A comic-book aficionado who had a relationship with legendary cartoon illustrator Jack Kirby (1917 – 1994) has a script that he cowrote with Kirby sometime in the early ’90s (earlier?) called NOCTYRNVS. The title alone would make me avoid this script for the rest of my life, but this guy has a notion that Guillermo del Toro might want to produce or direct it. Yeesh.
So this guy appealed to Tatyana on social media after seeing her in a recent photo with GDT at a party for Julian Schnabel‘s Vincent Van Gogh movie, At Eternity’s Gate (CBS Films, 11.16). Then he reached out to me on Messenger, thinking I might offer an introduction of some kind. But I don’t want to know from comic-book crap…nothing, stay away. And I said so.
A few days ago Indiewire posted comments from director Cary Fukanaga about the the three major movie-watching formats of our time — cinema, TV and streaming. The Maniac director basically said that the “old distinctions” between the three have pretty much evaporated, and that they’re “definitely 100% blended now.”
Fukunaga claimed that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma being a leading Best Picture contender while at the same time being offered as a Netflix feature (albeit one that will first play in cinemas for a couple of weeks) means that cinema is blurring into streaming and vice versa.
Everyone understands that in order to be nominated for an Oscar you can’t just be deserving — you also need a compelling narrative. A narrative is either a tidy summary about the career history of this or that contender (i.e., Glenn Close is beyond overdue, having been Best Actress-nominated six times without a win) or a concise explanation about why this or that film is a deserving Best Picture contender at this juncture in the zeitgeist.
I’m not claiming knowledge of each and every narrative out there, and there are too many categories to lay it all down in a single article. So for openers here’s a summary of the Best Picture narratives — a rundown of the loglines that seem to make sense as we speak — the actor narratives will follow tomorrow:
1. A Star Is Born — Bradley Cooper delivers and then some, best version of this oft-told tale, Academy needs to get behind this hugely popular film or risk seeming out of touch with Joe and Jane Popcorn;
2. Green Book — Most beloved Best Picture contender, expert craft meets pure feel-good, three great performances, forgive contrite Viggo Mortensen for a single verbal slip, Peter Farrelly catapults out of comedy realm;
3. Roma — Cuaron is an Art God, cinematic monochrome splendor of the highest order, women (especially a saintly maid) holding a family together, Netflix wants in so badly they’re abandoning their basic strategy by booking theatres;
4. First Man — Damien Chazelle switches gears again, makes intimate art film on a large scale, avoids Ron Howard-ish template;
5. Black Panther — Probably the only 2018 Best Picture contender that historians will be readily discussing 50 years from now, obviously an historical groundbreaker, the greatest African-American mythology film ever made, and the most socially and emotionally resonant Marvel film ever released;
6. Can you Ever Forgive Me? — I loved it but I can’t think of a narrative. “Melissa McCarthy gives her greatest performance” is a Best Actress narrative;
7. The Favourite — Yorgos Lanthimos goes commercial and delivers the best Barry Lyndon-ish film since Barry Lyndon;
8. First Reformed — Easily the most moralistic film of the Best Picture contenders, the greatest directorial comeback in years, Paul Schrader‘s best since Hardcore;
9. If Beale Street Could Talk — I can’t think of a catchy narrative — prettiest, gentlest Wong Kar Wai film in years?;
Fresh out of Wilton high school, five or six of us drove out to America’s heartland to earn a little money and have an adventure….hah! It was mostly an ordeal. We wound up working different jobs and different shifts — pushing cans, operating fork lifts, doing end-of-shift cleanup, hosing down freshly picked peas and beans. It was fairly miserable work all around — back-breaking, tedious, soul-smothering. Migrants did the actual picking in the fields.
For a week or two some of us were working the 8 am to 5:00 pm shift. We’d clean up, eat and head out for a night of beer-drinking at a local tavern. We’d sometimes go to a place in Fond du Lac called the Brat Hut. And when we got back to the plant around midnight or so we got into a habit — for a couple of weeks, I mean — of taking out our rage at Del Monte. Or at ourselves for being dumb enough to work at this godforsaken place.
A friend worked the evening shift atop a wooden chimney-like structure. His job was to clean freshly-picked beans and peas. Every night they were unloaded off trucks and sent up to his area on electrically-powered conveyor belts set at a 45 degree angle. The vegetables were then dropped into huge spinning cylindrical containers made of chicken wire. Our friend operated sprayers that bathed them in steaming-hot water.
The beans and peas were then dropped into tall metal chutes that fed them straight into a stream of open-topped, label-free cans about 20 or 25 feet below — constantly moving, spotless and gleaming. It would take no more than a second or two to fill up each can, maybe less. It went on like this all night, every night, and with a fairly deafening sound.
Each and every night for about two weeks, my beered-up friends and I would climb to the top of the tower, say hello to our friend, and piss right into the chutes that fed the beans and peas into the cans. We hit maybe 200 to 250 cans each night, minimum.
We were anarchic, fuck-all middle-class kids, but we’d been raised by good people in well-to-do homes and weren’t psychopaths. If guys with our backgrounds had the rage to piss into cans of vegetables every night you can bet others have done this since. A lot. Pissing into prepared food containers is what powerless people do to give them the feeling that they’ve somehow evened up the score. Think of this the next time you buy Del Monte.
Another structure that I care about in the Woolsey-threatened realm is The Old Place, the storied restaurant-saloon in the Agoura hills. This morning at 5:45 am the Malibu Times‘ Emily Sawickireported that there is “no known damage” to The Old Place….hooray!
Before this evening I’d never attended the Brooklyn-based Broadcast Film Critics Documentary awards. It was well-organized, briskly paced — by any measure an agreeable, fraternal family affair. Thanks to Joey Berlin and John DeSimio for making it easy to attend.
The big winners were Morgan Neville‘s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (Best Documentary, Best Director ands Best Editing) and Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi‘s Free Solo (Best Sports Documentary, Best Innovative Documentary, and Best Cinematography). Michael Moore (whose Fahrenheit 11/9 lost the Best Political Doc award to RBG) was handed the Critics’ Choice Lifetime Achievement Award. It was presented to Moore by Robert De Niro.
The Best Limited Documentary Series trophy went to Judd Apatow’s TheZenDiariesofGarryShandling — the only BFCA win that I was seriously enthused about. The Best Ongoing Documentary Series award went to Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.
I couldn’t find MaggieMay on Facebook, but she’s right. Allow me to blend mine with hers. Yesterday’s Viggo Mortensen pile-on was a “meaningless” expression of “progress-hindering semantic” crap by a bunch of p.c. nellies. Viggo was making “a very good point.” Whiteys “said the word back then while perpetrating racism…now they do the same racist shit while avoiding the word, playing at being non-racist because the slur isn’t uttered.” Viggo has been duly scolded but that’ll do for now. Everyone needs to ease up and stop shouting long enough to consider how gentle he’s always been and what he actually meant. And if that’s not enough, remind yourself that everyone makes mistakes.
It’s irksome that they’re charging $25 admission — $50 if you don’t want to wait in line. It’s also pointless to talk about the Grand Canyon-sized chasm between the raggedy, real-deal experience of Lou Reed, Nico, John Cale, Andy Warhol, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker and the presumably soothing corporate representation I’ll be submitting to in a few hours.
Update: The VU exhibit is not a soother but an immersive, highly intelligent, atmospheric and educational sink-in supreme. I was wrong to suspect otherwise.
“It was just ’66 and the first half of ’67…that’s all it was.”
This morning I read Brooks Barnes‘ 11.9 N.Y. Times piece about the anxieties and convulsions that have seized Hollywood culture (“A Year After #MeToo, Hollywood’s Got a Malaise Money Can’t Cure“). And honestly? The thing that really moved me — the only element that didn’t pass along feelings of despondency — was the L.A. nightscape photo by Hunter Kerhart.
Takeaway #1: Behind closed doors, older entrenched white guys ** are furious and depressed and taking sedatives. Yeah, I know — poor babies, right?
Takeaway #2: Apart from the flush salaries and perks, Hollywood has become a miserable, hellish place in which to work — contentious, combative, paranoid, Stalinoid, progressive but quota-driven, polluted with downmarket crap (superheroes, sequel-itis, horror films) and seemingly devoid of any semblance of pride, joy, comfort or (are you joking?) ’70s-style creative swagger.
Takeaway #3: Everyone “supports” #MeToo, diversity and representation in the ranks — forward into the future, etc. But at the same time the knives and clubs are out. It’s I Am Legend out there. And poor Viggo Mortensen, bruised and bloody on the floor, is wondering how he could have been so clumsy or stupid for a single second in the billions of seconds that have comprised his life. And the fires of hell (probably sparked by a campfire that some asshole forgot to douse) are consuming everything west of the 405.
N.Y. Times photo by Hunter Kerhart.
And on top of all this the vast majority of Americans — the flyover audience Hollywood is looking to simultaneously fleece and entertain and in rare moments emotionally seduce — hates politically correct culture.
If there’s one overriding conviction out there in Bumblefuckland it’s that the p.c. comintern is about fickle sensitivity, arch finger-pointing and instant Twitter lynchings. So much so that Average Joes not only felt sorry for the repulsive Brett Kavanaugh but doubled-down on their loathing of coastal elites by electing some seriously toxic righties a few days ago. Urban libtards are so despised that a sizable chunk of America supports Trumpian Mussolini culture as a bulwark against progressive upheaval. And yet Hollywood decision-makers, forced or obliged or seriously committed to accommodating themselves to p.c. changes, are ironically tasked with creating diversionary dreamscapes for people who despise the very ground they walk upon. Or something like that.
Dictator checklist: “You’re a narcissist who likes to see his name and face on buildings. You appoint family members to positions of power. You hold rallies when you’re not running, and they’re scary. You talk about jailing the press and political opponents. You want to hold military parades and muse openly about being president for life. You use your office for personal financial gain. You love other dictators. You lie so freely your supporters don’t know what the truth is any more, and don’t care. For a coup to work, it is first necessary for truth itself to be destroyed. As well as the people who try to report it. We now have state TV in this country — an actual propaganda channel with reporters that openly endorse the leader. And we have people who openly oversee the elections they are running in. Truth isn’t truth, the press is the enemy of the people, there are ‘alternative facts’, ‘there’s no proof of anything,’ ‘what you’re seeing and reading isn’t what’s happening’,” etc.
Six years ago Svetlana Cvetko, Graemm McGavin, Rihannon McGavin and I visitedGuillermo del Toro‘s Bleak House in Thousand Oaks — the greatest temple of horror-film worship that’s ever existed. Today Guillermo tweeted that Bleak House may be in danger of being consumed by the Woolsey Fire, and that he’s been forced to evacuate his home (which is right next door). I’m SICK over the possibility of Bleak House being engulfed in flames. It would be like the accidental burning of the Alexandria library.
Less than ten minutes into my first viewing of Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, I knew it was at least a B-plus. By the time it ended I was convinced it was a solid A. Now, weeks later, I’m convinced it’s a bit more. Like one of the ballsiest big-studio films made in a long while. Or something close to that.
It’s obviously not a typical Reitman film — it doesn’t deliver emotionally soothings a la Juno and Up In The Air. It is, however, a sharp and lucid account of a real-life political tragedy — the destruction of former Colorado Senator Gary Hart‘s presidential campaign due to press reports of extra-marital womanizing with campaign volunteer Donna Rice.
Said it before, saying it again: The Front Runner is a brilliantly captured account of a sea-change in press coverage of presidential campaigns — about a moment when everything in the media landscape suddenly turned tabloid.
It’s coming from the same cinematic gene pool that produced Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate, Mike Nichols‘ Primary Colors and James Vanderbilt‘s Truth. Similar wavelength, same calibre. And Hugh Jackman delivers a steady, measured, well-honed portrayal of Hart. The whole cast, in fact, is pretty close to perfect — every detail, every note, every wisecrack is spot-on.
Why, then, are some critics giving Reitman’s film, which is absolutely his best since Up In The Air, the back of their hands?
In a nutshell, critics can be cool to films that portray journalists in a less-than-admirable light, which is what The Front Runner certainly does. The Miami Herald reporters who followed Hart around and broke the Rice story are depicted as sleazy fellows, and the relationship between the Miami Herald and Hart is depicted as deeply antagonistic, especially on the Herald’s part.
Yes, Hart screwed himself with his own carelessness, but the Herald is depicted as being more or less on the same level as the National Enquirer.
A paragraph from A.O. Scott ‘s 11.5.18 N.Y. Times review suggests an animus that has nothing to do with the general quality of Reitman’s film.
“A number of recent movies have taken a heroic view of the press,” Scott noted, “in particular the old-fashioned, printed-on-paper kind. Spotlight and The Post, for instance, depict journalists as tribunes of civic righteousness.
“The Front Runner, based on a book by Matt Bai, a former writer for The New York Times Magazine, takes a dimmer view of the fourth estate. It belongs to the accusatory tradition of Ace in the Hole, Network and Absence of Malice, movies that see reporters and editors not as guardians of democracy but as barbarians inside the gates of the republic, subverting its values through cynicism, self-importance and mercenary scandal-mongering.”
Remember how Vanderbilt’s Truth (’15), a whipsmart journalism drama, was tarnished in the press for portraying the collapse of Mary Mapes‘ faulty 60 Minutes investigation into George Bush‘s National Guard history and alleged cocaine use? A somewhat similar dynamic is happening right how.
In the view of Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich, Reitman’s film “side-eyes the press for whipping the story into a national firestorm.”
