Obviously my love for Bradley Cooper’s Maestro has become a minority viewpoint. Obviously the tide of public opinion has turned against it. I was completely swept up by Cooper’s stylistic audacity and particularly by Carey Mulligan’s performance as Felicia Montealegre, but you can’t fight City Hall or at least you can’t instruct or badger people into broadening their aesthetic horizons. All I can say is that I’m very sorry.
Partly because it sounds like woke gobbledygook, I suppose. Because it suggests that the simple bedrock concept of gender (as in primarily two, as in male/female) has been imposed by a foreign power to establish political control over a native culture. Which is bullshit, of course.
Thank you, God, for sparing me from the burden of such terminology throughout most of my life. Thank you for that blessing.
At the same time I felt curiously charmed by the “Little Horse” character in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (‘70), and I loved Chief Dan George’s “Old Lodge Skins” character (a performance that was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor) and his “live and let live” approach to life.
We all understand how the Oscar game works. If you want your indisputably excellent film to be regarded as a Best Picture contender, you have to release it during award season (late October to Christmas).
Yes, there have been exceptions. Everything Everywhere All At Once was released on 3.25.22, and it wound up winning the Best Picture Oscar on 3.12.23 — nearly a full year later. The Silence of the Lambs opened on 2.14.91, and collected five major category Oscars 13 and 1/2 months later, including Best Picture.
Timing is nonetheless a huge factor (at least in most people’s minds), and so let’s play a game, shall we? Let’s pretend that Ben Affleck and Alex Convery‘s Air, by any yardstick an excellent character-driven sports film with at least two Oscar-calibre performaces (Matt Damon‘s Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis‘s Deloris Jordan) and a terrific finale that really sinks in…let’s pretend that Amazon didn’t release it on 4.5.23 but during award-season prime time.
You know it would be sitting on the Gold Derby best-of-the-year rosters and possibly might have prevailed among one or more the critics groups. You know it would have. So let’s cut Air a break and pretend it was released six or seven weeks ago. We’d be looking at a whole different ballgame.
Wiki: “Air was originally slated for a streaming-only release on Amazon Prime Video, but Amazon Studios eventually decided to release it theatrically following strong results from test screenings. It was the first Amazon title since Late Night to be given an exclusive theatrical release, and $40 to $50 million went into promoting the theatrical. It began streaming on Amazon Prime Video on 5.12.23.”
And here we are in late December 2023, and the world has obviously changed since last spring, but Air is still a first-rate, dialogue-driven sports film. As well as being an excellent “dad” film. (No shame in that!) It’s a very human, inside-baseball sports drama that feels honest and relatable every step on the way. Cut from the Moneyball cloth.
For nearly a quarter-century Michael Mann made a series of intensely male-ish, high-stakes grand-slammers — hardcore films about headstrong fellows forging their own paths, sometimes outside the bonds of legality but always single-mindedly. And man, did they hit the spot!
The hot streak began with 1981’s Thief and ended with 2006’s Collateral, and also included Manhunter (’86), The Last of the Monicans (’92), Heat (’95), The Insider (’99) and Ali (’01) — seven films in all.
Then came the “excellent work but not quite a bell-ringer” period…Miami Vice (’06), Public Enemies (’09) and Blackhat (’15)…movies that registered as ground-rule doubles or triples. Which felt disorienting to Mann-heads given his 23-year home run history.
Now comes Ferrari (Neon, 12.25), which is made of authentic, bruising, searing stuff. In my eyes it’s another grand-slammer but what do I know? Obviously the reaction so far has been mixed-positive — many admirers but also a modest-sized crowd of dissenters.
There’s no disputing that The Iron Claw is coarse, bruising and emotionally shameless — a death-trip family flick with an arch-villain of a paterfamilias (Holt McCallany’s Fritz Von Erich) whose malice is barely addressed by his sons and never confronted.
And all of it colored by the fraudulence of the “sport” of wrestling itself — a rancid charade that makes you want to barf or at least turn away.
And the grotesque, eye-rolling spectacle of one son after another almost comically succumbing to the black void like Radio City Rockettes dancers performing choreographed splits…it’s somewhere between nauseating, hilarious and ludicrous.
There’s another thing that’s beyond dispute, and that’s the fact that those who are earnestly praising this beyond-bizarre, blue-collar soap opera should never, ever be trusted.
I’m dead serious — the critics and HE commenters who’ve given Sean Durkin’s film a gold star and a back rub are dishonest people, or at the very least completely unmitigated and certainly undisciplined by what most of us would call “taste”.
For the rest of their lives these knaves, these one-eyed jacks, these human-sized hunks of gravel will have to answer for their praise for this garbage dump of a film…it will stalk them in perpetuity.
Chicago Reader critic Micco Caparale, 12.19:
N.Y. Post critic Johnny Oleksinksi:
Incidentally: Before yesterday’s screening of The Iron Claw I hadn’t realized how short The Bear ‘s Jeremy Allen White is. The guy is only 5’ 7”, or seven inches shorter than the late Kerry Von Erich (whom he plays in the film) and an inch shorter than Humphrey Bogart.
Back in the mid ’90s I’d have written about that infamous VHS tape showing how The Naked Gun movies copied jokes and sight gags from Get Smart, Sledgehammer and other comedy movies and TV shows.
The VHS video in question (originally mentioned in Spy magazine in July 1993) has been digitally remastered and updated. It now includes David Zucker’s contention he’s only been influenced by his own work. I’m not saying that Zucker is basically a comedy kleptomaniac (I wouldn’t know), but there are those who feel this way.
How odd that Snoopy has suddenly become a thing on two fronts — not just retail shelves but also in Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro or more particularly in that already famous argument scene that happens around the three-quarters mark.
From “Why is Snoopy so popular with Gen Z?,” posted on 12.15.23 by Morning Edition‘s Leila Fadel and Steve Inskeep:
“One of the hottest toys this holiday season has little chance of making it into the hands of children. That’s because people in their 20s, people who are adulting, are grabbing up a toy known as Puffer Snoopy.
“Puff Snoopy Dog is a upmarket version of the cartoon beagle from Peanuts. He wears a puffy pale-blue jacket and a green-and-yellow ski cap.
“Snoopy was selling for $13.99 at CVS until stores sold out. People from Generation Z, we’re told, are posting on TikTok about their frantic searches.”
Something vital would be missing. McCartney’s hair has never thinned out, no bald spots, etc. Imagine if his hair was as sparse as Bob Mortimer‘s….it would be awful.
I own the inmaculate Sony 4K Bluray of Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb, and every so often I’ll rewatch it just to savor those wonderful monochrome enhancements.
I did this last night if you wanna know, but for the first time I watched an accompanying interview essay with Mick Broderick, author of “Reconstructing Strangelove: Inside Stanley Kubrick’s Nightmare Comedy” — exciting, absorbing, endlessly fascinating.
And it’s probably even easier to politely dismiss or shoulder-shrug Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (Searchlight, 12.8), which, for the fourteenth or fifteenth time, is a sexual Frankenstein meets Barbie with the same confident and completist feminist imprimatur at the conclusion.
But like Maestro, Poor Things really gains during a second viewing. I can’t wait for viewing #3.
I hate to say this, but credit is due to Everything Everywhere All At Once (a movie that I mostly hate) for expanding the procedural boundaries of what a Best Picture contender can be. The younger Academy members who voted for it basically said “weird, imaginative, ouside-the-norm surreal content is totally approvable in this realm.” So in a sense EEAAO has done Poor Things a favor.
Times Picayune columnist and movie critic Mike Scott:
David Poland:
Time‘s decision to celebrate Taylor Swift as the Person of the Year is, of course, first and foremost a shallow commercial hustle.
The editors are basicallly saying “superfluousness is not a crime…it’s not so bad and in some ways is pretty great…all hail the island of leave us alone, we’re happy where we are, don’t puncture the bubble of insularity that so many millions of women (mostly younger) want to live inside…that bubble of complacency…that temporary (hopefully eternal!) shelter realm…success, simplicity of mind, in some instances (probably more so than we’d like to admit) the shroud of vapidity.
No offense to Taylor herself — she’s smart, capable, knows what she’s doing. But the Time guys are squeaking mice. There are more things in heaven and earth, guys, than are dreamt of in your marketing philosophy.
AI kingpin Sam Altman would have been an unsexy choice, but what he’s helped to unleash is obviously exerting thousands of times more infuence (and an infuential threat) upon our land, culture and souls than Taylor Swift.
If it has to be someone or something vapid in order to make Time into a bigger cultural thing, I would blend Swift with Barbie and Greta Gerwig and call 2023 The Year of of the Self-Celebrating, Wrapped in Commercial Glory Girly Girls Who Have Little Use For Men and Would Pretty Much Like to Cast Them Aside Except For The Sperm Donation Stuff….Barbie, Taylor, Beyonce…the whole commercial and cultural blitzkrieg of it all.
Two days ago Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted to having read the proverbial writing on the wall and more or less bullhorned the following “whoa, Nellie!” message to Disney wokesters, which I’ve conveyed here in HE-styled rhetoric:
“All right, enough, dammit…we have to face facts…the Critical Drinker has been right all along and we have to acknowledge the state of things, or at least I do…the new Disney law is “no more woke propaganda in our movies”
“We’ve clearly alienated Joe and Jane Popcorn in the parenting community and we really have to get back to being good old family–friendly Disney, and in case you’re not reading me, we’ll henceforth be re-assessing the advisability of using LGBTQIA and maybe even progressive femme-bot material in our animated features. We’ll be taking it one step at a time.”
Sidenote: All hail Le Monde’s Arnaud Leparmentier, whose 11.29 article laid the situation on the line in a way that Variety or The Hollywood Reporter would never do.