slider

I didn’t want to submit to Darius and Abraham Marder‘s Sound of Metal (Amazon, now streaming) because I’d heard it was a chore to sit through. Plus I despise metal rock, and didn’t want to hang in that world at all. Plus I didn’t want to aurally experience any kind of simulated deafness or diminished hearing…later. But I knew I’d have to watch it sooner or later, and I was finally guilt-tripped into catching it last night. Alright, fine, fuck me, here we go.

Eureka! Sound of Metal is an absorbing and quite delicate film about using tragedy to transition from one world to another, and one that offers a doorway into a spirit world…not so much a world of deafness and signing but one that harbors a realm of cosmic serenity and stillness…a world that expresses the age-old axiom “never speak unless you can improve upon the silence.” Radiance is everywhere.

I’m more in love with writing than almost any other human activity, but I also adore the sound of gifted speaking voices (particularly those of great English-language actors) and singing and musical performance (especially Beethoven’s Ninth and Eric Clapton‘s “Unplugged” album), not to mention the sounds of nature and the city and everything else, etc. So I can’t completely submit to the majesty of cosmic silence, but I know that this is the realm of peace and solace…the one in which God resides.

I completely agree that Riz Ahmed‘s performance as Ruben Stone, a metal drummer whose hearing suddenly collapses at the beginning of a tour, deserves a Best Actor nomination. He’s only been a quality-associated actor for six years or so (Nightcrawler, Rogue One, The Night Of) but Ruben is by far the best role he’s ever lucked into, and as you might expect his best moments in the film are non-verbal. Just about all of them, I would say.

I also agree that Paul Raci, the 60ish guy who ploys Ruben’s straight-shooting guide and teacher at a rural deaf camp, deserves a Best Supporting Actor nom. Raci, whose parents were deaf and who knows the realm inside and out, is perfect in the part. Like Harold Russell was perfect in The Best Years of Our Lives, I mean. Raci is actually a blend of Russell and Lives costar Hoagy Carmichael.

Also excellent are Olivia Cooke as Lou, Ruben’s singing-bandmate girlfriend who insists that he enroll in deaf-camp training, and Mathieu Amalric as her wealthy French dad.

The sound design team — supervising sound editor Nicolas Becker, production sound mixer Phillip Bladh, whoever else — definitely deserve Oscar noms, and…oh, hell, the Oscars themselves.

Ruben adapts well to silence and signing, but he still longs for sound and speech. A sizable portion of Act Two is about him selling his mobile home, drums and sound gear so he can afford cochlear implants. But once the implants are embedded and activated, the sound that he hears is like that of an empty tin can attached to a taut metal wire. He pays $30K for this? I can’t believe in this day and age that expensive artificial devices sound this bad.

Read more

12:25 pm: Kelly Reichardt‘s First Cow, a commendable if vaguely irritating period drama set in 1820s Oregon, has won the NYFCC’s Best Film award. If this isn’t the most “what planet are these guys living on?” NYFCC award yet, I’d like to know what is.

For decades an occasionally offbeat NYFCC trophy signified something highly valued — a fully considered saluting of a worthy achievement by serious pros. But the woke-era NYFCC brand is something else. It used to be that the Los Angeles Film Critics Association was the loopiest award-giving group for their absurd mid-voting brunch breaks — the NYFCC has now overtaken them.

HE would have voted for Mangrove (despite Amazon’s decision to focus on Emmy awards), Nomadland, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Father, Mank…each delivers a stronger, more levitational viewing experience than First Cow.

Excerpt #1 from HE’s First Cow review: “Do you see what I mean about watching a Reichardt film? She can’t even indicate whether or not Cookie and King Lu are gently sexual with each other or just palsy-walsy. (Skeletons holding hands doesn’t count — the dying King Lu may have simply reached for Cookie’s hand out of a primal fear of death.) She can’t devise a conversation between them in which the pair, feeling antsy about the thievery, go to Toby Jones and suggest that he might want to fund them in a start-up bakery business. She can’t show the guy with a rifle actually shooting Cookie or, more to the point, King Lu. Because if King Lu takes a bullet it would therefore make sense when he lies down next to Cookie and dies.”

Excerpt #2: “And yet the things that happen in a Reichardt film never feel movie-fake. Her stories might feel a tad confusing or under-explained, but I’ve never had believability issues. She has a certain low-key way of shooting her material, and always takes her time and yaddah yaddah. But as I watched First Cow (I actually watched it in three stages) I felt my soul draining out of me like sand. First Cow never comes to you — you have to come to it, and with the patience of Job.”

12:03 pm: Sidney Flanigan, who movingly portrayed a traumatized rural teen trying to obtain an abortion in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, has been handed the NYFCC Best Actress award. In a certain fashion Flanigan played the under-written “Autmun” to the hilt, and I’m not dismissing the solemnity or scope of her performance — it’s one of the saddest female turns ever, certainly over the last 20 years. But this strikes me as yet another manifestation of NYFCC eccentricity. I would have approved of Nomadland‘s Frances McDormand taking the prize. Or (my personal choice) French Exit‘s Michelle Pfeiffer. Or Promising Young Woman‘s Carey Mulligan. Or Pieces of a Woman‘s Vanessa Kirby. Or The Life Ahead‘s Sophia Loren as a career achievement tribute. Any of these.

11:32 am: Earlier this morning the NYFCC handed their Best Foreign Language Feature award to Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s Bacurau, an allegorical modern-day Brazilian western (Sam Peckinpah meets El Topo‘s Alejandro Jodorowsky). I hated Bacarau when I saw it at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Andrei Konchalovsky‘s brilliant Dear Comrades! should have won.

11:15 am: Eliza Hittman, director-writer of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, has won the NYFCC’s Best Screenplay award. Critics have been creaming over this melancholy abortion-driven drama all year long, but I happen to feel it’s underwritten as far as Sidney Flanigan‘s Autumn character is concerned. She’s so traumatized and self-suppressed that she can’t let go (except during that deeply touching scene in which she’s questioned by the abortion clinic lady). I’ve always felt that this was dramatically insufficient. I respectfully disagree with Hittman’s “less is more” aesthetic. Plus Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a good film within its own perimeter, doesn’t hold a candle to Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

11:03 am: Nomadland‘s Chloe Zhao has won the NYFCC Best Director award. Expected, no dispute, completely deserved.

10:47 am: Sorry for overlooking the NYFCC giving their Best Supporting Actress trophy to Maria Bakalova, for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. She was engaging in that Borat sequel and yes, she helped to punk Rudy Giuliani but c’mon…this is pure eccentricity, pure organizational egotism on the part of the NYFCC. The Father‘s Olivia Colman or Mank‘s Amanda Seyfried should have won. Or Yuh-jung Youn in Minari for her colorful grandma. Or even Glenn Close‘s “Mamaw” in Hillbilly Elegy.

10:40 am: Delroy Lindo was won the NYFCC Best Actor award for his anxious, anxiety-torn performance as a Trump-supporting Vietnam veteran in Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods. Lindo acted that part all to hell and he has a strong narrative on his side, but I would’ve voted for The Father‘s Anthony Hopkins. You know who was really good and hasn’t gotten much awards attention? Ben Affleck in The Way Back — a solid performance about a guy struggling with alcoholism and his own glorious past.

10:05 am: The New York Film Critics Circle has given its 2020 Best Supporting Actor award to the late Chadwick Boseman for his performance in Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods. Boseman played a ghost and a memory whose name in life was “Stormin'” Norman Earl Holloway. You can call this a combination career tribute and shared grief award. The award essentially says “our hearts were broken when we lost this good and glowing actor to cancer last August, and this is our way of saying we love him and wish he was still among us.”

I understand the sentiment and share the sadness, but I also think it’s fair to ask if Boseman would’ve won for his performance had he lived. When the late Peter Finch won the 1976 Best Actor Oscar for his Howard Beale performance in Network, there were no post-win surprises or tut-tuts — Finch had hit a grand slam and everyone knew it. Ditto Heath Ledger when he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his Joker performance in The Dark Knight. Plus the NYFCC is a highly eccentric awards-bestowing group. They’ve shown that to be the case many times over.

If it had been my call I would have suggested handing Boseman a sorrowful special career-tribute award, and then given the Best Supporting Actor trophy to, say, Bill Murray (On The Rocks) or one of the One Night in Miami guys (Leslie Odom or Aldis Hodge), or Trial of the Chicago 7‘s Mark Rylance or Sacha Baron Cohen. Or Nomadland‘s David Straitharn.

Given what it obviously is, Fisher Stevens and Justin Timberlake‘s Palmer (Apple, 1.29) has the right kind of attitude. Or so it seems. Timberlake (who hits 40 on 1.31.21) as a former high school football star who returns to his small podunk hometown after serving a 12-year sentence for…who knows? Moves in with mom (June Squibb) and forms an unlikely friendship with Sam (Ryder Allen), a young effeminate lad who lives next door. You can see where it’s going in a flash.

If I’d been in Times Square during last night’s snow storm, the idea of peddling around on a bicycle would’ve never crossed my mind. I would’ve just tramped around in my snow boots, scarf, silken long johns, three T-shirts, sweater, gloves and thermal hoodie. I hate what Times Square has become, but what a thing to miss out on. What a moment.

Times Square during great blizzard of December 1947.

ditto

Read more

Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

Here’s HE’s latest Best Picture chart. I’m honestly split 50/50 on the merits of Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland and David Fincher‘s Mank, and so they’re tied for second place. (At least for the time being.) They’re both excellent films, and in a Mangrove-free world either could easily occupy the #1 slot. But Steve McQueen’s film happened, and there’s no question it’s 2020’s finest.

Curious as it may seem to some, I regard Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse (i.e., An Officer and a Spy) as a 2020 feature, even though it never opened (and probably never will open) stateside.

It had its world premiere at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, and began to illegally stream earlier this year. In my book that makes it a necessary 2020 release, as there was no other way to see it. The Polanski stamp demanded the attention of film mavens the world over. Even if J’Accuse was streaming right now on Amazon, Netflix or HBO Max, would most critics ignore it all the same? Probably. The applicable terms are “fear” and “cowardice.” Or, if you will, “playing it safe.”

I have nothing but disgust and condemnation for any sexual abuser in any realm, but in this instance it’s also unconscionable, I feel, to not separate Polanski the artist from Polanski the flawed individual. Brilliant filmmaking is brilliant filmmaking, and it’s completely derelict for critics to ignore this film, as almost all of them have over the last year or so.

I had to give J’Accuse the third place slot — it’s too mesmerizing, too exacting and too searing to be designated any other way.

The Mangrove irony, of course, is that Amazon has decided not to go for Oscars but Emmys, which I regard, due respect, as a mistake. If I’d been in Amazon’s shoes I would have submitted the other four Small Axe films — Lovers Rock, Education, Alex Wheatle and Red, White and Blue — for Emmy consideration while declaring Mangrove to be a theatrical, Oscar-qualifying, stand-alone feature.

There’s no theatrical realm to speak of these days so any half-decent streamer can (and in Mangrove‘s case, definitely should) be regarded as a Best Picture contender. If any 2020 film deserves to be so regarded, it’s Mangrove.

If not for the pandemic Mangrove would have premiered in Cannes last May, perhaps played a couple of early fall festivals besides NYFF ’20, and gone on to a semblance of theatrical glory. It would’ve certainly emerged as a top-ten favorite on all the lists. Academy and guild voters would’ve had no choice but bestow a Best Picture nomination, as they did six years ago with McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave.

Read more

Please tell me how you feel after reading Peter Suderman‘s “This Blockbuster Is Coming to a Living Room Near You,” a 12.11 opinion piece in the N.Y. Times.

If you’re at all human and north of 40, Suderman’s article will almost certainly usher in the gloom. It might even provoke stomach acid or the dry heaves. I’ve calmed down since I read it, but somewhere in the middle I was dreaming, absurdly, about running into Suderman and going all Jimmy Cagney on his ass.

There’s nothing in Suderman’s piece that’s especially new. The pandemic has all but killed theatrical, and post-vaccine there’ll be no putting the toothpaste back into the tube. Yes, theatrical has been slowly dying for years. Right now it seems as if middle-class, middle-budgeted, intended for theatrical films like Spotlight, Moneyball, Birdman, 12 Years A Slave, Call Me By Your Name, Drive, The Social Network, The Lighthouse, Zero Dark Thirty and Manchester By The Sea are becoming (or have become) all but extinct. A decade hence movie theatres will soon be regarded in the same light as Broadway theatre. Only elites will return to cinemas after the all-clear sign is given…what, nine months hence?

Before this year the only way to really savor big-screen films properly was at film festivals, at least in my view. That, at least, was something to hold onto. Right now the only safe way to go is with my 65-inch Sony 4K HDR. Then again I love being able to stream just about anything in HD or 4K these days…in that sense we’re living in a golden age. But man, I hated Silberman’s essay all the same. Or more precisely, I hated the subhead — “The next generation of event viewing is likely to look more like Game of Thrones and less like Tenet.” My pulse was racing. I was seething.

Bottom line: Suderman’s all-couches, all-streaming scenario reads like a reasonably candid assessment of what’s happened to Hollywood and exhibition over the last 10 or 11 months, and where we’re all probably headed. He’s not “wrong” but tone of the piece certainly flirts with my idea of smarmy and smug. All I could think about was Chryssie Hynde singing “My City Was Gone.”

Suderman excerpt: “The move by Warner Bros. means that even if anxiety about Covid-19 diminishes, some of the biggest movies of 2021 will no longer be exclusive theatrical engagements. Some viewers who might have ventured out to a multiplex will undoubtedly choose to stay home. And that, in turn, is another reason for those of us who love seeing movies in theaters to worry that when the pandemic ends, the theatrical experience of yesteryear will be gone.

“Theaters won’t disappear completely, but they are more likely to become rare first-class events rather than everyday experiences for the masses. To some extent, this was already happening, with comfier seating and more upscale concessions, and ticket prices rising in tandem. In the aftermath of the pandemic, moviegoing, once a Saturday-afternoon time waster and the go-to option for an inexpensive date, could become a comparatively rarefied luxury.

Peter Suderman’s reply was tweeted less than five minutes after this piece was posted.

Read more

Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman reported yesterday that Frank Marshall‘s BeeGee’s doc, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? (HBO, 12.12), “omits” the big-screen debacle that was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the 1978 musical fantasy that was produced by Robert Stigwood, directed by Michael Schultz and starred the Brothers Gibb.

Ignoring this tragedy in the BeeGees career is like omitting the Bay of Pigs episode in a doc about JFK’s presidency.

On the day it opened (7.21.78), the L.A. Herald Examiner ran a top-of-the-page headline that read “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bomb.” Universal marketing executives hit the roof and, if I remember correctly, cancelled advertising with the paper for revenge.

I was at the all-media screening at the old Rivoli theatre (B’way at 49th). As costar Peter Frampton began to sing “The Long and Winding Road,” a guy in the first or second row yelled “Ecchh!…ecchh!” The film all but ruined Stigwood’s reputation and that of the Bee Gees, who starred along with Peter Frampton, Steve Martin, George Burns, et. al.

It’s dishonest and unprofessional to wave this episode away. Very few films have bombed as badly. You can’t “omit” this.

Read more

HE-posted a few weeks ago: “First and foremost Mank has been made by and for film monks — smartypants types, devotional cineastes, those with a general sense of X-factor sophistication, guys like Bob Strauss, etc. That probably leaves out a certain portion of the community who will bestow earnest praise for its technical accomplishments. We all know what that means.”

While Mank currently has a respectable 88% Rotten Tomatoes rating, it has a slightly more concerning 79% rating on Metacritic. A reasonably decent aggregate between them, agreed, but then I read Ann Hornaday’s 11.18 Washington Post review, a half-and-halfer, and I realized that my respectful and admiring assessment of David Fincher’s film wasn’t as widely shared as I thought.

And then Mank began streaming on 12.4, and views of certain industry folk began to surface on Twitter and Facebook. This morning two Facebook threads this morning — one launched by Paul Schrader, another by Dale Launer — gave me pause.

Schrader complained that Mank “fails the first obligation of telling the story of a flawed protagonist — to convince the viewer that this character merits two hours of their time.” I replied that I initially felt this way, largely because Gary Oldman’s Herman Mankiewicz (20 years too old to be playing a 40something) to be mostly about being soused.

“But then, curiously, I began to like him more and more. Sappy as it may sound, he quipped and charmed his way into my heart.” And then Tesla executive Landon Johnson asked “how many times did you watch it before it charmed you?” And I replied “once” but at that very moment I knew Mank was in trouble with working industry types and related know-it-alls.

Mank will still be Best Picture-nominated, I suspect; ditto Fincher for directing and Eric Messerschmidt‘s black-and-white cinematography. But to go by almost everyone Amanda Seyfried‘s performance as Marion Davies is easily the most admired element — she’s the only real slam-dunk.

Consider Launer’s Facebook critique, which frankly made me go “hmmm.” A longtime seasoned screenwriter and a man of candid description and admission, he riffed on Mank in real time, and didn’t cut it much slack.

“I was going to have a nice evening by ordering in and watching Mank, which from the trailer looked stunning,” Launer begins. “But from the trailer, I wasn’t sure if it was a good movie or not. It is not.

“Annoying, pretentious dialogue dominates the movie. The writing has the feel of someone who went to an Ivy league school and want to show it off in their writing. Hence dialogue that sounds very ‘drawing room’ (or so it attempts) and is reaching for a sophisticated feel. This gives it a slightly ‘old timey’ feel — but not in a good way. A lot of ‘clever’ talk, but in statements rather than actual dialogue…witticisms but nothing that approaches reality. Superficially classy, but without elegance. Amateurish, like when a studio hires someone with a refined background and assumes they can write a compelling story. First with ‘exposition’ like someone saying ‘You remember when…’ instead of just showing us. I’d rather SEE the flashback.

“Then there’s a scene where there’s a writers room filled with east coast playwrights and journalists and they’re introduced as though the audience will be impressed. Best to impress us with their actions rather than their introduction. This is going to be a slog but to be fair, I’m only 28 minutes in and had to take a short break so my annoyance doesn’t turn out out and out anxiety. The first act is about to end (I think) and there should be a direction that takes off in an interesting way.

“The look, however is sensational. Shot on a digital black-and-white camera — production design, cinematography and the direction — all top notch.

Read more

12.8.20 will be the 40th anniversary of John Lennon‘s murder. I’ve written about this four or five times, but how can I ignore the 40th? How can I not go there?

I was in London, waking up on a couch in Stockwell, when I heard the news. I was there to do a Gentleman’s Quarterly interview with Peter O’Toole, whose career-reviving performance in The Stunt Man was one of the hot topics of filmdom. (I wound up doing it a couple of days later in the basement of “Shady Old Lady”, O’Toole’s Hampstead home at 98 Heath Street.)

So I was crashing with a couple of ladies I knew through a journalist friend, and the first thing I heard in the early morning light (maybe 6 or 6:30 am) was “Jeff, wake up…you need to hear this.” And then the radio came on.

Being in London that morning made me feel vaguely closer to the Lennon legacy. Somewhat. Even though Lennon had been a U.S. resident for eight-plus years. I felt gutslammed like everyone else, but I didn’t choke up for another few hours. That evening in fact. After a couple of pints. Alcohol does that.

My stoic younger brother wept, according to my mother. He visited my parents’ home (45 Seir Hill Road, Wilton, CT) the following day to talk it over, and it all leaked out. The poor guy didn’t wind up living what anyone would call a driven or a bountiful or even a somewhat happy life. He passed from an accidental Oxycontin and alcohol overdose in October 2009.

If I’d been in the States I doubt I would’ve heard the news from Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football. I’ve never watched football games, ever, for any reason. And I never will.

Many rock stars had died of drugs and fast living in the ’70s (Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin), but Lennon’s murder was the first big twentysomething and thirtysomething boomer tragedy — an event that throttled the big media world, and which made everyone who’d ever learned Beatle harmonies feel suddenly slugged in the heart, not in a sharply painful romantic breakup way but in a slightly older person’s (certainly not a younger person’s) way…a terrible weight of the world thing…an awful sense of vulnerability and the jabbings of a harsh and cruel world.

In the obsessively warped mind of Mark David Chapman, Lennon was killed for having betrayed his destiny as a kind of spiritual leader and torch-bearer, which he arguably was from ’64 through ’70 (the end of the dream coming with the release of Plastic Ono Band).

He was therefore assassinated, in Chapman’s mind, for the crime of having withdrawn from the hubbub and become a retiring house husband in the Dakota…just another pampered rich guy whom Holden Caulfield would have strongly disapproved.

YouTube guy: “I was watching that night. Never in a million years would I have imagined that John Lennon would be murdered, and that I would learn of his death from Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football. Like millions of fans, I burst into tears. I felt like I’d personally been robbed of most of my childhood. Of course I grieved for his family, but I was a member of John Lennon’s larger family, which was the whole world.”

Read more

Condolences to family, friends, fans and colleagues of Pamela Tiffin, whose death at age 78 was revealed last night. She actually passed on 12.2, and in a New York City hospital…coronavirus?

Only boomers and Baby Busters (i.e., those born in the ’30s) remember Tiffin because her U.S. acting career was only hot between ’61 and ’66, and she only made two good films at that — Billy Wilder‘s One Two Three (’61, in which she played the hot-blooded Scarlett Hazeltine, a strong supporting role) and Jack Smight‘s Harper (’66), in which Tiffin played a pouty sex kitten opposite Paul Newman.

She acted in three other films of note. The earliest was an underwhelming Tennessee Williams drama called Summer and Smoke. Tiffin had a nothing role. Directed by Peter Glenville, the underwhelming 1961 film featured Laurence Harvey, Geraldine Page, Rita Moreno, Una Merkel and John McIntire. She also costarred in The Hallelujah Trail (’65) with Burt Lancaster, and opposite Peter Ustinov in Viva Max (’69).

I’ll always feel a special affection for Tiffin’s spirited performance in the Wilder film, because that fast-paced, rat-a-tat farce was the only first-class, triple-A rated film she ever made.

She made a few surface-fizzle teen flicks between ’62 and ’66, and then moved to Italy where she made almost nothing but crap-level giallo films.

Tiffin was married to legendary journalist-editor Clay Felker (!) from ’62 to ’69, and then an Italian guy, Edmondo Danon, with whom they had two daughters, Echo and Aurora.

For the good of enlightened 21st Century culture and the emotional safety of a certain subsection of Millennials and Zoomers, it is proposed that two lines of dialogue in Woody Allen‘s Everything You’ve Always Wanted To Know About Sex (specifically the “What Happens During Ejaculation?” sequence) be removed.

Both can be found in the top video. At 2:48 a sperm cell played by Allen asks “what if this is a homosexual experience?” This has to go along with the look on Allen’s face. At 3:59 an African-American sperm cell asks, “What am I doing here?” — obviously toxic racism and completely unacceptable.

Read more