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Last night I tweeted that the “Get Out might win Best Picture” thing is a bizarre enthusiasm that seems to be about (a) extending the #OscarsSoWhite guilt complex by supporting a politically “woke” film, (b) industry POCs doing their usual identity-politics bonding and (c) GenX and Millenial coolios wanting to crown a horror-satire genre film for sheer perversity’s sake, largely because it doesn’t exude traditional Best Picture criteria.

I was inspired by a conversation between publicist Daniel Plainview (i.e., ClooneyDisciple), senior Indiewire critic David Ehrlich and Atlantic associate editor David Sims.

Plainview began by tweeting that “the only movies I think have a chance to win Best Picture in the order of likelihood (as of 12/30): 1. Get Out, 2. The Post, 3. Lady Bird, 4. Dunkirk, 5. Three Billboards.” Ehrlich: “I don’t think 3 billboards has a chance.” Sims: “It has a chance if the [Oscar noms] match the enthusiasm the guilds are showing for it. Like, if [Martin] McDonagh gets a directing nom and it gets 2 supporting actor slots? Look out.”

Twitter photo of Get Out devotee & propagandist “Clooney Disciple”

Then Ehrlich said, “I think it’s Get Out, The Post and Lady Bird, with Nolan winning for directing [Dunkirk].” And then Sims asked, “Where is this Get Out resurgence coming from? I say this as someone who predicted it a while back [but] this all just stinks of a wide-open race to me…I need the noms to help sort things out!”

And then Plainview laid his agenda on the kitchen table. “I think it’s still pretty wide open,” he told Sims, “but Get Out is (1) genuinely beloved, (2 & 3) a political choice AND a woke choice, (4) a hit, and (5) the rare movie to actually benefit from being released forever ago — it’s only gained momentum in the cultural conversation over last 10 months.”

What he meant by calling Jordan Peele‘s film “political” and “woke” is that the Academy needs to demonstrate for a second year in a row that #OscarsSoWhite mentality has been expunged and wiped clean. He meant that while 2017 was clearly owned by strong, stand-up women and the #MeToo pushback against sexually inappropriate behavior, renouncing #OscarsSoWhite is still paramount.

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Penelope Cruz, Daniel Day Lewis during a promotional photo shoot of Rob Marshall‘s Nine, which no one wants to even think about much less recall or re-watch. I can barely remember a single scene from this 2009 Weinstein Co. release. I saw it once and put it out of my head. Okay, I remember DDL driving along Italy’s Amalfi coast in a hot sports car, heading toward Positano.

Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant during or after filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (’46).

Marlene Dietrich in David O. Sleznick’s The Garden of Allah, which lost money.

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Last night I persuaded Tatyana to attend a 70mm screening of Lawrence of Arabia at the American Cinematheque Egyptian. She had never once seen it and was barely familiar with T.E. Lawrence, and I figured that despite the Egyptian’s so-so presentation it would be worthwhile for her to see it on a monster-sized screen with a big crowd of fans. I wasn’t delighted with the lack of truly sharp focus and that punch-through, extra-knockout quality that 70mm used to signify (but signifies no longer), but I didn’t mind it.

I was saying to myself over and over, “If only that amazing micro-sharp detail contained in the Amazon 4K streaming version of this classic David Lean film could somehow be projected…wow!”

Posted roughly a year go: “I shelled out $20 bills in order to watch Amazon’s 4K streaming version of Lawrence of Arabia, and I was really, seriously stunned by the miraculous detail.

“I’ve seen the restored, 8K-scanned Lawrence digitally projected via DCP under high-end conditions and at home via 1080p Bluray, and there’s no denying that the 4K streamed version (which is not real-deal 4K due to intense compressing, but somewhere between 2K and 4K) is really a cut above.

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“…that is not particularly acute.” In other words, fraying, undisciplined, wackadoodle.

From Ezra Klein‘s 12.29 Vox piece, “Incoherent, Authoritarian, Uninformed: Trump’s New York Times interview Is A Scary Read“:

“Imagine how we would react to literally any other president speaking like this. Trump has bludgeoned us into becoming accustomed to these kinds of comments but that, too, is worrying.

“This is the President of the United States speaking to the New York Times. His comments are, by turns, incoherent, incorrect, conspiratorial, delusional, self-aggrandizing and underinformed.

“This is not a partisan judgment — indeed, the interview is rarely coherent or specific enough to classify the points Trump makes on a recognizable left-right spectrum. [And] I am not a medical professional, and I will not pretend to know what is truly happening here. It’s become a common conversation topic in Washington to muse on whether the president is suffering from some form of cognitive decline or psychological malady. Whatever the cause, it is plainly obvious from Trump’s words that this is not a man fit to be president, that he is not well or capable in some fundamental way.”

This sort of thing always tests relationships that are grounded in commercial filmmaking, creativity and collaboration. This isn’t my business and I’m not a gossip columnist, but if I were Noah Baumbach I might be feeling….what, a bit twitchy about this? Not necessarily “resentful” but not, shall we say, entirely at peace. By the way: I never realized that Baumbach’s brilliant Greenberg (’10), which delivers a very particular kind of neurotic morose humor and which is known for being something of a bust, grossed more than the two Baumbach-Gerwig collaborations, Frances Ha (’13) and Mistress America (’15), the latter being a crackerjack modern-day farce a la His Girl Friday.

I couldn’t get worked up yesterday about the passing of one of showbiz’s toughest, spunkiest, hardest-working troupers. Where’s the heartache in Rose Marie having lived a rich 91 and 1/3 years? That said, I want to see that newish documentary (trailered after the jump) about her. Sidenote: When Maximilian Schell made his 1984 doc about Marlene Dietrich, the legendary 83 year-old star refused to be photographed, presumably for reasons of vanity. I think she had the right idea.

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No, I don’t believe that “Disney is bracing themselves for the Han Solo movie to bomb,” as Screengeek’s Simon Andrews reported five days ago, citing “a source close to the film’s production.” (I don’t think producers or Disney execs would admit this to themselves, much less whisper it to confidantes.) And I don’t believe “they’re essentially writing Solo off,” that “the script is unworkable” and that “it’s going to be a car crash.” I think this is unreliable trash talk.

Possibly bogus Solo ad art that came out of Russia.

But I do believe and was saying six months ago that Alden Ehrenreich is the wrong guy to play the young Han Solo, and that the film, however it turns out, won’t get much charisma bounce from his performance. “A seemingly joyless, small-shouldered guy who lacks a sense of physical dominance (Aldenreich is five inches shorter than the 6’2” Ford) and whose stock-in-trade is a kind of glum, screwed-down seriousness,” I wrote last June.

I don’t know when the Solo trailer is going to pop, but it would have made sense to attach it to The Last Jedi, no? If it’s not debuting before the 12.31.17, it’ll almost certainly appear sometime in January.

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Six days ago Danny Peary posted a q & a with author, film historian, screenwriter and former Variety critic Joseph McBride. The main order of discussion was McBride’s 2017 book, “Two Cheers for Hollywood,” a compilation volume (64 essays and interviews) that I mentioned eight months ago in a piece called “McBride’s Way”.

Right in the middle of Peary’s piece is a 42 year-old photo of McBride, future Variety and Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy and directors Sam Fuller and Francois Truffaut. It’s a poorly cropped, bad-angle shot — you can only see one-third of McBride at far right — but it was taken in late ’75 at an event that McCarthy helped organize on behalf of the promotion of Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H.. McCarthy was handling publicity for the film as well as the so-called Oscar campaign for Best Actress contender Isabelle Adjani. At the end of the day McCarthy’s boss, the notoriously cheap Roger Corman of New World Pictures, paid for two FYC trade ads for Adjani.

(l. to r.) Francois Truffaut, Samuel Fuller (where did Sam find that Kiwanis Club sport jacket?), Todd McCarthy, Joe McBride.

McCarthy’s campaign was nonetheless successful. Adjani was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in early ’76 (although Louise Fetcher won for her Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest). In late ’75 Adjani won Best Actress trophies from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review, and from the National Society of Film Critics in early ’76.

McCarthy’s recollection: “The event happened at the AFI when it was still up at the Doheny/Greystone mansion. I invited all the great old directors in Hollywood, ostensibly to get them to rally around the film for Oscars but privately so I could meet them all. Attending alongside Truffaut and Fuller were George Cukor, King Vidor, Rouben Mamoulian, Alexander Mackendrick and numerous others like Buck Henry, Milos Forman, et al. Quite a night. This was the first time I’d met Truffaut, and while the film was screening we sat outside and all he wanted to talk about was Watergate — he felt he didn’t understand it and American politics sufficiently so he pumped me for endless information so he could better comprehend was going on.”

McBride on general cultural downturn and betrayal: “I feel I was betrayed by the movies, as I was by the Catholic Church, my parents, my schooling, and our government. It’s hard not to continue loving the movies I once loved, though, as well as some occasional new ones. My feelings about the medium today are highly ambivalent. I feel in a sense I went into the wrong profession.

“But my interests have always been broad, and I’ve incorporated them into my work. My biographies of directors range widely into sociopolitical subjects, and I recently have been branching out into books on other subjects besides movies. So I can’t regret the choices I made as a youth (once you make them, it’s almost impossible to turn back), but the art form I loved [has] been trashed and turned largely into moronic fodder for the adolescent male audience, [and that] makes me beyond sad.”

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I’ve watched the five-year-old MGM Bluray of Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment a couple of times and I’ve never said to myself, “This is nice but it could look better.” Well, I suppose the 2012 disc could do with a little less DNR heightening, but to my plebian eyes it’s always looked great — extra-sharp detail, rich array of monochrome tones, mine-shaft blacks.

Why then did I pop for the new 4K restored Arrow Bluray version, which will arrive at the end of the week? Because Arrow techs rolled up their sleeves and worked with the original camera negative to restore this 1960 film. They applied standard restoration techniques (dirt and scratch removal, image stabilization, etc.) and presumably delivered a more film-like final product.

But mainly I fell for the Arrow sell. I wanted to believe that I’d notice significant improvements over the 2012 Bluray (i.e., a “bump”), and so I invested in that dream, however likely that may be.

David Brook of blueprintrreview says “the remastered print looks fantastic — clean, detailed and featuring a beautiful dynamic contrast range.”

A critic with fanboydestroy reviewed the Arrow disc about ten days ago: “As I haven’t seen the MGM Bluray version, the new Arrow Academy restoration is probably going to be the go-to version for a while. Using a combination of digital and standard restoration techniques, the film looks phenomenal…all cleaned up for higher resolution 4K sets.”

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Variety has asked a few critics to riff on some 2018 films they’re especially looking forward to. The list contains two forehead-slappers — Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One and Ava DuVernay‘s A Wrinkle in Time. (If you can’t tell what the latter has in store by way of last month’s trailer, you need to watch it again.) Leave it to Peter Debruge to speak excitedly of these.

Amy Nicholson has singled out Alex Garland‘s Annihilation, but you know that Paramount’s decision to preview it at last March’s Cinemacon and then push it into an early ’18 release indicates some kind of droop factor.

I was confused by Richard Kuipers‘ mention of Anthony Maras‘ The Palace, a thriller about the 2008 Mumbai attacks, as it’s been referred to as Hotel Mumbai for the last year or so.

Roma director Alfonso Cuaron during a March 2017 press conference about the end of filming.

I completely share Owen Gleiberman‘s excitement about Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody, Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows and Damien Chazelle‘s First Man.

HE’s leading ’18 hotties (apart from the Cuaron, Chazelle, Farhadi and Singer): Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria, Adam McKay‘s Backseat, Steve McQueen‘s Widows, Terrence Malick‘s Radegund, Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife, Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy, Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman, Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale, Paolo Sorrentino‘s Loro (life of Silvio Berlusconi), Paul Verhoeven‘s Blessed Virgin and Laszlo Nemes‘ Sunset, a drama set in pre-WWI Budapest. (14)

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It feels funny to be agreeing with Tucker Carlson’s essay about Matt Damon. As everyone knows Damon was recently all but lynched for remarks he shared with Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers ten days ago. “There’s not a single sentiment in [what Damon said to Travers] that’s not defensible or that 90 percent of the American population would find over the top or outrageous,” Carlson said. “It’s all within bounds or it would have been last year. [But] because a handful of Twitter users don’t like it, the rest of us have to pretend that Matt Damon is somehow guilty of something awful, and if we don’t pretend, we may ourselves be seen as collaborators in whatever crimes he supposedly committed and forced to share his punishment.”

The other night I streamed a handsome high-def version of George Stevens‘ Gunga Din on Amazon. I still love it for the nicely choreographed action in the first half-hour and the serious tension of the final 40 minutes (prisoners, snake pit, hostage, Sam Jaffe‘s “stupid courage,” triumphant defeat of Thug army, Kipling’s poem, Jaffe resurrected in a corporal’s uniform). That leaves 47 minutes of material that isn’t exactly tiresome or “bad” but which taxes your patience in certain ways.

I’m probably wrong in thinking that Gunga Din was the first big-budget Hollywood adventure to mix acrobatic adventure, winking humor and servings of serious drama in one package, but it was certainly one of the first. Stevens knew about laughs and slapstick choreography from having worked for comedy producer Hal Roach in the early ’30s, and he certainly used those skills here.

Victor McLaglen, Cary Grant in George Stevens’ Gunga Din.

Is there a single Millenial out there who’s even heard of this film, much less seen it beginning to end? I wonder. It doesn’t even begin to speak their language. But the afore-mentioned hour-plus (especially the opening 30) delivers so much dash and zest. You can’t help but marvel at how the individual cuts and pieces fit together just so.

In a piece called “It’s Criminal,” New Republic critic Otis Ferguson severely criticized Gunga Din for celebrating the authority of British colonialism without hesitation and at the same time depicting the “thuggee” terrorists (anti-colonialists who were more or less a late 19th Century version of India’s Viet Cong) as mere cutthroats. “So much for the content,” Ferguson concluded. He added as an afterthought that the “form” of Gunga Din is quite entertaining, rousing, thrilling, etc.

N.Y. Times critic B.R. Crisler addressed only the form in a N.Y. Times review that was published on 1.27.39:

“At its best, Gunga Din is an orchestration, taut with suspense and enriched in the fighting scenes with beautifully timed, almost. epigrammatic bits of ‘business‘ and a swinging gusto which makes of every roundhouse blow a thing of beauty.

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