masses, I can guarantee.”
The four best Raging Bull scenes, in this order…Miami jail cell, “harder, harder”, big fuckin’ elephant dicks, “ya want yuh steak?” Without these four….just sayin’. My first viewing was at an all-media screening at The Beekman in mid-November 1980. I loved it, of course, but the sound was subdued, even whispery at times. The sound was no better when I caught it twice more at a couple of midtown Manhattan theatres. I never really “heard” Raging Bull until it hit DVD in the late ’90s. The Bluray sounds best of all.
Yesterday I posted a three-year-old passage from “critic friendo” about the difference between critics vs. audience films. Today he followed up with his own rundown about which 2021 Best Picture contenders are which:
Audience films: Judas and the Black Messiah, Promising Young Woman, Chicago 7 (despite being nonlinear), maybe Minari (though the subtitles are a stopper for a lot of people).
Critic films: Mank (non-linear, inside-Hollywood, b&w); The Father (too confusing and non-linear); Nomadland (not enough plot, slow, too real); Sound of Metal (a critics film despite the great performances — too oblique, forces the audience to figure out too much, that metal scene would turn a lot of viewers off).
HE response: But of course, “confusing” is exactly the point of The Father, especially from poor Tony Hopkins’ (and also the audience’s) point of view, no?
It’s very clear soon enough that we’re in the same trap — forced like Tony to grapple with dementia — confused, dumbfounded, outraged, disoriented and uncertain who or what to trust. That’s precisely the strategy.
I get what you’re saying. Or what you suspect a significant portion of the audience may be saying to themselves as they watch. That however audacious Florian Zeller’s strategy may be, it follows that the sun will never burn off the fog — that there will be no eventual sorting out of the mystery because we know there’s no cure, no solution…escape is not an option.
And so that significant portion, you’re sensing, is saying, “Okay, we get it, brilliant move on the writer-director’s part…but no thanks.”
So they’re not saying “too confusing” — they’re saying “too confining, too repressive…we get the idea but we’d rather not submit to it, thanks all the same.”
It’s not that it’s “too non-linear” but that the nature of the mental quicksand we’re stuck inside of is all too tangible…that we’re basically in the grip of a quiet, tidy and well-mannered British horror film. From a Psycho-ish perspective we’re not in the shoes of John Gavin or Vera Miles or even Janet Leigh — we’re in the shoes of crazy Tony Perkins, ”scratching and clawing” from inside his “private trap”, and yet for all of it “never budging an inch.”.
In a way poor Tony Hopkins is grappling a bad LSD trip with no hope of Thorazine. I once went through the Mother of Bad LSD Trips when I was living in Boston way back when, and while it wasn’t exactly similar to the Hopkins nightmare I did sense that I was standing right next to a manhole of madness, and that if I looked into that manhole the darkness, like some cunning beast, might sense my vulnerability and reach out and seize me and take me down into the hole, and thst once inside I’d never climb out again.
In other words The Father, to expand a bit, is an old man’s horror film.
Earlier today Armie Hammer was accused of rape by a woman identified as Effie (i.e., “houseofeffie“). The charge was voiced at a press conference with attorney Gloria Allred in attendance. The LAPD is now investigating the accusation.
Effie said the alleged sexual assault took place on 4.24.17. Hammer “violently raped” her “for over four hours,” she said, and repeatedly “slapped” her head against a wall.
Indiewire excerpt: “Now 24 and living in Europe, Effie said she met Hammer when she was 20; She says [they] had an on-again, off-again relationship between 2016 and 2020.”
“I thought he was going to kill me,” Effie said. “I have come to understand that the immense mental hold he had over me was very damaging on many levels.”
Effie apparently didn’t specify when their relationship ended in ’20, but by her own account she continued to see Hammer “off and on” for at least another two and two-thirds years after the 4.24.17 incident. One could be forgiven for presuming, given Hammer’s allegedly kinky appetites, that other sexual encounters he had with Effie were not on the tender, gentle side.
Response from Hammer’s attorney: “From day one, Mr. Hammer has maintained that all of his interactions with [Effie] — and every other sexual partner of his for that matter — have been completely consensual, discussed and agreed upon in advance, and mutually participatory. It was never Mr. Hammer’s intention to embarrass or expose [Effie’s] fetishes or kinky sexual desires, but she has now escalated this matter to another level by hiring a civil lawyer to host a public press conference. With the truth on his side, Mr. Hammer welcomes the opportunity to set the record straight.”
“No criminal charges or lawsuits have been filed against tHammer. Those in Armie’s camp mainly blame the scandal on the unverified gossip account @deuxmoi, which published and proliferated its Armie claims to more than 750,000 users in January.
“If Armie is guilty of anything, [a] friend says, it’s having a penchant for super-kinky sex.
Critic friendo, written three years ago: “An audience film immediately announces what it’s about, tells a linear story with characters who are not only easy to understand and identify with but who make you eager to root for them. Audience films invite you in, show you around and make you comfortable so that you always know where you are. The Post is a good example of a well-made audience film.
“Critics’ films make you come to them. They challenge you to essentially jump aboard an already moving train and figure out where it’s going. The best critics’ films pay off that bet for audiences who believe the critic and take the challenge; the worst critics’ films (like The Master) have champions who make you believe there’s more than meets the eye here when, in fact, it’s all in their film-theory-addled imaginations.”
The current Best Picture nominees are The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah, Mank, Minari, Nomadland, Promising Young Woman, Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7.
Based on the above assessment, which could fairly, even-handedly be called audience films and critics films? Here’s my impression — they’re all audience films. They all pretty much come to you. None are especially difficult to jump aboard. The most complex are Judas and the Black Messiah, Mank and Sound of Metal, but that doesn’t make them critics films.
Email to a guy I’ve roomed with a couple of times at Sundance: “All I noted in a certain quickly-deleted conversational post was that the Atlanta shootings (by a 21 year-old white guy with stringy chin whiskers) didn’t appear to be racially motivated as much as by some kind of weird sexual addiction thing.
“I didn’t associate the Oscar race with the shootings. A person I occasionally speak to did…big deal. I just listened and thought ‘hmm, that’s an unusual angle but whatever.’
“And this person may have had a point, really, because of the way everything gets associated with everything else these days….it all mixes and swirls together in a big cultural whirlpool. Anyway it seemed like an interesting exchange at first, but then Twitter weighed in with shock and horror and I took it down.
“It’s just words and opinions, man….words and musings and associations. If you had been engaged on this particular angle or topic at a party somewhere, you would have listened and chimed in. You might have disagreed or told the person who shared this perspective that it was insensitive or whatever, and maybe you would have had a point. But because you’re a Twitter hyena, you tried to make it into a big thing.”
As of today, Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn is primarily known for three things. One, writing smart, sage, fair-minded assessments of films as they come along. Two, being one of the New York Film Critics Circle members who allegedly lobbied to give Best Actress trophies to Support The Girls‘ Regina Hall in 2018, and to Never Rarely Sometimes Always‘ Sidney Flanigan last December, and to bestow the NYFCC’s 2020 Best Film award to First Cow. And three, becoming possibly the first top-ranked film critic to actively push for the end of the career of a major-league filmmaker. Not saying this or that movie stinks, but “this guy needs to be erased, Goodfellas-style.”
I’m not certain if critics of past decades have advocated for this or that career to be fully and finally killed. Many looked the other way when certain screenwriters were blacklisted in the late ’40s and ’50s, of course, but that was a different thing. Maybe some influential critic of 60 or 70 years ago actually wrote “it’s time for the career of John Garfield or Abraham Polonsky or Carl Foreman to be suffocated” and I simply haven’t read about it. I’m just saying that I went “whoa” when I read the headline above Kohn’s article. Because actively lobbying for the final eradication of a filmmaker’s career…well, Kohn’s rep before today has always been that of a congenial, nebbishy, mild-mannered fellow…even-toned, comme ci comme ca, let the chips fall, roll with the tremors.
