Jeff Wells

Giamatti Over Cooper

by

The strongest Best Actor narrative belongs to The Holdovers‘ Paul Giamatti — bringer of a beloved centerpiece performance (Joe and Jane Popcorn have been over the moon for Alexander Payne’s ascerbic holiday film from the get-go) plus Paul’s legendary Sideways performance wasn’t even nominated 19 years ago.

Bradley Cooper’s devotional, emotionally emphatic, technically dazzling performance as Maestro’s Leonard Bernstein is obviously a formidable challenger, but Cooper’s narrative (i.e., he really researched and worked it) doesn’t quite measure up to Giamatti’s.

And forget Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy at this stage — the HE narrative (in terms of recognizable human behavior Murphy’s genius physicist is quirky to the point of being inhuman — he’s playing an alien from the planet Tralfamadore) has settled into the groundwater.

Plus Oppie was a flakey wimp (building an A-bomb to kill tens of thousands of Nazis is okay but not so much a hydrogen bomb, which shouldn’t be built because it’s too big). HE sides with Harry S. Truman (“Don’t let that crybaby back in here”).

Plus no admirer of Oppenheimer believes that Murphy’s Oppie was capable of sexual arousal as aliens don’t enjoy coitus…be honest. There was no believing for a second that Murphy and Florence Pugh actually did the deed.

If “Air” Had Been Released A Few Weeks Ago

by

We all understand how the Oscar game works. If you want your indisputably excellent film to be regarded as a Best Picture contender, you have to release it during award season (late October to Christmas).

Yes, there have been exceptions. Everything Everywhere All At Once was released on 3.25.22, and it wound up winning the Best Picture Oscar on 3.12.23 — nearly a full year later. The Silence of the Lambs opened on 2.14.91, and collected five major category Oscars 13 and 1/2 months later, including Best Picture.

Timing is nonetheless a huge factor (at least in most people’s minds), and so let’s play a game, shall we? Let’s pretend that Ben Affleck and Alex Convery‘s Air, by any yardstick an excellent character-driven sports film with at least two Oscar-calibre performaces (Matt Damon‘s Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis‘s Deloris Jordan) and a terrific finale that really sinks in…let’s pretend that Amazon didn’t release it on 4.5.23 but during award-season prime time.

You know it would be sitting on the Gold Derby best-of-the-year rosters and possibly might have prevailed among one or more the critics groups. You know it would have. So let’s cut Air a break and pretend it was released six or seven weeks ago. We’d be looking at a whole different ballgame.

Wiki: “Air was originally slated for a streaming-only release on Amazon Prime Video, but Amazon Studios eventually decided to release it theatrically following strong results from test screenings. It was the first Amazon title since Late Night to be given an exclusive theatrical release, and $40 to $50 million went into promoting the theatrical. It began streaming on Amazon Prime Video on 5.12.23.”

And here we are in late December 2023, and the world has obviously changed since last spring, but Air is still a first-rate, dialogue-driven sports film. As well as being an excellent “dad” film. (No shame in that!) It’s a very human, inside-baseball sports drama that feels honest and relatable every step on the way. Cut from the Moneyball cloth.

Read more

“Ferrari” Reactions Are Largely About Expectations

by

For nearly a quarter-century Michael Mann made a series of intensely male-ish, high-stakes grand-slammers — hardcore films about headstrong fellows forging their own paths, sometimes outside the bonds of legality but always single-mindedly. And man, did they hit the spot!

The hot streak began with 1981’s Thief and ended with 2006’s Collateral, and also included Manhunter (’86), The Last of the Monicans (’92), Heat (’95), The Insider (’99) and Ali (’01) — seven films in all.

Then came the “excellent work but not quite a bell-ringer” period…Miami Vice (’06), Public Enemies (’09) and Blackhat (’15)…movies that registered as ground-rule doubles or triples. Which felt disorienting to Mann-heads given his 23-year home run history.

Now comes Ferrari (Neon, 12.25), which is made of authentic, bruising, searing stuff. In my eyes it’s another grand-slammer but what do I know? Obviously the reaction so far has been mixed-positive — many admirers but also a modest-sized crowd of dissenters.

Read more

Warmest HE Remembrance

by

Posted 13 years ago: There are the rote facts of life, the plain material truth of things, and then there are the currents within. The singing angels, the demons, the fireflies, the banshees, the echoes, the dreams…the vague sense of a continuing infinite scheme and how we fit into that. Every last one of us can define our lives as a constant mixing of these two aspects, but the charm and final value of a person, for me, is about how much he/she seems to be cognizant of and dealing with the interior world, and how much he/she comments and refers to those currents and laughs about them, and basically lives on the flow of that realm.

Some go there more frequently or deeply than others, and some are just matter-of-fact types who let their spiritual side leak out in small little droplets from time to time, but Sterling Hayden, by my sights, was almost entirely about those currents.

He never just said, “I’d like a little sugar in my coffee” and let it go at that. Well, he would…but if you asked him to expand upon that notion he would just take off and you’d just sit back and marvel. Hayden knew various coffees and coffee growers and had walked through coffee plantations in the Caribbean at dawn and he knew all about how sugar was refined and would speak metaphorically about the sweetness of sugar being the enticement but coffee being the reality of it all, the bean from the earth, the bean that needed to turn brown and then be ground down and prepared just so, and then he’d be off on some tangent that took the coffee-vs.-sugar metaphor and ran with it, or took it and jumped off a cliff as it were.

Hayden was a fascinating, hungry and obviously vulnerable man, insecure and ridden with guilt about naming names in the ’50s, jolly or surly depending on the time of day, very singular, a great contentious bear of a man, unsettled, always the thinker, certainly a poet or a man trying all the time to be one, a man of the sea and a boy in some ways. He and Patti Smith would have gotten along famously. He loved pot. And he loved his Johnnie Walker Red.

“We were once speaking about his role as the farmer in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 and he started to talk about his final line in the film, which he wrote, and I said it before he did — ‘I’ve always loved the wind’ — and he loved that. He chuckled and patted my knee and said ‘God love ya.'”

Comparing ’23 to ’73

by

I’ve posted a roster of the 35 best films of 1973 twice before — this is the third time. Here’s my rundown of the best of ’23 and it only comes to 24 films. A lot of them are excellent or highly commendable, but overall they simply can’t compare to Team ’73…different culture, different atmosphere. blessed by the gods.

1973 stone-cold classics (10):

1. Badlands (d: Terrence Malick)
2. The Long Goodbye (d: Robert Altman)
3. The Exorcist (d: William Friedkin)
4. The Outfit (d: John Flynn)
5. Mean Streets (d: Martin Scorsese)
6. The Last Detail (d: Hal Ashby)
7. The Sting (d: George Roy Hill)
8. Last Tango in Paris (d: Bernardo Bertolucci)
9. American Graffiti (d: George Lucas)
10. The Last American Hero (d: Lamont Johnson)

1973 creme de la creme (12):

11. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (d: Peter Yates)
12. Blume in Love (d: Paul Mazursky)
13. O Lucky Man! (d: Lindsay Anderson)
14. Charley Varrick (d: Don Siegel)
15. Serpico (d: Sidney Lumet)
16. The Way We Were (d: Sydney Pollack)
17. Papillon (d: Franklin J. Schaffner)
18. Paper Moon (d: Peter Bogdanovich)
19. The Laughing Policeman (d: Stuart Rosenberg)
20. The Three Musketeers (d: Richard Lester)
21. Don’t Look Now (d: Nicolas Roeg)
22. Westworld (d: Michael Crichton)

1973 very good, highly respectable or at least enjoyable (13):

23. Amarcord (d: Federico Fellini)
24. The Last of Sheila (d: Herbert Ross)
25. The Paper Chase (d: James Bridges)
26. Save the Tiger (d: John G. Avildsen)
27. Scarecrow (d: Jerry Schatzberg
28. Sleeper (d: Woody Allen)
29. Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid (d: Sam Peckinpah)
30. Day For Night (d: Francois Truffaut)
31. La Grande Bouffe (d: Marco Ferreri)
32. The Holy Mountain (d: Alejandro Jodorowsky)
33. Emperor of the North Pole (d: Robert Aldrich)
34. Live and Let Die (d: Guy Hamilton)
35. Extreme Close-up (d: Jeannot Szwarc)

Read more

Good Heavens

by

My first thought as I watched the trailer for Rose Glass‘s Love Lies Bleeding (A24, 3.8), a blue-collar lesbian melodrama, was “nope, not for me.”

The second thought was “they’re taunting me…they want me to mansplain how the two leads are too butchy and therefore unappealing to Joe and Jane Popcorn.” Which they are.

Plus the fact that Kristen Stewart has clearly tried to butch herself down — not a hint of makeup, shaggy mullet — and Katy O’Brian is too stocky and buffed up, and frankly not all that classically fetching. I’m sorry but we can’t all be beautiful or button-cute.

A queer cinema landmark? Perhaps among a certain independent film sorority or within Venice Beach body-building circles, but you can’t seriously expect guys like myself to say “hmmm, looks interesting…I’ll definitely give it a shot.” C’mon, man…they’re not that attractive! Sorry but I’m more of a lipstick lesbian kinda guy

Bleeding will debut at Sundance ’24, and that’s where it belongs. Costarring Ed Harris, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov and Dave Franco.

Sapphic “Emmanuelle” From Brilliant French Director

by

Audrey Diwan‘s Happening (’21) is the second best film I’ve ever seen about the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion. (The best is Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, released 16 years ago.) Diwan and cowriter Rebecca Zlotowski has been lensing a lesbian Emmanuelle, which may turn up in Cannes next May.

Emmanuelle was a steamy hetero franchise in the ’70s and early ’80s with Sylvia Kristel in the lead role.

French actress Naomie Merlant, who has played heavy-breathing gay characters in Portrait Of A Woman on Fire and TAR, is the titular character in Diwan’s newbie. Naomi Watts,,Will Sharpe and Anthony Wong costar.

Jimi Hendrix: “There ain’t no straight stuff nowhere except for that Glenn Powell-Sydney Sweeney romcom, and Sweeney is kinda funny lookin’.”

Standard Beardo Stuff

by

It’s called a slow “zoom-in + track back” shot. Or, if you will, a slow “track forward + zoom reverse” shot….not sure which one was utilized. Does anyone?

Either way Brendan Hodges is a blathering bullshitter as it’s hardly a “difficult” shot. Steven Spielberg used an urgent zoom-in + track back in Jaws, seven years before he shot E.T.