“The only difference is that it’s all totally flipped. The fear of Communism and Communist association has become the fear of racism or racist taint or anything offensive to the Left, or even that which seems to argue with Critical Race Theory…anything in that realm. But the methods are exactly, and I mean EXACTLY the same. Except for the absence (so far) of a HUAC-like Congressional examination and indictment committee.
In a Promising Young Woman thread, I noted this morning that ’20 and early ’21 have been an especially weak year for the kind of rich undercurrent award-season films thatless–than–woke, middle–classpeople (includingX–factortypeslikemyself) tend to respond to and pay to see.
For since wokeness began to take hold in ’18 and certainly since the pandemic struck 13 months ago, the movie pipeline has been losingsteamand under-providing, to put it mildly. Nothing even approaching the level of Spotlight, Manchester by the Sea, Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, La-La Land, the long cut of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor, Zero Dark Thirty or Portrait of a Woman on Fire has come our way from domestic filmmakers. **
Above and beyond an array of pandemic suffocations, a significant reason for the strange absence of robust cinema, for this general faint-pulse feeling, is (wait for it) wokeness and political terror.
Wokeness might be good or (sadly) necessary for social change, but it’s not much of a propellant for the creation of knockout award-season flicks that really reach out and touch Joe & Jane Popcorn.
The bottom line is that the erratic pursuit of sweeping, penetrating, soul-touching art (a rare achievement but one that has occasionally manifested over the decades) has been more or less called off, it seems, because such films or aspirations, in the view of certain #MeToo and POC progressives, don’t serve the current woke-political narrative.
The passage is only two paragraphs long. Would you like to read it? Because what happened in the modern art world in the 1930s — i.e, the dominance of “social realism” — precisely mirrors what’s going on today.
For upscale, sensitive-person, social-reflection dramas have fallen under the influence of a new form of ’30s social realism and, it could certainly be argued, are being used to illustrate and argue against social ills that wokesters regard as evil and diseased. The result has been a new form of enlightened propaganda cinema. (Feel free to supply your own examples.)
For the making of cinematic art, like canvas art of the ’30s, has been more or less (or at least partly) “called off” in favor of serving the woke/thought revolution. For film artists of today, to paraphrase an old Barnett Newman observation about the ’30s, are residing “in an intellectual prison that [locks them] in tight.”
Read the following “Painted Word” passage and tell me this isn’t a dead-to-rights portrait of 2021:
Three years on, what are your honest, deep-down, no-bullshit feelings about the nine Best Picture Oscar nominees of 2017? Which, if any, would you gladly see again and perhaps would be down with re-watching repeatedly as the years pass on? Here are my current feelings…three are keepers, the rest you can put in the freezer.
The Shape of Water — I liked Shape well enough to give it a pass when I first saw it in Telluride ’17, but because of Michael Shannon‘s detestable Colonel Strickland character I’ll never, ever see it again. Call Me by Your Name — I could easily catch it again tonight. Great love story, blissful laid-back Italian countryside vibe….it all falls into place. Darkest Hour — Never again. Dunkirk — Sure…would watch it again any time. A Nolan knockout. Get Out — Truly sorry that I saw this fucking thing even once. I’ll watch The Stepford Wives again any time, but this? Never. Lady Bird — Excellent “heart” film, made by a real filmmaker…I’d watch it again tonight. Phantom Thread — A small, well-made, mostly infuriating film. Never again. The Post – I’ll re-watch All The President’s Men any time, but this? Saw it twice in ’17. Meryl Streep is quite good as Katharine Graham, but I’m not that interested in a third viewing. Okay, maybe. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — Never again, ever.
If you’re at all human and north of 40, Suderman’s article will almost certainly usher in the gloom. It might even provoke stomach acid or the dry heaves. I’ve calmed down since I read it, but somewhere in the middle I was dreaming, absurdly, about running into Suderman and going all Jimmy Cagney on his ass.
There’s nothing in Suderman’s piece that’s especially new. The pandemic has all but killed theatrical, and post-vaccine there’ll be no putting the toothpaste back into the tube. Yes, theatrical has been slowly dying for years. Right now it seems as if middle-class, middle-budgeted, intended for theatrical films like Spotlight, Moneyball, Birdman, 12 Years A Slave, Call Me By Your Name, Drive, The Social Network, The Lighthouse, Zero Dark Thirty and Manchester By The Sea are becoming (or have become) all but extinct. A decade hence movie theatres will soon be regarded in the same light as Broadway theatre. Only elites will return to cinemas after the all-clear sign is given…what, nine months hence?
Before this year the only way to really savor big-screen films properly was at film festivals, at least in my view. That, at least, was something to hold onto. Right now the only safe way to go is with my 65-inch Sony 4K HDR. Then again I love being able to stream just about anything in HD or 4K these days…in that sense we’re living in a golden age. But man, I hated Silberman’s essay all the same. Or more precisely, I hated the subhead — “The next generation of event viewing is likely to look more like Game of Thrones and less like Tenet.” My pulse was racing. I was seething.
Bottom line: Suderman’s all-couches, all-streaming scenario reads like a reasonably candid assessment of what’s happened to Hollywood and exhibition over the last 10 or 11 months, and where we’re all probably headed. He’s not “wrong” but tone of the piece certainly flirts with my idea of smarmy and smug. All I could think about was Chryssie Hynde singing “My City Was Gone.”
Suderman excerpt: “The move by Warner Bros. means that even if anxiety about Covid-19 diminishes, some of the biggest movies of 2021 will no longer be exclusive theatrical engagements. Some viewers who might have ventured out to a multiplex will undoubtedly choose to stay home. And that, in turn, is another reason for those of us who love seeing movies in theaters to worry that when the pandemic ends, the theatrical experience of yesteryear will be gone.
“Theaters won’t disappear completely, but they are more likely to become rare first-class events rather than everyday experiences for the masses. To some extent, this was already happening, with comfier seating and more upscale concessions, and ticket prices rising in tandem. In the aftermath of the pandemic, moviegoing, once a Saturday-afternoon time waster and the go-to option for an inexpensive date, could become a comparatively rarefied luxury.
Peter Suderman’s reply was tweeted less than five minutes after this piece was posted.
One of the problems, he writes, is that “we may have already seen almost all the big contenders.”A possible solution, he says, may come from Sundance ’21. Excerpt: “With Sundance taking place (largely virtually) at the end of January and Oscar qualifying extending to the end of February, a film or a couple of films could take Sundance by storm, schedule an immediate qualifying run, ride that burst of momentum to Oscar nominations and invigorate the race.”
HE to Pond: Sundance movies don’t take anything “by storm” any more. The days of Park City knockouts like An Education, Margin Call, West of Memphis, Manchester By The Sea and Call Me By Your Name bursting out of Sundance and reverberating all over the culture are over.
Three or four years ago Sundance transformed itself into a Khmer Rouge snow camp — a feminist-POC-LGBTQ wokey-woke forum for Millennial and Zoomer-favored Sundance head-trip flicks — films that will be streamed down the road by people who believe in the Sundance brand, but which will be mostly ignored by everyone except the Gotham and Spirit award nominators, and perhaps not even those guys.
For decades and decades there used to be this thing, this standard, this kind of widely admired, grade-A movie that was more or less regarded as extra-good on its own carefully constructed, well-ordered, just-right terms.
The charm was mostly in the craft and rigor and style of it, and rarely about what it was saying. That’s not to say that each and every significant film since the 1920s didn’t “say” something, or that the things that were said time and again (sometimes overtly, more often in the subtext) were entirely admirable. They often weren’t, but good movies were mostly about the way they played to a relatively accommodating paying crowd. They were about being smart, clever, confident and assured….about having their act figured out and thought through to the bottom, which often resulted in a more-or-less harmonious whole.
Right here and right now, this kind of approach to first-rate filmmaking — that kind of finely-tuned, craft-based methodology a la Manchester By The Sea, Call Me By Your Name, 12 Years A Slave, The Social Network, A Separation, Zero Dark Thirty, The Irishman, Lady Bird, Son of Saul, The Wolf of Wall Street, Leviathan, Joker, The Square, Moneyball, The Lighthouse, Dunkirk — that kind of filmmaking has been…well, not “forgotten” exactly but sorta kinda put aside for the time being. Right here and right now, films are mainly being made and judged according to who’s in them, who made them and whether or not the right boxes have been checked.
And guess what? If you say in so many words that the afore-mentioned seems to be happening, you’re a bad person who needs to be cancelled.
Critics are totally playing along with this, of course. Because they don’t want to be replaced.
This is the ideological garrison state within which we all currently reside. What a film is “saying” is all. Craft levels are appreciated, respected…but if they’re only so-so in this or that film, no one is going to get overly bent out of shape. Because ideology and social reflection are what matter. Say it correctly and assemble the package with the right collaborators, and you’re more than halfway home.
I never got around to watching Luca Guadagnino‘s We Are Who We Are until yesterday, which is when the debut episode began streaming on HBO. So that’s all I’ve seen of this eight-episode series — installment #1. (It’s embedded after the jump.)
Set in 2016, it’s a dive into here-and-now teenage alienation — an awkward-adolescence, coming-of-age, trying-to-figure-it-out thing about a 14 year-old kid (Jack Dylan Grazer, who just turned 17 in real life) with the worst taste in clothing…I have to stop myself right here. I don’t want to make this piece about my own sartorial preferences past or present, but if I was 14 today I would rather stab myself with a steak knife than wear an unsubtle, over-sized T-shirt with the ugliest pair of baggy, leopard-skin shorts ever manufactured in human history. Not to mention a pair of unappealing red sneakers…okay, I’ll give that part of the ensemble a pass.
We Are Who We Are is set on a U.S. military base near Venice, Italy, and it concerns the initially agonizing struggle of Grazer’s character, Fraser Wilson, to acclimate after flying in from New York to live with his mom, an Army colonel named Sarah (Chloe Sevigny), and her wife, Maggie (Alice Braga), who also wears a uniform. Fraser is gay but not “out,” or so it appears. (There’s an eye-rolling moment when he happens to step into a barracks and catch sight of a few Army guys taking a shower, and he just stares.) All kinds of new relationships, assessments and misadventures await the poor guy, the most prominent being Jordan Kristine Seamon‘s Caitlin, a long-haired, African-American beauty who appears to be more or less straight but you never know.
I didn’t initially care all that much for Frazer or the general vibe, to be honest, but then it began to gradually pull me in. Guadagnino, whose A Bigger Splash and especially Call Me By Your Name established him as a maestro of sun-kissed Italian sensuality and a certain instinctual, improvisational, come-what-may attitude about life’s possibilities, really gets into Fraser’s impressions and moods and whatnot, and even though he’s another typically inarticulate kid who lives deep in his head and inside whatever tunes he happens to be listening to, there’s something about the nowness, aliveness, alone-ness and scattered whatever-ness in the atmosphere of this thing that turns a certain key.
We Are Who We Are is breathing fresh air, up to something else and, to me at least, offering a new kind of stimulant.
Fraser seems so dorky, so emotionally stunted and scowling. He’s 14 but behaves more like an angry eight year old with a taller, lankier frame. I guess I’ll eventually get used to him. Interesting eyes but so fucking clueless and closed off. Yes, of course — so was I at that age. The difference is that I kept most of my anxiety bottled up inside, at least in the presence of elders and to some extent with my peers. I half-confided in a couple of friends, I suppose, although I probably wasn’t articulate enough at the time to even share my truest thoughts with myself. But at least I didn’t commit any clothing crimes.
A filmmaker friend who knows the series top to bottom assures me that “you’ll end up loving Fraser — he’s an angel of vengeance against the current.”
I don’t know what else to say except that the first episode has convinced me to see the series through to the end.
Let’s also say that you’ve managed to persuade gentle erotic mood-spinner Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) to direct your Scotty film. But you still need to find the right screenwriter[s] to make Scotty’s story into an engaging, playable thing.
In all honesty, would you hire Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, a couple of edgy straight guys who’ve done little more than wallow in adolescent, arrested-development stoner comedies since they broke through 13 or so years ago…would you hire Rogen and Goldberg to write your Scotty movie, a fair amount of which would have to include some guy-on-guy action…dicks, boners and such?
If your answer is “uhm, no…that’s probably not a great idea,” I would share your viewpoint. If your response is “yeah, hiring the writers of Longshot sounds intriguing and could definitely work,” I’d love to hear an explanation.
The apparent intention is to make Scotty’s story into…what, a satirical period comedy? Or at least to goof it up to some degree? I’m not saying Scotty Bowers didn’t live his life with a certain twinkle in his eye, but Rogen-Goldberg never wrote a line or a gag that didn’t reflect stoner Millennial mindsets and attitudes. Plus their sexual conveyances have always been unrelentingly straight. How are they supposed to make bisexual currents in 1940s and ’50s Hollywood come alive?
If you were Jack L. Warner in late 1945 and planning to produce Night and Day, a film about the life of Cole Porter, who would you hire to write it? Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, right?
Fleming reports that Tyrnauer and Altimeter Films partner Corey Reeser will produce alongside Rogen and Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures. Searchlight’s Richard Ruiz will oversee the project.
We all understand that Best Picture Oscar winners have always been chosen for primarily political reasons. Quality-focused judgments have always been secondary. So it will be when it comes to singling out 2020/21 Best Picture contenders. The big distinctive hurdle, as we’ve seen during three of the last four years, is that the winner will probably have to pass a “woke” test.
Over the last five years (’15 through ’19) only Spotlight (’15) and Green Book were pure quality-level or emotional bull’s-eye wins. Yes, wokester fanatics — Green Book was beloved for the emotional current of the last 20 or so minutes. And if you don’t like hearing that, tough.
Moonlight (2016, awarded in early ’17) is a good film, but it won Best Picture so the Academy members could proclaim they weren’t in the grip of #OscarsSoWhite. Don’t argue — just ask Spike Lee.
Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water…I don’t know know why it wasn’t beaten by the obviously superior Dunkirk or Call Me By Your Name in early ’18 as the script was clearly a curious, genre-level, sexy-beast wokey thing (a direct descendant of Creature From The Black Lagoon). Whatever the reason, Shape didn’t win because of any pure-quality consensus. Perhaps it prevailed by sheer force of personality (i.e., Sally Hawkins + GDT)?
Parasite obviously won because a sufficient number of voters agreed with the blunt-social-assessment aspect (life is unfair for the poor) plus the wokesters loved the idea of choosing a well-made film by a filmmaker of color, and one that didn’t fit the usual definition of a Best Picture winner. Plus Bong Joon-ho worked the town like a locomotive. The first half of Parasite is very good (it goes off the rails when they let the fired maid in during the rainstorm) but it won because of identity (i.e., non-white) politics. Don’t lie, don’t argue — that’s why.
So which of the ’20 and ’21 Best Picture contenders will be “allowed” to win the Best Picture Oscar? The winner might have to be a film that reflects the complex contrarian currents of our time and/or some kind of black-white cultural schism thing. Or it might win because it’s simply good. As far as I can project that means the finalists will be…ah, hell, you tell me. I haven’t seen squat, and I can’t foresee what conditions will be seven months hence.
The only films that seem to be distinctive enough are David Fincher‘s Mank (brilliant script but “too white guy”?), Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland (Searchlight), Ron Howard‘s Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix) and Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story (Disney).
I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s mid July and nobody has a clue. The Oscar season of 2020 and early ’21 is looking strange as we speak. A strange chapter for everyone everywhere. A feeling of apartness, alienation, despair. Nothing to depend on.
I could do Sundance ’20 without breaking a sweat. I could wangle tickets from publicists like I did last year, and without a single care about wearing a Camp Woke press pass around my neck. And I’d have a good time doing the usual social whirlygig and wearing my black cowboy hat and so on.
But you know what? Fuck Sundance. The films simply aren’t vital or necessary enough — they’re for people in the greater Sundance community who may or may not tell their friends to stream this or that festival favorite down the road, and that’s all.
Yes, they screened Lulu Wang‘s The Farewell last year and that was certainly a good thing, but the classic Sundance glory days are over. The era of debuting Oscar favorites like Manchester By The Sea and Call Me By Your Name is almost certainly drawing to a close. Because Sundance is no longer a launchpad — it’s become a self-absorbed instruction chamber for woke Stalinism and the perpetuation of Sundance movies that say the right p.c. things.
I’d like to go because I’ve been attending for 25 or 26 years straight and it’s in my January blood, but it’s just not worth the money and the hassle any more. The usual five or six standouts will screen and stream in good time. On top of which money is a little tight this year so maybe next year or maybe never again…who knows?
Or maybe not until independent film culture shifts into another mode and instructive representational wokesterism is no longer the dominant tune being played on the bagpipes.
14 days hence begins the third decade of the 21st Century — the 2020s. Herewith my list of the top 15 films of the last decade (starting in 2010) as well as my year-by-year tallies, working backwards — 84 films in all:
TOP FIFTEEN OF THE LAST DECADE: Manchester By The Sea, A Separation, The Social Network, Zero Dark Thirty, The Irishman, Call Me By Your Name, Son of Saul, The Wolf of Wall Street, Leviathan, Joker, The Square, Moneyball, The Lighthouse, 12 Years A Slave, Dunkirk.
Best of 2019: The Irishman, Joker, Les Miserables, The Lighthouse, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 1917, Marriage Story, Bombshell, Parasite, The Farewell (10).
Best of 2018: Roma, Green Book, First Reformed, Cold War, Hereditary, Capernaum, Vice, Happy As Lazzaro, Filmworker, First Man, Widows, Sicario — Day of the Soldado. (12).
Best of 2017: Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, The Square, War For The Planet of the Apes, mother!, The Florida Project. (7)
Best of 2016: Manchester By The Sea, A Bigger Splash, La La Land, The Witch, Eye in the Sky, The Confirmation, The Invitation. (6)
Best of 2015: Spotlight, The Revenant; Mad Max: Fury Road; Beasts of No Nation; Love & Mercy, Son of Saul; Brooklyn; Carol, Everest, Ant-Man; The Big Short. (10)
Best of 2014: Birdman, Citizen Four, Leviathan, Gone Girl, Boyhood, Locke, Wild Tales. (7)
Best of 2013: The Wolf of Wall Street, 12 Years A Slave, Inside Llewyn Davis, Her, Dallas Buyers Club, Before Midnight, The Past, Frances Ha (8).
Best of 2012: Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Barbara, The Grey, Moonrise Kingdom (7).
Best of 2011 (ditto): A Separation, Moneyball, Drive, Contagion, X-Men: First Class, Attack the Block (6).
Best of 2010: The Social Network, The Fighter, Black Swan, Inside Job, Let Me In, A Prophet, Animal Kingdom, Rabbit Hole, The Tillman Story, Winter’s Bone (10).
Right after today’s screening of Terrence Malick‘s A Hidden Life broke around 4 pm, I ran over to the Gray d’Albion for a showing of Luca Guadagnino‘s The Staggering Girl, a 37-minute short.
I’d heard it was smoothly made and roundly applauded, but I had a special motive in wanting to catch it. I was very upset by Guadagnino’s Suspiria, you see, and I was hoping that A Staggering Girl would flush that memory out of my head, Luca-wise. It managed to do that and then some.
It’s bothered some critics that Girl, a Directors’ Fortnight selection that was shot in Manhattan and Rome, has been financed by Valentino and is, in fact, a kind of upmarket commercial (i.e., “branded content”) for the fashion line. I chose to ignore this (sowhat?) and simply concentrate on the acting (from Julianne Moore, Mia Goth, KiKi Layne, Kyle MacLachlan, Marthe Keller and Alba Rohrwacher), the script by Michael Metnick and of course Luca’s assured direction.
It’s basically about an Italian-American writer named Francesca (Moore) who’s struggling with a memoir, and her relationship with her white-haired, Rome-residing mother (Keller) who’s begun losing her mind.
I didn’t check the cast before watching it, but was surprised to discover that Moore’s blustery, German-accented mom was Keller — I recognized the voice but not the face and certainly not the hair.
Story or theme-wise there’s not a lot to feast upon (apart from the beautiful gowns and pant suits, I mean). It’s mostly about Moore trying to persuade mom to come back to New York with her because she’s getting too old to look after herself, and Keller protesting that “this is my home!”
But settling into the vibe and mood of TheStaggeringGirl bestowed feelings of comfort, especially the portions that were shot in Rome. I worship the magic-hour light in that town.
There’s a great dream-dance sequence at the very end (several Valentino-clad women undulating to Sakamoto’s jazz) that works in terms of putting a cap on things.
I don’t see why I have to write three of four paragraphs justifying my enjoyment of The Staggering Girl. I love films that radiate a certain “the director knew exactly what he/she was doing” atmosphere, and this one has it in spades.