Within the last couple of days Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans suffered two savage bird pecks, the combination of which may prove fatal. First, Variety's Clayton Davis printed a reaction to The Fabelmans from "a prominent member of the [Academy's] producers’ branch", to wit: “I really didn’t like it.” And secondly, the five BAFTA nominations for Best Film didn't include The Fabelmans.
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I somehow missed a four-day-old report that Barack Obama had re-issued his Best Films of 2022 list as a tribute to Andrea Riseborough‘s searing performance in To Leslie. A gesture of respect, acknowledgment. Somehow this alters everything. In my head, at least. I’d interpreted the enthusiastic and orchestrated praising of Riseborough’s performance by a long roster of actor buddies as…well, expressions of loyalty and love. But Barack joining in changes things somewhat. He’s part of the cabal. Repeating: HE endorses Riseborough’s performance despite the film’s first hour having driven me up the wall. I feel much greater enthusiasm for Olivia Colman‘s performance in Empire of Light.
Ten nominees for the Producers Guild of America’s Daryl F. Zanuck award have been announced, and Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking — a dialogue-driven film that wokester critics have been touting as a Best Picture contender since it premiered in Telluride — didn’t make the cut.
I’ve been saying all along that Women Talking is a non-starter, and THR‘s Scott Feinberg tweeted during Telluride that he’d be surprised if it catches on among male industry veterans.
And yet Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, a film that more than a few gentle souls are terrified of even watching, is among the ten…go figure.
The ten PGA nominees: Avatar: The Way of Water (20th Century Studios); The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight Pictures); Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Marvel Studios); Elvis (Warner Bros.); Everything Everywhere All at Once (A24…no!); The Fabelmans (Universal Pictures); Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Netflix); Tár (Focus Features); Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount Pictures); and The Whale (A24).
HE to Friendo #1: “Are these Next Best Picture guys crazy? Women Talking is in third place among Best Picture contenders? On what planet?”
HE to Ruimy: “The truth is that almost every pundit has Women Talking in their predictions, but don’t be surprised if it misses out on a nomination. I’d say right now 60/40 it gets nominated.”
Friendo #2 to HE: “When it comes to Women Talking, the fix is in. A Best Picture nomination is going to happen whether people want it to or not. You could see that in Telluride.”:
HE to Ruimy: “Because of #MeToo tokenism and the fact that the one male character (Ben Whishaw‘s “August Epp”) is passive and tearful?”
Friendo #1 to HE: “The critics will have to drive this movie to Oscar nominations, and I don’t think they’re all on board.”
Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, HE’s choice for the Best Film of ‘22, has earned a solid passing grade (75%) from Joe and Jane Popcorn on Rotten Tomatoes. This represents a significant 30-point difference from the views of RT critics, most of whom are operating under the yoke of wokester mind tyranny and therefore compelled to dismiss the curious but compelling romantic dalliance between Olivia Colman and Michael Ward’s characters.
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BAFTA’s long lists are bringing me down, man. ’20 and ’21 were downish years, obviously, but so was ’22 to some extent. Several “good” films and performances here, but nothing really turns me on except for Top Gun: Maverick and Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar. Not a single Best Picture long-list selection made me swoon…not really. Each creme de la creme film has stuff that irritates me. Example: I hated, hated, hated Todd Field‘s decision to run Tar‘s closing credits at the very beginning.
The whole year was like that. What happened to the concept of movies reaching into your soul and altering the way you see life? Half the time after seeing a film in a commercial megaplex I want to pick a fight with an usher, preferably a fat Millennial one. Well, not actually but I fantasize about this from time to time.
BAFTA’s Best Picture Long List (alphabetized) + HE reactions + my own preferred list of ten.
Aftersun (HE: Dreary, inconclusive, middle-of-the-night nothingness inside a Turkish coastal resort for British tourists…my eyes glazed over, my brain left the room.)
All Quiet on the Western Front (HE: “I respect and admire AQOTWF for what it is and what it’s worth. But in our current realm this kind of large-sprawling-canvas, chaos-and-brutality-of-war film can only sink in so far. And 147 minutes felt too long. 120 or 125 would have sufficed.”)
The Banshees of Inisherin (HE: “There are many sane people out there who’ve found this film mystifying. I respect many things about it, including Kerry Condon’s performance. It’s not ‘bad’ as much as infuriating.”)
Elvis (HE: “Elvis isn’t quite as bad as I feared, but several sections are punishing to sit through. It’s a flashy, pushy, often exhausting carnival sideshow, very primary and primitive, clearly made for the ADD peanut gallery…a fairly blunt tool. And Tom Hanks‘ Colonel Parker accent is impossible.”
Everything Everywhere All At Once (HE: “It made me want to jump off the top of a 50-story office building with the intention of pressing a hand grenade against my chest and pulling the pin halfway down.”)
The Fabelmans (HE: “A truly fair-minded, non-obsequious opinion would have to acknowledge that the saga of Spielberg’s teenage years (mostly Phoenix, some Saratoga) is neither boring nor hugely interesting…it’s diverting in an on-the-nose, broadly performed way, but it mainly boils down to ‘decent with three pop-throughs — the Judd Hirsch rant, filming the Nazi war flick in the Arizona desert, and John Ford lecturing 17-year-old Steven about horizon lines.'”)
Living (HE: “The descriptive terms are ‘low-key,’ ‘no hurry,’ ‘tonally and visually accurate” (it’s set in 1952 London) and ‘quietly affecting emotional undertow.’ One quibble: Whenever old-school British bureaucrats of yore sat down in their first-class train compartments and unfolded their newspapers, they took their bowler hats off. Not so in Hermanus’ film.”)
Tar (HE: “Atmospherically transporting, powerfully charged and yet curiously infuriating. Watching with subtitles definitely helps. The best of the bunch, but I almost wish it wasn’t.”)
Top Gun: Maverick (HE: “High-powered San Diego flyboy saga, great action sequences, unambiguously straight-while-male-ish, “Great Balls of Fire”, etc.
Triangle of Sadness (HE: Not as good as The Square.)
In this order, HE’s top ten picks of ’22 (originally posted on 12.20.22):
Empire of Light
Close
Happening
Vengeance
She Said
Emily The Criminal
Christian Mungiu‘s R.M.N.
Top Gun: Maverick
Avatar: The Way of Water
Tar (despite the many irritations)
Friendo: "On Tuesday, 1.3, five ostensible Oscar contenders -- Babylon, Empire of Light, The Banshees of Inisherin, Women Talking and Tar -- made about $730,000 on 1,575 screens. Averaging three showings per day (or should I say four?), that's about 10 people per showing, which just about matches my personal experience.
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Jeff Sneider is a whipsmart, fair-minded guy with that strange intestinal fortitude quality known to very few journos in this racket. Co-panelist Scott Mantz is also part of this fraternity, having showed his own form of courage a few months ago in that Hollywood Critics Association dust-up.
In the minds of woke hive-mind fanatics I am a “divisive” columnist, as Jeff notes, but I care deeply about films and the remnants of the film culture that used to prevail in this industry (i.e., more cinematic, less of an emphasis on political instruction), and at least I’m not some breezy, constantly smiling opportunist (those Noovies promos!) and zeitgeist cruiser like Perri Nemiroff, whose face freezes and whose eyes narrow into a skeptical squint when Sneider mentions me.
“Emotional” sometimes gets conflated with “divisive”. What I am, boiled down, is a devotional, storied (40 years and counting), richly seasoned, aspect ratio-attuned, well-travelled and still strongly relationshipped Film Catholic who’s (a) filing as passionately as always and loving the grind, (b) had a pretty great peak ride for nearly 30 years (early ‘90s to late teens) but (c) has also endured some fairly intense cash-flow trauma over the last three years due to woke fanaticism, hence Sneider’s use of the term “divisive.”
Excepting the sea-change event of embracing sobriety in March of ’12, I haven’t changed that much over the last 20 or 25 years. My film devotion has been steady and reverent since I got into this racket in the late ‘70s, and I still regard myself as a sensible center-left type, but there are some Robespierre loonies (especially those from the absolutist DEI brigade and the older-white-guy-hating #MeToo fringe vengeance squad) who began going over the waterfall in ‘18 and ‘19.
That mad fervor is starting to calm down as we speak. Will woke lunacy last as long as the rightwing Red Scare paranoia did in the ‘50s? Maybe but who knows? It’s very easy to just go along with the mob. Very few have spine or sand. Even I am doing whatever I can to groove along with the loonies — no point in getting into small slap fights that I can’t hope to win.
In sum I appreciate and admire Mr. Sneider’s fairness and his respect for my integrity. Yes, I sincerely meant it when I put Empire of Light at the top of my 2022 list. Ditto my other selections, 30 in all.
I’ve finally decided upon the proper sequential order of HE’s top 30 films of 2022. Almost every title has a link to my original review. (Okay, one or two links don’t connect to a “review” as much as a riff that contains opinions.) But this is the final order, and if you insist on only considering a Top Ten list…
Okay, I didn’t really like The Northman, but I respected it. Excerpt: “Excessive isn’t the word — startling, repetitious, numbing, eye-filling, confounding and yet all of a single harmonious compositional piece. Obviously the work of a serious artist. Handsome, exquisitely composed and about as bereft of humanity as a film in this vein could possibly be.”
1. Empire of Light
2. Close
3. Happening
4. Vengeance
5. She Said
6. Emily The Criminal
7. Christian Mungiu‘s R.M.N.
8. Top Gun: Maverick
9. Avatar: The Way of Water
10. Tar (despite the many irritations)
11. Bardo
12. The Banshees of Inisherin (minus the finger stubs)
13. Thirteen Lives
14. Armageddon Time
15. The Menu
16. God’s Country
17. All Quiet on the Western Front
18. Palm Trees and Power Lines
19. Triangle of Sadness
20. Holy Spider
21. The Batman
22. The Northman
23. Living (decent)
24. Argentina 1985
25. Apollo 10 and 1/2
26. Navalny
27. Las Vegas portion of Elvis
28. Watcher
29. Bros.
30. The Fabelmans
THR columnist Scott Feinberg doesn't have any supernatural insights into award season positionings, but in terms of Best Picture predicting he does have the ability to pass along Robert Louis Stevenson's "black spot", so to speak.
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The HFPA has done everything possible to atone for past sins and it’s still not good enough — the twitter wokesters (Tomris Laffly, Clayton Davis, et. al.) want them suppressed and blacklisted to death.
I’m in a skin clinic undergoing a basel-cell cancer removal procedure**, but the woke Stalinists are trying to suffocate the Golden Globe awards by telling everyone (publicists in particular) not to mention this morning’s GG nominations.
Here’s what Sasha Stone posted a little while ago:
One of the reasons the wokesters are trying to suppress the Golden Globes is because the HFPA didn’t adhere to the feminist quota system — i.e., no women directors were nominated. For this and other reasons the GGs must be punished!
Here’s a complaint from Variety’s #1 wokester Clayton Davis:
Mashable’s Robert Daniels has posted a strong disapproval of Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light. It’s fair, I think, to call this a racial admonishment piece, as Daniels has voiced a fundamental objection to older white directors “fumbling” films about black characters — i.e., having the temerity to make such films in the first place.
Paul Rai’s approving comment [below] also laments James Gray’s Armageddon Time, another instance of an older white director “using black characterization as foundation fodder for [a white] director’s ethos.”
What do you think Daniels is talking about when he calls Empire of Light “a contrived, politically trite exercise”? He obviously doesn’t like the brief romantic pairing of Olivia Colman‘s Hillary and Michael Ward‘s Stephen, and he regards Mendes’ decision to merge an older, white, mentally anxious lady with a young, good-looking lad of color as a “trite” attempt to inject some kind of current cultural flavor.
In short, Daniels is saying, older white directors (Green Book’s Peter Farrelly included) need to stay 100 yards away from period sagas involving black characters, and 500 yards away if the story involves interracial sex.
Here’s how I put it on 12.7 in an HE piece “HE Fights for Empire of Light”:
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