Alan Ball‘s “somewhat autobiographically inspired Uncle Frank (Amazon, 11.26) hits a…successful balance between ensemble seriocomedy, Big Issues and a somewhat pressure-cooked plot. Set in the early ’70s, it casts the reliably deft Paul Bettany as a gay man forced to confront the Southern family to whom he’s stayed closeted. Even at its most manipulative, Uncle Frank remains polished and engaging. A big plus is Paul Bettany, who makes the title character’s residual Southern courtliness, acquired urbanity and painful psychological scars keenly felt.” — from Dennis Harvey’s 1.25.20 Variety review.

One look at Bettany tells you his character probably isn’t straight — the slender frame, the moustache, the extra-precise cut of his sports jacket, the way he holds his cigarette and touches his sternum during solemn discussions. His extended South Carolina-residing family senses something different about him, but they don’t spot the specifics. Or would rather not.

Summary: Joe Biden sounded sane, measured, calm, sensible, mature. Like always, Donald Trump deflected, denied, fantasized, etc. Barack Obama once allegedly described him as “a bullshitter” — check. What he’s always been, and incorrigible to boot.

Trump: “I do know they’re against pedophilia…they fight it very hard.” I think that might be a pull quote. Trump’s paranoid smoke about fake voting (“thousands of ballots dumped into a garbage can”) is completely unsupported by any serious reporting or known facts. Trump: “I [didn’t] want to panic this country…everybody’s going to die!” And he can’t remember when his last test was before his Covid announcement. (“I may have…”) Oh, and 85% of those who wear masks get the virus anyway. Have Trump’s views on mask-wearing changed since he himself got Covid? What about your tax debt? What about…forget it. This is a fact-free act, the usual smoke and pretense. Plus: “I’ve done a great job.” And it’s over.

Every time an allegedly exceptional, critically admired animated feature comes along, Oscar handicappers always say the same thing — “This film is so successful, so vital, so out-of-the-park engrossing and such an exception-to the rule that it deserves consideration as a Best Picture contender! It’s too good to to be confined to the Best Animated Feature category — it needs to leapfrog off that lily pad and stake its claim to Best Picture greatness!”

And every time this happens, Hollywood Elsewhere says “sorry but no…banal and simplistic as this may sound, animated features are not live action features and vice versa, and never the twain shall meet. And besides, what’s so terrible or diminishing about winning an Oscar in this category?”

This won’t stop the Soul cheering squad, but there’s really nothing further to discuss.

I’m not being derelict as far as seeing Kornél Mundruczó‘s Pieces of a Woman is concerned. Okay, I was derelict a while back as I failed to watch a limited-opportunity streaming version that I received during the Venice Film Festival. But I’ve asked Netflix to send me a link, etc.

“For 128 minutes, Vanessa Kirby has you hooked into her every move in Pieces of a Woman (Netflix, TBD). As Martha, a high-powered executive who loses her child during a harrowing home birth, Kirby mesmerizes by showcasing the human frailty and devastation that happens when tragedy comes knocking.

“Her acting tour-de-force reminded me of Gena Rowlands’ masterful work in John Cassavetes’ classic Woman Under the Influence (’74).” — from Jordan Ruimy’s 9.24 World of Reel review.

“The opening scene, shot in one 23-minute continuous take, took two days and six takes to shoot. Harrowing to watch, it sets up the stakes for the rest of the film, which flows magnificently well thanks to Mundruczo firm grasp of his narrative — his work here is a directorial high-wire act of the highest order. Kirby is an absolute Best Actress contender. Ellen Burstyn is excellent in the supporting role as well.”

The opening title appears after this scene ends, or roughly a half-hour into the film.

“Letter To You“, the first studio album by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band since High Hopes (which I frankly didn’t pay a great deal of attention to), pops on 10.23. I have the album, and have listened to…uhm, five tracks. The only one that got me excited is “Ghosts“, which was released on 9.24. A friend notes that “If I Was A Priest” and “Song For the Orphans” sound like Bob Dylan and The Band — agreed. I’ve listened twice to an anti-Trump called “Rainmaker” — good, not great.

Herewith an elegant trailer for Francis Lee‘s Ammonite. Delicate, well-judged, nicely balanced. Lionsgate had planned to give Ammonite a limited theatrical debut on Friday, 11.13. This could happen.

Posted on 8.25.20: Observation #1: A close relation of Celine Sciamma‘s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, once again set near a beachy coastline in the distant past (Dorset in the 1840s), and once again about a lesbian love affair between tightly-corseted, socially restricted women who wear their hair in buns.

Observation #2: A bit of a May-December romance with 43 year-old Winslet (now 44) as the real-life fossil-searcher and paleontologist Mary Anning, who was born in 1799 and died in 1847. 26 year-old Saoirse Ronan (25 during filming) plays geologist Charlotte Murchison, whose husband, Roderick Impey Murchison, paid Anning to take care of her for a brief period.

Except the 1840s romance that allegedly occured wasn’t a May-December thing. Murchison was actually 11 years older than Anning, having been born on April 18, 1788. She was therefore in her early 50s and not, as the film has it, in her mid 20s. Furthermore Roderick Murchison wasn’t, as the film indicates, some kind of patronizing sexist twit who regarded his wife as a fragile emotional invalid who needed looking after. The Murchisons were actually partners in their geological studies; they travelled all over Europe together.

Charlotte Murchison lived to age 80; poor Mary Anning passed from breast cancer at age 47 or 48.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow? Raze out the written troubles of the brain? And with some sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart?

I’m not Rocky Sullivan because I haven’t done anything criminal or even “wrong” except in the minds of…I’d rather not say. But in the quiet lull before every award season…nope, can’t go there. I’ve never liked Angels With Dirty Faces (’38) because of that famous last scene. The ambiguity of it, I mean. The horror of dying yellow. I don’t know what I’m saying.

Jack Sholder and Bob Hunt‘s** The Hidden (’87) was easily the greatest and the weightiest New Line exploitation release of the ’80s. Because it had a great undercurrent. On the surface The Hidden (originally titled Hidden) was a lunatic sci-fi horror comedy about a slimey bug alien that takes over a series of human hosts, turning them into greedy heavy-metal freaks with a lust for hot cars, high speeds and ultra-violence.

What The Hidden was really serving, of course, was a greed-decade metaphor that was just as observant in terms of social portraiture as Oliver Stone‘s Wall Street (released the same year and less than two months after The Hidden opened on 10.22.87) or even for that matter Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (’13), which audiences loved for its crazy behaviors and excessive indulgences when it came along 26 years later.

Note to Quentin Tarantino and New Beverly Programmers: Wall Street and The Hidden on a double-bill someday…please.

The Hidden‘s idea was that something coarse and greedy and ravenous was spreading across the culture, but that it didn’t come from American family values or from the deregulatory capitalist free-for-all that Ronald Reagan had unleashed or from our own educational teachings or beliefs, but from an alien life form. Which of course let America off the hook…the monster made us do it! A brilliant concept that captured or reflected the current of the mid ’80s (written during the boom years and released only three days after Black Monday of 1987), and yet offered as urban escapism. Because it hid all of its social assessments and reflections inside exploitation tropes (car chases, bank robberies, shoot-outs, corrupt politicians).

This kind of slam-bang action film (“I want the car!”) comes along once in a blue moon, if that. The best horror thrillers are always the ones that try to double-track by “saying” something about the times from which they’ve come. I’m not saying this kind of film isn’t being attempted these days. Maybe they are. Examples?

I just bought an HD copy on Amazon.

** “Bob Hunt” was Jim Kouf‘s screenwriting alter ego. Why he chose to not take credit for The Hidden screenplay is a mystery to me.

In all fairness or likelihood, Glenn Close will almost surely be nominated for her performance as an old-school, decent-hearted Kentucky grandma in Ron Howard‘s Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix, 11.24). Several times nominated before (and especially deserving of a win for her performance in 2018’s The Wife), never won. Alas, the naysayers (not against Glenn but the film or more precisely the trailer) are already assembling.

This decision is a stain on the reputation of NBC News, which has decided to reward Trump for walking away from a debate. It's not the first time NBC has let itself serve as Trump's useful idiot, but it may be the most egregious. https://t.co/kOVdmIi91W

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) October 14, 2020

Daniel Lombroso‘s White Noise (10.21, iTunes/Amazon) is an Atlantic-sponsored doc about alt-right racism. It focuses upon Richard Spencer, Lauren Southern and Mike Cernovich “as they ride a wave of racist ideas to viral fame,” etc.

But there’s a quick insert shot in the trailer which gave me pause. Southern is shown pasting a sticker to a wall that says “it’s okay to be white.” Which means, given that Southern is being depicted as a non-liberal, discriminatory, less-than-compassionate person, that it’s definitely not okay to be white — that there’s something inherently flawed or diseased or poisonous about being a descendant of white Anglo Saxon or European Germanic tribes.

In other words if you’re a WASP you’re not only in league with Southern and her ilk but you have a real genetic problem, and so you need to pick up a copy of “White Fragility” and go through anti-racism training and gather some birch branches and self-flagellate, etc.

I’m sorry but I don’t buy that.

From “Rosanna Arquette Oversteps,” an HE post from 8.7.19: “Speaking as an X-factor white guy from a middle-class New Jersey and Connecticut upbringing, I don’t feel repelled or disgusted by my Anglo-Saxon heritage and family history. I deeply regret the cruelty visited upon immigrants and various cultures of color by whites, but the fact that racist attitudes were common throughout most of the 20th Century and certainly the 19th Century doesn’t mean that white people (more particularly my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, reaching back to the mid 1800s) were inherently evil.

“By current standards the people I came from may seem insufficiently evolved, of course, but they were born into a certain culture and were dealt certain cards, and most carried the weight as best they could. They weren’t born with horns on their heads.

“Nor do I feel that elemental decency is absent in the majority of white people today. I feel profoundly repelled by the attitudes of your backwater Trump supporters, of course, but they are not me. I come from a family of ‘good’, well-educated, imperfect people who believed in hard work, discipline and mowing the lawn on Saturday afternoons, and who exuded decency and compassion for the most part. I am not the devil’s spawn, and neither is my Russian-born wife or my two sons. I’ve witnessed and dealt with ignorant behavior all my life, but I’ve never bought into the idea of Anglo-Saxon culture being inherently evil. Please.”

…if and when Biden wins and Trump retires to Mar a Lago?

Friendo: “It’s probably too late to put [the woke] genie back in the bottle as an entire generation has been brainwashed by the gender-studies-and-identity-politics fascist-college-professor mafia, and the mainstream media has been infiltrated by this insanity as if eaten by termites. I grieve for all of this (and have for several years now), and I really do get it.

“[But eventually] backlashes are going to set in (did you see Bill Burr‘s opening monologue on SNL? — I was shocked that they allowed it). And once the fervor goes out of the whole idea of a ‘resistance’ (a term so despicable and narcissistic that it makes me almost physically ill), I think some of the wind may go out of the woke sails.

“Things go out of fashion, and then come back in. And vice versa. And wokeness, as destructive as it is, is nothing if not fashion. It has no more moral reality than buying a handbag to prove you’re cool.

“Basically, wokeness is white supremacy for hipsters. I assume that at some point people with IQs over 100 are going to start figuring that out.”

HE to Friendo: I have more motivation to despise the wokester totalitarian thought-police left than most. I’ve flirted with primitive fantasies I’d rather not speak of. Sometimes I feel as if I’m Travis Bickle talking to Peter Boyle in that scene outside the Belmore Cafeteria….”I’ve got some really bad thoughts.” Nobody despises these monsters like I do.

Trump is not a “bad” person. We’re all frightened and delicate children under the crust, but he’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen or heard of who seems a literal manifestation of evil…a sloppy, lying, toxic, terrified, improvising, totalitarian, foam-at-the-mouth blowhard brute of the lowest order. Silvio Berlusconi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Benito Mussolini, Augusto Pinochat, Kim Jong Un, etc.

It has always bothered me that some seem to see Biden-vs.-Trump in purely strategic terms. It’s a tennis match, a gladiatorial duel. Trump, they say, is merely a product, an agenda, point of view. These folks never seem to mention the moral necessity of banishing the demented, alcoholic uncle who’s blasting shotun holes through the walls and generally trashing the community. “Trump might win if he does this or that,” they say. “If people despise the left enough they might break for him,” etc. This is a moral issue, not a strategic one. It’s life vs. death. Trump is not a “bad guy.” He’s literally Satanic.

Friendo: “There’s no such thing as a sure thing. But there’s something that even the polls and studies don’t measure — that the nation seems exhausted by Trump. It’s like living with a drug abuser. After a while, you just want out.”