If “Air” Had Been Released A Few Weeks Ago

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We all understand how the Oscar game works. If you want your indisputably excellent film to be regarded as a Best Picture contender, you have to release it during award season (late October to Christmas).

Yes, there have been exceptions. Everything Everywhere All At Once was released on 3.25.22, and it wound up winning the Best Picture Oscar on 3.12.23 — nearly a full year later. The Silence of the Lambs opened on 2.14.91, and collected five major category Oscars 13 and 1/2 months later, including Best Picture.

Timing is nonetheless a huge factor (at least in most people’s minds), and so let’s play a game, shall we? Let’s pretend that Ben Affleck and Alex Convery‘s Air, by any yardstick an excellent character-driven sports film with at least two Oscar-calibre performaces (Matt Damon‘s Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis‘s Deloris Jordan) and a terrific finale that really sinks in…let’s pretend that Amazon didn’t release it on 4.5.23 but during award-season prime time.

You know it would be sitting on the Gold Derby best-of-the-year rosters and possibly might have prevailed among one or more the critics groups. You know it would have. So let’s cut Air a break and pretend it was released six or seven weeks ago. We’d be looking at a whole different ballgame.

Wiki: “Air was originally slated for a streaming-only release on Amazon Prime Video, but Amazon Studios eventually decided to release it theatrically following strong results from test screenings. It was the first Amazon title since Late Night to be given an exclusive theatrical release, and $40 to $50 million went into promoting the theatrical. It began streaming on Amazon Prime Video on 5.12.23.”

And here we are in late December 2023, and the world has obviously changed since last spring, but Air is still a first-rate, dialogue-driven sports film. As well as being an excellent “dad” film. (No shame in that!) It’s a very human, inside-baseball sports drama that feels honest and relatable every step on the way. Cut from the Moneyball cloth.

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“Ferrari” Reactions Are Largely About Expectations

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For nearly a quarter-century Michael Mann made a series of intensely male-ish, high-stakes grand-slammers — hardcore films about headstrong fellows forging their own paths, sometimes outside the bonds of legality but always single-mindedly. And man, did they hit the spot!

The hot streak began with 1981’s Thief and ended with 2006’s Collateral, and also included Manhunter (’86), The Last of the Monicans (’92), Heat (’95), The Insider (’99) and Ali (’01) — seven films in all.

Then came the “excellent work but not quite a bell-ringer” period…Miami Vice (’06), Public Enemies (’09) and Blackhat (’15)…movies that registered as ground-rule doubles or triples. Which felt disorienting to Mann-heads given his 23-year home run history.

Now comes Ferrari (Neon, 12.25), which is made of authentic, bruising, searing stuff. In my eyes it’s another grand-slammer but what do I know? Obviously the reaction so far has been mixed-positive — many admirers but also a modest-sized crowd of dissenters.

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Joe Popcorn Stands By Clooney’s “Boys”

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The shithead critics who’ve pissed all over George Clooney‘s The Boys in the Boat — easily his best directed film since Good Night and Good Luck — have been themselves pissed on by Joe and Jane Popcorn.

Good for this — Clooney’s underdog-vs.-overdog Olympic sports film is familiar but elegant — a confident effort that believes in itself and presents grace and simplicity for the virtues they’ve always been.

The difference is that critics are hung up on racial signage (i.e., the woke comintern has instructed them to regard any all-white, non-diverse movie that isn’t about building the A-bomb…they’ve been ordered to regard such films askance) and Joe and Jane simply aren’t distracted by same…they’re just watching the movie and going “hmm, yeah, pretty good.”

When Bad People Review Bad Films

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There’s no disputing that The Iron Claw is coarse, bruising and emotionally shameless — a death-trip family flick with an arch-villain of a paterfamilias (Holt McCallany’s Fritz Von Erich) whose malice is barely addressed by his sons and never confronted.

And all of it colored by the fraudulence of the “sport” of wrestling itself — a rancid charade that makes you want to barf or at least turn away.

And the grotesque, eye-rolling spectacle of one son after another almost comically succumbing to the black void like Radio City Rockettes dancers performing choreographed splits…it’s somewhere between nauseating, hilarious and ludicrous.

There’s another thing that’s beyond dispute, and that’s the fact that those who are earnestly praising this beyond-bizarre, blue-collar soap opera should never, ever be trusted.

I’m dead serious — the critics and HE commenters who’ve given Sean Durkin’s film a gold star and a back rub are dishonest people, or at the very least completely unmitigated and certainly undisciplined by what most of us would call “taste”.

For the rest of their lives these knaves, these one-eyed jacks, these human-sized hunks of gravel will have to answer for their praise for this garbage dump of a film…it will stalk them in perpetuity.

Chicago Reader critic Micco Caparale, 12.19:

N.Y. Post critic Johnny Oleksinksi:

Incidentally: Before yesterday’s screening of The Iron Claw I hadn’t realized how short The Bear ‘s Jeremy Allen White is. The guy is only 5’ 7”, or seven inches shorter than the late Kerry Von Erich (whom he plays in the film) and an inch shorter than Humphrey Bogart.

Curse of “Iron Claw”

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My first thought while watching The Iron Claw was “my God, what has Zac Efron done to himself? He looks like the Incredible Hulk…not to mention that awful Prince Valiant hair…good heavens.”

Professional wrestling is a joke. I’ve always hated the crude theatricality, the over-amped machismo. Fuck this “sport” and fuck me for being gullible enough to believe I might have an okay time with this low-rent, on-the-nose, over-pumped waste of time.

Bodies dropping to the canvas, guys screaming in pain, the exaggeration of anguish.

I hate wrestling culture even more than bowling culture (Kingpin) and NASCAR culture (Talladega Nights) and that’s saying something.

It took me less than ten minutes to decide I didn’t give a damn about the Von Erich family and their ludicrous blue-collar braggadocio and strange penchant for self-destruction and tragedy — Kevin (Efron), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson), Papa Fritz (Holt McCallany), Mama Doris (Maura Tierney), Pam Adkisson (Lily James) and Mike (Stanley Simons).

Which HE commenters urged me to see this fucking film? As they brought pain into my life, I will bring some kind of pain into theirs. It’s only fair.

Three dead brothers embracing at lakeside…

The Iron Claw has another half-hour to go. I feel obliged to stick it out but God, this is awful.

Warmest HE Remembrance

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Posted 13 years ago: There are the rote facts of life, the plain material truth of things, and then there are the currents within. The singing angels, the demons, the fireflies, the banshees, the echoes, the dreams…the vague sense of a continuing infinite scheme and how we fit into that. Every last one of us can define our lives as a constant mixing of these two aspects, but the charm and final value of a person, for me, is about how much he/she seems to be cognizant of and dealing with the interior world, and how much he/she comments and refers to those currents and laughs about them, and basically lives on the flow of that realm.

Some go there more frequently or deeply than others, and some are just matter-of-fact types who let their spiritual side leak out in small little droplets from time to time, but Sterling Hayden, by my sights, was almost entirely about those currents.

He never just said, “I’d like a little sugar in my coffee” and let it go at that. Well, he would…but if you asked him to expand upon that notion he would just take off and you’d just sit back and marvel. Hayden knew various coffees and coffee growers and had walked through coffee plantations in the Caribbean at dawn and he knew all about how sugar was refined and would speak metaphorically about the sweetness of sugar being the enticement but coffee being the reality of it all, the bean from the earth, the bean that needed to turn brown and then be ground down and prepared just so, and then he’d be off on some tangent that took the coffee-vs.-sugar metaphor and ran with it, or took it and jumped off a cliff as it were.

Hayden was a fascinating, hungry and obviously vulnerable man, insecure and ridden with guilt about naming names in the ’50s, jolly or surly depending on the time of day, very singular, a great contentious bear of a man, unsettled, always the thinker, certainly a poet or a man trying all the time to be one, a man of the sea and a boy in some ways. He and Patti Smith would have gotten along famously. He loved pot. And he loved his Johnnie Walker Red.

“We were once speaking about his role as the farmer in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 and he started to talk about his final line in the film, which he wrote, and I said it before he did — ‘I’ve always loved the wind’ — and he loved that. He chuckled and patted my knee and said ‘God love ya.'”

Comparing ’23 to ’73

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I’ve posted a roster of the 35 best films of 1973 twice before — this is the third time. Here’s my rundown of the best of ’23 and it only comes to 24 films. A lot of them are excellent or highly commendable, but overall they simply can’t compare to Team ’73…different culture, different atmosphere. blessed by the gods.

1973 stone-cold classics (10):

1. Badlands (d: Terrence Malick)
2. The Long Goodbye (d: Robert Altman)
3. The Exorcist (d: William Friedkin)
4. The Outfit (d: John Flynn)
5. Mean Streets (d: Martin Scorsese)
6. The Last Detail (d: Hal Ashby)
7. The Sting (d: George Roy Hill)
8. Last Tango in Paris (d: Bernardo Bertolucci)
9. American Graffiti (d: George Lucas)
10. The Last American Hero (d: Lamont Johnson)

1973 creme de la creme (12):

11. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (d: Peter Yates)
12. Blume in Love (d: Paul Mazursky)
13. O Lucky Man! (d: Lindsay Anderson)
14. Charley Varrick (d: Don Siegel)
15. Serpico (d: Sidney Lumet)
16. The Way We Were (d: Sydney Pollack)
17. Papillon (d: Franklin J. Schaffner)
18. Paper Moon (d: Peter Bogdanovich)
19. The Laughing Policeman (d: Stuart Rosenberg)
20. The Three Musketeers (d: Richard Lester)
21. Don’t Look Now (d: Nicolas Roeg)
22. Westworld (d: Michael Crichton)

1973 very good, highly respectable or at least enjoyable (13):

23. Amarcord (d: Federico Fellini)
24. The Last of Sheila (d: Herbert Ross)
25. The Paper Chase (d: James Bridges)
26. Save the Tiger (d: John G. Avildsen)
27. Scarecrow (d: Jerry Schatzberg
28. Sleeper (d: Woody Allen)
29. Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid (d: Sam Peckinpah)
30. Day For Night (d: Francois Truffaut)
31. La Grande Bouffe (d: Marco Ferreri)
32. The Holy Mountain (d: Alejandro Jodorowsky)
33. Emperor of the North Pole (d: Robert Aldrich)
34. Live and Let Die (d: Guy Hamilton)
35. Extreme Close-up (d: Jeannot Szwarc)

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Joseph Conrad’s “Youth”

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If you’re lucky or industrious enough to enjoy a peak period, it almost always happens between your mid 20s and early 40s. (Mine didn’t begin until my early 40s — go figure.) Any way you slice it youth is a ferociously fast train, and is over before you know it.

Johnny Depp was 31 when this Annie Leibovitz photo was taken in ‘94; Kate Moss was 20.

Gene Tierney was 23 when this shot was taken. She peaked in the 1940s — all was gravy, her life knew no bounds, she had a thing with JFK, etc. Career-wise and otherwise things got tough for her in the ‘50s.

Sounds of Silence

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Luce Potter was a Mexican actress (born in Chihuahua in 1914) whose best-known performance was entirely about silence and the power of seeming passivity. Augmented by way of reptilian pincer “fingers.” Nor was she expressive in terms of her eyes or facial features —she just stared and calculated and commanded. Okay, her eyes moved once when she glanced downward at a young boy but otherwise she was impassive. She had a slight assist from William Cameron Menzies, but no one who’s seen this wordless performance will ever forget it.

I Hadn’t Bothered to Learn

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…that German-born actor Conrad Veidt (1893-1943), best known for playing the odious Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca (‘42), was quite the impassioned anti-Nazi activist (he and Jewish wife Lily Greger left Germany when Hitler took power in ‘33) and was “perhaps” bisexual and certainly into occasional cross-dressing, at least during the Weimar era.

I had somehow completely forgotten that Veidt played a major role in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (‘20), the seminal German expressionist horror film.

Veidt’s Los Angeles pallies called him Connie. He stood six-foot-three.

During his final two or three years he lived smack dab in central Beverly Hills (617 No. Maple Drive) and for a time was into occult spirituality.

Having inherited a weak heart from his mother and having aggravated this condition with chain smoking, Veidt died while golfing at the Riviera Country Club on 4.3.43 — roughly three months after Casablanca opened in Los Angeles (it had premiered in NYC in November ‘42) and eleven months before it won the Best Picture Oscar on 3.2.44.

Antithesis of Cinematic Passion

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Vertical Entertainment’s couldn’t-care-less theatrical release of Phillip Noyce’s Fast Charlie (12.8) was a reminder that some distributors are actively hostile to the idea of proudly presenting a first-rate film in theatres as a kind of cultural hors d’oeuvres prior to streaming.

Vertical apparently went to some effort to belittle Noyce’s film during its one week of theatrical life, such as limiting its NYC-area exposure to Coney Island’s Kent Theatre (1170 Coney Island Blvd.), allegedly a sticky-floors, hole-in-the-wall viewing experience.

Streaming is Vertical’s basic game plan, but if you’re going to briefly dip your toe into theatrical, you have to man up and summon a little heart and soul. You have show respect and a little caring.