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A couple of hours ago Glamour‘s Abby Gardner, speaking on behalf of the “woke” Twitter comintern, lambasted the editors of a just-published L.A. Times‘ Envelope issue (dated 12.21) for excluding actresses of color from the cover and the conversation.

The issue celebrates six top contenders for the Best Actress Oscar — Lady Bird‘s Saoirse Ronan, I, Tonya‘s Margot Robbie, In The Fade‘s Diane Kruger, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool‘s Annette Bening, Wonder Wheel‘s Kate Winslet and Molly Game‘s Jessica Chastain. All of them fair-skinned with blonde or ginger-colored hair…shame!

Gardner’s complaint is, of course, complete bullshit for two reasons: (a) the idea was apparently to highlight leading Best Actress contenders, and (b) this year there are, lamentably, no non-white actresses in serious contention for that trophy. (Best Supporting Actress is a different story — Mudbound‘s Mary J. Blige, Girls Trip‘s Tiffany Haddish, Downsizing‘s Hong Chau, Shape of Water‘s Octavia Spencer.)

The only woman of color who might have made it into the 2017 Best Actress circle is Natalie Paul, who was excellent in Matt Ruskin‘s Crown Heights but who never really campaigned or found traction of any kind.

If there’s a “problem” with the Envelope cover it’s because three leading contenders — The Post‘s Meryl Streep, The Shape of Water‘s Sally Hawkins and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri‘s Frances McDormand are missing. And honestly? The only actresses on the current cover who really count and deserve the highest consideration for the Best Actress Oscar are Ronan and Kruger.

Okay, you could maybe add Robbie to the hottie list, but Bening, Chastain and Winslet aren’t happening.

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Mike Nichols and Buck Henry‘s The Graduate, perhaps the most culturally on-target, stylistically audacious and emotionally affecting relationship comedy in Hollywood history, opened exactly a half-century ago — on 12.22.67. But guess what? It’s time for a significant portion of that respect and glorification to go away, and for two reasons. I’m presuming that HE readers can guess the first without reading any further.

Just as former New York Post critic Lou Lumenick proclaimed a couple of years ago that Gone With The Wind has become a disreputable and even odious film because it reflects unfortunate racial attitudes of the late 1930s, Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson announced yesterday that it’s time to take The Graduate down a peg or two, partly because of recent allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Dustin Hoffman, and partly because Benjamin Braddock is a dullard — a far less interesting character than Anne Bancroft‘s Mrs. Robinson or even Katherine Ross‘s Elaine Robinson.

HE response #1: Deplorable as Hoffman’s behavior is alleged to have been during certain encounters in the ’80s, when The Graduate was shot he was a 29 year-old actor doing his damnedest to make the Braddock character sympathetic and engaging, and for the last half-century just about the entire civilized world has agreed that he achieved that goal. You can’t come along 50 years later and say “But Hoffman acted like a sexist asshole in the ’80s!” and so everything he did creatively before, during and after the Reagan era has to be darkly re-assessed.

HE response #2: On top of which Nichols and Henry, The Graduate‘s director and screenwriter, deliberately portrayed Braddock as confused, unfocused, de-politicized and largely inarticulate for the first 65 minutes. That was all a set-up for the big pivot point when Benjamin realizes he loves Elaine and is determined to end his affair with her mother. The first hour and change is about a bumbling guy in a passive-reactive state of mind, and the last 35 or 40 minutes is about this guy struggling to achieve a goal and attain a kind of emotional fulfillment.

HE response #3: Wilkinson doesn’t take credit for her “Mrs. Robinson is a more layered and intriguing character than Braddock” opinion, which I happen to agree with as far as the first 65 minutes is concerned. She acknowledges, in fact, that Roger Ebert offered this opinion at the time of the film’s 30th anniversary. She could have added that Sam Kashner said the same thing in a 2008 Vanity Fair piece about the making of The Graduate.

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One of my most keenly anticipated Sundance ’18 films is Paul Dano‘s Wildlife, an adaptation of Richard Ford‘s same-titled novel, published in 1990 and set in 1960 Montana.

The main costars are Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan as the married Jerry and Jeanette Brinson; the secondary performers are Ed Oxenbould as their son Joe, and Bill Camp as — here comes the rough part — an older, richer guy named Warren Miller whom Jeanette, believe it or not, has an affair with when Jerry, having lost his country-club job, leaves the homestead to become a firefighter.

Carey Mulligan and Bill Camp? The mind reels, convulses.

Carey Mulligan as Jeannette Brinson in Paul Dano‘s Wildlife, which will debut during Sundance ’18.

The official Sundance summary sidesteps the nitty-gritty. For a fuller understanding of where this film goes and what it delivers, consider a N.Y. Times review of Ford’s book by Christopher Lehman-Haupt:

“‘In the fall of 1960, when I was 16 and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.’ So begins Richard Ford‘s disturbing new novel, ‘Wildlife’. In it, Mr. Ford seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. Its action takes place in Great Falls, Montana. The theme, too, is a familiar one in Mr. Ford’s work, a love triangle involving a mother, a father and a son.

“The 16-year-old narrator is Joe Brinson. His father is a professional golfer who teaches at a country club in Great Falls. He is a natural athlete ‘with delicate hands and a short fluid swing that was wonderful to see but never strong enough to move him into the higher competition of the game.’ This is a perfect image for the searching innocence of Joe’s father, who has brought his family from Lewiston, Idaho, ‘in the belief that people — small people like him — were making money in Montana or soon would be, and wanted a piece of that good luck before all of it collapsed and was gone in the wind.’

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A damning portrait of arrogant male power and the ultimate abuse of a female subordinate, Chappaquiddick (Entertainment Studios, 4.6.18) is obviously its own raison d’etre. The story of the 1969 Chappquiddick tragedy is well-known and has been well-investigated, but producers Mark Ciardi, Chris Fenton and Campbell McInnes, screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan and director John Curran wanted to deliver a concise but take-no-prisoners version of this cold, tragic tale in a narrative theatrical form.

Chappaquiddick has the cojones to call a spade a spade about a late, much beloved political figure, a respected liberal deal-maker and the most powerful and longest serving representative of what was, for decades, American’s premiere political family — the closest thing we ever had to a version of the British royals.

But over the last couple of months, Chappaquiddick has unwittingly slipped into the here and now. Without design or anticipation, what Chappaquiddick said last year during its making, the portrait it created of a world-famous power abuser and blame-shifter suddenly fits right into what’s happening now with this and that alleged sexual abuser being taken to task and made to walk the public plank.

There’s no question that the film is dealing straight, compelling cards, and that it sticks to the ugly facts as most of us recall and understand them, and that by doing so it paints the late Massachusetts legislator and younger brother of JFK and RFK in a morally repugnant light, to put it mildly.

All along I’ve been hoping that Curran would just shoot the script efficiently, minus any kind of showing off or oddball strategies that might diminish what was on the page. This is exactly what he’s done. Curran has crafted an intelligent, mid-tempo melodrama about a weak man who commits a careless, horrible act, and then manages to weasel out of any serious consequences.

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I tried to pick 20 or 25 of HE’s best 2017 photos. Not every shot was taken with my iPhone 6 Plus, but 97% were. Anyway, I couldn’t do it — had to go for 39.

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I’m afraid that Ridley Scott‘s All The Money In The World is one of my picks of the litter, and so HE’s Best of 2017 roster has to be once again recalculated:

Top ten: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, (3) Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird, (4) Darren Aronofsky‘s mother!, (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (6) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (7) Oliver Assayas‘ Personal Shopper [2016 holdover], (8) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, (9) Steven Spielberg‘s The Post, (9) Ridley Scott’s All The Money in the World, and (10) Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation [2016 holdover].

Honorable fraternity: (11) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless; (12) Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, (13) Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver, (14) Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project, (15) Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, (16) David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story, (17) David Gordon Green‘s Stronger, (18) Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade, (19) Brad Pitt‘s War Machine, (20) Joseph Kosinski‘s Only The Brave, (21) Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread, (22) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out, (23) Denis Villeneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049, (24) Patti Jenkins‘ Wonder Woman, (25) Taylor Sheridan‘s Wind River, (26) Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky, (27) Geremy Jasper‘s Patty Cake$ and (28) John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick (saw it in Toronto, opening in April ’18).

By the way: I didn’t know until today that All The Money stars Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams worked “for free” when Ridley Scott flew back to England and Rome to re-shoot 22 scenes with Kevin Spacey replacement Christopher Plummer. You can bet, however, that their travel, hotel and per-diem expenses were covered.

On 12.14 I made it clear that I had no problem with the Academy’s foreign-film branch leaving Robin Campillo‘s BPM: Beats Per Minute off the shortlist. I respect BPM — it’s fleet and sharp and well cut — and I admire, of course, the balls-out militancy of the ACT UP movement in the late ’80s and ’90s. But to me Campillo’s felt too strident, too hectoring and a little too Taxi Zum Klo.

Yeah, that’s right — I prefer gay movies (i.e, Call Me By Your Name) to queer cinema. I guess that makes me a bad guy in some quarters, right?

Variety‘s Guy Lodge has dutifully passed along the elitist disappointment about the BPM snub. “More conservative voters in the general branch might not warm to the film’s length, talkiness and frankly queer sensibility, it was reasoned,” GL wrote, “and when the film got frozen out of the Golden Globes last week, we were given a hint that it wasn’t a universal favorite outside the critical enclave. [For] the general verdict from onlookers was that the Academy had erred badly by passing on Campillo’s film.”

Translation: Those who didn’t vote for BPM are likely homophobes, and they need to work through that. Group therapy, night classes, etc.

Guys like Mark Harris and Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson can lament this, but there’s no law that I know of stating that you have to be moved by, say, a scene in which an AIDS-ravaged guy gets a death-bed hand job. “Reform is desperately needed here,” tweeted Harris. “And the fact that it’s a gay movie…this is a stain.”

Presumably the foreign language committee as well as the Academy at large understand that the next queer movie that comes along needs to be embraced with a bit more fervor. If not, more charges of homophobia!

The first Sundance showing of Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, about cartoonist John Callahan, is about as prime as it gets — Friday, 1.19 at 9:45 pm, Eccles. And today’s announcement about the Amazon release being selected as a 2018 Berlinale competition title completes the picture. The film is apparently a first-rater with heat, and Van Sant is looking pretty slick himself.

(l.) Jonah Hill, (r.) Joaquin Pheonix.

Don’t forget that Van Sant was all but covered in shit after the critical drubbing that his last film, The Sea of Trees, received in Cannes two and a half years ago. It just goes to show that if you keep hustling and don’t let failure get you down, you’ll eventually find yourself back on top or close to it. Maybe. If you’re X factor to begin with.

Pic stars Joaquin Phoenix as Callahan, and costars Rooney Mara, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, Mark Webber and Udo Kier. Amazon will open the period drama stateside on 5.18.18.

Owen Gleiberman‘s latest Variety essay, “Four Reasons Why Star Wars: The Last Jedi Isn’t One for the Ages“, is (what else?) highly perceptive and sharply written. If you haven’t time to read the whole thing…

Excerpt #1: “Something happens” at the end of a climactic lightsaber duel in Jedi “that echoes a famous death from the original 1977 Star Wars. It’s a ‘whoa!’ kind of moment, but…turns out to be merely the set-up for a much bigger ‘whoa!” moment.

“That mega, super-ultra ‘whoa!’ is designed to blow our minds, and in one sense it does. It leaves the audience with popped eyes and dropped jaws, going ‘Geez, I didn’t know the Jedi could do that!’

“But approximately two seconds after you’ve taken the moment in, it also leaves you with the feeling that the reason you didn’t know they could do that is that the film is making up its rules as it goes along. The moment is arbitrary, breathless but superimposed — spectacular in a monkeys-might-fly-out-of-my-butt sort of way. It seals the experience of The Last Jedi, a movie in which stuff keeps happening, and sometimes that stuff is staggering, and occasionally it’s quite exciting, but too often it feels like the bedazzled version of treading water.

“Yet you hang on and go with it, because you’re yearning for something great, and this is what the Star Wars universe, in its sleek retro-fitted corporate efficiency, has come down to: Making stuff up as it goes along.”

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I’ve had the BFI Bluray of Ken Russell‘s Women In Love (’69) on my bookshelf since August 2016. Yesterday it was announced that Criterion will be releasing its own version on 3.27.18. The Criterion will almost certainly look identical to the BFI. Both are 4K scans of a BFI-restored print from 2015; both using a 1.75:1 aspect ratio and running 131 minutes.

The Criterion jacket features a painting of drowned lovers, taken right from the film. More alluring than the still images on the BFI Bluray.

Women in Love is Russell’s greatest work — a perfectly captured, brilliantly written period romance that pulls you in immediately with a feeling of Lawrentian eloquence and authenticity. Not as shocking or inflammatory as The Devils but richer and more flavorful and more spiritually open, not to mention erotic. Billy Williams‘ cinematography is dazzling — the pictorial detail and robust colors on the BFI Bluray are worth the price in themselves.

Released just over 48 years ago but looking fresh from the lab, Women in Love is one of the most lusciously captured films ever made about men, women and relationships (and I’m not just talking about the nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed), and one of the most articulate portrayals of the sadnesses and frustrations that plague so many lovers.

It’s also one of the first mainstream films to fully explore and dramatize the lives and longings of free-spirited, semi-emancipated 20th Century women (i.e., Glenda Jackson‘s Isadora Duncan-like Gudrun and Jennie Linden‘s more conservative Ursula) in a historical context.

Posted on 8.21.16, but applicable right now: “If Women in Love had never appeared in ’69 and yet was somehow recreated by a fresh creative team and released this fall by Focus Features or Fox Searchlight, it would instantly vault into the Best Picture category. Because nobody and I mean nobody makes brainy, pulsing period dramas as good as this for the theatrical market any more.”

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This morning The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg posted a pre-holiday Oscar race chart. One standout call was Feinberg’s decision to throw in with Variety‘s Kris Tapley by describing Darkest Hour as a “maybe not” in the Best Picture race. In Feinberg parlance and especially in mid-December, “maybe not” contenders are given a “major threat” designation…same difference.

But even more striking is the sudden influence of the just-announced SAG Ensemble Award nominees, and particularly Feinberg’s decision to place Get Out at the very top of the Best Picture list.

Everyone realizes that Get Out is a tenacious contender that has struck a nerve, and that a Best Picture nomination is 100% locked. But placing it ahead of everything else seems….what, excessive? Delusional?

Do I have to say again that the three most Oscar-deserving films of the year — Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird and Dunkirk — are the most independent-minded and very much singing their own tune, and are far more adventurous and accomplished than Get Out?

HE readers are probably sick of this opinion, but what am I supposed to say about Feinberg going apeshit for Get Out? Declare what a seer he is?

As for the mystifying Daniel Kaluuya for Best Actor thing, I riffed on that the other day.

Two friends disagree. “Scott’s call isn’t delusional at all,” says critic #1. “I have a feeling Get Out is going to win too. I just need more intel to make a full prediction. Right now it’s down to three: Get Out, Lady Bird and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

Critic #2 says that Kalyuua gives “a strong performance in an important film, and [the Kaluuya talk] is retroactive justice for Sidney Poitier NOT getting a Best Actor nom for In the Heat of the Night 50 years ago, while costar Rod Steiger did and won the category.”

So 2017 is not the year of women pushing back at the patriarchy and sexual misconduct, and we’re still offering make-up apologies for #OscarsSoWhite?

“I don’t see it that way,” critic #2 replied. “Get Out overcame its genre stereotyping to become one of the most significant and talked-about films of 2017.”

For the 37th or possibly 38th time, Get Out is just a hooky genre film — a satirical horror-thriller that delivers a social metaphor message a la Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and is pitched squarely at mainstream liberals. That’s really ALL IT IS. But when you add the cheering section factor, Get Out begins to morph into this on-target, Bunuelian, capturing-of-a-zeitgeist film. Sizzle overwhelming the actual flavor of the steak.

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Hollywood Elsewhere’s favorite 2017 foreign-language pic, Andrej Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, is among the nine just-announced finalists for the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar.

Two contenders that I didn’t care for — Angelina Jolie‘s First They Killed My Father (Cambodia) and Robin Campillo‘s BPM: Beats Per Minute (France) — didn’t make the cut. (Here are my negative responses to the Jolie and the Campillo.)

The other eight nominees: Sebastian Lelio‘s A Fantastic Woman (Chile); Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade (Germany — my positive review); Ildiko Enyedi‘s On Body and Soul (Hungary); Samuel Maoz‘s Foxtrot (Israel); Ziad Doueiri‘s The Insult (Lebanon); Alain Gomis‘ Felicite (Senegal); John Trengove‘s The Wound (South Africa); and Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square (Sweden — here’s a chat I did with Ostlund).

Loveless director Andrey Zvyagintsev during Hollywood Roosevelt chat during AFI Fest; pull quotes from Loveless one-sheet.

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