The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted about La La Land‘s likely home court advantage in terms of Oscar noms and awards. Feinberg wrote this article as a kind of thumbs-up, back-pat gesture to Team La La, but it actually implies that Damian Chazelle‘s well-admired musical is a bit of a banality. Which I don’t feel is true — I’m saying that Feinberg’s piece kinda suggests this.

Feinberg’s supposition is that residents of Los Angeles (i.e., where most Academy and guild members live) “get” La La Land as a familiar tale happening on home turf, and that as long as a movie in question presents a mostly positive, upbeat, alpha-vibey representation of Los Angeles and movie culture in particular (as La La Land does), the odds favor a win or two.

But the very finest Los Angeles-set films, of course, have never been alpha-vibey. They’ve all been about crime, smog, corruption, fallen angels, moral ambiguity and existential drift.

A few of the best in this realm are John Boorman‘s Point Blank, Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye, Robert Aldrich‘s Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Knife, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Big Lebowski, Frank Perry‘s Play It As It Lays, Martin Ritt‘s No Down Payment, Howard Hawks‘ The Big Sleep, Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Richard Fleischer‘s The New Centurions, Joel Schumacher‘s Falling Down, William Wellman and George Cukor‘s versions of A Star Is Born and John Schlesinger‘s The Day of the Locust. Others?

Feinberg mentions a few downbeat but highly regarded L.A-set films that received no Best Picture nominations — Easy Rider (drug dealing), The Player (glib concepts, shallow manipulations, an impulsive murder of a screenwriter), Mulholland Drive (dreamscape horrors, mental afllictions, hot lezzy sex scene), Training Day (LAPD corruption), Nightcrawler (cutthroat video paparazzi) and Straight Outta Compton (racial tensions).

I haven’t seen either of these films on a really big, well-lighted screen…ever? Absorbing the classic 1960 John Sturges western will help to flush out memories of Antoine Fuqua’s remake, and as for Bullitt….well, I need to light a small candle for poor Robert Vaughn, who passed just after the election of Donald Trump, as well as Walter Chalmers — a name that will live in my head until my dying day and probably beyond that.

Trump’s response to Arnold Schwarzenegger and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln: “Even though Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s piss-poor Apprentice ratings make him look like a serious loser and not, frankly, someone I’d want to be associated all that much if at all (DJT only hangs with winners and/or billionaires), his respect for President Lincoln and particularly his idea about friendship and affection is fantastic…really really fantastic. I’m thinking in particular of my wonderful, wonderful friendship with Kanye West, who’s a great American.

“I’m not sure what ‘mystic chords of memory’ actually means but I like the sound of it. You know me — if a little bit of that A. Lincoln schwing can rub off on DJT, I’m all for it. I’m also for honoring and preserving Mr. Lincoln’s union. Reviving and rebirthing it, I mean, in a literal demographic sense. For alt-right values are surely American values — the better angels of our nature! Winning!”

A rotting rabbit, cracks in a wall, another wall turning into gooey soft clay. What is all this? What’s with the quietness? All I know is that I’m still waiting for better scary shit to happen. You have to assault people with more intensity, more shock cuts, louder sound. Goose it up!

After my initial viewing of Martin Scorsese‘s Silence (which resulted in a 12.10 review), I decided that I probably didn’t need to see it a second time. One, it’s a bear to sit through and two, I think I got everything there is to get. And yet I’m seeing it again this evening at the DGA, and then joining an after-reception. If you ask around it’s no secret that Silence hasn’t caught on all that strongly with Academy and guild members, at least as far as year-end nominations are concerned. (Nor with the blogaroos.) But perhaps Issey Ogata‘s supporting performance, which I feel is easily among the most memorable and distinctive of 2016, will resonate. Here’s that HE advertorial on Ogata’s behalf that I posted last month.

On 12.22 I posted a rant about how Sundance Film Festival media relations guy Jason Berger had taken away my beloved Express Pass, which I was honored to carry for five straight festivals (’12 thru ’16) and by which I had easy access to screenings and therefore some extra, extremely valuable writing time.

Now that I’ve been downgraded to a General Press Pass, I’ll be “back in the mosh pit, waiting in lines, requesting tickets in advance from the press office, bumming tickets from publicists, forced to hit the Holiday Cinemas pass-holders tent at least 45 minutes or an hour before a given screening, etc. And my access to public Eccles screenings, where a lot of the action often takes place, will be catch-as-catch-can.”

I just tried the online ticket request form….ridiculous.

It’s quite unfair of N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes, I feel, to focus on a pair of financially-settled sexual harassment civil suits filed against Casey Affleck in 2010 — unfortunate but minor in the grand scheme of things.

It’s even shittier to roughly equate this over-and-done-with incident with Nate Parker‘s Penn State history, Mel Gibson‘s unfortunate outbursts of ’06 and ’10, that charge of indecent sexual assault facing Bill Cosby, Amber Heard‘s withdrawn domestic violence complaint against Johnny Depp and that non-story involving Maria Schneider, Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando. Why didn’t Barnes throw in Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and Errol Flynn while he was at it?

And to suggest that Affleck hasn’t faced a lot of heat over the 2010 lawsuit because he’s connected with powerful people (i.e., his brother Ben) or because he’s white…wow. Serious off-the-reservation stuff.

In terms of Golden Globe parties and whatnot, I’m feeling more jazzed about attending two Saturday events — a late afternoon La La Land gathering followed by an evening Paramount soiree — than the Golden Globe shindigs on Sunday. There’s no point in attending the after-events if you can’t get into a late-afternoon viewing party, and who wants to endure the shuttle-service delays (Century City to the Beverly Hilton) that interfered last year, and which will probably be repeated to some extent? (Variety‘s Daniel Holloway is reporting that “tremendous security” measures will be in effect, which sounds to me like the Ninth Circle of Hell.)

The big benefit of winning a Golden Globe award is that you get to sell the fence-sitters with your acceptance speech. Remarks that are especially eloquent, confessional or heartfelt tend to enhance or underline one’s Oscar worthiness.

HE’s predictions for the GG film contests:

Motion Picture — Drama: Definitely Manchester By The Sea. The Gold Derby gang is going for Manchester with Moonlight the runner-up. I just can’t see the gently affecting, perfectly respectable Moonlight prevailing over the emotional wallop of Manchester. For some reason Variety‘s Kris Tapley is predicting that Hacksaw Ridge will take the prize — nope.

Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy: Obviously La La Land.

Best Director: La La Land‘s Damien Chazelle.

Best Actor — Drama: Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea.

Best Actress — Drama: A little man in the pit of my stomach is telling me the winner could be Elle‘s Isabelle Huppert, but I’m also thinking this little guy doesn’t get out that much. My consensus guess is that Jackie‘s Natalie Portman will take it. Tapley is predicting Arrival‘s Amy Adams….naaah.

According to an 11.11 fivethirtyeight report, roughly 57% (nudging 58%) of eligible voters cast ballots this year, which was slightly down from 58.6 percent in 2012 and 61.6 percent in 2008. A little less than half of that 58% — less than 29% of eligible voters — voted for Donald Trump.

That’s more than one out of every four voters, but less than one out of every three. Which makes the notion of a Trump mandate the stuff of fantasy, especially when coupled with Hillary Clinton‘s 2.9 million lead in the popular vote (65,844,954 or 48.2% vs. Trump’s 62,979,879 or 46.1%).

I continue to believe that support for Trump was and is largely about racial pushback — whites reading the writing on the wall and attempting to assert dominance one last time (“make American white again'”) over a changing nation that over the last 15 or 20 years has increasingly been defined by multiculturalism and politically-correct issues and criteria. On top of the general loathing for Hillary, I mean.

This opening of Risky Business clip is a reminder that as recently as the ’80s many filmmakers shot their films in an open-matte 1.37:1 aspect ratio. Even if you’re not a boxy-is-beautiful fanatic like myself, you have to admit there’s something very pleasurable about suddenly seeing all of that extra visual information on the tops of bottoms of the frames — information that has been steadfastly hidden since the forces of 1.85 fascism decreed 20 or 25 years ago that only 1.85 croppings of standard-Academy-ratio films would be offered for rental or purchase.

I don’t like acknowledging that Risky Business opened 33 and 1/3 years ago, but it did.

Filed on 8.10.13:

“Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business reflected and in some ways defined the early ’80s zeitgeist (Reagan-era morality, go for the greenbacks, the receding of progressive ’70s culture). And it brought about an ungodly torrent of tits-and-zits comedies, so numerous and pernicious that they became a genre that forever tarnished the meaning of ‘mainstream Hollywood comedy.’ But Risky Business was a perfect brew.

“The Tom Cruise-Rebecca DeMornay sex scenes were legendary, the vibe of upper-middle-class entitlement was delivered with natural authority, Joe Pantoliano‘s Guido is arguably a more memorable character than his Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos, and the opening dream sequence is just as funny and on-target in its depiction of encroaching doom as Woody Allen‘s Bergmanesque train-car sequence at the beginning of Stardust Memories.

“I had an invite to a special Risky Business screening at the Beverly Hills Academy a week before the opening, but I blew it off because a girlfriend was visiting that night and things were hot and heavy at the time. I wound up catching it ten days later at a theatre in Westwood, and I remember saying to myself after it ended, ‘Wow, what I was thinking when I missed that screening?’

Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song, a mid-Obama administration nostalgia flick (shot in 2011 and ’12) that nobody cares about, will be world premiered on Friday, 3.10 at Austin’s South by Southwest film festival.

Big deal — Malick’s film was largely shot in Austin (where he also lives, right?) so where else would the big opening happen? Plus the SXSW debut is only 7 days before the commercial unveiling on 3.17, and the film will almost certainly screen for big-city critics before 3.10.

I know this is asking a lot, but if Broad Green wants anyone to talk about Song to Song as a film of interest or possible excitement they’re going to have to assemble and release (gasp!) a trailer. And maybe even a one-sheet. The release of such materials would unfortunately violate the privacy and sanctity of the post-production editing process, which Malick has been enjoying for over four years, but sooner or later even artist-poet types have to meet the requirements of the market.

My head is telling me that Gavin Wiesen‘s All Nighter (Good Deed, 3.17) probably isn’t all that great, but my gut is telling me “hold on, this might be okay.” Logic tells me that a film that began shooting in July 2015 and didn’t open last year probably has issues, but J.K. Simmons is a charismatic movie star, and he looks and sounds just right in this thing, not overdoing it, playing it dry and cool. This is the kind of role that Robert DeNiro used to play in his sleep. So maybe. Emile Hirsch is scaring me a little bit (vomiting at the dinner table bit is really bad) but a little voice is telling me this might have a little bit of a Midnight Run thing going on.