Hollywood Elsewhere is looking for succinct dismissals — films seen or released within the last 12 months that fall short, aren’t good enough, don’t make it, can’t cut the mustard.

Keep the posts short and tight. State the title and explain what the basic problem is, and nothing more than that.

Example: Early on Chloë Zhao‘s The Rider paints itself into a narrative corner (head injury, no more rodeo-riding) and thereafter has NOWHERE TO GO, and at the same time it refuses to resolve this central problem in the manner of Darren Aronofsky ‘s The Wrestler. This is why it’s an IXNAY and a NO-GO.

Give the Motion Picture Academy credit for at least respecting Psycho enough to nominate Alfred Hitchcock for Best Director. That was a fairly nervy statement for a relatively stodgy era and mindset. Oscars and Oscar nominations generally went to prestige-level dramas and spectacles, and never before to a stark black-and-white horror film that involved knives, nudity, lunch-hour “matinees”, cross-dressing and a mummified corpse.

Yes, Academy members were essentially saluting Hitch for Psycho‘s huge impact on film culture and for making a lot of money, but still…

57 and 1/2 years have elapsed since the 1960 Oscars were handed out on…good God, 4.17.61. Once again, HE considers whether the top-ranked winners were appropriately feted or over-praised.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

One of the 1969 movie posters being used for Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is a bus ad for Robert Aldrich‘s The Killing of Sister George. It was recently spotted and snapped by Peter Avellino (Mr. Peel’s Sardine Liqueur) and re-posted yesterday by Hollywood Elsewhere (“Tarantino in Westwood“). Today I noticed that a Kino Lorber Bluray version will pop on 11.27.18. I don’t think I can go there but I’d definitely stream it. Commentary tracks by film historians Kat Ellinger and David Del Valle + actor/filmmaker Michael Varrati and camera operator Brian West.

Minor problem: The Cinerama Releasing Corporation initially released Sister George on 12.12.68, or roughly eight months before the Manson murders.

“Peter Jackson [has] combined cutting-edge special effects with impeccable curatorial instincts to bring the First World War to life in a way that outmatches and outclasses even the best efforts of movie fiction (from All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930 to last year’s Journey’s End). Gifted with more than 600 hours of archive footage from Imperial War Museums, Jackson has sculpted a fly-on-the-wall documentary (a Great War reality show, if you like) that is, at times, intensely moving just as it is relentlessly eerie.” — from Kevin Maher’s Times review, posted on 10.16.

They Shall Not Grow Old opens commercially in the U.K. today (10.16). Doc will also be distributed to all of Britain’s secondary schools after release. Surely someone on this side of the pond is trying to secure distribution rights.

Read more

After three or four weeks of gratis sampling, the HE:plus paywall went up tonight. Half of HE content will henceforth be free, the other half for a price. Three and three daily, or more depending on the breaks. No worries if you’d rather just stick with HE free, which has been rolling now for 14 years. But I’m going to push as hard as I can with HE:plus and keep the doors open, so we’ll see what happens. Thought: After each posting I could read it aloud and maybe digress with a thought or two, and then post the mp3 above or below. Wouldn’t add much to the workload. Making this up as I go along.

The presumption all along has been that 20th Century Fox’s longstanding intention to release James Gray‘s Ad Astra in mid-January meant that an Academy-qualifying release in December (i.e., two months hence) would eventually be announced. Well, forget it. January is history and the new opening date for this “epic science fiction thriller” is now 5.24.19. Which presumably means that Fox marketers figured that the benefit of a December ’18 platform debut wouldn’t amount to much, and that a Cannes debut will probably deliver a greater bounce. Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland and Jamie Kennedy costar.

Claire Denis‘ High Life (A24) reportedly had an underwhelming showing at Roy Thomson Hall during the Toronto Film Festival. I was told by a journalist friend that half the audience had bolted by the time it ended, partly because it had begun late but mainly, he said, because the science-fiction drama had injected a certain lethargy. From that moment on I had no interest. I can smell trouble, and you can’t trust the big-name critics as they’re mostly in the tank for Denis.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

The big five nominees for the third annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards were announced this morning, and Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Free Solo led the pack with six nominations. The other five hotties are Minding the Gap and Wild Wild Country (five nominations each) and Dark Money, Hitler’s Hollywood and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (for noms each).

Hollywood Elsewhere couldn’t stand to watch Free Solo because the no-safety-line, life-and-death dynamic freaks me out. That’s obviously not a putdown but a simple, no-big-deal admission that I couldn’t bear to watch the damn thing.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

A decade or two will sometimes offer a clarifying, cut-through-the-bullshit perspective, especially when it comes to Oscar winners. It’s been 25 and 1/2 years since the 1992 Oscars were handed out on 3.29.93, so I figured I’d run through the top-ranked winners and decide if any mistakes or oversights were made.

Best Picture: Giving it to Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven was the right call. It’s a rugged, scrappy western full of irony and lament and all kinds of tortured guilt and self-loathing on the part of Eastwood’s Bill Munny character, and it simultaneously takes a hard look at Hollywood’s whole violent tradition of glorifying frontier justice. And yet Martin Brest‘s Scent of a Woman, manipulative and pandering as it sometimes was, offers a richer emotional catharsis. It has three or four big-payoff scenes compared to Unforgiven‘s two — “we all got it comin'” plus the violent barroom finale.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

This morning President Trump told journalists that Jamal Khashoggi could have been gutted, sliced and diced by “rogue killers”. He emphasized that King Salman‘s denial of any Saudi Arabian involvement in Khashoggi’s disappearance “could not have been stronger” so “who knows?” What a shameless sociopath.