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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.

“What do you…Rita! how are you!…Bob, how do you explain that lifeless Alexander The Great flick with Richard Burton, Claire Bloom and Fredric March? I mean, that movie just laid there like an uncooked, unseasoned filet of flounder. You need to jump into something, man…I don’t know, some kind of intense, contemporary, character-driven thing. Something about pool sharks or street gangs, something loose and jazzy and French New Wavey…”

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A “friendo” whom I know pretty well and whose opinions I don’t always agree with but whose observations are always fairly spot-on…this person has seen Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick‘s four-part Allen v. Farrow (HBO Max, starting on 2.21), and I’m upset and alarmed about what he told me, which is that he found the doc persuasive. Not in a conclusive smoking-gun sense, but in a way that registered. He went into it with a “show me” attitude and came out with his mind…well, nudged to some extent.

“Friendo” has read tons of material about Woody Mia Dylan Soon Yi over the last 28 years — he knows the turf pretty well. And he shares my view that certain adamant kneejerkers from the film realm were all too willing in years past to cast Woody aside. The doc nonetheless persuaded him as far as it goes that Allen may (emphasis on the “m” word) be guilty of committing an act of one-off incest with Dylan Farrow on 8.4.92. Just allowing for the possibility that the Woody haters…I don’t want to think about it. I’ve been on the Woody-is-innocent team for such a long time.

“Friendo” didn’t arrive at this conclusion suspicion without thinking it over good and hard. And he says the doc is “not” a hatchet job, in part because of the craft levels.

I’ve requested a link to Allen v. Farrow but until HBO coughs one up I’ve obviously no basis from which to accept or argue. The Woody friendlies (including Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman and Allen friend and confidante Bob Weide, who posted a sight-unseen assessment roughly a week ago) have vented suspicions and logical counterpoints all along, as I have. But Weide hasn’t seen the doc and even says he doesn’t want to.

Another journo colleague who’s never been part of the lynch mob says the doc is not a slam-dunk or dispositive, and yet Moses Farrow’s landmark 2018 essay (“A Son Speaks Out“) is challenged in the doc by members of the family, as well as by Allen’s own testimony in a child custody hearing. Allen allegedly stated, I’m told, that Moses had “gone for a walk that afternoon and was not in the house.”

Plus, I’m also told, the doc shows a police drawing of the attic in which the alleged molestation took place. Despite Moses’ claim that were no train tracks or toy-sized trains of any kind in the attic, the drawing allegedly shows train tracks and a toy train set-up of some kind.

Not in the house? A plain-spoken offering of first-hand testimony from a then-14 year-old kid who was there on that fateful day, and who is currently a licensed marriage and family therapist…I’m sorry but I was sold early on. Moses’ claim that there was no operating train set in the attic has always been, for me, one of the most important pieces of testimony. Moses states in the essay, in fact, that the train set was sitting in a kind of downstairs play room for the boys.

Now comes an alleged image, supplied by the Connecticut police, that argues with this? And Moses wasn’t even around when the alleged incident took place? What’s going on here?

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Jerry Zucker‘s Ghost (’90) implanted a creepy idea in the minds of millions — that when a seemingly evil or at least dastardly person dies (like, say, Tony Goldwyn‘s “Carl” or Rick Aviles‘ “Willie”), his soul is surrounded by a crew of shadowy growling demons who grab hold and take him down to hell. I’d be lying if I said this image didn’t manifest when I read about the death of Rush Limbaugh, a victim of lung cancer at age 70.

A truculent and blathery broadcaster of a long series of Big Rightwing Lies since he became a nationwide brand in the early ’90s (although he’d been making a lot of noise as a radio talk-show guy starting in the late ’80s), Limbaugh is, was and always will be the grandfather of rightwing disinformation and bullshit, right up to a radio show statement he made on 2.24.20 about the coronavirus: “I’m dead right on this…the coronavirus is the common cold, folks,” adding that it was being “weaponized” to bring down Trump.

When Limbaugh’s lung cancer diagnosis was announced three weeks earlier, or on 2.3.20, I posted the following: “I want to say this plainly but carefully: I did not feel profound sadness when I read of Rush Limbaugh’s condition. His strident-rightie rhetoric did a lot to inflame Bumblefuck Nation and rupture the fabric of civility in this country and fortify the toxicity that fuels the culture-war fires to this day. In the eyes of many millions Limbaugh is a flat-out villain. Anyone on my side of the battlefield (i.e., with a liberal or left-center attitude or philosophy) who says he/she feels badly about Limbaugh’s misfortune is just ‘saying that’, trust me.”

But of course, there is no cosmic moral judgment system that sends guys like Limbaugh to the caverns of hell and others into the clouds of heaven. I regret to say that death is a non-judgmental, non-denominational agent of flatline finality and that’s all. Nothing would give me more comfort than to learn otherwise…to learn that the 21 grams of spiritual matter that used to reside inside the body of Rush Limbaugh is hovering in some dark, self-loathing place. Wherever and whatever that is, it’s probably safe to say that Donald Trump‘s soul will be joining him down the road.

Four or five years ago, a certain multi-word mantra began to get around in entertainment-related journalistic circles. The mantra was this: “Get with the ‘woke’ Khmer Rouge program — embrace the notion that almost all straight white guys are evil or at least deplorable on some level, that people of color are blessed and need to be embraced and exalted every which way, and that the time has come for women who’ve been sexually harassed and/or discriminated against to be avenged — or forget about working as a front-line journalist.”

In short, the time had come for a little reverse discrimination against white males. Was this viewpoint justified? Yes — absolutely, abundantly and to hell with due process. Bully boys in powerful positions had earned this enmity for centuries, and now the tables had turned and a lot of powerfully corroded whiteys were hauled before courts (legal as well as Twitter-verse) and the general tone turned to one of condemnation and retribution.

Fairly or unfairly, the message was clear to every seasoned, semi-verified or would-be journalist or critic: talk the talk and walk the walk, or you won’t survive in this industry. Because a revolutionary mind wave, driven by Donald Trump nausea and Harvey Weinstein-esque repulsion, is spreading throughout liberal professions, and those who fail to sign on with enthusiasm will…uhm, have a difficult time of it.

My first significant taste of Khmer Rouge hysteria happened in the fall of ’17, as I was on my way to the Key West Film Festival. Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich shrieked like a p.c. banshee when I tweeted to Jessica Chastain that an aspiring film critic not only needs to be talented, tenacious and willing to eat shit, but that it would “help” if he/she is “fetching.” Ehrlich was appalled that anyone would even suggest that an attractive appearance might have something to do with how you’re received in mixed company or by potential employers. I called him a delusional little bitch, of course. 18 months later Bill Maher set him straight.

All to say that when it comes to reviewing Allen vs. Farrow, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering‘s four-part Woody Allen hatchet-job doc which totally pushes the Dylan-and-Mia view of things, there’s no way for critics in the employ of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Indiewire and the Daily Beast to say anything except “hmmm, yeah, maybe, food for thought, who knows?, Allen is toast anyway and he’s probably guilty of what Dylan has long claimed, and this four-part investigation sure makes him look like the devil so he probably is.”

Do we all understand the basic dynamic? These critics are simply not allowed to disagree with the Mia-Dylan case or or quote from Moses Farrow‘s essay (“A Son Speaks Out“) or point out the Woody-exonerating facts. If they divert from the party line, they’ll be in trouble and they know it.

I haven’t seen Allen vs. Farrow (it premieres on HBO Max this weekend) but the hanging-judge reviews by Indiewire‘s Ben Travers and the Daily Beast‘s Marlow Stern speak for themselves. These guys were clearly wokester Woody haters before they watched the series. Then again the THR and Variety reviews don’t really come up for air either.

HE’s overwhelming impression is that the Dick-Ziering doc is a one-sided hatchet job. Elite wokester journas, to repeat, are so sold on and submerged within the faith of #MeToo deliverance and historical righteousness (which, on its own terms, is not disputed in the slightest by HE) that there’s only one way to review this four-part doc, and that’s by ignoring the facts and dismissing Woody’s denials and and Moses Farrow’s account of Mia’s psychology and behavior and what happened up at Frog Hollow on that day in August of ‘92. Haters are gonna hate. Deniers are gonna deny.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy: “Are you surprised by this? Imagine if a trade like THR or IndieWire would actually go against the grain and flat out say ‘this documentary is bullshit‘ and ‘it neglects facts and is one-sided”…the backlash would be so overwhelming that there would be calls for the writer to be fired. It’s fucking sad. Unless you operate your own site you’re basically committing career harakiri if you side against woke and #MeToo narratives.”

My first New York Film Festival was the ’77 edition. I was planning to move into a cockroach-infested Soho apartment on Sullivan Street, but in late September I was still sharing a home rental in Westport, CT. I forget how many films I saw but I definitely caught Wim Wenders‘ The American Friend (the big public screening was on 9.24.77), Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (10.1.77) and Francois Truffaut‘s The Man Who Loved Women (ditto). All three were shown at 1.66:1.

If I recall correctly New York Film Festival director Richard Roud conducted a brief post-screening interview with Truffaut following the screening.

I was in awe of Roud, whose investment in nouvelle vague French cinema was storied by that point. I loved his deep voice and moustache, the smooth and off-handed way he spoke French, his continental cool-cat fashion sense and the constant smoking of what I assumed were unfiltered Galouises.

A Cahiers du Cinema contributor in the ’50s, Roud began running the Löndon Film Festival in ’60. He co-founded the NYFF in ’63 with Amos Vogel. Roud was a huge Jean Luc Godard enthusiast from way back, and I recall Andrew Sarris telling me that at one point that in his capacity as a NYFF board member he had to tell Roud and his co-enthusiasts that he couldn’t make it with Godard when his films took on an ultra-didactic political character in the early to mid ’70s.

Roud passed in 1989 at age 59.

This interview between Roud and Truffaut was taped right around the festival’s showing of The Man Who Loved Women. A longer version of the interview is on the Criterion Bluray of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.

YouTube comment by “spb78”: “I’ll have to watch this full interview again on the Jules et Jim set, but if I’m correct in assuming there was no follow-up by the interviewer then what a wasted opportunity. Because the obvious question to Truffaut would’ve been ‘You articulated the auteur theory when you were a critic. Since becoming a filmmaker, do you still maintain this theory?’ Instead of telling Truffaut the theory is proven by his films, he should have asked Truffaut if making films validated his theory.”

Truffaut was 45 when the interview happened. He died of a brain tumor on 10.21.84 at age 52. My ex-wife Maggie and I visited his Cimitiere du Montmartre grave in January ’87.