Right after the first media screening of Avatar 2 I said for the 157th time that you can’t trust fanboys. The only reactions you can trust are those from “grumpy” critics, which is to say discerning types who don’t immediately drop to their knees when confronted with next-level CG.

I wouldn’t call Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman a grump or a grinch, but he’s no easy lay**. His assessment of Avatar 2, therefore, has value.

Key Gleiberman passage: “At its height, it feels exhilarating. But not all the way through. Cameron, in The Way of Water, remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that.

“The story, in fact, could hardly be more basic. The Sky People, led again by the treacherous Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), have now become Avatars themselves, with Quaritch recast as a scowling Na’vi redneck in combat boots and a black crewcut. They’ve arrived in this guise to hunt Jake down. But Jake escapes with his family and hides out with the Metkayina. Quaritch and his goon squad commandeer a hunting ship and eventually track them down. There is a massive confrontation. The end.

“This tale, with its bare-bones dialogue, could easily have served an ambitious Netflix thriller, and could have been told in two hours rather than three. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The Way of Water is braided with sequences that exist almost solely for their sculptured imagistic magic. It’s truly a movie crossed with a virtual-reality theme-park ride. Another way to put it is that it’s a live-action film that casts the spell of an animated fantasy. But though the faces of the Na’vi and the MetKayina are expressive, and the actors make their presence felt, there is almost zero dimensionality to the characters. The dimensionality is all in the images.”

In a forthcoming issue of Total Film Oppenheimer‘s Christopher Nolan is claiming that he and his crackerjack physical effects team “recreated the first nuclear weapon detonation without using CGI.” I’m not 100% certain but I think Stanley Kubrick went the same way for Dr. Strangelove‘s grand musical finale.

HE not yet having seen The Whale is entirely on A24 and their reps, who are totally playing “hide the ball” from certain viewers. The idea of seeing it in the city this weekend is an option, of course, but a conversation I had this morning with three friends gave me pause:

Friendo #1: “The Whale is very bad.”
Friendo #2: “It’s a tough sit, but I was sobbing at the very end.”
Friendo #1: “The Whale begins with Brendan Fraser jerking off to gay porn.”
HE: “Is that how the play version began?”
Friendo #1: “I didn’t see the play.”
HE: “Jerking off? Please tell me [Darren] Aronofsky‘s camera shows restraint.”
Friendo #1: “And then somebody walks in on him.”
Friendo #3: “I missed the first minute at my Toronto screening. I got in when he was naked in the shower. I didn’t notice any jerking off. Maybe I missed it.”
Friendo #1: “I don’t remember a shower scene, but the first scene definitely shows him jerking off, bro,”
Friendo #4: “Yes! That’s how it starts!”
HE: “Aaaggghh.”

I have always been an ardent fan of Mr. Aronofsky’s, but saying that I am genuinely fearful of seeing The Whale is putting it mildly.

I was under the impression that Raphael Warnock would defeat Herschel Walker by…I don’t know, 51% to 49%? Slightly better as it turned out. Warnock finished with 51.2% to Walker’s 48.8%. Think of it — 48.8% of Georgia voters wanted to send Walker, that clown, to the U.S. Senate.

Antoine Fuqua‘s Emancipation begins streaming on Apple+ three days hence (12.9), and I’ll tell you straight and true that it didn’t make me feel miserable. Nor did I find it boring. A fair amount of it is “believable” as far as that concept goes. And Will Smith‘s performance as Peter, a Louisiana slave who escapes from a work camp by running, splashing, wading and rowing his way across endless miles of swamp, is very commendable — there isn’t a single thing that Smith does or says that feels phony or pushed or sentimentalized or…okay, Smith’s Peter is a little Hollywoody.

Smith grew (or pasted on) a chin beard and dropped several pounds to remind us that slaves were almost certainly never well-fed.

There is, however, a thing that’s missing from this 132-minute action film, and that’s any sense of surprise. Nothing happens that you don’t expect to see, or that you don’t see coming from a mile away. Each and every white slave driver (including the top-dog psychopath, played by Ben Foster) is cruel, vicious and repellent as hell. Not to mention bearded and smelly-looking and afflicted with bad teeth (and almost certainly halitosis).

A surprise would have been for one white scumbag to be a little less evil than the others, perhaps a tiny bit guilt-ridden or even briefly, momentarily decent in his treatment of the slaves. But no — every single slaver is pure reprehensible scum. Which they were, of course, but you know what I’m saying…trying for a little originality or the unexpected is always appreciated.

A film such as this (based on fact but fueled by an expected catharsis in which the runaway good guy prevails at the end) is basically about rooting for the gruesome deaths of the scurvy white guys. There’s a slave revolt moment (Spartacus rebranded) that I especially enjoyed. Ditto the third-act moment when Smith murders the black collaborator (a replay of the climactic scene in Django Unchained when Jamie Foxx kills Samuel L. Jackson‘s Uncle Tom. I was puzzled by a scene in which Smith’s left-behind wife Dodienne (Charmaine Bingwa) mutilates herself with a cotton gin, but we’ll let that go.

The basic idea behind Emancipation is “how would it be if it wasn’t Peter but the Philadelphia-born Will Smith suffering as a slave in 1860s Louisiana, and if Smith, being a hot-shot movie star in the guise of a slave, was smarter and tougher and more tenacious than anyone else in the film”…so tough and tenacious that he fights off an alligator while underwater and then kills this growling beast with a sharp knife, just like John Wayne killed that Native American warrior in the first act of Red River.”

But let’s understand that Smith’s bad-ass slave is a satisfying heroic figure — a guy you’re glad to hang with. You don’t want him to die or get captured, and you definitely want him to fight and kill the psychopathic Foster in the third act. You want him, in short, to be Sylvester Stallone in First Blood, and he occasionally rises to that occasion.

But again, there are no surprises. I decided during the film’s first third, at which point I knew that Emancipation would be rife with cliches, that Ben Foster should be attacked by a gator while taking a poop, and then dragged into deep water and drowned and then eaten. Or, failing that, if he could get bitten by a cottonmouth snake and thereby weakened by the venom, leaving him no choice but to lie down in order to gradually gather his strength and is then attacked by a gator and dragged underwater. That would wake you right up — for a venal white character to die not for the sins of racism and cruelty, but because he was unlucky in a damp and dangerous environment.

But at the end of the day I didn’t feel too much hurt from Emancipation. Lots of white-guy hate, but how can anyone say it’s not justified in this context? Justified but not that interesting. But if you watch it with your expectations suitably lowered…if you remind yourself that Fuqua is a genre guy — basically a proficient hack — and there’s no way this film is going to knock anyone out…if you watch it with these understandings, it isn’t all that bad of a sit.

Sidenote: I tried reviewing Emancipation late last week and it just wouldn’t come. I don’t think I cared enough one way or another.

I did, however, admire Robert Richardson‘s desaturated, bordering-on-monochrome color scheme. It would have been ballsier to go with straight black-and-white, of course, but Fuqua doesn’t have that kind of integrity.

I was planning to share some off-the-cuff remarks before Monday night’s Bedford Playhouse screening of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon (Paramount, 12.23).

The special-event showing, courtesy of Paramount, kicks off Bedford Marquee, a new program that will occasionally showcase exciting new films two or three weeks before their release, and will include post-screening discussions when feasible.

Babylon began on time and all went well, but I couldn’t attend because of my Covid situation. I’m currently feeling fine with an 98.4 temperature, but it would have been cavalier to mingle. So early Monday afternoon I recorded some of the thoughts I would’ve shared live, transferred the eight minute and 45 second file to Vimeo and sent it to Bedford Playhouse bros Dan Friedman and Robert Harris.

I was told they might not be able to squeeze it in due to the fact that the film is on a specially encrypted DCP that can only be tested and played within a limited time frame. The DCP only arrived yesterday, due to bad weather and other delay factors and accompanied by bouts of anxiety and uncertainty — not unsual if you know anything about the workings of UPS and DHL.

Either way it was extremely cool of Paramount to allow us to present this herculean effort by director-writer Damien Chazelle, which I saw three or four weeks ago in Manhattan.

The next Bedford Marquee attraction will be a two-for-one deal — a mid-January screening of the recently restored Invaders From Mars (’53) along with a master-class from restoration master Scott MacQueen about the film’s exquisite visual transformation as well as a discussion of the film’s impact upon the sci-fi genre and how it reflected American culture and cold-war paranoia.

Inventively directed and impressionistically designed by the great William Cameron Menzies, Invaders From Mars is hands down the spookiest, most unsettling flying saucer film of the 1950s, due in no small measure to that eerie vocal-choir score by the unsung Mort Glickman.

Aside from the mildly distressing fact that I don’t look like I did 15 or 20 years ago, I’m okay with the video. Yes, I would prefer to wear amber-tinted shades a la Jack Nicholson but the red-frame, gray-tint ones are passable.

Harrison Ford‘s digital de-aging looks pretty good, I must say. It certainly looks better than Robert De Niro‘s de-aging in The Irishman.

Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny sounds like a game show.

The 2022 Sight & Sound poll popped earlier this afternoon, and we all knew what the results would reflect, right? Not so much with films directed by older white guys (especially OWG directors with a somewhat dicey or shady reputation), and up with films directed by women and POCS. And so Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxel, a 201-minute film about duty, survival, sex working, regimentation and repetition, and which ends with a “john” getting stabbed in the throat with a pair of scissors, was named #1.

In other words, (a) down with the insensitive asshole patriarchy, (b) up with chopped onions carefully mashed into ground beef, and (c) hooray for Delphine Seyrig finally having an orgasm.

In 2012 Jeanne Dielman ranked #36 on the BFI list…fine. But how did it manage to suddenly vault up to the #1 position? Admired films tend to move up gradually, no? It feels to some of us like Dielman won because of an organized campaign among feminist-minded critics. If Dielman had landed in the 10th or 12th spot in the 2012 poll, today’s win would have seemed more of a natural thing. But to go from 36th place a decade ago to #1 in ’22? It seems to me like the fix was in.

You can’t argue or complain with the BFI critics, who are primarily a bunch of highbrow snoots trying to out-snoot each other.

If you ask me the BFI Directors Greatest Films of All Time list is a lot more grounded and sensible.

So 60th-ranked Moonlight has edged out Casablanca (#61), Goodfellas (#62) and The Third Man (#63). I’ve seen all four, and I’m telling you straight from the shoulder that there’s no way Moonlight deserves, deliberately or haphazardly, to be ranked above the other three…NO WAY ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH.

Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo is now ranked second, and I honestly thought it would take a bigger hit than that. I figured the legend of Hitch having allegedly made Tippi Hedren‘s life hell during the making of The Birds and especially Marnie…okay, let’s drop it, but I’m slightly surprised.

Three indisputably great 20th Century films about conflicted white males dealing with disillusionment and corruption — David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (’62), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (’74) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (’69) — were booted off the critics’ list of the top 100. Polanski had to pay for his sexual indiscretions of the ’70s and ’80s, I suppose, and Peckinpah had to be banned for his notorious misogyny. But why did the saga of T.E. Lawrence get the shaft? What exactly did Lean or Lawrence do to earn the heave-ho? Was it the old arrogant British imperialism thing, or the fact that women are barely seen and certainly not heard seen in that classic desert epic?

1. “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxel” (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
2. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
3. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. “Tokyo Story” (Ozu Yasujiro, 1953)
5. “In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai, 2001)
6. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. “Beau travail” (Claire Denis, 1998)
8. “Mulholland Dr.” (David Lynch, 2001)
9. “Man with a Movie Camera” (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
10. “Singin’ in the Rain” (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1951)

There was something so soulful and sensual (at least in my head) about Christine McVie‘s singing voice. And I always sensed something randy about her nature. She was hot and heavy with Dennis Wilson in ’73 or ’74…something like that. I used to fantasize about her now and then…sorry.

Of all the Fleetwood Mac hits McVie crooned, my all-time favorite is the melancholy “Did I Ever Love You?.” (Or “Did You Ever Love Me?” — one of those.) Co-written by McVie and Bob Weston, it’s about a relationship that’s no longer working, largely due to the guy behaving like an aloof dick for too much of the time.

Released as a single in ’73, the song didn’t track. “Did I Ever Love You?” is Fleetwood Mac’s only flirtation with steel drums, which obviously makes it sound kind of Jamaican.
‘
McVie passed today at age 79. I’m very sorry.

I’ve been working on launching a special industry-friendly film series at the renowned Bedford Playhouse, which is run by Dan Friedman. The program is called Bedford Marquee, and a 12.5 screening of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon will kick things off.

I’ll be offering a few observations (including some historical footnotes) a few minutes before the show begins at 7 pm.

Located within the Clive Davis Arts Center, the BP is one of the finest commercial screening facilities I’ve ever settled into — easily the technical equal of any upscale industry screening facility (including the Academy Museum theatre and/or the classic AMPAS theatre in Beverly Hills) in the U.S., Paris, Cannes or anywhere.

Esteemed restoration guru Robert Harris supervised the BP’s upgrade.

We’re also planning a special mid-January screening of the recently restored Invaders From Mars (‘53). The film was painstakingly restored by Scott MacQueen, who will present a master class about the film’s history and cultural influence.

A sprawling three-hour epic of 1920s Hollywood, Babylon opens nationwide on 12.23.