Jeff Wells

Three days ago Criterion laid off 16 staffers, or roughly 20% of its 80-person workforce. Peter Becker called it a “reorganization” brought about by new “challenges and opportunities.” What he meant is that Criterion income has been shrinking and they have no choice but to cut back on expenses. The home-video world is changing. Physical media is dying and streaming is king. And Criterion’s film-snob appeal isn’t what it used to be. Hell, they’re still dragging their feet in the matter of 4K Blurays.

The snob thing has been a yes-no factor for decades. If you don’t like snob films, you’re not a true Criterion person, and they’ve been dining out on this sensibility since the ’80s. For every Malcom X Bluray (Spike Lee populism at its finest), there are ten dweeb titles. That’s how they roll.

Look at their current offerings — Bergman Island (a better-than-decent film but obviously aimed at people who prefer arugula salads to pizza or hot dogs), Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy, the 1934 Imitation of Life, Terry Gilliam‘s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Todd Haynes‘ The Velvet Underground doc, Three Films by Mai Zetterling, a Michael Haneke trilogy, Jane Campion‘s nearly-impossible-to-rewatch The Power of the Dog.

Criterion should release more ’70s noirs like Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick and John Flynn‘s The Outfit.

Why didn’t Criterion ever release a decent Bluray of David Jones‘ adaptation of Harold Pinter‘s Betrayal (’83)?

As irritated as I’ve been over the visual quality of certain Criterion releases over the last 15 years (way too much inky darkness in their Only Angels Have Wings and Rebecca Blurays, horrible digital mosquito grainstorming in several Blurays of black-and-white classics, the Dressed To Kill fiasco, the relatively recent teal plague, releasing A Hard Day’s Night within a 1.75 aspect ratio rather than 1.66) I still love them for the blue-chip, grade-A presentation factor, and would like to see their physical media business continue indefinitely.

I’m very sorry they’re going through a rough patch.

Daniel Kremer on Facebook (posted yesterday):

“In contrast to other companies producing physical media, Criterion increasingly comes off like a cold monolith, too stuck in a pattern of ‘we’re the Criterion Collection, motherfuckers…don’t you know who we are?! You move with us — we don’t move with you.’

“The result? Kino Lorber, Arrow, Imprint, Indicator and other boutique labels easily moved into their space –– a space that they first colonized.

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True story: A reputable critic was seated at a dinner table during a wedding reception (let’s presume it was sometime in the ’90s or early aughts), and noticed that producer Mace Neufeld was a tablemate. After being introduced, Neufeld (who passed last January) had one…make that two questions for the critic. Neufeld question #1: ”Do you know Manohla Dargis?” The critic said yeah, he did. Neufeld question #2: “What’s the deal with that broad?”

Early in Todd Field‘s Tar there’s a glaring moment of assholery. Not owned by Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar but Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist‘s Max, a student in Lydia’s conducting class.

Upon being questioned by Lydia, Max declares that “as a BIPOC pangender person” he’s not “into” Johann Sebastian Bach, due to the 18th Century composer having been (a) white, (b) privileged and (c) a bit of a sociopath in his youth.

The instant Max says this, the viewer understands what a tyrannical little bitch he is — a Zoomer willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater because a gifted artist’s behavior was imperfect or even abusive.

Others (including, I presume, Tar director Todd Field) see things differently. In a fair-minded world the unfortunate shortcomings of a genius artist (like, say, the predatory Roman Polanski of the ’70s and ’80s) wouldn’t be disqualifying when it comes to assessing his/her work. The presence of profound talent, mind, doesn’t mean that sexually voracious or manipulative behavior warrants an automatic “get out of jail” card. But given the historical record, it should, I feel, be regarded with a less-damning perspective. I mean, we certainly don’t want the Max brigade to be calling the shots…good heavens.

In Michelle Goldberg‘s 10.21 N.Y. Tines essay about Tar (“Finally, a Great Movie About Cancel Culture“), she writes that “the notion of separating the art from the artist has gone out of fashion,” at least among Millennials and Zoomers. Over-45 types, she notes, “have complicated and contradictory feelings about the rapid changes in values, manners and allowances that fall under the rubric of cancel culture.”

In my case, these feelings can be fairly described as disgusted and appalled. But then you knew that.

I’m prodded by a 12.21 story posted yesterday by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy. It concerns a Max-like critic (presumably younger but who knows?) who recently voted in the once-a-decade Sight & Sound poll about the Greatest Films of All Time The critic, an East Coast IndieWire person and quite possibly a woman (though not necessarily), recently told a film producer that he/she had refused to vote for any Alfred Hitchcock film because of his sexual “predator” rep, earned by well-sourced accounts of his behavior with Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds and Marnie.

How many Max-ian critics are part of the current Sight & Sound fraternity, which has, I gather, recently expanded its ranks with certain Millennial and Zoomer contributors? Are there enough Hitchcock haters to unseat his masterful Vertigo (’58), which pushed aside Citizen Kane in the last Greatest of All Time poll in 2012? (Vertigo didn’t even appear in the S&S poll until 1982, when it came in seventh. It ranked fourth in ’92, and then second in ’02 polling,) A critic friend says he’s “sure that Hitchcock is safe overall,” but a voice is telling me that the Max factor may topple Vertigo.

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HE believes that Kerry Condon, who plays the sensible but distraught Siobhan (the sister of Colin Farrell‘s Paddy) in The Banshees of Inisherin, has given the most grounded and formidable supporting actress performance so far this year.

For what it;s worth Condon is on the Best Supporting Actress lists of almost all of the finger-to-the-wind Gold Derby prognosticators, and clearly has plenty of wind in her sails as we speak.

If not Condon I would vote for Carey Mulligan‘s Megan Twohey in She Said.

Due respect but I find it almost satirical that Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis‘s broad, comic-book-level performances in Everything Everywhere All at Once are even being discussed in this context. Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley‘s taut, enraged performances in Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking are entirely respectable, but they’re arguably playing feminist constructs as opposed to rounded, relatable human beings.

Meanwhile the competition for the appealing alternate titles of of Martin McDoangh’s new film continues apace. My favorites are (a) Fingers (hat tip to James Toback’s 1978 film), (b) Five Finger Exercise or…what others?

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Serial killer sagas have always been hot tickets. I’ve liked exactly five — Manhunter, Mindhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en and Zodiac — but then I’m an outlier.

Jett and Cait are big fans of serial killer “product.” Netflix’s idiotically titled Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is “the ninth most popular English-language TV show of all time, with 56 million households having viewed all 10 episodes.” Against my better judgment I watched three or four episodes…later.

A friend had told me that The Good Nurse, a stand-alone, fact-based drama about the hospital serial killer Charles Cullen, was quite good so I caught it the other night in Manhattan. I was underwhelmed. Mystified even. It’s one of those films that you manage to endure. It’s certainly nothing to write home about. I began losing patience around the 40-minute mark, and then I was stuck for another 80.

It’s one of the darkest and dreariest looking films I’ve seen in ages (obviously intentional and quite the contrast as the dp, Jody Lee Lipes, shot Trainwreck and Manchester By The Sea).

All through it I was asking myself “who could possibly care about this glum, plodding little film?” The answer, of course, is that tens of millions will become instant fans, no matter how flat or slow it is. Simply because Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) murdered at least 40 hospital patients and perhaps hundreds of others with injections of insulin and dejoxin, etc. That’s all they care about.

Redmayne’s Cullen is a kind of soft-voiced, good-natured dolt…dullness incarnate until the very end. Jessica Chastain is Amy Loughren, a nurse who’d been fairly friendly with Cullen but later helped detectives get the goods on him.

The Danish-born director, Tobias Lindholm (A War), shoots Krysty Wilson-Cairns‘ script (based on Charles Graeher’s same-titled 2013 book) in a dry, chilly, grim fashion.

A friend called The Good Nurse “Fincheresque” but David Fincher would never direct a film this dull.

By the way, what other film set in a hospital focused on an unstable man who surreptitiously kills patients with overdoses of insulin and dijoxin? Paddy Chayefsky’s The Hospital (‘71).

Friendo #2: “Although it might have been taking artistic license, if I had been brought in to punch up The Good Nurse I would have suggested the following: Chastain’s character agrees to help the police only because she’s convinced Redmayne is innocent and wants to prove it to them. She’s then doubly horrified to learn the truth.”

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Prince Charles and Lady Diana were the same height — 5′ 10″ — but not so much in Season 5 in The Crown (Netflix, 11.9).

Dominic West, who plays Charles, stands six feet even while the stork-like Elizabeth Debicki tops him by three inches. The obvious solution would have been for West to wear elevator shoes. Apparently that option was discarded.

The previous four Crown episodes have always been strong, classy and well-sculpted, but after Spencer who among us doesn’t feel Diana’ed out?

“Like 1917 before it, and like the better films that continue to inspire a concentratedly grisly mode of war picture (the epochal Russian film Come and See is explicitly referenced at least once, as is the more recent, and more problematic, The Painted Bird), All Quiet on the Western Front is state-of-the-art in shoving your nose in realistic-seeming carnage and possibly inducing hearing damage in laying on the ear-splitting aural experience of a firefight.

“The in-the-trenches tracking shots that Stanley Kubrick crafted for Paths of Glory (a movie that culminated in a point that actually made sense, unlike this muddle) are now steady hand-held digital panoramas of exposed viscera and agonized writhing. Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning ‘war is hell’ into a ‘can you top this?’ competition.” — from Glenn Kenny’s 10.14 review.

Netflix will begin streaming Edward Berger‘s All Quiet on the Western Front on 10.28.22.

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But without street gangs or guns, and probably without a violent ending. Hanks’ Otto to new neighbor: “Ever notice how every once in a while you come across someone you shouldn’t be fucking with? That’s me”….not.
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Sony will release A Man Called Otto on 12.25. Produced by Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Rita Wilson, and directed by Marc Forster. Based on a 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove, directed by Hannes Holm. Shot earlier this year in Pittsburgh.

I for one really admired Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington‘s The Equalizer 2 (’16), and I have no problem with them making another one. We’re all cool, I’m presuming, with The Equalizer 3 currently filming on the Amalfi Coast — Atrani, Ravello, Minori. Bring it on, bruh.

There’s nothing wrong with being a respected, Sam Fuller-ish or Robert Aldrich-y hack who does genre films and efficiently at that**.

But it’s fair, surely, to ask if this might reflect upon the presumed prestige factor that some are attaching to Fuqua’s allegedly Oscar-calibre Emancipation (possibly “Fuqua’s best” according to Variety‘s Clayton Davis)? Runaway slave saga on one hand, whupass on the other…what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

** Although I hated, hated, HATED Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven.

It is my conviction that there are no awful discourses on Hollywood Elsewhere. Okay, now and then but mostly never. Even when the wokesters are repeating their broken-record bullshit (or, alternately, pleading with me to post only about movies and leave cultural politics out of it), there is always the eloquent, brilliantly phrased filmklassik ready to jump in at short notice.

It was around dusk and peaceful in the ancient section of Rome on 6.2.17. My Macbook Pro was sitting on a small round table on a narrow cobblestoned street. I was using the wifi from a cafe called Barnum Roma (Via del Pellegrino, 87, 00186 Roma, Italy), and for a moment I stopped and stood up and took a slow-pan video, and as God is my witness it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

It doesn’t matter how long my Barnum Roma time lasted (an hour or so) — what matters is how serene and in-the-pocket I felt when I was standing there. It still gets me off just to watch this.

I’ll always be a fan of Al Pacino‘s big speech at the end of The Devil’s Advocate, but Keanu Reeves makes a re-watch so difficult. He’s stuck with all the clunky lines, of course, but the yelling, the anger and denial and pulling out the gun with that dumb glare on his face….everything he says and does is truly terrible.

This tediously moralistic Taylor Hackford film is 25 years old now, and if you ask me Pacino’s John Milton was at least partly based upon Donald Trump. (The producers rented Trump’s apartment for a scene, I’ve read.) The screenwriters were Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy, but the maestro behind Pacino’s big soliloquy was Gilroy, or so I’ve always understood.