Thanks all the same but that’s still a hard “ixnay.”

After much thought and consternation I’ve decided that grief recovery dramas are a bad thing to wade into, and that they’re actually a sub-genre of sorts…a shamelessly whorish one.

And that’s not a putdown of Manchester From The Sea because Casey Affleck doesn’t recover from grief at the end — he’s stuck in the swamp and will never climb out.

The only grief recovery drama I’ve truly admired is Robert Redford‘s Ordinary People (’80) — the sadness in that film gets me each and every time.

Otherwise I’ve had it with this genre. HE to grieving characters: I’m not saying “snap out of it!” like Cher in Moonstruck, but I am saying i’ve no interest in holding your clammy hand as you moan and writhe and quake with sorrow.

Note: I’m not referring to real life and actual grief, of course, but to the exploitation of same by the wrong people.

In the wake of Bo Goldman‘s passing I’m fully aware of what I’m supposed to say, which is that his screenplays were wonderful.

Well, I’m sorry but over the decades I never regarded Goldman as much more than a good, respected, dependable craftsman.

That’s not a putdown as very few screenwriters have made their way into that kind of pantheon, but I never thought of Goldman as one of the pip-pip-pips. I’ve understood for decades that everyone thought he was great, and I never offered an argument.

I’ve never mentioned that 34 or 35 years ago I was assigned to write coverage of Goldman’s screen adaptation of Susan Minot‘s “Monkeys“, and I honestly didn’t think it was all that rich or profound or even, to be perfectly frank, good.

Tonally Goldman’s Monkeys reminded me of the fractured and despairing family weltschmerz that Goldman’s Shoot The Moon was consumed by.

The best line in that 1982 Alan Parker film, which I never liked all that much, was when Albert Finney said that “San Francisco could die of quaint.” I also got a huge kick out of Finney destroying Peter Weller‘s backyard landscaping with his station wagon…crazy nuts.

But I loved Goldman’s script of Melvin and Howard, for the most part. And I admire his screenplays for Scent of a Woman and The Flamingo Kid (uncredited).

I never loved anything about Milos Forman‘s One Flew over The Cuckoo’s Nest (’75), Goldman’s adapted screenplay included, and I’m saying this as a guy who once played Dr. Spivey in a Stamford, Connecticut stage production of the 1962 play, written by Dale Wasserman and based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel.

Not coming to a theatre near you. Not even playing at a North American film festival (including Telluride!). Because the monsters are calling the shots on Maple Street, and that means Polanski’s The Palace has also been kibboshed.

You can immediately feel confidence and stylistic swagger in this scene from Roman Polanski‘s The Palace. The lighting and staging and whipsmart dialogue and generally disciplined atmosphere are aces…anything but rote. It’s obvious that a major-league director shot and blocked this scene out to the last precise detail.

If it wasn’t Polanski at the helm of this dark period comedy (shot in Gstaad), it could be early ’70s Bernardo Bertolucci or Luchino Visconti.

The cinematographer is Pawel Edelman (The Pianist, An Officer and a Spy, The Ghost Writer).

So that’s not Mads Mikkelsen as the top hotel guy? MM isn’t listed in the IMDB or Wikipedia credits, but it sure looks like him (or his twin brother).

I would much rather see The Palace than sit through Kate Winslet‘s Lee, which will debut in Toronto. Winslet trashed Polanski and Woody Allen three years ago, and I’m not about to forgive her any time soon.

With due respect and fond affection, I don’t find the prospect of watching The Great Escaper enticing.

Hanging with the seriously withered Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson, I mean. For reasons that need no explanation or elaboration. Very sorry. Give me Get Carter and Sunday Bloody Sunday, thanks.

From a recent Standard piece by Elizabeth Gregory:

“There was never any question that 89-year-old Bernard Jordan would take part in the 70th anniversary D-Day commemorations in June 2014. The British veteran, who had been a navy officer during the Second World War, had lost many of his friends in its bloody battles, and he planned to pay his respects.

“What was more unexpected, was that Jordan decided to attend the D-Day celebrations in France. And given that he lived in a nursing home in England, which he had to cunningly break out of to make the trip, it made his ambitions all the more surprising. But of course the ex-Mayor and town councillor succeeded, popping up in Normandy a couple of days after disappearing from his Hove care home.

“The film runs along two timelines. In the present day, octogenarians Bernard and Rene Jordan live together in a home and sometimes find themselves feeling disjointed from modern society. And the film flashes back to when they were young: it depicts their love story, as well as Jordan’s memories — or perhaps imagined memories — of his friends in peril on the beaches during the Normandy landings.”

This is only a working theory or, if you will, an undeveloped premise, but the theory is that Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie and Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles drink from the same well water. Simmering frustration and anger at men, resulting in a sense of feeling trapped or stuck and needing to redefine or break through.

I won’t be burrowing into this idea any further (or at least not today), but the analogy hit me early this morning and I’m convinced that despite Barbie and Jeanne Dielman being hugely dissimilar in many ways, there’s a certain validity to saying “they aren’t that far apart.”

Posted on 12.2.22: In the wake of Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (’75) topping the BFI Sight & Sound poll, I had to give it another shot. So I watched it on the Criterion Channel, on my Macbook Air. Most of it, I should say. I made it through the first 90 minutes the hard way (i.e., without cheating), but then something inside me began to wither and crumple, and I began to watch ten-minute portions. But I missed nothing.

Jeannie Diulman is a statement, all right. Three hours and 21 minutes of torpor, tedium and depression. Such a sad, suffocating and listless film. (Yes, that’s the point but c’mon.) It’s about a life of a prim and proper sex worker (Day of the Jackal’s Delphine Seyrig) that’s mainly about servitude and the renunciation of joy and the suppression of the spirit. A film about regimented motherhood and the raising of a dull, homely, tragically obedient son whose life is doomed to the same kind of repetition, the same dutiful stiflings and silences and submissions.

Seyrig is Spartacus in the kitchen — a sex-hating sex gladiator without a sword. A slave who endlessly prepares meals and adheres to regularity, regularity and more regularity. She never breaks out of Capua, so to speak, and we never see her having sex except at the very end, and in an odd, ugly and curious way at that. But we do see her prepare many dinners.

“The WGA and SAG/AFTRA strike is about more than the particulars of how the so-called creative class gets paid. It’s really about whether or not there can be a creative class at all.

“My working assumption is that within 20 years, if not much sooner, A.I. will be able to write, direct and act (via computer-generated images that are indistinguishable from real people) movies and TV shows. It will write credible novels and news stories and opinion columns and compose film scores and pop music. It will mean a growing number of creative endeavors will no longer easily find meaningful vocational outlets. It will amount to a kind of material degradation of human civilization that may prove irreversible.” — N.Y. Times columnist Bret Stephens, posted on 7.24.23.