Jeff Wells

In the wake of the recent Blind Side squabble between ex-NFL pro Michael Oher and his one-time benefactors Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has taken another look at John Lee Hancock‘s The Blind Side (’09), which told the story of young Oher and the Tuohys, and basically slapped it around, calling it “even more fake [today] than before.”

“[The film’s version of] Michael Oher is treated, by the Tuohys, as a kind of family mascot. There’s never any conflict between them, and not much in the way of conversation.

“Bullock’s Leigh Anne, with her diamond-studded crucifix necklace, charges through the film like a refugee from Dallas, crusading for her sainthood merit badge, while Michael, with his benign torpor, rarely rouses himself with a force of ego. At one point, when Leigh Anne and Sean are discussing whether to become his legal guardians, Sean says, ‘Michael’s gift is his ability to forget. He’s mad at no one, and he really doesn’t care what happened in the past.’ Leigh Anne agrees, making a (comic) point of how much she hates it when her husband is right.

“But Sean’s statement about Michael is shocking in how wrong it is. Michael’s gift is his ability to forget? Who would say that about a white character who’d suffered the kinds of things Michael did? The movie is reducing him to a Teddy-bear simpleton, with little to no psychology. He never has rich exchanges with the other family members; he never expresses anything but gratefulness (or, after he crashes the truck they just bought him, cringing regret). There’s no interior complexity to Michael, and that’s the lie of The Blind Side. It’s what allows his character to basically be used by the Tuohys to feel good about themselves.”

Okay, but you know what I remember about The Blind Side? I bought the bullshit. I knew I was being fed suspicious vegetables, but they found their way into my heart all the same. And the sales agent was Sandra Bullock‘s performance as Leigh Anne. Everyone bought it, and no amount of complaining 14 years later can change that,

Consider a certain George Hickenlooper quote from 2009, excerpted back then by Sasha Stone.

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We’re all pleased that IFC/Sapan will be opening Trân Anh Hùng‘s The Pot au Feu (aka The Taste of Things) later this year as part of a generally vigorous effort to snag Oscar attention and perhaps even Best Picture and Best Director nominations.

And we’re doubly pleased that it’s just been announced as a New York Film Festival “Spotlight” attraction.

And we’re extra double ding-dong delighted that the NYFF guys aren’t calling it a North American premiere, which means this masterful foodie flick will be debuting at Telluride two weeks hence. (The Toronto Film Festival slate is not an option as its slate is wrapped tight with no room to breathe.)

But we’re still appalled that IFC/Sapan has (a) dropped the original, perfect-sounding French-English title, which translates as The Pot Roast and was used when it played in Cannes three months ago, and (b) saddled it with the pedestrian title of The Taste of Things….please!

I wrote last night that The Taste of Things “isn’t an awful title, but it sounds vaguely antiseptic and blanded down…flat, lacking in flavor and aroma…it no longer sounds or feels like a film simmering in French culture, but like a gourmet cookbook that might have been written by the owner of a suburban restaurant in northern New Jersey or Westchester County.”

The best response was posted early this morning by HE commenter “Christophe“: “I don’t mind the new title, but somehow find it ironic that notoriously marketing-obsessed Disney/Pixar had the guts to release a mass-market film called Ratatouille, and yet an indie foreign-film distrib thinks The Pot au Feu is too strange-sounding for discerning audiences.”

When you get right down to it, IFC/Sapan is hung up on au Feu as the original title starts with “The“, followed by “Pot,” a familiar kitchen term to any rube in Arkansas.

IFC/Sapan exec #1 during conference: “But they won’t understand what au Feu means, and we’ll lose tens of thousands in revenue!”

IFC/Sapan exec #2: “But millions understood Ratatouille, and that’s obviously a bigger tongue-challenge than au Feu could ever be.”

IFC/Sapan exec #3: “Will you come up for air, please? Clem Kadiddlehopper is not going to pay to see this film in Dogpatch, Kentucky…it’s a film that discerning, semi-educated audiences will flock to in the cities and suburbs, and a nice easy title like The Pot au Feu won’t give them a moment’s hesitation.”

The good news is that IFC Films and Sapan Studios, U.S. distributors of Tran Anh Hung‘s The Pot au Feu, have committed to a prestige Oscar campaign for the French foodie masterpiece, not just for Best International Feature (if and when it’s selected by France as its official nominee) but in all categories, including Best Picture.

This means it’ll open this year and not, as feared by HE, in the winter or early spring of ’24. From my perspective this is wonderful and gratifying news, as The Pot-au-Feu is still HE’s hands-down favorite film of the year.

For several weeks I’ve been sharing concerns that IFC and Saban might, God forbid, give The Pot au Feu the bum’s rush by opening it in the doldrums of early ’24, which is what IFC has done in the past with promising titles.

It is extremely heartening, to say the least, to learn otherwise, and that this Cannes-praised film might….do we dare to dream? …play Telluride and one or two other prestigious fall festivals…who knows?

I apologize for airing my pessimistic concerns, and I congratulate IFC and Saban for doing the right thing.

The bad news is that Tran Anh Hung‘s film has been retitled, according to Variety‘s Clayton Davis, as The Taste of Things. HE’s gut reaction: gaaahh!

IFC and Saban’s concern, obviously, is that U.S. audiences might find the original French title, which basically means meat and vegetable stew, meaningless or overly obscure.

The Taste of Things isn’t an awful title, but it sounds vaguely antiseptic and blanded down….like something that a whitebread PTA committee might have decided upon. It’s flat, lacking in flavor and aroma. It no longer sounds or feels like a film simmering in French culture, but like a gourmet cookbook that might have been written by the owner of a suburban restaurant in northern New Jersey or Westchester County.’
‘
But overall this is excellent news, at least as far as IFC & Saban’s Oscar determinations are concerned.

Danny Wu‘s American: An Odyssey to 1947, a documentary that’s mostly but not entirely about the experience of genius filmmaker Orson Welles during the mid 1940s, will be released by Gravitas Ventures on 9.12.23.

A Wellesnet announcement, dated 8.4.23, says that the doc “follows the rise and fall of Welles while interweaving stories of diverse individuals amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression, World War II and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb.”

Synopsis: “Director Orson Welles navigated his meteoric Hollywood rise beginning in the early ’40s. As WWII begins a Japanese American boy visits abroad, and an African American soldier enlists in the U.S. Army. As the story advances, each character follows their own ambitions in search of their American identity. The doc’s first half is about the romantic rise of a great American director, and the second half transitioning into the realities of race and life in the Jim Crow era.”

I haven’t seen the film, but the title feels like a stopper….ungrammatical, inelegant. How does an odyssey go “to” a given year without mentioning the year of origin or the beginning of the arc? But let’s not dismiss or mischaracterize. I’m looking forward to it. Really.

Earlier today, however, I was struck by a remark from critic and author Joe McBride, a renowned Hollywood historian and Welles biographer who probably knows more about the late filmmaker (who died in ’85) than anyone else.

McBride: “Welles did a couple of shameful radio shows right after the Hiroshima bombing on 8.6.45, praising the dropping of it. I wonder if this film will ignore them.”

Shameful?

I replied to McBride as follows:

“Joe — The lives of tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen who would have been ordered to invade Japan were spared because of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings.

“What’s so shameful about Welles praising Truman’s decision to bomb Japan on 8.6.45 and 8.9.45?

“I am here and alive and breathing (ditto my sons Jett and Dylan and my granddaughter Sutton) because my Marine lieutenant dad, Jim Wells, wasn’t ordered to invade Japan. The odds of his surviving that assault were relatively low, or so he and his Marine comrades believed.

“Japanese leaders started the war, and despite their growing inability to prevail against U.S. forces during the final two years of the war, they refused to consider surrender when it was proposed in ‘45. They made their own fanatical bed.

“The A-bomb murders of roughly 200,000 Japanese citizens were beyond horrific, of course, but savage cruelty is in the basic DNA…the basic nature of war.

“So if Orson Welles praising the atomic bombings of Japan was shameful, as you’ve said, would it have been better for the U.S. to invade Japan and thereby invite a mass slaughter of U.S. troops? Is that what you’re saying?

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Here are HE’s finest films of the first eight months of ’23 — two thirds gone, four months to go.

I’ve given no consideration at all to box-office performance — the rankings are strictly about how successful and satisfying each film is according to its own game and rules, and how thematically fulfilled it feels when all is said and done.

A special demerit system applies in the case of otherwise commendable, first-rate films that delivered (a) manosphere pissnado or (b) caused my soul and knees to ache due to slow pacing and density of dialogue.

1. Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu
2. Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant
3. Cruise & McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023)
4. Christian Mungiu‘s RMN
5. Eric Gravel‘s Full Time
6. Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer — first-rate film but I groaned at the one-hour mark, knowing there were two full hours to go…my soul cried out.
7. Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie [manosphere pissnado demerit]
8. Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest
9. Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon
10. Matt Johnson‘s Blackberry
11. Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid
12. Ben Affleck‘s Air
13. Celine Song‘s Past Lives
14. Jean-Stephen Sauvaire’s Black Flies.
15. Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance
16. Nicole Holofcener‘s You Hurt My Feelings
16. Kelly Fremon Craig‘s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

No offense but I still haven’t seen How To Blow Up A Pipeline.

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HE’s director-writer friendo believes that the WGA negotiators are “an ineffective wild bunch — great with threats, terrible with realistic negotiations.”

The three principal hardheads, he asserts, are Patric Verrone (whom he calls “the Iago figure”), David Goodman and “the melodramatic and very bellicose” Chris Keyser.

David Young stepping aside from negotiating last February meant that “the WGA had a different playbook in mind, a more militant and rigid one.”

“WGA leadership wanted a strike the last time their contract us up, but due to COVID couldn’t ask for a walkout,” he says. They’re now asking, he contends, “for unrealistic mandates for a business model that will be marginalized in the future, such as dictating a minimum number of writers hired for staffing. That’s akin to making a one-man show on Broadway illegal, forcing upon the production a supporting cast.

“Whatever deal the WGA winds up getting could have been achieved without a strike,” he states, adding that “the main leverage right now remains the actor walkout.”

“The strike fund is just whispers on the picket lines as many people haven’t qualified for aid, expressing anger at not getting help.

“David Young suddenly having a medical issue last February after leading every negotiation successfully for years…well, that says something as he was a blue-collar outsider with a tougher style than the mild-mannered scribes used in the past. He was a teamster type, a street fighter.

“Verrone led the strike the last time [2007], planning for it long before it was called. One opinion is that he was a little animation guy who wanted to have his roar heard by the studios that ignored him in the past.”

I’ve been presuming all along that the two strikes will slog on and on and ruin the red-carpet aspect of the early fall film festivals and half-destroy award season promotions until they finally end in October or November…best guess.

But then that Guardian story appeared last Saturday, and then last night a director-writer friendo said the following: “There’s been radio silence so that probably means the [Writers Guild] is going to take this deal in principle. [Bob] Iger turned conciliatory and got involved, allowing concessions. The WGA negotiating committee is particularly maladroit (i.e., given to bungling), but Carol [Lombardini] from the AMPTP is skilled and not the heavy here.”

My spitballs are (a) definitely Mark Meadows, (b) probably Rudy Guiliani, (c) possibly John Eastman. Further speculation?

Oh, and by the way? If I were Fani Willis I wouldn’t entertain ambitions to run for public office down the road. She’s presumably an excellent attorney but to say she has an awkward speaking style is putting it mildly. She reminded me of Tiffany Haddish announcing the Oscar noms in 2018. You can feel her struggling as she reads the particulars.