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Back in ’51 a gifted artist in the employ of 20th Century Fox created an alternate version of The Day The Earth Stood Still. He/she added (a) a giant, dark gray mummy’s hand and (b) Gort carrying a screaming Las Vegas blonde dressed in a pink-champagne gown instead of Patricia Neal in a dark business suit. No one complained when the film opened on 9.18.51 and everyone realized that neither of these elements were in the film. Because artists were allowed to…wait for it…use their imaginations!

A few months later an Italian poster artist followed suit with similar art for Me Secreto Me Condena, which is what Alfred Hitchcock‘s I Confess was called in Roma, Siena, Venice, Genoa, San Remo, Montepulciano, Firenze, Milano and Brindisi. (Google Translation: “I Secretly Condemn Myself.”) Montgomery Clift was no longer a priest, and the same gown-wearing blonde from The Day The Earth Stood Still poster was back, only this time wearing a semi-transparent black outfit and lying before Clift in a posture of shame and degradation.

Tina Fey, Amy Poehler opening remarks (2:55): “The Golden Globes are given out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association…made up of around 90 international, non-Black journalists who attend movie junkets each year in search of a better life.” (4:38) “Nomadland is about a lady played by Frances McDomand who travels across the desert in her van and poops in a bucket.” (5:46) “Soul is a beautiful Pixar animated movie in which a middle-aged black man accidentally get knocked out of his body and into a cat. The HFPA really responded to this movie because they do have five cat members.”

6:10 pm: HE is unable to invest any interest in animation, but respectfully believes that the HFPA giving a Golden Globe in this category to Pete Docter‘s Soul in an odd call. Posted on 11.29.20: “Despite an absolute avalanche of charm and energy and whimsical, wild-ass associations, Soul is just not good enough. Too fast and busy, too scattered, too all over the place, too hyper. And because it pushes a fundamentally false or at least conflicted concept of life. And because (this is minor but significant) it tries to normalize obesity with the casting of the fattest animated cat you’ve ever seen in your life.”

6:35 pm: Congrats to The Trial of the Chicago 7‘s Aaron Sorkin for winning the 2021 Golden Globe for Best Screenplay, Motion Picture. Posted on 9.22.20:

7:15 pm: Congrats to Minari for winning the Best Foreign Language Feature Golden Globe award. The only problem is that it’s not really a foreign-language feature. It’s a totally American film, set in the Midwestern heartland and featuring a scene in an American small-town church and costarring a Jesus freak (played by Will Patton). It happens to focus, yes, on characters who happen to speak Korean because that’s their native language. But it’s not a foreign-language film. Not in the usual sense.

7:45 pm: Congrats to The Mauritanian‘s Jodie Foster winning a GG for Best Supporting Actress, but where did this come from? And why, again, was Mank‘s Amanda Seyfried shafted? The Father‘s Olivia Colman gave the most compelling performance in this category, but she didn’t win because she won the Best Actress Oscar two years ago for The Favorite…right? Zip for Hillbilly Elegy‘s Glenn Close. I just don’t get (and I don’t “mean” anything by this) where the Foster vote came from. What drove it? Where was the big rationale?

8:10 pm: Congrats to Nomadland for winning Best Motion Picture, Drama; ditto Chloé Zhao winning for Best Director. Congrats all around.

Andra Day delivered an excellent performance in The United States vs. Billie Holiday — no question about that. But what she brought was significantly better than the film itself. Usually the film has to be well-liked or at least well-respected for a major category acting win to happen — not this year. You have to admit that Day winning is a surprise.

The bottom line is that HFPA members are seemingly terrified about possibly getting canceled or blackballed by the woke crowd. Hence the Boseman win (pure sentimental tribute trophy) + Kaluuya (I honestly feel that Sacha Baron Cohen really nailed Sorkin’s enhanced version of Abbie Hoffman, and I could’ve accepted a win for Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami) + Minari.

HFPA to Hollywood community (per friendo): “Just because we are an all-white voting body does not mean we are not woke. We get it. Please understand this. Because we do.”

Friendo: “Oscar-wise it’s Nomadland vs The Trial of the Chicago 7 for Best Picture. I think Boseman will probably win the Oscar for that goofy performance.”

Nobody gives a damn about a 73 year-old Tony Award-winning play called Mr. Roberts. Well, a few boomers do, I suppose, but everyone hates boomers (polluted the planet, took all the money, condemned Millennials to a lifetime of economic anxiety) so fuck them and the play together. Whatever merits the play (co-written by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan) may have radiated during the Truman administration, they’ve long since seemed to matter.

But speaking as someone who long ago watched a degraded pan-and-scan version** of the 1955 Warner Bros. CinemaScope adaptation with Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell and Jack Lemmon in the lead roles, I’ve always been mystified why anyone in the mid ’50s ever thought Mr. Roberts, regarded as some kind of ace-level heart comedy in its heyday, thought it was any good.

A WWII Naval chuckler set aboard a backwater cargo ship called “the bucket” (and based upon some short stories written by Heggen about his war experiences), it’s basically a serving of coarse service humor, sentimentality and painfully sodden slapstick.

And yet the stage version of Mr. Roberts, directed by Logan, won a Tony Award for Best Play. I’ve never read the Heggen-Logan original, but the film must have coarsened the material considerably. It just stands to reason. Broadway sophistos have rarely celebrated the above-described behaviors in any form.

The central idea of the film version is that the enlisted men are eight-year-old children who love their kindly father (Fonda’s Mr. Roberts, a Lieutenant JG) and despise the petty, neurotic and tyrannical Captain Morton (Cagney). Over and over the film conveys what a rollicking pleasure it is to taunt or belittle Morton or better yet make him so furious that he throws up.

Oh, and what a hoot it was to watch nurses undress through binoculars from a distance of several hundred yards. And to make your own liquor with various rotgut ingredients…hilarious!

With the exception of one amusing scene in which the under-educated Morton rants about how much he hates snooty college boys like Roberts and how they treated him when he worked as a bus boy in the 1920s (“Oh, bus boy! It seems my friend here has thrown up all over the table…fetch a mop and clean up the mess, bus boy, will ya?”), there’s nothing the least bit funny in the entire film. You can see what was intended to be funny but none of it lands.

The lead performances are fine in and of themselves (Lemmon won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), but the crew is just awful. The simpleton behavior and mentally-stunted emotions…God.

The principal reason for the failure of Mr. Roberts was John Ford, the genius-level, Oscar-winning director who was also a lifelong alcoholic and a surly old cuss who always brought the material down to his own unpretentious and irreverent level, especially when it came to films about men in uniform. Ford worshipped the idea of getting loaded and being insubordinate and snarly and generally sour-facing everyone.

Alleged Cagney quote: “I would have kicked his brains out. He was so goddamned mean to everybody. He was truly a nasty old man.”

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Koji and Gustav, Lady Gaga‘s two kidnapped French bulldogs, have been returned unharmed by a mystery woman who…what, just happened to find the them on the street? Or who maybe read about the $500K that Lady Gaga had offered to anyone who returns the dogs, even if the person in question “finds them unknowingly”? **

The dogs were stolen Wednesday night in Hollywood from Lady Gaga’s dog walker, Ryan Fischer, who was shot during the altercation.

The dogs were dropped off at the LAPD’s Olympic Station (1130 Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90006 — near corner of Vermont and 11th Street). The thieves are still on the loose, according to the fuzz. What are the odds that the woman who returned the dogs knows a little something about something?

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Or should I say “here’s hoping”? God and vaccines willing, the 2021 Telluride Film Festival (Thursday, 9.2 thru Monday, 9.6) will be a humdinger, you bet. Too few days, too many films. At least 20 hotties.

Among the titles that could play over this five-day gathering: 1. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom; 2. Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth 3. Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch; 4. Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley; 5. Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde ; 6. Robert Eggers‘ The Northman; 7. Leos Carax‘s Annette; 8. Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog; 9. Terrence Malick‘s The Way Of The Wind; 10. Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter; 11. Paul Verhoeven‘s Benedetta; 12. Taika Waititi‘s Next Goal Wins; 13. Celine Sciamma‘s Petite Maman; 14. Mia Hansen-Løve‘s Bergman Island; 15. Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater; 16. Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis; 17. Ruben Östlund‘s Triangle of Sadness; 18. Steven Soderbergh‘s No Sudden Move; 19. Ridley Scott‘s Gucci; and 20. Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho.

What other possibilities? And what are the realistic odds that screenings will be able to happen in the old-fashioned, pre-pandemic way?

During the promotion of The Nice Guys (’16) Ryan Gosling called Abbott & Costello‘s Hold That Ghost (Universal, 8.6.41) “kind of a masterpiece.” I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s an agreeably silly deal — sloppy but lively, fast-paced, everyone’s on mescaline including the tough-guy gangsters**. On top of which I’m a fool for handsomely mastered 1080p versions of silvery black-and-white films of the ’40s. Which is why I’d love to get my hands on a Hold That Ghost Bluray.

The problem is that it isn’t selling or renting as an individual unit. You have to shell out $105 for an Abbott & Costello Complete Universal Collection box set. I wish the Universal home video guys would ease up and issue a stand-alone Bluray. That’s all I have to say.

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The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and David Rooney have posted a “should win” / “will win” piece about the Golden Globe awards, which will happen on Sunday, 2.28. Rooney offers the shoulds; Feinberg projects the wills.

Herewith are HE’s reactions with a particular focus on two questions in the matter of Best Picture, Drama. One, does the viewer want to “live” in the world of a given film or performance? (A major consideration that journos almost never ponder.) And two, what does the film in question say about life on the planet earth right now that strikes a resonant chord?

Best Picture, Drama

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says Nomadland
WILL WIN: Feinberg says either The Trial of the Chicago 7 or Nomadland.
HE SEZ: Nomadland is a sad, sporadically spirited mood poem about “houseless”-ness — about good people who’ve suffered blows and lost the battle but continue to push on like the Joad family. The cultural/political winds obviously point to a Nomadland win. We all feel the heart current, but who wants to “live” in this world of roaming 60-plus vagabonds who exchange stories, sit around campfires and take care of business in buckets? Answer: Nobody. Which is why The Trial of the Chicago 7 might win because hanging, strategizing and arguing with the likes of Hoffman, Kuntsler, Hayden, Rubin, et. al. is a more vital way to be.

What does Nomadland say about our current communal state that’s real and truthful? Thank God for strength, reaching out and resourcefulness in this most brutal difficult soul-draining of realms, but who rejects a good deal (safety, security, better hygiene, a bathroom) when it’s offered? What does Chicago 7 say? We may have our strategic differences and combative personalities, but there’s the spit and spunk of it all. Fight on!

Best Picture, Musical or Comedy

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says Hamilton (“In a weak category this year, it has to be Thomas Kail‘s performance-capture recording of the Broadway juggernaut that bottles the thrill of live theater with rare skill,” he says.)
WILL WIN: Feinberg says Borat 2.
HE SEZ: Hamilton is a play that was captured by cameras…period. Borat 2, a film that ridicules red-hat bumblefucks and Rudy Giuliani, will win. What does Borat 2 say about our current communal state that’s real and truthful? Answer: There are assholes aplenty out there (including the medieval sexists of Eastern Europe), and it’s fun to laugh at them. No harm, no foul.

Who wants to “live” in the world of Borat 2? Answer: No choice — we are living in that world.

Best Actress, Drama

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says Carey Mulligan.
WILL WIN: Feinberg says Mulligan. “Frances McDormand and Viola Davis won recently,” Scott reasons, “whereas Mulligan never has.”
HE SEZ: Mulligan. She’s good in Promising Young Woman in a dry, brittle, controlled fury way. She was at least five if not ten times more affecting in Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette, Thomas Vinterberg‘s Far From The Madding Crowd, Lone Scherfig‘s An Education, in 2015’s Skylight on Broadway, in BBC/Netflix’s Collateral, etc. And she’s very good in The Dig. But sometimes you win for the performance that you win for — just happens that way. Mulligan won’t thank Variety‘s Dennis Harvey, of course, but that whole kerfuffle probably did a lot to cement her winer’s circle status.

Who wants to “live” in the world of Promising Young Woman? Answer: Not this horse. Young men are pigs, but I’d prefer to live in a realm in which guys who resemble Bo Burnham‘s pediatrician stay the way they were written for the first seven-eights of the film, and don’t pull a last-minute switcheroo to satisfying some arbitrary “we need a twist” requirement.

Best Actor, Drama

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says Ma Rainey‘s Chadwick Boseman.
WILL WIN: Feinberg says Anthony Hopkins (“Only Hopkins’ The Father is up for best pic, plus the HFPA adores him…eight noms going back 42 years!.
HE SEZ: Boseman might win, but a Best Actor trophy should be about more than expressing a great collective sadness about a young actor’s untimely death. The finest performance of Boseman’s career was James Brown in Get On Up. Plus “everyone knows that Boseman’s ‘Levee’ doesn’t blow the doors off the hinges — not really. It’s a poignant performance (especially during the scene in which Levee recalls a sad episode involving his mother). I understand the sentiment behind giving Boseman a special tribute, of course, but giving him a posthumous GG award for a performance that is no more than approvable feels like a disproportionate thing to do.” — posted on 2.10.21. The GG trophy should go to either Hopkins or Sound of Metal‘s Riz Ahmed.

Who wants to “live” in the world of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Father and Sound of Metal? Answer: Ixnay on the first two, but the world of Sound of Metal is vast and cosmic and full of wonder.

Best Actress, Musical or Comedy

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says French Exit‘s Michelle Pfeiffer (“Her withering hauteur and spent surrender elevate every moment”).
WILL WIN: Feinberg says Borat 2‘s Maria Bakalova.
HE SEZ: Rooney is right — the award should go to Pfeiffer. Critics have been hailing Bakalova’s praises all along, and she’s totally fine in the film but the fact that she’s won 19 Best Supporting Actress prizes around the country is, like…what? Strictly a falling-dominoes dynamic.

Best Actor, Musical or Comedy

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says Borat 2‘s Sacha Baron Cohen. (“Andy Samberg‘s role in Palm Springs doesn’t extend his range, Lin-Manuel Miranda isn’t Hamilton‘s strongest player, and James Corden is abrasive in The Prom.”)
WILL WIN: Feinberg says Cohen
HE SEZ: Cohen.

Last weekend I re-watched the extended cut of Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25.13). It runs around 138 minutes, or 20 minutes longer than the theatrical cut.

I hadn’t watched the long cut in roughly seven years, and I’m telling you it’s aged beautifully — it’s a ruthlessly brilliant, ice-cold film about irrevocable fate and death by way of the Mexican drug cartels. And yet The Counselor‘s throat was cut by most critics, earning a meager 33% and 48% on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

The Counselor Bluray includes an excellent “making of” documentary that lasts around…oh, 45 minutes or so. For whatever reason it’s not on YouTube.

Initial HE review: “I was so impressed by the profound assurance, philosophical authority and thematic clarity in Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25), which I saw last night, that I pleaded with Fox publicists to let me say a few things despite the Thursday afternoon review embargo. They gave me permission to do so.

“I was also very taken by the visually seductive stylings (the dp is Dariusz Wolski with editing by Pietro Scalia) and what I would call a bold but almost reckless indifference to conventional audience expectations for a film of this type.

“I asked to speak to Counselor producers Nick Wechsler and Steve Schwartz, and they called about an hour later and we talked for…oh, 15 minutes or so.”

“Ignore Counselor Naysaysers,” posted on 10.24.13:

“Take no notice of The Counselor‘s 34% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It simply means that a lot of reviewers found the movie unlikable or unpleasant. Or they found it too scary to handle — they had to push it away in order to go on living their lives. But shame on those reviewers who are calling it a bad or poorly made film, or that ‘everyone’s speech is awash in gaudy psycho-blather and Yoda-like observations,’ which is blind bullshit. Or that ‘you can’t believe a word of it.”

“Yes, you can. You can believe every word. You simply have to understand and accept that The Counselor is expressing a cold and clear-eyed view of the Mexican cartel drug business with a very blunt and eloquent voice. It is an undistilled visit to McCarthyland, which is to say the bleak moralistic realm of novelist and (in this instance) first-time screenwriter Cormac McCarthy. You can say “wow, that’s one cold and cruel place” and that’s fine, but you cannot call The Counselor a bad or negligible or sloppily made film. I hereby declare these viewpoints anathema and excommunicate.

“Consider instead the praise from Toronto Star critic Peter Howell and St. Louis Post-Dispatch critic Joe Williams. Or the two hosannahs I posted yesterday. Or consider the words of N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, who calls Ridley Scott‘s film “terrifying” and “implacable.”

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Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin‘s Tina (HBO, Rollin‘ On The River, Max, 3.27), a life of Tina Turner doc, will presumably explore the occasionally abusive relationship she endured with longtime romantic and musical partner Ike Turner (1931-2007), who struggled with cocaine-exacerbated issues in the ’70s.

That’s a polite way of saying Ike was an abusive dick.

Given today’s climate, the doc will presumably come down hard on Ike — how could it not? But will it show Tina’s microphone fellatio routine that she performed during 1969 Rolling Stones tour? Not cool by #MeToo standards,

Tina, now 81, became a Swiss citizen in 2013. She lives in Château Algonquin, built on the edge of Lake Zurich in Küsnacht, Switzerland.

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When Kyle Buchanan wrote a profile about Promising Young Woman‘s Carey Mulligan a couple of months ago, attention was gained and the pot was stirred. Especially when Mulligan was quoted saying that she “took issue” with Dennis Harvey‘s Variety review of her film.

Yesterday Buchanan posted an interview with Nomadland‘s Frances McDormand, and the motive was more or less the same as Mulligan’s had been — perk up the conversation, blow a favoring breeze.

On 3.15 McDormand and Mulligan will almost certainly be announced as competitors for the same Best Actress Oscar. Why do I have this feeling that this is not McDormand’s year to win? Partly because she won an Oscar three years ago for her performance as an angry mom in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, her second such honor after winning for her Marge Gunderson in Fargo 24 years ago. Enough, right?

But now McDormand has offered another reason. She’s told Buchanan that she’s still looking to live under the radar. Buchanan notes McDormand “is highly skeptical of any ceremony where actors are done up like glamorous gladiators“, adding that when her husband Joel Coen “was asked to produce the Oscars alongside his brother, Ethan, McDormand suggested they set the telecast at Coney Island, which would have forced Hollywood glitterati to mingle with the freak show.”

Buchanan further notes that McDormand sometimes appears “barefaced instead of Botoxed and once wore her own jean jacket in lieu of borrowed couture,” a form of “mild noncompliance [that] is tantamount to a declaration of war in Hollywood.”

Right after Fargo, McDormand “made a very conscious effort not to do press and publicity for 10 years,” she says, “but it paid off for exactly the reasons I wanted it to. It gave me a mystery back to who I was, and then in the roles I performed, I could take an audience to a place where someone who sold watches or perfume and magazines couldn’t.”

“To her,” Kyle writes. “Nomadland is the culmination of that effort to keep herself unspoiled in the public eye. ‘That’s why it works,’ she said. ‘That’s why Chloé could bear to even think of doing this with me, because of what I’ve created for years not just as an actor, but in my personal life.”

Get the picture? Low-key, no thanks, we’re good, the Oscars are a bit gaudy, we have our own deal.

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I’ve seen and admired Nick Jarecki‘s Crisis (Quiver, 2.26), a skillfully wrought, multi-charactered, Traffic-like drama about the intrigues and ravages of the opioid epidemic. It began shooting roughly two years ago, and was ready to roll out by early ’20, or roughly a year ago.

I don’t know how it would have fared critically or commercially if the pandemic hadn’t hit, but I know two things. One, Crisis (originally called Dreamland) deserves everyone’s respect, and two, it doesn’t deserve to contend with so much as a single bad Armie Hammer joke.

As Jake Kelly, an undercover double agent dealking with users and sellers and basically in quicksand up to his neck, Hammer delivers a steady, no-frills performance. He doesn’t try to do anything the cute or charismatic way. Crisis is a complex ensemble piece, but at the same time as lean and trim as anyone could imagine, and trouper-wise Hammer fits right in. He holds back.

Not once during my viewing did I think about Hammer’s recent travails. Okay, I did think about them but mostly I was muttering “this is what good cinema does…it brings you in and shuts the world out….nice deal.”

I was also thinking that whatever Hammer might have gotten wrong in terms of excessive zeal or showing a lack of sensitivity or consideration for this or that B&D partner, his troubles are his own turf’s. No overlap, leave it alone.

The same consideration should, of course, be given to the other two Hammer films opening this year — Kenneth Branagh‘s Death on the Nile (20th Century, 9.17) and Taika Waititi Next Goal Wins, which will probably “open” during the ’21 and early ’22 award season.

Here’s the link.