Lila Neugebauer and Jennifer Lawrence‘s Causeway (Apple, theatrical + streaming), is an extremely solemn, snail-paced, drip-drip recovery drama.

Lawrence is Lynsey, a gay U.S. soldier who suffered brain damage during a recent tour in Afghanistan. I saw it last night, and although the running time is 92 minutes it felt like two hours, minimum.

Lawrence is believably plain, but the performance by costar Brian Tyree Henry struck me as actorish and inauthentic.

Supporting players Linda Emond, Jayne Houdyshell, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Fred Weller are good enough.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and Marcus Jones have posted several Best Picture Oscar predictions. Some of their calls have merit; others are a joke. Their choices are pasted below.

Among the Thompson-Jones picks, HE has boldfaced the titles of films that are either actually good or are thought to be genuinely good, and which may seriously deserve Best Picture consideration.

In fact, before picking apart the Thompson-Jones calls, here are ten of HE’s Best Picture projections, mostly based upon the fact that the films are (or in some cases are presumed to be) actually good and/or held in high esteem, and therefore deserving of a BP nomination. These are not political predictions as much as judgment calls:

1. The Fabelmans
2. TÁR
3. Top Gun: Maverick
4. Avatar: The Way of Water
5. Babylon
6. Empire of Light
7. She Said
8. Armageddon Time
9. Bardo
10. Close

Thompson-Jones reactions: The letters UL (as in “unfortunately likely”) appear next to films that aren’t good enough but will probably be be nominated anyway. The letters NH (as in “not happening”) appear next to films that haven’t much of an emotional or political prayer. The words FORGET IT are placed next to titles which HE regards as absurd and/or ridiculous in this context.

Frontrunners:

The Banshees of Inisherin / UL
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever / FORGET IT
Elvis / UL
Everything Everywhere All at Once / / UL
The Fabelmans
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio / ANIMATION
TÁR
Top Gun: Maverick
The Woman King / FORGET IT
Women Talking / NH

I’ve been complaining about all-but-unintelligible movie dialogue for several years now, and the almost uniform response from the HE commentariat has been that it’s mostly my fault — my hearing isn’t what it used to be so I need to get a hearing aid and blah-dee-blah.

That may be true to some extent but movie dialogue has nonetheless been increasingly hard to understand over the last decade or so, and it’s absolutely not entirely my fault.

According to Slashfilm’s Ben Pearson and an absolutely historic article that I was too distracted to read until today, a good amount of the blame is on actors, mixing boards, theatre sound systems, Chris Nolan, etc.

Please accept my humble, bended-knee apology for overlooking Pearson’s piece, titled “Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand.”

And please read it, and then watch the video.

Pearson says the chief culprits are (a) Chris Nolan, who has made a fetish out of mixing his films so you can barely hear the dialogue, (b) self-conscious actors who deliver “soft, mumbling, under-their-breath delivery of some lines,” (c) a lack of respect for sound recording during principal photography, (d) too many digital tracks resulting in de-prioritizing dialogue, (e) mixing for cinemas vs. mixing for streaming.

One thing Pearson doesn’t mention is vocal-fry murmur, which Millennial and Zoomer actresses began to project back in the early teens. I first wrote about the vocal-fry plague eight years ago.

All I know is that I’m really looking forward to watching Tar at home with subtitles — something tells me this will be transformative.

…but I honestly would’t want to spend a weekend in a glass house topped by an ostentatious, big-ass glass dome, much less hang with the guy who owns or has designed it.

Most of us understand that avoiding gauche, declasse people and their environments is a basic requirement in life. If I’m going to fraternize with super-wealthy or super-opportunistic folks I want to stay someplace cool and approvable in an architectural sense. In a home, for openers, that doesn’t say “boy, I sure am wealthy!”

…to come out of The Banshees of Inisherin will be Kerry Condon‘s Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Otherwise it’s an Irish death march — a well-composed, essentially nihilistic film about a self-destructive island of lost souls.

Regional friendo: “Saw Banshhes of Inisherin earlier today. Less than a dozen people in the theater.

“I think a lot of people are expecting one McDonagh thing — more In Bruges wackiness – and getting something entirely different. It’s a very downbeat film, not funny at all (okay, there are maybe one or two chuckle moments), and it quickly becomes obvious why it’s set during the Irish Civil War, which pitted brother against brother, friend against friend.

“What’s going on in Inisherin is the war in microcosm…the violence, the despair, the unforgiving nature. It takes place in an economically depressed setting, one that seems way behind the times with no electricity, no cars, no decent roads, where the police and the priesthood seem to rule over everything.

“Brendan Gleeson‘s character relies on his music to keep him from despair, but it doesn’t really help. Colin Farrell relies on his friendship with Gleeson to help pass the endlessly boring days. And Kerry Condon, truly the heart and soul of this film, knows she has to get off the Island or else turn into a bitter old hag, like the other women in the film.

“Can’t say I enjoyed the fecking movie, and I had some trouble with the fecking accents. But it’s deeper than I expected, and I appreciated where McDonagh was going with it. But boy, is it a downer!”

Steven Spielberg is a big fan of Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus (’60), and in this AFI interview clip (which appears to be 20 or 25 years old) he shares two or three things that he likes in particular.

One is the duel to the death between Kirk Douglas‘s Spartacus and Woody Strode‘s Draba — short sword vs. three-pronged trident and net. Except starting at 1:28, Spielberg’s memory fails him. This isn’t a felony (we all misremember stuff) but I’m amazed that the AFI crew didn’t stop him and suggest a re-take.

Spielberg recalls that Spartacus and John Ireland‘s Crixus had become friendly, which is true, but they don’t fight each other– Spartacus and Draba do. Spielberg nonetheless recalls that in the dark holding pen adjacent to the gladiator arena, Douglas is sitting across from Crixus…wrong. Douglas and Strode share the pen while Ireland and another guy are fighting. Ireland winds up killing his opponent, and then staggers away, exhausted.

The power of the sequence is that Draba, who has stoically kept his feelings to himself, had told Spartacus that “gladiators can’t make friends…I might have to kill you.” But when Draba has gained the upper hand in the arena and is one trident thrust away from killing Douglas, he instead tosses the trident at the Romans who’ve been watching them from above (Laurence Olivier‘s Crassus, John Dall‘s Glabrus, Nina Foch‘s Helena Glabrus, Joanna Barnes‘ Claudia Marius).