Jett and his pit bull “Joey” haver been inseparable since ’09 or thereabouts. Joey was slightly freaked when Jett and Cait moved him into the West Orange abode. To me Joey is a beloved nephew, and it pains me to see that his snout and chin area have gone gray. The average pit bull lifespan is 12 to 14 years. Diet, exercise, luck of the draw, etc. Let’s not think about it

No streaming for Pedro Almodovar‘s The Human Voice, a surreal 30-minute short that premiered to excellent reviews at last September’s Venice Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics is insisting that the film will only be shown in theatres…great. But that probably means no bookings until the early summer of ’21 or possibly later.

Critic friendo to HE: “Regarding your 10 Best of All Time list, nothing before the end of WWII? No Lubitsch, Keaton, Welles, McCarey, Hawks? I guess I can understand this, but I’m still surprised.”

HE to critic Friend: One, when you’re restricted to naming 10 films (I actually threw in a second roster, #11 to #20), you have to he hard. Two, the specific criteria I mentioned — films that seem to echo some aspect of today’s culture, or which reflect something about human nature that seems especially pronounced now — leaves out many great or noteworthy films of the ’20s and ’30s. And three, I guess I didn’t want to sound old fogey-ish.

2021 is about to manifest, and you can’t look back too much. Many if not most Millennials regard the ’80s as the somewhat rickety old days, and Zoomers see the ’90s in a similar light. And they both see the ’60s and ’70s (when GenXers like Barack Obama were growing up) as remnants of a dusty, mostly irrelevant past. To them…hell, to some people in their 40s the 1920s and ’30s are like something out of the Paleozoic era.

If someone asked for a Ten Best of the ’20s, ’30s and early ’40s, off the top of my head I would list F.W. Murnau‘s Sunrise, William Wellman‘s The Ox-Bow Incident, Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, Buster Keaton‘s The General, Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, John Huston‘s The Maltese Falcon plus King Kong, The Wizard Of Oz, Bringing Up Baby, Sullivan’s Travels, Casablanca, The Lady Eve, Gunga Din, The Grapes of Wrath, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, John Ford‘s The Informer, Abel Gance‘s Napoleon, Abbott & Costello‘s Hold That Ghost, Leo McCarey‘s Duck Soup, Renoir‘s The Rules of the Game, Battleship Potemkin, All Quiet on the Western Front, James Whale‘s Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, McCarey’s The Awful Truth, Lubitsch‘s Trouble in Paradise plus My Man Godfrey, Que Viva Mexico, Twentieth Century, The Philadelphia Story, Sherlock, Jr., Tod Browning‘s Freaks, I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Shadow of a Doubt, The Public Enemy, Michael Curtiz‘s Robin Hood, Hawks‘ Scarface and Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy, Selznick/Fleming’s Gone With The Wind and Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Lifeboat. What’s that, a little more than 40?

Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (A24, 12.11.20) was recently nudged out of Best Motion Picture, Drama competition at the Golden Globes, and thereby forced to compete in the Best Foreign Language category. The HFPA made this decision because the film, an Arkansas-set drama about a South Korean family trying to survive as subsistence farmers in the mid ’80s, is largely spoken in Korean. And yet the film has some American-speaking costars, including Will Patton as a devout Jesus freak.

In the view of Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Minari getting the elbow has made it into a must=see. “Why is this a good thing?” Thompson asks. “[Because] most Oscar voters have never heard of Minari.”

In this, the most emotionally claustrophobic and soul-suffocating flatline year in over a century, “building buzz and awareness is a challenge,” Thompson notes. “That’s why the Globes controversy may be a boost for Minari, which garnered support from the Gotham Awards and early critics groups (Los Angeles, Boston) for supporting actress Youn Yuh-jung.”

It would be one thing if “most Oscar voters” haven’t seen Minari. Because they’re notoriously lazy, of course, and always will be. And because many are reluctant to wade into what sounds like exotic subject matter. (The title is the name of a kind of Chinese celery and/or Japanese parsley.) But Thompson said “most Oscar voters have never heard” of Chung’s film. To which anyone with half a brain would say “how could that be?”

Minari has been a vaguely buzzy title since it premiered nearly a year ago in Park City, and has certainly been discussed and prodded and kicked around over the last three or four months…c’mon. (I posted my thumbs-up review on 10.30.20.) How could Oscar voters have not at least heard of this worthy little film, which will probably find its ultimate awards payoff at the ’21 Spirit Awards? Are they cows in the field? How hermetic and shut-off could they be?

Here’s Scott Feinberg’s take on what happened with the Minari reclassification.

If I were Kevin Spacey I would fly to Prague and attend to you-know-what. Okay, I’ll say it — upper eye lids, eye bags, neck wattle. Libor Kment at Esthe Plastica (Na Příkopě 1047/17, 110 00 Staré Město, Czechia). Plus a few hundred micro hair plugs as long as he’s over there. Trust me — Prague is a real Christmas-type place to be.

Spacey’s latest Xmas Eve video appears to have been shot in some kind of public park in…you tell me. Southern Florida? Santa Barbara? A bit of traffic noise in the background.

Orange Plague “must be remembered as the worst, if only for [not signing the Covid relief bill and flying down to Florida to play golf] alone. This has to be a bottom. He must be seen as the worst, and we must run away from him and this type of behavior as fast as we ever collectively as a country before.” — Chris Cuomo during last night’s broadcast.

CNN: “Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer says he’s been forced into hiding after being harassed and threatened following baseless claims made by President Trump’s legal team and conservative media outlets that his company defrauded Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Coomer is suing the Trump campaign, included Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, for slander.”

Orange Plague has pardoned a whole lotta bad guys recently, and today granted clemency to 26 skunks and assorted scumbags.

The best known is Paul Manafort, that slippery eel of a double-dealing international operator who lied and finagled on Trump’s behalf while serving as his campaign chairman from June to August 2016, and who was investigated, prosecuted and jailed by Robert Mueller and his team.

Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, was also pardoned. Ditto Roger J. Stone Jr., Trump’s longtime adviser, fixer and pally-wally.

The key question, of course, is how will Trump manage to pardon himself?

Three days ago Outpost director Rod Lurie asked industry-connected Facebook followers for their Ten Greatest Films of All Time lists. Five years ago I posted a list of 160 of my all-time greatest films, and even that omitted a shitload that I regard quite highly. So the idea of boiling that list down to ten…forget it.

Let’s use a more specific standard for inclusion, to wit: which films on your greatest of all time list seem to echo some aspect of the way things are today or reveal or reflect something about human nature as most of us are assessing it in late 2020? Certain great films like Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate, for example, seem to address life and/or the human condition as it was in the mid to late ’60s, and perhaps not as much today.

I’m told that many if not most of the lists that have come in so far have Jaws at the very top. I’m sorry but that’s pretty close to ridiculous. It’s just a popular, well-jiggered summer monster beach flick…come on!

HE’s Top Ten Greatest American Films (and this could all change five minutes from now): (1) A Serious Man, (2) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, (3 & 4) The Godfather & The Godfather, Part II (5) 12 Angry Men, (6) Election, (7) Paths of Glory, (8) Rushmore, (9) Manchester By The Sea, (10) On The Waterfront.

HE’s Top 11 to 20 Films: (11) Lawrence of Arabia, (12) Moneyball, (13) Groundhog Day, (14) Goodfellas, (15) Out Of The Past, (16) Children of Men, (17) Zero Dark Thirty, (18) Heat, (19) The Best Years of Our Lives, (20) Shane.

Chris Nolan‘s Tenet has been streaming and on 4k Bluray for eight days now. I’ve watched it with subtitles one and a half times so far, and there’s no question it plays much more coherently (and certainly less problematically) this way. But you know what? It tickles and taunts more than it adds up. It still doesn’t make a whole lot of basic sense. I’m sorry but that’s a fact.

I loved the audacious, ahead-of-the-curve, first-time-ever freshness of Tenet when I saw it on a big screen in Flagstaff on Friday, 9.4, but maybe I was extra-enthused because I was so happy to watch a film in a theatre again.

I still love the inverted/backwards shit (especially during that dazzling 747 airport sequence) but the charm of that gimmick has fallen away pretty sharply, you bet.

I only know that subtitles doesn’t really solve the basic Tenet problem, which is the arrogant Nolan himself. I loved Dunkirk but now I’m back to thinking he’s an infuriating filmmaker — a guy whose films will always tax my patience (unless he makes another based-on-history film). It’s a tragedy to know deep down that Nolan will never make a film as engaging as Memento again.

I didn’t realize how badly Tenet was flunking across the board until I read a 12.18 Facebook review by Nick “Action Man” Clement, who is easily the kindest, most obliging, most turn-the-other-cheek reviewer of mainstream commercial films on the planet earth, and certainly since the 2.25.20 death of the big-hearted F.X. Feeney.

Clement’s basic deal is to bend over backwards in order to give a generous coo-coo tongue bath to almost any popcorn flick out there, past or present. It’s not that Clement has no taste, but that he’s unable to suppress the primal love he has for “guy” movies.

In this sense Clement is a dependable brand, just as Hollywood Elsewhere is a dependable place for cranky drillbit truth-telling.

So when Clement panned Tenet a few days ago, I went “holy shit….this means something! Nolan has overplayed his ‘too tricky for school’ routine and wound up shoving a cold banana up his ass….if he’s lost Nick Clement, he’s definitely done something wrong.”

Consider Clement’s assessment:

1. Overall I thought this was okay – certainly entertaining in the moment but in the end, not up to my expectations. And it makes me sad to report this fact, as I’ve pretty much loved all of Christopher Nolan’s output up until this point. Merely “okay” is not what I expect from this filmmaker. The Prestige and Interstellar remain my two favorites, Dunkirk was exceptional, and massive The Dark Knight Rises and Inception POWER. But this felt miscalculated.

“Mississippi Queen “has just everything you need to make it a winner. You’ve got the Chris Walken cowbell**, the riff is pretty damn good, and it sounds incredible. It feels like it wants to jump out of your car radio. To me, it sounds like a big, thick milkshake. It’s rich and chocolatey. Who doesn’t love that?” — The late Leslie West to Guitar Player‘s Joe Bosso, posted on 8.31.20.

Mountain (West, bassist and vocalist Felix Pappalardi, keyboardist Steve Knight, drummer N. D. Smart) lasted from ’70 to ’72. It wasn’t about metal but old-style hard rock. Metal didn’t really kick in until ’73 or thereabouts. It was fully established by the mid ’70s.

Quarters are still worth carrying around, but nickles and dimes are almost like pennies now. It was sometime in the mid ’70s or certainly the early ’80s when I resolved to never put another penny in my pocket. If a merchant gives me a dime or a nickel I’ll throw them into this pewter cup that my mother bequeathed. Five, tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds will probably hang in there another decade or two, but it won’t be long before $1 dollar notes will be retired.

My grandfather once showed me a $500 bill — let me hold it and everything. I like carrying Kennedy half dollars around. I always have eight or ten of them in my front pockets.