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The only thing that didn’t quite work about John Krasinki‘s A Quiet Place (’18) is that I could never detect a social metaphor. The horror, it seemed, was totally situational in a random-ass way. Don’t make a sound or the big brown alien monsters will rush in and murder you whambam. Okay, fine, but what’s the real-life echo?

Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby‘s The Thing was about early ’50s paranoia over invaders from the sky, be they Russians or flying saucers. Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers was about submitting to the blandness of the Eisenhower years…the mid ’50s conformity of the suburbs. George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead was about a sick society grappling with evil histories and buried behaviors — dead bodies walking the earth in order to wreak vengeance. Rosemary’s Baby was…I’m not sure but it had something to do with that 4.8.66 Time magazine cover that asked “Is God Dead?” Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook was some kind of metaphor about car crashes and dead husbands and the terror of facing parenthood alone.

But what was A Quiet Place about?

It hit me a couple of days ago. All you have to do is change “don’t make a sound” to “don’t make the wrong sound” or more precisely “don’t say the wrong thing.” Then it all fits. The big brown monsters are fanatical wokesters who rush in like the wind and destroy your life and livelihood if you mutter the wrong phrase or use incorrect terminology or happen to like Real Time with Bill Maher or late-period Woody Allen films or if you posted the wrong thing in 2009, etc.

Now it makes sense! Now I get what Krasinki was on about, and what A Quiet Place Part II probably has in mind. I’m perfectly serious.

There are ten upcoming 2020 releases that smell like possible Best Picture material. To me anyway. David Fincher‘s Mank, Aaron Sorkin‘s Trial of the Chicago 7, Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel, Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater, Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, Joel Coen‘s Macbeth, Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, Leos Carax’s Annette, Paul Greengrass’s News of the World and Terrence Malick‘s The Last Planet. (10)

I know that Carax’s film…actually I know nothing except it’s a musical and Carax is crazy in a good way. I’m sensing that post-Parasite things suddenly feel a lot less constrained as far as Best Picture criteria are concerned. I know that Malick doesn’t do Oscar-aspiring films, but Planet is some kind of Jesus of Nazareth saga. (Almost certainly not geared for the Mel Gibson crowd.) I have a 12-year-old draft of Sorkin’s film — just received it today. I’ve read Mank, but I’d also love to read Blonde, Stillwater and News of the World.

Ana de Armas in Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde.

The somewhat-less-likelies include Chris Nolan‘s Tenet, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks, Denis Villenueve’s Dune, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, Edgar Wright’s Last Night In Soho, Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk, Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water and Liesl Tommy‘s Respect. (11)

Not to mention Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island. (4)

That’s 25 head-turners for starters. What am I missing, cream of the crop-wise?

Earlier this month I repeated a matter of common industry knowledge about Ben Affleck and Gavin O’Connor‘s The Way Back (Warner Bros., 3.6). Affleck has been famously struggling with alcohol issues for years, and so (in the realm of the film) is “Jack Cunningham”, a former basketball star who bends the elbow. The film is therefore self-portraiture to some extent.

Today a N.Y. Times profile of Affleck, written by Brooks Barnes, acknowledges the obvious and offers Affleck a forum by which to admit his past sins and express regrets.

The photos reveal that Affleck is no longer the “fat bearded boozer” he plays in O’Connor’s film. He’s sober (for now), shaven and relatively slender. Then again, as Barnes’ piece reports, Affleck has had three stints in rehab (in ’01, ’17 and ’18) and then he relapsed last fall.

Affleck admission #1: “I drank relatively normally for a long time. What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.

Affleck admission #2: “It’s not particularly healthy for me to obsess over the failures — the relapses — and beat myself up. I have certainly made mistakes. I have certainly done things that I regret. But you’ve got to pick yourself up, learn from it, learn some more, try to move forward.”

Affleck admission #3: “People with compulsive behavior, and I am one, have this kind of basic discomfort all the time…[they’re] trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can’t break. That’s at least what happened to me.”

Affleck admission #4: “Relapse is embarrassing, obviously. I wish it didn’t happen. I really wish it wasn’t on the internet for my kids to see. Jen and I did our best to address it and be honest.”

The Way Back opens two and a half weeks hence, but nobody I know has seen it.

Note: If I’m not mistaken the N.Y. Times used to capitalize the “i” in internet – no longer.

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Posted on 12.18.07: “Throwing a bag of Mexican takeout food at a cab is not what anyone would call a mature or attractive thing to do, but that’s what I did last night after a Boston Checker almost hit me as I was crossing Commonwealth Avenue in slushy snow. I have to be honest and say it felt right for about three or four seconds. Then I felt like an idiot.

I turned to my left and saw a pair of killer headlights half-screeching and half-skidding towards me. Instead of leaping out of the way I went into a dead-freeze, deer-in-the-headlights mode. The cab stopped — no exaggeration — with less than six inches to spare.

Anyone who’s ever escaped getting hit like this knows that the usual reaction is rage. I think I said something really cool and clever like “what the fuck are you doing, asshole?” Their cab driver screamed something back in the same vein. That tore it — he almost kills me and then he yells at me? That’s when I threw the Mexican takeout, which hit the passenger-door window.

The cabbie, double-riled by the bean dip and guacamole splattered over the rear door and window, hit the brakes and jumped out, and I went into mock Sideways mode (Thomas Haden Church swinging the club on the golf course) and howled like an animal. The driver jumped back in and drove off. End of dignified altercation.

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I doubt I’ll be seeing Ricky Tollman‘s Run This Town (Oscilloscope, 3.6). Mainly because of Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen, The Politician), who has one of those faces you can’t help but fantasize about punching or at least slapping. In this trailer Platt seems to radiate a certain dim-witted, candy-assed uncertainty and open-mouthed ambivalence, and hanging with him for 99 minutes would almost certainly be too much to bear. I hate this guy.

Pic follows Platt’s Bram Shriver, a Toronto reporter whose professional prospects are enhanced when he’s fed a cellphone video of then-Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (Damien Lewis in a fat suit) smoking crack. You’ll notice that the trailer never gives you a good look at Lewis’s obese mayor. To go by Joe Leydon‘s South by Southwest review (4.16.19), there’s a reason for that.

Posted on 4.16.19: “It doesn’t help at all that Mayor Ford — who looms large, literally and physically, despite his status as a supporting character — is played by a heavily latexed Damian Lewis in a less-than-convincing fat suit. Lewis so closely resembles Mike Myers’ Fat Bastard character in the Austin Powers franchise that it’s practically impossible to fully appreciate his spot-on portrayal of a man with an unstable id checked only sporadically by an image-conscious superego (Donald Trump, anyone?).”

Has a fat suit ever worked in a dramatic film? Yes — John Lithgow‘s Roger Ailes in Bombshell. Other instances?

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Now that Criterion has established itself as an outfit that likes to add teal tints to highly regarded classics (Teorema, Midnight Cowboy, Bull Durham, Sisters), I’m naturally dreading what might happen with their forthcoming Great Escape Bluray, which will street on 5.12.

Make no mistake — with four teal-tinted disasters to their credit, a Criterion Bluray of a late 20th Century color film is now something to be feared.

To go by DVD Beaver captures that I’ve posted three or four times, what they’ve done with the above four titles is nothing short of vandalism. I’m especially concerned with DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze having complained seven years ago that MGM’s 2013 Great Escape Bluray was “a little heavy on the teal.”

Even if Criterion doesn’t screw the colors up, their 4K remastering almost certainly won’t deliver a “bump” to John Sturges’ 1963 war classic. I’ve seen this film ten or twelve times, most recently a restored projected version at the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival, and it just doesn’t look all that extra–level. It never did and it never will. Daniel Fapp‘s 35mm cinematography is perfectly fine but except for two or three sequences that were either shot in fog or tinted misty-gray, there’s nothing about his widescreen visuals that really stand out.

I don’t know why Criterion is even releasing a 4K digital restoration, but God forbid they”ll make it look worse than even before.

“Underwhelming Great Escape“, posted on 4.27.13: “I caught yesterday afternoon’s TCM Classic Film Festival screening of The Great Escape, and I’m sorry to say that it was a pleasant but no-great-shakes experience.

“John Sturges‘ classic World War II action drama has been remastered for a forthcoming Bluray (due May 7th) and I was assuming that the DCP version would make this 1963 film look and sound a little spiffier and brassier and more eye-filling than it did the last time I saw it in a theatre, which was sometime in the ’80s.

“Especially, you know, if the DCP guys scanned the original negative and were given the funding from MGM Home Video to do an extra nice job.

“I’m kidding, of course. MGM Home Video is renowned as a bargain-basement outfit. They don’t want to spend a dime more than they have to. If MGM Home Video ran an airline you wouldn’t want to fly with them, trust me. The result is that they probably scanned an inter-positive rather than the original Great Escape negative with an order to do the best job they could within a tight budget. I don’t know any budgetary facts but what I saw on the big Chinese screen looked like a handsomely-shot film that had been mastered by the Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Airline and Storm Door Company.

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For as long as I can remember the pitchforkers have come out of the woodwork almost every time Roman Polanski is mentioned in any context. They certainly jumped in yesterday when I posted about the Cesar Academy having announced its intention to resign following the 45th Cesar Award telecast on 2.28, “partly for the crime of handing out 12 Cesar nominations to Polanski‘s An Officer and a Spy, and partly for insufficient nursing of political ties with feminist or #MeToo-supporting filmmakers.”

The piece was titled “French #MeToo-ers Boot Cesar Academy,” but before you could turn around the discussion had devolved into a condemnation thread about Polanski’s predatory behavior with under-age girls in the ’70s and ’80s, which allegedly included rape and assault. Rape is obviously a vicious crime, but because I tried to mitigate the vitriol by referring to European cultural imprints about ages of consent between 14 and 16, I was called a “piece of shit”; another Polanski qualifier was called a “loathsome fuckstick.” As if we were somehow attempting to excuse the odious scenario of a 42 year-old man having it off with a 13 year-old girl.

This morning I noted that “Americans have always plugged their ears over the European age-of-consent norms but cultural imprints matter, and the vast majority of European countries set their ages of consent between, believe it or not, ages 14 to 16, which strikes me personally as way too young. I’ve always thought 18 was a decent benchmark.

“13-14 is definitely, emphatically too young. Ditto 15. When you hit 16 you’ve stepped into American cultural imprint territory because of Ringo Starr’s ‘you’re sixteen, you’re beautiful and you’re mine’ and Randy Newman‘s ‘half pound of cocaine and a 16 year-old girl in a long black limousine on a hot September night.’ But 16 is too young, I feel, and so is 17. 18 seems right. We all know about teen hormones and that nobody’s going to stop basic impulses, but women under the age of 18 are arguably lacking in judgment. They should be entitled to all-hands-off status if they want that, and the law should enforce this.

“And in terms of older guys having it off with younger women, they should steer clear of anyone under 20. Once women hit 20, or the average age of a junior in college, they’re on their own.”

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Speaking as an old-time journalist acquaintance of Robert Towne, whom I occasionally visited and spoke to during the early to late ’90s, I felt a bit jarred by a 2.12 N.Y. Times review of Sam Wasson‘s “The Big Goodbye.” Specifically by a statement written by Mark Horowitz, to wit: “No Polanski, no Chinatown.”

The thought is that Towne’s screenplay of Chinatown (of which there were many, many drafts) would have stayed a screenplay without Polanski’s input. He and Towne collaborated for several weeks, during which time Polanski insisted on cutting away much of the sprawl and specificity of Towne’s 1937 detective yarn, as well as using as a dark, downbeat ending.

As Chinatown production designer Richard Sylbert once remarked, “The point is the girl dies…that’s [Roman’s] whole life.” Horowitz writes that Sylbert might have added, “And the monsters win.” In Towne’s original Chinatown drafts Evelyn Mulwray doesn’t die and in fact kills her father, the evil tycoon Noah Cross.

I called Towne a short while ago to ask if he has anything to add or qualify or dispute. He said a few things but under the cloak of privacy. It’s obviously Towne’s call to speak out or be silent, but I were in his shoes I would send a response to the N.Y. Times. I can at least state that from his perspective the “no Polanski, no Chinatown” equation is a less than fully comprehensive summary, but I hope Towne chooses to post his recollections in some specific, chapter-and-verse fashion before too long.

Last night I finally saw Nat Faxon and Jim Rash‘s Downhill (Searchlight, 2.14.20), which is a fairly straightforward remake of Rubin Ostlund‘s Force Majeure (’14). Downhill is almost a half-hour shorter than the ’14 version, but otherwise I found it better than decent — adult, well measured, emotionally frank, well acted and cunningly written. (Faxon and Rash shared screenplay credit with Jesse Armstrong.)

It’s not a burn, it’s not about a “black and white situation” (as one of the less perceptive characters puts it) and it provides ample food for thought and discussion.

Both films conclude that a father running from an impending disaster (i.e., a huge avalanche) without trying to save or protect his wife and kids is a bad look. Which of course it is. Both films condemn the dad in question (Will Ferrell in the newbie, Johannes Bah Kuhnke in Ostlund’s version) and more or less agree with the furious wives (Julia Louis Dreyfus, Lisa Loven Kongsli) that dad should have (a) super-heroically yanked the wife and kids out of their seats and hauled them inside in a blink of an eye or (b) hugged them before the avalanche hit so they could all suffocate together.

Hollywood Elsewhere says “yes, it’s ignoble for a dad to run for cover without thinking of his wife or kids,” but I also believe that instinct takes over when death is suddenly hovering. I also feel that Dreyfus and the two kids acted like toadstools by just sitting there on the outdoor deck and hoping for the best.

Question for Dreyfus and sons: A huge terrifying avalanche is getting closer and closer and you just sit there? You have legs and leg muscles at your disposal, no?. A massive wall of death is about to terminate your future and your reaction is “oh, look at that…nothing to do except watch and wait and hope for the best”?

Both films film basically ask “who are we deep down?” They both suggest that some of the noble qualities we all try to project aren’t necessarily there. But Rash and Faxon’s film also says “hey, we’re all imperfect and yes, some of us will react instinctually when facing possible imminent death. So maybe take a breath and don’t be so viciously judgmental, and maybe consider the fact that tomorrow is promised to no one so just live and let live.”

I was especially taken by Downhill‘s spot-on philosophical ending (i.e., “all we have is today”). Seriously, it really works. I came to scoff at this film (due to the less-than-ecstatic Sundance buzz) but came away converted.

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Dense, complex and bursting with stylistic pizazz, the trailer for Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch (Searchlight, 7.24) conveys some of what the film is about. What it’s mostly about, basically, are visual compositions of fine flavor and aesthetic precision. In color and black and white, and in aspect ratios of 1.37:1 and 2.39:1 a la The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Also in the vein of Budapest, it’s about a distinctive institution that peaked in the mid 20th Century and then fell into ruin or hard times. To quote my own Budapest Hotel review, it’s “a valentine to old-world European atmosphere and ways and cultural climes that began to breath their last about…what, a half-century ago if not earlier.”

Story-wise, Dispatch is an American journalism film, oddly set in a second-tier French city of the ’50s and ’60s, except nobody seems to speak much French. It’s an homage to a New Yorker-ish publication, but with a Midwestern heart-of-America mindset. It tells three stories of headstrong American journalists reporting and writing about three big stories, one of them having to do with the French New Left uprising of May ’68. Otherwise the historical context…well, I’m working on that. Timothy Chalamet‘s Phil Spector hair is a stand-out.

Wiki boilerplate: “The film has been described as “a love letter to journalists set at an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional 20th-century French city”, centering on three storylines. It brings to life a collection of tales published in the eponymous The French Dispatch. The film is inspired by Anderson’s love of The New Yorker, and some characters and events in the film are based on real-life equivalents from the magazine. One of the three storylines centers on the May ’68 student occupation protests, with Timothee Chalamet and Lyna Khoudri‘s characters being two of the student protesters.

Speaking in April 2019, Anderson said, “The story is not easy to explain, [It’s about an] American journalist based in France” — Bill Murray‘s Arthur Howitzer Jr., the editor of The French Dispatch, based on Harold Ross, the co-founder of The New Yorker — “who creates his magazine. It is more a portrait of this man, of this journalist who fights to write what he wants to write. It’s not a movie about freedom of the press, but when you talk about reporters you also talk about what’s going on in the real world.”

Obviously locked for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival.

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I’ve never seen Elem Klimov‘s Come and See (’85), which is commonly regarded as one of the most searing antiwar films ever made. So I’m naturally looking forward to Janus Films’ theatrical restoration of this Russian-made film, which was Klimov’s last. It will play at Manhattan’s Film Forum between 2.21 and 3.3. I’d naturally like to see it in Los Angeles, but it doesn’t seem to have a local booking.

With a new 2K restoration you’d also presume that a Criterion Bluray would be in the pipeline, but I can’t find hide nor hair. I’ve done some basic searches…zip. A publicist friend says it’s viewable via TCM On Demand — haven’t been able to find it there either. I’m sure this is all my fault, and not that of distributor Janus Films.

All I know is that I’ve been repeatedly admonished by Tatyana for not seeing it, and the reprimands aren’t going to stop until I do.

If Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, our deranged and grotesque authoritarian crime-boss president will almost certainly be re-elected, and this country will be saddled with a political and cultural tragedy of increasing proportions.

This is not theory, not maybe — it’s real. How can Democrats be so rock stupid as to not see the tragedy that’s currently unfolding and taking shape? The republic is splitting, cracking apart. The end of civic sanity and reason is nigh. And it’s like we’re all covered in a kind of slow-motion glue.

The untested Sanders (a virtual babe in the woods on the national stage) is electoral death. He won’t just get knifed and bloodied by the Trump smear machine — he’ll probably get creamed a la Jeremy Corbyn and George McGovern.

Can anything prevent this nightmare? Not if African-American voters have anything to say about it, and of course they will starting with the South Carolina primary.

Pete Buttigieg recently connected with moderate suburban Iowans, and could theoretically do the same countrywide in the general. But AAs (particularly your older-demo homophobes) are apparently determined to sit on their hands rather than support him. (One more time — thanks, guys!) And of course Bernie bruhs and other progressives hate Pete’s guts. Except Pete or someone like him — a sensible, practical-minded, non-scary moderate liberal or left-centrist — represents the only shot at beating Trump. Who else could become the prime banner-carrier for this kind of approach at this point? Biden, Warren and Klobuchar are too low in the polls — they have no serious heat. Ditto Bloomberg and Steyer. It’s down to Pete v. Bernie, except Bernie is more or less Corbyn.

Filed on Sunday, 2.9 by London Times correspondent Josh Glancy: “At a ‘politics and eggs’ event on Friday morning in Manchester, New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders faced a friendly crowd, who applauded his familiar spiel about the ills of Wall Street, Donald Trump and big pharma. But one voter, Lenny Glynn, had a question.

“’There’s a lot of people in this room that share your anger, your anxiety and your rage,’ Glynn said. ‘But there’s a question in a lot of our minds. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the British Labour Party, who is very similar ideologically and politically to you, just took them to the worst defeat they’ve had in half a century. How can you assure us that you would not face the same onslaught?”

N.Y. Times columnist Frank Bruni, filed on 2.8: “You can analyze Sanders and assess his prospects in terms of how liberal many of his positions are: the end of private health insurance, the dismantling of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, free tuition at public colleges regardless of a student’s economic circumstances. By that yardstick he’s Corbyn, and, in my view, a hell of a general-election risk.”

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