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McMafia, the eight-part BBC1 minseries that will begin airing on AMC on 2.26, is based on a same-titled book by Misha Glenny and directed by James Watkins.

Glenny chose the name McMafia “because of how professional, organized and homogenous international gangsters have become,” it says here.

As Semiyon Kleiman (David Strathairn) tells banker Alex Godman (James Norton), “These people dress like bankers, they speak a dozen languages, they eat in the best restaurants, stay in the best hotels. But underneath all that sophistication, there’s an open grave in the Mexican desert with 50 headless corpses inside.”

McMafia “has been criticized for its stately pace and complex plotting,” a review stated. “It can feel a little po-faced, lacking the wit of a Hugh Laurie or a Tom Hollander, who both brought light and shade to The Night Manager.

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Welcome, much-needed changes to the movie industry have already been brought about by #Time’s Up and #MeToo, but it was suggested during a dinner last night that some kind of new Hays Code agreement might eventually be adopted by the motion picture, TV and streaming community. I wasn’t told, mind, that this idea is actually being kicked around, but a friend believes that the current climate might lead to such a measure, and who knows?

The new Hays Code agreement could partly seek to eliminate gender discrimination and pay disparity between men and women. I for one think that’s a pretty good notion if fairly implemented.

The friend also suggested, however, that another goal might be to institute sexual morality advisories that would discourage depictions of sexual misconduct and assault against women and minors without appropriate consequence. The sexual morality portion would be a matter of tremendous concern to filmmakers, he said. I don’t think I need to explain why this concern would be manifest among directors and screenwriters of all stripes and stations.

Again, I’m not saying that such an agreement is actually being discussed by anyone, but where there’s conversational smoke there’s sometimes fire. Maybe. I’m mentioning this because before last night I’d never heard such an idea, even in the loosest of conversations. We are witnessing, after all, the gradual emergence of a new form of liberal Calvinism these days, so it wouldn’t be totally crazy if a #Time’s Up production code was eventually agreed upon and instituted.

When we say Hays Code (named for Will Hays) we really mean the Breen code (named for Joseph Breen). It was adopted in response to what some regarded as a climate of tawdry morality in movies of the early 1930s. The code was a set of moral guidelines that was applied by major studios from 1934 to roughly 1968.

The code began to slowly erode in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but it ended with a bang when Elizabeth Taylor said “goddam you” to Richard Burton in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff (’66).

Last night I spoke to a knowledgable industry friend who agrees with Mark Harris about Woody Allen’s career being toast. While he’s appalled and horrified by the current terror and believes that the only sane response is to duck and wait it out, he also thinks A Rainy Day in New York will be over, done and finito for the Woodman.

He also suspects that Amazon will jettison A Rainy Day in New York, although they’ll look like gutless political cowards if they do this. On the other hand Call Me By Your Name star Timothee Chalamet, who costars in Rainy Day, will have to answer very carefully when a questioner brings up the Allen hoo-hah on the next red carpet.

He said that Woody needs $25 million to make his films, all in, and that he’s not going to be able to raise this without significant name-brand U.S. actors along with general support from the U.S. film industry. My friend didn’t say that Allen’s films are obviously winding down anyway in terms of quality, but others have noted this.

What about the European market? I said. Allen is worshipped in France, etc. Allen’s producers won’t be able to raise $25 million from European financiers alone, he said, because the European market for his films isn’t large enough.

He’ll have to scale his fee and production costs way down to make a European-centric feature — $10 million or even $9 or $8 million. He’ll have to shoot guerilla-style, hip pocket, on the fly, available light, etc.

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Jordan Ruimy and I recorded a chat three or four hours ago, but the batteries in my recently purchased Olympus recorder died about 12 minutes in….brilliant. But two good things came out of our chat, and they both belong to Jordan, at least in this context.

Oscar-bait movies are regarded askance by younger industry types plus the new guild and Academy members. And this, Ruimy believes, is why Steven Spielberg‘s The Post never caught on. People smelled Oscar-bait calculation from the get-go, and they don’t like the mindset (an “important” story or theme done classy, aimed at 50-plus types, bucks-up stars and screenwriters) and the “game” of it all.

The 45-and-unders looked at this well-written, respectably made prestige flick with two boomer superstars (Streep, Hanks) and said, “Where is it written that we all have to stand up and salute Oscar-bait movies like little toy soldiers every fucking November and December?”

The fact is that two of the hottest Best Picture contenders — Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water and Jordan Peele‘s Get Out — are pretty close to B movies, or at least what used to be regarded as B-level material — a romantic monster flick and a dark horror-zombie satire.

Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’56)

Jack Arnold and William Alland’s The Creature From The Black Lagoon (’54).

In the mid 50s the forebears of these films — The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Invasion of the Body Snatchers — never had a chance of any kind of Oscar attention, much less respect, but The Creature from the Love Lagoon and Invasion of the White Suburban Obama Lovers are right at the top of the heap today.

Ruimy also believes that Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri may start losing cred due to backlash articles that I, frankly, haven’t paid attention to. One is Matthew Olson‘s 1.8.18 Digg piece titled “Expect The ‘Three Billboards’ Backlash To Dominate All Oscars Talk — Here’s Why.” Another is a Maeve McDermott USA Today piece called “The Growing Racial Backlash Against ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’,” posted on 1.3.18.

And don’t forget Bill McCuddy‘s adamant declaration that “Oscar voters will not pick Aquaman.” Older, grayer, creasier Oscar voters, he meant. The under-45s are fine with Aquaman, as noted above. Ruimy also sees an element of vulnerability in The Shape of Water.

So where does that leave us? It’s possible that both of these Fox Searchlight pieces will lose a cetain amount of steam over the next three or four weeks, and that Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird will surge in and take the big prize. Ruimy also believes that Get Out might also surge and scoop up the Best Picture Oscar, but I won’t have it…no!

On 1.12.16 I posted about a visit to North by Northwest‘s cropduster junction. Here it is again, and with larger photos:

Daryl H. Thornhill, grandson of Roger Thornhill, has paid a visit to a hallowed place — a place where his ancestor was nearly murdered by machine-gun fire from a cropdusting biplane. Daryl is standing at “Prairie Stop, Highway 41” — actually an area near the intersection of Garces Highway and Corcoran Road near Wasco, a suburb of Bakersfield. Right by the side of the road, in fact, and taking shots with his iPhone 6 Plus. The weather is sunny and mild. Dead calm.

A SUV appears from behind a far-off thicket of small trees. It approaches and stops about 60 or 70 feet from where Daryl Thornhill is standing. A rural-type fellow in a lumpy brown suit gets out. Thornhill and Brownsuit regard each other. Thornhill decides to walk over and break the ice.

Thornhill: Hi. (pause) Hot day.
Brownsuit: Seen worse.
Thornhill: (Beat) Have you ever seen a film called North by Northwest?
Brownsuit: Can’t say I have ’cause I haven’t.
Thornhill: Well, a couple of websites say they shot a famous scene from that film right here, right on this spot. 12168 Corcoran Road.
Brownsuit: Can’t trust what you read on the web.
Thornhill: My thought exactly. It’s flat out here, but otherwise the area bears almost no resemblance to the area in the film. No corn crops, no tilled soil, no telephone poles. The area in the film looked like rural Illinois or Indiana. This looks like….well, not classic farmland at all. Desert scrub, fruit trees. It looks more like the area outside Ravenna in Antonioni’s Red Desert.
Brownsuit: Red Desert?
Thornhill: Another movie.

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Last month it looked like The Florida Project‘s Willem Dafoe had the Best Supporting Actor race all sewn up. Starting with the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and into early January, Dafoe’s performance as a harried motel manager couldn’t stop racking up wins. He took at least 13 trophies from the National Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Toronto Film Critics Association, the Indiewire Critics poll blah blah. Okay, enough already, he’s got it.

(l.) Florida Project‘s Willem Dafoe; (r.) Three Billboards‘ Sam Rockwell.

And then five days ago Dafoe suddenly lost…what happened? Sam Rockwell‘s performance as a none-too-bright local cop in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri took the Best Supporting Actor prize at the Golden Globe awards, and out of the blue Dafoe’s mojo was no more. Last night Rockwell won again at the Critics Choice awards, and now people are wondering if Dafoe was strictly a finicky critics favorite but Rockwell is more of a rank-and-file industry guy. They’ve both been nominated for a SAG award in this category; we’ll see how this shakes out on 1.21.

Could Dafoe be the new Bob Hoskins? In late 1986 the likelihood of Hoskins winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as a lovesick chauffeur in Neil Jordan‘s Mona Lisa seemed guaranteed. After winning the Best Actor prize at the ’86 Cannes Film Festival, Hoskins — like Dafoe — won the same award from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics. And then he won the Best Actor BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe…how could Hoskins lose?

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Yesterday Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water won the Critics Choice award for Best Picture. CC picks don’t always mirror Academy preferences, but they have much of the time. That plus Shape‘s Golden Globe win last Sunday tells me that this erotically-tinged period fantasy fable is probably going to win the Best Picture Oscar.

A friend says “no way” because The Shape of Water has no SAG ensemble nomination, and is therefore a longer shot to win than Get Out. Okay but…but…but…Get Out can’t win the Best Picture Oscar…no! There’s also a possibility that both of these projections are wrong and that Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri will take it instead.

Two days ago it was apparent that Shape, Three Billboards and Jordan Peele‘s Get Out had become the leading soft default picks across the board. But Shape is the apparent darling. It’s softer, smoother and more sumptuous than the well-written, very finely performed Billboards, its closest competitor, and it’s apparently fated to overtake the politically correct support enjoyed by Jordan Peele‘s Get Out, which is either tied with Billboards or in third place — you tell me.

Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water.

Accept it — a Best Picture Oscar for a very handsomely composed genre film about rapturous mercy sex with the Creature From the Love Lagoon might soon be placed alongside the statuettes for Birdman, Spotlight, The Hurt Locker, 12 Years A Slave, Platoon, The Godfather Part II, A Man For All Seasons and The Best Years of Our Lives in the Academy’s golden display case in the upstairs lobby. Probably. Maybe.

It will therefore cinch a hard-fought triumph over (a) one of the boldest, most avant garde and stunningly captured war films ever made, (b) the most emotionally affecting and transformational gay love story since Brokeback Mountain and probably of the 21st Century, and (c) one of the sharpest, punchiest and most fetchingly performed coming-of-age tales about a young woman at the start of her adult life, and in a year that obviously cries out for a top-tier woman-directed film and/or a female-centric story to be celebrated above all.

The reasons for Shape‘s possible victory: (a) it’s a lot warmer than Dunkirk and certainly warmer than the somewhat jagged-edged Three Billboards, (b) it isn’t dealing gay cards (which is a seeming disqualifier among older white male Academy members given that last year a meditative, under-stated gay movie won the Best Picture Oscar), (c) it’s an emotionally inviting fable with a Johnny Belinda-like lead performance from Sally Hawkins, and (d) you don’t have to believe in socially progressive largesse or be on the “woke” bandwagon — you just have to be susceptible.

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Recently there’s been a fresh wave of accusations against Woody Allen. Again. The last time I checked, and especially after reading Robert Weide’s 12.13.17 summary of the certainly debatable 25 year-old allegations against Allen, I thought the matter had been more or less put to bed. Move on, let sleeping dogs lie, etc.

Weide’s piece was posted in response to Dylan Farrow’s 12.7 L.A. Times essay that asked why Woody has escaped a #MeToo slapdown. But any fair assessment of the facts suggests that Dylan’s accusation is, at the very least, clouded by uncertainty. Just take ten minutes and read the Weide piece. It’s all there. Really.

Nonetheless the tide has recently turned, and we’re now back in a Crucible-like environment, and more or less due to three things.

One, that Richard Morgan Washington Post piece about Allen’s obsession with teenaged girls, as evidenced by certain scripts he’s written. Two, Greta Gerwig‘s declaration that she’ll never work with Allen again. And three, Mira Sorvino‘s open letter to Dylan Farrow (i.e., “I believe you”).

Something snapped inside when Hunter Lurie, the son of director and HE pally Rod Lurie, asked this morning why no one has queried Timothy Chalamet about a controversial-sounding Allen film, A Rainy Day in New York, that he co-stars in.

I took this to mean that Lurie believes that Chalamet needs to follow in Gerwig and Sorvino’s footsteps, etc. He claimed otherwise, but he also tweeted that he suspects that A Rainy Day in New York, which partly focuses on a 40ish guy (Jude Law) in a reportedly unconsummated relationship with a much younger woman (Elle Fanning), might become a hot potato and perhaps not even be released due to the real-life echoes.

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The Directors Guild of America membership has an infuriating if not infamous decision to live down.

It has not only backhanded the brilliant Call Me By Your Name helmer Luca Guadagnino (i.e., “Sorry but the Oscars already did the gay thing last year with Moonlight, and we feel too gayed-out to go there again”) but has nominated Get Out director Jordan Peele twice(!!) — for its top-dog feature-film award award as well as a possible trophy for being the best first-time director.

This is impossible, ridiculous. I give up. Sheepthink, no justice, just politics. The fix is in.

For the top feature film award the DGA also nominated Lady Bird‘s Greta Gerwig, The Shape of Water‘s Guillermo del Toro, Three Billboards‘ Martin McDonaugh and Dunkirk‘s Christopher Nolan.

Other first-time nominees are Taylor Sheridan (Wind River), Aaron Sorkin, Geremy Jasper (Patti Cake$) and William Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth).

The Post‘s Steven Spielberg wasn’t nominated, and this, I fear, is the final death knell. The Post — ironically my favorite Spielberg film since Saving Private Ryan — will most likely not be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

Other blow-offs include The Florida Project‘s Sean Baker, Mudbound‘s Dee Rees and The Beguiled‘s Sofia Coppola.

Who will take the top honor? Del Toro, I suspect, although I would give it to Nolan without blinking an eye.

Received from a New York guy who gets around: “What a kick in the groin to Steven Spielberg and Luca Guadagnino. I’m talking of course about the double-down bet the DGA just placed on Jordan Peele. If he’s a newcomer — and that’s how I think he should be considered — he doesn’t belong in both categories.”

Last night (i.e., Tuesday) Tatyana and I attended a well-catered if crowded Mudbound party. It happened inside a mid-sized, two-story Chateau Marmont bungalow (the fabled oval-shaped pool was just outside) and was sponsored by Sandra Bullock and Moonlight costar Trevante Rhodes. Director Dee Rees and costars Mary J. Blige, Jason Clarke, Garett Hedlund and Rob Morgan attended; ditto producer Cassian Elwes.

During last night’s Mudbound gathering: (l. to r.) director Dee Rees, costar and Best Supporting Actress contender Mary J. Blige, Sandra Bullock. (Thanks to Ginsberg-Libby’s Paige Niemi for supplying photos.)

The idea was to remind Academy members who haven’t yet filled out their nomination ballots (Friday, 1.12 is the final day) that Mudbound is (a) one of the year’s most awarded and nominated films, (b) that Blige is a serious Best Supporting Actress contender, and (c) that the striking cinematography by ASC-nominated Rachel Morrison deserves a nom of its own.

I spoke briefly to Clarke, Elwes, Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman and elite Manhattan party orchestrator Peggy Siegal, et. al. The Mark Wahlberg-Michelle Williams pay disparity thing was a hot topic; the James Franco and Michael Douglas accusations less so. People are rolling their eyes and waving the stories away. The waiters were serving small bowls of lightly sauced Fettucini Bolognese — best I’ve ever tasted since sampling a similar dish in Rome last June.

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Ask ten film historians about David Lean‘s Ryan’s Daughter, and they’ll all say it nearly killed Lean’s career. Slow and stately, over-indulged, visually pompous and old-schoolish to a fault. And that awful, Oscar-awarded village-idiot performance by John Mills. Magnificent Freddie Young cinematography, okay, but otherwise a sudden fall from grace. Not even close to the realm of Lawrence of Arabia or Brief Encounter or Bridge on the River Kwai or even the respectably second-tier Dr. Zhivago or A Passage to India.

But you know what? Last night I began watching an HD Amazon stream of Ryan’s Daughter on my Sony 65″ 4K TV. I was sitting there like a 12 year-old and studying the Super Panavision 70 detail and just marvelling at how good it looks. The HD transfer was apparently taken from a 35mm source but it’s staggering all the same. It looks much better than what I recall from some half-forgotten viewing at some Massachusetts or Connecticut bijou (i.e., not a 70mm house).

And I realized that the trick to watching Ryan’s Daughter is to watch it on a monitor like mine, and to ignore as much of the story and the dialogue as possible (not to mention the bland British officer performance by Christopher Jones) and just focus on the visuals and the music.

That opening shot of the steep Irish cliffs near Dingle Bay, and that tiny little ant (i.e., Sarah Miles) running left to right as she approaches the edge…my God! And that footsteps-in-the-sand sequence with Robert Mitchum. 20th Century filmmaking rarely exceeded this level of immaculate care and visual eloquence.

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