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Two award-season signifiers are making my blood run cold and unleashing Beetlejuice shrieking. I’m left with no choice but to drop to my knees and beseech all HE readers with a semblance of spine and aesthetic perspective to stand tall and firm against the apparently genuine possibility that Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s Everything Everywhere All At Once might win the Best Picture Oscar.
I’m totally okay with either Avatar 2: The War of Water (which I won’t even see for another couple of days) or Top Gun: Maverick taking the top prize, but the idea of EEAAO winning…the symbolism of such an event would be devastating….my soul would be crushed flat.
I know I shouldn’t allow myself to get all wound up about such a possibility…it would mean that the wrong people are running the circus…that Millennial standards have more or less taken over…I know that many people out there despise EEAAO, but if a win were to happen there would be a great shattering cry heard across the land…oh, the A24 of it all!
Between THR‘s Scott Feinberg putting EEAAO at the top of his Best Picture spitball roster plus this infuriating A24 release corralling 14 nominations from the Critics Choice org…this is really and truly a bad, bad thing…really. And it’s almost totally a generational split. Only Millennials and Zoomers like EEAAO, and the only way to address this situation is to assess the generational chasm…
If this isn’t the basis for a serious Academy war, I don’t know what could or would be…GenX and Boomers standing hard and resolute against Millennials and Zoomers…a standoff between voters of minimal taste and admirers of one of the most infuriating films to flirt with Best Picture contention in Academy history….words fail.
What percentage of Academy voters are male and over 50? Because that’s the demographic that will absolutely not vote for EEAAO. They hate this fucking film and, speaking from experience, went through the pains of hell trying to watch it. Only Millennials and Zoomers like it. What does the HE commentariat think? What’s the conversation?
Last night I finally watched Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985, and it held me start to finish. Altogether a morally sobering experience, a disturbing history lesson and finally an affirmation of civic decency.
Based on the true story of the Trial of the Juntas, the film focuses on Argentina’s great moral reckoning — the prosecution of several fascist junta bigwigs who, during Argentina’s military dictatorship, had embarked on a campaign to exterminate hardcore leftists like a gardener eliminates crabgrass. An estimated 30,000 Argentinians were “disappeared” by the junta during the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Heroic Buenos Aires prosecutor Julio Strassera, assisted by Luis Moreno Ocampo and a team of young researchers, brought a complex case against the baddies, and put a lot of them (but far from all) in jail, and certainly made a moral statement that resonated worldwide.
I saw Argentina, 1985 with the original Spanish-language dialogue (Amazon streaming idiotically defaults to English dubbing). I still don’t care for the first half-hour (too whimsical and anecdotal and digressive) and I felt increasingly annoyed by the constant cigarette smoking, but this is nonetheless a fact-based, disciplined, well-ordered story of good guys vs. bad guys. Based on the historical record, pic exemplifies how a first-rate, down-to-business research procedural and courtroom drama should operate.
Just before watching it I had been bickering with a smart guy who knows his Latin American history. He had been reminding me that Argentina has a long history of being a bad-news country that believes in white supremacy and racially repressive policies, and for many decades had made life very difficult for native Argentinians and POCs. The finale of Argentina, 1985 doesn’t leave you with this kind of residue at all. It leaves you with a great feeling of humanitarian compassion and decency. So there’s a basic conflict of perceptions.
Here’s a taste of how our discussion had been going prior to watching Mitre’s film…
Latin American history guy to HE or LAHG: “The fact is that Argentina, just like the U.S., committed genocide against its native population, so that today only about 1% of the country is indigenous, and lives in the south, hundreds of miles from Buenos Aires. The country’s black population is also miniscule, about 1%. The majority are European immigrants, primarily from Italy, Spain, Germany and England.
“Of all the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, only Argentina and Chile (which also did a number on its indigenous population) have an overwhelmingly white population. All the other countries are a mix of black, mixed black and white, mixed white and indigenous, and pure indigenous.”
The consensus after Joshua Logan’s Picnic opened in December ‘55 was that William Holden, who’d turned 37 the previous April, was too old to play Hal Carter, whom original author William Inge had written as a drifter in his mid to late 20s.
But Holden’s Picnic miscasting would have paled alongside another mismatch that mercifully didn’t happen. The film was Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky’s The Americanization of Emily (‘64), in which Holden had been cast as dog-robber Charley Madison. He wisely pulled out.
James Garner, who had previously been cast as “Bus,” the role that James Coburn ultimately played, took the Madison role.
Holden would have been at least a decade too old to play Madison, who is supposed to be a youngish, slick-operator type (mid 30s — Garner was 35) and certainly not 40ish and world-weary.
Filming on The Americanization of Emily happened in late ‘63 (a hotel party scene was filmed on 11.22.63) and, I believe, early ‘64. A drinker, Holden was 45 at the time and looked every inch of it. He was even looking a bit haggard and baggy-eyed in The Counterfeit Traitor, which was filmed in ‘61 when Holden was 43.
Remember how over-the-hill, creased and saddle-baggy Holden looked in The Wild Bunch, which was filmed in ‘68?
Which other major roles were filled by actors who were clearly too old to play them? Ben Platt in Dear Evan Hansen doesn’t count — too recent.
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Like everyone else I really and truly liked James Garner, not just as a steady, easygoing actor but as the deep-down, no-bullshit person he seemed to actually be. But I rarely paid attention to his TV work (never caught a single Rockford Files episode), and I seriously admired his performances in only seven films — Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (’57), William Wyler‘s The Children’s Hour (’61), John Sturges‘ The Great Escape (’63), Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Americanization of Emily (’64 — his peak), John Frankenheimer‘s Grand Prix (’66), Martin Ritt‘s Murphy’s Romance (’85) and Clint Eastwood‘s Space Cowboys (’00).
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The U.S. version of Mother’s Day won’t happen until 5.14.23, but that’s okay. The track is from “That’s Why I’m Here,” an album released in October ’85. Joni Mitchell and Don Henley were two of four backup singers.
Right after the first media screening of Avatar 2 I said for the 157th time that you can’t trust fanboys. The only reactions you can trust are those from “grumpy” critics, which is to say discerning types who don’t immediately drop to their knees when confronted with next-level CG.
I wouldn’t call Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman a grump or a grinch, but he’s no easy lay**. His assessment of Avatar 2, therefore, has value.
Key Gleiberman passage: “At its height, it feels exhilarating. But not all the way through. Cameron, in The Way of Water, remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that.
“The story, in fact, could hardly be more basic. The Sky People, led again by the treacherous Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), have now become Avatars themselves, with Quaritch recast as a scowling Na’vi redneck in combat boots and a black crewcut. They’ve arrived in this guise to hunt Jake down. But Jake escapes with his family and hides out with the Metkayina. Quaritch and his goon squad commandeer a hunting ship and eventually track them down. There is a massive confrontation. The end.
“This tale, with its bare-bones dialogue, could easily have served an ambitious Netflix thriller, and could have been told in two hours rather than three. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The Way of Water is braided with sequences that exist almost solely for their sculptured imagistic magic. It’s truly a movie crossed with a virtual-reality theme-park ride. Another way to put it is that it’s a live-action film that casts the spell of an animated fantasy. But though the faces of the Na’vi and the MetKayina are expressive, and the actors make their presence felt, there is almost zero dimensionality to the characters. The dimensionality is all in the images.”
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