Posted on 5.11.13: I had an issue today with the wonderful people at Superfit, a health club in Berlin Charlottenberg (Wilmersdorferstrasse 54). I wanted to just hit the treadmill and use some of the machinery, but I didn’t think to bring sweats or shorts with me to Europe. So I tried to skirt the fashion norm by paying my 10 euro-per-day fee and using the facilities with my Nike workout shoes and jeans. Yes, I know, of course — jeans don’t pass muster in a workout club. It’s not cool and I get that. They’re totally right. But I was looking for a little leniency.

Call me a cheapskate but I just couldn’t see shelling out 20 or 25 euros for a pair of bathing suit trunks or gray sweatpants so I could pay 10 euros to do two miles on a treadmill for one time. I was being a pain and a bit obstinate, okay, but was it really that crazy to ask for a little slack? As a one-time deal?

Last night I attended a Green Book screening + after-party on Mt. Olympus Drive. Director-cowriter Peter Farrelly was there; ditto costars Linda Cardellini and Joe Cortese. A pleasant time was had by all.

I was talking to Film Threat‘s Chris Gore about the prevailing climate of woke political terror, which we both despise, and about my being denied a press pass for Sundance ’19 for insufficient woke-itude. In a flash of inspiration Chris told me I needed to create my own Sundance pass with “rejected” stamped across it.

I went right home and sent snaps of my 2016 Sundance press express pass to HE’s own Mark Frenden, the Chicago-based designer who created that HE-stamped American Friend poster I love so much. This morning he sent me my new pass, which I think is dead perfect. This weekend I’ll print it out at Kinko’s. I intend to wear this pass around my neck during my whole forthcoming Park City visit (1.22 to 1.31).

As Wednesday’s attempted torpedo takedown of Green Book made clear, all Oscar contenders need to delete anything and everything from their Twitter accounts in order to fully protect themselves. Because their enemies will search through their twitter histories for anything negative they can find find. Who knows which other films or contenders will be next?

Only one thing seems more or less assured, and that’s the fact that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma is totally bulletproof in this regard. Apart from the fact of its own cinematic excellence, Roma is adored by the wokesters. Twitter banshees have never taken shots at it, and they never will. Because they don’t want to. Because Roma has no indictable qualities.

Roma has all the heat, all the momentum right now. It didn’t suffer an embarassing Golden Globes loss a la A Star Is Born, but in fact triumphed. It will probably rule during Sunday’s Critics Choice awards. It will win at the BAFTAs. The Alliance of Women Journalists has saluted it. Roma is all alpha, all “forward ho!”…all win, win, win, win, win, win.

Somebody please explain how Roma can lose the Best Picture Oscar. Or how Cuaron can lose the Best Director trophy. I just don’t see how either scenario is possible at this stage. One plea to Academy voters: Give the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar to Pawel Pawlikowski‘s abundantly deserving Cold War, not Roma. Spread it around.

It took her a while after Wednesday’s attempted Green Book takedown, but yesterday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted one of the best bitch-slappings of the lefty woke fascist brigade (i.e., “Woketopia”) that anyone’s ever read. I dare Mark Harris or A.O. Scott or Manohla Dargis or Team Indiewire or Melissa Silverstein or anyone from that snowflake crowd to question or push back upon what Sasha has written here — I double-dare them.

Please read the whole thing but here are some of favorite portions:

Excerpt #1: “The leaders of Woketopia…truly believe that Green Book winning the Oscar is the worst thing that could happen in America.

“‘THEY DESERVE IT!’, they scream. At best, that’s what we get. At worse we get a lot of tongue-clucking and lectures by high-minded folks who are here to set everyone straight about what deserves or doesn’t deserve the Oscar. I’m referring not to black critics, BTW, but to certain white critics who scream the loudest.

Except #2: “This has greatly impacted how the Oscar race is covered, as bloggers scan each project for un-wokeness. Films by and about white males are mostly fair game for any kind of attack, and hopefully will eventually be just completely shunned. One tweet is all it takes to send a wave of hysteria through the hive mind and suddenly that film, too, is problematic. And anyone who likes the film or votes for the film is likewise caught up in that shitstorm.

Except #3: “When I heard about how much Green Book was liked, the first thing I thought was ‘white filmmakers telling a story about race are going to get creamed.’ It didn’t matter how good it was. It’s simply not possible, in today’s climate, for any white person to tell a story about race. White people and specifically white men are considered the enemy unless they arm themselves by becoming Woke Warriors, which many of them have done.”

What if Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis hadn’t been released five-plus years ago and instead a couple of months ago? Would it be a more formidable Oscar contender than it was in actuality, when it managed only two nominations (cinematography, sound mixing) and no wins?

Few Coen films have aged better than Llewyn Davis. Every time I re-watch ILD (I’ve seen it at least nine or ten times) it gets a little funnier, a little craftier and more perverse.

Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, No Country For Old Men and Burn After Reading are maxed out — they are what they brilliantly are, preserved in a kind of Coenesque amber. But Llewyn Davis never stops breathing and expanding and rolling its eyes.

It was one of the most critically celebrated and heavily awarded films of ’13, but the Academy slowboats brushed it off. Why? Because in their eyes it was too glum, too downbeat, too grayish-brown, too resigned. Because the misty desaturated color scheme did something to their souls that they just didn’t like.

Suzanne Vega: “I feel that the Coens took a vibrant, crackling, competitive, romantic, communal, crazy, drunken, brawling scene [i.e., early ’60s folk music in Manhattan’s West Village] and crumpled it into a slow brown sad movie.”

For me it’s one of the most consistently amusing Coen flicks ever made. In a downish, contemplating-suicide sort of way. I’d like to watch it again right now. Hell, I want to see a 4K version.

On this, the 20th anniversary of the HBO debut of The Sopranos (1.10.99), I’m trying to understand why my all-time favorite moment might be the one in which a seething Tony orders that low-rent Millennial guy in Artie Bucco‘s restaurant to take his baseball cap off. I guess it’s because, for me, the baseball-cap guy represents all the Millennials whose cinematic preferences have all but turned theatrical exhibition into a superhero waste dump. 2nd favorite: Paulie and the cat. 3rd favorite: Junior tips off Tony that Richie Aprile is planning to move against him. 4th favorite: Tony beats the hell out of a guy who insulted Meadow. 5th favorite: Tony chews out Richie for using New Jersey garbage truck drivers to push cocaine.

Presumably conveying shades of Antonioni’s The Passenger, Christian Petzold‘s Transit is an adaptation of Anna Segher‘s 1942 novel. It concerns a German refugee (Franz Rogowski) who, trying to escape Third Reich fascism, steals the transit papers of a dead novelist and assumes his identity in order to escape into France. Except Petzold’s film isn’t period — it’s set in the here-and-now.

There’s nothing worse than being in a hurry as you’re trying to serve some Sheba Perfect Portions to a hungry howling cat.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Posted on 4.11.14: “Did you know that Oklahoma!, despite its stodgy mid-1950s squareness, is all about sexual longing and mating rituals and perversity, and is generally teeming with erections and dampness and pelvic thrusts?

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

I just turned in my 2019 Critics Choice Awards ballot. The winners will be revealed at the big CC awards show on Sunday, 1.13, inside Barker Hangar. My main criteria was to (a) vote for serious true-quality contenders and not necessarily the hive favorites, and (b) to not vote for A Star Is Born in any category. I’ve omitted four or five of the minor categories.

BEST PICTURE
Black Panther
BlacKkKlansman
The Favourite
First Man
Green Book
If Beale Street Could Talk
Mary Poppins Returns
Roma
A Star Is Born
Vice

JW PICK: Roma

BEST ACTOR
Christian Bale – Vice
Bradley Cooper – A Star Is Born
Willem Dafoe – At Eternity’s Gate
Ryan Gosling – First Man
Ethan Hawke – First Reformed
Rami Malek – Bohemian Rhapsody
Viggo Mortensen – Green Book

JW PICK Willem Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate / Serious conflict — I wanted to vote for either First Reformed‘s Ethan Hawke or Vice‘s Christian Bale, but Dafoe’s Van Gogh slipped into my consciousness a couple of days ago and has hung in there.

BEST ACTRESS
Yalitza Aparicio – Roma
Emily Blunt – Mary Poppins Returns
Glenn Close – The Wife
Toni Collette – Hereditary
Olivia Colman – The Favourite
Lady Gaga – A Star Is Born
Melissa McCarthy – Can You Ever Forgive Me?

JW PICK: Glenn Close, The Wife / serious conflict here — my actual favorite is Melissa McCarthy but I’m also a Close supporter from way back. Plus a Close win at the CC awards will bolster her Oscar chances and thus lessen the odds favoring Lady Gaga.

Hollywood Elsewhere will attend the Sundance premiere of Dan Reed‘s Leaving Neverland, a four-hour doc about the experience of two men — James Safechuck and Wade Robson — who’ve claimed to have been molested by the late Michael Jackson as minors. The Channel 4 doc (technically a pair of two-hour docs) was added yesterday to the Sundance ’19 lineup.

Jackson’s Santa Barbara sexual molestation trial of ’04 and ’05 didn’t involve Safechuck and Robson but Gavin Arvizo, who’s now 29.

Portion of a statement from the Jackson estate: “This is yet another lurid production in an outrageous and pathetic attempt to exploit and cash in on Michael Jackson. This so-called ‘documentary’ is just another rehash of dated and discredited allegations. It’s baffling why any credible filmmaker would involve himself with this project.”

Statement from Reed: “If there’s anything we’ve learned during this time in our history, it’s that sexual abuse is complicated, and survivors’ voices need to be listened to. It took great courage for these two men to tell their stories, and I have no question about their validity. I believe anyone who watches this film will see and feel the emotional toll on the men and their families and will appreciate the strength it takes to confront long-held secrets.”

Leaving Neverland will pop on HBO sometime this spring.

As mentioned, Hollywood Elsewhere will be operating on God’s good humor and the kindness of publicist pals during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. I’ve been told I’m definitely good for several films (Neverland included) so things seem to be working out. If only I’d managed to be more “woke” over the last two or three years I would have my usual press pass and things would be less complicated.

This is right up Hollywood Elsewhere’s alley — “horror” in quotes mixed with social metaphor in order to reflect some aspect of present-day art or culture or whatever.

If Dan Gilroy‘s Velvet Buzzsaw (Netflix, 2.1) was opening in a standard theatrical-first way, it would probably suffer the fate of other upscale horror flicks (Hereditary, The Babadook, The Witch) — rave reviews, not enough business. Low-rent horror fans hate this smarthouse foie gras approach — they just want their meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

Wiki boilerplate: “After a series of paintings by an unknown artist are discovered, a supernatural force enacts revenge on those who have allowed their greed to get in the way of art.”

Gilroy to Business Insider: “It’s set in the world of contemporary art in Los Angeles, and its got a Robert Altman-like large ensemble cast. It’s got a Player vibe to it. There’s a large cast and we’re moving around from person to person as we move through this world. The story is being told through these different characters.” HE to Gilroy: Not primarily through Jake Gyllenhaal‘s character?