Damn few actors have the innate ability to make this kind of dialogue — “Put down the magazine before you hurt yourself…okay, Harold?” — land as well. This plus a just-right expression of world-weary “God help me.” Bill Murray owns this attitude. He coined it. If you insist on beating him with birch branches along with a time-out, fine. We all understand that paying just over $100K to the Being Mortal production assistant was just for openers, and that the real punishment starts now. But don’t excommunicate him. He’s Bill Murray, for chrissake. He understands everything, has been everywhere, carries the whole equation in his head, etc.

“I guess we have to ask ‘what is the point of any of this?” Because activists are imposing their ideology on nearly every corner of the industry, making film awards — and films in general — something other than what their original purpose has always been. And honestly, what are these awards going to be but a ceremony inside of a devout religion?” — Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, posted on 8.23.22.

10.12.22: Wokesters within the Los Angeles Film Critics Association have decided to follow the lead of the Spirit and Gotham Awards by abandoning gender-based acting awards.

When the LAFCA foodies vote in December they’ll hand out two Best Lead Performance trophies (either gender or gender-neutral) and two awards for Best Supporting Performance (ditto).

LAFCA motive #1 is to emphasize how different L.A. wokester culture is from tens of millions of Joe and Jane Popcorn movie lovers in every corner of the nation, who don’t give a shit about any of this.

LAFCA motive #2: “Non-woke film fans may love the idea of gender-based acting categories for now, but we are leading the way to a bold and brave new realm…henceforth we are living in a gender-neutral world, whether you like it or not. Wake up and woke up and join us…it’s a joyful revolution!”

Here’s a portion of my reaction to the Spirit Award announcement, which I posted six or seven weeks ago -/ obviously the same deal.

“I will say this straight and clear and true: If the Academy decides to go gender-neutral with the Oscar acting awards, the eclipse will be total and absolute, and I mean beyond the level of anything dreamt of by Michelangelo Antonioni …culturally and aesthetically, the Oscars will have slit their own throats.

“Which award-giving org will succumb next to glorious trans fluidity-slash-equality? If the gender-neutral advocates within BAFTA, the Academy, the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice and the guilds…if they manage to eliminate gender-based acting awards, Average Joes and Janes will simply walk away and stay away…they will raise their fists and voices and say “stop this insanity, stop this bullshit…men are men and women are women and they generate different moods and expressions and ways of living and processing the ups and downs of living…stop this bullshit and come down to earth.”

Visual economy is always a great thing, but it can be dazzling when a single shot (or a brief sequence) portrays a character’s basic attitude.

There’s a moment near the beginning of Louis Malle‘s Damage (’92), a masterful drama about an obsessive, self-destructive affair between a British politician (Jeremy Irons) and his son’s fiance (Juliette Binoche), that exhibits this.

Irons walks into his tres elegant, two-story home in Hampstead Heath at the end of the day and tells his wife (Miranda Richardson) about a meeting with the Prime Minister. The maid is fixing dinner, he’s feeling smug and successful and all is generally well. He makes himself a drink and strolls into the nearly living room. He take a sip and looks around, and the expression on his face says everything — unfulfilled, unchallenged, drained.

Malle doesn’t dwell on Irons’ face. He shows it to us for maybe three or four seconds, and then fade to black. It tells us all we need to know.

Can anyone think of other films and other moments in which something essential or fundamental about a character is explained in a single brief shot?

[Initially posted on 5.30.17] Tatiana and I are staying in a stone cottage on a wine farm called Azienda Agricola Caparsa (47 Via Caparsa), near Radda in Chianti. (Luca Guadagnino says there are so many English who live or rent in this region that some call it “Chiantishire.”)

The owner, Paolo Cianferoni, is a dead ringer for Steven Spielberg if you take away the beard, and de-age Spielberg by ten years.

Paolo told me yesterday that original Sideways author Rex Pickett stayed here some years back. So between Pickett, Spielberg and myself the place has a definite Hollywood aroma.

Paolo’s electric bolt fence is more or less dead center in this photo. You can’t see it all that clearly, I realize, but does that matter? It’s there, okay? I’m telling you.

I told Paolo that Tatiana and I were planning to hike over to Radda in Chianti, and so he pointed to a shortcut path through his vineyard. He then pointed to a metal gate at the top of a far-off incline. The gate was electrified, he said, to keep out deer and whatnot, but I just needed to open it carefully and watch where I step.

So we got to the gate and I delicately opened it — no shock. Thinking I was in the clear, I stepped through and, being a bit sweaty and breath-starved, missed the fact that a thick, coiled, half-camoflauged wire was lying in the dirt three or four inches from the gate. My ankles touched it and a split second later I was James Cagney at the end of Angels With Dirty Faces. My body convulsed. I felt as if my kidneys had been punched by a guy with brass knuckles. The electric current was mild (i.e., high enough to dissuade animals without killing them), but it definitely rocked my attitude.

For a while there I felt like (a) a huge dumbass.  I actually still feel this way.

(l.) Caparsa vineyard owner Paolo Cinaferoni; (r.) Steven Spielberg.

Patty Duke won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 1962, but who even watches Arthur Penn‘s The Miracle Worker these days? But everyone knows Angela Lansbury‘s performance in The Manchurian Candidate, Duke’s chief rival that year.

She played Eleanor Iselin, the scheming wife of a rightwing, Joseph McCarthy-like senator who’s actually a tool of the Chinese-Russian Communists, and one of the most deliciously evil villains to grace the screen in the 20th Century.

Lansbury should have won the prize. It’s hard to find a hardcore movie fan today who doesn’t relish her performance. Eleanor Iselin is not only demonic but neurotic (braying voice, temper issues, vindictive), and each of her lines are layered with just the right amount of darkly comic icing. Plus she conveys a hint of sexual rapport with (and even lust for) her brainwashed son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey).

Ms. Lansbury died today at age 96, just five days short of her 97th birthday.

It broke my heart when I learned that Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight, 10.21) wouldn’t be screening at Telluride ’22. I knew it would be at least pretty good, and I couldn’t figure why Telluride hadn’t grabbed it. Probably some Venice Film Festival bullshit.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been hearing it’s a lot more than “pretty good”, and that it might even be a Fabelmans conqueror. And now that I’m hearing that a fair number of critics believe that Banshees might actually win the Best Picture Oscar, my heart is still broken as I won’t see it until 10.20, or the day before it opens.

Critic friendo #1: “I’m hearing that the movie that’s going to win Best Picture is the Martin McDonagh film. I’ve just heard it here and there. People adore this film.” Critic friendo #2: “Don’t miss Banshees…it’s A-plus. It made me realize how (1) filmmakers in America don’t really know how to tell good stories because they all want to write their own scripts and they’re not great writers. And (2) I’d forgotten how powerful a great story can actually be, and why they matter so much. McDonagh is such a great fucking writer.”

Critic friendo #2 response to Best Picture buzz: “I have to agree with that. Also Best Original Screenplay.”

The new Women Talking trailer tells you it’s a quality-level thing for smart women…grim, somber, articulate, muted palette, lotsa dialogue. I can only tell you that as much as I recognized the pedigree and respected the aims of Sarah Polley’s film (UA Releasing, 12.2), I looked at my watch at least seven or eight times.

Posted on 9.9.22: Step outside the woke-critic realm and there’s a sizable body of opinion (or so I determined after speaking with Telluride viewers) that Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking is a static, dialogue-driven #MeToo chamber piece that could be fairly described as a “tough sit.”

Based on Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel, which is “loosely based on real-life events that occurred in 2011 at the Manitoba Colony in Bolivia,” Women Talking is about several women dealing with corrosive sexual trauma.

Set within an isolated American Mennonite community, Women Talking focuses on a nocturnal, seemingly dusk-to-dawn discussion inside a barn, and focuses on eight or so women debating whether to leave their community to escape the brutality of several men who have repeatedly drugged and raped them.

Fortified by several first-rate performances (most notably from Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara and Claire Foy) and currently enjoying a 92% and 90% approval ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively, the post-Telluride narrative is that Women Talking will probably be Best Picture-nominated and will certainly be in the running for a SAG Best Ensemble prize.

The other narrative is that this counted-on support for Women Talking will be largely emotional (particularly driven by the overturning of Roe v. Wade) and certainly political.

As I wrote in a 9.5 piece called “Telluride Hive Mind,” “The elite Telluride critic community feels it has no choice but to worship Polley‘s film…politically speaking there’s no upside to not praising it.”

I added that Women Talking is “sturdy and nicely handled as far as it goes, but sitting through it felt confining and interminable. For me, it was almost totally about waiting for it to end.”

The indisputably brave, lone-wolfish Kyle Smith of The Wall Street Journal: “Critically acclaimed as an oblique commentary on the #MeToo moment, it’s an example of a prestige film that is more focused on point-scoring than coherence.”

A sentence in Jordan Ruimy’s mostly negative Toronto assessment, however, gave me pause: “There were women sobbing all around me during the press & industry screening of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, so I assume the film will work with a large contingent of people. But it fell flat for me.”

Roe v. Wade plus Toronto “sobbing” means Women Talking isn’t going away and will command repeated salutations in award-season assessment articles between now and early ’23 (the Oscar telecast happens on 3.12.23). The bottom line is that, as THR‘s Scott Feinberg suggested during Telluride, a significant percentage of Academy and guild members will probably be less than enthused.

This won’t stop the wokester cabal, of course. They will push for Women Talking with the same fervor they used to (unsuccessfully) take down Green Book, and which some of them will use to diminish Sam Mendes‘ immensely affecting Empire of Light, which will absolutely be Best Picture-nominated…trust me.