From just-posted Indiewire piece, “A Star Is Born Is a Crowdpleaser, But Does That Make It an Oscar Frontrunner?“:

“As the fall season continues to come into focus, A Star is Born remains the one movie with massive commercial potential coming out at the height of Oscar season. But the Bradley Cooper-directed update to this famous rags-to-riches saga has already become an internet meme weeks before its release. As the movie continues to gain traction, there are still many questions about its long-term appeal: Will Cooper’s movie dominate a dense season or is it dwarfed by some of the more audacious contenders?”

HE translation: In the face of Kris Tapley‘s fascinating, almost humorous refusal to walk back his early proclamation about Cooper’s undoubtedly well made crowd-pleaser, Indiewire (i.e., Eric Kohn) feels there’s enough credibility to the burgeoning notion that A Star Is Born has been over-hyped in terms of its Best Picture or Best Director chances…there’s certainly enough cred to discuss and kick it around.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson says in the below discussion that while A Star Is Born is good for this or that nomination, whether or not it wins “is a whole different discussion.” Kohn claims that in the popular movie realm, Black Panther has a stronger team of horses than A Star Is Born. This may be true.

The first photo of Tom Hanks-as-Fred Rogers surfaced yesterday.  It’s from the set of Marielle Heller‘s You Are My Friend, a Rogers biopic (inspired by the Morgan Neville doc) that will open on 10.18.19.

Fred Rogers, man. What a nice guy. I mean, what a really nice guy…right? Gentle manner, red sweater, blue sneakers, an Eisenhower Republican…what’s not to like? I know I’m sounding a little facetious here, but he was a “nice guy”, and he always will be.

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[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh tried to defiantly lie and bluster his way through his Senate Judiciary Committee rebuttal testimony yesterday. Any reasonably sane, semi-mature, level-headed person who believes Kavanaugh’s bullshit is either (a) flat-out lying or (b) afflicted with serious deficiencies as a reader of human behavior.

“You can’t kill my life and career over my rapey, blind-drunk high-school and Yale shenanigans…that shit doesn’t count, I was 17 or 18, Mark Judge and I were fucking around…whatever. Oh, and fuck you eternally, Democratic conspirators!”

I’ve run into guys like Kavanaugh from time to time, and they’re mostly about their lack of empathy (“The world is for the few,” etc.) and their like-minded buddy-bruhs and shared hostilities and belief in clubby entitlements. And I hate, hate, hate his crude, vaguely moaning, thick-tongued way of speaking — I loathe and despise the sound of his disgusting seal-bark voice. Ope!…ope!…ope!…ope! And those butt-ugly pig eyes. In a suit. The oinky eyes of a pugnacious Trenton, New Jersey bartender who’s been caught skimming.

Kavanaugh’s sickening testimony followed the obviously truthful, straight-from-the-heart, straight-from-the-pain testimony of Palo Alto psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford. Her words and memories are and were obviously, 100%, drop-to-your-knees lucid and sincere, and shouldn’t be degraded by side-by-side comparisons to Kavanaugh’s Irish-street-punk taunts and rage-bombs.

I had to train into the city and therefore missed Kavanaugh’s testimony. So he started things off with a bang, huh? I’ll see the replay this evening but in the meantime, any impressions? Question: What’s that twitchy thing Kavanaugh does with his nose, simultaneously sniffing and blinking his eyes?

Sen. Lindsey Graham’s behavior today was, I felt, fairly disgusting,

It was announced today that Warner Bros. will release Clint Eastwood‘s The Mule, based on a true story about an old guy who volunteers his services as a drug mule, on 12.14.18. Eastwood has directed and produced the film, and plays the lead role to boot.

It wasn’t long ago when the announcement of a Eastwood film opening in December would stir notions of possible Oscar contention. That’s due to the impactful December releases of Million Dollar Baby (12.15.04) and Gran Torino (12.12.08), and to a lesser extent American Sniper (12.25.14).

But the critical responses to Eastwood’s recent Sully (’16) and The 15:17 to Paris (’18) have, due respect, diminished the buzz along these lines. Variety‘s Brent Lang has flatly stated that The Mule “is seen as more of a commercial effort” and is “not expected to be a major Oscar contender.”

The Mule costars Bradley Cooper, Michael Pena, Laurence Fishburne and Dianne Wiest.

I don’t “know” anything but here’s how I see it, or am feeling it. Melissa McCarthy‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me? performance is still at the top because of the surprise factor. I wasn’t expecting to be as strongly affected as I was, and I believed every word, every line, every conveyance. Glenn Close‘s silent partner in The Wife is a close second for reasons I’ve recently explained — it’s a great zeitgeist-capturing performance that is also very specific and beautifully measured and released, especially in terms of her character’s anger. Cold War‘s Joanna Kulig is ranked third because she’s simply given one of the slyest and most memorable force-of-personality performances of the year, hands down — the most fascinating, combustible, full-hearted and femme fatale-ish. Viola Davis‘s survivor in Widows is not diminished by being in fourth-place, but as gripping as her tough woman in a tense, high-pressure situation, I can’t see ranking her above McCarthy, Close and Kulig. Lastly I’ve got Lady Gaga, who for my money has delivered the goods in A Star Is Born — I believed her character’s situation, felt her currents, etc.

Christine Blasey Ford‘s testimony has been quite touching. She was clearly terrified but everything about her — that look in her eyes, the glasses, the vibe of anxious sincerity, her quiet, quivering voice, her body language, that lock of blonde hair dangling in front of her face and that moment when she choked up when Sen. Diane Feinstein was describing her ordeal — tells you she’s not lying. Not to mention the other two accusers and that anonymous woman who, according to her mother, allegedly witnessed Kavanaugh being sexually aggressive with a woman during a 1998 social occasion. How is Brett Kavanaugh‘s Supreme Court nomination not toast?

“They can’t begin to comprehend what you are” is a line from this trailer for Simon Kunberg‘s Dark Phoenix (20th Century Fox, 2.14.19), the X-Men spin-off movie focusing on Sophie Turner‘s titular character (aka Jean Grey). Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t another way of saying “they can’t begin to comprehend what you are”…wouldn’t another way of saying this be “they have no idea what you are”?

Dark Phoenix costars James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Evan Peters, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alexandra Shipp, plus Jessica Chastain, Ato Essandoh and Scott Shepherd.

Last night I read Alex Ross‘s 9.26 New Yorker essay about the long and arduous crusade to assemble and release Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind=. It was comforting to read that someone from a reputable, major-league print publication had finally pointed the finger at the chief culprit behind the endless delays that afflicted this endeavor — Welles’ longtime girlfriend and Other Side of the Wind costar Oja Kodar.

Ross: “When Welles fans discuss the fate of Wind, the name Oja Kodar inevitably surfaces, often in an unflattering light. A Croatian sculptor and actress, she co-wrote the script, had a lead role in the film, and — as the Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum has established — directed three scenes of the film-within-the-film.

“Kodar has been accused of holding up efforts to complete it, whether because of excessive demands or on account of a psychological block against seeing it finished. Yet she has artistic as well as legal authority over the work. In 2015, she made a rare public appearance at a Welles festival in Woodstock, Illinois. (The town was formerly the site of the Todd School for Boys, where Welles’s theatrical career began.) In an interview with Rosenbaum, Kodar made clear her profound attachment to Wind.

“Now in her late seventies, she is a charismatic woman who speaks in a mixture of poetic flights and pungent aphorisms.”

I haven’t seen Ryan Suffern‘s A Final Cut for Orson: 40 years In The Making, which tells the story of the assembling and completion of Welles film. I have no idea if Kodar’s influence upon this effort has been discussed or even alluded to in Suffern’s 38-minute film, but I’ll be interested to see what’s what. Has anyone seen it? Can anyone shed light?

Here are two articles that I posted, in 2015 and 2016, about Kodar’s role in the process.

Five weeks ago I declared for the third or fourth time that Glenn Close is definitely going to be Best Actress nominated for The Wife, and she actually may win this time. Repeating: The Wife is a solid double-A quality package — a tidy, well-ordered, somewhat conservative-minded, theatrical-style drama. Some may say it’s a little too stagey, but it’s as good as this sort of thing gets. It satisfies, add up, delivers. Will the New Academy Kidz fall in line? They should. Brilliant acting is brilliant acting.

Right now 20 out of 22 Gold Derby “experts” (myself included) have Close among their five most likely Best Actress contenders. (The two hold-outs are USA Today‘s Brian Truitt and KPCC’s Claudia Puig.) But what’s the feeling within the HE community? The Wife has been playing in theatres since last month so what’s the verdict? Is Close a lock for a Best Actress nomination or not? The fact that she’s been nominated six times previously is a decisive factor or not?

Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, from a 9.26 podcast interview with Close: “Is The Wife, a film about an older, smart, accomplished woman who was wronged by a man, but stood by him, and who eventually comes to realize her own worth and stands up for herself, particularly resonant in the aftermath of the presidential election defeat of Hillary Clinton, not to mention the onset on the #MeToo era?”

Glenn Close: “Yeah. What I love about this movie is that what we ended up creating with a very, very close collaboration of all of us, is a highly-complex, very specific relationship. And I think the more specific you can be, funnily enough, the more it can universally resonate with people — they will bring to it and take away from it whatever it is that they have in their life. But it will be an authentic resonance and an authentic emotion.”

It’s 8:10 am in Connecticut. Psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford will begin her Senate Judiciary Committee testimony less than two hours hence. She’s accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who will also testify today, of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school in the early 1980s. Here’s her opening statement. I don’t see how any reasonable person could determine that she’s not telling the whole painful truth.

This morning I spotted a “Page Six” photo of the recently married Michelle Williams, 38, and musician husband Phil Elverum, 40, the frontman of Mount Eerie. Williams told Vanity Fair they were secretly married last summer. I realize that I’m a neurotic about certain things, but I had four reactions when I considered the photo. One, they look happy. Two, Elverum is only 40 and he’s already half gray with a receding hairline? Three, he’s wearing extra-baggy dad jeans and a flesh-colored, low-thread-count T-shirt. Four (and worst of all), he’s wearing flip-flops? I know — conventional wisdom says I’m the guy with the problem and not Elverum, but I wouldn’t dress this way with a knife at my back.

Sidenote: On June 2, 2017 Tatyana and I sat close to Williams and then-boyfriend Jonathan Safron Foer during a late night dinner at Rome’s Pier Luigi.