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In the same way that I re-watched Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion when the pandemic began in March 2020, I feel like re-watching Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, a 2017 doc about the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine from 11.21.13 to 2.23.14.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review:

Regional friendo: “I finally got around to watching CODA. Maybe I missed something?  It plays like a randy after-school special with fart jokes and broad sitcom sex jokes.  The rising above one’s station in life is nothing new.  It’s all played very safe.  More cloying than moving.  I’m probably in the minority. It’s one of those films that is nearly critic-proof. If you knock it, then you probably hate kittens, puppies, Santa, and kids. It reeks of ‘TV movie’. Nothing worse than calculated sentimentality and cheap emotional scenes. I’d rather spend more time with the Guccis than this crowd.”

HE comment: I was irked by the beginning of the Berklee School of Music audition scene, when it initially appears as if Emilia Jones‘ character is choking (i.e., lack of confidence). This is a cheap device that some directors resort to — the big moment arrives and our lead protagonist has to deliver or die, and it seems as if he/she is going to drop the ball but then…recovery! Mimi Leder‘s On The Basis of Sex pulled the same crap when Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) is about to deliver a big argument before the Court of Appeals, and seems to hesitate and stammer before getting it together.

Woody Allen‘s Love and Death (’75), a satire of early 18th Century Russia and the philosophical issues that weighed heavily upon the brooding types of that era, is a very clever and inventive film. Thick with allusions to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and the plots of War and Peace, The Gambler, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Shot with some difficulty in France and Hungary but handsomely produced, it’s…what’s a fair description?…decently diverting.

The only problem with Love and Death (which I caught in June ’75 at the Westport Fine Arts Cinema) is that it’s not really “funny.” Okay, I silently snickered three or four times but snickers don’t count.

Actually, I laughed once. Woody’s “Boris Grushenko” and Diane Keaton‘s “Sonja” are married and starving and forced to eat melted ice and snow. One evening Sonja announces that they have a special treat for dinner — sleet. “Oh, fantastic…sleet!,” Boris enthuses. Why has this one 47-year-old joke resonated? It’s the only one I can vividly recall.

Bill Maher: “Republicans don’t see Russia meddling in our elections as a bad thing…they see it as white people helping white people.”

Bret Stephens: “You talk about Joe Biden’s opportunity to turn around his Presidency…to remind us that he is the leader of the free world, and [that] the free world means something, and one of the things it means it that we’re an open society…open to people of every background and skin color and ethnicity and religion, and he is going to [channel his authority] against all enemies, foreign and domestic, but the greatest enemy is foreign, being Xi Jinping of China of Vladimir Putin of Russia, and domestic enemies who want to tear the country apart…by turning it into a facsimile of what they imagine Russia to be.”

HE to Friendo: “Do you really believe that the best response is to prattle on about sanctions and post condemning tweets about Putin’s cruelty and moral depravity? To basically just watch this carnage while saying ‘oh, nom this is so horrible?’ The moment seemingly requires a more forceful and engaged response than talking about sanctions and seizing Putin’s assets.

“How many hundeds or thousands of innocent people are about to suffer violent death because of this maniac? Is it really that crazy to talk about doing something to save Ukrainians from the horror at their doorstep?

“In all seriousness, a concerted effort should be made to kill Putin. Slit his throat, cut him to ribbons, blow him into pieces. Seriously. He’s a madman, a bringer of death, a killer of innocent sheep. What he’s doing now is no better than Hitler invading Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Send in MI6 or Ethan Hunt and the Mission Impossible team or some kind of Day of the Jackal stealth assassin (Edward Fox) and end his life. Tom Cruse joined a Herman high command plot to kill Hitler in ‘43 — this is the same kind of thing. We approved of what Cruise tried to do. How can we not approve of a Putin hit?

I’m perfectly serious. If Hitler and his fellow high-command fanatics had been iced in ‘42, Rommel and other sensible Germans could have taken charge and wound things down. How many imprisoned Jews could have been saved if Hitler had been disposed of?

Friendo to HE: “You’ve officially watched too many movies, Jeff. Or, at least, believed too many of them. You think this is going to be solved by Ethan Hunt killing Putin? If it were that easy, we would do it. But it’s fantasy.”

HE to Friendo: “If this was 1941 or ’42, you would have written the same. ‘You’ve officially watched too many movies, Jeff. Or, at least, believed too many of them. You think this is going to be solved by Walter Pidgeon killing Hitler in Fritz Lang’s Manhunt? If it were that easy, we would do it. It’s fantasy.”

…that the smartest way to hurry along the demise of the malignant Trump era (please!) is to go easy, social-media-wise, on the Trump faithful. The idea is to brush aside perceptions that these people are, to put it charitably, the odious dregs of society. Okay, but that’s a tough one. All along their allegiances and impulses have been fundamentally ignorant, lazy and contrary to human decency. The only thing I partially agree with is their hate of wokesters and extreme left-Twitter crazies.

Unbelievable! Morons together outrageously!! Trump sucked Putin’s ass for four years!!

And I feel very badly for all the brave Ukranians right now because (let’s face it) nobody is doing shit to help them out. Not in any substantive way. The world is just texting “this is awful” and “Putin is a beast” while the invasion rages on, and we all know what’s going to happen within a week or two.

On the evening of Thursday, March 3rd, the Santa Barbara Film Festival will present an on-stage interview with the five 2022 nominees for the 2022 Best Director Oscar — The Power of the Dog‘s Jane Campion, Drive My Car‘s Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Licorice Pizza‘s Paul Thomas Anderson, Belfast‘s Kenneth Branagh and West Side Story‘s Steven Spielberg.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, always the gentle diplomat, will moderate the group interview on the stage of Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre. Here are some suggested questions that Feinberg might want to consider asking….hah!

Spielberg question #1: Leaving aside the Covid diminishment factor, what were your commercial expectations or hopes for West Side Story before it opened? Did you think it might appeal to Millennials and Zoomers and GenXers, or just boomers? Put another way, what led you to remake a famous 1961 musical that everyone’s seen and which won a ton of Oscars 60 years ago? You obviously did a beautiful job of re-energizing the material and all the critics loved it, but younger audiences totally blew it off. Thoughts?

Spielberg question #2: You’ve been working fairly steadily with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski for a quarter century now — The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, The Adventures of Tintin, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, The Post, Ready Player One, West Side Story and the upcoming The Fabelmans. And a majority of these films bear Kaminski’s famous visual trademark — subdued, grayish colors with a milky, semi-hazy lighting scheme. If you could be magically transported back to the ’70s and early ’80s and had the chance to re-shoot your classic films from that era — Duel, Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. — would you bring Janusz along so he could give the subdued grayish-milky treatment to those films also?

Campion question: We all know that you’re locked to win the Best Director Oscar. The message has gone out that it’s your time, and that we need another woman to win, and that Netflix will finally have a major Oscar to its credit. And there’s no question that The Power of the Dog is very well made and exquisitely finessed. But these two factors aside, what was it that convinced you that a grim story about a toxic closet case and a belligerent asshole in 1920s Montana…a story of this macho dickhead making life miserable for his brother’s wife and how her gay son has his revenge…what was it about this story that told you “this…this is a story about closeted sexuality that needs to be told…this is a story that 2021 audiences are hungry to see!”

Branagh question: You’ve made a film about the struggles of a Protestant Belfast family during “the troubles”, but without really explaining what the troubles were about or indicating what your personal views are (or were) about the occupation of northern Ireland by British troops, and what the Catholics were fighting for, and whether or not the whole Protestant, anti-Catholic thing had merit or not. Since you didn’t get into it in your film, would you care to discuss it now?

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The valiant, never-say-die, pretty-much-doomed defense of Ukranian soldiers against the Russian invaders is reminding me of the “fuck it” attitude of William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates and Ben Johnson at the finale of Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch.

As they start firing at General Mapache and his surrounding troops, these four bad hombres know they’re totally outgunned and as good as dead. But they’re determined to take as many of Mapache’s men with them as possible.

“Ukrainians vow to ‘give Putin hell'”, a 2.25 Daily Mail story by Jennifer Smith

“Defiant Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are preparing to fight Russia’s army to the death, vowing on Friday to ‘give Putin hell from every house’ when his men make their advance through the major city of Kyiv in a stunning show of resilience. 

“Among them was a marine who blew himself up along with a bridge in the Kherson region near Crimea in a heroic act that slowed down Russian troops. The marine was named by the General Staff of the Armed Forces as Vitaly Shakun. He was manning the Henichesk bridge in the Kherson region when Russians advanced and mined it. 

“According to the General Staff’s Facebook page, the battalion decided the only way to stop them was to blow up the bridge.  Shakun had no time to escape. He told his comrades he was going to detonate, and second later they heard an explosion.”

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