The prevailing assumption right now (and please correct if I’m missing something) is that the Best Actor Oscar is Joaquin Phoenix’s to lose. The Adam Driver talk, which will probably re-surge over the next few days with Marriage Story opening on 11.6, began during the Telluride Film Festival but has since leveled out. I realize that Uncut Gems is not a typical Academy-friendly film, but Adam Sandler‘s submission to his Diamond district gambling junkie character is breathtaking — one of the all-time great crazy goon performances with manic energy to burn. (I saw it again two or three nights ago, and was all the more impressed.) Robert De Niro‘s Irishman lead isn’t as much of a knockout as Al Pacino‘s Jimmy Hoffa, agreed, but he can’t be denied a Best Actor nom, especially for his ownage of the final 30 to 40 minutes. It was painful to take Pain and Glory‘s Antonio Banderas out of the fifth slot, but The Two Popes is a popular film with the 50-plus crowd, and the acting honors belong mostly to Jonathan Pryce.

The Joker stairs have become a tourist destination, starting around two or three weeks ago. They’re located at 1165 Shakespeare Avenue in the Bronx. The bottom of the concrete staircase, I mean. The peak is located at the juncture of Anderson Ave. and West 167th Street. Take the 4, B or D line north to 167th Street station. Six blocks north of Yankee Stadium. It’s actually called “Joker stairs” on Google maps.

The last time Hollywood Elsewhere visited a Bronx location via subway was…never. I drove down from Connecticut to a Yankee game with some friends in ’78 or ’79…something like that. If I was in the NYC area I’d probably take a pass.

I was initially turned on by Beto O’Rourke‘s attempt to win Ted Cruz‘s U.S. Senate seat — the youthful elan, the progressive firebrand thing, the humanist current, skateboarding in the parking lot, a tall Bobby Kennedy, etc. And then came the announcement of his Presidential candidacy and that Vanity Fair cover. He seemed destined to have a serious impact. A lot people were sensing this.

But I switched horses when Pete Buttigieg came along. Pete (who is now surging in Iowa polling) struck me as a much more formidable candidate. Suddenly Beto didn’t seem like that gangly rockstar from Texas riding a propulsive groundswell, etc.

Pete aside, the thing that fundamentally killed my Beto allegiance was that he apologized too much to the wokesters. “I’m sorry, so sorry, please forgive me” — too willing to grovel. I’m not suggesting that Beto’s spine is a bit soft, but a vague instinctual suspicion along these lines began to take hold, and I began to feel a certain distance. His compassionate open-border views on immigration were untempered, it seemed, by even a touch of realpolitik pragmatism. He just didn’t seem to have that steady, straight from the shoulder, “this is who I am, take it or leave it” quality. He expressed his beliefs with skill and feeling, but he seemed to be more of an emotional vibe guy than anything else.

And then Beto surged in the early August aftermath of the El Paso and Dayton shootings, and I admired his zeal about automatic-weaponas, and his sudden willingness to pepper his views with profanity while talking to reporters. For the first time he seemed to have thrown away caution; he seemed willing to die on a hill. I admired his declaration that he would, if elected, try to confiscate buy back automatic weapons. Suddenly he didn’t seem wussy. A fresh infusion of fibre.

But that faded after a few days, and Beto never took off. People in my corner liked Pete better — that was mainly it. That and money. Pete and Beto were selling the same generational turnover thing, more or less, but Pete seems more substantive.

I never figured Beto would withdraw before Corey Booker, Julian Castro or Andrew Yang. Who will drop out next? How long can Kamala Harris last?

It’s too bad Beto won’t be running again for the U.S. Senate seat that is currently held by Republican John Cornyn.

All great or extra-impact films say something that audiences recognize as truthful — things they’ve learned and accepted through their own travails, and which prompt a muttering of at least two things — (a) “Yup, that’s how it is, all right” and (b) “this movie knows what goes.”

The Social Network said that even cold-hearted geniuses have emotional needs and vulnerabilities. The Godfather, Part II said that close-knit families were drifting aport and falling into spiritual lethargy, especially given the fact that mafia karma is a bitch. High Noon says you can’t trust your fair-weather friends — only yourself. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold says that little people will always get squashed in the eternal battles between ruthless governments. Prince of The City says that you can’t purify your soul without ratting out your friends so live with your misdeeds. Shane says that being a gunslinger is a stain that can’t be erased. Sunset Boulevard says we all need to live in the present and that constantly looking back will kill you. North by Northwest says you can’t live a life of shallow, affluent diversion — that you have to man up and do the brave and noble thing. Raging Bull says that if you live like an animal, you’ll end up a lonely animal in a dressing room. Unforgiven says you can’t escape your basic nature, and that no one blows guys away like snarling Clint.

The Irishman says a lot of things, but the most profound takeaway is you can’t lie to your children or keep them at arm’s length. Well, you can but at your peril. Because old age, walking canes, Depends and death are just around the corner, and you might want a caring someone to talk to and hold your hand during the downswirl. Nobody gets out of life alive.

Consider the following capsule assessment of texasartfilm.net‘s Dustin Chase: “Two good performances and some technical wizardry doesn’t warrant [The Irishman‘s] excessive running time and crippled pacing. [For it] gives the audience very little to take with them or apply to their own lives.”

The natural, obvious, fall-on-the-floor response is “WHAT?” Followed by “what kind of a life has Dustin Chase lived?” God knows, but it hasn’t involved much in the way of mortal meditation. When I staggered out of that first Irishman press screening everyone was feeling gut-punched and gobsmacked by those last 30 to 40 minutes. An older actress friend had tears in her eyes.

And “two good performances”? Try 11 or 12, minimally — Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Stephen Graham, Marin Ireland and the wordless Anna Paquin are the stuff of instant relish and extra-level pulverizing. Not to mention Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Kathrine Narducci, Domenick Lombardozzi as “Fat Tony” Salerno, Sebastian Maniscalco as “Crazy Joe” Gallo, etc. Everyone in this film is perfect. The awareness that you’re watching actors giving performances goes right out the window almost immediately. You’re just there and so are they and vice versa.

“Excessive running time“? The Irishman feels like two, maybe two and a half hours, max.

“Crippled pacing”? Who is this guy?

If you ask me this Irishman scene is as choice and classically hilarious as Joe Pesci‘s “what…I’m a clown, I amuse you?” scene in Goodfellas. It’s about Al Pacino‘s Jimmy Hoffa debating Stephen Graham‘s Anthony Provenzano about business-meeting etiquette.

I’m with Pacino — you wear a suit or at least a sport jacket to a meeting (and not beach shorts and white loafers), and you can’t be late by more than ten minutes. Heavy traffic is an allowable excuse for a five or ten-minute delay, maybe, but not fifteen. Fifteen minutes late means “no offense but I didn’t care that much about being on time…anyway I’m here so whaddaya whaddaya?”

The Irishman‘s three-and-a-half week exhibition experience begins today. (Streaming will begin on Wednesday, 11.27.) New York and Los Angeles are well served, of course, and other major cities (Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle) have a booking or two. But major cities in many other regions do not. Some states have been totally blanked.

When Netflix bookers failed to cut deals with major exhibitors, they were honorably obliged to find indie exhibition playdates that would reach culturally attuned audiences in big cities. We’re talking about a blue-chip, critically-approved Martin Scorsese masterpiece here. What’s the point of showing a film of this calibre in Podunk burghs while at the same time blowing off audiences in big, wealthy, culturally aspiring hives?

Here’s a rundown of where The Irishman is playing nationwide. No bookings at all in at least 22 states — Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Hawaii, Vermont, Virginia, Rhode Island, Kansas, Kentucky, Iowa, South and North Carolina, South and North Dakota, Minnesota, Mississippi, Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, New Hampshire or Tennessee. (I may have missed a state or two.)

In the entire state of Texas The Irishman is playing in exactly one theatre in Dallas. Netflix couldn’t find a booking in the People’s Republic of Austin? The Alamo Drafthouse guys weren’t interested?

It’s playing in Georgia but only in the Atlanta suburb of Athens. They couldn’t find a booking at the SCAD Trustees theatre in Savannah?

In New Jersey Netflix avoided the affluent commuter suburbs (including the film-friendly city of Montclair) in favor of two nowhere hamlets, Skillman and Washington Township.

And Netflix blew off the entire east coast of Florida to book it in Bonita Springs, a Gulf of Mexico resort town.

A perfect Miami venue would have been the historic, independently owned Tower Theatre (1508 SW 8th St.). Right now Pedro Almodovar‘s Pain and Glory is playing there along with Pierre Salvadori‘s The Trouble With You. Local Scorsese fanatics have no choice but to drive across the state for two hours, rent a motel room in Bonita Springs, and then drive back the next day.

Are you telling me Netflix couldn’t find a single acceptable booking in the entire east coast strip of southern Florida? They couldn’t book it in Key West’s Tropic Cinema?

The evidence suggests that Netflix bookers simply didn’t give a damn about serving upmarket viewers. They adopted a scattershot dartboard approach and booked it whatever and however.

If they’d hired a seasoned indie exhibition veteran to oversee their bookings they could have hit the right cities and regions and reached out to the right audiences.

The vibrant, razor-sharp image quality of the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty has never been properly captured for home viewing — not really.

The 2006 DVD claimed to be a “new digital transfer from restored 65mm elements,” but I was told back then that it was actually harvested from 35mm elements that reflected (but didn’t actually constitute) the 65mm version. The 2011 Bluray looks fairly crisp and robust, but at the same time it looked to me as if the 2006 harvest was simply uprezzed to 1080p. The cost of harvesting from the original 70mm elements may have been too costly, or perhaps the elements had become so degraded that a restoration wasn’t worth the candle.

All to say that in a perfect world this flawed but interesting epic would probably look even better with a nice 4K re-do. For streaming, at least, if the cost of producing and marketing a new 4K disc isn’t feasible. Even in this death-of-physical-media age, I continue to hope for 4K versions of the major large-format films of the ’50s and ’60s. A 4K Ben-Hur, drawn from an 8k scan of the original 65mm camera negative, would be a must-own.

I’ve said two or three times that the lure isn’t Mutiny on the Bounty itself (although many portions are quite good) as much as how luscious it could look if given a proper blue-chip restoration. This mostly-good, partly-problematic sea epic was shot in Ultra Panavision 70.

I can’t even find the link to an August 2006 piece about the DVD version, but here’s a portion:

“Say what you will about the ’62 Bounty — historical inaccuracies and inventions, Marlon Brando‘s affected performance as Fletcher Christian, the foundering final act. The fact remains that this viscerally enjoyable, critically-dissed costumer is one of the the most handsome, lavishly-produced and beautifully scored films made during Hollywood’s fabled 70mm era, which lasted from the mid ’50s to late ’60s.

“Roger Donaldson‘s The Bounty (’84) is probably a better Bounty flick (certainly in terms of presenting the historical facts), but the ’62 version has more dash and swagger. It has a flamboyant ‘look at all the money we’re pissing away’ quality that’s half-overbaked and half-absorbing. It’s pushing a kind of toney, big-studio vulgarity that insists upon your attention.

“And the ’62 Bounty definitely has first-rate dialogue and editing, and three or four scenes that absolutely get the pulse going (leaving Portsmouth, rounding Cape Horn, the mutiny, the burning ship). And Bronislau Kaper‘s score delivers vigor and majesty. (A critic in ’62 wrote that his music “saws away intrusively at times,” but the intrusions are agreeable.)

“You could argue that this Bounty is only nominally about what happened in 1789 aboard a British cargo ship in the South Seas. It’s more about early ’60s Hollywood than anything written by Nordhoff & Hall.

“The ’62 Bounty is mainly a portrait of colliding egos and mentalities — a couple of big-dick producers (Aaron Rosenberg was one), several screenwriters, at least two directors (Lewis Milestone, Carol Reed) and one full-of-himself movie star (Marlon Brando) — trying to serve the Bounty tale in ’60, ’61 and ’62, and throwing all kinds of money and time and conflicting ideas at it, and half-failing and half-succeeding.

“Seen in this context, I think it’s a trip.”

In 2011 HE commenter “Manitoba” wrote that he found “a great account of the replacement of director Sir Carol Reed in Trevor Howard‘s authorized biography “A Gentleman And A Player” by Vivienne Knight.

“British members of the cast were so outraged by the firing of Reed that they demanded a meeting with MGM studio chief Sol C. Siegel. Led by Howard, they marched into his office. He rose to greet them. ‘Gentlemen, before you say anything, I want you to understand one thing,’ Siegel said. ‘The only expendable commodity in a great movie, is a good director.’

“The book claims that replacement Lewis Milestone soon realized the film was actually being made by a committee of three — Brando, producer Aaron Rosenberg and writer Charles Lederer, who was trying to catch up while ‘bedevilled by Brando’. Milestone realized that the wisest policy was to ‘let it ride.'”

Portions of the above are lifted from a post that appeared on 11.2.11.

Along with Eddie Murphy‘s Rudy Ray Moore and Ruth E. Carter‘s costumes, Da’Vine Joy Randolph‘s supporting performance in Dolemite Is My Name is a stand-out. Last weekend I became one of the last journos to finally see Dolemite. Since then there’s been no ignoring that Randolph’s “Lady Reed” is the emotional center — the poignant performance that stays with you. And so I decided to put her on my Best Supporting Actress list. And in so doing I discovered that Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Blackfilm’s Wilson Morales, Gold Derby honcho Tom O’Neil and Variety‘s Tim Gray feel the same way.

There also doesn’t seen to be much doubt that Marriage Story‘s Laura Dern is the leading Best Supporting Actress contender at this stage, and that Hustler‘s Jennifer Lopez is in the first runner-up position.

Representative Katie Hill should not have been pressured to resign over a consensual extramarital relationship with her campaign finance manager. It’s nobody’s business, and has no bearing on anything. Hill was torpedoed by ugly rightwing cyber-goons, and also, apparently, by her estranged husband Kenny Heslep, whom she’s described as “abusive.”

More and more embarassing photos would have been leaked, Hill said earlier today, and she simply had to end it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Hill made “some errors in judgment that made her continued service as s member untenable.” But only because of the determination of rightwing uglies to further humiliate her.

What’s happened to Hill is sickening. Yes, she indulged in intemperate and reckless behavior to some extent, but she did nothing “wrong”. It was just recreational whatever. Who cares?

In a farewell speech before Congress that was delivered earlier today, Hill said the there was a “double standard” and “misogynistic culture” that resulted in her decision. “I’m leaving,” she stated, “but we have men who have been credibly accused of intentional acts of sexual violence and remain in boardrooms, on the Supreme Court, in this very body and, worst of all, in the Oval Office.”

In response to a question about what The Irishman might’ve been if he and Robert DeNiro had switched roles, Al Pacino ignored the hypothetical in favor of a half-century-old recollection from an Actor’s Studio acting class, Lee Strasberg in attendance, sometime around ’68 or ’69. (I think.) Captured by Netflix guys during last weekend’s Irishman press conference at the Four Seasons, which I attended. A great story, passed along with typically exuberant Pacino panache. It starts around the 11-minute mark. (Thanks to Netflix for providing the video.)

A few days ago the Broadcast Film Critics Association announced its Best Documentary nominations. The awards will be presented on Sunday, 11.10, at BRIC in Brooklyn, per longstanding tradition.

The org’s top nominees are The Biggest Little Farm, Apollo 11 (an HE fave) and Peter Jackson‘s They Shall Not Grow Old (ditto). I’m a loyal and respectful BFCA member, but ignoring A.J. Eaton and Cameron Crowe‘s David Crosby: Remember My Name is, no offense, deranged. The film is mystical, mythical, uplifting and brazenly honest — it restoreth your soul. And it doesn’t matter if Crosby didn’t get along with Scott Feinberg two or three months ago. Please…a non-issue.

HE’s list of the finest and most award-deserving 2019 documentaries, 14 in all and in this order:

(1) David Crosby Remember My Name, (2) Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Review (except for the fantasy fake-out interviews), (3) Madds Bruger‘s Cold Case Hammarskjold, (4) Asif Kapadia’s Diego Maradona, (5) Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, (6) Untouchable, (7) Mike Wallace Is Here, (8) Alexandre O. Philippe‘s Memory: The Origins of Alien, (9) Apollo 11, (10) Dan Reed‘s Leaving Neverland, (11) Peter Jackson‘s They Shall Not Grow Old, (12) Matt Tyrnauer‘s Where’s My Roy Cohn?, (13) Ken Burns‘ Country Music and (14) The Edge of Democracy.

On Saturday, 11.2 Once Upon A Time in America‘s Quentin Tarantino, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt will drop by the New Beverly Cinema for a post-screening q & a. DGA members were notified of this a while back, and also informed of numerous opportunities to re-see OUATIH. The appearance will be streamed to certain select venues but not to the general public. A version of the discussion will probably show up on YouTube sooner or later.