During last May’s Cannes Film Festival N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, who’s become an unbridled celebrator of feminist-brand cinema in recent years, praised Todd Haynes’ May December (Netflix, 12.1), an underwhelming (to put it kindly) attempt at blending the Mary Kay Letourneau saga with a semblance of a re-heated Persona. Dargis actually went apeshit, predicting Oscar glory. I wouldn’t say that reactions to the recent N.Y. Film Festival screenings of Haynes’ film have necessarily put the kibbosh on this fantasy, but I would say that the general lack of excitement is palpable.

HE’s most recent May December piece appeared on 9.26.

Last night I saw for the very first time Rouben Mamoulian‘s Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde (’31). I had watched two or three segments (particularly the Miriam Hopkins stocking-removal + side-boob scene) but never the entire thing.

It was a beautifully restored version showing on the Criterion Channel, but I was doubly impressed and actually astonished by the extended POV sequence in the very beginning, which I had somehow never read about.

It was almost certainly Mamoulian’s idea to begin with, I’m guessing, but the renowned cinematographer Karl Struss (Sunrise, The Great Dictator, Limelight) was obviously a full partner. The shot uses a circular, partially-closed iris view, and it starts with Fredric March‘s unseen Dr. Jekyll playing an organ, talking to his butler, walking through his home, putting on an evening cape, leaving his home (we finally get a peek at March when he looks in a mirror) and arriving as a college classroom for a lecture.

If before last night you had asked me what film was the first to make use of extended POV cinematography, I would have said Robert Motgomery‘s Lady in the Lake (’47), a hardboiled Phillip Marlowe crime story.

Everyone has a look of excitement and anticipation in their eye after they’ve graduated high school and are about to start college. The great adventure! When I attended my 25th celebration most of my ex-classmates had either surrendered that gleam or put it into a bureau drawer somewhere. To me they looked sedate, staid, settled. All except for a small fraternity, which I estimated to be maybe 5% of the crowd. X-factor types with a semblance of life in their veins. Looking for action, adventure, the next discovery.

Posted on 6.29.15: The other day a friend mentioned a pending high-school reunion. Okay, fine, I wanted to say, but if you were fundamentally unhappy and occasionally miserable in high school (as many of us were, and as I definitely was), you’ll need to stash that history in your locker and keep it there until the reunion is over.

Reunions tend to remind a lot of us what a regimented environment and cultural concentration camp high school was. Most of us only realize this after we’ve found our footing as adults. I was lost but now I’m free, or certainly a lot freer.

My high-school years didn’t feel “miserable” in an unmistakable, lemme-outta-here sense; the unhappiness I lived with seeped into my system in a hundred subtle ways. I was so down it looked like up to me. All of it. I didn’t expect any semblance of “happiness,” but I was hoping all the time that life might eventually become less grueling.

I wasn’t anti-social but I didn’t party and run around all that much until my senior year, and once that phase kicked in I became a madman. The truth is that on a certain level I was a kind of functioning alcoholic (no serious behavioral problems but a few serpents under the surface) from my late teens until I quit the hard stuff in the mid ’90s. The real healing didn’t begin until I went sober in March 2012, or so I tell myself.

Before I socially flowered I watched a shitload of TV and listened to a lot of music and basically lived in my head. I was a secret genius who could potentially be persuaded to join the crowd, but no one ever asked. I know that my father’s alcoholism felt and smelled like mustard gas in our home, especially during dinner hour, and that my self-esteem was in the basement. I mostly felt apart, diminished and unworthy when it came to women. In school I didn’t do sports or join clubs or do anything extra-curricular except for detention.

My life didn’t really kick into gear until my mid 20s when the journalism thing started, and even that was agony until I became a half-decent writer and had learned the ropes and had gotten to know people, etc. Things didn’t actually kick into a good place (confidence, comfort, fair reward) until the online column era started, in late ’98 — a quarter-century ago.

The Gotham Award nominations were announced at noon today, and hoo boy…talk about an organization and a community that lives in a deep mine shaft within its own secular planet…nominations that represent an elitist bubble of urban progressive sensitivity that could choke a plowhorse…a mindset that frequently spits upon Joe Popcorn cinema and enforces a social prejudice agenda…diverse, convulsive, queer-friendly, gender-neutral, indie-favoring, right index finger inserted in rectum, down with older white guys, “we know what we know and if you don’t like where we’re coming from that’s on you because we represent the better angels of the human condition, in large part because we’re more highly evolved”…

Okay, I’m half on-board with a few of the acting nominations…some of them are fairly spot-on so the people who selected them aren’t knaves but perceptive, sensible types for the most part. But the Best Feature and Best International feature nominees…yeesh.

The five Best Feature nominees are Ira Sachs‘ Passages (forget it), Celine Song‘s Past Lives (the fix is in on this one, trust me), Tina Satter‘s not-half-bad Reality, Kelly Reichardt‘s Showing Up (a reasonably decent woke-lifestyles-in-Portland film) and A.V. Rockwell‘s A Thousand and One (not a chance).

The Best International Feature noms are All of Us Strangers, Anatomy of a Fall, Poor Things, Tótem and The Zone of Interest. Yup, that’s right — they’ve blown off the audience-friendly The Taste of Things (i.e., The Pot-au-Feu). I didn’t realize that Poor Things was a truly international production….whatever.

Outstanding Gender-Free Lead Performance noms: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Origin, Lily Gladstone in The Unknown Country (peresumably a KOTFM stalking horse), Greta Lee in Past Lives, Franz Rogowski in Passages, Andrew “beard stubble” Scott in All of Us Strangers, Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla, Teyana Taylor in A Thousand and One, Michelle Williams in Showing Up and Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction.

Outstanding Supporting Performance noms: Juliette Binoche in The Taste of Things (obviously NOT a supporting performance), Penélope Cruz in Ferrari (yes!!), Jamie Foxx in They Cloned Tyrone (what about his knockout performance in The Burial?), Claire Foy in All of Us Strangers (very good performance), Ryan Gosling in Barbie, Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry (first-rate!), Sandra Hüller in The Zone of Interest, Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (good performance), Charles Melton in May December (forget it), Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers (best of the bunch or at least tied with Penelope Cruz!).

Back to the root elements: Remember Ray Walston in My Favorite Martian with the insect antennae popping out of his head? Many of the Gotham nominators are 2023 Walston variations…alien humanoids with a knowledgable, sophisticated, well-educated dweebo sensibility…Snidely Whiplash foo-foos who all drink from the same well or the same teapot…Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, Jessica Kiang, Claudia Puig, Alison Willmore, Thelma Adams, David Fear, Jon Frosch, Wendy Ide, HE’s own Guy Lodge, plus Carlos Aguilar, Lindsey Bahr, Lovia Gyarkye, David Sims, Monica Castillo, Robert Daniels, Tim Grierson, Tomris Laffly…okay, I’m not 100% certain that each and every Gotham Awards nominating committee member is a “bad” person but many of them are, in my humble opinion.

These folks are mostly ideological sycophants, political cowards, go-alongers…people who have sworn loyalty to the politically purifying, disruptive, anti-populist social serum that’s been flowing through the veins of Stalinist theological authoritarians and generally plaguing cinema since ’17 or thereabouts by attempting to transform the art of motion pictures into an instrument of progressive social change…these are basically your Strelnikovs, your enlightened cool kidz…advocates of sweeping social change first and movie fanatics second.

If, for the sake of self-protection and your own professsional survival, you’ve decided to flip against a certain mouth-breathing sociopathic bully boy, fine. It simply means that your interests are now being harmed by your previously obedient association with Donald Trump, and that you’ve trying to wash yourself clean of this ignominous chapter in your life and move on. But the weeping in court is pathetic. Suck it up, comport yourself like a responsible adult and read the statement, but theatrical displays of remorse are basically cheap theatre.

This is some kind of optical photographic distortion. Richard Burton (5’10”) seems too large compared to Clint Eastwood (6’4″). Elizabeth Taylor was only 5’2″ — a stature sister of Kamala Harris.

I’m not going to say who, but during last night’s Montclair Film Festival screening of The Holdovers I was sitting next to a youngish guy (early 30s), and I could sense his vibe all through it and that he wasn’t exactly grooving with pleasure.

I could tell that he was okay with it in a subdued way, but the crowd (mostly GenX and boomers) was chuckling and guffawing left and right. The Holdovers is nothing if not full of sly, cutting humor and lacerating putdown lines that are cavalier and half-mean and yet sometimes heartfelt. And so this guy’s silence felt a tiny bit ominous.

And then around the two-thirds or three-quarters mark, he looked at his watch. That told me everything. The under-40s are going going to respond to this film with a little resistance.

Given that The Holdovers is set during the ’70 to ’71 Christmas and New Year’s holiday, obviously people who were around back then are going to relate more than Millennials or Zoomers. Nobody’s disputing this — seemed obvious from the get-go.

But Payne’s film is about much, much more than just savoring the nostalgia vapors and the exactly-right period aura and all the atmospheric trimmings. It pays off in dozens of deep-down ways, and I thought the fact that it’s obviously an excellent film, and one that exudes complete confidence in iself…I thought this obvious fact might start to win this guy over. But it didn’t.

Not to mention that slender, physically glowing quality. And yet I was fairly full of despair at 17 and 18. I felt no real hope and excitement about anything until I hit 25 or 26. And then slowly and very gradually, the pieces of the puzzle started to fit together.

It has long been my opinion that any Oscar-season pundit who professes to truly love and recommend too many films for Oscar glory…anyone who pours out award-season love too generously is, in my humble opinion, a kind of slut.

Say what you will about Hollywood Elsewhere but I don’t sell praise and affection as a rule. When I express love for a film or a performance or some other significant cinematic achievement in whatever category, it means something. Okay, now and then I’ve moderated or tempered my opinions in exchange for ads, but spottily.

What 2023 award-season contenders has Hollywood Elsewhere passionately gone to bat for so far? Which films do I, Jeffrey Wells, seriously love and admire as we speak? I’m just stating this plain and straight because all my life I’ve been in this racket for those rare poutpourings of love, awe and excitement.

Unlike the gladhanders, I have strict standards. I don’t think it means anything if your standards are overly elastic. Then again I’m not a hate factory. The wokester killers and suppressionists have tried to characterize me as such, but love means nothing if you’re not picky.

HE LOVE: Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers. Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things. David Fincher‘s The Killer. Michael Mann‘s Ferrari. Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things. Almost certainly American Fiction and Napoleon, although I haven’t yet seen them. Plus I earnestly respect and admire the impact that Barbie and Oppenheimer had las summer. That’s nine at the top of the list….nine!

Not to mention Errol Morris‘s The Pigeon Tunnel, Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge (official German submission for Best Int’l feature), Aki Kaurismäki‘s Fallen Leaves. Call it twelve.

And let’s not forget Jean-Stephen Sauvaire’s Black Flies, which I tumbled for in Cannes last May. (And I don’t care what Manohla Dargis thinks of it.)

Plus Guy Ritchie‘s excellent The Covenant, Christian Mungiu‘s RMN, Cruise & McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One, Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid, Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest. Ben Affleck‘s Air. And…uhm, okay, Celine Song‘s Past Lives to a modest extent.

Mainly because he was taking shots at my hero, President Barack Obama, during the 2012 election. Now I’m telling myself realizing that Romney wasn’t actually so bad, and that this country is much worse off because there are no more classic, candidly-spoken “classic” Republicans. Center-stage-wise, all we have in this regard is Nikki Haley and Chris Christie.