If you lived 99 more-or-less bountiful years, and seemed to somehow grow in emotional stature the older you got, and then, upon your passing, inspired a torrent of love notes and fond recollections, you could say from heaven “yeah, I guess I got some of that right…some of it definitely worked out.”

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “The biggest hurdle the Oscars face, especially in the time of a pandemic accompanied by a streaming revolution, is that the films that tend to be nominated are winning a smaller and smaller slice of the audience.

“[If] the nominees include Belfast, The Power of the Dog, Licorice Pizza, The Lost Daughter and The Tragedy of Macbeth, that will read as a roster straight out of the too-smart-for-school megaplex.

“I’m not saying don’t nominate those films. I’m saying that if those are the only films nominated, it’s going to be another year of the Oscars’ slow-motion implosion. Would it really be such an unspeakable vulgarity this year for the Oscar slate to include Spider-Man: No Way Home? Not as a token mainstream gesture but because it’s a film that honestly meant something to the larger public. Why has this become such an insane idea?

“What’s actually insane is leaving a movie like that one out of the mix. If the Oscars want a future, it would be a shrewd strategy for them to not inflict the death of a thousand cuts on themselves by using the dagger of elitism.”

HE to Gleiberman #1: Which Twitter elitists have insisted that handing a Best Picture nomination to Spider-Man: No Way Home would be “an insane idea”? I’m presuming we’re talking about the same dweebs who believe that Drive My Car is the film of the year, but…

HE to Gleiberman #2: If one of the nominees is King Richard, no one will think this is “straight out of the too-smart-for-school megaplex.” There are two family movies in Best Picture contention this year — one is excellent, the other less so. King Richard is the excellent one.

I remember very clearly the first time infant Jett smiled. He was lying next to me in bed. Daybreak or soon after. A small, sudden eruption of joie de vivre. Babies surprise you like that.

…and looking to the fine marketing people at Columbia for guidance. Thinking it over, kicking it around. I would first and foremost have to sneak in a large bottle of Moet Chandon champagne and at least four or five plastic cups…that’s a given. Right off the top Nicholas and Alexandra is a no-go; ditto Happy Birthday, Wanda June and Richard Brooks‘ Dollars. For me it boils down to either Roman Polanski‘s Macbeth or Peter Bogdanovich‘s The Last Picture Show. [Thanks to Larry “Jerry Garcia” Karaszewski for the screen grab.]

Honest admission: I’ve somehow never seen Joseph Losey‘s The Go-Between.

Five and 1/3 years ago I was persuaded to buy Eureka Entertainment’s Region 2 Bluray of Robert Aldrich‘s The Flight of the Phoenix (’65).

DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze wrote that the Eureka Bluray “looks magnificent,” certainly compared to the unexceptional DVD from 13 years ago. “This 1080p looks fabulous — richer colors, far superior contrast and some impressive detail on the film’s many close-ups…our highest recommendation!”

This despite an opinion that I posted on 5.22.16 that Joseph Biroc‘s cinematography for the Aldrich film, while professionally handled as far as it went, never seemed distinctive enough to warrant any special excitement, and certainly didn’t seem to be prime Bluray material.

Quote: “I’ve seen it two or three times on cable, and as best I can recall it just looks sufficient…it’s nothing more than a professionally shot, decently framed desert-locale thing…I certainly don’t remember any mesmerizing visuals.”

And now Criterion wants cinefiles to shell out $31.96 for their own “2K digitally restored” Flight of the Phoenix Bluray? In a pig’s eye.

“‘When Douglas Sirk retired from American filmmaking and returned to Europe at the end of the 1950s, his reputation was that of a director who simply churned out glossy Hollywood weepies. But after a major critical reappraisal, spurred by the critics of Cahiers du Cinema, the German-born filmmaker was reclaimed as an auteur with a varied body of work, an eye for visual stylization, and a sophisticated understanding of Brechtian artifice, not to mention one of cinema’s greatest ironists.’

“So read a portion of a Film Society of Lincoln Center announcement about “Imitations of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk” (1.23.15 thru 1.6.16), a comprehensive retrospective that “tracks Sirk’s artistry from his early German films through to his early Hollywood forays into multiple genres and on to the now-canonical works of his late career.”

“Respectful Sirk Takedown,” posted on 2.22.10: “The German-born Douglas Sirk has long been considered a world-class, pantheon-level filmmaker. That’s because the film dweebs have been telling us for years that the dreadfully banal soap-opera acting, grandiose emotionalism and conservative suburban milieus in his films are all of an operatic pitch-perfect piece and are meant as ironic social criticism. (Or something like that.)

“The dweebs are playing an old snob game. They’re basically saying that you have to be a serious cineaste to recognize Sirk’s genius, and that if you don’t recognize it then you need to think things through because you’re just not as perceptive as you need to be.

There’s no winning against this mindset, which is somewhere between a schoolyard bully move and an intellectual con. The dweebs (and I’m talking about a very small and cloistered group of big-city critics) have put one over on us. And I’m suggesting, due respect, that the time has come to push back on Sirk and to consider him once again as the Guiding Light-level director that some (myself included) believe that he always was.

Sirk was mostly dismissed by critics of the ’50s and early ’60s for making films that were no more and no less than what they seemed to be — i.e., emotionally dreary, visually lush melodramas about repressed women suffering greatly through crises of the heart as they struggled to maintain tidy, ultra-proper appearances.

In his praise of Written on the Wind, Roger Ebert wrote that “to appreciate [this film] probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman‘s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.”

Aaaah, the old concealment game! John Ford used to do this also, but you can watch Ford’s films, or at least savor what’s good about them (despite the Irish sentimentality). If Ebert’s comment isn’t Orwellian film-dweeb speak, I don’t know what would be.

Criterion’s Written on the Wind Bluray pops on 2.1.22.

In a 12.29 scold piece, HuffPost’s Candice Frederick has described Licorice Pizza and Red Rocket as two of 2021’s “most lauded comedies.”

Rocket has been “lauded,” all right, but there isn’t a single solitary moment that qualifies as even faintly amusing, let alone comedic. The adjectives that correctly apply to Sean Baker’s film are (a) skanky, (b) icky, (c) bottom of the barrel and (d) appalling. It doesn’t make you laugh — it makes you want to take a shower.

Licorice Pizza is certainly an agreeable ‘70s hang as far as it goes, and it occasionally amuses in a vague sort of way, but “comedic” it’s not. At best it’s an in-and-outer…a dry attitude meanderer…even the Jon Peters waterbed sequence is somehow spotty and never quite lands.

I was okay with The Real Charlie Chaplin, a Showtime doc by Peter Middleton and James Spinney. All my life I’ve been fascinated by the Chaplin saga…his well-known genius, traits, peccadilloes, contradictions and dark sides. I was especially keen on absorbing whatever might might come forth about his glory years — roughly the quarter-century between the mid teens and the release of 1940’s The Great Dictator.

There are a few renactments, which I despise in documentaries. I managed, however, to put this resentment aside for the most part.

The film charts his gradual decline starting in ’51 or thereabouts, when Chaplin, falsely accused of being a Communist and previously under fire for personal behaviors regarding younger women, was officially informed that he would not be allowed back in the U.S. If #MeToo had been a thing back then, Chaplin would’ve been roasted on a stick. But even without it, Chaplin’s fall from grace was quite the historical fork in the road.

In keeping with this general tone of candor, I was naturally expecting that the doc would explore the horrific making and calamitous release of Chaplin’s final feature film, The Countess From Hong Kong (’67), which starred Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. And yet oddly, this misbegotten romantic comedy is completely ignored.

Just under 15 years ago I had a delightful late-evening dinner at one of the most deliciously atmospheric old-school London restaurants I’ve ever visited. Back then the place was called Two Brydges — now it’s called the Brydges Place Club (2 Brydges Place, London WC2N 4HP). Six of us ate there after seeing Richard Schiff perform in his one-man play, Underneath the Lintel, at the Duchess theatre.

The Brydges Place Club is a members-only operation. It’s housed in a four-story Georgian-style building that dates back to the Dickensian era. I distinctly recall that the floor beams slightly sagged.

I’m an absolute fool for snooty old London eateries. I’m especially enticed by ruling-class establishments that look down on people who appear to lack a certain pedigree (i.e., joints that might possibly give Edgar Wright a hard time). I’ve been to a few others, including (a) Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese (145 Fleet St, London EC4A 2BU), (b) Wiltons’ (55 Jermyn Street, St. James, London), (c) Rules (Covent Garden, 34-35 Maiden Lane, London), (d) The Ivy (5 West St, London), (e) Simpson’s in the Strand (100 Strand, London, (f) F. Cooke (150 Hoxton St, London). What others?

There are two kinds of irksome or infuriating 2021 movies — (a) the kind that I understand and admire from a certain perspective and kind of feel sorry for (like Don’t Look Up, The Power of the Dog, The French Dispatch, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Many Saints of Newark, Benedetta) and (b) the kind that I want to strangle to death (like Annette, Spencer, The Matrix: Resurrections and The Green Knight).

Please name your own list of films that you feel sympathy for despite their failing to cut the mustard, and those which you’d like to stick a steak knife in.