Jeff Wells

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].”

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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)

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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.

From HE’s 7.20.22 review of Jordan Peele‘s Nope: “No discipline, this fucking film. It’s ‘imaginative,’ if you want to call it that. As slow and talky and stodgy as Cleopatra was, it at least made sense. Which is more than you can say for Nope. So Cleopatra is better.

“Say it again — when Gordy the monkey appears, the film comes alive. What Gordy has to do with the dumbshit rascal white-oppressor aliens is anyone’s guess.

“Steven Yeun costars in Nope, and I couldn’t understand why he was in it. Yes, he has something to do with Gordy (I won’t say) and he wears a red suit and a big white cowboy hat in one scene, but he has NOTHING to do with anything.

“I need to re-watch this movie with subtitles some day.

“Why the hell is Kaluuya’s character named ‘OJ,’ of all things?

“If Dore Schary had somehow returned from the dead and become the producer on this film, before filming began he would have invited Peele to lunch and said, ‘Look, I’m just a Jewish white-guy producer and I don’t know much about African Americans or horse ranches or Fry’s Electronics, but WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MOVIE ABOUT?? You don’t know, do you? You’re just farting around with spooky alien visitors and trying to cook up something different and trippy, but THIS MOVIE IS BULLSHIT, JORDAN…you know it and I know it.’

“And Peele would reply, ‘It’s a metaphor about white people’s oppression of BIPOCs.’ And Schary would reply, ‘What are BIPOCs?’ And Peele would say, ‘Don’t worry about it, bruh…I got this.’

“No white-ass producer would dare say ‘bullshit’ to Peele, of course, lest he/she be accused of harboring racist attitudes. Which is why Nope turned out this way…a crazy, impressionistic, Jasper Johns-like mess. Peele was apparently given carte blanche control, and this is what happens.”

Following up yesterday’s Hospital post, “Love From Older Dude Perspective“:

Posted on 3.22.06: “I came across two dialogue files by accident this morning — two clips from Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Hospital (1971), and it hit me all over again how wonderfully particular and penetrating and needle-sharp these soliloquies are.

“George C. Scott‘s confession to a colleague about what a wreck his middle-aged life has become is about as masterful and genuine-sounding as this sort of thing gets, and I love the the cadence he brings to some of the lines. (The almost imperceptible pause he inserts between the words “pushing” and “drugs” is sheer genius.) And the “murder by irony” confession by wacko doctor-patient Barnard Hughes is a wow, particularly at the end when he recites a litany of medical ailments (one after another after another…no end to it) that comprise, metaphorically or otherwise, “the whole wounded madhouse of our times.”

“There’s always a fair amount of good dialogue at any given time, but the super-pungent, intellectually flamboyant stuff that Chayefsky used to write — a little show-offy at times but pleasurable as hell — has…well, maybe it’s out there and I’m just not running into it. Or maybe it’s just gone.”

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From Sasha Stone‘s “Is The Oscar Movie Really Dying?” (1.2.23):

“You can easily see our future as a species. Civilization is migrating online. Our online behavior is determined by clicks, views, engagement, and branding. That takes away the power of the ordinary consumer to vote with their feet. One person, one movie ticket. Now it’s what will get a lot of likes if I stand next to it on Instagram. What will make ME look good? How can I define myself as a Good Puritan?

“Hollywood essentially built its house of straw, and the big storm finally came. COVID wiped out their main demographic: wealthy white liberals. They are the kind of people who wear masks while walking alone in the park. The chances of them going to the movies are going to be slim. But even those people are also kind of done with ‘woke Hollywood.’

“What that means is that movies have robbed the public of the essentials of storytelling. There has to be an anchor to the truth. As a species, we have an attuned bullshit detector. We can spot their manipulation of reality from a mile away, and when that happens, the focus is off the story and on the people who are so afraid of criticism that they drag out a person of every type and skin color to use as shields to protect them.

“The Oscars now have the same problem. No white men for Best Picture or Best Director has led to them twisting themselves up like pretzels trying to right the wrongs of society every time. Well, if there is one industry that really must rely on meritocracy, then it’s film awards. Otherwise, there is no point. If it isn’t about the best, and a majority of professionals don’t decide the best, why even have awards at all? Why not just hand out certificates of achievement? Doesn’t that serve their purposes better than pretending “deserves” has something to do with it?

“I say this as someone who argued for decades about inclusion and diversity. But never in all that time did I think they would then rig the game to hand out awards that got them off the hook and made them look good. I always thought the person winning had to actually deserve it.”

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Clerk: “This’ll just take a few minutes, sir. First name?”
Harry: “Harry.”
Clerk: “Last name?”
Harry: “Weenie.”
Clerk: “Just two names?”
Harry; “Four. My full name is Harry Balding Ginger Weenie.”

I Stand With Prince Harry pic.twitter.com/BjX5d8M39X

— Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) January 6, 2023

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A day rarely passes when I don’t watch a couple of “Idiots in Cars” videos. Enormously pleasing. All my life I’ve found the automative misfortunes of bad drivers hilarious. And I’m mostly an LQTM-er — I rarely laugh out loud.

BAFTA’s long lists are bringing me down, man. ’20 and ’21 were downish years, obviously, but so was ’22 to some extent. Several “good” films and performances here, but nothing really turns me on except for Top Gun: Maverick and Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar. Not a single Best Picture long-list selection made me swoon…not really. Each creme de la creme film has stuff that irritates me. Example: I hated, hated, hated Todd Field‘s decision to run Tar‘s closing credits at the very beginning.

The whole year was like that. What happened to the concept of movies reaching into your soul and altering the way you see life? Half the time after seeing a film in a commercial megaplex I want to pick a fight with an usher, preferably a fat Millennial one. Well, not actually but I fantasize about this from time to time.

BAFTA’s Best Picture Long List (alphabetized) + HE reactions + my own preferred list of ten.

Aftersun (HE: Dreary, inconclusive, middle-of-the-night nothingness inside a Turkish coastal resort for British tourists…my eyes glazed over, my brain left the room.)

All Quiet on the Western Front (HE: “I respect and admire AQOTWF for what it is and what it’s worth. But in our current realm this kind of large-sprawling-canvas, chaos-and-brutality-of-war film can only sink in so far. And 147 minutes felt too long. 120 or 125 would have sufficed.”)

The Banshees of Inisherin (HE: “There are many sane people out there who’ve found this film mystifying. I respect many things about it, including Kerry Condon’s performance. It’s not ‘bad’ as much as infuriating.”)

Elvis (HE: “Elvis isn’t quite as bad as I feared, but several sections are punishing to sit through. It’s a flashy, pushy, often exhausting carnival sideshow, very primary and primitive, clearly made for the ADD peanut gallery…a fairly blunt tool. And Tom Hanks‘ Colonel Parker accent is impossible.”

Everything Everywhere All At Once (HE: “It made me want to jump off the top of a 50-story office building with the intention of pressing a hand grenade against my chest and pulling the pin halfway down.”)

The Fabelmans (HE: “A truly fair-minded, non-obsequious opinion would have to acknowledge that the saga of Spielberg’s teenage years (mostly Phoenix, some Saratoga) is neither boring nor hugely interesting…it’s diverting in an on-the-nose, broadly performed way, but it mainly boils down to ‘decent with three pop-throughs — the Judd Hirsch rant, filming the Nazi war flick in the Arizona desert, and John Ford lecturing 17-year-old Steven about horizon lines.'”)

Living (HE: “The descriptive terms are ‘low-key,’ ‘no hurry,’ ‘tonally and visually accurate” (it’s set in 1952 London) and ‘quietly affecting emotional undertow.’ One quibble: Whenever old-school British bureaucrats of yore sat down in their first-class train compartments and unfolded their newspapers, they took their bowler hats off. Not so in Hermanus’ film.”)

Tar (HE: “Atmospherically transporting, powerfully charged and yet curiously infuriating. Watching with subtitles definitely helps. The best of the bunch, but I almost wish it wasn’t.”)

Top Gun: Maverick (HE: “High-powered San Diego flyboy saga, great action sequences, unambiguously straight-while-male-ish, “Great Balls of Fire”, etc.

Triangle of Sadness (HE: Not as good as The Square.)

In this order, HE’s top ten picks of ’22 (originally posted on 12.20.22):

Empire of Light
Close
Happening
Vengeance
She Said
Emily The Criminal
Christian Mungiu‘s R.M.N.
Top Gun: Maverick
Avatar: The Way of Water
Tar (despite the many irritations)

This was the very first video sent to me by Tatiana during her Mexico-and-Cuba trip. It’s still my favorite. I’d really like to go there. Buena Vista Social Club, etc.