There has to be at least a short list of films that have great-sounding titles but are close to unwatchable. Such is In Like Flint, the 1967 James Coburn espionage spoof and sequel to Our Man Flint (’66). I can think of only two others: Things To Do In Denver When You;re Dead and Midnight in the Garden of Evil.

All ’60s spy spoofs suck horribly — the Flint films, Dean Martin‘s Matt Helm films, Get Smart, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Casino Royale (’67), the James Bond take-off with David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, etc.

In Like Flynt is a derivation of “In Like Flynn,”a 1940s slang term. The Wiki page says it means “having completed a goal or gained access as desired,” and that it’s “sometimes used to describe success in sexual seduction.”

Expanded: “The term is often believed to refer to movie star Errol Flynn. Flynn had a reputation for womanizing, consumption of alcohol and brawling. His freewheeling, hedonistic lifestyle caught up with him in November 1942 when two under-age girls, Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee, accused him of statutory rape. The trial took place in January and February 1943, and Flynn was cleared of the charges.

“According to etymologist Michael Quinion, the incident served to increase Flynn’s reputation as a hound, which led to the popular phrase ‘in like Flynn.’ Columnist Cecil Adams also examined the term’s origins and its relationship to Flynn. Many early sources attesting the phrase say it emerged as war slang during World War II.

That’s really terrific about Mindy McCready killing her late boyfriend David Wilson‘s dog before offing herself. McCready to pooch: “Ahh luv you, doggie, but I gotta die so I can join my fella and that means you gotta go too, poor fella. Yeah, sorry, I know…but it’ll be quick, I promise.”

The last dog I read about being killed due to its owner committing (or intending to commit) suicide was Blondi, Adolf Hitler‘s German Shepherd who was poisoned before Der Fuhrer and Eva Braun took cyanide. That’s nice company to be in, Mindy, if you’re reading this from purgatory.

Depression is an ugly bear that can take you straight to hell, all right, but some people greatly increase the likelihood of suicide by boozing heavily and keeping guns handy. That’s what McCready and Wilson (who also shot himself) did. Otherwise I’m sure they were fine, fine people.

In shooting herself McCready abandoned two sons — 6-year-old Zander and 10-month-old Zayne.

My only beef with these obviously sophisticated guys, who know their stuff cold, is that they’re hung up on films that walk, talk, look and act “serious” and “important.” And so they blow off Silver Linings Playbook, a film about Regular Joes that gets the whole “steaks, salads, cocktails” thing in 24-hour diners. And they also ignored Anna Karenina…not cool. Otherwise they have my respect. Sharp, intelligent analysis.

Oscar-predicting Harvard whiz kid Ben Zauzmer, who got 75% of his predictions correct last year, doesn’t give a hoot in hell for all this Emmanuelle Riva talk. He’s sticking with Jennifer Lawrence for Best Actress. He’s also predicting (a) Argo for Best Picture, Daniel Day Lewis for Best Actor, Tommy Lee Jones for Best Supporting Acto, and Anne Hathaway for Best Supporting Actress. Bens’ twitter handle is BensOscarMath.

Mark Caro‘s Os-Caro Quiz has been kicking Oscar buffs’ asses for 23 years. I went through it and was irked by all the research I had to do . I like movie quizzes that make me feel like I know everything. This made me feel like I don’t know enough. It vaguely depressed me but not really.

Scott Feinberg‘s Hollywood Reporter interview with Best Actress nominee Emmanuelle Riva has prompted a fresh assessment. I’m as moved by her acting in Amour as the next guy and I respect her body of work. I’ve always felt mesmerized by her erotic aura in Alain Resnais‘s Hiroshima Mon Amour, and I love the idea of an 85 year-old trooper not only being nominated but being spoken of as a possible winner. That, at least, would be a surprise in a ceremony that seems all too predictable right now.

But someone has to speak candidly about Riva’s acting in Amour. She gives a fine, unvarnished, honest-feeling performance, but what is it really? She’s playing a woman of her age going through — sadly, infuriatingly — what almost every 80-something or 90-something person goes through, and therefore in a certain sense she’s just skillfully and honestly delivering what she knows. Which is a bold and true thing. I just don’t find it levitational. To me her performance is a 7.5 or an 8.

What her character, Anne, goes through in Amour naturally invites profound sympathy (we all feel for our parents and grandparents going through similar trials) but Riva’s task is basically about conveying resignation and melancholia and, toward the end, pain, anger, humiliation and resolve.

Boil it down and praise for her performance is essentially a response to the fact that we all personally relate in this or that way, and the likely fact that Riva clearly knows whereof she acts and may quite possibly “be” Anne in this or that respect. (Though I hope not too much.)

I’m not trying to diminish her performance. It’s quite strong and impossible to dismiss. I’m just assessing it from a realistic perspective.

My somewhat hazy recollection of Howard Zieff‘s Hearts of the West (’75) is that (a) it was overly broad, obviously an attempt to engage the rubes, (b) its reliance on crude, on-the-nose behavior diminished the realism and dignity of the characters, and (c) I didn’t believe for one second that Jeff Bridges was any kind of writer — he struck me as an actor with insufficient verbal skills and not much education.

I’m mentioning this because Hearts of the West is playing at a currently running Film Comment film series, which is profiled in a 2.17 piece by N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis.

“Thanks to word leaking out of the New York WGA East show, anyone [at LA’s WGA award ceremony] with a Blackberry or iPhone knew that Argo and Zero Dark Thirty won their respective Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay awards long before the actual winners in Los Angeles even knew,” Deadline‘s Pete Hammond wrote last night. “The announcement of Argo‘s win came fully an hour and a half [before the LA announcement].

“It seems a shame that an awards ceremony has to be run like this,” Hammond laments. “Can’t we keep it a secret until the envelopes are opened on both coasts? C’mon, this is the social media age. Stuff leaks out fast. Let’s fix it.”

Obviously the WGA West and WGA East officers need to coordinate their ceremonies accordingly. But that was apparent with the advent of cell phones. The problem is either the WGA East announcing too early or the WGA West announcing too late. (Or both.) Either way it suggests that WGA honchos on both coasts share the same cluelessness about social media that currently plagues Republican bigwigs, as Robert Draper‘s 2.14 N.Y. Times Magazine article points out.

Going out on a limb, Hammond writes that Argo‘s Best Adapted Screenplay prize “pretty much seals the deal for this film” winning big at the Oscars. “The WGA votes were all in by Friday January 25th, just before the PGA and SAG coronations of Argo were announced…with Golden Globes, Critics Choice Movie Awards, PGA, DGA, SAG, BAFTA and now WGA major wins Argo is in just about as commanding a position as any film could possibly be on the cusp of marching into the Academy Awards.”

Hammond will never say it, but the “sympathy for snubbed Ben Affleck” factor that produced surprise and exhilaration following Argo‘s BFCA/Critics Choice and Golden Globe wins has deflated into a kind of slumbering, heavy-lidded depression.

We all want something electric to happen at the Oscars, the prime example being the surprise wins by The Pianist at the end of the 2003 Oscar ceremony. But that possibility is now almost completely out the window. Where is the exhilaration in Ang Lee winning Best Director? The only possible jolt would be Robert DeNiro overcoming the apparent advantage held by Lincoln‘s Tommy Lee Jones following his SAG win by taking the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Hammond pooh-pohs Mark Boal’s WGA Original Screenplay win for Zero Dark Thirty, as a harbinger of Oscar success “since WGA rules banned Oscar-nominated scripts like Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained and Michael Haneke‘s Amour, both front-running Oscar entries. This is still a wide open race at the Academy Awards but the WGA imprimatur gives Boal a nice boost.”

If Amour wins the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, okay….c’est la vie. But a Tarantino/Django win would be, from my perspective, appalling.

Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty screenplay has won the Writers Guild of America’s award for Best Original Screenplay. This may or may not have been intended as a rebuke to the Stalinists who tried to take ZD30 down with charges that Boal and Kathryn Bigelow‘s film endorses torture, but it feels like one from this corner. This is the kind of recognition that this film needed and richly deserved. Congrats to Biggy-Boal, Megan Ellison and everyone else who gave their all to this film. Presumably this paves the way for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar win.

Earlier: Chris Terrio‘s Argo screenplay won the WGA’s Best Adapted Screenplay award. Jesus, this is boring. In the wake of this Bilge Ebiri tweeted the following: “Congrats, Hollywood award-givers. In a year with so many amazing films, you’ve managed to form a consensus around the merely okay yet again.” Kris Tapley replies: “It’s so silly to expect otherwise. ‘Generally agreeable’ wins in a competition where so many are polled.”

On 11.15.12, The Independent‘s Anthony Quinn wrote the following: “A film called Amour sounds like a date movie, and I suppose Michael Haneke‘s drama could be one — but only if it were your very last date on earth.” After Sasha Stone told him that Amour was her idea of a date movie, Jett took his girlfriend, Caitlin, to see it. You can imagine the effect it had.
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