Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

So Renee Zellweger has it all locked down, right? That’s what I’ve been telling myself for four months now, or since I saw Judy at the Telluride Film Festival.

And I’d certainly say so now. Simply put, none of her competitors has the same sense of accumulated heat and coagulation. And no one else has Zellweger’s award-season narrative, which boils down to (a) went away then returned with a seriously risky role (for if she didn’t bring Judy Garland back to life in all senses of that term all bets would be off), (b) still glowing at 50, and (c) cheers for an actress who hasn’t lost her mojo.

Seriously — tell me how she’s going to lose.

I knew in my bones that Zellweger had this after attending the Judy premiere at the Academy four months ago (9.19). Full house, unmistakable emotional reactions, cheers and applause. (And a great after-party.)

SPECIAL HE ADVERTORIAL:

I wrote the next day that for what it was worth “both the film and particularly Zellweger’s performance, all but locked for a Best Actress nomination, sank in a bit deeper. Not just the sadness and humor but the vigor of it. I was studying her more closely, enjoying the flicky facial tics and raised eyebrows and hair-trigger grins all the more. RZ slams a homer!”

There’s never been any question that Zellweger’s performance as the financially strained, worn-at-the-seams Judy Garland had that certain snap-crackle-awe. I felt that in Telluride, and especially the humorous spritzy side. We all know that performances of this type always end up nominated.

Judy is an adaptation of the Olivier- and Tony-nominated Broadway play End of the Rainbow, about Garland’s last few months during a run of sell-out concerts at London’s Talk of the Town.

I didn’t know or care much about personal problems, alcoholism and pharmaceutical abuse when I was a kid, but Judy Garland was the very first Hollywood star whom I associated with these issues. After seeing The Wizard of Oz at age seven or eight my mother (or was it my grandmother?) mentioned that Garland’s adult life was a mess. I never forgot that.

Garland had ten or twelve good years (mid ’30s to late ’40s) before the downswirl pattern kicked in. Stress, anxiety, pills, self-esteem issues. Garland was between 31 and 32 when she made George Cukor‘s A Star Is Born, supposedly playing a fresh-faced ingenue but occasionally looking like the battle-scarred showbiz veteran that she was. A barbituate overdose killed Garland at age 47, at which point she seemed 60 if a day.

When I spoke to Zellweger four months ago at the annual Telluride brunch, her appearance was anything but Garland-esque. She looked exactly (and very fetchingly) like a somewhat older but entirely vibrant and relaxed version of Dorothy Boyd, the lover and wife of Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. She looked like herself, I mean, and well-tended at that.

Zellweger was 26 or thereabouts when she costarred in that landmark Cameron Crowe film. 24 years have passed, and she still has some kind of serene, settled, casually glowing thing going on. If I didn’t know her and someone told me she was 42 or 43, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye.

Best Actress trophies from Golden Globes, Critics Choice, National Board of Review, etc. Not to mention the recently bequeathed Oscar and BAFTA nominations plus the forthcoming Riviera Award at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, etc. Timing, momentum, the curve of history…arrival.

Tail-end of Eric Kain‘s “People Are Upset Over Joker’s 11 Oscar Nominations — Here’s Why They’re Wrong,” posted yesterday (1.14) on Forbes:

“Sure, Joker isn’t a perfect film. But to say that it celebrates toxic masculinity is to misunderstand it not only completely, but willfully. And that’s not how it works, people. An honest critique assesses a film based on its merits, not on the biases you seek to fill in the blanks with.

“Oh, and if you doubt my bonafides on this, read my colleague Mark Hughes’s take from when this film first came out. Mark is about as liberal as they come, and he also insists that the movie is the furthest thing from ‘toxic’.

“I really do think it’s a shame that more women weren’t nominated this year and it’s honestly galling that Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to ever win an Academy Award for Best Director. That’s a big red flag, frankly, and I won’t argue with anyone who says the Oscars are a joke. Clearly there are some deep-seeded issues with the Academy Awards and some serious soul-searching needs to happen.

“That being said, this is also a reflection of the industry, which has been playing catch-up when it comes to female directors for some time now.

“But the controversy over Joker’s nominations is misguided and frankly distracts from bigger, more important issues. If you don’t like the movie, fine. That’s completely fine — we all have our own tastes. Just don’t make it something that it’s not.

“P.S. I wonder what these same folk would say about American Psycho or Taxi Driver, two films that are cut from the same cloth and quite powerful examinations of similar issues.”

Four days into the Santa Barbara Film Festival (1.15 to 1.25), which kicks off tomorrow night, SBIFF honcho Roger Durling will host a special 20th anniversary screening of David O. Russell‘s Three Kings. (It actually opened 20 years and three months ago, or on 10.1.99.)

The screening will happen on Saturday, 1.18 at 2pm at the historic Lobero theatre, and it’s 100% FREE to all film-loving human beings who may be in the Santa Barbara area. Russell will sit for a post-screening q & a.

Are Americans as hated now by people in the Middle East as we were back then? Hard to say, but the main characters in Russell’s film (played by George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube) aren’t average Americans. Well, they begin their journey as standard selfish fellows, but they grow out of that.

Note: Yes, I’m aware that “Anniversary” is misspelled in the SBIFF app art.

I could’ve posted the following yesterday: “In today’s Guardian (1.13) is a brilliant Jessa Crispin piece that said critics who think and write like Mark Harris have become so political-minded and have chugged so much virtue-signalling Kool-Aid that they’re not only opposed to telling the truth about films as a rule but are pretty much incapable of doing so.”

Journo pally #1: “The underlying wokester idea is basically ‘we are going to ferret out the monsters.’ It is Mark Harris’ job as high priest of Film Twitter to EXPOSE the evil that lurks beneath the Academy members. Expose their biases and old-fashioned views to shame them for their choices. Never coming into that conversation would ever be whether the performance or the film is good enough. We all just accept this reality because no one wants to be the next one to be called out, exiled, shamed.

“Ultimately the people who pay the price for this aren’t people like Mark Harris. He’ll be just fine. Eventually it will fall on the actors of color and women because sooner or later people are going to think “this has nothing to do with merit at all [for] there is something else at work, a kind of puritanical purge so that we can exist in a kind of utopian dream.” But that dream has been shattered by Trump. So what we’re doing is simply tinkering with a world that doesn’t really matter all that much anymore. Policing the Oscars? Really? It comes down to that.”

Journo pally #2: “Where the Oscar nominations revealed that white woke critics are living in a Twitter bubble, they reacted by burrowing deeper inside the bubble, doubling down on their ‘Joker is the Antichrist that must be stopped’ narrative. There’s no arguing with these people. They’ve become hectoring fanatics of art puritanism.”

CBS news report (slight rewritten): Senior White House officials tell CBS News they increasingly believe that at least four Republicans will vote to call witnesses. But what if Senate witnesses are approved and Republicans insist on calling Typewriter Joe to testify?

In addition to Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah and possibly Cory Gardner of Colorado, the White House also views Rand Paul of Kentucky as a ‘wild card’ and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee as an “institutionalist” who might vote to call witnesses, as one official put it.

The question of whether to call new witnesses in the trial would be decided by the full Senate after the trial gets underway. A simple majority of 51 votes will be needed to approve motions to call witnesses, meaning Democrats would need to convince four out of the 53 Republicans in the Senate to vote with them to compel testimony.

White House officials [have] reiterated the president’s intention to claim executive privilege if necessary to block John Bolton from testifying. Mr. Trump told Fox News last week that he would likely do so to “protect the office.” While Bolton could testify about some events that would fall outside the scope of executive privilege, the White House would fight to prevent Bolton from discussing direct conversations with the president.

We already knew that Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods was unlikely to premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival due to the (presumably) lingering Netflix prohibition. Now that Spike has been named as the honcho of the 2020 Cannes Film Festival jury, Da Five Bloods really isn’t screening there. It’ll almost certainly debut at the fall festivals (Venice, Telluride, Toronto, NYC).

Posted on 11.26.19: I’ve heard from a guy who attended a recent NYC-area screening of Lee’s film, which he says had a running time between 160 and 165 minutes and is pretty much completed with the credits in place.

Tipster: “It’s a slick, fast-paced, 165-minute emotional-flashback-to-Vietnam film. It’s a present-day thing about four aging veterans (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., Norm Lewis) returning to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to find the remains of the ‘fifth Blood’ (played in flashback by Chadwick Boseman) who was killed in action. They’re also looking to retrieve a pile of gold that they buried during their Vietnam service.

“And so they head off into the jungle and reconnect with one another in various ways. There’s a sort of Last Flag Flying sense of bonding between these men, all living different lives from when they knew each other, and all of them they sharing a similar sense of fear with age and time closing in, and all haunted by the wartime histories.

“Spike opens with a montage of the violence of the late 60s and early 70s, set to the music of Marvin Gaye — there’s a lot of Gaye in this, actually, and he uses it so well, all fitting in smoothly and providing momentum from the start.

“I saw Bloods with two other critics, and they both loved it. It will be a major success for both Spike and Netflix, and I could even see a directing and picture nomination depending on how they decide to release it.”

God, do I miss waiters with confident, take-it-or-leave-it airs! Hell, any sort of attitude, character, subtle swagger. Consider this paragraph from a N.Y. Times review of Carbone, a storied Italian eatery on Thompson Street in the West Village.

In today’s Guardian (1.13) is a brilliant Jessa Crispin piece that basically says that critics have become so political-minded and have chugged so much virtue-signalling Kool-Aid that they’re not only opposed to telling the truth about films as a rule but are pretty much incapable of doing so.

The piece is called “Is politics getting in the way of assessing which films are actually good?”

Excerpt #1: “This was…the year media outlets like the New York Times and Vanity Fair insisted Little Women was mandatory viewing to prove you’re not a misogynist. Even GQ ran a piece implying how important it was men ‘support women’ by watching this film about some white ladies having a hard time during the civil war.

“Men’s supposed lack of interest in Little Women became the dominant narrative of the movie, implying it reveals the (alleged) lack of interest men have, in the words of the New York Times, in ‘see[ing] women as human beings’.

“It couldn’t possibly be that Little Women is just a bad movie — although it is. Little Women is one of those books that has been over-adapted, with five previous film adaptations, plus a miniseries, plus a theatrical production, plus an anime version, and on and on.”

Excerpt #2: “But if you insist that a movie is important, you don’t really have to deal with whether or not it’s good. You can shame people into seeing it as a political statement, rather than as an entertainment or cultural selection.

“Same with the ‘dangerous’ or ‘disturbing’ moniker, which got used on everything from Joker to the latest Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was marked down for everything from not giving its female costar Margot Robbie enough lines to its gratuitous violence against a female would-be murderer to its filming of women’s feet (fetishes are now dangerous, I guess).

“If a critic doesn’t like a film, labeling it as dangerous — and implying you might get killed if you go see it — is an attempt to keep people away.”

Excerpt #3: “Part of this language is the result of our commenting culture choosing to see everything through a political lens. There must be a political reason for Tarantino giving so few lines to a female actor in his latest film, and that political reason must be he does not respect or have any interest in women. There must be a political reason this movie doesn’t have the correct number of roles given to actors of color, and that reason must be that the director is racist.

I know Joker is “divisive.” Then again it’s grossed $1.067 billion worldwide ($334 million domestic, $732.7 million overseas) so I guess it’s not that divisive, right? And it is the most zeitgeisty of all the Best Picture nominees. And now it has 11 Oscar nominations. So what makes it an unlikely Best Picture winner exactly? An Oscar prognosticator who just arrived here from Mars would probably conclude that Joker has the Best Picture Oscar in the bag. And yet everyone continues to say “oh, no, no…can’t win, too dark, too anti-social, too diseased,” etc.

via GIPHY

HE to Greta Gerwig: “I am again very, very sorry for sharing my ‘subdued’ reaction to Little Women. I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I guess you thought that when I said my reaction was ‘subdued’ I wasn’t being honest with you, but I was. I respected and got it as far as I was able, but I couldn’t do honest cartwheels.”

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

From Sasha Stone’s post-Oscar nom assessment (“The State of the Race: Oscar Nominations Drop at Last”):

“Best Picture and Best Director are still wide open.

“It should be noted that the stats champ right now is The Irishman. It’s the only one so far that has every requisite nomination we usually look for in a Best Picture winner:

“(1) It came out early (i.e., in late October)
(2) Globes nominations for Director, Picture, Screenplay.
(3) SAG ensemble nomination.
(4) DGA nom for Scorsese.
(5) Eddie nomination plus Oscar nomination for editing
(6) Oscar nominations for acting, directing, and writing.”

I’ve heard what people are saying about The Irishman. I’m not an idiot. I’m a semi-reasonable fellow as far as it goes, and I know that the odds don’t look good for a Best Picture win. I just have this one teeny-weeny little hangup, which is the dead cold fact that The Irishman is easily and obviously the finest film of the year — hands down, made by a master, clean and true, don’t even debate it. The Movie Godz know the truth of it, and many in the journalistic and filmmaking community do also.

I’m sorry but there’s this thing called “reality“, and every so often (not frequently but now and then) it can actually influence how people will vote.

Lone Scherfig‘s The Kindness of Strangers (Vertical, 2.14) was killed in Berlin last February, ending up with a 5% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Review excerpt #1: “I think they’ve probably hit bottom with this howler, a criss-crossing ensemble piece set in New York and featuring a rogues’ gallery of non-characters slowly learning to appreciate the transformative power of (sick bucket please) ‘forgiveness’ — Kevin Maher, London Times. Review excerpt #2: “Dear lord, I’ve been searching high and low for something nice to say about this mess, and I have come up nearly empty.” — Barry Hertz, Toronto Globe & Mail.

Scherfig’s An Education (’09) was perfect, in my humble view. One of the best John Schlesinger films ever made. Then came the so-so One Day (’11). Then she seemed to fall out of the groove — The Riot Club (’14), The Astronaut Wives Club (ABC TV, 2015), Their Finest (’16) and now The Kindness of Strangers. Mystifying.