Following yesterday’s At Eternity’s Gate event, Tatyana and I attended a screening of Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me? at the London hotel. It was my fourth viewing, and the best-sounding presentation of all — I could hear each and every vowel and syllable as if the actors were standing right next to me. The q & a included Heller, presumed Best Actress nominee Melissa McCarthy, presumed Best Supporting Actor nominee Richard E. Grant, co-screenwriter Jeff Whitty, producers Anne Carey and Amy Nauiokas. Heller said they used a newfangled Panavision DXL camera, a relatively new device with a super-sharp 8K resolution. And then they de-tuned the lenses to make the image less perfect. Collider‘s Scott Mantz hosted the discussion.

David Leonhart‘s 1.5 N.Y. Times opinion piece, “The People vs. Donald J. Trump” (subhead: “He is demonstrably unfit for office — What are we waiting for?”) has attracted 2434 comments.

“The presidential oath of office contains 35 words and one core promise: to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ Since virtually the moment Donald J. Trump took that oath two years ago, he has been violating it.

“He has repeatedly put his own interests above those of the country. He has used the presidency to promote his businesses. He has accepted financial gifts from foreign countries. He has lied to the American people about his relationship with a hostile foreign government. He has tolerated cabinet officials who use their position to enrich themselves.

“To shield himself from accountability for all of this — and for his unscrupulous presidential campaign — he has set out to undermine the American system of checks and balances. He has called for the prosecution of his political enemies and the protection of his allies. He has attempted to obstruct justice. He has tried to shake the public’s confidence in one democratic institution after another, including the press, federal law enforcement and the federal judiciary.

“The unrelenting chaos that Trump creates can sometimes obscure the big picture. But the big picture is simple: The United States has never had a president as demonstrably unfit for the office as Trump. And it’s becoming clear that 2019 is likely to be dominated by a single question: What are we going to do about it?”

Answer: Besides making a lot of noise, not all that much. The Republican-controlled Senate will never vote to convict Trump on impeachment charges. The only way out is to defeat him in 2020, and the only way that’ll happen is for the Democrats to nominate an X-factor charisma candidate — somebody in the vein of JFK, RFK, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, etc. In other words, the Dems have to christen Beto O’Rourke as their presidential nominee. Joe Biden is too old and ambivalent; Bernie Sanders is too old; Elizabeth Warren doesn’t have the voltage; Kamala Harris is too prosecutorial, etc.

The final episode of Ben Stiller‘s Escape at Donnemara (Showtime) airs tonight. I reviewed the series on 11.16.18 after streaming the whole thing via Showtime press access. Now that everyone’s seen the first seven episodes, what are some of the reactions?

Posted in mod November: “It’s an appropriately grim, throughly-delved-into saga of the Clinton Correctional prison break of 2015, and the schemings of convicted murderers Richard Matt (Benicio del Toro) and David Sweat (Paul Dano), and about the help they got from miserable prison worker Tilly Mitchell (Patricia Arquette), a married, middle-aged woman with whom both convicts had a sexual thing with.

“It’s mainly Arquette’s film (she’ll be nominated for an Emmy) with Del Toro and Dano delivering like the natural-born pros they are every time at bat.

benicio: i'm gonna say this line like i'm a scary monster ok

director: maybe just try it normal?

benicio: pic.twitter.com/xTlHrzL3QK

— adidas tiro 19 men's training pants (@bobby) January 6, 2019

“Escape at Dannemora is composed in spare, straight fashion — utilitarian, not overly shaded and certainly not arthousey, unpretentious. And oh boy, did I feel gloomed out by those bright green walls everywhere. If only state-prison walls were dark olive drab.

“Despite suggestions and metaphors contained in the word “escape”, Stiller’s film is mainly about the planning of the break. The first five episodes, to be exact, while simultaneously focusing on Matt, Sweat and Mitchell’s triangulated relationship. Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood‘s Escape From Alcatraz was also primarily about planning, but of course that whole film ran only 112 minutes.

“I honestly felt that this portion went on too long — that Stiller was more into keeping me locked up than offering what I wanted from the beginning, which was to savor those little tingles of freedom, however brief and despite the wrong kind of company. We all want to tag along when the door swings open.

During yesterday afternoon’s post-screening q & a at Soho House, At Eternity’s Gate director Julian Schnabel was asked to examine himself as he had examined Vincent Van Gogh in his film. Who is he, deep down? Schnabel answered, “I am my paintings and I am my films. Everything else is just heresay and chit-chat.”

HE answer to same question: “I am six things — my daily column, my personal history, the people I love (first and foremost my wife, sons and best friends but also beloved deceased persons like my parents, Cary Grant, John Lennon, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Lou Reed and numerous others), the places I’ve travelled to (both in inwardly and geographically), my cats and my shoes — principally my brown suede Bruno Magli lace-ups, the black Beatle boots, the black-and-white saddle shoes and the Johnston & Murphy brown-boot lace-ups. And the bulky motorcycle jacket and black cowboy hat. What is that, eight?”

Yesterday afternoon I sat for my second viewing of Julian Schnabel‘s At Eternity’ Gate (CBS Films), which I’ve come to regard as the finest Vincent Van Gogh flick ever made. The difference between it and, say, Vincent Minnelli and Kirk Douglas‘s Lust for Life or Robert Altman‘s Vincent and Theo is an absolute belief in Van Gogh’s inner light. It’s not a tourist’s view of the man, but a portrait of an artist by an artist — a “you are Van Gogh” dreamscape flick.

In the view of many Willem Dafoe‘s performance of this gentle, conflicted, angst-ridden impressionist is his best since playing Yeshua of Nazareth in Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (’88). When I say “many” I mean the National Society of Film Critics, who yesterday morning decided that Dafoe’s performance was and is the year’s second finest, right after Ethan Hawke‘s tortured priest in Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed. That’s quite the ringing endorsement when you think of the competition.

As I said last October, At Eternity’s Gate “is more into intimate communion, intuitions, revelations.” It’s a channelling of the dreams, angels and and torment that surged within Van Gogh during the final chapter in his life, when he lived in Arles and St. Remy de Provence.

Schnabel and Dafoe sat for a q & a discussion following the screening, which happened at West Hollywood’s Soho House. After that everyone went down the hallway for a wine-and-sliders-and-swedish-meatballs gathering. HE’s own Phillip Noyce, who directed Dafoe in ’94’s Clear and Present Danger, was there; ditto producer Don Murphy.

Julian Schnabel: “The movie is about painting being above recognition. Above criticism. When you’re a younger artist, you want agreement from people. Later, you realize that what you’re doing is the thing and not the agreement from other people. I think Van Gogh was very successful. He accomplished what he wanted to do. He expressed the inexpressible. We’ve all projected this bourgeois concept about success. At a certain moment Van Gogh was, like, ‘I thought I was supposed to educate people and show them how to look at the world, but I stopped thinking about that — now I just think about my relationship to eternity, by which he meant the time to come.'”

HE interpretation by way of Tom Wolfe‘s “The Painted Word“: Van Gogh’s paintings didn’t strive to “reconstitute an anecdotal fact but constitute a pictorial fact.”

Willem Dafoe: “The idea was ‘painting what I see,’ and not painting a representation…of what I thought had to account for that thing in front of me…seeing is perception…Van Gogh is very haunted by this feeling, this vision of what he was, and he wants to share it…and I think that’s an interesting impulse…a classic artist’s impulse.”

Approves, that is, of the following excerpts from “Why Writing Top Ten Best Lists Is the Worst,” a realclearlife.com article that Thelma posted about a week ago:

Excerpt #1: “Every time I see A Star is Born atop a list, I think my fellow critics must be on crack. The remake is a Bradley Cooper vanity production headed for some kind of apocalyptic end-of-aesthetics-as-we-know-them accolades come Oscar season. Cooper, from the dais, will be both humbled and honored. I can’t wait. What can be expected of a film where the signature song is ‘Shallow’? Not that it doesn’t have its value: it’s best seen with a gaggle of inebriated friends late at night like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Excerpt #2: “The diversity spread. In the current climate, loathe be the critic who doesn’t do a little shifting to ensure that their list isn’t simply the best films but also mixes in ample women directors, those of color and LGBQT. This is laudable — but in a studio and independent system where white males still dominate the films in the pipeline, this could lead to stretching. Hence BlacKkKlansman, a clumsy if well-cast period comedy based on a fantastic idea: a black man goes undercover in the Colorado KKK and meets Grand Wizard David Duke. But…it reflects Spike Lee’s fatal flaw: his inability to get out of his own way and tell the urgent story at the center of his movies.”

Excerpt #3: “Obvious overkill — the same thirty films get recycled in the critical equivalent of virtue signaling.”

HE to Adams: Variety‘s Kris Tapley doesn’t approve of critics who use the term “virtue signalling.” He thinks “it makes you sound like people who say ‘libtard’ and ‘cuck’ with a straight face.” Fair warning.

8:26 pm: Bohemian Rhapsody beats A Star Is Born for Best Picture, Drama! Oh, joy and rapture! Bobby Peru, Bobby Peru, Bobby Peru…you know what just happened! And producer Graham King doesn’t even mention Bryan Singer???? Posted on 12.26.18: “Due Respect, But A Star Is Born Must Be Stopped.” We did it, kids! We did it! Oh, and Kris Tapley can kiss Hollywood Elsewhere’s ass.

8:16 pm: The glorious shutdown of A Star Is Born continues as Bohemian Rhapsody‘s Rami Malek wins for Best Actor! Hollywood Elsewhere is howling, whoo-hooing, rolling around the floor, slapping the thighs. “Thank you to Freddie Mercury!” But Malek didn’t thank Bryan Singer at all? Bohemian Rhapsody was Singer’s story, in a way. He channelled all of his life as a bad boy into Freddie’s character. It’s his mea culpa. It’s one thing to not mention an alleged sexual predator when you’re worried about losing, but after you’ve won…? Not even a minor mention?

8:05 pm: Lady Gaga HASN’T won the Golden Globe for Best Actress, Drama! The great Glenn Close wins instead! Amazing! Does this portend a corresponding Best Actor loss by A Star Is Born‘s Bradley Cooper? I’m hyperventilating, experiencing convulsions, having trouble breathing. Gaga has lost! Bobby Peru, this is for you!

7:56 pm: Green Book wins for Best Film, Musical or Drama. Are Robert Strauss and other like-minded critics red-faced and fuming as we speak? Maybe, maybe not. But I’d like to think so. Three Golden Globes for this very finely made film — a feel-good road dramedy that HE is proud to have praised and stood by through thick and thin. This is HE’s feel-good moment.

7:48 pm: HE’s own Olivia Colman (dead brilliant in Tyrannosaur) wins for Best Actress, Comedy or Musical for The Favorite. HE agrees, approves, applauds.

7:37 pm: Assassination of Gianni Versace wins for Best Limited Series or TV Movie. Fine. Never saw it. I will now.

7:35 pm: Sam Rockwell as Bob Fosse? Another awful Walmart commercial.

7:33 pm: Great iPhoneX commercial! Best commercial of the evening?

7:27 pm: Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Best Performance by an Actress, TV series, Comedy or Musical. And Chuck Lorre‘s The Kaminsky Method wins for Best TV series, Comedy or Musical.

7:17 pm: Harrison Ford presents the Best Director award to Alfonso Cuaron. Which is a good thing because (I know this is going to sound small and mean) at least Bradley Cooper didn’t win. But it is good, I think, that A Star Is Born isn’t sweeping because ASIB is not an original film that comes from the culture that we’re all living and struggling in. And (forgive me) it does seem to increase the possibility that Cooper won’t win for Best Actor. Be honest — Cooper didn’t look overjoyed when Alfonso won.

7:08 pm: El Duderino is given the Cecil B. DeMille award. The career reel covers everything, but was there a clip from Stay Hungry (’76), one of his all-time greatest? A special thanks is offered to Peter Bogdanovich, the Coen brothers, Scott Cooper, “the late great Michael Cimino,” etc. Great quote: “We’ve all been tagged….we’re all here, all alive!” 2nd Great Quote: “We’re all trim tabs! Tag…you’re it”

7:04 pm: I need to watch Games of Games. Colorful rollicking sadism, etc.

6:56 pm: Tyler Perry asks, “Are the people at the Golden Globes as drunk as they seem? Yes, they are.” Darren Criss wins for his performance in The Assassination of Gianna Versace. Verdict on that floral tux jacket he’s wearing?

6:52 pm: Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma wins Best Foreign Language feature award. Fine & hearty congrats, but how is it that Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War wasn’t even nominated?

6:44 pm: Christian Bale will win Best Actor award for his vp Dick Cheney portrayal in Vice. That British working-class accent. Here’s to Bale’s upcoming portrayal as the “charisma-free” Mitch McConnell!

6:41 pm: Sharp Objects‘ Patricia Clarkson wins for Best Supporting Actress, TV

6:32 pm: Mahershala Ali wins Best Supporting Actor for Green Book! HE agrees, approves, applauds. It would have also been nice if Richard E. Grant (Can you Ever Forgive Me?) had won but Green Book is close to my heart. And now the Green Book screenplay has won! So Green Book is going to win for Best Film, Comedy or Musical…great. I’d like to think that at least a few of the p.c. tyrants who went after Green Book on twitter are grinding their teeth and punching their refrigerator doors as we speak. Feels pretty good on this end!

6:24 pm: GG co-host Sandra Oh wins for Best Actress, TV Drama for Killing Eve. Overdoing the shock and surprise and oh-my-God? Naaah.

6:18 pm: Regina King wins Best Supporting Actress for If Beale Street Could Talk. So now she’s back in the Oscar conversation? The fact that she was absent from the SAG noms indicated otherwise. Regina pledges that everything she produces over the next two years is going to “be 50% women”…okay!

6:12 pm: I hate these Walmart commercials — hate, hate, hate. I generally avoid the Walmart experience like the plague, but now my determination to steer clear is doubled down. I kind of hate the Die Hard-ish Brooklyn Nine-Nine trailer also — no offense.

6:04 pm: Justin Hurwitz wins Best Original Score for First Man! HE approves, agrees, applauds. And of course, “Shallow” wins for Best Song. Don’t overdue the emotionally overwhelmed thing, Ms. Bluehair…everyone but everyone was predicting this. Due respect.

5:57 pm: The legendary Carol Burnett looks pretty good. Great pipes in her prime. Tribute reel is nicely assembled. I’d forgotten about Friendly Fire (’79). “How incredibly fortunate I was top be there at the right time…the cost alone…48-piece orchestra…so grateful for the chemistry we had…our producer, our choreographer, our writers….one big happy family for 11 years (’67 to ’78)….I’m so glad we had this time together.”

5:54 pm: “This is Crazy Rich Asians, a money-whore movie that made a ton of money…”

5:53 pm: Alien Pepsi commercial is self-inflated, cloying, generally repulsive.

5:45 pm: Escape at Dannemora‘s Patricia Arquette win for Best Actress, Limited Series. HE agrees, applauds. The incarcerated Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell doesn’t agree or applaud. Arquette played off, her speech having gone on.

5:43 pm: Ben Whishaw wins for Best Supporting Actor, A Very English Scandal. Whishaw is always good, but he played such a dreary dad in Mary Poppins Returns.

5:20 pm: Am I expected to know or care about Richard Madden winning winning Best Actor blah-dee-blah for Netflix’s The Bodyguyard? I don’t. I never will. Well, probably not. FX’s The Americans win for Best TV series, Drama….zzzzz. Secret Life of Pets 2 trailer…I hate animation with such a grand and terrible passion. Image quality on the Roma trailer looks so much better than the film did at the Aero the other night.

5:20 pm: SpiderMan: Into the Spider-Verse wins for Best Animated Film. Who’s the woman with the extremely styled hair behind the winners? Former Sony chief Amy Pascal.

5:16 pm: Michael Douglas wins Best Actor, TV Series, Musical or Comedy, The Kaminsky Method. “Chuck Lorre thinks getting old is funny.” “This has to go for my 102-year-old father Kirk…”

5:13 pm: Sandra Oh: “This moment of change…I see you, I see you, I see you.”

5:08 pm: Hollywood Elsewhere apologizes for the modem fritzing out, killing the cable signal. It took about six or seven minutes for everything to boot up again.

Last night I visited the Aero, Hollywood Elsewhere’s favorite one-screen theatre in the western hemisphere, for a 70mm presentation of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma. I love the film but transferring digitally-shot images to celluloid delivered nothing that struck me as wowser or extra-distinctive. It looked perfectly fine (clean, sharp, silvery), but my eyes never popped out of their sockets. It actually looked a little better when I watched it a week or two ago via Netflix streaming, specifically on my Sony 4K HDR 65-inch monitor.

Genial, silver-haired Alfonso dropped by for a quick q & a after it ended. Standing ovation, waves of love and worship, Alfonso offering the prayer gesture, etc. I didn’t have the nerve to ask about whether the dogshit in the driveway was intended to serve as some kind of metaphor of some kind or if Alfonso simply remembered it that way.

Francois Margolin and Lemine Ould M Salem‘s two-year-old Jihadists (aka Salafistes), an allegedly immersive and “grueling” documentary about cadres of radical Islam, will open in New York and Los Angeles on 1.25.

An invitation to view the film with a video link was accidentally sent out within a cc format, so simple rsvps were received by everyone on the mailing thread.

I cheerfully responded as follows: “Hey, [publicist’s first name] — Happy New Year & please send a link. How many heads are cut off in this thing? — Jeffrey Wells.” One guy replied, “Actually it’s not heads I’m worried about!” (I didn’t get the allusion.)

Another guy wrote the following: “So do you genuinely not understand the difference between ‘reply’ and ‘reply all’, or did you just want everyone to enjoy your golden witticism?” HE reply: “I thought I was just hitting reply. If you’re telling me you didn’t at least briefly flash on the possibility of decapitation footage in this doc…well, I don’t know what to say to you, Pinocchio.”

You can’t have a polite or even a civil discussion with journalists these days. Someone is always flinging turdballs about something or other, which means I have to throw them back, and then it’s all downhill.

Straight from twitter, balloting as we speak…

‏BEST PICTURE: THE RIDER (44 points) / HE comment: No comment.

RUNNERS-UP:
ROMA (41 points)
BURNING (27 points)

BEST DIRECTOR: Alfonso Cuarón, ROMA (60 points) / / HE comment: Fine.

RUNNERS-UP:
Lee Chang-dong, BURNING (22 points)
Chloé Zhao, THE RIDER (22 points)

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM: ROMA (44 points) / HE comment: Cold War should have won.

RUNNERS-UP:
COLD WAR (34 points)
BURNING (30 points)
SHOPLIFTERS (30 points)
‏
BEST ACTOR: Ethan Hawke, FIRST REFORMED (58 points) / HE comment: Of course!

RUNNERS-UP:
Willem Dafoe, AT ETERNITY’S GATE (30 points) / HE comment: Dafoe should be one of the five.
Ben Foster, LEAVE NO TRACE (25 points)
John C. Reilly, THE SISTERS BROTHERS and STAN & OLLIE (25 points)

BEST ACTRESS: Olivia Colman, THE FAVOURITE (36 points)

RUNNERS-UP:
Regina Hall, SUPPORT THE GIRLS (33 points)
Melissa McCarthy, CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (27 points)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Regina King, IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (47 points) / HE comment: If you guys say so…whatever.

RUNNERS-UP:
Elizabeth Debicki, WIDOWS (37 points)
Emma Stone, THE FAVOURITE (24 points)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Steven Yeun, BURNING (40 points) / HE comment: Green Book‘s Mahershala Ali.

RUNNERS-UP:
Richard E. Grant, CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (35 points)
Brian Tyree Henry, IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, WIDOWS and SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (32 points)

BEST SCREENPLAY: Armando Iannucci, David Schneider and Ian Martin, THE DEATH OF STALIN (47 points)

RUNNERS-UP:
Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (27 points) / HE comment: Holofcener and Whitty deserved to win.
Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, THE FAVOURITE (24 points)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Alfonso Cuarón, ROMA (70 points)

RUNNERS-UP:
James Laxton, IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (26 points)
Lukasz Zal, COLD WAR (24 points) / HE comment: Zal’s juicy monochrome images should have won the top prize.

I understand there are no secrets these days — that everything’s on the table. And I realize that you’re definitely in trouble if you don’t thank your significant other during an award acceptance speech. But there’s something to be said for understatement and deft allusions rather than specific, heartfelt affirmations that sound like they were written for a speech.

Two days ago in Palm Springs Bohemian Rhapsody star Rami Malek went the latter route. He and Bohemian costar Lucy Boynton, 24, have been doing the bop ** since at least last May, but he confirmed their relationship anyway while accepting the Breakthrough Performance Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

“Thank you, Lucy Boynton,” he said. “You have been my ally, my confidante, my love…I appreciate you so much.”

Hearing from someone near and dear that I’m “appreciated” doesn’t exactly warm the cockles of my heart. The word is a rote-sounding, dryly positive blanket term. Everyone in the world uses it because anybody can appreciate anything without getting their feet wet. It’s a businessy, daylight-hour, arm’s-length word. “I appreciated the kind gesture” or “I deeply appreciate your donation to my son’s cub scout troop”…that line of country. Percy Bysshe Shelley would have put it some other way.

** Otherwise known as “rop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom.”

How does the Academy move forward on re-hiring Kevin Hart as the next Oscar host after all the pushback plus Don Lemon airing a special opinion piece that says “no can do, this doesn’t work, Kevin needs to walk away”?

From 1.5 edition of Richard Rushfield‘s The Ankler: “Why should we have [an Oscar] host? Who in their right mind would step into this mess? There hasn’t been a gig in showbiz as certain to take a wrecking ball to a performer’s reputation since someone hired a stand-up comic as a joke-telling mohel at Barry Diller’s grandson’s bris.”