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Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “The biggest hurdle the Oscars face, especially in the time of a pandemic accompanied by a streaming revolution, is that the films that tend to be nominated are winning a smaller and smaller slice of the audience.

“[If] the nominees include Belfast, The Power of the Dog, Licorice Pizza, The Lost Daughter and The Tragedy of Macbeth, that will read as a roster straight out of the too-smart-for-school megaplex.

“I’m not saying don’t nominate those films. I’m saying that if those are the only films nominated, it’s going to be another year of the Oscars’ slow-motion implosion. Would it really be such an unspeakable vulgarity this year for the Oscar slate to include Spider-Man: No Way Home? Not as a token mainstream gesture but because it’s a film that honestly meant something to the larger public. Why has this become such an insane idea?

“What’s actually insane is leaving a movie like that one out of the mix. If the Oscars want a future, it would be a shrewd strategy for them to not inflict the death of a thousand cuts on themselves by using the dagger of elitism.”

HE to Gleiberman #1: Which Twitter elitists have insisted that handing a Best Picture nomination to Spider-Man: No Way Home would be “an insane idea”? I’m presuming we’re talking about the same dweebs who believe that Drive My Car is the film of the year, but…

HE to Gleiberman #2: If one of the nominees is King Richard, no one will think this is “straight out of the too-smart-for-school megaplex.” There are two family movies in Best Picture contention this year — one is excellent, the other less so. King Richard is the excellent one.

Last night, feeling jazzed about rediscovering Taylor Hackford‘s Proof of Life and realizing it’s a lot better than I’d recalled, I rewatched another violent, crime-related Russell Crowe film from the aughts — Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster (’07).

It remains a sturdy, absorbing, culturally fascinating, Sidney Lumet-like depiction of the rise and fall of heroin importer Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) and the scrappy, scrupulously honest detective, Richie Roberts (Crowe), who eventually busted and prosecuted Lucas in ’75 and ’76.

AG opened 14 years ago, and plays just as grippingly as ever — no diminishment, constantly engaging, stepped in the lore of Harlem and North Jersey. And my God, Denzel (52 during filming, now 67) looks so young! Younger, in fact, than he did in Spike Lee‘s Inside Man (’06). And what a murderer’s row of African American (or African British) players — Chiwetel Ejiofor, RZA, Cuba Gooding Jr., Joe Morton, Idris Elba, Common, the late Clarence Williams III, Ruby Dee, Roger Guenveur Smith, Malcolm Goodwin.

I was struck again by how satisfyingly well made this film is, as good in its own New York City way (the clutter and crap of the streets, high on those uptown fumes) as Lumet’s Prince of the City (’81).

One reason it plays so well, I was telling myself last night, is that big-studio movies, free from the influence of the superhero plague that was just around the corner in ’06, were generally a lot better in the aughts than they are now. 2007, remember, was one of the great all-time years.

Incidentally: I’ve never watched the 176-minute “Unrated Extended Edition” of American Gangster. Has anyone?

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…and if he still cared about creating silk screens at age 93, he would have instantly recognized a couple of days ago that THIS (i.e.., the TMZ headline) is a 21st Century Andy Warhol silk screen classic if anyone ever saw one. Right up there with “Elvis Presley in Flaming Star.”

Last night and for the first time in 21 years, I re-watched Taylor Hackford and Tony Gilroy‘s Proof of Life. My vague recollection was that it had missed the mark, having lost money and gotten mixed reviews. I was wrong.

A believable, propulsive, well-textured kidnap, ransom & rescue drama set in South America (and largely based on a Vanity Fair article by William Prochnau called “Adventures in the Ransom Trade“), Proof of Life is good stuff — sturdy, smartly written and genuinely thrilling from time to time.

I found it very charismatically performed by Russell Crowe (relatively trim and quite handsome back then) and David Caruso. Alas, Meg Ryan is the opposite of that — as the anguished but argumentative wife of a kidnap victim (David Morse), almost everything she says and does is twitchy and annoying — she never seems to get hold of herself and get past her suspicions and resentments. Much better is Pamela Reed, as Crowe’s sister who flies down to assist.

I think the reception to Proof of Life got lost in the fog of the Crowe-Ryan affair. Hackford said this in so many words, that the film lost money because in the public mind the affair had overwhelmed the make-believe. Crowe was quoted as calling Hackford “an idiot” for saying this, but Hackford was right.

All I know is that after watching Proof of Life without the Crowe-Ryan mucky-muck, it came off better than expected — a strong, complex, grown-up thriller that ends with a great battle sequence.

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Hollywood Elsewhere was a thriving business and a happy workplace for roughly 13 or 14 years. After launching in August ’04 ad income …well, it was touch-and-go for a while but found its footing sometime in early ’06. And then it grew and grew…offering stability, adventure, intrigue, annual European travel and a thriving lifestyle.

The worm began to turn with the horrific election of Donald Trump in November ’16. From that point on and certainly by the end of ’17 and into early ’18, you could feel the first tremors of wokesterism, triggered by perceptions of obstinate patriarchal whiteness as represented by the various bad guys of the moment (the Trumpster mob, Harvey, Woody, Roman and all the other alleged ogres who were being called out, many deservedly so).

Before I knew it the furies were swirling all over the place…anything that smelled even vaguely of older-white-guy attitudes or viewpoints became a form of evil. HE’s ad income began to drop in ’17 and ’18. It’s been a hellish four years.

I was reviewing all this after stumbling upon a post about a private evening tour of the Louvre’s Egyptian exhibit. It happened on 5.13.17, or four and two-thirds years ago. Life is never a bowl of cherries, but things felt relatively happy and settled at this point. The calm before the storm. Here’s how it went…

HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko and David Scott Smith invited me to join them early Saturday evening at the Louvre. A connected friend of Svet’s escorted us inside to a restricted–access tour of the Egyptian exhibit. I had never before wandered through this world-renowned museum as an invitation-only cool cat. No crowds or lines to cope with. The Egyptian statues, sarcophagi, relics and artifacts were nothing to sneeze at either. The highlight was the 4000 year-old chapel of the tomb (or “mastaba”) of Akhethotep, a bigwig in the Old Kingdom who was close to the king. (Egyptian rulers weren’t called pharaohs until the New Kingdom.)

Svetlana Cvetko, David Scott Smith at Louvre cafe — Saturday, 5.13.17, 7:50 pm.

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I’m obviously fine with sharing judgmental or negative impressions of films, but I don’t like to dwell on them. One post is enough. But a few minutes ago I happened to glance at a poster for Love Actually, and it all came flooding back…

According to a 12.20 article by Kenneth Partridge, the disdain for Paul McCartney‘s “Wonderful Christmas Time” (’79) has never ebbed. Anyone whose musical tastes are the least bit refined is probably a hater. I don’t blame them, but you can’t visit any Bloomies or Nordstrom or a department store of any kind during the holidays and not hear it played repeatedly.

Yes, of course — John Lennon‘s “And So This Is Christmas” is a much better tune, by any criteria you’d care to mention. But I’ll bet Macca’s is the most popular among the hoi polloi.

Of the three songs below, my guilty-pleasure favorite is “Christmas Time Is Here Again.” I’m sorry but it’s infectious.

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I’ve taken my temperature three or four times today, and right now it’s 97.9. I don’t quite feel at peak strength, but I’m past the worst of the Omicron seige. This is the first day since last Tuesday that I haven’t wanted to sleep like a corpse. In fact I’ve been standing at my desk for eight hours.

I thought I might start to climb out of it yesterday (Thursday) but Omicon rallied and refused to back down. But it’s mostly gone today, or is certainly receding. It was a bear for about two and a half days. I couldn’t do anything but sleep, night or day. I managed to tap some stuff out on the phone, okay, but sitting up was out of the question.

I’ve been told, by the way, that my grandfather name is “papa” — the same name that my father embraced when Jett and Dylan were young. I guess I’m okay with it, but can’t Sutton just call me Jeff? How any grandfather could accept being called “gramps” or “grandpappy” or “boompah”…Jesus!

After last week’s euphoric reaction to the second half of Spider–Man: No Way Home, I fell into an unusual state of mind. Almost beatific. I began to consider that maybe, just maybe, I’d allowed myself to judge too harshly when it came to big CG-driven tentpole films. Perhaps I was evolving on some level, I told myself.

That shit is now over and done with. For last night I sat through Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix: Resurrections, and I’m back to hating again. BIG hate. Which is where I belong — where God wants me to be. I’m talking “throwing up on the Persian rug” hate.

Death to putrid corporate cash-grab sequels like this one…death to all absurdly complex, dingle-dangle mind-fuck movies that bury the viewer in awful dialogue and hopelessly complex lotting and feelings of frustration that very quickly lead to “man, I really don’t give a fuck about any of this” and then to prolonged screaming. Death to endless martial-arts fight scenes in which the combatants get punched or kicked 67 or 78 times and don’t weaken or slow down in the slightest.

Fuck this movie for further tarnishing the memory of the original 1999 The Matrix, which I’ll always love. Everything I hated about The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions — the horrible sense that a good idea is being mangled and twisted and then lost in the shuffle…those awful 2003 vibes are delivered in industrial-strength doses in Resurrections. It starts out badly or clumsily or ever-emphatically (less than ten minutes I sat up the couch and said out loud “this is bad”), and then it gets worse and worse and still worse. I was dying by the end. It’s a horrible film.

There’s one good moment in The Matrix: Reloaded…one in which Neo is trying to escape from a subway tunnel. He takes off like a bullet but two seconds later ends up exactly where he started. No elaborate FX, just a simple camera trick that Buster rKeaton could have dreamt up…and it’s the coolest moment in the film.

There’s a similar small pleasure in Resurrections — a line of dialogue spoken by Jonathan Groff‘s “Smith” character, the head of a booming San Francisco video-game company due to a wildly popular Matrix game created by Keanu Reeves‘ Thomas Anderson (aka Neo). In a one-on-one with Anderson, Smith explains that Warner Bros., the parent company, “has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy, with or without us” — presumably the same conditions that led to Wachowski’s involvement in Resurrections. This, at least, was mildly amusing — the only moment in the entire film that worked.

Otherwise I sensed trouble almost immediately. As soon as I glimpsed Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and listened to his half-solemn, half full-of-shit metaphysical patter after he decides that he doesn’t want to kill “Bugs” (Jessica Henwick) and her pallies after all, I muttered “but of course, the new Morpheus…Larry Fishburne’s son or whatever because Fishburne is 60 and probably overweight and unable to handle the martial-arts moves that he performed 20-plus-years ago.”

It turns out that Morpheus II is the same Fishburne and the same old Morpheus — he’s just 25 years younger and looks and sounds like the guy who played Bobby Seale in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. But right away — during the obligatory opening action sequence, which films of this sort have to begin with because default Matrix knuckle-draggers are looking for as many bullet-time sequences as possible…bullet time! bullet time!… where was I?…

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Herbert Ross‘s Pennies From Heaven, a big-studio adaptation of Dennis Potter’s original BBC musical drama, opened almost exactly 40 years ago — Friday, December 11, 1981.

I was a huge admirer of Potter’s 1978 original presentation (critics adored it), and my reaction to the Ross (which I reviewed for The Film Journal) was something along the lines of “as remakes go this is truly a brave and striking effort, and almost as good as the BBC version. I adore many of the musical sequences, but something feels wrong…it’s a film about how grim and draining and merciless life was for so many during the Depression, yes, but it’s also a kind of heavy-sauce mood trip, almost a horror film…a feeling of walls closing in.”

Ross and Potter’s versions were pretty much identical. A struggling Depression-era loser named Arthur Parker (played by Steve Martin in ’81, Bob Hoskins earlier) lives in a fantasy retreat of popular songs in order to keep his spirit going and endure life’s constant misery. The contrast between the harsh reality of Arthur’s actual life vs. the the dreamworld songs that fill his head (and those of costars Bernadette Peters, Christopher Walken, Jessica Harper and Vernel Bagneris) either moved you or sank you, but how could anyone fail to admire the audacious concept?

I’ve always been a fan of what Pennies From Heaven was about and how it got there. Brave and highly inventive, honoring the Potter while advancing its own signature, etc. Martin and Bernadette Peters were excellent. The black-and-white homage to a Fred Astaire + Ginger Rogers dance number in Follow The Fleet was pretty great, as I recall. I remember being extra impressed by Walken’s big dance number. But I haven’t once re-watched it over the last four decades. Not once.

Because somewhere around the halfway or two-thirds mark Pennies From Heaven drops a pill into your system that feels more dispiriting than anything else. It keeps leaning in the direction of despondency, death and doom. It’s a movie that says “most of us are rats on the treadmill, and the game is totally rigged against us so you may as well resign yourself to the endurance of it all…in all likelihood the only respite you will experience with any regularity will be in the realm of fantasy.”

Lars von Trier‘s Dancer in the Dark (’00), which I’ve seen three or four times, used pretty much the exact same premise. This time Bjork was the tragic and incorrigible daydreamer who, like Martin and Hoskins before her, ended up on the gallows.

Pennies From Heaven was a bust — $22 million to produce, $9.1 million in theatrical revenues. My pet peeve was the way Bagneris’s accordion player was initially portrayed as another sad but sympathetic loser, and then he turns out to be a rapist and a murderer of a young blind girl. Bagneris seemed like a weirdo to begin with, and for some primal reason I was repelled by the idea his character turning into a secret maniac, and of Martin being convicted for Bagneris’s crime…this was my big drop-out moment a la William Goldman.

Could Netflix or Amazon or Hulu be persuaded to fund a remake today? Or a similar musical tragedy with the same basic premise?

82 year-old Fred Astaire on Ross’s film: “I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They don’t realize that the ’30s were a very innocent age, and that [the film] should have been set in the ’80s. As is it’s just froth. It makes you cry it’s so distasteful.”

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Why would Brad Pitt degrade his brand by costarring in a obviously ham-fisted, aimed-at-blithering-idiots, piece-of-shit adventure comedy like The Lost City (Paramount, 3.25)? It’s been 37 years since Romancing The Stone and nobody will give a shit anyway, but that’s more or less the template. (Or, if you will, Romancing The Stone meets a slightly less bullshit-stuffed Jungle Cruise.) Kathleen Turner played a reclusive romance novelist back then and Sandra Bullock is playing a romance novelist now. Channing Tatum is the new Michael Douglas, a brawny hero with feet of clay. Beware of directors Adam and Aaron Nee.

I will not watch this film. If I do, I will hate it.

Last night Ben Affleck told Jimmy Kimmel that his reported remarks to Howard Stern about supposed links between his alcoholism and his waning marriage to Jennifer Garner, which sounded to a lot of people like “Jennifer made me an alcoholic,” were taken out of context and turned into toxic click-bait by voracious online rewriters.

Affleck did reportedly say that he and Garner “probably would’ve ended up at each other’s throats,” and if they hadn’t divorced “I probably still would’ve been drinking…part of why I started drinking was because I [felt] trapped…I was like, ‘I can’t leave because of my kids, but I’m not happy, what do I do?’ And what I did was [I] drank a bottle of scotch and fell asleep on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution.”

There was certainly more to their marriage than just this awkward summary.

Two thoughts:

(a) A “bad” or unfulfilling relationship (sexual boredom? constant conflicts over values and lifestyle issues? feelings of being intellectually stifled or constantly misunderstood or challenged?) can result in a repeating, no-way-out negative dynamic, and that can make a husband or a wife feel trapped. A couple can sometimes gradually work through this stuff; other times it’s hopeless. Anyone who’s been married knows what I’m talking about.

(b) Imagine if Garner had been the one who succumbed to alcoholism and sought a divorce while agreeing to joint custody, and who later said to Howard Stern the same things that Affleck said. Imagine if she’d said “I really wasn’t happy and every day was an ordeal, and yet there I was, stuck in a bad marriage, and I had to figure some way out of it…if I’d stayed with Ben I probably would’ve remained an alcoholic.” No one in the twitterverse or on The View or anywhere else would’ve trashed Garner like Affleck got trashed yesterday. Because the media always turns a blind eye when a woman admits to some kind of selfish behavior or failing, because if they don’t cut her a break or rush to her defense they’re probably sexist pigs under the skin. But if an older guy (white or BIPOC) admits to some selfish failing the media always chimes in with “look, a suspected asshole just admitted he’s an asshole!”