A seemingly reputable air-travel website is reporting that American Airlines has announced that they’re suspending their flights from both Miami and New York to Milan through 4.25.20. American Airlines notes that this decision is being made due to a reduction in demand. It also reports that last night a New York to Milan flight was cancelled “after an American Airlines crew allegedly refused to operate the flight “due to fears related to coronavirus in Northern Italy.”
Plummeting demand for a product or service invariably results in lower prices. This is why I recently decided to fly to Cannes by way of Milan rather than Paris. Why, then, are round-trips fares for New York to Milan flights still costing $600? That’s a typical, non-pandemic price. I’m looking for RT prices to drop to $400 or $450 tops, but they stubbornly won’t budge.
How dare the French Film Academy ignore the army of anti-Roman Polanski protestors by giving him the Cesar award for Best Director? Don’t they understand that the Cesars are not about honoring the finest in artistic achievement but about submitting to the current political narrative among #MeToo progressives and in furtherance of concurrent cancel-culture decrees?
Seriously, the members who voted for Polanski are to be commended for not allowing the militants to intimidate them into voting differently.
Variety is reporting that “numerous walkouts” happened at the Salle Pleyel when the Polanski win was announced. One of the evacuees was Best Actress nominee Adele Haenel, star of Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables, one of the HE’s 2019 faves, won the Cesar for Best Picture. It also won the people’s choice prize. Les Miserables costar Alexis Manenti (he played the pugnacious racist cop) won for best male newcomer. The film also won for best editing.
I realize that institutional film awards are rarely about quality in and of itself and are usually about what the majority of voters believe to be the most the urgent political concerns (or moods or trends) of the moment.
In the French film industry there are two camps — the old guard and the progressive anti-Polanski-ites. The latter group, wanting to send a message to the industry about patterns of sexism and sexual exploitation, were angered that Polanski and An Officer and a Spy were nominated for several Cesar awards, and are now doubly appalled that he won.
The director and co-writer of An Officer and a Spy (aka J’Accuse) actually took two Cesar awards in Paris on Friday night — one for Best Director and another for Best Adapted Screenplay, shared with co-writer Robert Harris. An Officer and a Spy‘s Pascaline Chavanne also won a Cesar for best costume design.
Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy: Polanski didn’t attend the festivities. He announced a day or two ago that he feared a “public lynching” by feminist protestors if he went. Earlier today An Officer And A Spy producer Alain Goldman and star Jean Dujardin also announced they also wouldn’t be attending the Cesars. Goldman told AFP “an escalation of inappropriate and violent language and behavior” towards Polanski was the reason.
Bernie Sanders‘ loss to Donald Trump next November will usher in a period of catastrophic bully-boy autocracy that will make the last three years look faint-hearted by comparison. It will also shatter the Democratic party into a thousand shards of shrieking recrimination — people will lose their minds — while accelerating the planet’s fossil-fuel destruction tenfold and God knows what other horrors.
In ’16 blunt-spoken Bernie seemed like a good guy compared to cackling eye-bag Hillary, but now he’s the Pied Piper of Destruction and an all but certain deliverer of…oh, God, more misery than most of us can even imagine. And for the sake of the very best intentions. Over the cliff and into a Jeremy Corbyn-like abyss.
And so tonight’s Las Vegas debate, naturally, will be all about what a terrible billionaire candidate Michael Bloomberg is. A candidate who might have a chance of beating Trump…maybe. Progressive twitter has been tearing Bloomberg down over the last several days, and this evening he’ll be slashed, trashed, hammered, punched, bruised, brutalized and rhetorically spat upon, etc. Partly by Warren but mostly, I presume, by the Death’s Head Moth from Vermont.
I’ve never liked Amy Klobuchar, but I’m almost hoping she catches on. She won’t because too many people feel as I do but I’m hoping against hope. I don’t know what to do or say or feel. We’re dead, finished, kaput. The most corrupt and ethically destructive U.S. president in history is probably going to be re-elected. We’re all in a pit of hell. When Bernie loses next November you can thank guys like Kid Notorious along with the wokester purists.
Bloomberg is somewhere between 5’7″ and 5’8″, by the way. Watch closely when and if he stands next to Mayor Pete, who’s also said to be 5’8″.
To go by frame captures provided by DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze, the Criterion teal monsters are back, and this time they’ve desecrated Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Teorema. Once again, natural or subdued blues have apparently been rendered with a garish teal-green tint. Look at the images. A year and a half ago I asked Tooze if there might be something off about the color tuning on his 4K Bluray players or 4K TV, and his emphatic reply was “I’ve been doing this 18 years, and it’s not me.”
So what is wrong with Criterion? This is vandalism, plain and simple. This is organizational derangement. This has happened three times previously with teal-tinted Blurays of John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy, Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham and Brian DePalma‘s Sisters. And nobody has complained except for Tooze (half-heartedly), myself and a handful of thread commenters. And now Teorema.
From Joe Leydon, sometime this morning: “Something else about The Graduate and not unlike The Sterile Cuckoo, which followed two years later. It appears timeless because it’s not at all reflective of its time. You’d never know from looking at these films (both of which I love, and both of which I saw back in the day) that the Vietnam War was going on.”
HE response: “The Graduate actually was reflective of its time as far as your vaguely stifling upper-middle-class norms were concerned. Anti-Vietnam War and anti-Dow Chemical napalm fervor (‘Dow shall not kill’) was hot on university campuses but in your cushy suburbs this political current only caught on in the aftermath of all the ’68 convulsions (MLK and RFK killings, LBJ folding his tent, Chicago Democratic Convention riots) and beyond. In ‘67 the middle-class miasma was mainly about dreaming about the Beatles and getting high and zoning out…an odd blend of vague resignation and regimentation and cruising around for nocturnal adventure. Whiffs of sexual secretions (as well as ‘blue balls’) and Brooks Brothers shirts that smelled like pot and the sounds of Buffalo Springfield and Sgt. Pepper.
If you could easily move into any home or apartment in which a movie character resides, what would you select? A recent Facebook thread asked this question, and believe it or not the author said he’d like to live in Scotty Ferguson‘s Vertigo apartment in San Francisco.
The guy has his pick of any residence in the movie world, including Robert Downey, Jr.‘s houseboat in Zodiac, the gaudy Tony Montana mansion in Scarface, Robert De Niro‘s seaside home in Heat, Joe Starrett‘s cabin in Shane and Xanadu in Citizen Kane, and he chooses an unexceptional and rather pokey one-bedroom apartment at 900 Lombard (at Jones)?
Jesus, why not choose Popeye Doyle’s Brooklyn one-bedroom rathole in The French Connection? Or Jeff Lebowski‘s Venice apartment?
Hollywood Elsewhere is torn between (a) Kristen Stewart‘s small Paris apartment in Personal Shopper, (b) the mountainside John Robie home in To Catch A Thief (which Sasha Stone and I actually visited in 2011), (c) the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired VanDamm home in North by Northwest, and (d) Lionel Barrymore‘s ramshackle hotel in Key Largo.
No, I wouldn’t like to live in that 19th Century Knives Out mansion. I love that cozy third-floor area where Chris Plummer wrote and slept, but otherwise it’s too big, too cavernous, too costly to heat.
Out of 31 Gold Derby experts, only four — Variety‘s Tim Gray, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Decider‘s Chris Rosen and myself — have stood up for Dolomite Is My Name‘s Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Her performance as Lady Reed is arguably the most touching and open-hearted of the year. In any category.
And 27 GD know-it-alls have blown her off. Nice one, guys!
Three other contenders deliver the intrepid beating heart thing. The Farewell‘s Zhao Shuzhen, who plays the ailing grandmother, Nai Nai. Bombshell‘s Margot Robbie, who portrays a fictitious Fox News comployee, Kayla Pospisil**, but in a stunned and shattered victimhood mode. And Richard Jewell‘s Kathy Bates, in her most noteworthy feature film performance since…what, Gertude Stein in Midnight in Paris?
The performances of the other three highly-rated contenders — Marriage Story‘s Laura Dern, Hustlers‘ Jennifer Lopez and Little Women‘s Florence Pugh — are all about spunk and spirit and strutting around. (Pugh delivers all this plus impudence.)
I respected Robbie’s performance and felt sorry for Pospisil (that awful scene in Roger Aisles‘ office), but at no time did I feel any kind of profound or meaningful kinship with her (mainly due to the rightwing thing). The emotional currents that seep out of Randolph’s Lady Reed are far more affecting, and yet Robbie has been included on 25 out of 31 GD lists. She’s obviously a bigger name that Randolph, but her performance isn’t in Randolph’s league. At all. Seriously.
The last time I checked performances that make you feel something deep and poignant are the ones that result in acting nominations…no? I guess gutsy and ballsy have more clout these days.
** Pospisil is a very strange last name. A mixture of a prescription drug and an opossum.
I was initially intrigued by Lucy Ellman‘s “Patriarchy Is Just a Spell,” a 12.26 N.Y. Times piece about Alfred Hitchcock‘s Spellbound. But the subhead — “I’m outing Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller Spellbound as a #MeToo film” — doesn’t really manifest.
Ellmann basically notes how the male characters in Spellbound treat Ingrid Bergman‘s character, Dr. Constance Petersen, like a sex object or otherwise disregard her authority as a psychoanalyst. Over and over and over, Gregory Peck included. That doesn’t make Spellbound a #MeToo film. It makes it a study of upscale 1945 culture and how almost all males from that realm were sexist assholes in one way or another, certainly by the standards of 2019.
Spellbound is, was and always will be a less-than-satisfying film. The psychological jargon has always felt gimmicky and simplistic, and Peck’s character, John Ballantyne, is, in fact, a brooding, hair-trigger jerk.
But the film has always held my attention for (a) the falling-in-love, opening-of-doors sequence when Bergman realizes she’s head over heels for Peck and vice versa, and (b) the fact that Bergman and Peck did in fact lock loins during production. Both were 29 at the time.
Peck to People‘s Brad Darrach in a 1987 interview: “All I can say is that I had a real love for her (Bergman), and I think that’s where I ought to stop. I was young. She was young. We were involved for weeks in close and intense work.”
Ellman #1: “Psychoanalysis has often despaired of women. Detailing the faults of mothers has worn out the velvet of many an analytic couch. Freud expressed mystification and exasperation with the uncharitable question ‘What do women want?’
“Well, maybe what women want is to steal the show, regain center stage, which is in fact their rightful place in the world — and in the movies. Echoes of the matriarchal cultures that dominated prehistory lurk in our collective unconscious. Female supremacy is alluring.”
I too find female supremacy alluring. This is probably the way to go, given the toxic tendencies of too many boomer, GenX and Millennial males. Things have to change.
It’s pricey ($75) and over-sized, as the below comparison shows. Doesn’t fit on the shelf like the others do, but there’s the audacity. I’d previously leafed through the Mad magazine “Bounty Law” parody, but it’s cool to own it. I love the 45 vinyl record with the yellow plastic turntable adapter. And I love the additional 7 scenes. Thanks to the Sony promo gang.
Sidenote: I’ve seen OUATIH in theatres two or three times, I’ve streamed it on HD and now I’m watching the 4K version, and dp Robert Richardson chose to shoot with a strangely subdued screen-door or mosquito-net visual effect. And I”m sorry but my eyes are annoyed by this. Richardson never allows you to look at the images without this odd scrim in the way. It’s less evident in open-sunshine scenes (Pitt fixing the TV aerial on the roof) but it keeps returning.
Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables (Amazon, 1.10.20) is the official French nominee for the 2020 Best International Feature Oscar, having nudged aside Celine Sciamma‘s much-admired Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It was my favorite film at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, and the film I’d most like to see win the foreign Oscar on 2.9.20.
I know Parasite has it in the bag but Ladj Ly‘s film is just as socially incisive as Bong Joon-ho‘s, and it has no insane story-logic issues. And a much better ending. It would be a major miscarriage of artistic justice if Les Miserables doesn’t at least emerge as one of the Best International Feature Oscar nominees.
Ladj struck me as a sea of calm. Settled, unhurried, matter of fact, good eye contact. Reluctant to smile too quickly or easily, but when he smiles it counts. His English sucks as badly as my French, which naturally put me at ease.
So we had a nice, easygoing chat but I never got a quote as good as the one Ladj gave the N.Y. Times the other day, so here it is: “I was inspired by my own history. Everything in the film comes from my life, from beginning to end. It’s a sort of autobiography, and a witnessing. I tried to make a film that resembles [the community that I live in]. To live in these towers — it’s violent, it’s degrading.”
Set in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, a poor but tightly-knit African Muslim community (where Ladj grew up and still lives), it offers a jolting contemporary echo of the cruelty, harassment and oppression that ignited Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel, this time rooted in police brutality and racial animus.
Written by Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and brilliantly shot by Julien Poupard, LesMiserables feels like a rough-and-tumble Antoine Fuqua film, using the basic dynamic of Training Day (but with three cops instead of two) plus a Little Do The Right Thing plus a constant stream of anxious urban energy. And with an open-ended existential ending that resembles the finale of Danis Tanovic‘s No Man’s Land. Or, if you will, the last two or three minutes of Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, which everyone saw a year or so ago and then flushed out of their heads after the 2.24.19 Oscar telecast, is back in the news. The arch period comedy has won three big trophies at the 32nd European Film Awards — Best Film, Best Comedy and Best Actress for Olivia Colman‘s portrayal of Queen Anne.
The other Best Film nominees were Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor and Roman Polanski’s An Officer and A Spy. It was nearly a foregone conclusion that Polanski’s film wouldn’t win anything because of the recent #MeToo Paris protests, so the race was basically between Pedro, Marco and Yorgos.
Pain and Glory‘s Antonio Banderas, who won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actor award last May, won EFA’s Best Actor award.
Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables, which won the jury prize at Cannes and is representing France at the Oscars, won the European Discovery award.
Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire won the European Screenwriter prize.
I’m told that 46% of the directors of the forthcoming 2020 Sundance Film Festival are women…cool. The highest percentage ever. And I’m sure the annual ten-day event (1.23 through 2.2) will be…I don’t what. Snowy? Wokey-wokey? Inspiring? A lot of whoo-whooing before each premiere screening? A sense of zeitgeist fatigue? A feeling of “here we go again”?
A Taylor Swift doc (Taylor Swift: Miss Americana). Julie Taymor‘s Gloria Steinem biopic, titled The Glorias. Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted. Sean Durkin‘s The Nest. Viggo Mortensen‘s Falling. Rodrigo Garcia‘s Four Good Days. Nat Faxon and Jim Rash‘s Downhill. Brenda Chapman‘s Come Away.
But Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods, the Last Flag Flying-ish Vietnam gold-hunt film, won’t be there.
You know why? Because Sundance is a secular woke-spiritual get-together that has kinda sorta stopped mattering, and Spike knows Cannes is a better deal. He knows and I know that Sundance of 2020 is about itself — movies for the woke devotional — whereas the Sundance festivals of 2015 or ’10, ’05, ’00 or ’95 were about movies looking to ignite and connect and bust out and generate currents of serious consequence, and perhaps even some award-season action down the road. No more. That era has past.
Now the filmmaker deal is “come to Sundance to introduce your film to the Sundance friendlies, and maybe they’ll tell their Instagram friends about it when it starts streaming four or six or ten months hence…whenever. But you’re almost certainly not breaking out. You and your film are members of Sundance Village, and you’ll never, ever step out of that realm. Unless you’re Kenneth Lonergan or someone in that fraternity.”
If you believe in Sundance Village movies and the values that they stand for and/or are endorsing and seeking to bring about, then Sundance Village is for you. Buy your ticket packages, lay out the dough for the condo, buy your snow gear and your Southwest Airlines discount tickets.
But I know some people who aren’t going this year. Because they know that the high-voltage Sundance necessity of years past is ebbing, and that it won’t be a total tragedy if they don’t attend. Because they’ll see the hotties (there are always four or five) in good time. Maybe some will be streamable while the festival is underway.
10 or 15 years ago the slogan was “Sundance spelled backwards spells depressing.” Now it’s “Sundance spelled backwards means ‘does anyone give that much of a shit?'”
My honest attitude after attending for 25 or 26 years? I think I’ve conveyed that.