On 2.4.20 Kino Lorber will issue a 4K restoration Bluray of Russell Rouse‘s The Oscar (’66). I tried watching it once, but A couldn’t get past the first hour. It’s basically a Joseph E. Levine horror flick about a ruthless actor (Stephen Boyd‘s Frankie Fane) who claws his way to the top, etc. The dialogue and especially the performances are drop-dead awful. Some enjoy watching bottom-of-the-barrel films, but not me. A director friend says the commentary track by Josh Olson and Patton Oswalt “promises to be one for the ages.” Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson provide another commentary track.
Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables (Amazon, 1.10.20) is the official French nominee for the 2020 Best International Feature Oscar, having nudged aside Celine Sciamma‘s much-admired Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It was my favorite film at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, and the film I’d most like to see win the foreign Oscar on 2.9.20.
I know Parasite has it in the bag but Ladj Ly‘s film is just as socially incisive as Bong Joon-ho‘s, and it has no insane story-logic issues. And a much better ending. It would be a major miscarriage of artistic justice if Les Miserables doesn’t at least emerge as one of the Best International Feature Oscar nominees.
Ladj struck me as a sea of calm. Settled, unhurried, matter of fact, good eye contact. Reluctant to smile too quickly or easily, but when he smiles it counts. His English sucks as badly as my French, which naturally put me at ease.
So we had a nice, easygoing chat but I never got a quote as good as the one Ladj gave the N.Y. Times the other day, so here it is: “I was inspired by my own history. Everything in the film comes from my life, from beginning to end. It’s a sort of autobiography, and a witnessing. I tried to make a film that resembles [the community that I live in]. To live in these towers — it’s violent, it’s degrading.”
Set in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, a poor but tightly-knit African Muslim community (where Ladj grew up and still lives), it offers a jolting contemporary echo of the cruelty, harassment and oppression that ignited Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel, this time rooted in police brutality and racial animus.
Written by Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and brilliantly shot by Julien Poupard, LesMiserables feels like a rough-and-tumble Antoine Fuqua film, using the basic dynamic of Training Day (but with three cops instead of two) plus a Little Do The Right Thing plus a constant stream of anxious urban energy. And with an open-ended existential ending that resembles the finale of Danis Tanovic‘s No Man’s Land. Or, if you will, the last two or three minutes of Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation.
4K, 60 frames per second…watch this full screen or better yet mirrored on your 4K big-screen. I’ve been to this region of Switzerland twice and have driven this exact same road (Grundelwald to Lauterbrunnen and beyond) and have gotten misty-eyed both times. If you’re at all receptive to God’s architecture this video will put you into state of a meditative awe. I love that no one has narrated with the usual rambling blah-blah.
Would it have killed Sal, the pizzeria owner in Do The Right Thing, to mount a few photos of African-American cultural heroes (Muhammud Ali, Malcolm X, etc.) alongside the usual portraits of Frank Sinatra, Enrico Caruso, Fiorello LaGuardia and Vito Corleone? It was Sal’s restaurant, sure, but his customers were mostly African-American and Fort Greene, at the time, was a mostly African-American neighborhood. Almost anyone would have realized that sharing the wall was a smart move.
But not Sal. Because he was a proud, mouthy, pugnacious, under-educated cannoli prole who tended to argue first and think about it later.
Which is why Spike Lee hired the late Danny Aiello to play him. Because Aiello exuded white, working-class Italian-American culture without saying a word. No matter who he played, Aiello always seemed earthy, a bit anxious, wary, unsettled and on the bulky side. His characters always had something to prove. He could have never played an effete university professor or a wealthy architect. Well, perhaps he could have but he never did.
The 86-year-old Aiello died today (or last night) at a hospital in northern New Jersey. He had a home in pricey Saddle River, but he came from a New York City background that was all pizza and meatballs and subway rides and snowcones. Born in Manhattan to a large family, raised in the Bronx…a New Yorker and a New Jerseyan through and through.
My favorite Aiello performance? One of the especially fucked-up guys in a 1984 (or ’85) N.Y. Broadway production of David Rabe‘s Hurlyburly.
HE’s favorite Aiello screen perfs: Moonstruck, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Ruby, Harlem Nights, Léon: The Professional, 2 Days in the Valley. I never ever saw his performance as Don Domenico Clericuzio in the miniseries The Last Don (’97).
I never understood why Aiello’s assassin said “Michael Corleone says hello!” just before he attempted to strangle Michael Gazzo‘s Frankie Pantangeli in The Godfather, Part II. The hit was ordered by the Rosato brothers, of course. Aiello’s assassin had every expectation that Pantangeli wouldn’t survive so what difference does it make if he believes during his final seconds of life that Corleone was behind it or not?
The merde hit the fan three days ago when the Golden Globe award nominations were announced minus any prominent women (Little Women‘s Greta Gerwig, The Farewell‘s Lulu Wang, Queen & Slim‘s Melina Matsoukas) nominated for Best Director, or their films nominated for the Best Motion Picture prizes.
The same “holy moley” reaction happened on Tuesday when the SAG noms failed to include Little Women, etc.
Many angry reactions have been heard (including a claim by Matsoukas that a majority of the Golden Globe nominating committee blew off screenings of her film), but today the N.Y. Timesweighed in with another complaint piece, passing along the same stuff that others have been tweeting since Monday.
Reported by Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes, the article embraces the progressive party line — i.e., lamenting an apparent “man tsunami” and asking “where are the women?”
Little Women producer Amy Pascal and producer Elizabeth Cantillon are heard from, as is USC gender bias authority Dr. Stacy L. Smith. An excerpt from an 11.23 Peter Bart Deadline riff discussing “male panic” and “the need to protect one’s turf” is included.
The Times article has only one dissenting quote, taken from a great, independent minded piece about this topic on 12.10 by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone; “‘Pick a woman, any woman’ seems to be the message,” Stone is quoted as saying. “Many prominent voices refuse to accept the possibility that the five best movies of the year might be directed by men.”
Excerpt: “Women have come a long way in Hollywood since 2017, when the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements swept the culture — maybe so far that the film establishment, still overwhelmingly male, is reflexively trying to throw on the brakes, said Cantillon, who has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 2017. ‘I think there was all this support for the resistance,’ she said, ‘and then they were like ‘Whoa, not so fast.’”
It’s time to rectify the 1959 Oscars once and for all. Posthumously, of course, but better late than never. The winners of record will still retain their places in history, of course, but 60 years have passed and new perspectives have emerged, and it’s time to ratify this.
Charlton Heston gave a first-rate performance in Ben-Hur, and rode that film’s political coattails to win a Best Actor Oscar. But who watches that 1959 Biblical epic today to savor Heston’s emoting? The film is admired, justly, for the sea battle and chariot race sequences, for Robert Surtees‘ cinematography, and for the huge expensive sets. But HE has another Best Actor winner in mind.
This morning I re-read an HE review of Joel Edgerton‘s The Gift, which was initially posted on 8.9.15. It has some pretty good stuff in it, particularly about the psychology of Edgerton’s “Gordo the weirdo,” a creep who wants revenge because he endured a traumatic high-school episode that he never recovered from and which caused his life, he feels, to go downhill.
My basic reaction that was that anyone who believes that having a difficult time in high school will doom you to an unhappy, off-center life…well, that person is in love with losing to begin with. High school can be horrible, of course, but it’s just something to get through and escape from. It defines nothing.
Excerpt: The Gift is basically about a wounded psycho-loser (“Gordo the weirdo”) who skillfully insinuates himself into the life of Jason Bateman‘s Simon, a former high-school classmate who’s now a married, well-to-do security company executive, and who’s just moved to Los Angeles with his ultra-delicate dodo-bird wife (Rebecca Hall). And then, bit by bit, Gordo causes increasing paranoia and chaos.
“Simon, it turns out, is a manipulative amoral shitheel who ruined Gordo’s life in high school (or so Gordo believes) with a heartless gay-smear gossip campaign. We’re further informed that Simon is still fucking people over with loose gossip at work so it’s time for the chickens to come home to roost…right?
The basic idea is that if you did something cruel in high school you have to pay for this as an adult by being completely destroyed. ‘You might be done with the past,’ Gordo tells Simon, ‘but the past isn’t done with you.’ I’m sorry but that’s almost 100% bullshit.
“The dawn of every new day tells us to shed our old skins and fears and start anew. Many of us do that. Remnants of past errors or traumas may linger in this or that way (guilt, nightmares, self-destructive habits) but unless you’re a former murderer or child-molester healthy people move on. Sometimes they transcend.
“We’ve all done things we’re sorry for. I’ll never forgive myself for repeatedly whacking a turtle’s shell with a board when I was six or seven and causing the poor thing to bleed. (I thought it was a snapping turtle.) But you have to try to forgive yourself and try and grow into a better person. Unless…you know, you’re Josef Mengele and the only option is a black capsule.
Richard Jewell costar Olivia Wilde hasn’t exactly thrown director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray under the bus for having controversially suggested that Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs exchanged sex for information from an FBI agent. But in a series of tweets she has certainly distanced herself from Eastwood and Ray, basically saying “hey, don’t look at me…I’m just an actor who’s paid to perform lines.”
Wilde tweet: “I cannot speak for the creative decisions made by the filmmakers, as I did not have a say in how the film was ultimately crafted, but it’s important to me that I share my personal take on the matter.”
Variety‘s Pat Saperstein has written that in Richard Jewell, Wilde/Scruggs “is shown sleeping with an FBI agent [played by Jon Hamm], who later gives her information that security guard Richard Jewell a suspect in the bombing at the Summer Olympics.” My recollection is that sex between Wilde/Scruggs and Hamm’s FBI agent is implied but not shown. Wilde says to Hamm “wanna get a room or do you want to go to my car?” or words to that effect.
The N.Y. Times and Twitter are saying that exit polls indicate that Boris Johnson‘s conservatives are headed for a majority. The win will “cement Mr. Johnson’s claim to 10 Downing Street, paving the way for Britain’s exit from the European Union in less than two months.” — N.Y. Times.
British urbans and outlying bumblefucks voted in pubs, churches, schools and other polling stations for their next government in this, the third general election since 2015.
“[The late] Agnes Varda used to say, ‘I’m not a female director. I am a woman, and I’m a director. Please, never pick up a film because it’s directed by a woman. Pick up a film because it’s a good film.” — Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Fremaux to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn in 4.20.19 interview.
Eliza Hittman‘s Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, a teenage abortion drama, will debut at next month’s Sundance Film Festival. Focus Features will open the British-American co-production on 3.13.20. Hittman’s film shouldn’t be confused, however, with Carl Hunter and Frank Cottrell Boyce‘s Sometimes Always Never, a British-produced comedy-drama that opened a year ago. I’m not sure what Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always alludes to exactly, but Sometimes Always Never, which is about a London tailor, refers to three-button suits.
