I realized a half-hour ago that I’m not feeling a lot of Warren Beatty mojo in my blood right now, certainly not enough to make me drive all the way to Goleta today in order to watch Beatty receive the Kirk Douglas Award at the Bacara Resort. Roger Durling and the Santa Barbara Film Festival are sponsoring the event, and as much as I love and support Roger and his many tributes, I can’t overcome the indifference I’ve been feeling about Beatty lately. Something snapped inside when he delayed a planned interview a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t a huge deal, but on some level I suddenly felt as if I was Hubert Humphrey campaigning in the 1960 West Virginia primary in the rain. One result is that the idea of abandoning the column for six hours in order to drive up there in order to take part in a big smooch-ass ceremony suddenly feels like a journey too far. I’ve attended several Kirk Douglas Award ceremonies before, and I will hopefully attend many more in the future. All hail the Santa Barbara Film Festival, and I’ll always admire and respect Beatty for his long and brilliant career. Just not tonight.

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The New York Film Critics Circle having divvied up their choice awards in a mostly fair and judicious manner, first and foremost by handing their Best Film award to Damien Chazelle‘s La La Land. They also pleasured Moonlight‘s Barry Jenkins with a Best Director award, Manchester By The Sea’s Casey Affleck with a Best Actor trophy, and Elle‘s Isabelle Huppert as their Best Actress pick. The towering Michelle Williams won Best Supporting Actress for Manchester By The Sea, and Mahershala Ali won Best Supporting Actor for delivering a brief but compassionate performance in Moonlight. Manchester‘s Kenneth Lonergan won the NYFCC’s Best Screenplay award, and Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America was named Best Documentary.

Best Film, La La Land (HE reaction: Agreement, approval. I would’ve gone for Manchester but La La Land is brilliant, exuberant — it gains with each viewing. And the Moonlight foo-foos were beaten back…yes!)

Best Director, Barry Jenkins, Moonlight (HE reaction — respectful disagreement — Moonlight is a fine, smallish film about caring, loneliness, intimacy and compassion, but using three separate actors in three succeeding stages of life to depict a single character is not, to me, a mindblowing dramatic strategy — it’s just a strategy — overpraised by the foo-foos and the focused-agenda crowd from the get-go);

Best Actor, Casey Affleck, Manchester By The Sea (HE reaction — approved);

Best Actress, Isabelle Huppert, Elle and The Things to Come (HE reaction — approving if a tiny bit surprised — two awards now for the deserving Huppert (NYFCC, Gothams) and zip so far for presumed front-runner, La La Land‘s Emma Stone);

Best Supporting Actor, Mahershala Ali, Moonlight (HE reaction — approved but Manchester‘s Lucas Hedges delivered so much more, hit so many more notes — Ali played a kind, nurturing soul who was gone after Act One);

Best Supporting Actress, Michelle Williams, Manchester By The Sea, Certain Women (HE reaction — approved);

Best Screenplay, Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester By The Sea (HE reaction — approved);

Best Cinematography, James Laxton, Moonlight;

Best Animated Film, Zootopia;

Best Non-Fiction Film, O.J.: Made in America (HE reaction — you bet! You can call it an 8-hour ESPN cable series, but it was too good not to win regardless);

Best Foreign Language Film, Maren Ade‘s Toni Erdmann (HE reaction — still don’t get it after catching this again on disc — dryly amusing here and there, but overlong with off-putting lead, and nowhere near as revelatory as admirers claim);

Best First Film, Kelly Fremon Craig, The Edge of Seventeen;

Best First Film, Trey Edward Shults, Krisha;

Special Award — Thelma Schoonmaker & Julie Dash.

Tons and tons of nominations have been announced by the Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA) for the 22nd Annual Critics’ Choice Awards, which will happen on the evening of Sunday, 12.12 at Santa Monica’s Barker Hangar. Too many to summarize, really, but the long and the short is that La La Land landed 12 nominations (including Best Picture, of course, as well as noms for director Damian Chazelle and costars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling). Arrival and Moonlight took ten each, Manchester By The Sea nabbed eight (Casey Affleck, Lucas hedges, Michelle Williams), Hacksaw Ridge seven and six for Fences (Denzel Washington for directing and acting, Viola Davis for best supporting), Hell or High Water (noms for Jeff Bridges and Ben Foster both), Jackie, Lion. Plus a sizable truckload of TV nominations that are too numerous to mention…sorry. Another time.

Art by Todd Alcott

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You can’t fully trust any of these guys who tweeted today about Martin Scorsese‘s Silence. Well, you can but I don’t. Not entirely. They’re all feeling too flattered to have been among the first to see it to be completely candid. If I’d been allowed to see it today (instead of this coming Sunday afternoon) I probably would have bent over backwards to say whatever kind things I could within the bounds of honesty and integrity. Everyone feels obliged to kneel in front of the Marty altar. Shared by news org guy whose colleague saw it today: “Makes The Mission seem like Star Wars.”

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I’m telling myself that a series of upcoming Egyptian screenings (12.9 through 12.27) of a brand-new 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a big deal, but I’m not 100% sure that it is any more. I’m not certain I could tell the difference between a lab-fresh 70mm print and a first-rate DCP. Maybe some people can but I’m not sure about myself. I know that DCPs always look great no matter what, and that 70mm sharpness, clarity and dynamic sound used to mean a lot more than it does today. But I’ll attend one of these shows, I’m sure. The only enhancement that would really knock me over would be if they up-rez the 70mm negative to IMAX and then project it in a serious, super-sized IMAX theatre. And, I suppose, if they create a 4K Bluray version, except I won’t be buying a 4K Bluray player any time soon because they’re still only converting CG jizz-whizz to that format.

I always sink into a vague form of depression and/or resignation when I read the Dramatic Competition rundown for a forthcoming Sundance Film Festival, in this instance the 33rd annual which will run from 1.19 to 1.29. Then I’ll read the rundown again and start hearing more stuff as the days and weeks progress, and eventually I won’t feel quite as badly. I know that the way these films are usually described by Sundance staffers, who always default to strict p.c. terminology, are enough to make you fall asleep or slap your forehead. Or both.

As always I’ll mostly be catching the Premiere program at the Eccles and only occasionally darting over to the Park City Library for the Dramatic stuff. But maybe not. Information seeps through. Consciousness evolves. It all shakes out.

I know that during every Sundance I’ll have to sit through a Melanie Lynskey film, and I accept that. I know I’ll have to sit through a film about a young guy trying “to escape his bleak home life and navigate questions of self-identity” (which always means being gay). I mainly look at the casts in the Dramatic Competition — if a film costars several cool, name-brand actors, I’m usually interested in seeing it. If it doesn’t, meh. Eventually I get used to the idea of seeing all these dicey-sounding films, and when push comes to shove I’ll show up for a few.

Typical example: Alexandre Moors and David Lowery‘s The Yellow Birds, about a couple of guys fighting in the Gulf War and one of them getting wasted, and the surviving guy going back home and “struggling to balance his promise of silence with the truth and a mourning mother’s search for peace.” Oh, please, no…the surviving guy has taken a vow of silence? Oh, fuck me. Costarring Tye Sheridan, Jack Huston, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Patric, Toni Collette and Jennifer Aniston.

The three most interesting-sounding docs are (a) Brian Knappenberger‘s Nobody Speak: Hulk Hogan, Gawker and Trials of a Free Press — the title tells you everything; (b) Marina Zenovich‘s Water & Power: A California Heist; and (c) Pete Nicks‘ The Force, about the notoriously corrupt, scandal-ridden Oakland police department.

Three days ago an apparently non-gendered person (possibly a woman) named “N Ziehl” posted a Facebook riff about a personal experience with narcissistic personality disorder, and particularly as it has manifested within the life form known as Donald Trump. “I am not a professional…I am speaking purely from decades of dealing with NPD and sharing strategies that were helpful for me in coping and predicting behavior,” the person wrote. The three best observations are #1, #2 and #5, to wit:

(1) “NPD is not curable and is barely treatable. Trump is who he is. There is no getting better, or learning, or adapting. He’s not going to ‘rise to the occasion’ for more than maybe a couple hours. So just put that out of your mind.”

(2) “Trump will say whatever feels most comfortable or good to him at any given time. He will lie a lot, and say totally different things to different people. Stop being surprised by this. While it’s important to pretend ‘good faith’ and remind him of promises, as Bernie Sanders and others are doing, that’s for his supporters, so they can see the inconsistency as it comes. He won’t care. So if you’re trying to reconcile or analyze his words, don’t. It’s 100% not worth your time. Only pay attention to and address his actions.

(5) “We should expect that Trump only cares about himself and those he views as extensions of himself, like his children. (People with NPD often can’t understand others as fully human or distinct.) He desires accumulation of wealth and power because it fills a hole. (Melania is probably an acquired item, not an extension.) He will have no qualms at all about stealing everything he can from the country, and he’ll be happy to help others do so, if they make him feel good. He won’t view it as stealing but rather as something he’s entitled to do. This is likely the only thing he will intentionally accomplish.”

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“I haven’t seen a fiction film that captures the issues around eating disorders so accurately and so humanely, and I think that for young people going through similar things, a film like this can have a real healing power” — Sundance programming honcho Trevor Groth speaking to Variety‘s Peter Debruge about Marti Noxon‘s To the Bone, a Sundance Film festival Dramatic Competition entry about 20 year old Ellen (Lily Collins) battling anorexia with the help of other sufferers and with the aid of unconventional therapy. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you care about kids battling a compulsion to throw up every time they eat? When writing about Rules Don’t Apply last year I mistakenly referred to Lily Collins as Lily Taylor. Well, To The Bone costars both Collins and Taylor! As well as Keanu Reeves, Carrie Preston, Alex Sharp and Liana Liberato.

“It is commonly believed” that the career of Vilma Banky, Rudolph Valentino’s costar in Son of the Sheik (’26) and The Eagle (’25), “was cut short due to the collision of her thick Hungarian accent and the advent of sound; it has also been said that Banky began losing interest in films after her marriage to Rod La Rocque (Rod La Who?) in 1927. By 1928, she had announced her intention to eventually retire. Of Banky’s 24 films, eight exist in their entirety (Hotel Potemkin, The King of the Circus, The Son of the Sheik, The Eagle, The Winning of Barbara Worth, The Night of Love, A Lady to Love, and The Rebel). Her post-Hollywood years were spent selling real estate with La Rocque and playing golf, her favorite sport. She died at age 90 in 1991.”

Middle-Eastern market one-sheet for Allied

I’ve seen Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo many, many times, but for whatever reason I’ve never assigned specific meanings to the color scheme the way this Society of Geeks guy does here. (This video essay was posted last March — I only just watched it this morning.) I don’t recall Robin Wood or any other Hitchcock scholar assessing the meanings of green (Madeline Elster‘s personal color as well as a symbol of otherworldly, ghostly, deathly chill-vibes) and red (erotic desire, sexual obsession, the abandonment of decorum) in this classic 1958 film. Not to mention the uses of yellow and blue. Nor can I figure out the origin of the narrator’s fascinating accent. This essay works as a companion piece to Nerdwriter’s riff about Hitchcock’s careful blocking of scenes.

I’ll be seeing Tony Gilroy and Gareth Edwards‘ Rogue One: The Cousins (Disney, 12.16) a week from Monday, or three days before it opens nationwide. Variety is reporting that the film recorded the second-highest first day of pre-sales in domestic box office history. The highest first day sale was earned by J.J. Abrams‘ Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That 2015 film opened last year to nearly $248 million. Rogue One is expected to take in more than $130 million upon opening day, Variety has speculated, or a little more than half of what Awakens pulled down.