Soon-Yi Testimony

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If after reading Daphne Merkin’s just-posted Soon-Yi Previn interview as well as Moses Farrow’s 5.23.18 essay (“A Son Speaks Out“)…if after reading these personal testimonies you’re still in the “I believe Dylan Farrow” camp…if you haven’t at least concluded that there’s a highly significant amount of ambiguity and uncertainty in this whole mishegoss, then I don’t know what to say to you. There’s probably nothing that can be said to you.

Journo pally: “Ugh…I’m starting to loathe Ronan and Dylan Farrow.”

Toronto Voters Tumble for “Green Book”

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Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book has won the Toronto Film Festival’s Grosch People’s Choice Award for most popular film! Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma and Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk were the second and first runners-up. A Star Is Born came in…what, fourth? Astonishing. (What happened to the suspected ballot-stuffing thing?) HE’s mind is officially blown. Downside for Green Book: It’s now in danger of being labelled the Best Picture front-runner.

Documentary Award: Free Solo. The Biggest Little Farm and This Changes Everything were the second and first runners-up.

Midnight Madness award winner: The Man Who Feels No Pain. Assassination Nation and Halloween are the second and first runners-up, respectively.

Scratch The Old Guys and Who’s Left?

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Yes, Joe Biden feels and looks too old (that over-sized neck wattle is a real problem), but my insect antennae are sensing that he would win the allegiance of 50-plus conservative hinterland guys, and would therefore beat Donald Trump handily in 2020. Mark Harris nonetheless feels he’s too old, and he’s not wrong about the problem of Biden or Bernie running for a second term. Eliminate those two and who’s left? Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Meryl Streep. Yes, Streep.

Posted on 7.15.18: “I resent Warren for not mounting a tough challenge against Hillary Clinton in ’15 and ’16. If she had she might’ve saved us from Trump. That aside she has a passionate, humanist schoolmarm voice, and is tough and scrappy.

“I like Sen. Kamala Harris a little more than Warren because she’s even scrappier — you could use the term prosecutorial — and I love the idea of a whipsmart mixed-ethnic woman of 53 (she’ll turn 55 on 10.20.19) running against the dessicated, pot-bellied, none-too-bright Donald Trump, who’ll turn 74 on 6.20.20.”

This Is Not Cinerama

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The Cinerama Dome is commemorating their 55th anniversary by showing four seminal Cinerama features — The Battle of the Bulge (9.30), Grand Prix (10.7), How The West Was Won (10.21) and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (11.7). They’re all being projected in “Digital Cinerama.” All but one debuted at the Dome, and three were single-camera, faux-Cinerama 70 mm presentations. How The West Was Won was originally shown via the classic three-projector, three-panel celluloid system of yore, but not this time. This is apparently the first time that “Digital Cinerama” has been presented at the Dome.

Waiting With Bated Breath

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The winners of the Toronto Film Festival’s Grolsch People’s Choice awards will be announced at 1 pm eastern. The most popular movie award is almost surely between A Star Is Born and Green Book. Everyone is presuming that Toronto’s Lady Gaga fans have avalanched the voting but maybe not. Peter Farrelly knows the odds are against his film, but if Green Book wins…eureka! The suspense is in the air and bearing down…nails are being chewed as we speak. HE reminder: Even if A Star Is Born wins (which I’m assuming will happen), Green Book is still a Best Picture contender. It can’t not be.

Backed Into A Corner

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Panos Cosmatos‘ Mandy opened two days ago. Between Telluride and Toronto I haven’t had a chance to see it. Am I looking forward to seeing this alleged gonzo revenge bloodbath flick? No. Do I feel obliged to see it regardless? Of course. You can’t ignore ironically fetishized cult-frenzy films in this day and age. Am I equating Mandy with major dental surgery? Yes. Will effete know-it-alls like Bob Strauss make fun of me if I don’t see it? Yes. So Mandy-wise I’m between a rock and a hard place. I have to man up and see it, and I will do that.

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Buchanan Understands

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In his first Oscar-odds-assessment piece of the season, N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” columnist Kyle Buchanan notes that “uncertainty makes the Best Actress field hard to predict, since The Favourite fields three women, each of whom could position herself as a lead: Olivia Colman shines as a diminished Queen Anne manipulated by two crafty women in her court, played with comic precision by Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz.”

However, later in the piece Buchanan adds that “should Ms. Colman drop down to the supporting-actress category for The Favourite, she would probably coast through Oscar season, picking up trophies right and left.”

HE to 20th Century Fox award-season strategists: One, Colman’s role in The Favourite is not a lead — she’s Robert Shaw in The Sting. It would not be category fraud if she ran for supporting. And two, she’s this year’s Bruce Dern. Remember how Dern’s performance as a doddering old guy in Nebraska was praised left and right but he refused to campaign for Best Supporting Actor? And then lost? He could have easily won if he’d gone for supporting. Easily.

Ballot-Stuffing Gaga Fans?

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The Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice Awards will be revealed tomorrow. I’m hoping that Green Book wins the popularity prize, but the betting is that A Star Is Born has it in the bag; ditto Lady Gaga for Best Actress. The suspicion is that high-fervor Lady Gaga fans will be avalanching the process.

It’s been claimed that the voting system isn’t fair — that you don’t have to see the film to vote & can vote multiple times for the same film with different email addresses. But TIFF spokesperson Andrea Grau says this isn’t true — that TIFF has “ensured that an individual cannot vote for the same film multiple times by email address. The data is processed through our system which then analyses the origin of the vote and matches votes to TIFF’s ticket buyer information and database.

“Using these methods any attempts to sway the result through mass campaign voting can be quickly identified and discounted.”

It’s also been suggested that TIFF should reinstate the rule that voting for a film is limited to those who actually watched a film (e.g., entering some sort of proof or barcode or whatever). I’m not even sure when or if that rule was removed. I’ve asked around; hard to pin down.

Irony of the Game

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Universal’s two big Oscar ponies are Damien Chazelle‘s First Man (10.12) and Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book (11.21). By any comprehensive, even-handed standard Chazelle’s film is the grander, more far-reaching and more muscular achievement — a movie that delivers a somewhat familiar tale in unusually intimate terms, and with fresh cinematic brushstrokes. And yet Farrelly’s film, conventional and safely conceived as it is, is more emotionally winning than Chazelle’s by a country mile. And it deals with a subject and a climate that every over-45 person can recall (black-white relations as they used to be in the bad old days) while engaging audiences in an easy, comforting, non-challenging way. In a phrase, Green Book has a better shot at winning the Best Picture Oscar. I’m sorry but it does.

Slumberball

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After averaging five or six hours of nightly sleep over the last two and a half weeks (Telluride + Toronto), I actually allowed myself to catch eight hours last night. Which is why I began a little later this morning than usual. Perhaps a little more relaxation this weekend, and then New York Film Festival press screenings begin early Monday morning. The first will be (what the hell) Alex Ross Perry‘s Her Smell.

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