Yesterday Tatiana announced the official launch of Tatiana-pravda.com, with a caveat that all the articles will be in English. She’ll probably post most of her articles concurrently on HE, or at least those about movies, books and travel. This one is about her struggle to learn English in her youth.

Tatiana excerpt: It’s almost certain I will never ever speak English as well as Russian. 70% at best, and only after years and years of hard work.

As I began this article there were two competing voices within.

One said, “Nobody will be really interested in your writing. Even a super exciting story sounds dull and trivial if it’s told clumsily or without spirit.”

Another voice replied, “Yes, you’re absolutely right. You will sound dreary and your readers will be bored. But you know how a person achieves great heights? When he/she finds himself in an uncomfortable situation and needs to climb out of it. Or if a person creates a challenge for himself. But the heart beats faster and faster and the blood craves adrenalin. It’s like jumping with a parachute for the first time in your life.”

I fell in love with English at first sight, or more precisely at first sound :-). I was six or seven years old when I first heard it spoken. In the Soviet Union era all students were required to study a foreign language after graduating from elementary school (three years). We all went to school when we were seven years old. After elementary school we transferred to middle school (five years). And then high school (two years).

Exceptions were the language schools where you studied a foreign language from the very beginning.

I was very excited about studying English. But guess what? We were instructed in English but not encouraged to speak it conversationally. Anti-capitalist propaganda, the Cold War, full isolation of the USSR from the world…we all were very busy with building communism.

We were reading texts about London (“London is the capital of Great Britain”), Washington and New York, but were absolutely unable to speak the language of an imperialist nation that we taught to regard as our enemy.

Buying a house is necessarily a slowish, meticulous, step-by-step process. Endless protocols and procedures, and it’s never a done deal until you’ve signed every last form and inspected the place with a fine-tooth comb. But congrats are nonetheless in order for HE’s Jett Wells and wife Caitlin Bennett on purchasing their first home.

It’s located on a leafy cul-de-sac in West Orange, New Jersey, which is 20 or 25 minutes from Manhattan. Built in the 1930s, nice-looking floors, three bedrooms (or three and a half…I forget), an attic, a basement, 1 1/2 bathrooms, excellent front porch, huge back yard for the dogs, hilly. Expected occupancy by 12.1.20, or possibly a bit earlier. Their neighborhood is due south of Montclair; it’s also near Caldwell, where my maternal grandparents lived for decades.

Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan, respectively the writer and director of A Face In The Crowd (’57) “were convinced they had another hit on their hands. They didn’t. Critics shrugged, and the box office disappointed. (The film was so unsuccessful, in fact, that it effectively ended Andy Griffith’s movie career**, consigning him to the very medium A Face in the Crowd assailed.)

“I thought it was going to tap a very responsive chord,” Kazan wrote to Schulberg. “Apparently I miscalculated.”

“The problem, as diagnosed by The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, was that audiences found Rhodes unbelievable. The public, he wrote, would never be snowed that easily — they would be ‘finished with him’ before a real-life Rhodes could do nearly so much damage.

“Time, of course, would prove Crowther wrong and the filmmakers right. Though the film arrived just as television was saturating the country — in 1950, fewer than 10 percent of American households had a set; by the end of the decade, nearly 90 percent did — the two men intuited how susceptible the American public would be to this form of mass communication and the ways it could be used to corrupt the nation’s politics.

“Indeed, to the extent the film got it wrong, it was by not being cynical enough.” — from Jake Tapper‘s “Why Americans Fall for Grifters — a warning from a 1957 film” (Atlantic, November 2020 issue).

** Except No Time For Sergeants, released exactly a year after A Face In The Crowd, was a major hit. It was actually the financial failure of Onionhead (released in late ’58) that drove him into television, according to Griffith’s videotaped interview in the Archive of American Television.

This feels like a film that knows itself and how to deal the cards. A little touch of the Coen Brothers’ True Grit (grizzled old guy looking after spirited young girl) but minus the bearded schnorring from pot-bellied Jeff Bridges and supplemented by some Tom Hanks kindness and fortitude. With bad guys and gunplay and the usual hygiene issues associated with the Old West. Directed and co-written by Paul Greengrass, based on a same-titled novel by Paulette Jiles. Lensing by the great Dariusz Wolski (The Counselor, The Martian, All the Money in the World, Sicario: Day of the Soldado). Music by James Newton Howard.

Obviously Mel Gibson as a take-no-prisoners Santa Claus vs. Walton Goggins as a dedicated hitman…yes, it’s “funny”, I get that. But why is it called Fat Man (Saban Films, 11.13.20)? Gibson isn’t even stocky. It should be called…I don’t know, Naughty or Nice or Jolly-Ass Beardo or something in that vein. Written and directed by Eshom and Ian Nelms (who?). David Gordon Green and Danny McBride are exec producers. Oh, and it’s spelled Kris Kringle, not “Chris Cringle.”

I intend to vote early but I don’t trust Louis DeJoy‘s structurally weakened USPS system. Besides I want to vote the old-fashioned way — personally, physically, atmospherically, aromatically. California’s early-voting URL says the earliest I can do this is on Friday, 10.30, so I guess that’s my shot. I can drop off my filled-in ballot or walk in fresh and use the hole-punch method.

Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Edgar Wright…so long ago.

Are you going to tell me that Donald Trump‘s fraternal signalling to hate groups (“Stand back and stand by”) wasn’t a partial driving force behind the mentality of the 13 fanatics who’ve been charged with plotting to kidnap and possibly kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer? These bumblefuck bad guys are said to be affiliated with the Wolverine Watchmen, obviously a name that blends two movie franchises.

From 10.8 N.Y. Times story by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Shaila Dewan and Kathleen Gray: “Authorities in Michigan charged 13 men with a battery of terrorism and conspiracy charges on Thursday, revealing what they said were plans by anti-government extremists to storm the State Capitol building, initiate a civil war to cause society to crumble and kidnap the Michigan governor ahead of the presidential election.

“At least six of the men had talked about taking Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, hostage since the summer, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court and unsealed on Thursday. The men met over the summer for firearms training and combat drills and tried to make explosives; they also gathered several times to discuss the mission, including in the basement of a shop in Michigan that was accessible only through a ‘trap door’ under a rug, the F.B.I. said.

“The men had surveilled Ms. Whitmer’s vacation home in August and September, and they indicated that they wanted to take her hostage before the election in November, Richard J. Trask II, an F.B.I. special agent, said in the criminal complaint. In July, one of the men said the group should take Ms. Whitmer hostage and move her to a ‘secure location’ in Wisconsin for a ‘trial,’ Mr. Trask said.

“He said the F.B.I. believed the men were planning to buy explosives this week for their plot. Court records indicated that at least five of the men had been arrested on Wednesday in Ypsilanti, Mich.; it was not immediately clear if the sixth man had been taken into the custody.

“The state charged an additional seven men, all from Michigan, with providing material support for terrorist activities, being members of a gang and using firearms while committing felonies. The men were said to be affiliated with the Wolverine Watchmen, an extremist group, and have been charged with state crimes, which carry penalties of two to 20 years in prison.

“You pick a fight with Willy, you are finished.”

But of course, Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) didn’t actually pick a fight with publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst when he wrote (or co-wrote) Citizen Kane. It was headstrong director-cowriter Orson Welles who did that, no? He chose the subject, sold it to RKO, assembled the forces, poked at the hornet’s nest, etc. Mank was just the pithy writer-for-hire who created the structure and made the dialogue sing, and who later won a (shared) Best Screenplay Oscar for his troubles.

The just-posted Mank teaser is about the trials and tribulations of good old Mank and his frenemy Orson and their mutual antagonist Mr. Hearst….about a truly gifted screenwriter who wrote delicious dialogue and one of the greatest films of all time despite — aye, the rub — a close-to-suicidal drinking problem.

As played by Oldman, Mank is a bleary-eyed, chubby-faced consumer of spirits who stumbles around and occasionally falls down and does all the usual things that theatrically inclined alcoholics do. But — but! — he was as brilliant and heaven-sent as screenwriters come, and oh what a fine fellow when all the ledgers are balanced and the final checks have been cut.

I’m still expecting to do handstands over this thing, but my understanding or absorption of The Great Herman J. is about who he was as a man of prolific letters and visions…words, arias, screenplays…his typewritten soul. Teasers obviously have to be brief and succinct, and all this one does is convey the colorful but unfortunate fact that Mankiewicz was often in his cups.

Was he really this louche, this bleary, this soused? Speaking as a dedicated vodka-and-lemonade man in the mid ’90s and a slurpy Pinot Grigio guy in the aughts until my 3.20.12 vow of sobriety, and speaking also as the son of a witty, functioning alcoholic until the formidable James T. joined AA in ’75, my understanding of the disease is that drunks don’t flaunt it. They do everything they can, in fact, to hide it.

All that aside, nothing thrills me to the bone like a grade-A, 131-minute David Fincher film in the wings. And I love “coming to a screen near you.” Your TV screen, they mostly mean, as a limited theatrical release (which would thrill me to no end) is due for November, but only in the big towns.

The last seven months have been a saga of continual heartbreak, deflation and despair. I remain convinced that Mank will provide a brief respite.

…and it hung in there. Pence didn’t feel his presence? He didn’t feel the faint tickle? A real man would’ve felt it and flicked it away. Was the fly meditating or defecating? All I know is that the winged intruder eventually lost interest and flew off. “There are better things to do in my short fly life,” he decided.

“Ballsiest Visionary Art Film Of The Year,” posted on 11.4.17: Who knows if there will even be serious film historians 50 years hence? The culture might be so degraded by then…I don’t want to think about it. But if they’re still around one or two will probably look back upon our troubled epoch and ask “which 2017 films really conveyed what the world was like back then? Which tried to express what people were hoping for or afraid of? Which tell us the most in terms of cultural self-portraiture or self-reflection?”

I can guarantee you right now that Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! will definitely be among the few films that scholars of 2067 will study when they ponder U.S. culture during the first year of Donald Trump’s administration.

I can also assure you that no one will pay the slightest historical attention to Thor: Ragnarok or Logan or even Blade Runner 2049. These three films have earned serious box-office coin, of course, while mother! topped out at a measly $17,800,004 domestic and $25,850,098 foreign. But they won’t matter when all has been said and done and the deciders have completed their assessments. Art lasts; all diversions melt.

In the same way that the mid ‘1950s were clearly reflected by Kiss Me Deadly, Patterns, No Down Payment and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the currents of the mid to late’60s were c channelled by Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, The President’s Analyst and The Graduate, Aronofsky’s allegorical horror film burrows right into the dirt and muck of the here-and-now.

In my book mother! is either the fourth- or fifth-best film of the year, in part because it’s probably the most courageous. How did Aronofsky get Paramount to finance and release a film that Joe and Jane Popcorn reportedly hated with a passion? Whatever the back-story, the release of mother! is a proud event in the annals of American cinema because it went for something and nailed it, because it reaches right into the nightmares and agitations and self-loathings of a convulsive era and says “do you smell it…do you sense the disease and disruption? Not the chaos that you’re watching on-screen, but the real-deal horrors that are defining the world outside?”

If there are any film critics organizations out there with any balls, they’ll give Aronofsky a special artistic courage award or two next month.

“Obviously all horror flicks are signifiers of cultural undercurrents,” I wrote on 9.15.17. “Most stand and deliver as visceral experiences, but the best ones slip into your bloodstream and before you know it you’re them. Or they’re you. mother! is visceral as hell, but you can’t watch it and not think ‘uhhm, this is about more than what I’m seeing on the screen…this might actually be about everything that’s happening on the planet right now.’ Or not. Up to you. But it begs to be grappled with.

From Scott Feinberg‘s exclusive THR story (10.7) titled “Drive-In Screenings Will Now Count Towards Eligibility”:

1. Films which are intended for theatrical release, but are initially made available through commercial streaming, VOD service or other broadcast may qualify by making the film available on the secure Academy Screening Room member site within 60 days of the film’s streaming/VOD release or broadcast.

2. Films may [also] qualify with a traditional theatrical release, completing a seven-day run in one of six qualifying cities (Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco/Bay Area, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta), screening at least three times daily, with at least one screening between 6 pm and 10 pm daily.

“Additionally, drive-in theaters in these cities will now qualify as a commercial venue. The screening requirement [in this instance] will be adjusted from three times daily to once daily. Films that have a theatrical release are not required to submit to the Academy Screening Room within 60 days — it is optional.”

The 93rd Oscars will happen on Sunday, 4.25.21.