…and you’re basically Jeft with a pinker, smirkier, glossier, sexually averse Poor Things. Don’t get me wrong —Barbie is fine but but compared to the sumptuous banquet of Poor Things it’s fast food.
Good & Bad “Valance” 4K Discs
In May ‘22 “Paramount Presents” released a 4K Bluray of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (‘62) that didn’t pass muster. Restoration guru Robert Harris called it technically flawed (de-grained with an overlay of fake amoeba swirls). Three months hence (3.5.24) a remastered 4K disc (sans amoeba) will go on sale.
HE reminder: The last name of John Ireland’s “Cherry Valance” in Red River (‘48) is pronounced Val-ANCE while the surname of Lee Marvin’s arch-villain in TMWSLV is pronounced VAL-unce. Exact same spelling.
Friends of Barton Academy
Snaps of last night’s post-Holdovers screening soirée at Hollywood hills home of director-screenwriter Sacha Gervasi (Anvil!) and producer Jessica de Rothschild — hosted by Colleen Camp and attended by Best Actor frontrunner Paul Giamatti, helmer Alexander Payne, costar Dominic Sessa, Dustin Hoffman (Megalopolis), producer Mark Johnson, director Phillip Noyce (Fast Charlie), Orlando Bloom and other industry lah-lahs.
Restricted Chicago Film Critics Awards Approval
HE emphatically agrees with three 2023 trophies passed out today by the Chicago Film Critics Association — Poor Things‘ Emma Stone and The Holdovers‘ Paul Giamatti for best female and male lead performances, and Giamatti’s costar Da’Vine Joy Randolph for best supporting actress. Yes!
The other awards (including May December‘s bizarrely over-praised Charles Melton for best supporting actor and most promising performer) are basically woke lickspittle.
So Wrote Marcus Aurelius
“Meditations,” Book 3, page 20:
Kohn-Kushner Connection?
This is a reach, I realize, but if Harmony Korine “has been coming over” to the North Miami home of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump “to study the Torah,” then it’s probably within the realm of social possibility that Korine’s employee, former IndieWire critic and editor Eric Kohn and current honcho of Korine’s EDGLRD…it seems at least socially possible that Kohn might also one day break bread with the Kushners somewhere in that region. Imagine…Kohn occupying only a short social spitting distance between himself and The Beast.
There’s a rumor swirling around that Kushner is the main funder of EDGLRD.
Enduring Sundance Fizzle
Zero enthusiasm for the the slate of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival (January 18–28). I feel nothing….nothing at all. Festival director Eugene Hernandez is doing his level best, I’m sure, but has simply arrived too late in the cycle. Sundance is a shell of its former self.
For roughly 20 to 22 years or so (mid’90s to mid teens) this fabled Park City gathering was heavenly, and certainly more than worth the time, expense and hassle of going there.
My press pass was zotzed by the Robespierres in ’18, but I attended Sundance ’19 anyway and saw films by the grace of publicist pals. For the last four years I haven’t even thought of it.
It was 43 and 1/2 years ago when Robert Redford announced the idea of a Sundance Institute of some sort. He did so during a private chat-and-discussion at Yale University’s Battell Chapel. It happened on Thursday, 5.2.80, and I was right there front and center. I taped the whole thing.
For at least four years I’ve been calling the Sundance Film Festival a wokester cul de sac…a dead end in itself, a dog in a box. Robert Redford‘s annual Park City gathering was alive and crackling between the early ’90s until 2016, pumping new blood and attitude into Hollywood and in some instances even reaching Average Joe multiplexes — 25 years of vitality.
Then the wokesters began to take over in ’17, and within a year Sundance had become a festival for woke purists. Or, as I wrote in ’18, “a socialist summer camp in the snow…largely about woke-ness and women’s agenda films — healings, buried pain, social ills, #MeToo awareness, identity politics, etc.”
I’ve said this four or five times, only to be met by a consensus view from the HE commentariat that boiled down to “aahh, pipe down… you’re just pissed off because they yanked your press pass.”
But now finally…finally!…a writer director has told The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield that “the indie Sundance machine” has indeed woked itself into a corner, “creating films that no one wants to see…there’s a reason why you don’t have many indie breakouts because the stuff that has been deemed important is completely out of touch.”
Thank you!! Someone has finally joined me in saying how over the last four years the Robespierre contingent have all but poisoned the indie realm, which is annually celebrated in Park City. Indiewire would rather slit its collective throat that admit this, but now there are two of us…me and this writer-director guy!
“Blitz” Just Around The Corner
There’s every reason to assume that last week’s research screening of Steve McQueen‘s Blitz, an ensemble narrative about the Nazi bombing of England in the early 1940s, was encouraging to all concerned.
A viewer told World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy that Blitz constituted a “major achievement…both epic and intimate with some jaw-dropping [visual] filmmaking [chops].”
London filming began in November 2022; shooting also took place in Greenwich last February.
Perhaps a Cannes premiere six months hence? McQueen is a friend of that festival.
The Blitz cast includes Saoirse Ronan, Leigh Gill, Harris Dickinson, Erin Kellyman, Stephen Graham, Paul Weller, Kathy Burke, Benjamin Clementine, Hayley Squires= and Sally Messham.