A day rarely passes when I don’t watch a couple of “Idiots in Cars” videos. Enormously pleasing. All my life I’ve found the automative misfortunes of bad drivers hilarious. And I’m mostly an LQTM-er — I rarely laugh out loud.
A day rarely passes when I don’t watch a couple of “Idiots in Cars” videos. Enormously pleasing. All my life I’ve found the automative misfortunes of bad drivers hilarious. And I’m mostly an LQTM-er — I rarely laugh out loud.
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)
This was the very first video sent to me by Tatiana during her Mexico-and-Cuba trip. It’s still my favorite. I’d really like to go there. Buena Vista Social Club, etc.
Having scored an early copy of Prince Harry’s “Spare” (Random House, 1.10), The Guardian‘s Martin Pengelly has posted a tale about Harry’s elder brother, Prince William, knocking him to the floor during verbal fisticuffs over Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle.
Brothers are allowed to slap each other around if they want to, and nobody should have anything to say about it. It’s between them.
I should add, however, that while I’ve never had any feelings or opinions about William up until now, reading that he bashed chickenshit Harry fills me with (I’m perfectly serious) newfound respect.
Harry has written that following the slapdown, his first telephone call was to his therapist. What a pathetic candy-ass! His therapist!
Purely from memory, but my memory’s pretty good when it comes to Paddy Chayefsky….a post-coital scene between the late Diana Rigg and the late George C. Scott, from Chayefsky and Arthur Hiller‘s The Hospital (’71):
Rigg: “I love you, Herb, and want to marry you and have children. And of course, you love me. I mean, you ravaged me three times.”
Scott: “Three times?”
Rigg: “You were as puffed up as a toad about it. Punched a slight hole in your crusade for universal impotence, didn’t it?”
Scott: “Diana, I raped you last night in a suicidal rage. Where did we get love and children out of that?”
Rigg: “For heaven’s sake, Herb. I ought to know whether a man loves me or not. Last night you screamed it, bellowed it, shouted it from an open window.”
Scott: “Well, I think those were more feelings of gratitude than anything else.”
Rigg: “Gratitude for what?”
Scott: “Well, my God, for resurrecting feelings of life inside me that I thought dead!”
Rigg: “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Herb…what do you think love is?”
Scott: “All right, I love you! I’m not about to argue with so relentless a romantic.”
You can never trust trailers but my God, the new Renfield trailer looks magnificent! Could the film itself be as good? Could this be the definitive vampire comedy that will unseat Love at First Bite and present one of Nicolas Cage‘s greatest-all-time performances?
If the film turns out as good as the trailer I’m seriously in favor of Cage being Oscar-nominated for Best Actor…trhe campaign would become a career tribute thing, and he could win. Look at him, for God’s sake! Listen to that enunciation! The crescendo of his career!
Directed by Chris McKay and written by Ryan Ridley (based on an story by Robert Kirkman), Renfield is about a toxic, dysfunctional relationship between Renfield, the apprentice vampire played by Dwight Frye in Tod Browning‘s original 1931 Dracula and played in Renfield by Nicholas Hoult. Awkwafina plays Renfield’s traffic-cop girlfriend.
Universal will open Renfield on 4.14.23. Possibly the first excellent film of 2023!
Condemn and cancel the following persons for creating this obviously deranged and predatory serving of erotic titillation — a scene that more or less gives a pass to all would-be rapists and gun fetishists: Robert Redford (alive), director George Roy Hill (passed in 2002), screenwriter William Goldman (died in 2018), actress Katharine Ross (because she went along with it!). Who else?
From D.C. maven Jester Bell (aka Theresa Campagna):
YouTube commenter #1 (Masked Panther): “The joker is supposed to be a respected dangerous lunatic. Not some pregnant man. So sad the direction D.C. is going / allowing.”
YouTube commenter #2 (Harley Quinn): “If this doesn’t show how dead DC is then [I don’t know] what will.”
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall‘s Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year’s Telluride...
More »7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when...
More »It took me a full month to see Wes Ball and Josh Friedman‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes...
More »The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
More »Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
More »For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...
More »asdfas asdf asdf asdf asdfasdf asdfasdf