It’s a critical cliche to praise a performance along the lines of “this isn’t acting but a channeling…a complete psychological and biological submission.” This certainly describes Christian Bale‘s must-see performance as former vice-president Dick Cheney in Adam McKay‘s Vice — no question. But I’m persuaded that even in this realm Bale has gone above and beyond.

I haven’t felt the same kind of chills since Robert De Niro‘s Oscar-winning performance as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (’80), except this time I felt a deeper recognition and…I don’t know, something extra.

Mainly because I feel I know Dick Cheney pretty well, certainly in terms of his appearance and voice and laid-back, Prince-of-Darkness attitude, and I wasn’t at all familiar with Jake La Motta when I first saw Raging Bull 38 years ago. I was deeply impressed (who wasn’t?) by De Niro’s coarse, bellowing Bronx-Italian shtick — that primal beastliness that he’d obviously drilled into, body and soul. But experiencing Bale’s Cheney was, for me, slightly more of an “oh, wow” or a “holy moley” thing.

It’s like De Niro’s La Motta was Elvis Presley in the mid ’50s, and now Bale’s Cheney is the Beatles during their first American tour, and De Niro has just sent Bale a cable saying “okay, the torch has been passed — I had a nice long run as the king of wholly transformative weight-gain performances, and now you’re the standard-bearer…hats off, due respect.”

There’s always a slight gap between knowing what a certain famous person looked, acted and sounded like and how this or that actor registers when trying to make a performance happen. There’s always that “uh-huh…yeah, pretty close, good work” kind of acknowledgment. And sometimes not so much. Every time an actor has tried to portray John F. Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood, Greg Kinnear, Cliff Robertson, William Devane, Martin Sheen, Caspar Phillipson, etc.), the chasm has been distracting if not irritating. But not in the matter of Bale-as-Cheney. Bale is up to something else.

You can say “hold on, calm down…this is the exact same current that I got from Charlize Theron‘s Aileen Wuornos in Monster, Bruno Ganz‘s Hitler in Downfall, Ben Kingsley‘s lead performance in Gandhi, Meryl Streep-as-Maggie Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Helen Mirren in The Queen,” etc.

Maybe, maybe not. All I can say is that I felt the appliance of skill and technique with each of these. Plus the presence of makeup or prosthetics. On top of which, as mentioned, I didn’t know the real-life characters as well as I do Cheney.

This Bananas scene used to be an amusing little hoot. Wait…who chuckled? I heard someone chuckling or at least tittering. Who did that? C’mon, fess up.

A few hours ago The Hollywood Reporter posted a Gary Baum-authored profile of former Woody Allen girlfriend Christina Engelhardt, and more precisely her eight-year relationship with the director-writer-actor-comedian that began in late ’76 and ended in ’84.

She was Allen’s secret sexual partner between the ages of 17 (although they first met when she was 16) and 24. No public dates, no dinners at Elaine’s — just furtive assignations at his Fifth Avenue apartment.

Engelhardt was one of two inspirations for Mariel Hemingway‘s Tracy character in Manhattan; the other was Stacey Nelkin, who hooked up with Allen when she was attending Stuyvesant High School in ’77 or thereabouts. Engelhardt tells Baum that she felt badly about how her Allen relationship came through in the film; it hurt to consider how Allen had objectified her or kept her at a distance.

But think about it — Tracy is the most centered and least neurotic or deceptive character in Manhattan.

Engelhardt’s Allen relationship was unequal and certainly exploitive on his end, but show me a relationship between any famous film-industry hotshot and any “civilian” that wasn’t similarly unfair or lopsided, especially in the context of the ’70s and ’80s when a whole different set of rules and assumptions were in effect.

Plus the Allen alliance opened a few doors. After they went their separate ways Engelhardt became a kind of half-employee and half-platonic muse for Federico Fellini. She’s currently working for producer Robert Evans and living in the Beverly Hills flats.

Baum’s article is smoothly written, carefully phrased, seemingly well-researched and for the most part fair-minded.

But at the same time a tad clueless. Because it applies a #MeToo filter to a story that happened during a time when urban upscale lah-lahs were frolicking in an almost I, Claudius-like culture that in some ways was more sexually impulsive and freewheeling and live-as-let-live than anything happening today. Which doesn’t seem quite fair.

The idea, at least on the part of Baum’s THR editor, seems to have been to “get” Allen by furthering the #MeToo-linked narrative that he used to be a manipulative and to some extent unscrupulous fellow who used his fame and power to get what he wanted from women. But Engelhardt doesn’t exactly cooperate with this goal. “I’m not attacking Woody,” she tells Baum. “This is not ‘bring down this man.’ I’m talking about my love story. This made me who I am. I have no regrets.”

Engelhardt was right in the thick of things when Allen began a somewhat committed relationship with Mia Farrow in ’80 or thereabouts. I’m using the term “somewhat” because Woody, Mia and Christine enjoyed a menage a trois thing for a while. Baum: “Despite the initial shock of jealousy, Engelhardt says she grew to like Farrow over the course of the ‘handful’ of three-way sex sessions that followed at Allen’s penthouse as they smoked joints and bonded over a shared fondness for animals.”

Earlier today, in a piece called “The Year Jimmy Carter Went Down,” I wrote that Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning Ordinary People “could probably never be made today, and if someone were to make it anyway it would get hammered for dwelling in its own secluded realm, a lack of diversity, a portrait of white-bread grief and neuroticism, etc.”

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

For now, name recognition is the only consideration. Joe and Bernie naturally have the edge in that department. That’s all that’s going on.

Let’s say Todd Field‘s In The Bedroom had never opened in ’01 and was instead released a couple of months ago with, say, an aged-up Matt Damon in the Tom Wilkinson role and an aged-up Jennifer Garner in the Sissy Spacek role. Would it now be (a) the leading front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar, (b) a hanging-in-there Best Picture contender, diminished in part because it’s a little too Maine-y, or (c) a respected small-town drama that, like First Reformed, is expected to do a lot better with the Spirit awards than the Oscars?

Best Picture: If Beale Street Could Talk. Best Director: You Were Never Really Here‘s Lynne Ramsay. Best Actor: John C. Reilly, Stan & Ollie. Best Actress: Can You Ever Forgive Me‘s Melissa McCarthy. Best Supporting Actor: Can You Ever Forgive Me‘s Richard E. Grant. Best Supporting Actress: If Beale Street Could Talk‘s Regina King. Best Animated Feature: Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs. Best Foreign Language Film: Shoplifters.

Two days ago Clint Eastwood‘s The Mule opened in 2588 situations and earned a not-bad $17,210,000, for a $6550 average. If it manages to triple this amount by the end of its domestic run, it’ll have $50M in the till.

It could do better than that. Ten years ago Clint’s somewhat similar Gran Torino opened wide (2808 theatres) to the tune of $29,484,388, or an average of $10,500 — a tad less than double what The Mule has done. Gran Torino concluded with a domestic tally of $148,095,302. If The Mule manages roughly half of this, the concluding domestic figure will be roughly $75K. But I doubt it’ll get there.

The Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings are only 62% and 58%, respectively.

You can chalk up some of the negativity to the p.c. complaints, as Clint’s character shares some racially-insensitive comments. Film Yap’s Chris Lloyd called it “a cross between a Faustian tragedy and a Greatest Generation road trip comedy…like a fantasy safari for Trump voters.” See?

From my own 12.12 review: “The Mule is Clint’s finest since Gran Torino…a modest, nicely handled film about family, aloofness, guilt and facing one’s own nature…a plain-spoken, well-ordered saga of a guy coming to terms with his failures as a man and a father — a selfishly-inclined fellow who’s always preferred work over family, etc. It’s an entirely decent effort in this respect, and a well-structured one to boot.”

Presumably a fair number of HE regulars have seen it. Reactions?

A Criterion Bluray of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale‘s ‘ I Want To Hold Your Hand pops on 3.26.19. Set during the Beatles’ first visit to the U.S. in February ’64, it’s a screwball farce about several kids trying to slip into the Plaza Hotel while the Beatles were staying there and/or score tickets to their first-ever performance on Ed Sullivan Show.

Screwball farce is a very tough thing to get right, I’ve always heard. I’m not calling I Want To Hold Your Hand a “bad” film, exactly, but so much of the material doesn’t “land” that it’s exhausting after a while — it makes you feel like you’re on a comedic forced march. The tone feels pushed and agitated.

After catching an all-media screening in March of ’78 or thereabouts I distinctly remember saying to myself “good God…not seeing that one again.” The word must have gotten out because it flopped commercially — cost $2.8 million to make, earned $1.9 million in ticket sales.

18 months later I became a huge fan of Zemeckis and Gale’s Used Cars, which had a similar farcical tone but also a much sharper script. And funnier performances — Kurt Russell, Jack Warden, Gerrit Graham, Frank McRae, et. al.

I Want To Hold Your Hand‘s mostly female cast includes Nancy Allen, Susan Kendall Newman (Paul’s daughter), Theresa Saldana and Wendie Jo Sperber. The nasal-voiced Eddie Deezen is the stand-out, I suppose, but like everyone else he overdoes the hyper. Deezen’s best all-time performance happened five years later in John Badham‘s War Games, in which he played the spazzy “Mr. Potato Head” — see after the jump.

If the Academy’s expanded Best Picture nomination process (resulting in five to eight or nine nominees) were in effect in 1980/’81 and if the New Academy Kidz groupthink view that “exceptional genre films are award-worthy” had been in effect, it’s reasonable to presume that the following eight films would have been Best Picture contenders: Breaker Morant, Coal Miner’s Daughter, The Elephant Man, The Empire Strikes Back, Melvin and Howard, Ordinary People, Raging Bull and The Stunt Man.

No offense but I don’t believe that Fame and Private Benjamin — a pair of diverting, female-empowerment entertainments — would have been considered worthy of Best Picture consideration. Private Benjamin is the better of the two, I suppose, but I’m not sure that’s saying much. I saw it once and have never felt an urge to revisit.

If I’d been an Academy member marking my preferential ballot back then, I would have put Martin Scorsese‘s Raging Bull at #1 because it’s a blunt tool that nonetheless delivers delicacy, tragedy and the worst kind of aching, lonely-man anguish. Among the Best Picture hotties it was the most glamorously unglamorized, the least formulaic and the most against-the-usual-grain contender (raw, crude, earthy…the Florida jail-cell primal scream scene alone), the most flavorful (“I’m not an animal, I’m not that bad”, “Defeats its own purpose,” “I dunno whether to fuck him or fight him”) and the most…I don’t know, the most face-slappy or gut-punchy.

And I would have put Bruce Beresford‘s Breaker Morant as my #2. A Vietnam-metaphor drama about politicians and the military elite sticking it to rank-and-file soldiers in order to save their own necks — a kin of Paths of Glory (which at the time had been released 23 years earlier) and an equally-strong indictment. Arguably the finest hour of Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown and Jack Thompson.

My #3 would have been Robert Redford‘s Ordinary People. By today’s standards it would probably be called a “white people movie”, and could probably never be made today, and if someone were to make it anyway it would get hammered for dwelling in its own secluded realm, a lack of diversity, a portrait of white-bread neuroticism, etc.

I know that for a lot of people 1980 was a Raging Bull-vs.-Ordinary People year, but they’re closer in spirit that many would admit. Ordinary People was, in its own way, almost as full of anger and push-back, refrigerator-punching rage as the Scorsese-De Niro film. Except for the self-loathing “God hates me” factor, Raging Bull has never affected anyone emotionally — not really. Certainly no one I know, or, you know, anyone who parks their car in the HE garage. Okay, the jail-cell scene gets people.

My #4 would have been The Empire Strikes Back, and my #5 would have Melvin and Howard.

The remaining trio, in this order: Coal Miner’s Daughter (the third Best Picture contender that year to pass along a female-empowerment saga), The Stunt Man and The Elephant Man (i.e., primarily a production design effort).

Now I’m suddenly in the mood to stream Breaker Morant and Coal Miner’s Daughter. I love Tommy lee Jones in the latter — “Three ways to go in this town…coal mine, moonshine or move on down the line.”

Last night the American Cinematheque Egyptian screened William Friedkin‘s To Live and Die in L.A. (’85) and Ivan Passer‘s Cutter’s Way. Friedkin’s film has improved over the years — I realized this after watching the Bluray a year or two ago. William Petersen‘s William Chance is still a reckless sociopath, but he somehow seems less over-the-top, less of a bludgeoner than he did 33 years ago. Because society has undergone a coarsening, a degradation process since the Reagan era.

But I can’t stand Cutter’s Way anymore. I re-watched it after John Hurt‘s death and had to shut it off. Every engaging film requires viewers to invest in the main characters at least somewhat, but Hurt and Jeff Bridges are playing such sputtering, saliva-spewing losers. Not to mention the singular possessive title, which is a no-no ’round these parts. As I explained last September, the implication of a singular possessive title is that “the main character will be some kind of willful, egoistic, manipulative, obsessive type, and who wants to spend two hours with an asshole?”

If I’d been there last night I probably wouldn’t been able to focus on anything Friedkin or Kusama said because of a huge visual distraction. By which I mean they were both wearing sneakers with white midsoles, a 21st Century shoe design that I’ve previously described as “whitesides.” As I explained last month, walking around with a pair of whitesides equals instant social discrediting. Posted on 11.11.18: “White midsoles are about as 100% outre as it gets right now. There are so many different shoe styles, textures, color combos, tints and side-colors out there, but if you choose whitesides you’re no better than someone who wears Crocs. I’m not trying to be some kind of judgmental Torquemada but whitesides really don’t make it.”

Tiffany Haddish, Michelle Wolf, Chris Hemsworth, Hannah Gadsby, Rami Malek, Michael Strahan, Rachel Brosnahan, Sarah Silverman, Allison Janney, Terry Crews, Kanye West, Rosanna Barr, Matthew McConaughey, Ellen Degeneres…none of ’em. Bill Hader…seriously. He’d be perfect. Oh, that’s right, sorry…guys are out. Has to be a woman. Check.