“…give me your real estate broker’s number…we don’t live there.”

Real clarity here from @SRuhle

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— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) September 21, 2024

I haven’t yet seen The Brutalist or Joker: Folie a Deux, and my fingers are crossed for A Complete Unknown…go, James Mangold and Timothee Chalamet!

But there’s no question that Anora, Conclave, All We Imagine As Light and A Real Pain are first-rate knockouts and likely Best Picture nominees.

So if you want to think hopefully or liberally that’s seven that appear likely to make the cut early next year. Okay, eight if you include the better-than-decent Emilia Perez, which has nonetheless been overpraised by the whoo-whoo brigade.

I’ve no faith in Gladiator II, certainly not with the dreaded Paul Mescal in the lead. It’s my humble opinion that Ridley Scott’s peak years are behind him.

Yes, I admired Dune: Part Two but let’s not get carried away.

A formidable cinema year always has at least 15 if not 20 films that qualify as very good to excellent. As I’ve just indicated, it’s a push to name more than ten 2024 films that make the grade.

Forget The Substance. It’s a passable Cronenbergian social-satire horror flick, but guys like David Ehrlich need to calm down.

2007 boasted 25 top-of-the-liners. 1971 saw the release of 27 grade-A releases, and 55 if you want to be gracious about it. Face it — ‘24 has proved to be a weak sister.

Sasha Stone‘s latest roster:

A decades-old Manhattan story from producer Mike Kaplan was posted a day or two ago by renowned film scholar and book author Joseph McBride.

HE to McBride: Fascinating story but what year did this happen? Or at least what decade? The ‘60s or 70s? Were they on the Fifth Avenue downtown bus? Lexington or Third Avenue? The great and confident Lillian Gish felt intimidated by an odd bus moment or by Garbo or what? How long were they together on that bus? How many average folks were with them? Was it raining?

This story cries out for more detail!

I’m thinking of Tom Cruise’s Collateral story about that dead guy doing laps around Los Angeles on a bus or metro car and nobody noticing. We live alone, and we’re gonna die alone…take it or leave it.

This George Clooney–Brad Pitt programmer is obviously a shoulder-shrugger.

Several weeks ago I equated Wolfs with a marginally soothing plate of warm waffles, but that 73% RT rating is concerning. If a movie has a problem or two it’ll end up with a score in the mid-to-low 80s, but a low 70s rating means “uh-oh.”

Plus it’s not playing in Fairfield or Westchester counties — you have to catch it in the city this weekend or not at all. Apple will begin the streaming on 9.27.

After seeing Sing Sing early last June I didn’t have the courage to say what I really thought about its Best Picture chances. I said it would “probably end up with a Best Picture nom…maybe.”

Be honest — the words “probably” and “maybe” are sometimes squishy chickebshit terms used by equivocating jellyfish.

What I wrote may have been an accurate assessment of where Oscar pundits and industry voters might be coming from as the second half of 2024 unfolds, but I chickened out by not saying what I really thought, which is that achey-heart, leaky-eyed Colman Domingo delivers a stand-out performance but the movie more or less just lies there. It’s a well-intended shoulder shrugger, and everyone knows this.

9.19 World of Reel comment thread:

HE to Rufus: Maestro is a masterful, one-of-a-kind biopic. Bradley Cooper tried so hard, achieved so much. Portions are dazzling, swoon-worthy, genius-level. Carey Mulligan’s performance is for the ages.There’s something deeply wrong with anyone calling it “a complete dud.” In all honesty, YOU’RE a complete dud in this respect. Throw yourself upon the church steps, weeping, and beg God the Father for forgiveness.

Over the decades many of the Kennedy men (Joe Sr., JFK, Teddy) have been hounds, and RFK Jr. has been no exception.

But nothing apparently “happened” between himself and New York‘s doghouse-dwelling Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi (no hugging, no hand jobs, no lips or tongues). They just…what, text-flirted? This, in any event and in the view of her employers, constitutes a serious breach of journalistic ethics on her part.

There’s more to this than what’s been said. Don’t reporters and profilers routinely try to get famous people to lower their guard by vibe-flirting with them? (Not with any sexual intent but with a charm-school attitude.) Don’t famous people routinely try to get journalists to “fall” for them, so to speak, in order to be more favorably profiled?

New York magazine statement sent late yesterday to THR‘s Carly Thomas and Katie Kilkenny:

“Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.”

In HE’s book, a “personal” relationship alludes to fluids.

THR: “New York Magazine didn’t name Kennedy, but people familiar with the matter told Status‘ Oliver Darcy that Nuzzi did not proactively disclose her alleged relationship with Kennedy (Darcey clled it “inappropriate”) and that the magazine only recently learned of it. Darcy reported that the alleged relationship started around the new year, after Nuzzi’s November 2023 profile on the former presidential candidate.

In the comment thread that followed yesterday’s piece about Netflix’s official launch of Karla Sofia Gascón’s Best Actress campaign for Emilia Perez, HE reader “NPalma759”, seemingly irked, posted a question:

HE reply: A Best Supporting Actress Oscar is less of a big deal…it’s a little more elastic or experimental or in some cases a “here I am” greeting-card thing. Miyoshi Umeki for Sayonara…Donna Reed for From Here to Eternity…that line of country.

A Best Actress Oscar is or can be monumental, at least in voters’ heads. When a name-brand actress wins one, it can be fairly stated and without hyperbole “now she belongs to the ages.”

Young Jennifer Lawrence entered that hallowed realm when she deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar for her passionate eccentric nutter in Silver Linings Playbook, performed when she was only 21. But Lawrence scored like a champ, and in the same guns-blazing way that young Mikey Madison (25) managed for her lead role in Anora. Madison is fated to win the Best Actress Oscar early next year or I’m a monkey’s uncle.

A Best Supporting Actress Oscar is fine and fully noteworthy, but it’s “not quite Ivy League” in the Richard Masur sense of that term — it’s something else — call it a career launcher (Mercedes McCambridge in All The King’s Men), a respectable milestone, a you-go-girl salute…it can be a tribute to a wowser blast-off performance by a respected veteran (Beatrice Straight in Network) or a passing fancy applause for a newcomer…an eye-opener, a cluck-cluck, an approval-meter surge.

In this sense I would’ve been fine with (or would have at least understood) Lily Gladstone’s Molly Burkhart performance taking the 2023 Best Supporting Actress Oscar. I would have felt badly for the most deserving winner, The Holdovers’ Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who in fact won) but I would’ve gone along with it.

You can’t just elbow your way into the Best Actress realm as a strategic woke poker player…you have to show a tiny bit of reverence for the heart and soul histories…if you believe in Movie Catholicism and if you’re part of that dwindling fraternity that believes (or once believed) that movie theatres are churches, you really shouldn’t use a Best Actress Oscar campaign as a means to promote or validate or celebrate a formerly marginalized identity. It lowers the property values when you do that. It’s called “gaming the system.”

Variety’s Clayton Davis ran the exclusive at 9:55 am Pacific: Netflix will campaign Emilia Perez’s Karla Sofia Gascon for Best Actress. Because Karla’s titular character is trans, and so is Gascon herself.

Does anyone remember Fred Zinnemann’s Julia (‘77)? Vanessa Redgrave played the titular character, but she was campaigned for Best Suppprting actress because…wait for it…she played a supporting role. And she won.

Steve McQueen‘s Blitz is obviously a curio — McQueen imposing a “presentism” take upon the London blitz — i.e., German bombing between 9.7.40 to 5.11.41. McQueen is too good of a filmmaker for the end result to be mediocre, but given the avoidance of Venice and Telluride one presumes it’ll probably underwhelm on some level. No reviews until the big London Film Festival debut (10.9.24). Limited theatrical bookings on 11.1., followed hy streaming on Apple TV+ on 11.22.24.

HE’s very first thought about this trailer for Bong Joon-ho‘s obviously problematic Mickey 17 (Warner Bros., 1.31.25) was “whoa…RPatz is starting to look 40ish…38 years old, no longer a spring chicken.”

My second thought was “why is Warner Bros. insisting on releasing this weird-ass movie in January?” Answer: They’re not releasing it as much as dumping it. It’s probably too broadly eccentric and cult filmy, and the distribution team is scared. Bong Joon-ho has overplayed his alleged genius hand, and now the chickens have come home to roost.

My own humble opinion: This is karmic payback for that scene in Parasite in which the drunken con artists let that fired maid inside the home during the rainstorm. The Movie Godz said “Bong has to pay for that, and so what’s happened to Mickey 17 is only fair.”

Where exactly is the “universality” in several sad, lonely, frustrated Texans listening to Hank Williams and making do with life in a small, one-horse town that’s on the verge of extinction?

Yes, Peter Bogdanovich conveyed compassion for Cloris Leachman‘s character while Mike Nichols allegedly conveyed a certain contempt for Anne Bancroft Mrs. Robinson, but how or why does that make Bogdanovich’s film better?

I’m thinking of that “let’s talk about art” / “let’s not talk at all” hotel room scene between Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman. Raw, scalding and quite sad.

TLPS is slower, artier and more poignant and windswept, okay, but Nichols’ film connected with tens of millions back in the day. It touched a major nerve — strongly echoing what boomers felt about their materially driven, greatest generation parents and their mid ‘60s values — while TLPS was…I don’t know, more solemn and lethargic.

I adore Ben Johnson’s “old times” soliloquy at the fishing pond. But then, of course, Sam the Lion succumbs to a stroke.

Where are all these residents of Anarene, Texas headed? How much more humdrum and downish can their lives get? What’s life without a dream, right? What are they gonna do, commit mass suicide with grape juice cyanide in paper cups?