Warning — spoilers contained in the following conversation:

HE: I just came out of Drive My Car.  Obviously a good solemn film that conveys many unsaid things, but slow, long and quite pretentious and even a tiny bit banal toward the end.  Not my idea of the Best Picture of 2021, I can tell you that. Nothing like a little Uncle Vanya to clear out the psyche and open up the closets of suppressed feelings, right?

Friendo: I was totally swept up in it. I didn’t find it banal at all. It is, however, “life-affirming,” so you could make the argument that it’s a feel-good movie dressed in austere Japanese art-film clothing.

HE: That sounds about right.

HE: We will suffer and stumble and weep at times, but go on living.

Friendo: But this isn’t Uncle Vanya! I’ve never much embraced the life-staggers-on quasi-pessimism of that play. Drive My Car uses Uncle Vanya, but it’s a far more bracing and uplifting work.

HE: I lost patience when the young woman driver started telling her longish story about not rescuing her mother from the crushed house. That’s when I said, “Okay, this has gone far enough.”

Friendo: I was completely held by that. Great story…truthful and quietly gripping. Why did you check out of that?

HE: I’m not dismissing it. The scene in which the young actor more or less confesses to having had sex with the director’s late wife…that’s the best scene in the film. I just felt that the familiar and borderline banal payoff (we must all stagger on) was too long in arriving.

Friendo: Good scene. But I thought everything in the movie worked. Thought the last part with the driver was powerful, and that the onstage Vanya stuff was cathartic.

HE: Why did the young good-looking actor beat to death a guy who took his picture? What was THAT about?

Friendo: The guy was sick of getting his picture taken, so he was kind of like a Sean Penn who went too far.

HE: Japan looks so super-developed. So bland, so nothing. So many freeways and high-rises. Depressing.

Friendo: The message of this movie is: We go down into the depths, we touch our tragedy, and we transcend it. We can escape it. That’s not Vanya.

HE: If you say so. What was the female driver doing with his red Saab at the very end? And what was with the dog? That said, I agree that it’s humanistic and even Ozu-like.

Friendo: Yes, and uplifting!

HE: A two-hour film that lasts 179 minutes can’t be uplifting.

Friendo: A quiet humanistic film is never allowed to be three hours?

HE: All I know is that I began rolling my eyes during the crushed house monologue. And they both wouldn’t stop smoking cigarettes.

Sundance ’22 will announce the slate tomorrow (12.9)…I think. Late last month Indiewire‘s Kate Erbland and Eric Kohn speculated that Luca Guadagnino‘s Bones and All, a cannibalism in the ’80s love story starring Taylor Russell and Timothee Chalamet, might debut there.

But it won’t. An authoritative source told me this morning that Bones “is still in the works and will not be ready for months.” Which sounds to me like it might not even be ready for Cannes — more likely the early fall festivals (Venice/Telluride/New York)?

I thought Bones might be a Sundance fit given that Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name enjoyed a triumphant Park City debut in January 2017, or nearly five years ago. But of course Sundance was an entirely different equation back then. The Park City gathering was still a powerhouse indie launch thing (Manchester By The Sea was the big explosive film of Sundance’s 2016 fest.) Since then, of course, Sundance has changed identities. It’s now the Sundance Wokester Festival….a secular event for people of the wokester faith & cloth.

In short, even if Bones was ready for Sundance ’22 it probably wouldn’t be a great idea.

‘

Arson is a ghastly crime, of course — menacing, malicious. And it’s good to hear that last night’s burning of the Fox Christmas tree resulted in no harm to any fire fighters or passersby. The 49 year-old arsonist, a Brooklyn resident, was arrested soon after the tree ignited. The initial presumption, of course, was that the tree was torched as a political statement by a Fox hater. There are flammable Christmas decorations all over midtown Manhattan, but the arsonist chose the Fox tree. Do the math.

JUST IN: @ShannonBream announces on @FoxNewsNight that Fox News's Christmas tree has caught fire outside their HQ on the Avenue of the Americas. pic.twitter.com/Ah0OUfTrlE

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 8, 2021

The problem with The Killers is Burt Lancaster‘s Pete Lund, a loose cannon and pretty close to a blithering idiot with the emotional constitution of a sullen, poorly raised ten-year-old.

If you ask me Lund had those bullets coming for ripping off his partners in that robbery so he could spend the dough on Ava Gardner, except she was no good for the start…that was obvious. So he was a fool, a sap. Not in the least bit sympathetic, and altogether the weakest link in the film.

What saves The Killers are four performances — Edmond O’Brien ‘s insurance investigator with an attitude, and the three tasty bad-guys — William Conrad, Charles McGraw and Albert Dekker.

Posted on 12.29.20: As a longtime chronicler of those wraparound DeMille/Mayfair billboards, this is fairly unique. For Robert Siodmak and Mark Hellinger‘s The Killers didn’t play the Mayfair but the legendary Winter Garden theatre. United Artists briefly turned the decades-old venue into a movie palace between ’45 and ’46.

The Killers opened in August 1946

Jules Dassin’s Night and the City opened on 6.9.50.

David Fincher and David Prior‘s Voir (Netflix, currently streaming) is a collection of six essays about film worship. I’ve watched four and they’re all finely wrought, but I have to spit something out. Despite my long friendship with Sasha Stone I can’t not say what I know to be true, which is that her autobiographical piece — “Summer of the Shark” — is the most eloquent and well-produced of the lot.

It’s the only one that reaches out and says “this, once upon a time, was me” plus “this was all of us back in the fanciful, doobie-toke Gerald Ford era, and what an impressionable time it was.” It’s about what’s gone forever and will never come back, but in another sense about what’s lasted forever.

“Shark”‘ tells a modest but fascinating little saga about young Sasha (played as a ten-year-old by Eva Wilde, and as a 17 year-old by Shannon Hayes) and her sister Lisa sinking into the captivating vortex of Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws, and how that film lit a certain fascination and devotion in both of them, and in Sasha especially.

The essay paints a swoony, sun-dappled portrait of hippie-ish Topanga Canyon and San Fernando Valley teen culture in the ’70s…detailed, lulling and just as time-trippy as Licorice Pizza in this respect…and tells how Sasha and her sister came to worship the refuge and sanctum of movies in that era (partly for the Spielberg and Star Wars-ian coolness, partly to escape from the turmoil of their mom’s bad boyfriends), etc.

Prior (whose involvement was more hands-on than Fincher’s) does a killer job of blending Jaws beach footage with recreations of Sasha’s own beach time — he and dp Martim Vian even mimic that famous zoom in-track back shot of Roy Scheider.

All in all, “Summer of the Shark” is a great little short (only around 12 minutes…longer?). I’m very proud of Sasha for having written from her heart and narrated it just so and worked so hard for so long on this thing, and (with Fincher and Prior’s expert assistance) having given it just the right touch and spin.

Walter Chaw‘s “Profane and Profound”, a delicious take on Walter Hill‘s 48 HRS., and Drew McWeeny‘s “But I Don’t Like Him”, about unlikeable protagonists, are very fine essays also.

I didn’t care for Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou‘s “The Ethics of Revenge”, a piece about Park Chan-wook‘s Lady Vengeance (’05) — it struck me as cold and creepy. And I haven’t watched “Film vs. Television,” although I hear it’s admirable.

Friendo: “Watching Voir….your pal Sasha’s episode was good…looks like they spent some money on that one recreating the ’70s.  Then again Fincher doesn’t do anything cheap.”

Previously: “Some of our greatest cinema challenges us to really confront our own hearts in the safety of that darkened theatre. That’s part of the purpose of filmmaking.” — quote from Voir trailer.

2021 Reality Check: Movies stopped challenging or even slipping into the hearts of filmgoers with any regularity a long time ago. The only current movies that even flirt with this aesthetic are West Side Story, King Richard, Cyrano, Pig, A Hero and one or two others. Voir is therefore a nostalgia flick to a certain extent.

The dual purpose of 90% to 95% of movies is to (a) repeat and reenforce woke narratives and (b) enhance corporate revenue.

It’s not just Film Twitter that resides in a bubble; it’s a healthy majority of film critics. That aside, I respect Kristen Stewart‘s performance. She gave it her all.

Last night Sasha Stone announced that after years of reluctance, she’s joined the Critics Choice Association — an accommodating, political-minded, awards-giving outfit whose leadership has recently come to believe they’ve supplanted the Golden Globes as the leading, default, go-to predictor of the Oscar awards.

And perhaps they have.

I was a CCA member for many years, going back to the mid or late aughts….I forget which. CCA honchos Joey Berlin and John DeSimio ejected me last March for a spurious reason that boiled down to a matter of political cowardice (theirs) in the face of woke hysteria.

I explained the deal in a piece I posted three months ago called “Hester Prynne Has Nothing on Yours Truly.” I quoted another person’s viewpoint, and posted it for an hour, and those beasts shot me in the stomach for it. So I stated unequivocally what I believed nine or ten months ago and what I believe today in my heart, which is that Joey and John and the people who pressured them are bad people (as in cowardly, hysterical, unprincipled, swinish, venal).

That’s not saying much in a town like Los Angeles, I realize, but there it is regardless.

Hollywood Elsewhere will catch an invitational screening of Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story at the Bedford Playhouse on Thursday, 12.9. Blue-chip restoration guru Robert Harris oversaw the technical projection and sound quality at this recently recreated cinema (633 Old Post Rd, Bedford, NY 10506), so it’s a safe bet that this screening will be as good as the one I caught at Manhattan’s SVA theatre a week ago.

Which reminds me: There’s no other award-season film out there that delivers as fully as West Side Story does. Emotionally, I mean. So because my eyes welled up three or four times, it’s more than likely that WSS will take the 2021 Best Picture Oscar. Yes, 59 years after the previous version, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, won the exact same prize.

I know everyone (myself included) said over and over that one West Side Story Best Picture Oscar was sufficient and that history doesn’t need to repeat itself and that it’s better to hand the big prize to another deserving film (but not The Power of the Dog — Jane Campion‘s Best Director Oscar is safe but that’s it). But I don’t see any way around a WSS win at this point.