Jeff Wells …is way too influenced by the mood and spirit of RRR, which is basically schlock that’s been virtue-signalled into the awards conversations. Ehrlich is nonetheless a first-rate montage artist.
THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2022: A Video Countdown from david ehrlich on Vimeo.
I’m not fully understanding what’s causing all the “chaos” on the shoot of Francis Coppola‘s Megalopolis, at least as described by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kim Masters, Scott Feinberg and Aaron Couch.
Apparently the trouble has to do with the visual effects either costing too much or not being good enough to satisfy Coppola, or a perhaps a combination of the two.
The piece says that Coppola, whose lack of experience with effects-heavy shooting suggests he could have used the counsel of someone like James Cameron, “fired almost his entire visual effects team Dec. 9” — a month ago — “with the rest of that department soon following.”
Mark Russell (In the Heights, The Wolf of Wall Street) was the film’s top visual effects production supervisor. Production designer Beth Mickle and supervising art director David Scott have also flown the coop, the story says. A source says the $120-million budgeted film “now has no art department.”
The futuristic Megalopolis “has descended into chaos,” the story claims, citing “multiple sources.” Roughly halfway through shooting in Atlanta and with filming expected to finish in March, Megalopolis has already been tagged as a mess, giving off “severe Apocalypse Now vibes.
A production source has told the THR trio that “it’s unclear whether the production can go forward as planned.”
Coppola’s reps haven’t said anything to anyone, but his movies have always been fraught with financial anxiety and general uncertainty.
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has posted a significant insider quote: “Coppola’s movie is definitely in trouble. He’s shaking down people to get extra cash. grips are pissed. Dude is taking money from his own budget and is siphoning cash from things like costume, make-up, and production design accordingly.”
I’ll tell you this much. Joe and Jane Popcorn aren’t going to be very enthusiastic about paying to see Megalopolis when it hits theatres, which, knowing Coppola, probaby won’t happen until sometime in ’24. The film just sounds too labrynthian, too complex, and certainly not primitive enough for the Millennial and Zoomer ADD crowd.
In his recent Home Theatre Forum review of Kino’s forthcoming 4K Bluray of Michael Winner‘s Death Wish (’73), restoration guru Robert Harris has used a kind of double-edged sword.
One one hand he describes it as a substandard 4K release that’s not worth the price, and says that the 40th anniversary Bluray version (released in 2014) is a better deal overall. On the other hand he’s calling the 4K version something new on hi-def market — 2K UHD.
Harris: “I’ve been giving the 4K Death Wish situation some thought, and the answer is simple — it represents a new format.
“It’s a 4k UHD release derived from a 2k master. [It therefore doesn’t] in any way take advantage of an actual 4K resolution, but rather simply [goes] for the HDR/DV ‘pop’ that will be seen on OLED panels.” In HE terminology, Harris is referring to a “4K bump.”
Kino is distributing the 4K version, but the actual work has been performed by Paramount.
“The question is that since [the 4K Death Wish] doesn’t actually carry true 4K resolution, what to call it? I’d go with ‘2K UHD’.
“How to market 2K UHD releases? First, try and explain [what they are] to consumers. How to price them? A few dollars above Bluray.
“The 2K UHD variant already exists, but has not been recognized as such.
Continuing: “I’ve now compared the Bluray variant with the 4K, and they’re quite different.
“While they both seem derived from the same master, which appears to be an older image harvest from an interpostive and not the original camera negative, the Bluray disc has a more natural grain structure.
“The 4K UHD disc has highly reduced grain, and a very awkward digital grain pattern that seems to clump, and at times appears to have mold embedded in the film element.
“The 4K [version] has very little relationship to film, while the 2014 Bluray has a more natural appearance.
“I’d be equally happy with a Bluray derived from the same newer master, but those who purchase 4k should be on notice before they place an order, that they are not receiving true 4K, and merely the HDR pop.”
“You must read this book. And then watch The Shining again the second you put the book down. And I don’t care if you’ve seen it 50 times, you will never see it the same way again. It’s going to change everything.” — Alleged excerpt from Steven Spielberg‘s forward to Taschen’s limited-edition tribute book about Stanley Kubrick‘s landmark horror film.
An intriguing prospect, I’ll admit, but given how much I know about The Shining and considering my having seen it at least 20 times and contemplated it sixteen or seventeen ways from Sunday over the last 40 years, I’m not sure I’d buy this book if it cost $150. I might lay my money down if it was sale-priced at $15.00 or thereabouts, but $1500 dollars?
HE is hereby offering to tap out a paywalled 1500-word piece about the innards ands gizzards of The Shining, and the cost will only be…uhm, $100. Okay, $75. I don’t know what I’ll say but I can probably cook something up.
Remember that final scene in La Strada? A half-wasted Anthony Quinn grappling with a terrible cosmic realization as he sits on a beach late at night? That was me ten minutes ago when I read Jason Blum’s tweet about RRR‘s supposed Best Picture heat.
If the 31-year-old fashion model Emily Ratajkowski has been around in ’54 and had decided to extend some of that breathtaking largesse to a morally ambivalent, seen-better-days Hoboken longshoreman named Terry Malloy…that I could understand. If HE was banging out a daily column for the Hoboken Gazette, I could report this happy news without so much as a hiccup or raised eyebrow.
The Daily Mail‘s Justin Enriquez is reporting that comedian Eric Andre, 39, has recently become one of the recipients of Emily Ratajkowski‘s experimental largesse. Andre is to be congratulated for what any realistic person would call a truly extraordinary quirk in the cosmic scheme of things. Ratajkowski is just sampling, of course, so this isn’t analogous to, say, Shirley Jones marrying Marty Ingels in 1977.
But in addition to their sometimes well-grounded, highly perceptive praising of stellar filmmaking and performances, the New York Film Critics Circle has (be honest) been in the grip of woke theology over the last four or five years. Most of us understand this, and the NYFCC honchos and spokespersons will deny it to their dying day.
For decades a NYFCC award was a gold-standard honor — a classy, triple-A stamp of irrefutable big-city approval. But since ’18 or thereabouts the NYFCC members have sought to integrate notions of quality with “the sacralization of racial, gender and sexual [identity],” as Matthew Goodwin put it in February 2021. In short, they’ve become known as a contender for the most reliably eccentric, woke-flakey critics group, neck and neck with the occasionally wokejobby Los Angeles Film Critics Association. (Note: HE has agreed on certain occasions with LAFCA award calls, hence the term “occasionally woke-jobby.”)
For me the syndrome seemed to begin in 2018 when the NYFCC handed their Best Actress award to Support The Girls‘ Regina Hall. For me there was no contest among the Best Actress contenders that year — Melissa McCarthy‘s performance in Can you Ever Forgive Me? was heads and shoulders above Hall’s, and yet the NYFCC allowed themselves to be guided by identity politics. They disputed this, of course.
IndieWire‘s Eric Kohn, a leader of the NYFCC’s Hall support group: “There is no groupthink to the NYFCC voting process. The rules are right there on the site. Nobody’s ‘using’ any single award for their private agenda.”
The following year the NYFCC handed their Best Actress trophy to Us‘s Lupita Nyong’o for no apparent reason other than her woke identity credentials. Posted on 12.14.19: “Seriously? Honoring Lupita Nyong’o’s performance was eight parts wokester virtue-signalling, and two parts serious regard for a noteworthy performance…trust me. The NYFCC used to be the NYFCC — now it’s an organizational ally of IndieWire‘s wokeness crusade. Good as she was in Jordan Peele’s interesting if underwhelming horror flick, Lupita basically delivered an intelligent, first-rate, Jamie Lee Curtis-level scream-queen performance with a side order of raspy-voiced predator doppleganger.”
HE believes that the NYFCC’s grand-slam wackadoodle happened in 2020, when they gave their Best Film award to Kelly Reichart‘s First Cow (a baffling, eccentric call for eccentricity’s sake), and their Best Actor prize to Da 5 Blood‘s Delroy Lindo, who played an furiously unstable Trump supporter (and in so doing beat out Judas And The Black Messiah‘s Lakeith Stanfield, who was far more deserving, not to mention The Father‘s Anthony Hopkins, Minari‘s Steven Yeun, The Sound of Metal‘s Riz Ahmed and Mank‘s…okay, let’s forget Gary Oldman).
Plus their Best Actress award went to Sidney Flanigan (Never Rarely Sometimes Always), basically for quietly weeping during an interview with a Manhattan-based abortion counselor after zero emoting throughout the entire film. They also gave their Best Supporting Actor award to Da 5 Bloods‘ Chadwick Boseman, basically because the poor guy had tragically passed a few months earlier, and their Best Supporting Actress: trophy to Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), which was based upon nothing other than the fact that she played a spunky woman from a small Eastern European village who wound up hoodwinking Rudy Giuliani in a hotel room.
How wackadoodle were their 2022 choices? I for one was…I was about to say flabbergasted when the NYFCC handed their Best Director award to RRR‘s S. S. Rajamouli — a virtue-signalling gesture if there ever was one, and a head-scratching accolade for a film that many of us regard as “flamboyant garbage…ludicrous, primitive crap that believes in ridiculous extremes and heroic absurdities.” But I wasn’t surprised given what the NYFCC has turned into. They also went for Everything Everywhere All At Once‘s Ke Huy Quan (“Short Round”) for Best Supporting Actor — strictly an identity call + a nod to the popularity of EEAAO among Millennials and Zoomers — and Nope‘s Keke Palmer for Best Supporting Actress…an award that made no sense as all given that Palmer merely flaunted her Millennial diva spunkitude.
The National Society of Film Critics announced their 2022 film awards today, and there’s really only one way to interpret the Best Director trophy going to Aftersun‘s Charlotte Wells.
Aftersun is my idea of a spacey, ethereal mood-trip film. I’m not the only one who feels that it’s just not gripping or engrossing enough to warrant this kind of honor (ask any honest critic). This indicates that Aftersun‘s NSFC supporters voted for Wells as a gesture for feminist recognition and gender tokenism.
Like almost all major-outlet critics, the NSFC is composed of members who live in their own secular little world. In my opinion they’re residents of (a) the Planet Uranus or (b) the Abbey of St. Martin, where they live on chickens, raw lettuce, goat’s milk and goat cheese, and wear brown robes and sandals. As far as the Wells vote is concerned, they are absolutely not of this earth.
It could be argued, in fact, that Aftersun is a borderline infuriating space-out film. This is certainly my own personal opinion, I can tell you.
If Aftersun had been directed by a male, it most certainly wouldn’t have won anything. The NSFC critics know the truth of this, and of course they won’t admit it.
Best Picture / TÁR (61), Aftersun (49), No Bears (32) — HE strongly approves.
Best Director / Charlotte Wells, Aftersun (60), Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave (47), Jafar Panahi, No Bears (36) — HE strongly disapproves.
Best Actor / Colin Farrell, After Yang & The Banshees of Inisherin (71); Paul Mescal, Aftersun…WHAT??; Bill Nighy, Living (33) — HE approves of Farrell winning.
Best Actress — Cate Blanchett, TÁR (59); Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once (38), (tie) Tilda Swinton – The Eternal Daughter / Michelle Williams – The Fabelmans (27) — HE approves of the Blanchett win.
Best Supporting Actor — Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once (45); Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway (35 — bending-over-backwards tokenism); Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin (27) — HE doesn’t approve of any of these performances.
Best Supporting Actress / Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin (57); Nina Hoss, TÁR (43); Dolly de Leon, Triangle of Sadness (35) — HE heartily approves of Condon’s win.
By HE standards Owen Roizman, who passed today at age 86, was and always will be one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers, certainly within the zeitgeist of the ’70s and ’80s. God, the streak Roizman was on between ’71 and ’78 alone! The French Connection, Play It Again, The Heartbreak Kid, The Exorcist, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Three Days of the Condor, Network, Straight Time. Not to mention True Confessions, Tootsie, Havana, Grand Canyon, Wyatt Earp, etc.
Special credit should be given to Roizman for stepping into that surreal episode when a William Friedkin-approved Bluray of The French Connection came out in ’09. Roizman didn’t tippy-toe around the obvious, which was that the ’09 Bluray’s bizarre color scheme (bleachy, desaturated, high contrasty) was an outright desecration. Three years later a properly remastered, Roizman-approved version was issued on a subsequent Bluray, and thank God for gloriously happy endings.
Posted on 3.8.12: “The new, Owen Roizman-approved French Connection Bluray is a blessing…a pure celluloid capturing of a great New York film experience, some of it luscious, some of it spotty and grainy but all it looking true and right. Some of it looks more lab-fresh than I’ve ever seen. Punchy red neons and such. Other parts look…well, the way they did at Leows’ 86th Street when it opened in the fall of ’71, I’m guessing. Raw, wham-bam, high-impact footage all the way.
“No more bluish bleach. No more splotchy colors and monochrome, high-contrast crap. No more creepy-perverse digital fuckwad action. The guy who mucked up the notorious 2009 Bluray version, director William Friedkin, has come to his senses and re-done his masterwork under Roizman’s influience.
“’The nation’s three-year-long, Freidkin-incited French Connection Bluray nightmare is over,’ I tweeted. ‘The bleachy, splotchy ’09 version has been replaced.’
“On 2.24.09 Roizman spoke to Aaron Aradillas on a blog-radio show called “Back By Midnight,” and he called the transfer “atrocious,” “emasculated” and “horrifying.” He said that he “wasn’t consulted” by Freidkin and he “certainly wants to wash my hands of having had anything to do with [it].”
We’re now officially a half-century beyond one of the greatest film years in Hollywood history — 1973.
I came upon a 12.28.22 stacker.com article called “Best Films Turning 50 in 2023,” and figured “okay, but why not just list the best and leave it at that?”
I was surprised to realize that HE’s 1973 roster — 10 stone-cold classics, 12 creme de la cremes, 13 good to very good — is almost as strong as my 1971 rundown, which I first posted in 2015.
Compare the top 22 of ’73 with HE’s best of 2022. Both were highly respectable years, but compare 1973’s top ten with the likeliest Best Picture contenders on Gold Derby (Elvis, The Banshees of Inisherin, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Top Gun: Maverick, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Woman King, Glass Onion, The Fabelmans, TAR, Avatar: The Way of Water, RRR)…it’s almost embarassing.
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)
Those People (Netflix, 1,.27) was directed and co-written by Kenya Barris (black-ish). Barris co-wrote the screenplay with star and co-producer Jonah Hill.