Did Jimmy Fallon call White Noise “a super fun movie”? Or something close to that? It’s not. Okay the A&P “dancing in the aisles” finale is fun, but that’s it.

Artists Equity , a Ben Affleck-Matt Damon production company, was annnounced a few days ago, but HE has its own schedule.

Affleck-Damon are to be congratulated for planning to make five ’90s-style movies a year — appealing to semi-smart people, hopefully no guilt or virtue signalling, no kneejerk woke shit, etc. Excellent!

The flaw in the plan, of course, is that the audience stupidity factor is so overwhelming that it could choke several horses per day. Given a choice between Cocaine Bear and Artists Equity’s first film, an ’80s flick about Nike and Air Jordans, most people would probably choose the former. Am I wrong? I wish I was.

Artists Equity sounds like a 21st Century version of United Artists, which was founded in 1919 by D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford in the pursuit of artistic independence, and First Artists (’69 to ’80), which made films for Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen.

Affleck: “I see no differentiation between commercial and quality. You ask [Netflix CEO] Reed Hastings, ‘Hey well, we went for quantity.’ I’m sure that established a footprint, I’m sure there’s some wisdom in that, and I’m sure they had a great strategy, but I would have said, ‘How do you make 50 good movies a year?’ How is that possible? There is no committee big enough. You just can’t do it. It’s a thing that requires attention and dedication and work and it resists the sort of assembly line process.”

“There’s just so much to see [these days]. There’s a lot of investment that’s gone into a lot of people my age, around that age. My wife, who’s 53, the most famous, admired, spectacular woman in the world, there weren’t 53-year-old stars in the 1940s and ’50s. That was it. And there weren’t really for men [either]. Paul Newman was kind of old at 37. You read about Newman at 37, 38 and they were like, ‘Well, as you move into the sunset of your life, Paul, after Towering Inferno….’ And now people are much more familiar with this group of people. They’ve kept that name recognition in a marketplace that is so diffuse where it’s more and more and more valuable to be able to attract eyeballs, to be ab

What’s up with Affleck’s voice? I know his precise tone and timbre, and it sounds like he’s recovering from strep throat.

In the wake of Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (’75) topping the BFI Sight & Sound poll, I had to give it another shot. So I watched it on the Criterion Channel, on my Macbook Air. Most of it, I should say. I made it through the first 90 minutes the hard way (i.e., without cheating), but then something inside me began to wither and crumple, and I began to watch ten-minute portions. But I missed nothing.

Jeannie Diulman is a statement, all right. Three hours and 21 minutes of torpor, tedium and depression. Such a sad, suffocating and listless film. (Yes, that’s the point but c’mon.) It’s about a life of a prim and proper sex worker (Day of the Jackal’s Delphine Seyrig) that’s mainly about servitude and the renunciation of joy and the suppression of the spirit. A film about regimented motherhood and the raising of a dull, homely, tragically obedient son whose life is doomed to the same kind of repetition, the same dutiful stiflings and silences and submissions.

Seyrig is Spartacus in the kitchen — a sex-hating sex gladiator without a sword. A slave who endlessly prepares meals and adheres to regularity, regularity and more regularity. She never breaks out of Capua, so to speak, and we never see her having sex except at the very end, and in an odd, ugly and curious way at that. But we do see her prepare many dinners.

Duty, diligence and desperation, partly due to very little money and partly due to having nothing inside. A film about being numb and experiencing a form of daily resignation and death. A woman who owns no record player and hardly ever listens to music on her shitty radio and of course never sings or even hums along. The film simulates emptiness, nothingness, endless mediocrity. A woman who’s obviously smart and discerning and disciplined enough to hold down a decent job but has decided instead on a life of miserable prostitution and sporadic infant care.

Grunting pig that I am, I found the chaste bathtub scene (and Seyrig’s glorious, half-glimpsed nudity and the slight, tantalizing ripples of middle-aged flab) the only respite, and thank God for that and Delphine Seyrig in general! But I came to deeply despise Seyrig / Dielman’s son, whose stifled life is so dull and deflated that he’s almost a figure of evil. I wanted to reach into the screen and give this wimp a good slap across the chops.

The second-to-last scene is the only one that shows Seyrig having it off with one of her homely, pathetic johns. It concludes with a sudden, impulsive and unconvincingly depicted murder of a certain ugly fellow — a scissor stabbing in the neck. Followed by a final scene in which Seyrig meditates about her life and this murder and the certainty of being freed from her agonizing life by being sentenced to prison (or, if she’s lucky, to life in a mental hospital).

So after submitting the viewer to a form of torture for three hours, Seyrig / Dielman finally “breaks out of Capua,” but she never revolts in a full, satisfying or expressive way. For Jeanne Dielman is the anti-Belle du Jour. A flatline version. Such a tragic meditation, but despite what the film’s many admirers seem to believe, it’s not a profound (much less an illuminating or transcendent) thing to subject viewers to this much pique and boredom.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is convinced that politicized quota thinking strongly influenced the BFI’s 2022 Sight & Sound poll. I don’t see how anyone can argue otherwise. It’s my personal suspicion (as well as Sasha Stone‘s) that the progressive clique got together and decided to catapult Chantal Akerman‘s widely respected 1975 film into the top position.

Harrison Ford‘s digital de-aging looks pretty good, I must say. It certainly looks better than Robert De Niro‘s de-aging in The Irishman.

Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny sounds like a game show.

The 2022 Sight & Sound poll popped earlier this afternoon, and we all knew what the results would reflect, right? Not so much with films directed by older white guys (especially OWG directors with a somewhat dicey or shady reputation), and up with films directed by women and POCS. And so Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxel, a 201-minute film about duty, survival, sex working, regimentation and repetition, and which ends with a “john” getting stabbed in the throat with a pair of scissors, was named #1.

In other words, (a) down with the insensitive asshole patriarchy, (b) up with chopped onions carefully mashed into ground beef, and (c) hooray for Delphine Seyrig finally having an orgasm.

In 2012 Jeanne Dielman ranked #36 on the BFI list…fine. But how did it manage to suddenly vault up to the #1 position? Admired films tend to move up gradually, no? It feels to some of us like Dielman won because of an organized campaign among feminist-minded critics. If Dielman had landed in the 10th or 12th spot in the 2012 poll, today’s win would have seemed more of a natural thing. But to go from 36th place a decade ago to #1 in ’22? It seems to me like the fix was in.

You can’t argue or complain with the BFI critics, who are primarily a bunch of highbrow snoots trying to out-snoot each other.

If you ask me the BFI Directors Greatest Films of All Time list is a lot more grounded and sensible.

So 60th-ranked Moonlight has edged out Casablanca (#61), Goodfellas (#62) and The Third Man (#63). I’ve seen all four, and I’m telling you straight from the shoulder that there’s no way Moonlight deserves, deliberately or haphazardly, to be ranked above the other three…NO WAY ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH.

Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo is now ranked second, and I honestly thought it would take a bigger hit than that. I figured the legend of Hitch having allegedly made Tippi Hedren‘s life hell during the making of The Birds and especially Marnie…okay, let’s drop it, but I’m slightly surprised.

Three indisputably great 20th Century films about conflicted white males dealing with disillusionment and corruption — David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (’62), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (’74) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (’69) — were booted off the critics’ list of the top 100. Polanski had to pay for his sexual indiscretions of the ’70s and ’80s, I suppose, and Peckinpah had to be banned for his notorious misogyny. But why did the saga of T.E. Lawrence get the shaft? What exactly did Lean or Lawrence do to earn the heave-ho? Was it the old arrogant British imperialism thing, or the fact that women are barely seen and certainly not heard seen in that classic desert epic?

1. “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxel” (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
2. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
3. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. “Tokyo Story” (Ozu Yasujiro, 1953)
5. “In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai, 2001)
6. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. “Beau travail” (Claire Denis, 1998)
8. “Mulholland Dr.” (David Lynch, 2001)
9. “Man with a Movie Camera” (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
10. “Singin’ in the Rain” (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1951)

There was something so soulful and sensual (at least in my head) about Christine McVie‘s singing voice. And I always sensed something randy about her nature. She was hot and heavy with Dennis Wilson in ’73 or ’74…something like that. I used to fantasize about her now and then…sorry.

Of all the Fleetwood Mac hits McVie crooned, my all-time favorite is the melancholy “Did I Ever Love You?.” (Or “Did You Ever Love Me?” — one of those.) Co-written by McVie and Bob Weston, it’s about a relationship that’s no longer working, largely due to the guy behaving like an aloof dick for too much of the time.

Released as a single in ’73, the song didn’t track. “Did I Ever Love You?” is Fleetwood Mac’s only flirtation with steel drums, which obviously makes it sound kind of Jamaican.
‘
McVie passed today at age 79. I’m very sorry.

I’ve been working on launching a special industry-friendly film series at the renowned Bedford Playhouse, which is run by Dan Friedman. The program is called Bedford Marquee, and a 12.5 screening of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon will kick things off.

I’ll be offering a few observations (including some historical footnotes) a few minutes before the show begins at 7 pm.

Located within the Clive Davis Arts Center, the BP is one of the finest commercial screening facilities I’ve ever settled into — easily the technical equal of any upscale industry screening facility (including the Academy Museum theatre and/or the classic AMPAS theatre in Beverly Hills) in the U.S., Paris, Cannes or anywhere.

Esteemed restoration guru Robert Harris supervised the BP’s upgrade.

We’re also planning a special mid-January screening of the recently restored Invaders From Mars (‘53). The film was painstakingly restored by Scott MacQueen, who will present a master class about the film’s history and cultural influence.

A sprawling three-hour epic of 1920s Hollywood, Babylon opens nationwide on 12.23.

From “Avatar and the Mystery of the Vanishing Blockbuster,” a N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine piece by Jamie Lauren Keiles (11.30.22):

“The history of recorded images might be described as an incremental quest to master the building blocks of consciousness — first sight, then motion, then sound, then color. With Avatar (’09), Cameron revealed that human ingenuity could marshal even more: physics, light, dimensionality; the ineffable sense of an object being real; the life force that makes a thing feel alive.

“This is not to say that Avatar is good. The movie is basically a demo tape, each plot point reverse-engineered to show off some new feat of technology. The awe it inspires was not just about itself but rather the hope of new possibilities. It was easy to imagine someone in 2009 leaving the theater and asking: ‘What if we made more movies like this? What if we made good movies like this?’

“The year 2009 was a relatively optimistic one: Obama had just won on the audacity of ‘hope.’ Climate change still felt far away. The forever wars were going to end. Surely we would fix whatever caused the recession. Avatar pointed toward a widening horizon — better effects, new cinematic worlds, new innovations in 3-D technology. It did not yet seem incongruous to wrap a project based in infinite progress around a story about the perils of infinite growth.

“Avatar: The Way of Water (20th Century, 12.16) will emerge into an almost total deferment of that dream. Today, 3-D is niche (at best); digital effects are used to cut costs; home streaming is threatening the theater; and projects of ambitious world-building are overlooked in favor of stories with existing fanbases.”