Pretty much any list of 2021's finest documentaries would include Morgan Neville's Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, John Hoffman and Janet Tobias' Fauci, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering's Allen vs. Farrow, Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground, Andre Gaines' The One and Only Dick Gregory, Mariem Pérez Riera's Rita Moreno: Just A Girl Who Decided to Go For It and, of course, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's Summer of Soul.
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King Richard has an 89% Rotten Tomatoes score but a 71 Metacritic score?? Any critic who dismisses or puts this film down, trust me, is basically saying “I’m a pisshead with my head up my ass.”
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy: “In September, I spitballed the Best Picture race that was starting to take shape post-Venice and Telluride. My conclusion was that Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast was the current de facto frontrunner. Five weeks later, I’m starting to doubt that assessment.
“Having seen Marcus Reinaldo Green’s King Richard, I can safely say it is the better and more effective crowd pleaser. It has the goods to go all the way. Rags-to-riches tale? Check. True story? Check. Inclusivity? Check. High-entertainment? Check.
“The film itself could get up to 4 acting nods, it’ll also be triumphant at SAG. Maybe the directors branch will be a little tougher on it since this isn’t really an auteur film, but it’s my current Best Picture winner. The film has already won five audience awards at film festivals. Astounding.”
#KingRichard is a knockout. One of the strongest and most soul-stirring sports dramas in years, with a brilliant balance of heart and humor. Will Smith is the best he’s ever been, Aunjanue Ellis is equally as electrifying, and Jon Bernthal is just a *blast*. Absolutely adored it. pic.twitter.com/B0tfg6kCHE
— Zach Gilbert (@zachbgilbert) November 5, 2021
You have to know how to read Scott Feinberg‘s regularly updated Hollywood Reporter articles about Oscar spitball guesses. Yes, they reflect his “best attempt to predict the behavior of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and not his personal preferences,” but they also reflect a mid-fall decision that many handicappers make — i.e., it’s easer to insincerely approve of certain mediocre contenders because it’s early yet (not even Halloween!) and why not shrug our shoulders and go with the flow?
Feinberg’s Best Picture Frontrunners:
King Richard (Warner Bros., 11/19, trailer) / HE says: Almost certainly fated to win the Oscar.
Belfast (Focus, 11/12, trailer)
The Power of the Dog (Netflix. 11/17, trailer) / HE says: Will be nominated but that’s all.
A Hero (Amazon) / Excellent film, but belongs in Best Int’l Feature category.
C’mon, C’mon (A24, 11/19, trailer) / HE says “tech categories, otherwise not a chance.”
The Hand of God (Netflix, 12/3, trailer) /
CODA (Apple, 8/13, trailer) / Crowd-pleasing, sitcom-level, calm down.
The Harder They Fall (Netflix, 11/3, trailer) / Why?
Summer of Soul (Searchlight, 7/2, trailer) / a found footage documentary, doesn’t count.
In The Realm of Feinberg-Speak, “Possibilities” means “unlikely but who knows?”
Flee (Neon/Participant, TBD, trailer) / NC
Titane (Neon, TBD, trailer) /
Parallel Mothers (Sony Classics, 12/24, trailer) / HE says “utterly brilliant Pedro, his best in years!”
The Lost Daughter (Netflix, 12/31, TBD)
Spencer (Neon/Topic, 11/5, trailer)
In The Realm of Feinberg-Speak, “Longer Shots” means “dead in the water”
The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24/Apple, 12/25, trailer)
Cyrano (MGM/UA, 12/31, TBD)….wrong! Beautifully made, wonderfully acted by Peter Dinklage!
Tick, Tick…Boom! (Netflix, TBD, trailer)
Red Rocket (A24, 12/3, trailer)…grim silence after it played in Telluride’s Galaxy theatre.
The Green Knight (A24, 5/29, trailer)…one of HE’s worst endurance tests of the year….even worse than Dune in this respect.
We all understand that Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel (20th Century, 10.15) is a medieval #MeToo yarn about conflicting recollections of a brutal rape.
Two depictions are shown, one from the perspective of the victim, Jodie Comer‘s Marguerite de Carrouges, and a second from the perspective of the rogue perpetrator, Adam Driver‘s Jacques Le Gris. A third perspective from Marguerite’s husband, Matt Damon‘s Jean de Carrouges, is recited but not visualized.
A pair of 20th Century films offered likely inspiration with similar tales of violation. First and foremost was Akira Kurosawa‘s Rashomon (’50), which focused on four differing versions of the rape of a wife and the murder of her samurai husband. Decidedly inferior was Martin Ritt‘s The Outrage (’64), a Rashomon remake that costarred Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson and William Shatner.
Nobody wants to think about The Outrage now because (a) it has a mediocre reputation (I haven’t seen it in decades, and even that viewing was one too many), (b) it briefly tarnished Rashomon and (c) Newman played a heavily made-up Mexican with a broad Pancho Villa accent…a racist felony that probably requires posthumous cancellation for Ritt and Newman both and a permanent ghost status from the Academy Museum.
Still these films were forerunners of The Last Duel and perhaps warrant a looksee, etc.
There’s a decent-looking Rashomon Bluray from Criterion; The Outrage is only available as a 480p Amazon streamer.
The Stalinist prison guard living inside Dear White People showrunner and writer Jaclyn Moore has emerged. For she’s attempting to persuade Netflix to zotz Dave Chappelle‘s The Closer because his remarks about trans people, she feels, are prejudicial and uncool.
Last night Moore stated on Twitter and Instagram that she’ll no longer work with Netflix after watching The Closer. “After the Chappelle special, I can’t do this anymore,” Moore wrote. “I won’t work for Netflix again as long as they keep promoting and profiting from dangerous transphobic content.”
If I was a Netflix honcho, I would reply to Moore as follows: “I hear you. You’re not altogether wrong. Chappelle’s views on trans women certainly don’t mirror our own, and we hope you and your community understand that. This aside, we deplore Stalinist censorship and don’t approve of efforts by anyone to muzzle anyone, least of all a brilliant comic whose entire career has been about considering the view of persons like yourself and occasionally saying ‘nope, not me, sorry.'”
HE to Moore: Anyone who partially describes Chappelle as a “goofy” comic doesn’t really hear him or get where he’s coming from, no offense. He’s not goofy or wacky, and he doesn’t live in a doo-wacky, doo-wacky, wah-wah world.
Chappelle: “In our country, you can shoot and kill a n***a, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.”
From Owen Gleiberman‘s 9.26 Variety piece about Dune‘s day-and-date, theatrical-plus-HBO Max opening on 10.22:
“3. It’s going to play a lot less well on television. Growing up, I once watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on a 16-inch black-and-white TV set, and it actually worked. That’s how great a movie it is. Dune is a lot less great. I would argue that it’s a reasonably commanding sci-fi parable that begins to run out of gas in its last hour. That’s because Frank Herbert, in the Dune books, may have been a better world-builder than he was a storyteller.
“The world of Dune, like the world of Lawrence of Arabia or the original Blade Runner, needs to overwhelm and envelop you. But if you watch it at home, the film’s narrative — is Paul Atreides the Messiah? Watch the House Atreides go down to defeat, and look out for that sandworm! — is going to stand revealed as the rather patchy affair it is. When you shrink the grandeur of Dune, you shrink its appeal.
HE comment: I appreciate big-screen grandeur as much as the next guy, but given the high likelihood that the content of Dune (story, dialogue, pacing) is going to make me miserable and moaning and writhing in my seat, it might be a more interesting thing to watch it on a 16-inch black and white TV. Okay, I’m kidding. 16-inch black and white TVs no longer exist.
In 2012 I saw the digitally restored Lawrence of Arabia projected at the Salle du Soixentieme in Cannes, and it looked beautiful. Four or five years ago I saw a 70mm Lawrence on a moderately large screen at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre, and it didn’t look all that great — half the time I was thinking how much better my digitally streamed 4K Lawrence (issued around ’16 or thereabouts) seemed. After I watched Sony’s 4K UHD Bluray version in June ’20, I called it “the most exciting and orgasmic home video experience of my life — a mind-blowing eye bath.”
What am I saying? That 70mm isn’t what it used to be, that a big-movie presentation has to be a first-class, technically flawless thing or nothing, that watching a film without Millennial mongrels eating pizza and cheese nachos nearby can be a blessed thing, and that seeing a big movie like Dune on a 65-inch 4K HDR screen isn’t necessarily a tragedy.
Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Here’s one useful definition of a great sci-fi fantasy film. It’s one in which the world-building is awesome but not more essential than the storytelling. In the first two Star Wars films, those dynamics were in perfect sync; they were, as well, in The Dark Knight and the Mad Max films. Blade Runner, in its way, is an amazing movie, but its world-building packs more punch than its transcendental neo-noir noodlings.
“Viewed in that light, Dune is a movie that earns five stars for world-building and about two-and-a-half for storytelling. If you stack it up next to David Lynch’s disastrously confounding 1984 adaptation of Dune, it can look like a masterpiece. (Most of the story now makes sense.) And for an hour or so, the movie is rather mesmerizing.”
Is “rather” mesmerizing the same as “somewhat” mesmerizing? I wonder. So for 60 or 70 minutes, Owen is saying, Dune is sorta kinda transporting, but not so much the remaining 85 to 90 minutes. Unless, one imagines or speculates, the viewer in question happens to be fucking RIPPED.
Gleiberman: “It’s not just that the story loses its pulse. It loses any sense that we’re emotionally invested in it. As the movie begins to run out of tricks, it turns woozy and amorphous. Will Part II really be coming? It will if Part I is successful enough, and that isn’t foregone. It’s hard to build a cliffhanger on shifting sands.”
HE to Gleiberman: How can you assess Dune without speculating on how it plays if the viewer is STONED out of his/her gourd? Do you personally get high? I suspect not so just this one time, shouldn’t Variety hire Seth Rogen or some ex-High Times contributor to write his/her own kind of review? Might it be a different entree if viewers were to consume a potent edible 20 minutes before showtime?
Denis Villneueve: “But I would not feel so all alone…”
The 51st Academy Awards telecast, which celebrated the finest film achievements of 1978, happened on 2.20.79.
HE personal picks are as follows: Best Picture — tie between Coming Home and Days of Heaven. (Runners–up: Heaven Can Wait, The Deer Hunter, Midnight Express, An Unmarried Woman, Interiors.)
Best Director — tie between Hal Ashby, Coming Home, and Terrence Malick, Days of Heaven. (Runners–up: Warren Beatty and Buck Henry, Heaven Can Wait; Michael Cimino, The Deer Hunter, Woody Allen, Interiors, Alan Parker, Midnight Express).
Best Actor: Jon Voight, Coming Home. Best Actress: Jane Fonda, Coming Home. Best Supporting Actor: Jack Warden, Heaven Can Wait. Best Supporting Actress: Maureen Stapleton, Interiors.
Best Original Score: Ennio Morricone, Days of Heaven.
Posted on 10.6.17: “Blade Runner 2049 lasts an eternity — I checked my watch at least five or six times, and my muttered mantra all through it was ‘I don’t give a shit about any of this, I don’t give a shit about any of this, I don’t give a shit about any of this’ — but it’s certainly a major vision thing. Pay your $16 dollars and sink into a thoroughly gloomy realm of super-holograms (including ones of Frank Sinatra and Vegas-era Elvis Presley), rot, ruin and industrial scrap, a toxic shithole populated with grim-faced characters you would just as soon squash as look at, a world of hair-grease and sprayed sweat and impassive, cold-death expressions, and all of it blanketed with rain, snow, sludge and chemical mud-glop.
“And oh, yeah, for a story that you won’t give two shits about. A dingleberry doodle plot involving memory implants and obscured lineage and a secret no one must know (no one! just ask Jared Leto!) and a little wooden horse with a date (6.10.21) carved into the base, and some shit-hooey about original replicant creator Eldon Tyrell having given Rachael, the experimental replicant played by Sean Young in the ’82 original, the organic potential to reproduce and blah blah. And a narrative pace that will slow your own pulse and make your eyelids flutter and descend, and a growing need to escape into the outer lobby so you can order a hot dog and check your messages.
“BR49 should have run two hours, not two hours and 44 minutes.
“Do yourself a favor…seriously. Before seeing it this weekend, read the Wikipedia synopsis. Doing so will remove the irritating, hard-to-follow story tease and allow you to just concentrate on the visuals, which is all this thing is about anyway. It doesn’t matter anyway — nothing does, it’s all shit and distraction, you’re all just contributing to the Warner Bros. bottom line, to Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford‘s wealth while you subtract from your own. We’re all punks, fools, suckers, knaves. Warner Bros. pours a little whiskey onto the plastic floor, and like Ford’s Blade Runner wolf dog we lick it right up.
“Fuck the story, fuck the lineage factor, fuck it all. Just sink into the chilly murderous vibe and Gosling’s impassive, glazed-over robot eyes, and Ford’s subtle emotional delivery (has he ever cried before on-screen?). Nobody cares and it doesn’t fucking matter if RG or Ford or Kevin Tsujihara are replicants. I’m a replicant with the capability of siring children and writing a daily column. What difference does it make if I’m an android or not, or if I dream of electric sheep? Nobody cares, nothing matters, it’s all bullshit.
“What of the virtual-reality prostitute, the homicidal super-bitch and the brittle, tough-cookie supervisor played by Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks and Robin Wright? Smart women will not be pleased. (After the show a friend was listening to a whipsmart feminist deploring these characters and the phony, piss-poor writing.) For these are cardboard, non-dimensional figures (women acting like men or fulfilling men’s fantasies) who would never be hatched by a woman screenwriter. Grow some soul and awareness, Hampton Fancher and Michael Green.
“How important is Gosling’s little wooden horse, and how does it feed into everything else? I’m still scratching my head about that, but I’m sure someone will explain it later today. Is Gosling’s “Joe” the replicant son of you-know-who? I didn’t give a shit. Is there any kind of emotionally satisfying undercurrent in any of this? Fuck no.
“There’s one moment — one! — that made me sit up in my seat and say to myself ‘wait, hold on, this is semi-poignant.’ But the spoiler whiners will kill me if I get specific. It involves Ford and a younger woman — I’ll leave it at that.
“I knew this wouldn’t be a glorious, all-around triumph. I knew it would be brilliant but problematic. I knew not to trust those rave reviews written by balding, bespectacled, heavyset dweebs. If they’d written ‘it’s a bear to sit through and it makes you feel like shit, but it’s a masterpiece,’ okay, but too many of them just wrote “it’s a masterpiece!’ This is why people don’t trust critics. They live in their own world.
Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, who only spitballs about the Oscar potential of films she’s seen and who, like many others, takes great delight in getting early peeks at expensive, highly anticipated films, has put Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune (Warner Bros., 10.22) into her top slot on Gold Derby’s Best Picture prediction list.
That’s it, I said to myself. I have no more faith in Dune than I did in Blade Runner 2049 before seeing it (less actually), and I’ve never cared for the idea of investing in dense, multi-part sagas taking place in distant exotic realms and requiring enormous reading investments, and so it is now the solemn duty of all good souls and concerned cinefiles who stand with HE to say to Anne Thompson “what you like or what you think will be Best Picture nominated means nothing to us because we don’t trust you…we may become Dune fans down the road but for the time being we’re going to search for ways to diminish Dune just to spite your enthusiasm for it.”
Thompson was invited to see it the other day at the Steve Ross theatre on the Warner Bros. lot, you see, and there was wine and cheese and whatnot served in the lobby, and it was all very lah-dee-dah.
A friend who attended the same screening says Greig Fraser‘s cinematography is quite mesmerizing and that you can coast along on that aspect to your heart’s content. But there was absolutely no following the story for this person, not having read the original 1965 Frank Herbert novel or any of the sequels (Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune,Chapterhouse: Dune) and having no recollection of the disastrous 1984 David Lynch version, and that the plotting was too complex and that it seemed as if everyone was speaking some kind of foreign tongue, and that this sense of being lost and adrift had not, to put it mildly, coagulated into anything that amounted to the Right Best Picture Stuff…at least in this person’s opinion.
Let this be a moment in award-season history…a moment in which the little people in the bleachers rose up against the Anne Thompsons of the world, sitting in their pricey mezzanine seats along the first-base and third-base lines while sipping Chardonnay and munching fine cheese-and-cracker combos while the little people cope with their soggy popcorn and hot dogs and plastic cups of beer.
A couple of days ago Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling did a sit-down with Roadrunner director Morgan Neville. Here’s the whole interview, and below is a clip of the portion in which Neville addresses — calmly, openly, intelligently — the “deepfake” thing.
Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has addressed the pearl-clutching outrage over Morgan Neville‘s decision to “digitally deepfake” Anthony Bourdain‘s voice in three aural passages in Roadrunner, the just-released doc about the late foodie and CNN travelogue adventurer.
As I pointed out in a 7.15 post titled “Bourdain Deepfake Isn’t A Problem,” Neville’s alleged offense involved the audible creation of sentences (i.e., three) not actually spoken by Bourdain but written by him. Neville created an A.I. replication of Bourdain’s voice, assembled from vowel and consonant splices and fragments of legit Bourdain recordings. And so we hear Bourdain “reading” the passages even though he didn’t actually do that.
Gleiberman believes that Neville should have copped to the fakery somewhere in the film (probably in the closing credits), but otherwise isn’t that rattled. His basic point is that “when it comes to swapping in fake reality, documentaries have been sliding down a slippery slope for years,” especially in the area of reenactments.
“A reenactment and a voice fake actually do different versions of the same thing,” he points out. “Both cement a reality in your mind — the image of something or the sound of something — that didn’t happen, at least not in the way it’s presented.”
Gleiberman also notes that the deepfake Bourdain voice “probably gets closer to reality than most reenactments do,” and that documentaries in which an actor will read a subject’s words, sometimes simulating their tone of voice, “isn’t much of a leap from what Roadrunner does.”
Shorter Gleiberman: “Not much of a hoo-hah here, fellas!”
Best passage: “The manipulation of Bourdain’s voice in Roadrunner seems to open a Pandora’s Box. What happens when unethical filmmakers employ such techniques? But let’s not pretend that we’ve been purists about it. Documentaries have been inching away from unalloyed reality for a long time. And it’s we in the audience who enable it. We’re the ones who like our reality sweetened, heightened, finessed until it looks just like a movie.”
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