A month ago I briefly reviewedJeff Pope‘s Archie, a four-part Britbox miniseries about the emotionally and psychologically fraught Cary Grant. I didn't like it much, but after watching the final two episodes I was struck by a curious observation.
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“I’ve made thuh preservationuharrAmerican democracy thuh central issue of my Presidency…agh believe in free and fair elections, the right to vote fairly and tuh have your vote counted…” — Joe Biden‘s opening words in new campaign ad.
It’s fair to say that this 60-second ad is primarily aimed at diverse rainbow types.
Until the one-third mark all the sympathetic faces are non-white. Footage of white, Confederate-flag-carrying yokels who marched in Charlottesville and during the Jan. 6th insurrection are shown between :12 and :18. A neutral-mannered 70something white bumblefuck type (i.e, blue plaid shirt) appears at the 19-second mark; another aging, white-bearded bumblefuck voter with a Home Depot baseball cap appears at the 24-second mark.
We’re shown a blonde Anglo Saxon female (40ish) with a ballot covering her face at the 40-second mark. The 1945 Iwo Jima guys (including Native American Ira Hayes) appear at the 52-second mark. But no white male Millennials and Zoomers, or none that I’ve noticed. And no middle-aged, beefy-faced white guys at all, most of whom are presumed to be Trump or RFK, Jr. voters.
At the 48-second mark Biden says, “That’s our soul…we are the United States Uhmerica.” He wanted to say “of” but it didn’t quite happen, and the ad guys decided against looping it in.
In his latest THR Oscar forecast columnScott Feinberg is claiming that PastLives helmer Celine Song is a more broadly popular Best Director nominee than PoorThings’ YorgosLanthimos, TheHoldovers’ Alexander Payne and Maestro’s BradleyCooper.
This is insanity! What kind of woke-ass, gender-focused sewing circle is Feinberg having tea with?
PastLives is a nicelyassembled but unsatisfyingrelationshipfilm that doesn’t do the thing or bring it home (i.e., in crude terms it doesn’t let you come). It has been written off as a decent try by sensible industry folk, and yet Feinberg is allowing himself to be fiddle-fiddled by the A24 safe-space mafia…the identity fanatics who are whispering “we need a woman of color in the mix.”
I just want to come clean and admit that despite my projecting a devotional film buff profile all my life or at least since the ‘80s, I never got around to seeing Carl Dreyer‘s The Passion of Joan of Arc (’28) until last night.
But I finally went there, man, and now I’m “experienced” in the JimiHendrix sense of the term.
An English-subtitled version of the definitve director’s cut (i.e., the 1981 Oslo version) became available for free public domain streaming on 1.1.24, you see, and that’s what I watched. Lying in bed, MacBook Pro, best headphones.
Good God, what a lapel-grabbing, no-way-out masterpiece! Right away it leaps out at you and says “stop scrolling and whatever the hell else you’re doing and grim up and give it up and watch this, will you?”
I knew right away it was made by a genius…a no-bullshit artist from the same general gene pool as Eisenstein, Murnau, Fincher, Eggers, Kubrick, Ford, Bresson, Fellini, Kurosawa, Scorsese, Powell.
The incessant close-ups, the feeling of Dreyer being in total control, the penetrating focus, the brilliant use of montage, the tracking shots, the sets (painted pink so as to stand out against the white sky), the anguish, the purity, the pain and the cruelty.
What a bleeding, bllistering, open-hearted titular performance by ReneeJeanFalconetti.
And the cinematography by RuolphMate, who also shot ForeignCorrespondent and Gilda and directed D.O.A., WhenWorldsCollide and The300Spartans (a decent sword-and-sandal epic).
I can’t stand tapping this out on the iPhone with the car running…morelater.
We haven't seen much snow in the northeast recently, and the odds are that with global warming and all we're not going to see much of the stuff from here on. Spotty, half-assed snowfalls at best.
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Otherwise all I can say is that (a) Zac Efron sure looks better without the buffed-up wrestler bod and that godawful Prince Valiant hair, and (b) award–wise Colman Domingo, due respect, isn’t happening,
Faced with a new round of accusations over plagiarism in her scholarly work and despite the rumored back-channel intercession of Barack Obama, Harvard University's first Black president, Claudine Gay, has resigned.
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