Whatever the bottom-line human reality of Hunter Biden‘s psychology (which obviously has been off-center and unstable for some time), the tabloid-media image of Joe Biden‘s younger (and only surviving) son is that of the new Jordan Belfort — wealthy and connected with a seemingly wild nocturnal life, alcohol and crack cocaine issues, an affair with his late brother’s wife, sued for child support by a Washington, D.C.-based stripper, asking for a “brand-new dildo, fresh out of the package” at a strip club, an outrageous party animal.

Plus his well-compensated but resigned-from seat on the board of an energy company in Ukraine places him right in the center of the Ukraine scandal, at least as far as Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani‘s imaginings were concerned, and it’s entirely possible that Hunter will be asked by Congressional Republicans to testify sometime before the Senate’s final impeachment vote.

So Hunter’s saga has almost every Wolf of Wall Street element — unsavory affairs, drugs, booze, strippers, dildos, paternity suits, the appearance of 1% favoritism and at least the appearance of corruption, etc. And all of this is echoing back upon his father’s current campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Is the Hunter Biden mess being pushed along by Republican-friendly sources and journalists in order to make Typewriter Biden look bad through parental association? Of course, but at the same time it is the stuff of lurid, juicy, high-calorie scandal.

And I, for one, would like to see Oliver Stone make a movie about all this, in the same way he made a better-than-decent film out of George W. Bush‘s life and times. Which couldn’t come out until sometime in ’21, at the earliest. It would be good. We would all definitely pay to see it.

Hunter Biden has to sit down with a major media figure and admit to all his wild shenanigans, chapter and verse, and then throw himself upon the church steps and say, “I was a flawed man and yes, I did some things I shouldn’t have done, and I’m sorry…I’m now sober and going to AA meetings, and that’s where things are at now. If he does this, his accusers will have nowhere to go, and the stench of tawdry scandal will start to abate.

Around the 1:40 mark, Irishman dp Rodrigo Prieto explains how the attitude and character of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) is reflected in the film’s matter-of-fact shooting style. Quote: “Frank Sheeran approached his job [as a Philadelphia mob family assassin] is a very methodical way. He cases the place, he decides what he needs to do, and then he does a, b, c and d. So the camera behaves like that. The camera is not doing, you know, spectacular, mysterious moves — it’s kind of matter-of-fact. This is the building, this is where it is, here comes Frank Sheeran, the victim comes up…pup-pup.”

I don’t know how many tens of thousands are into occasionally aging their iPhone snaps and videos with vintage effects, but I got the bug earlier this year. There’s something delicious about making high-def 1080 video look like crappy video from the ’80s. Or, better yet, like speckly 8mm film from the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s. Not to mention the option of choosing varying aspect ratios, but at the same time keeping the high-quality sound.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Consider The Root‘s Michael Harriot properly bitchslapped and cut down to size in the wake of yesterday’s bizarre criticism of Pete Buttigieg. The Atlantic‘s John McWhorter has posted a response that’s half logical schooling and half WTF forehead-slapping.

I finally caught up with Jan Komasa‘s Corpus Christi four or five nights ago. I apologize for not mentioning it earlier because it’s a very fine, self-aware film with a poignant spiritual current.

It’s about a kind of spiritual impostor, a 20 year-old just released from a juvenile detention camp who pretends to be a priest when he arrives in a rural Polish village.

The irony is that this blue-eyed kid with a violent past (played by Bartosz Bielenia) gradually becomes the real thing — a comforting presence who stands up for decency, compassion and forgiveness, and whose influence seems to make a real difference to the local townspeople, especially in the matter of a recent DWI car accident that took the lives of several high-school-age youths.

Corpus Christi is basically saying that profound spiritual currents can manifest in almost anyone, and that some people have the God thing inside and some don’t. In this sense it’s a thoughtful discovery drama that stays with you.

Komasa’s film is the Polish entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. It premiered to positive reviews at the recent 2019 Venice Film Festival. It also played Toronto.

Corpus Christi reminds me of two English-language films with a vaguely similar stamp — Lawrence Kasdan‘s Mumford (99), about a popular small-town psychologist (Loren Dean) who’s gradually exposed as a fraud, and Bryan Forbes‘ Whistle Down The Wind (’61), about a young small-town girl (Hayley Mills) coming to believe that a bearded criminal hiding in her father’s barn (Alan Bates) is a reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

Corpus Christi is inspired by real events, but I don’t see how that matters one way or the other. It is what it is on its own terms.

Last weekend’s screening happened at San Vicente Bungalows. Producer Laura Bickford (Traffic, Che, Duplicity, Arbitrage) arranged it. I took the below photo during the after-party. (l. to r.) Cinematographer Piotr Sobocinski, Jr., director Jan Komasa, producer Aneta Hickinbotham.

Note: My “Komasa” spelling is correct.

Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite is his best film ever — no disputes. (Not even from this corner.) And it will almost certainly be Best Picture-nominated, partly because of the crafty, whipsmart direction but mainly because it addresses drastic income disparity, which is a major concern these days. A film that rides this horse makes the SJW crowd cream in their pants.

But when push comes to shove during Phase 2, Parasite won’t clear the final hurdle because of the five arguments I have with it, and which I posted on 10.14.19. [Posted after the jump.]

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Galloway is all cranked up about the Parasite possibility, but the odds of it winning the Best Picture Oscar…well, I’ve said it.

Best paragraph: “Voters must be convinced that a foreign-language film has a legitimate chance to win the Best Picture Oscar. Netflix may have shaken the walls with its Roma campaign, says one strategist. ‘It allowed people to consider this could be done‘ — that a foreign entry could become a key contender for best picture.’ Now Parasite must publicize its critical raves and audience exit scores to prove it’s no ordinary film.”

Here we go with another riff about Ana de Armas‘ Marta, the central character in Rian Johnson‘s Knives Out. No one needs to “address” the fact that she’s wearing the kind of pricey hipster pants (cuffs three or inches above the shoe line) that only upmarket, cutting-edge Millennial women and style-enslaved actresses wear. But it’s worth mentioning for good measure.

Given that Marta lives with her family in a smallish apartment, I think it’s fair to presume that she probably shops at Target or maybe Saks Fifth Off, and that even if she wanted to wear those pants they would be out of her budget range.

The bottom line, I’m presuming, is that de Armas wanted to look cool despite who Marta was and what her fashion tastes probably were and that Johnson, juggling 200 or 300 other things in his head as he prepared for principal photography…Johnson figured “sure, fine, why not?”

It’s not a crime that he approved these pants. Nobody in the world is complaining about them except me — I get that. Monica Castillo probably never even thought about them. But stuff like this sticks in my craw from time to time. It is what it is.

The Masterful Irishman is now HD streaming on Netflix. I’m sorry to acknowledge that the theatrical thing is more or less over, but happy to say I saw it three times in a first-rate theatre (Netflix screening room, the main Chinese, Westside Pavillion). Tens of millions who couldn’t drag their ass out to a theatre over the last three and a half weeks are finally having a looksee.

Critic Monica Castillo has penned a N.Y. Times opinion piece about how Knives Out, which everyone regards as a diverting whodunit in an Agatha Christie vein, made her feel rattled and vaguely threatened.

This is because Castillo felt a tribal kinship with Ana de Armas‘ Marta character, a South American immigrant who had worked as an assistant and care-giver for Christopher Plummer‘s rich paterfamilias (i.e., author Harlan Thrombey) before his apparent murder. Over the course of the investigation into his death, Marta has to fend off various needles and provocations that Castillo found upsetting.

The piece complains that Johnson was insensitive for subjecting Marta to certain snooty, aloof attitudes from various members of the wealthy Thrombey family. Castillo describes them as “the micro-aggressions [that] working-class immigrants face daily.” Which is a way of saying that Knives Out isn’t (ahem) woke enough.

Castillo blames Johnson, the “white and American-born” director-writer, for presenting Marta as an outsider standing on cultural eggshells, and suggests that if he were a nicer, gentler fellow he would have tried to infuse Knives Out with the woke-ier mindset of Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s Take Out and Jim McKay’s En el Séptimo Día, a pair of films that take a fuller measure of their immigrant characters.

Is Castillo saying that Johnson is using the Thrombey family members as spokespersons for his own belittling and/or dismissive attitudes about Latino immigrants? No, not exactly, but she seems to vaguely hint at this. Either way Johnson created the Thrombeys and their attitudes, she’s more or less saying, and must deal with the blowback.

How exactly has Johnson sinned?

He fails to specify Marta’s ethnic identity, for one. Because the Thrombeys are uncertain which South American country Marta is from, Johnson is passing along Anglo attitudes that “deny Marta a part of her cultural identity,” Castillo says, and in so doing “perpetuate the myth of Latino homogeneity, that our countries and customs are interchangeable, mashed together to fit neatly into a census box.”

The film also “takes pains to cast Marta as an outsider in other discomforting ways,” Castillo notes. “During a family argument, the youngest in the family, an alt-right troll, calls Marta an ethnic slur. In another scene, she’s called upon to clarify whether her family came to the United States legally, or ‘the right way,’ as one of the Thrombeys puts it. Another member of the family hints that he could have her mother deported because she’s undocumented. Several family members assert, patronizingly, to Marta that they have ‘always taken care of’ her.”

Hollywood Elsewhere proposes that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences give Netflix a special Attaboy Oscar for re-opening the Paris theatre and pledging to keep the lights burning. Take 90 seconds during the 2.9.20 Oscar telecast and give Netflix a big old bear hug for this.

A beloved midtown Manhattan movie theatre is no longer dark! This might be the happiest film industry event of 2019.

Great lead paragraph by N.Y. Times‘ Nancy Coleman, posted on 11.25: “When the Paris Theater, New York City’s last surviving single-screen movie house, shut its doors in August, it wasn’t just a heart-wrenching loss for film lovers: It was a physical symbol of the ways streaming services are fundamentally changing the film industry.

“Now, a streaming platform is coming to its rescue.”

When the death of the Paris was announced in mid June, an HE commenter suggested that Netflix could step in and turn the Paris into a prime exhibition opportunity for original Netflix features. Lo and behold!

Netflix announced its agreement to lease the space yesterday (11.25).

All of these arrived today. The one I’d most like to watch right now? As in “immediately stop what I’m doing and pop it in tout suite”? The Boxy Lighthouse.

POC wokesters are snarling at Pete Buttigieg for having said the following eight years ago, during his first mayoral campaign: “Kids need to see evidence that education is going to work for them. You’re motivated because you believe that at the end of your education, there is a reward, there’s a stable life, there’s a job. And there are a lot of kids — especially [in] the lower-income, minority neighborhoods — who literally just haven’t seen it work. There isn’t someone they know personally who testifies to the value of education.”

HE comment: Buttigieg was completely correct when he said that kids need to absorb positive cultural and community values regarding the benefits of higher education. Kids need to see and consider these benefits for themselves, repeatedly, to become believers.

I speak from personal experience because I wasn’t positively imprinted about college, mainly because of the example of my own father.

“Kids” from “lower income, minority neighborhoods” don’t have “someone they know personally who testifies to the value of education.” — Pete Buttigieg, 2011 South Bend Mayoral Candidate #MayorPete #PeteForAmerica #Pete2020 #Buttigieg2020 #Buttigieg pic.twitter.com/sd1bZDLoG8

— Resist Programming 🛰 (@RzstProgramming) November 24, 2019

Going by my dad’s behavior, I had two distinct impressions. One was that higher education resulted in a better job and the ability to earn more money so you could afford to live in a nice home and own a nice TV and go on summer vacations. All of which I took for granted. The other impression was that living this kind of life, “pleasant” and settled as it was, would probably be accompanied by emotionally brusque behavior, acting like a grump half the time, having a stiff drink when you come home on the commuter train, and basically living a glum, sour-faced life.

I consequently felt, by the time I was in my early to mid teens, that living a semi-flush, middle-class, college-educated life wasn’t necessarily a happy, desirable thing.

I would imagine that all kinds of negative, less-than-encouraging messages and indications are fed into the heads of lower-income kids. Some may emerge from a difficult economic family situation with the idea that getting a higher education is a very good thing. Some may also emerge from a difficult upbringing with an idea that there’s probably no way out and that the best you can hope for is occasional relief by way of good music, good laughter, family support and a fun social life.

Guys like Michael Harriot can throw 2019 woke values at something someone said ten or twenty years ago, and call them racist or patronizing. It’s very easy to do this. This kind of sneering SJW condemnation is par for the course in the twitterverse. This is exactly the kind of thing that President Obama lamented a couple of weeks ago.