In his latest THR Oscar forecast columnScott Feinberg is claiming that PastLives helmer Celine Song is a more broadly popular Best Director nominee than PoorThings’ YorgosLanthimos, TheHoldovers’ Alexander Payne and Maestro’s BradleyCooper.
This is insanity! What kind of woke-ass, gender-focused sewing circle is Feinberg having tea with?
PastLives is a nicelyassembled but unsatisfyingrelationshipfilm that doesn’t do the thing or bring it home (i.e., in crude terms it doesn’t let you come). It has been written off as a decent try by sensible industry folk, and yet Feinberg is allowing himself to be fiddle-fiddled by the A24 safe-space mafia…the identity fanatics who are whispering “we need a woman of color in the mix.”
I just want to come clean and admit that despite my projecting a devotional film buff profile all my life or at least since the ‘80s, I never got around to seeing Carl Dreyer‘s The Passion of Joan of Arc (’28) until last night.
But I finally went there, man, and now I’m “experienced” in the JimiHendrix sense of the term.
An English-subtitled version of the definitve director’s cut (i.e., the 1981 Oslo version) became available for free public domain streaming on 1.1.24, you see, and that’s what I watched. Lying in bed, MacBook Pro, best headphones.
Good God, what a lapel-grabbing, no-way-out masterpiece! Right away it leaps out at you and says “stop scrolling and whatever the hell else you’re doing and grim up and give it up and watch this, will you?”
I knew right away it was made by a genius…a no-bullshit artist from the same general gene pool as Eisenstein, Murnau, Fincher, Eggers, Kubrick, Ford, Bresson, Fellini, Kurosawa, Scorsese, Powell.
The incessant close-ups, the feeling of Dreyer being in total control, the penetrating focus, the brilliant use of montage, the tracking shots, the sets (painted pink so as to stand out against the white sky), the anguish, the purity, the pain and the cruelty.
What a bleeding, bllistering, open-hearted titular performance by ReneeJeanFalconetti.
And the cinematography by RuolphMate, who also shot ForeignCorrespondent and Gilda and directed D.O.A., WhenWorldsCollide and The300Spartans (a decent sword-and-sandal epic).
I can’t stand tapping this out on the iPhone with the car running…morelater.
We haven't seen much snow in the northeast recently, and the odds are that with global warming and all we're not going to see much of the stuff from here on. Spotty, half-assed snowfalls at best.
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Otherwise all I can say is that (a) Zac Efron sure looks better without the buffed-up wrestler bod and that godawful Prince Valiant hair, and (b) award–wise Colman Domingo, due respect, isn’t happening,
Faced with a new round of accusations over plagiarism in her scholarly work and despite the rumored back-channel intercession of Barack Obama, Harvard University's first Black president, Claudine Gay, has resigned.
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Other than believing that A New Hope and especially The Empire Strikes Back are the only first-rate Star Wars films ever made, HE has no investment in the currently evolving Star Wars franchise.
And I couldn’t care less about the utter ruining of the material, the legend and the lore by Lucasfilm’s Kathy Kennedy (the CriticalDrinker has been saying this for some time) and particularly her plan to launch an Untitled New Jedi Order film that will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and star Daisy Ridley as Rey.
Average Joe fanboys hate this, of course. They’re up in arms. They don’t think the Star Wars franchise should be about pushing woke values or feminism but classic escapism, primal themes and the usual yaddah yaddah.
Obaid-Chinoy’s Wiki page describes her as “a Pakistani-Canadian journalist, filmmaker and activist known for her work in films that highlight gender inequality against women.”
All Hollywood hiring practices are “performative.”
The primary goal has always been to make money, of course, and in the case of Barbie it didn’t seem unusually risky to tap into the mythology of a 60-year-old doll franchise and then give it a sassy progressive spin.
That said, nothing will weaken your standing or get you fired faster than your rivals sensing you’re trying to do something other than make money.
Askyourselfthis: if you were the progressive-minded senior editor of a sweepingUSC–fundedstudyofHollywoodhiringpracticesregardingwomen and personsofcolor, and particularly if your report was created under the imprimatur of the USCAnnenbergInclusionInitiative, would you be inclined to be (a) critical or admonishing or punitive or (b) less so in that regard?
ThreeFundamentalHollywoodLaws: (a) nobody knows anything, (b) nobody wants to stand out by making bold creative decisions of any kind, and (c) you don’t need a conspiracy of cowardice given that cowardice is so deeply embedded in our DNA.
…you think first and foremost of a kind of gentle but vaguely flinty mindset (intelligence, insight, sensitivity). Then you think of drink-and-dial MilesRaymond in Alexander Payne’s Sideways (‘04). The current focus, of course, is Barton Academy’s ancient history professor Paul Hunham in TheHoldovers (Payne + David Hemingson), but in a certain light Miles lingers because of what happened…a grievous wrong that must be addressed and corrected at long last.