If you've been watching Elizabeth Meriwether's The Dropout (Hulu), you know she's very exacting about strong resemblances between the principal characters and the actors who play them, either naturally or by way of makeup.
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The six-day Oscar voting period begins tomorrow (Thursday, 3.17) and ends the following Tuesday (3.22) at 5 p.m. This. Is. It. And here's how the the Best Picture situation seems as we speak.
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Cruel perversity runs through Adrien Lyne's Deep Water (Hulu, 3.18). That's what you feel more than anything else....the cold-blooded cruelty.
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Broadcast News opened in December 1987 -- call it 35 years ago. Back when William Hurt...the masterful Hurt!...was nearing the end of his glorious groove phase.
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Yesterday Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke became the first major Democratic Party figurehead to explicitly come out against the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in schools. He said it in so many words during a town-hall-styled meeting in Victoria, Texas, a small town northeast of Corpus Christi.
I’ve listened to the video six or seven times — Beto definitely said this.
Until yesterday no big-name Democrat had stood up and said “ixnay” to the wokesters on CRT and equity in schools, which were (a) huge losing issues for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe last November and (b) vaguely contributed to the ejection of three woke Democratic school board members in San Francisco a few weeks ago. This is a very significant thing. Everyone has been saying that Democrats need to step away from CRT or face defeat in next November’s mid-terms — this is the first leak in the dyke.
I’m surprised….well, not that surprised that Beto’s statement hasn’t been reported by CNN or MSNBC or The New York Times.
Reported on 3.12.22: “O’Rourke spoke to a crowd of Texas in Victoria on Friday, where he was asked about critical race theory’s appropriateness for being taught in grade schools. O’Rourke at first dodged the issue, telling a crowd member that the concepts of CRT are not being taught in schools at present.
“‘And I think you and I are probably on the same page as well. We don’t see CRT being taught in our schools right now. It is a course that is taught in law schools,’ O’Rourke said.
“Immediately after his comment, a member of the audience asked if O’Rourke supported CRT in schools, to which the gubernatorial candidate said, ‘No, I don’t think [CRT] should be taught in our schools.’
Posted on 2.16.22: Remember those woke nutcase San Francisco school supervisors who made headlines in early ’21 by announcing plans to remove the names of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln from local schools (among others), and who were also big equity supporters (i.e., make the grading system easier for BIPOC students in order to address allegedly unfair advantages enjoyed by smarter kids who get better grades)?
And remember how Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in last November’s Virginia Governors race because McAuliffe endorsed the teaching of critical race theory in Virginia schools, and particularly because he implied parents who shared concerns along these lines were racist?
Well, the same thing has happened in ultra-liberal San Francisco, of all places. Those woke school board members — school board President Gabriela López, members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga — have been removed from their positions “over a failure to reopen schools last year” due to virus restrictions and particularly due to “unpopular actions aimed at advancing racial justice.”
Remember those woke nutcase San Francisco school supervisors who made headlines in early ’21 by announcing plans to remove the names of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln from local schools (among others), and who were also big equity supporters (i.e., make the grading system easier for BIPOC students in order to address allegedly unfair advantages enjoyed by smarter kids who get better grades)?
And remember how Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia Governors race because McAuliffe endorsed the teaching of critical race theory in Virginia schools, and particularly because he implied parents who shared concerns along these lines were racist?
Well, the same thing has happened in ultra-liberal San Francisco, of all places. Those woke school board members — school board President Gabriela López, members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga — have been removed from their positions “over a failure to reopen schools last year” due to virus restrictions and particularly due to “unpopular actions aimed at advancing racial justice.”
The San Francisco results are another warning for wokester Democrats — (a) a majority of parents (especially Asian parents) think equity programs are bullshit, (b) they’re into merit, or good grades counting more than enforced social justice policies, and therefore (c) they are going to kill you in November.
Preliminary results showed the vote to oust each of the school board members topping 70 percent. Parents to López, Collins, Moliga: “It feels soooo good to say fuuhhhhhhck you!”
Washington Post: “The board had engaged in moves aimed at advancing racial equity that critics said were divisive and ill-advised, particularly for a period when schools were closed and academic and emotional damage to the city’s children was accruing.
“The board also argued that Lowell High School, an elite program populated overwhelmingly by Asian American and White students, needed an admissions system that would better represent the city’s Black and Hispanic residents. The board’s abrupt decision to alter the admission rules, switching to a lottery, incensed San Francisco’s large Chinese American population as well as others in the Asian community, who read the change as hurtful to students from their community who worked hard and got the top grades and scores.”
I’ve been thinking about switching from the rumblehog to a decent pre-owned car. I’m no longer flush thanks to the wokesters, but I don’t want to get into a years-long payoff deal. So I’ve been looking for a nice little tool-around car. Something older, a dependable brand (Beemer, Volvo, Nissan), well-maintained. Yesterday afternoon I was attracted to a white 2002 BMW, 165K miles, for $2500. The only hitch is that it’s in Palm Springs. But it seemed appealing so I reached out to the owner, and then the weirdness began.
The owner is a dude — I could tell that much. Right off the top he said “no talking, just text me.” He knows autos and does his own maintenance, but he wouldn’t tell me his name or where he lives, and suggested that our initial meeting happen in front of an office building. It turns out the Beemer needs service — the usual tune-up stuff plus new brake discs and pads, which meant I’d be paying an extra $500 or more — figure $3K and change.
The idea was to travel to Palm Springs later today and test-drive the Beemer, and give it to a local mechanic for approval, and then finalize things on Friday. That meant I’d have to take a bus to Palm Springs and take a few Uber rides and pay the mechanic for his time and stay in a hotel plus meals — another $250 or $300, minimum. Now we’re in the $3400 to $3500 region.
I asked the Palm Springs Phantom if I should call him Mr. X. He laughed. I said I was a journalist and explained about Hollywood Elsewhere, and he said “what’s that?” I assured him that I don’t work for the CIA, the Russians, the Palm Springs vice squad, the FBI or the East German Stasi. “Are you really going to do this cloak-and-dagger thing until I arrive?,” I said. “No name, no gender, no nothing? No offense but this feels a tiny bit weird.”
Mr. X: “That’s because that [stuff] doesn’t matter.”
HE: “I don’t mind the spy-movie intrigue. But there’s something existential about this conversation.”
Mr. X: “Are you actually interested in buying this car?”
HE: “Definitely. But you know what I mean. Your identity is going to come out in the wash anyway, right? Bill of sale, pink slip, transfer of title.”
Mr. X: “Yeah.”
HE: “I am 110% serious.”
Mr. X: “Cool. Sounds good…see you tomorrow, man.”
HE: “So when I knock on the door tomorrow at 5 or so, will you be wearing a Yoda mask?”
Mr. X: “That’s not my home address — that’s a business center.”
HE: “Ahh, got it. Well, this is very shadowy but okay. I’ll find a way out there and line up mechanic, and find a decent motel or hotel. This will be, as noted, a two-day process.”
This morning I decided to blow the whole deal off. A guy who won’t reveal his name or address — what is he, a terrorist? A drug dealer? Plus the whole “take a bus to Palm Springs, take three or four Ubers, stay in a motel plus find and hire a mechanic” thing seemed a bit much. When I told him of my decision, Mr. X said, “You’re wasting my time, bruh.”
I wouldn’t say that a majority of people selling cars on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist are scammers, but a significant portion are. Plus the people who’ve written me about buying the rumblehog are scammers also. Favorite line: “I’m a sergeant in the military, I’m going overseas with my team”…really? Second favorite line: “I’m selling this for my invalid mother.” A guy with another car for sale (2013 white Impala) wanted to meet him in central Watts (just south of the 105) and bring cash…no PayPal or Venmo. Sure thing.
“The big winner, nomination-wise, was The Power of the Dog…12 nominations, one for every person who saw it. Lady Gaga was a surprise, not being nominated, but the biggest snub in my opinion…I’m actually even angry about this, I’m kind of embarassed to say…[the biggest snub was] the unforgivable omission of Spider-Man: No Way Home.
“How did that not get one of the ten nominations? There were only 11 [half-decent] movies made this year. Forget the fact that [Spider-Man] made $750 million [domestic] and it still going. This was a great movie, and there were three Spider-Men in it! One of them was Andrew Garfield, and he was a Best Actor nominee.
“You’re telling me Don’t Look Up was better than Spider-Man? It most certainly was not.
“When did we decide that a Best Picture [nominee] always has to be serious? This was not the point when they started making films. Ben-Hur…chariots of leprosy. Frankenstein…a monster powered by lightning. Fantasia…Mickey Mouse on an acid trip. The Wizard of Oz…flying monkeys and a witch. These are great, classic, Oscar-level movies. There’s northing wrong with serious movies, a lot of them are fantastic and deserving, but when did ‘serious’ become a prequisite for earning an Academy Award?”
From Richard Rushfield‘s latest Ankler post, “Behold, The Incredible Shrinking Oscars…Again“:
“So the Academy exists to ratify the esoteric choices of guilds and 400 critics groups; critics who themselves are largely now unread, except by each other. But of course, it was impossible to hold the theatrical category to any viewership standards once the floodgates opened to the streamers, which are a black hole of information from which only glimpses of light emerge. And instead of taking public reaction into account, it’s just thrown out the window, and Oscar can become…another critics’ film circle?
“Which, if you’re looking at it from a perspective of honoring craftsmanship in cinema, is wonderful.
“If you’re looking at it from a perspective of maintaining a mass medium’s connection with a mass audience, then well, what would you say is the level of public excitement for one’s local critics’ circle announcements? Have you sensed an unfulfilled public demand for more of those?
“As one friend put it, ‘For years the promotion of movies and moviegoing was the collaboration of studios and the press. That’s over. The press has taken up streamers and indies to ‘save’ indies [the Eric Kohn / David Ehrlich aesthetic] and studios have all but said fuck it.’
“So in the Best Pic category, we have a cluster of films that were…flops, disappointments, underperforms, at best given a Gentleman’s C for COVID. And then a bunch of films whose audiences are total mysteries.
“To put it another way, is there any evidence that there is a single person under 40 on the planet who has watched a single one of these movies?”
Six or seven years ago I began to assemble a list of the greatest lead performances in feature films, and Monica Vitti in L’Avventura was one of them, you bet.
The names that that came to mind off the top of my head were James Gandolfini in The Sopranos, Geza Rohrig in Son of Saul, Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront and The Godfather, Amy Schumer in Trainwreck (I’m dead serious), George Clooney in Michael Clayton, Gary Cooper in High Noon, George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose, Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Alan Ladd in Shane, Brad Pitt in Moneyball, Marilyn Monroe in Some like It Hot, Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast and Betrayal, Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings, Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton, Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Capote and, last but not least, Vitti in…aww, hell, her entire Michelangelo Antonioni travelogue.
After 90 years and 2 months on the planet earth, Vitti has left for realms beyond. I’m very sorry but then again she really lived a life, particularly during her ultimate star-power and mesmerizing collaboration years with the great Antonioni — a five-year exploration comprised of L’Avventura (’60), La Notte (’61), L’Eclisse (62) and Red Desert (’64).
Were it not for this five-year chapter, we wouldn’t this day be praising Vitti to the heavens. She “lives” today because of Antonioni, and a significant reason for his own exalted early-to-mid-’60s rep is due to — owned by — Vitti’s allure.
In her Antonioni films Vitti always seemed to be thinking “is this all there is?” Or “my God, there’s so little nutrition…I’m sinking into quicksand, withering away…so little in the way or sparkle and joy…nearly every waking minute I’m consumed by the glammy blues.”
Yes, she laughed and loved in L’Ecclisse, but only briefly and anxiously and in a sense ironically. The African tribal dance sequence was the exception — a spoof, of course, but lively and sexy.
Born in 1931, Vitti was 28 or 29 at the beginning of her Antonioni period and 33 when their collaboration ended — no spring chicken even at the start.
From Adam Bernstein’s Washington Post obit: “Her willowy physique, husky voice, full lips and mane of sun–kissed blond hair gave her a raw sensual appeal. But Antonioni cast her against type in a cycle of acclaimed films about emotional detachment and spiritual barrenness. He made her the personification of glamorous malaise.”
Take L’Avventura, for one example. It’s about wealthy Italians wandering about in a state of gloomy drifting, anxious and vaguely bothered and frowning a good deal of the time.
The movie is about the absence of whole-hearted feeling, and it never diverts from this. If there’s a moment in which Vitti conveys even a hint of serenity in her intimate scenes with Gabriele Ferzetti, it barely registers. I don’t remember a single shot in which Ferzetti smiles with even a hint of contentment.
From “Red Desert Return“: “I saw Red Desert for the first time in 2015. I know the Antonioni milieu, of course, and had read a good deal about it over the years, so I was hardly surprised to discover that it has almost no plot. It has a basic situation, and Antonioni is wonderfully at peace with the idea of just settling into that without regard to story.
“And for that it seemed at least ten times more engrossing than 80% or 90% of conventional narrative films I see these days, and 87 times better than the majority of bullshit superhero films.
“Vitti plays a twitchy and obviously unstable wife and mother who’s been nudged into a kind of madness by the industrial toxicity around her, and Richard Harris is an even-mannered German businessman visiting smelly, stinky Ravenna. The film is about industrial sprawl and poisoned landscapes and a lot of standing around and Vitti’s neurotic gibberish and a certain caught-in-the-mud mood that holds you like a drug, specifically like good opium.
“Each and every shot in Red Desert (the dp is Carlo di Palma, whom Vitti later fell in love with) is quietly breathtaking. It’s one of the most immaculate and mesmerizing ugly-beautiful films I’ve ever seen. The fog, the toxins, the afflictions, the compositions.”
Perhaps later this year the New Beverly Cinema will program a superficially linked double bill — Phillip Noyce‘s The Desperate Hour and William Wyler‘s The Desperate Hours.
Five months ago Noyce’s film played at the Toronto Film Festival as Lakewood. Now it’s got a catchier title. Here’s my 9.21 review with the title switched out:
An adult all alone and on a phone, having to talk his or her way out of (or through) a tough, high-pressure situation. I don’t know how many times this set-up has been built into a compelling feature, but I’m thinking at least four**.
The very best is Steven Knight‘s Locke (’14), an 85-minute character study about a construction foreman (Tom Hardy) grappling with issues of personal vs. professional responsibility. Three years ago Gustav Möller‘s The Guilty, a gripping, Danish-made crime thriller that I just re-watched yesterday, delivered similar cards. Last weekend a same-titled remake, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, played at the Toronto Film Festival, and will debut theatrically on 9.24 before hitting Netflix.
Now there’s Phillip Noyce‘s The Desperate Hour, which stars Naomi Watts as Amy, a widowed, small-town mom reacting not only to news of a Parkland-esque high school shooting, but to the possibility that her sullen and estranged son Noah (Colton Gobbo) may be involved in some way.
Nearly two-thirds of this 84-minute film (47 minutes) are focused solely on Amy and her iPhone in a remote wooded area. We’re talking about a torrent of smooth steadicam footage plus several overhead drone shots and some elegant editing (kudos to Lee Haugen), plus Watts stressing, emoting and hyperventilating her head off — a one-woman tour de force.
Right away I was thinking Noah might be the shooter, and that, you bet, made me sit up and focus all the more. And that’s all I’m going to say.
My second reaction was about Amy’s iPhone, and what an amazing reach it has. She’s in a woodsy area a few miles from town (I didn’t catch how many reception bars were showing) and yet she experiences only a couple of signal drop-outs, and she’s watching all kinds of video and whatnot without a hitch.
I was also impressed by her iPhone’s battery — what power! (I never leave home without a back-up battery for my iPhone 12 Max Pro — I have too many active apps and the battery is always draining hand over fist.)
Despite all that’s going on at the high school and having to juggle all kinds of incoming info, Amy continues to jog during most of her phone marathon.
If there’s one thing that viewers will be dead certain of, it’s that Watts will stumble and suffer an ankle injury. I was telepathically begging her not to. HE to Watts: “C’mon, stop…don’t…there are all kinds of obstacles on your forest path and you obviously need to focus so just start speed-walking”…down she goes!
The pace of The Desperate Hour is very fast and cranked up, and Amy is nothing if not resourceful. She manages to persuade an auto mechanic whom she doesn’t know to supply crucial information about Noah’s whereabouts, as well as info about a possible shooter’s name and contact info. All kinds of conversations and complications ensue, and you’re always aware that Chris Sparling‘s script is determined to increase the stress and suspense factors.
Most of these efforts felt reasonable to me, or at least not overly challenging or irksome. The Desperate Hour is a thriller. I didn’t fight it. I accepted the rules and requirements.
Congratulations to IndieWire‘s Zack Sharf, an obedient soldier for the woke brigade, getting hired as Variety‘s digital news director.
At IndieWire Sharf posted anything and everything that might hurt the Oscar chances of Green Book…didn’t work out!
In August 2018 Sharf jumped into that totally moronic, p.c.-inflamed Good Boys controversy after TMZ posted photos of a stand-in for 11-year-old Keith Williams wearing makeup to darken his skin color. Sharf did his best to further inflame things by getting a cinematographer to say that the practice of applying blackface for lighting purposes was “unorthodox.”
In a 5.4.21 interview with Barry Jenkins, Sharf wrote that “Jenkins’ biggest issue with the gaffe all these years later is that it perpetuated a false narrative that Moonlight only won Best Picture because the Academy wanted to honor a Black film.” Spike Lee to Variety, 6.21.17, starting at :37: “The reason why what happened at the Oscars this year [i.e., during the 2.26.17 Oscar telecast, when Moonlight was belatedly announced as the Best Picture Oscar] was because of the year before [with] #OscarsSoWhite. I mean, that was a bad look for the Academy, and they had to switch up with more inclusion, more diversity.”
In a 6.28.21 piece about The Harder They Fall Sharf was so terrified of using the term “Black western” that he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. In his riff about a new trailer for The Harder They Fall, he went with Netflix’s term — a “new school Western.”
By the way: Sharf wrote in July 2019 that The Lighthouse will be presented “in Academy ratio,” which would mean 1.37:1. In fact the film was presented in 1.19:1 — an aspect ratio introduced in 1926.
Last night and for the first time in 21 years, I re-watched Taylor Hackford and Tony Gilroy's Proof of Life. My vague recollection was that it had missed the mark, having lost money and gotten mixed reviews. I was wrong.
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