Do The Right Thing -- Stand Up For Excellence
September 25, 2024
I Would Have Preferred A More Challenging...Okay, A More Insulting Tone
September 25, 2024
Opposite Peas in Polish Travel Pod
September 25, 2024
In Martin Scorsese‘s The Aviator (’04), Cate Blanchett‘s impersonation of Kate Hepburn (that fluttery Bringing Up Baby laugh on the golf course) earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
Seven years later Blanchett delivered another based-on performance, a financially fallen woman who was half Ruth Madoff and half Blanche DuBois, in Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine, this time snagging a Best Actress Oscar.
In Todd Field‘s TAR Blanchett plays an obsessive and emotionally ruthless orchestra conductor who gets eaten by cancel culture. It’s almost certainly her grandest and far-reachingest effort, and the first Oscar-heat performance that is entirely Blanchett’s creation — no echoes of perviously celebrated actress or notorious characters. And there’s really no way she doesn’t win her third Oscar for this on 3.12.23.
Partly because Blanchett’s competition is so comparatively underwhelming — nobody else is quite in her class.
Michelle Yeoh will be Best Actress-nominated for Everything Everywhere All at Once, but the film is a groaner, many 40-plus Academy members hate it, and Yeoh’s nomination will essentially be about her ethnicity…be honest. The EEAAO campaign is based on a DEI approval consensus. Ask yourself what the Academy reaction would be if EEAAO wasn’t about an Asian-American family (white folks don’t verse-jump as a rule but imagine it anyway) and if Yeoh’s character was a stressed-out 50something white woman played by, say, Laura Linney. Or by Jamie Lee Curtis with the IRS investigator played by Yeoh. Be honest.
There’s no question that Michelle Williams as the peculiar, emotionally eccentric mother in The Fablemans is a very broad and actressy performance. While Williams may be be nominated, the buzz has fallen away. I really don’t see her winning.
The most that Till‘s Danielle Deadwyler can hope for is a Best Actress nomination, because that’s as far as things will go.
I’ve heard people say that Margot Robbie‘s feisty, outsized performance in Babylon made them recoil, and given the negative reactions to Damien Chazelle‘s 1920s Hollywood epic I wouldn’t be surprised if Robbie is passed over.
Ana de Armas expertly did what she told to do in dramatizing the ache and trauma of Marilyn Monroe‘s sad life, but Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde is too deeply despised.
Viola Davis in The Woman King? No room at the inn.
I’ve been listening to Sarah Polley‘s podcast chat with Megan Daum (“The Unspeakable”). There’s a special focus, of course, on Polley’s Women Talking (UA Releasing, 12.23). Which many will respect but few outside of the feminist #MeToo take-power community is going to love…behonest.
Within its own realm Women Talking is a “respectable” effort, but it’s still a dialogue-driven political piece — a dimly-lighted, dusk-to-dawn discussion among several Mennonite women in a barn, about how they should respond to a series of horrific rapes within their community. The question is “do we stay or do we go?”
The question for critics is “where is the political upside for me if I say I have problems with this?” The answer is there is none, which is why almost all the critics (especially the wokester Branch Davidian types) have completely fallen for Polley’s film while insisting it’s a Best Picture contender
I know what Women Talking is, good and not-so-good, and that it’s aimed at a certain mindset and demographic even. Anyone who says “this film is just wonderful and eloquent and powerful and you simply have to see it”…if that’s all they say, they’re absolutely lying by omission.
From her first professional encounter with callous behavior on Terry Gilliam‘s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (’88), Polley has been very concerned about safety…safety on sets, protection from abusers. This is partly who she is, what she’s experienced…naturally she’s drawing from this well. She’s a serious person and a serious filmmaker.
It’s just that her film didn’t speak to my older-white-dude way of seeing things. It certainly didn’t reach in and touch me. I was checking my watch, waiting for it to end.
Women Talking‘s basic idea is basically “stand up to the pigs…condemn them, abandon them, isolate them.” Agreed! But the idea isn’t that a few sex-starved, cold-blooded Mennonite men are brute beasts, but that the overall patriarchy (straight white men) is to be regarded with extreme suspicion as too many white males seem amoral, heartless and exploitive. They probably need to be fought tooth & nail and perhaps even overthrown.
Last September a friend opined that Polley’s film is “almost comically male-hating.” When the wimpy and wimpering Ben Whishaw is the only male they can trust, you know what Polley is saying…”tearful, guilt-stricken-on-behalf-of-their-gender gay men are cool but forget straight guys!!”
Really? There isn’t one decent straight guy in the community who can be trusted? Not one regular dude who’s disgusted by the rapes and pledges to support the women? Imagine how the film could be spiritually and emotionally opened up, so to speak, if there was such a character. Or if a second straight male were to intrude only to speak skeptically about the assaults and argue against leaving.
Women Talking is oppressive because (a) it’s oxygen-starved and visually claustrophobic, (b) there’s no dramatic tension to speak of because from the perspective of the horribly brutalized victims it’s ludicrous to argue for staying, (c) the characters don’t sound like isolated Mennonites but smart, educated, worldly women playing their idea of isolated Mennonites.
Presumably some HE regulars have seen it and would care to weigh in?
Wednesday night Jody and I were having a light dinner at Terrain, and a guitar lady (late 30s, cute face, pleasant pipes) was singing the usual pop Christmas tunes.
But we were hearing too many kid-level songs (“Jingle Bells,” “Frosty the Snowman”), so I asked the waitress if the troubadour would consider something a little more adult-sounding. Like, say, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — a once popular, more recently derided 1944holidaytune about a hound’s crude attempt at seduction. Icky, yes, but at least an improvement over “Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
Our cheerful server pretended to be horrified — “Oh, she can’t sing that! Somebody’ll get mad.” Could you ask her to sing it anyway? I asked. Maybe she’ll brave it? The waitress said she’d pass along our request. Deaf ears. The thought passed.
But we ran into the singer as we were leaving and mentioned our interest in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and to our surprise she said she was a fan and would’ve absolutely sung it, no prob. She seemed to simply like the idea of a Christmas holiday tune about possibly getting poked, and didn’t care about the 21st Century Harvey Weinstein creepitude**.
I’d forgotten that Alvin Lee, the fastest guitarist in the west, died in 2013 at age 68. Martin Scorsese was one of the camera guys filming this legendary Woodstock performance.
So is Cillian Murphy going to spend the entire film looking haunted and forlorn about being the father of the A-bomb? Because I don’t want to go on a guilt trip with this guy. I really don’t. If it hadn’t been for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs that led to Japan’s surrender, my Marine lieutenant dad would’ve been ordered to take part in a huge land invasion of Japan. The odds of survival would have been quite low. Tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen would have died. War is hell, war is horrific…I don’t want to watch a movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer feeling bad and gloomy. I really don’t. He can go through the gloom later in life.
The failure of Everything Everywhere All At Once to be included on the Academy’s short lists for Visual Effects and Makeup & Hairstyling tells us that a serious percentage of Academy members aren’t fans of this A24 release, which suggests that support for it winning the Best Picture Oscar is a lot less than people think. (Yes, it might get nominated in that category.) If EEAAO was the juggernaut that its supporters believe it to be, it would have at least been included among the VFX and Makeup & Hairstyling shortlist nominees.
This is truly the happiest news of the day. I’m levitating off the couch. Thank you, God, for making my day…THANK GOD IN HEAVEN!
The intro is confusingly written, but for our secondpodcastSasha and I discussed HE’stop20filmsof ‘22…didn’t have time for all30. Sasha was in central Colorado as we recorded; she’s currently in the vicinity of Topeka, Kansas.
I hated this movie…hated it. Have there been any other movies shot in India that reemble The White Tiger? Films that operate in the realm of reality? That aren’t cartoonish, fantastical, ludicrous, overwhelming and over-produced? I’m certain that at least some Indian filmmakers are telling stories in a White Tiger-ish way.
A gang of film-centric Variety staffers — top-dog critics Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman plus Lisa Kennedy, Jessica Kiang, Tomris “kill the Golden Globes…no forgiveness!” Laffly, Guy snooty-snoot Lodge and Amy Nicholson — have decided to celebrate Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho as the greatest or most artful wowser pulverizer of all time.
The 1960 classic sits atop a list of 100 excellent films, the placement of which I mostly agree with. Except for two selections, that is.
Parasite (#82) turns on a completely idiotic plot contrivance and ends chaotically and nihilistically — obviously a woke diversity fave, but no way does Parasite deserve to be part of the 100 all-time greatest…stop it.
And following the calamitously corrupt Sight & Sound poll of a few weeks ago, Jeanne Dielman (#78) is damaged goods now. I recognize that Variety is trying to counterbalance the Dielman scandal and supply perspective by putting it in 78th place. But by clumsily and bizarrely pole-vaulting Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 film to the #1 position in the S&S poll, which was totally a gender #MeToo call, wokester fanatics have flung permanent egg yolk upon Jeanne Dielman‘s face. It was properly respected and admired before — now it’s a symbol of unwarranted woke power-grabbing.
Who decided on the pecking order of Variety‘s 100 greatest films? No one’s saying. All I’m told is that it was an “exuberant” group effort.
As much as I love and worship Psycho, it has to be stated that it’s a cineaste choice. It doesn’t have the necessary cultural or emotional depth or gravitas to earn the #1 spot. It’s basically a brilliant technical exercise thing — a pure cinema tutorial.
The plot (Robert Bloch was inspired by Ed Gein) is hardly drawn from the same well as, say, Ikiru or 12 Angry Men or The Grapes of Wrath or some other film that reaches down into the cultural terra firma and grapples with life as it actually smells and feels and bruises. It doesn’t really connect thematically with any commonly recognizable aspect of the human experience. It’s about lust, perversity, murder, taxidermy. Definitely a small, rural, oddball movie, but so beautifully assembled, so perfect in every way.
A far greater Hitchcock in terms of touching the common chord and dealing with a recognizable theme is Strangers on a Train. As alternates I would’ve chosen Lifeboat or North by Northwest. The latter is a contrived thriller, but you can feel real life in it — you can feel the actual throbbing world of 1958 and ’59 along with the cynicism and emotional coolness and calculation. The crop-duster sequence alone is just as arresting as anything in Psycho, and arguably more timeless.
Where is the humanity in Psycho? Anthony Perkins‘ psychological confession scene in the motel parlor is simultaneously riveting and sad, but it’s basically a conveyance of how fucked-up Norman Bates is. The most humane, sensible and fair-minded figure in Psycho is Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam), and he gets stabbed to death. The second most humane is Sheriff Chambers (John Mcintire). The Crane sisters (Marion and Lila) are antsy, wiggy, a bit neurotic. John Gavin‘s Sam Loomis is a bundle of nerves and anxiety and self-doubt.
And c’mon…Janet Leigh’s decision to steal $40K from her boss is pure lunacy. It would be one thing if she’d arranged to meet Gavin in Bora Bora, but to simply drive to Fairvale with $40K in cash is ludicrous.
If you break Psycho down, it’s basically pulp. This happens and then that happens. No one’s idea of deep or stirring or resonant. But I LOVE how it’s all put together. Such smooth and deliberate assurance. How the pieces all fit together like a perfect jigsaw puzzle.
Friendo: “If you break it down, THE MOVIES are pulp. That’s what they are. A pulp form. In Psycho’s case, pulp is made sublime.”
HE to Friendo: “The feeling of dread and foreboding in Psycho all stems from Bernard Herrmann’s music. His score is the soul of the film — not the story or the characters. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano was very upset when he saw the first cut, without the Herrmann music. Hitchcock assured him that everything would be okay once the music was inserted and the cutting was perfectly timed.”
Psycho is utterly brilliant, but it’s also basically “well, if the woman in the window is Mrs. Bates, who’s that woman buried out in Greenlawn Cemetery?”
Update: Moonlight definitely doesn’t deserve to be #42 on this list. It’s two-thirds of a fairly moving film (the last act doesn’t work and its admirers know that), and it was selected by the Variety gang as a political inclusion thing. The main reasons why it won the Best Picture Oscar in early ’18 are (a) two woke checkboxes– Black and gay, (b) Academy members felt they had to counter the #OscarSoWhite narrative of a year or two earlier, and (c) a cheap bullshit award-season narrative that La-La Land had compromised the authenticity of the Black experience by making Ryan Gosling‘s character a big jazz fan, which white guys aren’t allowed to be.