I’ve never seen lions at the beach before pic.twitter.com/zzf6RKgEZe

— Theo Shantonas (@TheoShantonas) September 8, 2020

AMPAS (i.e., The People’s Wokester Central Committee) has announced new representation and inclusion standards for all would-be seekers of a Best Picture Oscar starting in 2024. The standards were emailed to everyone earlier this afternoon.

AMPAS Quote: “For the 94th Oscars (2022) and 95th Oscars (2023), submitting a confidential Academy Inclusion Standards form will be required for Best Picture consideration, however meeting inclusion thresholds will not be required for eligibility in the Best Picture category until the 96th Oscars (2024).”

The more I think about these new standards and the various ways they can be met, the less oppressive they seem. But still…

Hypothetical 2024 situation: Imagine that it’s September 2022, and that Manchester By The Sea or Call Me By My Name, to name two examples of recent racist or exclusionary cinema, had never before been made. They are about to go into production sometime in late ’22 or early ’23, with Kenneth Lonergan and Luca Guadagnino directing respectively. After skimming the new standards, ask yourself how they would affect the making of Lonergan and Guadagnino’s films, given their producers’ hope to market themselves by becoming Best Picture contenders.

Reader request: Then is then and now is now, but someone should really count how many previous Best Picture winners (1929 to 2019) would be eligible with these new rules. Less than 10%? Roughly 20%?

AMPAS Verbatim: “For the 96th Oscars (2024), a film must meet TWO out of FOUR of the following standards to be deemed eligible:

STANDARD A: ON-SCREEN REPRESENTATION, THEMES AND NARRATIVES

To achieve Standard A, the film must meet ONE of the following criteria:

A1. Lead or significant supporting actors

At least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors is from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.

• Asian
• Hispanic/Latinx
• Black/African American
• Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native
• Middle Eastern/North African
• Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
• Other underrepresented race or ethnicity

A2. General ensemble cast

At least 30% of all actors in secondary and more minor roles are from at least two of the following underrepresented groups:

• Women
• Racial or ethnic group
• LGBTQ+
• People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing

Eight and a half years ago Variety‘s Jeff Sneider reported that DreamWorks and Working Title Films had agreed to pool forces on a remake of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rebecca (’40). The plan was for Nikolaj Arcel to direct and Eastern Promises scribe Steven Knight to write the script, but that fell by the wayside along with Universal’s participation.

The project eventually wound up at Netflix with Ben Wheatley directing and screenplay credit shared by Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse. Armie Hammer has the thankless task of playing the snooty, brusque-mannered, deeply bothered Maxim de Winter (i.e., beaten by Laurence Olivier before he says a line) and a blonde-haired Lily James is the unnamed protagonist (Joan Fontaine‘s role some 80 years ago).

The trailer makes it clear that the tale is set in late 30s, pre-war England. Even so it seems as if the patronizing old-school sexism and upper-class chauvinism that Fontaine‘s character was subjected to (and was so intimidated by) will be a tough sell in this day and age. “What woman would be able to relate to this?” I asked. “Maxim is a totally arrogant and insensitive chauvinist, and that 1940 world (Manderley, servants, George Sanders, Mrs. Danvers) is but a musty memory. Our world has no ties or connections to it, or none to speak of.

“All you could do to juice up the new version would be to strengthen ‘Danny’s’ lesbian attachment to the dead Rebecca.

“The important thing for everyone to remember is to never visualize Rebecca — no actress, no flashbacks, no dialogue. Keep her abstract and ethereal.”

The trailer indicates that Wheatley ignored this advice. The late Rebecca de Winter is visualized as some kind of wispy ghost in one brief shot, and as a swarm of ghost bees in two others.

Her forthcoming Marvel film aside, director Chloe Zhao has focused twice on poverty-level, hand-to-mouth protagonists who are stuck in a no-way-out situation.

The Rider (’17) was about Brady, a former rodeo star who’s been told he can’t ride any more due to having suffered traumatic brain damage. The poor guy has nowhere to go, and the film, primarily a mood-and-atmosphere piece, ends on a note of resignation. In Nomadland (Searchlight, 12.4), which is debuting this Friday at three festivals simultaneously, Frances McDormand‘s Fern is stuck in an itinerant, job-to-job lifestyle, driving from place to place, barely hanging on. Heavy load, hard row, no rest for the weary, handsomely shot, quietly moving.

A Nomadland teaser was released this morning. Seemingly aimed at blogaroos, tastemakers and critics, it says “this film is not about narrative propulsion…it’s basically another Rider… an award-season hothouse flower…naturalistic tone, realistic downish mood, the refuge of the road.”

I caught the Dune trailer last Friday. It played right before Tenet in that Flagstaff Harkens plex that I mentioned. My first reaction was that it was selling a more solemn and meditative experience than David Lynch’s 1984 version (or at least my 36-year-old memory of it), and that Greig Fraser‘s cinematography was ace-level. I’m not looking forward to it, but the trailer (which felt more like a teaser) left me with a feeling that it might not be too bad.

Trailer tomorrow. #DuneMovie pic.twitter.com/6xulWsrpUr

— DUNE (@dunemovie) September 8, 2020

According to the Daily Mail‘s Daniel Bates, Michael Cohen‘s “Disloyal” — a tell-all by President Trump‘s ex-personal lawyer, fixer and bagman — contains an allegation that Trump regarded his marriage to Melania as “just another deal.”

Cohen has reportedly written that Trump was never all that bothered about Melania’s reaction to his alleged cheating. “I can always get another wife,” Trump allegedly said. “That’s no problem for me. If she wants to go, so be it.”

It pains me to say this, but for a proven liar and sociopath these quotes sound curiously honest.

Of course his marriage to Melania is “just another deal” — that’s been obvious from the get-go. Has there ever been another couple in the public eye with less of a caring or even half-sincere emotional current between them? She’s in it for the money (shocking!), and Trump wanted a trophy wife for p.r. appearance purposes.

After yesterday’s rave reviews from the Venice Film Festival, Regina King‘s One Night in Miami (Amazon) is suddenly looking like an award-season contender.

My immediate thought after reading Owen Gleiberman and David Rooney‘s reactions and especially Clayton Davis’s Oscar-race assessment was “cool, so where’s the mouth-watering trailer?”

For whatever reason King and Team Amazon decided to release a 65-second clip instead, and one that’s not all that stirring.

60% of it sidesteps the basic thrust of the film (four famous African-American cultural figures — Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown — hash out the the state of American blackness) in favor of a familiar-sounding boast by Eli Goree‘s Clay, crooning about his boxing victory over Sonny Liston and preening in front of a mirror. The remaining 40% is about Kingsley Ben-Adir‘s Malcolm explaining in a low-key way that the evening’s agenda isn’t about partying but self-reflection. Fine, but we wanted a serving of what the film is altogether — visually, rhetorically, spiritually.

Compare this to a 2015 trailer [below] for a 2015 Denver Center for the Performing Arts production of Kemp Powers‘ stage play. More comprehensive, crackling energy. I’m sorry but Hollywood Elsewhere feels let down. Please assemble a tasty, crafty teaser, guys. And what about a release date?

L.A. friendo who’s seen it: “Very well written, good for what it is, and Leslie Odom, Jr.’s performance as Sam Cooke is the keeper. But Clayton Davis isn’t doing Regina King’s film any favors by over-hyping it. It’s not the Second Coming.”

Brave New Brainslam. Me Want Subtitles. What The Fuck? Submit Or Quit.

During a month-old chat between myself and Jordan Ruimy, it was mentioned that Regina King‘s One Night in Miami had just been added to the Venice Film Festival lineup.

Based on a play by Kemp Powers, pic tells a fictionalized account of an actual February 1964 meeting that happened in a Miami Beach hotel room between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke, as the group celebrates Clay’s surprise title win over Sonny Liston.

“That’s the only title that turns me on,” I remarked. “It’ll rise or fall depending on Eli Goree‘s performance as Clay and Kingsley Ben Adir‘s as Malcolm X. And on the writing, of course.”

Now, to go by early reviews, One Night in Miami is sounding like a serious award-season hottie. Variety‘s Clayton Davis is calling it “the first bonafide major contender for the 2021 Oscars season.

“Setting the stage for a very long, unpredictable season, King’s emotionally charged and vibrant helming of this stage play adaptation is wonderfully restrained,” Davis raves. “[She] never lets the story get away from her. Not stepping into the director’s chair as a gimmick, she pays meticulous attention to the four men’s stories and the world she builds for the viewer.”

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “The appeal of a movie like this one isn’t just that we’re seeing different fabled worldviews pinging off each other. It’s that the characters, loosened up by a few drinks and the pleasure of their camaraderie, reveal who they are — not just what they think and feel, but how they think and feel it — in a way that even a lot of good biopics never quite find the room for. I love Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, but in all three hours of it we don’t see much of the casual, sitting-around-and-shooting-the-breeze Malcolm. Even if you’re as monumental a man as he was, that’s still a lot of what life is.

“All four burrow their way into the psyche of these legends, into their manners and contradictions and vulnerabilities. Goree nails but shrewdly understates the music of Clay’s voice, the insistence that could rise to a lordly bellow, Hodge invests Brown with a seen-it-all wary force, and Leslie Odom Jr., from Hamilton, makes Cooke a supreme paradox: smooth as silk on the surface, roiling underneath. The men we see before us are suffused with their destinies and, at the same time, they’re funny, earthy, relatable people who wear their egos on their sleeves.

Most of the time I’m working hard at posting whatever seems right, and other times I’m floating around in various Paris memories. Sometimes it’s a struggle to focus on the here-and-now.

Tatiana, Gleb — rue Bretagne cafe, late May 2019.

For thousands of years expectant parents never knew their baby’s gender until the moment of birth. Ultra-sound scans changed all that, of course, but the news was shared discreetly with parents and close friends.

No longer. Nowadays aspirational vulgarians are making a huge deal out of gender-reveal parties. The same immoderate types who throw self-aggrandizing birthday parties for themselves invite pallies to outdoor events in which their child’s gender is proclaimed like the winner of a regional beauty pageant, with all kinds of pomp and braggadocio, smoke-generating devices and fireworks displays, etc. Blue smoke for a boy, pink for a girl, champagne all around.

Yesterday morning a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device that was used during an outdoor gender-reveal party in Yucaipa’s El Dorado Ranch Park ignited a major blaze, which is currently burning over 8,600 acres in San Bernardino County.

What kind of a drooling moron ignites any kind of incendiary device for any purpose during a massive heat wave while fires are burning throughout California? If I was the deciding judge I would throw the book at the couple who did this. I would insist that both be put on a daily work detail in which they’d have to smash rocks with sledge hammers.