“We knew a [movie villain] of old by his Black Hat or his Black Moustache; and today by his white skin.” — a passage from David Manet’s “Everywhere An Oink–Oink.”

From Mark Athikatis’s Washington Post 12.7.23 review:

A just-released Wall Street Journal presidential preference poll has Nikki Haley running 17 points ahead of President Biden — 51% to 34%. That’s not a huge margin but the thundering rumble of mighty horses.

The Beast is also beating Gurgly Joe, but only by 47% to 43%. Biden and DeSantis are running even, 45% to 45%.

THR’s Scott Feinberg surely understands in the depths of his soul that he’s deeply disappointed (angered?) the Movie Godz by placing the three most admired, exciting and deserving Best Picture contenders — Poor Things, Maestro, The Holdovers — in the #5, #7 and #8 slots in his latest Oscar prediction column.

I realize that Variety’s Clayton Davis doesn’t approve, but American Fiction, as much as I adore the first 45 to 50 minutes and agree that it’s among the year’s finest, is not happening as a frontrunner. Pundit-wise it simply hasn’t caught on like some of us thought it might..

Take away the guilt + identity factors and nobody really loves Killers of the Flower Moon — it’s a long hair shirt movie with a tiresome lead character. And Barbie has been showered with more than enough accolades, thanks.

The latest Gold Derby rankings are more accurate.

Jordan Ruimy: “GD-wise I honestly think The Holdovers should be #3. Ahead of Poor Things. Joe and Jane LOVE The Holdovers. Every non-critic I speak to cannot stop raving about it.”

One of the reasons that enthusiasm levels for Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders have been diminished all along is Austin Butler’s relentless, extremely off-putting chain-smoking. Nothing looks cheaper or pollutes an actor’s presence like smelly nicotine sticks. Marlon Brando knew this territory like the back of his hand, and never lit up in The Wild One.

HE to Butler: Never, ever go there again.

Note: “Austin Tucker” was a political consultant of an assisted liberal politician in The Parallax View (‘74).

Ryan O’Neal has died at age 82, presumably from cancer. It feels unsettling to acknowledge (or remind ourselves of the fact) that death doesn’t fool around, and because…well, a half-century ago O’Neal was quite the hotshot with golden-amber hair and a Prince of Malibu title and all the rest of it.

On 8.4.19 I wrote that I preferred to think of O’Neal as the guy he was in the early to mid ’70s, when things were as good for him as they would ever get.

I had two minor encounters with O’Neal in the ’80s.

The first was after an evening screening of the re-issued Rear Window** at West L.A.’s Picwood theatre (corner of Pico and Westwood) in late ’83. As the crowd spilled onto Pico O’Neal and his date (probably Farrah Fawcett) were walking right behind me, and I heard O’Neal say “that was sooo good!” Being a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan, this sparked a feeling of kinship.

Four years later I was a Cannon publicity guy and charged with writing the press kit for Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which didn’t turn out so well. I for one, however, liked Mailer’s perverse sense of humor.

I did an hour-long phoner with O’Neal, and my opening remark was that he was becoming a really interesting actor now that he was in his mid 40s with creased features. He was too good looking when younger, I meant, and so his being 46 added character and gravitas. O’Neal was skeptical of my assessment but went along — what the hell.

In fact O’Neal’s career had been declining for a good five or six years at that point. He knew it, I knew it — we were doing a press-kit-interview dance because there was nothing else to say or do.

O’Neal’s last hit film had been Howard Zeiff and Gail Parent‘s The Main Event (’79), which critics panned but was popular with audiences. He had starred in four mezzo-mezzos before that — Peter Bogdanovich‘s Nickelodeon (’76), Richard Attenbrough‘s A Bridge Too Far (’77), Walter Hill‘s The Driver (’78) and John Korty‘s Oliver’s Story.

Consider this HE anecdote about some 41-year-old graffiti on an Oliver’s Story poster.

O’Neal’s career peak lasted for five years (’70 to ’75) and was fortified by a mere four films — Arthur Hiller‘s Love Story (’70), Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? (’72) and Paper Moon (’73), and Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon (’75). (The Wild Rovers and The Thief Who Came to Dinner, which O’Neal also made in the early ’70s, were regarded as mostly negligible and therefore didn’t count.)

Geoffrey Mcnab’s 12.8 Independent interview with Paul Schrader is a good read, but it’s paywalled. I’m not a subscriber but have managed to read it anyway. I don’t think I should share the link…sorry.

If you walk over and look them in the eye and ask them to please cut the crap, the AFI Sight & Sound gang will admit the truth.

They know that Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon is not one of his top-tier films. They know it’s basically a woke movie, a guilt-trip thing. They know that it has no character viewpoint other that “century-old Oklahoma white guys bad.” They know that Scorsese and Eric Roth decided to more or less abandon FBI agent Tom White, the central figure in David Grann’s 2017 book, in favor of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s dumbshit Ernest Burkhart, who isn’t worth the effort.

They know all that and voted Killers as the year’s top film regardless. Because they wanted to proclaim their belief and investment in the redemption narrative. It’s their way of saying “we get it Marty…you did your best under the circumstances and understandably felt that you couldn’t go with White as the champion…we get it and we support you and are on your side despite the fact that if we were voting on merit alone we wouldn’t have chosen Killers….you get that and so do we…plus we absolutely believe in the metaphor of Lily Gladstone‘s identity campaign for Best Actress…all hail our recognition of past sins and our attempt at absolution or at least forgiveness.”

Finally but limited…AMC Lincoln Square, Regal Union Square, Brooklyn Drafthouse. The suburbs are cooling their heels.

I prefer the idea of Poor Things or Maestro or The Holdovers taking the Best Picture Oscar because they’re such grand buffets…because they combine lavish and concurrent servings of cinematic nutrition and dessert, fascinating novelty and invention in the case of the first two and well-constructed involvement (endless emotionalism and irony, thematic richness, abundant imagination and just-right-ism, and inescapable leakage in the case of Maestro’s ending)…because they flipped me over and held me in their grip.

Oppie on the other hand…that oppressive college-lecture hall delivery and horrible, aching sense of frigid isolation (stuck in that godawful makeshift New Mexico isolation camp and that suffocating D.C. committee testimony room with the killer combo of Nolan’s dialogue and that soul-stifling, cold-eyed, alien-from-planet-Tralfamadore performance from Cillian Murphy, whom I now never, EVER want to watch in a film ever again….please.

I’ve begun to rewatch Oppie on Amazon and the subtitles do help to some extent, but I once again felt caught in a long, punishing endurance test…that same feeling I had during my two theatrical viewings…DEAR GOD I’ll never forget that feeling of entrapment and interior devastation…those volumes upon volumes of dialogue pages and a running-time clock that proceeded at a snail’s pace, only to chickenheartedly avoid the obvious and inescapable climax of those Hiroshima and Nagasaki infernos.

Oppie is obviously a smart, well-crafted, full-court-press film for smarty-pants viewers with greater intestinal fortitude than I, but it killed me to slosh through that Murphy-Oppie swamp…that dense narrative thicket, that after-school detention feeling…wading through a three-hour technical briefing that murdered my spirit and killed my legs and made me feel like Winston Smith’s head in a rat cage…a steady, plodding, scene-by-scene procedural that was always about Nolan saying “I won’t be coming to you because you have to come to ME”…an intellectually freeze-dried process if I’ve ever endured one.

And I’m supposed to feel somehow knocked out, by the way, by Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as the Salieri-like Lewis Strauss and those 16 or 17 repetitions of that outdoor Einstein-Oppie-Strauss scene that Nolan diabolically keeps cutting back to over and over and over again?

I’m glad that Oppie is so well liked and has enjoyed great financial success, and if it wins the Best Picture Oscar…fine.. But it compressed and suffocated and held me down on the wrestling mat, and is basically, for me, this year’s TAR.