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.

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.