Imagine being at last night’s Rose Bowl drive-in screening of Nomadland. Imagine all the usual distractions — small-looking screen if you were parked in the middle section, not-bright-enough image, people roaming around, ambient sounds.

Now add a guy parked in front of you who decided to watch the film with his air-conditioning on, which of course meant keeping his engine on for two hours straight and thereby bothering nearby viewers with (a) his bright red parking lights (i.e., the drive-in equivalent of twitter-surfing during a theatrical screening) and also (b) the gentle spewing of exhaust. Thanks, homey! The temperature was around 70 so no real need for a.c. Alas, some people want what they want when they want it.

I heard William S. Burroughs say “some people are shits” during a Madison Square Garden appearance about 40 years ago. It always stayed with me.

Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland is a moody, mesmerizing bulls-eye — a 21st Century Grapes of Wrath minus the simmering anger of Tom Joad and the villainy of random predators.  Like John Ford and John Steinbeck‘s 1940 classic, Zhao’s film is pure Americana, set against a backdrop of brusque fate and heartless capitalism, shaded with angst and no shortage of adversity and yet sustained by a certain persistence of spirit, both in front of and behind the camera. 

It’s a masterful, painterly portrayal of the American dispossessed, and a fascinating, character-rich study of a roaming vagabond and a constantly evolving community of weathered, mostly retirement-age homeless victims of a cruel economy (it’s set in the wake of the ’09 recession). 

I respected Zhao’s previous film, The Rider, which, like Nomadland, is about a sympathetic character who’s stuck in a tough situation with no apparent way out.  But I didn’t love it for the rigid scheme and an ending that was mostly about resignation.

Nomadland is on another level.  Within five minutes I knew it was a much better, more ambitious film — quietly somber and yet grander in scope, gentler, sadder.

A Best Actress nomination is absolutely locked and loaded for Frances McDormand and her performance as Fern, a sturdy 60something, widowed and close to broke and living out of a van and with no interest in settling. She’s an iron-willed survivor coping with extreme vulnerability; amiable and attentive and yet closed off or at least resistant to emotional attentions on a certain level, self-described as “house-less” as opposed to homeless, moving from job to job, camp to camp, parking lot to parking lot.  Inscrutable and yet scrutable. 

Nomadland, trust me, is going to be Best Picture nominated.  Obviously. Zhao will be Best Director nominated.  Joshua James Richard‘s magic-hour cinematography will also lasso a nom. But not, I’m told, Ludovico Einaudi‘s haunting piano score, because it wasn’t composed for the film.

A friend told me that Nomadland, which he felt had shortchanged him due to a lack of some of the usual usuals (carefully-plotted story, second-act pivot, decisive ending), would’ve been better as a half-hour short.  I strongly disagree due to the incontestable fact that it grows and deepens and adds more detail with each and every scene.  It’s a portrait piece.  

By the end you’re left with a full understanding of an industrious but somewhat closed-off woman who doesn’t want to invest in anything but her own discipline, and is curiously resistant to any overtures that verge on the intimate.  She can only live in the unstable now, in her own hard but not quite miserable life.

Thank fortune for Fern as well as the audience that Nomadland is full of humanist grace notes…charity, kindness, confessions, helping hands.

Shot in 2.39:1 (which none of the critics so far have even mentioned), it’s all character and atmosphere and mood — “tone poem” is the most favored term thus far.  The enhancements are, in this order, (a) McDormand McDormand McDormand, (b) a winning supporting turn by David Straitharn as a kindly, would-be romantic partner, (c) a steady supply of brief turns by real homeless folk, (c) the painterly images…gently dusky and soft and glowing, (d) Zhao’s crisp, urgent editing and especially (e) Einaudi’s score, which pulls you in you right away and captures exactly the right meditative tone.

I wasn’t able to attend Friday night’s special drive-in screening of Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland. Don’t ask. But I’ll figure something out. Right now I have to stream a couple of films of some importance. Tomorrow is another day.

I was sitting at my desk about 25 minutes ago when I heard five or six shots fired. Bam-bam-bam-bam!…loud. I ignored it. Then six or seven shots followed — bam, bam, bam, bam bam bam! I walked outside to see what’s what, and saw there were cops everywhere (eight to ten cars, lights flashing) with guns drawn at the corner of Melrose and Huntley. I wanted to take photos but was told twice to get back inside for my safety. Two or three African American guys plus a caucasian blonde woman. Hands up, raise your T-shirt, drop to your knees. A loudspeaker telling someone to drop their weapon and get down. A couple of choppers flying overhead.

I’ve noted twice before that Variety‘s Clayton Davis has called Regina King‘s One Night In Miami “the first solid Oscar contender to drop in the fall festival circuit.”

But hold upski a second. Because in the other corner we have The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg declaring that Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland is “the first across-the-board Oscar contender of the unusual 2020-2021 season.”

Didn’t Feinberg see One Night in Miami? He probably did. It’s been streaming around since its Venice Film Festival debut. So why didn’t he call Regina King‘s film the first serious Oscar contender and Chloe Zhao‘s the second?

Feinberg: “Adapted by Zhao from Jessica Bruder‘s acclaimed 2017 non-fiction book of the same name, Nomadland paints a beautiful and haunting portrait of the ways in which many older Americans have been impacted by the Great Recession. And it features a leading turn by a never-better Frances McDormand that could well result in her becoming only the second person to accumulate as many as three best actress Oscars, after Katharine Hepburn, who won four.

“It’s hard to imagine a film that could better capture the zeitgeist — often a major consideration for members of the film Academy, conscious or not — than this portrait of mournful and weary resilience, which begs the question: is this really what has happened to America, the land of promise, and the American dream? It is set during the Obama years, but is just as much a comment on the Trump years, so it won’t be easy for either side to politicize it.

“The closest comparison that I can think of is the 1940 classic The Grapes of Wrath, which was adapted from John Steinbeck‘s story of people hit by hard times but passing by or surrounded by people in the same boat and therefore, perhaps, maintaining their dignity and their strength to carry on.”

Feinberg won’t say it, but I will. The ’20/’21 Oscar race is going to be strongly influenced by women, people of color and wokeness in general. The ideal Best Picture Oscar winner will ideally be directed by a woman (preferably by a woman of color like Zhao), and the least likely contenders for the Best Picture Oscar will probably be, unfair as it sounds, films primarily about white-guy realms. I suspect that Mank, a mostly-white-guy period film, may run into resistance because of this. If this doesn’t happen, great. But the wind is the wind.

Variety award-season columnist Clayton Davis was apparently floating on a cloud while writing his review of Regina King‘s One Night In Miami, calling it “the first solid Oscar contender to drop in the fall festival circuit.”

Okay, maybe it is, especially given the current woke criteria and all. But I saw it last night and I’m here to say “yep, good film in a disciplined and concentrated sort of way, but calm down.”

I don’t know how to explain it in so many words, but I somehow expected that a film about a February 1964 meeting between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in a Miami hotel room would amount to something more than what this movie conveys.

.One Night in Miami is a respectably decent translation of a good, thoughtful play about African American identity in the ’60s. But it’s not a great film or even a brilliant one. But it’s good enough in terms of observational fibre and social relevance, or at least the second half is. But the fact that it was directed by Regina King doesn’t make it any more or less than it actually is.

And for a film that largely (65% or 70%) takes place in a single hotel room, it visually underwhelms. Tami Reiker‘s cinematography doesn’t match the high water marks of Boris Kaufman‘s one-room lensing of 12 Angry Men or Glen MacWilliams‘ cinematography for Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.

Denzel Washington’s titular performance in Spike Lee‘s Malcolm X was a tougher and more resolute dude than Kingsley Ben-Adir‘s version. Malcolm won’t stop beating up on poor Sam Cooke, and he seems weak when he asks Cassius (“Cass”) to join him in breaking with Elijah Muhammad. And he weeps! Just not the solemn, heroic figure that I’ve been reading about all these years. And wasn’t he wearing that carefully trimmed Van Dyke beard in ‘64?

Good moment: When Cooke criticizes Malcolm for reacting in a cold, racially dismissive way when JFK was murdered (“The chickens coming home to roost”). Cooke says his mother cried over the news, and Clay says his momma cried too.

Leslie Odom, Jr. is quite good as Cooke, but I didn’t believe an early scene at the Copacabana in which the snooty white clientele reacts to Cooke’s singing with derision and rudeness. In ’64 Cook was known all over as a major-league crooner who had released a cavalcade of hits going back to ‘57. No way would an audience of uptown swells treat him like that. Even if they didn’t like his act, the middle-class politeness instinct is too embedded.

I felt the same contemptuous attitude toward whiteys in the Copa scene that Ava DuVernay showed when she invented that Selma scenario in which LBJ told J. Edgar Hoover to tape-record MLK’s sexual motel encounters in order to pressure him into not pushing for the Voting Rights Act. You’ll recall how Joseph Califano called b.s. on that.

The postscript reminds that Malcolm X was murdered by gunfire a year later, but it ignores Cooke’s death in Los Angeles less than a year later. That tells you that King is a bit of a spinner — she didn’t want to leave the audience with a downish, mystifying epilogue. But it happened.

Repeating: Clayton Davis did One Night in .Miami no favors by calling it Oscar-worthy.

Last night I watched the new 4K UHD Psycho Bluray disc, and I’m very sorry to report that portions of it are grainstormed all to hell, and I mean totally smothered in swarms of digital micro-mosquitoes.

There were complaints here and there about the previous Psycho Bluray being overly DNR’ed (digital noise reduction), and so the Universal Home Video grain monks (i.e., “the grainmakers”) went into the control room and took their revenge.

The new Psycho reminds me of that 70th anniversary grainstorm Casablanca Bluray that Robert Harris and Glenn Kenny were so stuck on, and which I hated.

The older DNR’d Psycho Bluray (which I can no longer find on Amazon) is much more pleasing to the eye. Yes, I know that the DNR’ed look isn’t what the film really looked like when it came out of the lab in ’60, and I couldn’t care less. All the surfaces and textures look clean and smooth and ultra-detailed, but now the Universal gremlins have injected hundreds of billions of throbbing mosquitoes into this classic Hitchcock film.

Plus there are some scenes in the newbie that appear way too contrasty. Steer clear of the 4K version and stick with the 2010 Bluray. If you don’t own a copy, buy one now.

By the way: As noted earlier, the 4K Psycho includes some excised material that had never been available before, including a brief glimpse of Janet Leigh side-boob as Anthony Perkins watches her undress through a peephole.

Also: The knifing of Arbogast (Martin Balsam) at the bottom of the stairs now includes two or three extra stabbing strokes. Except the sound of Arbogast’s “arrhhwwghhhh!” is oddly delayed. The knife plunges in a couple of times, but he doesn’t go “arrhhwwghhhh!” until the third stab. Brilliant.

Note: The top video clip is an ECU of the Bates Motel parlor scene from the new 4K disc. The Egyptian mosquito grainstorm effect is obvious to the naked eye. The below video clip is an ECU of a scene from the 2010 Psycho Bluray — very little grain to speak of.

— From David Remnick‘s “Bob Woodward on a Nightmare Presidency,” posted on 9.10.20.

I haven’t yet watched the new Psycho 4K UHD Bluray. I’ll actually be picking it up today at a nearby Best Buy. And I don’t know who “litemakr2” is. Nor have I spoken to anyone about any alleged differences between the Psycho 4K soundtrack mixes (on both 4K and Bluray discs) and the previous Universal Home Video Bluray, which is one of my all-time favorites.

I’ve posted this YouTube comparison video just to throw it out there and ask for reactions.

Litemakr2 copy: “[This is a ] comparison between (a) the original 1960 mix and (b) the stereo remix created for recent Bluray and 4k releases. The remix has changed, added or removed certain sound effects and changed the mix levels of the music. There are many more changes, but this highlights alterations to two of the most famous scenes.

“The new 4k and Bluray discs do not have the original soundtrack at all (despite being labeled as such). Universal should issue replacement discs so viewers have the option of viewing Psycho with the original mix as Hitchcock intended.”

Ammonite star Kate Winslet to Vanity Fair‘s Julie Miller: “It’s like, what the fuck was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski? It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful.

“And I have to take responsibility for the fact that I worked with them both. I can’t turn back the clock. I’m grappling with those regrets but what do we have if we aren’t able to just be fucking truthful about all of it?”

In other words, having worked with Polanski in 201l’s Carnage, which was shot a year after Polanski’s controversial 2009 arrest in Switzerland in concert with a U.S. extradition attempt (or roughly a decade ago), Winslet has suddenly decided that this wasn’t cool, apparently because making Ammonite has strengthened her #MeToo convictions.

Obviously a little Johnny-come-lately but okay, that’s how she feels.

But to equate Polanski and Woody Allen in terms of alleged crimes and offenses is just forehead-slapping ignorant. Moreover, it was derelict of Miller not to ask Winslet about the mountains of evidence, indications and public statements that indicate Allen is completely innocent.

I’m so tired of having to refute kneejerk anti-Woody slander by obstinate or under-informed persons, but here, for what feels like the 28th or 29th time, is what any reasonable person would regard as the irrefutable truth of things:

(1) There is no evidence to support Dylan Farrow’s claim. But there’s a fair amount of evidence and ample indication that Mia Farrow, enraged by Woody’s romance with Soon-Yi Previn, made it all up to “get” Woody during an early ’90s custody battle, and as part of this determination coached Dylan to make the claims that she did. I happen to personally believe this scenario. There’s simply no rational, even-handed way to side with the “I believe Dylan Farrow” camp.

(2) If after reading Moses Farrow’s 5.23.18 essay (“A Son Speaks Out“) as well as Robert Weide’s “Q & A with Dylan Farrow” (12.13.17) and Daphne Merkin’s 9.16.18 Soon-Yi Previn interview…if after reading these personal testimonies along with the Wikipedia summary of the case you’re still an unmitigated Dylan ally…if you haven’t at least concluded there’s a highly significant amount of ambiguity and uncertainty in this whole mishegoss, then I don’t know what to say to you. There’s probably nothing that can be said to you.

(3) Excerpt from Yale–New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic report (issued in 1993): “It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen. Further, we believe that Dylan’s statements on videotape and her statements to us during our evaluation do not refer to actual events that occurred to her on August 4th, 1992.

(4) “In developing our opinion we considered three hypotheses to explain Dylan’s statements. First, that Dylan’s statements were true and that Mr. Allen had sexually abused her; second, that Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family and who was responding to the stresses in the family; and third, that Dylan was coached or influenced by her mother, Ms. Farrow. While we can conclude that Dylan was not sexually abused, we can not be definite about whether the second formulation by itself or the third formulation by itself is true. We believe that it is more likely that a combination of these two formulations best explains Dylan’s allegations of sexual abuse.”

The great Diana Rigg has passed from cancer at age 82. She lived a radiantly full life and enjoyed a long, vibrant career (her first professional gig happened in 1957 at age 19, performing in the RADA production of Bertolt Brecht‘s The Caucasian Chalk Circle), and I felt a genuinely poignant pang when I learned of her death this morning.

I understand that I’m obliged to celebrate (a) her Emma Peel role in The Avengers, (b) her wife-of-James-Bond turn in In Her Majesty’s Secret Service (’69) and (c) her ongoing performance as Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. But for me Rigg’s sincere but sardonic performance as Barbara Drummond in Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Hospital (’71) was her absolute finest moment.

The fact that Rigg was a pack-a-day smoker for 53 years straight (1956 until 2009) probably had something to do with her passing, but then again that was her choice. Quality over quantity, she probably felt. How anyone could believe that inhaling foul cigarette smoke for decades on end constitutes quality is beyond me.