For all the things that I love and worship about Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, there’s one thing that doesn’t add up and seems increasingly bizarre the more you think about it. Until it all becomes clear.

Roma is a naturalistic family drama, set in Mexico City in ’70 and ’71. The main character is Yalitza Aparicio‘s Cleo, a saintly maid who helps to take care of four kids (along with mama, grandma and another domestic) as well as the family dog. There’s a father, but he’s mostly absent — at work, travelling or spending time with a girlfriend.

The bizarre thing is Cleo’s odd refusal to clean up the dog poop that’s constantly being deposited on the sheltered concrete driveway adjacent to the main home. Every time Cuaron (who also served as his own dp) shows us someone leaving or arriving there are always two or three loads, and once or twice we see the family car squishing them flat.

Yes, there’s a scene in which Cleo brushes the poop into a waste pan and spot-cleans the driveway with a sanitizer of some kind. But more often we see the loads just sitting there — naggingly, defiantly — and once you start noticing their persistent presence you can’t think of anything else.

And at the same time you can’t help but wonder why poor Cleo isn’t more focused, especially considering a moment in which she overhears the pater familias complaining about how “there’s dog crap everywhere” and especially after she’s sharply scolded by Marina de Tavira‘s mother character (i.e., Sofia) to stay on top of this.

After a while you begin to realize that Cleo isn’t forgetting to scoop the poop as much as deliberately avoiding it. Not angrily but in a kind of “well, I don’t know, not in the mood, maybe not” kind of way. And you start to ask yourself “why?” It’s obviously an unpleasant task, but she knows she’ll incur greater wrath from her employers if she lets the matter slide. And yet she does.

Once you start thinking about the loads there’s almost nothing else that gets into your head. They don’t become the whole movie, but they never go away either. The loads, the loads, the loads…why doesn’t she attend to them more frequently? Does she ever walk the dog?

Then your brain flips over and you begin to wonder if the loads are more than what they seem. Maybe the loads are there but maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re metaphors for family problems that are being ignored, or even broader social problems (i.e., what the street protests are about). Maybe the loads are reminders of those things in life that can never really be fixed or fully understood. Or those nagging spiritual issues that Albert Camus and Rainer Maria Rilke and Carlos Casteneda wrote about.

The Roma poop issue is never resolved, but I swear to God there’s more to it than just “Cleo should clean up more.” It’s an existential quandary of some kind.

I should have streamed Support The Girls last night. That way I’d have something substantial to say about Regina Hall having yesterday won the New York Film Critics Circle Best Actress award. But I probably won’t be able to see it until Sunday. I have to catch Mary Poppins Returns this evening, and tomorrow I’ll be running around Manhattan the whole day.

For the sake of discussion I’m just going to repeat the basics, and offer what others are saying.

I mentioned yesterday that “nobody” had Hall on their top-five Best Actress contenders list, although some critics (including Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn and David Ehrlich) wrote some very positive things about Support The Girls and Hall’s performance last March when it premiered at SXSW.

Magnolia and Ginsberg-Libby offered Support The Girls press screenings last July and August, but it opened two days before Telluride and — this isn’t nothing — it made a grand total of $129K domestic. Not a typo — it made $129K all in.

It would be one thing if the NYFCC had given Hall a special stand-out, we-love-you, keep-on-keepin’-on award, but they gave her their Best Actress award, and that presumably means they felt Hall was better (stronger, more penetrating, more extra-special, more shake-the-rafters) than Melissa McCarthy‘s performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me. Or Glenn Close‘s in The Wife. Or Viola Davis‘s work in Widows. Or even Lady Gaga‘s in A Star Is Born.

Really? Better than McCarthy?

Some are saying that the NYFCC voted for Hall as a show-off gesture, and that it’s (a) partly about looking hip and ahead-of-the-curve and and (b) partly about delivering a huge fuck-you to the Gold Derby prognosticators for sticking to the same five or six Best Actress contenders. I completely agree with this sentiment when it comes to 90% of the GD members having refused to put First Reformed star Ethan Hawke on their Best Actor lists, but I also sympathize with their not having paid any attention to Hall, mainly because I haven’t seen it. (And I’m obviously not proud of this dereliction.)

The L.A. Film Critics Association has been playing this “nyah, nyah” game this for years, handing out awards to eccentric outlier performances as a way of (a) giving the finger to conventional award-season wisdom and (b) trumpeting their own deliberative edge and outside-the-box coolness. Not to mention their totally infuriating foodie thing in which they take a bagel-and-lox-and-cream cheese break in the middle of voting.

I believe there’s something to both motives. I believe that the NYFCC wokers do want to be seen as The Cool Kidz Who Set Their Own Standards and Make Their Own Rules and are Voting Ahead of the Curve.

Indiewire film editor and NYFCC chair Eric Kohn replies: “There is no groupthink to the NYFCC voting process. The rules are right there on the site. Nobody’s ‘using’ any single award for their private agenda. A lot of people genuinely love this movie, myself included — it was on my favorite movies of the year list — and I raved about it way back at SXSW last March. It’s an amazing showcase for Hall’s talents, and a side of her most people have never seen before.”

This five-year-old teaser for the TCM Classic Film Tour of Manhattan is, of course, painful to even glance at, much less consider. To think that there are people lazy or slow enough to sign up for this thing when all they have to do is visit a reputable NYC film location site (like Bob Egan’s PopSpots site) and use Google Maps to roam around town on their lonesome.

I myself have done my own little Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Prince of the City, Twelve Angry Men and Midnight Cowboy tours at different times. Four or five years ago a friend and I improvised our own little folkie Bob Dylan/Inside Llewyn Davis tour of the West Village, including a visit to the West 4th and Jones street location of the cover photo for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

The only guided film tour I’ve ever taken was a San Francisco Vertigo tour sometime around ’02 or ’03, offered under the auspices of the San Francisco Film Festival.

Snapped sometime prior to the 6.1.55 premiere of Billy Wilder‘s The Seven Year Itch. I tried watching this 20th Century Fox sex comedy a couple of years ago, and I couldn’t stay with it — it’s tedious, labored, constipated. I smirked a few times but I didn’t laugh once — not once. Tom Ewell wants to ravage Marilyn Monroe but he’s too chicken. On top of which I think his off-screen orientation came through on some level. I didn’t believe him.

Itch was the second of five ’50s films directed by Wilder during his “house director” phase, so-called because these films represented a creative hibernation for the director of Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. The usual Wilder traits — cynicism, opportunistic characters, smartass dialogue, ironic turnarounds — weren’t entirely absent in Sabrina (’54), The Seven-Year Itch, The Spirit of St. Louis (’57), Love in the Afternoon (’57) and Witness for the Prosecution (’57), but they were in relatively short supply. Wilder finally returned to form in ’59 with Some Like It Hot.

The house phase began in the wake of the success of Wilder’s Stalag 17 (’53), although the primary factor, I’ve always believed, was the failure of Wilder’s caustic and ultra-cynical Ace in the Hole (’51). After that film bombed critically and commercially, the word went around that Wilder needed to retreat from his hard-edged material and ease up for a while. He did.

I just had a chat with World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy about the New York Film Critics winners, particularly Regina Hall winning the Best Actress trophy for her performance in Support The Girls. Along with a little David Edelstein (but not too much), a discussion of the 18 films on Eric Kohn’s best of the year list, and a little mondo bizarro Beto O’Rourke vs. Hillary Clinton speculation. It’s cut into two portions — part #1 and part #2.

Congrats to Regina Hall for winning the NYFCC’s Best Actress award for her performance in Andrew Bujalski‘s Support The Girls. Which I didn’t bother to see, frankly, because it didn’t seem substantial enough, and because it opened two days before the start of the 2018 Telluride Film Festival.

Nobody and I mean nobody had put Hall’s performance on their Best Actress short list over the last several weeks– the NYFCC honor is totally out of the blue.

Wiki anecdote: “In 2010, at age 40, Hall unsuccessfully tried to become a nun after a bad break-up. Hall had previously wanted to become a nun at the age of 14. She was refused for being too old, as the cut-off age is 39.”

Lee Chang-dong‘s Burning is mainly about an uneasy fraternal tension between Jong-su, a young, none-too-bright writer (Yoo Ah-in), and Ben (Steven Yeun), a rich, laid-back sociopath who drives a Porsche. Jong-su is intensely interested in Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), a pretty 20something he vaguely knows from childhood, and yet she’s totally attached to Ben, who has much more of a comme ci comma ca attitude about women and in fact about everything.

The poster image is from a scene in which Hae-mi impulsively disrobes and does a primitive dance in front of Ben and Jong-su. It’s interesting that the designer decided to focus on this one moment, which doesn’t feel like anyone’s idea of an “important” scene while it’s happening. And yet the silhouetted image sinks in.

This is supposed to be a Mars sunset, but where’s the amber-orange tint? Why does it look so gray and ashy-smoggy? This could have been snapped on the 60 going out to Palm Springs, or taken from a camping site in Twenty-Nine Palms or in the middle of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains on the way up to Park City.

Trump repeatedly says Cohen is lying, but then adds: "Even if he was right, it doesn’t matter because I was allowed to do whatever I wanted during the campaign."pic.twitter.com/xncmtKKFmH

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) November 29, 2018

Imagine all the magical feeling, insight, intuition and imagination that surely flowed through the nimble mind of screenwriter Gloria Katz, who passed four days ago from ovarian cancer. There’s always so much more to a person’s life than their so-called career highlights, obviously, but this, fairly or unfairly, is what obituaries always come down to.

And the hard fact is that Katz and her creative collaborator husband Willard Huyck are best known for their fruitful association with George Lucas and more precisely two major hits (one uncredited) during the early to mid ’70s, and for one huge stinker that happened in the mid ’80s.

Huyck and Katz’s greatest credited success was American Graffiti (’73), Lucas’s semi-autobiographical, night-on-the-town adventure film set in 1962 Modesto, California. Graffiti‘s success led to a long association between the couple and Lucas, which peaked (in a financial sense at least) when Katz and Huyck worked as uncredited script doctors on Star Wars (’77). They also co-wrote Steven Spielberg‘s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (’84). They also teamed on the duddish Best Defense (co-writing screenplay, Huyck directing, Katz producing).

And then disaster struck.

Howard the Duck (’86), shadow-produced by Lucas, directed by Huyck, produced by Katz and based on their co-written script, not only failed commercially but became known as one of the biggest stink-bombs in Hollywood history. Huyck and Katz’s reps never really recovered. Katz wrote a 1989 TV film, Mothers, Daughters and Lovers, and then she and her husband co-wrote one more feature film, the Lucas-produced Radioland Murders (’94). And that was it. Smothered by tainted duck feathers. But at least they had that glorious ’70s streak to look back upon.

Remember the good old days when the New York Film Critics Circle’s website had a live-blog that would tap out the winners as they were decided upon? Now everyone just follows the blow-by-blow on Twitter or via Gold Derby. Voting is underway as we speak. 11:55 am: Things have stalled with ony three awards decided upon. Let’s get this show on the road, guys…hubbah-hubbah! 12:50 pm: All is forgiven with First Reformed‘s Ethan Hawke having taken the Best Actor prize, Paul Schrader winning the Best Screenplay trophy, and Can You Ever Forgive Me‘s Richard E. Grant having won for Best Supporting Actor. Not to mention Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma cinematography having also triumphed.

Best Picture: Roma. HE response: Yowsah.

Best Director: Alfonso Cuaron, Roma. HE response: Yup.

Best Actor: First Reformed‘s Ethan Hawke. HE response: Yes! I had Hawke on my Gold Derby Best Actor roster from the get-go while the go-alongers (i.e., the vast majority) ignored him. Why? Because First Reformed opened last May and was therefore not on their Oscar radar. Do you understand how completely embarassing this kind of thinking is?

Best Actress: Regina Hall, Support The Girls. HE response: I never saw it.

Best Supporting Actress: Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk. HE response: I don’t get it — King delivers a standard “mother courage” performance — but whatever. I would have voted for Amy Adams‘s Lynne Cheney performance in Vice.

Best Supporting Actor: Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?. HE response: All hail the glorious cat killer!

Best Screenplay: First Reformed, Paul Schrader. HE response: 100% agreement and then some.

Best Cinematography: Roma (Alfonso Cuaron). HE response: There was no other choice except for Łukasz Żal‘s lensing of Cold War. Hearty congrats to Cuaron.

Best Animated Film: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. HE response: I don’t care how good it supposedly is. I don’t do animated, especially anything to do with superheroes.

Best Foreign Language Film: Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War. HE response: 100% agreement, landmark film, exquisite cinematography

Best Documentary Feature: Minding The Gap. HE response: Haven’t seen it.

Best First Feature: Eighth Grade. HE response: Agreed, well deserved. HE would have preferred: No, no…Eighth Grade is a nakedly honest, highly focused film…no complaints.

YouTube guy: “Everyone remembers that scene from The Lion King when Simba is cornered by hyenas, and then Mufasa appears out of nowhere and comes to the rescue. This is almost exactly the same!”

The clip (posted on 11.27.18) has atrocious camerawork, but it’s heartening to see those two or three lions charging in and chasing the hyenas away. More thrilling, I’ll bet, than anything I’m likely to see in Jon Favreau‘s Lion King remake.

“You’re never alone / You’re never disconnected! / You’re home with your own / When company’s expected / You’re well protected!” — from “Jet Song,” music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.