Posted on 2.3.21: Sian Heder ‘s much-adored, Sundance award-showered CODA (Apple +, 8.13) is moderately appealing and nicely made for the most part. Understand, however, that it’s an “audience movie” — aimed at folks who like feel-good stories with heart, humor, romance and charm.

It’s about a shy Gloucester high-school girl named Ruby (Emilia Jones) with a decent if less than phenomenal singing voice. She’d rather attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music than work for her deaf family’s fishing business, we’re told. The film is about the hurdles and complications that she has to deal with in order to realize this dream.

CODA is one of those “real people struggling with life’s changes and challenges” flicks, but given the fishing-off-the-Massachusetts-coast aspect it’s fair to say it’s no Manchester By The Sea — trust me. It’s a wee bit simplistic and schticky and formulaic -— okay, more than a bit — and contains a fair amount of “acting.”

One of my fondest childhood memories (cliche!) is lying in bed at night and listening to not-so-distant freight and passenger trains clattering along, and especially to that whauuggghhhh sound…that honky, drawn-out groan…one of the great all-time reminders that life pushes on and that endeavor and industry never sleep, which is generally comforting.

In this age of instant everything, of GPS and constant insulation from the raw cacophony of things, of whirring, nearly-silent electric cars and digital this and that, four or five remotes in every living room, remotes everywhere, instant image and video available to any student or bedridden grandma or poor kid in Pakistan, OLED flat panels delivering instant Cary Grant in 1080p, 4K now and 8K before long…

In the midst of all this it’s really pretty wonderful to listen to or, better yet, board one of these huge, churning, rumbling remnants of 19th century technology, buckling and bellowing as they pull into a series of modest-sized stations (like the Metro North line between New Haven and Grand Central Station) an hour or so later…it makes you feel so completely on top of your life, so soothed and connected to the hum of things.

What would be your reaction if, say, a friend invited you to a home screening of Robert Siodmak‘s The Killers? Not a viewing of the Criterion 1080p Bluray version on a 77-inch Sony Bravia OLED 4K UHD TV, but a 16mm print projected onto a big sparkly screen or perhaps even a bedsheet?

If you’re a serious film buff, your reaction would be “damn right” — a church service with friends! The rickety-clickety-rickety-clickety sound of the projector, two big reels, the sharp beam of light, the bassy-squawky sound.

Miklos Rosza‘s main-title theme (hohm-buh-BUM-bohm) was half-stolen by the Dragnet series, which premiered in 1951 — the composer was Walter Schumann.

The nub of The Killers is this — Burt Lancaster‘s Pete Lund is a loose cannon and pretty close to an idiot — he has 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.

There’s an expectation that Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer (Neon), a drama about Lady Diana deciding to ask Prince Charles for a divorce during a weekend getaway, will play at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival. And so, being the conscientious type, I thought I’d better watch season #4 of The Crown, which deals significantly with that ghastly arctic relationship between them.

Kristen Stewart (aka KStew) and Jack Farthing play the Princess and Prince of Wales in Larrain’s film; Emma Corrin and Josh O’Connor play them in The Crown.

I watched the first three episodes of season #4 last night, and emerged deeply impressed by Corrin’s Diana (she not only resembles the late ex-royal but has the long-legged height factor, which is more than you can say for KStew) as well as O’Connor’s Charles.

Corwin certainly conveys Diana’s youth and naivete, and O’Connor’s Charles is the very essence of a human worm…a prissy, chilly, cowardly snob with a stooped-over posture and one of the coldest emotional cores I’ve ever felt from a series regular. Plus he closely resembles Charles.

KStew is said to be quite good in Larrain’s film, but she’ll have to do a lot to outshine Corrin.

Jordan Ruimy posts a research screening reaction: “Spencer sucks you right into Princess Diana’s head. It’s a chamber piece and one that will probably anger a lot of fans of The Crown, who will expect some kind of mainstream entertainment.

“Larrain’s movie isn’t the least bit ‘mainstream’ — it’s a Pablo Larrain film, and if you’ve seen Jackie then think of this as its spiritual successor, but in a very limited setting and with a lot more dialogue.

“Spencer is a sensory experience about the inner demons Diana had during her days with Charles, characters come and go but she remains firmly there in every scene. There will be a lot of pushback on this movie from royal apologists, who will claim that [some of] Steven Knight’s script is pure fiction, and maybe it is, but who are we to deny that Diana was basically stuck in this claustrophobic and highly stressful situation?”

HE reaction: She was the beloved Diana, Princess of Wales, with a certain agency — she wasn’t stuck in anything. Alas, this is EXACTLY what Larrain did with Jackie. He took Noah Oppenheim‘s straightforward script about Jackie Kennedy‘s experience from JFK’s 11.22.63 assassination to the 11.25.63 burial at Arlington, and turned it into a meditative, meandering metaphysical mood piece (i.e., “what’s it all about, Jackie?”.)

How anxious and paranoid could Diana have possibly been as she was telling Charles that their union was finished? Okay, she’s in a shitty marriage and the Windsors are a powerful family, but what are they gonna do? Have her strangled?

Source: The Numbers, market chart section.

The great Marcia Nasatir, a brilliant, pioneering producer who nudged her way into the chauvinistic Hollywood culture of the ’70s and became, in ’74, the first female vp production at a major Hollywood studio (United Artists), has passed at age 95.

Nasatir’s proudest producing achievement, certainly the one for which she’s best known, was Lawrence Kasdan‘s The Big Chill (’83).

At UA Nasatir also had a hand in finessing and/or guiding along One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Carrie, Coming Home, Three Days of the Condor, Rocky and Carrie. She moved to Orion in ’78, and then to Carson Productions, where she exec produced The Big Chill. As an independent producer, Nasatir oversaw and otherwise nurtured Hamburger Hill, Ironweed and Vertical Limit.

I knew Marcia to shmooze with at parties in the ’90s and aughts — always gracious, always witty and wise. And I loved “The Real Geezers,” her video movie-review series with Lorenzo Semple that ran in the mid to late aughts.

Please consider watching Anne Goursaud‘s A Classy Broad: Marcia’s Adventures in Hollywood, a 2014 documentary.

In the wake of a damning 165-page report about NY governor Andrew Cuomo‘s allegedly intimidating behavior with certain women, announced this morning by New York State attorney general Letitia James, the governor has issued a video response that basically says “I’m sorry that these women reacted as they did but that wasn’t where I was coming from.”

No resignation, no quarter, same deflection.

We can all sense or read into what probably happened during these various alleged episodes, but Cuomo is going to sidestep them regardless.

N.Y. Times summary of one episode: “A few days later, Charlotte Bennett, a former executive assistant to Mr. Cuomo, told The New York Times that the governor made comments that she took as sexual overtures while they were alone in his Albany office last year. Ms. Bennett said Mr. Cuomo said he was looking for a girlfriend and asked her whether she was monogamous and had sex with older men.”

Born in 1970, Matt Damon was raised in Cambridge, which can be a rough and brutish culture as far as old-school Boston machismo is concerned. He eventually moved up and out of Cambridge, of course, but you can never entirely rid yourself of the old ‘hood. Pieces and shards of your upbringing have a way of sticking to your skin, and there’s no washing them off completely.

Hence the difficulty Damon has gotten himself into after telling the UK Sunday Times‘ Jonathan Dean that “he only stopped using the “f-slur for a homosexual” months ago.

Damon clarification: “I have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life…I do not use slurs of any kind. I have learned that eradicating prejudice requires active movement toward justice rather than finding passive comfort in imagining myself ‘one of the good guys.’ And given that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community is still not uncommon, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst. To be as clear as I can be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”

Tens of millions of young straight guys who rocked and bopped around in the early to mid ’70s…they were all familiar with certain derogatory terms for gay guys. As urban culture evolved they learned, of course, that failing to jettison those terms…hell, even thinking with such terms would hurt them socially and professionally, and so most of them adapted. But with others the old attitudes hide in the shadows.

Warren Beatty is one of the most socially sensitive and political-minded fellows I’ve ever spoken to — he’s very, very careful with what he says and always uses the most oblique terminology he can think of. And yet even Beatty, in the person of George Roundy, used the “f” epithet in this scene with Carrie Fisher in Shampoo (’75), which was released when Damon was five years old. If Beatty and the Shampoo guys (Hal Ashby, Robert Towne) were okay with using the term, you can be damn sure that the world did back then and that it wasn’t a big deal to anyone. [The passage I’m referring to starts at the seven-second mark, and the epithet is repeated by Fisher at the 37-second mark and again at 1:02.]

Over the last few years progressive Hollywood has been doing everything it can to “Black up” Academy membership and by extension the Oscar Awards, and obviously that’s been happening, result-wise and nomination-wise, in the acting categories. But in the broader Best Picture category most voters will tend to support movies that tap into some kind of common cultural current…subjects and stories that reflect the “all” of human experience.

Specific social-agenda movies (going all the way back to I Am A Prisoner From a Chain Gang, They Won’t Forget, The Ox-Bow Incident and Gentleman’s Agreement) are almost always honored and respected, but snagging the big trophy is another equation.

We all understand that the Oscars are no longer the Oscars — they’ve become the Progressive Left Coast Tony Awards, addressing and reflecting the myopic industry culture and the general fear of wokesters on Twitter, etc. Which is why Joe and Jane Popcorn (not to mention Millennials and especially Zoomers) feel estranged if not divested, to put it mildly. Last April’s Steven Soderbergh Oscar show, a calamity by any yardstick, all but drove a stake through the brand.

Earlier today Sasha Stone and I spitballed the most likely 2022 Best Picture contenders, and there are only two one or two Black contenders that might have a shot — Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19 — obviously a Best Actor nomination waiting to happen for Will Smith) and Denzel Washington‘s A Journal for Jordan (Sony, 12.10).

The rest of the likelies are all white-centric, so even if the word goes out that King Richard and A Journal for Jordan have to be nominated to ensure at least a semi-significant Black presence, you’re still taking eight white films vs. two reflecting the POC experience.

The ten likeliest Best Picture contenders, from a pure-gut, finger-to-the-wind, eliminate-the-negatives perspective:

(1) Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom (PTA films have never been Oscar-friendly as a rule, but SB is set in the ’70s and has something to do with the industry, or at least with Jon Peters) (UA Releasing, 11.26)

(2) Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up (satire about planetary destruction careening toward earth and the limitless human capacity for denial) (Netflix, mid to late fall)

(3) Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho (Warner Bros., 9.17)

(4) Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (11.24, UA Releasing)

(5) Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel (20th Century, 10.15)

(6) Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19)

(7) Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner‘s West Side Story (20th Century, 12.10)

(8) Michael Showalter‘s The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Searchlight, 9.17)

(9) Aaron Sorkin‘s Being The Ricardos (Amazon, late 2021)

(10) Denzel Washington‘s A Journal for Jordan (Sony, 12.10).

Probably won’t make the cut for this and that reason (17): Dune, The French Dispatch, Nightmare Alley, In The Heights, No Time to Die, Passing, The Power of the Dog, Respect, Tick Tick Boom, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Pig, The Card Counter, Belfast, C’mon, C’mon, CODA, Cyrano, Stillwater.