I’m very sorry to pass along the death of Variety‘s Dave McNary, 69, who “tirelessly covered the film and labor beats for more than 20 years,” per Variety‘s obit. I didn’t exactly “know” Dave, but he always struck me as as decent, kindly soul. A Pasadena resident, Dave had suffered a stroke a few days before Christmas. He died Saturday. Before starting with Variety in ’99, McNary worked for UPI, the Los Angeles Daily News and the Pasadena Star-News.

Variety‘s Dave McNary

“Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.” — Francois Truffaut.

Because you want to see a man saving a deer that is stuck on a frozen lake back to safety. pic.twitter.com/ihZSUJIwql

— Danny Deraney or The King of Jingling (@DannyDeraney) December 24, 2020

[Beware of SPOILERS]: If you’re watching Soul today, please respond to a notion I posted on 11.29.20, to wit: Soul betrays its audience by (a) encouraging them to identify with and believe in Joe Gardner‘s long-denied dream about becoming a jazz musician instead of a frustrated middle-school music teacher, only to (b) pull the rug out on Joe’s dream in Act Three and end things with Joe feeling uncertain about what he really wants to do with his remaining time on earth. Possibly jazz, possibly teaching…who knows?

Repeating: And what of our jazz-loving protagonist changing his mind at the last minute so he can save Tina Fey’s “22”? I hated that. A major audience betrayal.

I didn’t hate that he cared for and wanted to save 22, of course, but his whole big dream is to escape the perceived mediocrity of being a middle-school music teacher. We’re encouraged to identify with his quest to become a real musician and to share the joy of being in the groove.

And then, after interminable delays, temporary blockages and goofy complications, he finally gets to play with the hot jazz group. And finally, all is well.

But then Joe changes his mind! He decides to go back to the celestial nether realm to “save” 22 from her hellish deflated existence, and in so doing sacrifices (according to the Great Before rules) his own chance at life.

And THEN the Picasso-like powers-that-be decide to bend the rules because he’s inspired them.

And THEN when he’s back on planet earth Joe is STILL not sure what really matters to him. Will he continue to gig with the jazz group? Or will he embrace his full-tine teaching job? He’s not sure, but one thing he’s ABSOLUTELY sure of is that he’s going to treasure each & every day of his life from then on.

In short, Soul is all over the place. It doesn’t know itself, can’t make up its mind, can’t finally decide what Joe wants. Deciding to save 22 is obviously a selfless and generous act of love, but generally speaking that kind of fundamental either-or choice (fulfill your destiny or make someone else’s life complete) is rarely if ever something that any of us have to face.

Our basic task is to figure out what we really love and then, if we’re lucky or extra-willful, make it happen on our own steam (or not). Many most of us never find inspirational love (a creative calling matched with the talent to bring it off) and just settle into lives of mezzo-mezzo mediocrity.

Yes, the best of those leading semi-mediocre lives discover that feeling and showing real love (caring more for the happiness of a wife or a child than your own) can add a dimensional glow to life. But for those of us lucky enough to find a great creative passion or calling, it’s all-consuming — a demanding but glorious taskmaster.

Posted on 1.22.20: I didn’t listen to Bill Maher’s 1.17 visit to the Joe Rogan Experience (#1413) until last night. Watch or listen away, but it doesn’t get really good until 52:56 when Rogan says we’re all living “in such a strange time.” Here’s an mp3 that I captured, and here’s a partial transcript.

Maher: “I feel at times, and I’m sure you do too, like a man without a country. There’s a group of us — Sam Harris, people you’ve had on, Jordan Peterson, Bari Weiss. We’re all progressives, but sensible progressives. Real progressives — not blindly ideological. And we don’t chase these virtue signallers who are always…as a friend of mine said, they wake up offended.

“And I am always reading a story — like daily — I read something, and what goes through my mind is that this country is now completely binary. Two camps, totally trible. You’re either red or blue. Liberal or conservative. And you have to own anything that anyone says from your side. People go “oh, you’re the party of…” So whenever there’s something on the left that’s cuckoo krazy, we all own it.

“And that’s one reason why Trump won. Because when you go through the polling, people [in the right-leaning middle and the right] are not oblivious to his myriad flaws. What they love about him…what they all say they love is that he isn’t politically correct. It’s hard to measure how much people have been choking on political correctness. They do not want to walk on eggshells. They don’t want to think that one little misstep and they’ll get fired, get castigated.

“These are not just famous people but regular people. And I think when someone reads stories [about this syndrome], and it’s an eye-roll. An eye-roll at the left. That’s when you lose people.

“Two weeks ago the N.Y. Giants, my football team, cut Janoris Jenkins because he used the “r” word. Do we have to say the “r” word? [“Retard”] He was cut from the team. First he said ‘I though it was a ‘hood thing.’ Maybe Jinoris Jenkins didn’t get the memo. Because he’s not on Twitter 24/7 and living with the wokesters, that you don’t do this anymore. There’s no room any more for someone just to say ‘oh, I didn’t realize…sorry, my bad’ and then move on with our lives. No — you’re cancelled, you’re cut, you’re irredeemable. And it’s ridiculous.

“And every day there’s some story like that, and it just all goes into the left wing bin, and that’s when people go, ‘You know what? Trump’s an asshole and I don’t like him but I don’t want to live in that [woke punitive] world. Because these [woke] people are even fucking crazier.’ And that is the great danger [that may lead] to reelecting [Trump]. And he very well may do it.”

Posted on 1.25.20: All I’m hearing from people on the Sundance ’20 beat so far is “duds”,” “wait until Monday or Tuesday”, “nobody’s really flipped for anything yet,” “nothing better than a B” and so on.

The general feeling I’m getting is (a) “we want to be as enthusiastic and attuned as possible to whatever people are seeing or talking about” and/or (b) “we certainly don’t want to post any flatline responses to films that others are digging or getting off on on some level, as that would indicate we don’t get it and therefore might not return to Sundance next year.”

Who can be trusted? Is there anyone up there with a Hollywood Elsewhere-type attitude? Anyone who constantly struggles with his/her negative feelings about wokesters and has to really fight to tap out fair-minded reviews because they don’t want to sound too toxic or dismissive? What critics or columnists can be semi-reliably counted upon to not swim with the school of little fishies? Who’s most likely to write “take it or leave it but this is what I think about a Sundance film that everyone is giving a pass to or flipping out for”?

My basic reaction to Team Indiewire so far is one of absolute distance. I don’t trust a single word they’re saying about any film debuting in Park City. I believe they’re in the tank for just about anything and everything, and if they have a less-than-enthusiastic response they’ll downplay or muffle it as much as possible.

In my mind Indiewire is basically Woke Pravda — an organ of the p.c. commentariat that hands out approval notices based largely on WHAT a movie is saying as opposed to HOW it is saying it.

Tell me I’m misguided or prejudiced against them and that I need to hit reset and flush my head out.

I really hate critics who seem determined to smile all the time and radiate as much positivity as they can at all times, and have rarely if ever posted a mezzo-mezzo review of anything, much less a pan. I’m thinking of one critic in particular who smiles so much she makes my own facial muscles ache. A determination to be relentlessly positive and borderline euphoric about damn near everything is much, much worse than having a generally negative attitude.

All this aside, I remain hopeful, based on the last 25 or 26 years of attending Sundance, that four or five worthwhile films will have emerged by next Tuesday or Wednesday.

Posted on 1.29.20: Bernie Sanders’ recent poll surges have me worried and thinking something I never thought I’d admit to myself, much less post in this column. I’m deathly afraid of what might happen if the devotional blues, Bernie Bros and under-30s manage to enable Bernie to capture the Democratic nomination. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this but for all his gaffes, droolings, weaknesses and vulnerabilities I want Joe Biden to beat Bernie.

And I really don’t feel much enthusiasm for Joe. Does anyone?

I realize that my favorite guy, Pete Buttigieg, is done, but I’m furious that the race has come down to this. Neither of these geezers has that magic-wandy current. People don’t want a crusty Democratic socialist trying (and almost certainly failing) to push through Medicare For All — they just want a return to sanity and normality. Buttigieg could be that “normal” but he’s been gored so many times by African Americans and the progressive left that it’s a miracle he’s still standing.

I agree with Bernie for the most part. People want change. I would love to see this country turn into Finland. But I’m terrified of what’s happening now.

From “Democrats court doom by backing Bernie Sanders,” a 1./29 USA Today piece by Matt Bennett and Lanae Erickson:

Subhead: “[Sanders’] ideas are toxic outside blue America. He’s never won anything that really matters outside of Vermont, and all the available data shows his brand is a flop in red and purple states.

Excerpt: “Sanders has never won anything that really matters outside of Vermont, and all the available data shows that his ideas are politically toxic. Yet a week before primary voting begins, he is surging in Iowa, New Hampshire and California.

“Democrats now face a monumental choice. Deciding which presidential candidate should go head to head with Donald Trump is the paramount political calculation of our lifetimes.

“In the past, when Sanders has declared himself and his ideas to be ‘winners’ in red and purple areas, it has turned out to be demonstrably false. Democrats must not be fooled by him now.

Plus: “Don’t ignore reality: Democrats need to face facts about Bernie Sanders, his heart attack and his health.”

Text from Santa Barbara friendo: “Hey, cranky Jeff – ghost from Christmas Future here. All is going to be okay. You are loved. You’ve got Tatiana by your side. Count your blessings instead of sheep. To paraphrase good ole Mary Tyler Moore, ‘You’re gonna make it after all.’ Love and Merry Christmas.”

“It’s a moderately diverting sequel. That means it’s also a distinct drop down from the 2017 origin story” — Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips. 59% Metacritic, 70% Rotten Tomatoes

I tried to find a cat-sized Santa hat for Anya, but failed. Tatiana found one online, but it won’t arrive until Monday. Yes, I know — I look like Captain Idiot.

Help! has been out on Bluray for six or seven years, but for some dumb reason you aren’t allowed to stream it as a rental. It’s a moderately bad film — just not worth owning. Someone needs to explain why director Richard Lester insisted on a 1.75 aspect ratio for the Criterion Hard Day’s Night Bluray, but waved nonchalantly at Help! being presented at 1.66:1.

“I realize, looking back, how advanced it was. It was a precursor to the Batman ‘Pow! Bam! Wow!’ on TV…that kind of stuff. But [Richard Lester] never explained it to us. Partly, maybe, because we hadn’t spent a lot of time together between A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and partly because we were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period. Nobody could communicate with us, it was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time. In our own world. It’s like doing nothing most of the time, but still having to rise at 7 am, so we became bored.” — John Lennon. “If you look at pictures of us you can see a lot of red-eyed shots; they were red from the dope we were smoking. And these were those clean-cut boys! Dick Lester knew that very little would get done after lunch. In the afternoon we very seldom got past the first line of the script. We had such hysterics that no one could do anything. It was just that we had a lot of fun…a lot of fun in those days.” — Ringo Starr.

The elegant “Slim” Keith (1917-1990) was in fact quite slim in her 1930s and ’40x heyday; somewhat less so from the mid ’50s onward. Slim was the inspiration for the classic Hawksian woman — sly, bluntly spoken, takes no guff. This shot was apparently snapped in the early ’40s, a year or two into her eight-year marriage to Howard Hawks (’41 to ’49). Slim and Hawks split over infidelity — i.e., his.

Taken outside Lennon’s home in Tittenhurst Park in Ascot, during the recording of “Imagine.”

The appropriate headline is “Wretched Slimy Bedbugs.”

In Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman (Focus, 12.25), Carey Mulligan plays Cassie Thomas, a dryly calculating and determined woman on a mission of appropriate vengeance against insensitive male assholes.

Is this “the performance of her career,” as N.Y Times profiler Kyle Buchanan (aka “”The Projectionist”) insists? It’s certainly an attention-getting one, and Mulligan is almost sure to be Oscar-nominated for a Best Actress trophy, and who knows? Maybe she’ll win it.

I happen to feel that the richest and most rewarding screen performance of Mulligan’s career came when she played Maud, a married woman who becomes drawn into the women’s suffrage movement in 1912 London, in Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette (Focus Features, 10.23.15).

From my 9.5.15 Telluride review:

“Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette (Focus Features, 10.23) is the shit — a near-certain Best Picture contender and a cast-iron guarantee that Carey Mulligan will be Best Actress-nominated for her subdued but deeply emotional, fully riveting performance as Maud Watts, a married factory worker and mother of a young son who becomes a women’s suffrage movement convert in early 1900s London, just as the militant phase (led by the Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU) begins to kick in.

“This is one top-tier, richly textured, throughly propulsive saga, and a good four or five times better than I expected it to be.

“The Suffragette trailers were promising enough but the people at Focus Features had done a brilliant job of tamping down any expectations on a word-of-mouth basis. I’d come to suspect, based on a lack of any palpable advance excitement, that it might turn out to be a decent, good-enough film that could possibly provide a springboard for Mulligan…maybe. Well, it’s much more than that, such that I felt compelled explain to Gavron at the after-party that I was fairly gobsmacked.

“Mulligan, looking appropriately hangdog for the most part, handles every line and scene like a master violinist. She’s always been my idea of a great beauty, but when she chooses to go there she has one of the saddest faces in movies right now. The strain, stress and suppressed rage of Maud’s life are legible in every look, line and gesture. Mulligan is fairly young (she just turned 30 last May) but she’s a natural old-soul type who conveys not just what Maud (a fictitious everywoman) is dealing with but the trials of 100,000 women before her, and without anything that looks like overt ‘acting.’ All actors “sell it,” of course, but the gifted ones make the wheel-turns and gear-shifts seem all but invisible.

“I was saying last night that her Suffragette perf is on the same footing with Mulligan’s career-making turn in An Education, but now, at 8:15 in the morning after less than six hours of shut-eye (and with my heart breaking over the realization that I’ve blown my shot at catching the 9 am screening of Spotlight), I’m thinking Maud is her signature role.”

From Matt Taibbi‘s “The Legacy of President Donald Trump,” with a subhead that reads “he was America’s tour guide on its loudest, most exhausting, and longest-ever journey in a circle”:

“It’s an odd sort of coup when the chief plotter has already agreed to surrender power on schedule. ‘Certainly I will, and you know that,’ Trump said, when asked if he would leave the White House on January 20th. My faith in Trump’s sanity is not so absolute that I can’t see him forcing the Secret Service to drag him out by his underpants on that day, but there’s a difference between throwing a media tantrum (Trump is adept at this) and successfully overthrowing the government.

“There was always so much less than met the eye with this story, a simple tale of an arrogant ruling class that first got a deserved comeuppance in the form of maybe the least deserving challenger imaginable. It then spent four years pretending it was beaten by a demonic supervillain instead of an ad-libbing, flatulent salesman with a fourth-grade reading level. The propaganda we had to endure to cover up the embarrassing real story had the unfortunate effect of furthering distrust in both media and government, and therefore (of course) swelling Trump’s numbers. This was yet another of the symbiotic idiocy cycles that have come to so characterize American politics in the Trump age.

“No one will admit it, but Trump was and is a quintessentially American type, and his rise to the presidency [is] one of the all-time American stories. It was[Mark Twain’s] ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County‘ meets Duck Soup meets Scarface, a tall tale saga of how anyone determined enough, and full enough of resentment, greed, and unearned confidence, can make it all the way to the top in this country, armed with nothing but the pure power of bullshit. Would we really want things any other way?

“All of this may have been a miserable confluence of events, but the core truth of the Trump story is that in democracy, we have to accept that anything can happen, even this. It’s part of the deal. More than that, it’s over. Let’s hope we never have to find out that the only thing worse than the circus we just went through is an alternative, where it’s impossible.”

Howard Hawks‘ Only Angels Have Wings (’39) never once gives the audience an establishing master shot of the port town of Barranca, which is supposed to be in Peru. No panning shots, no lingering overheads…nothing. Last night I came upon this photo of Hawks and Cary Grant inspecting a scale model of Barranca. I’ve been watching this film since I was 10 or 11, and I’d never seen this photo until 15 hours ago.

I now have a better idea of how big the combination bar, restaurant and living quarters are (or were imagined to be), and where the airfield was and where headquarters sat in relation to the downtown area and the shipping wharf.

Wiki data: Angels was shot at the old Columbia Ranch lot (411 N Hollywood Way, Burbank, CA 91505). Filming began on 12.19.38 and wrapped on 3.24.39 — 31 days over schedule. This was followed with several weeks of second-unit shooting of aircraft flying in various locations in the western United States. A few re-takes were shot in April with Grant and Victor Kilian (‘Sparks’). Two days of re-shoots with Rita Hayworth were also shot, but were directed by Charles Vidor. Angels opened on 5.10.39.

Fictional Peruvian port town of Barranca.