HE is reminding that the next big Bedford Marquee event is a special 4K screening of William Cameron Menzies‘ recently restored Invaders From Mars (’53). A special master class instruction from restorationist Scott MacQueen will also occur. It’ll happen three weeks hence on Sunday, 1.15.23 at 11 am.
How keen will local film buffs be about catching a sci-fi classic on a lazy Sunday morning? Understand this: This will be the only first-rate screening in a AAA first-rate theatre (which the BP definitely is) of an absolutely mint-condition restoration of perhaps the most influential Eisenhower-era space invader film ever made. This will almost certainly never happen again…trust me. Hot chocolate served in the indoor cafe. The more, the merrier!
Jeff Sneider is a whipsmart, fair-minded guy with that strange intestinal fortitude quality known to very few journos in this racket. Co-panelist Scott Mantz is also part of this fraternity, having showed his own form of courage a few months ago in that Hollywood Critics Association dust-up.
In the minds of woke hive-mind fanatics I am a “divisive” columnist, as Jeff notes, but I care deeply about films and the remnants of the film culture that used to prevail in this industry (i.e., more cinematic, less of an emphasis on political instruction), and at least I’m not some breezy, constantly smiling opportunist (those Noovies promos!) and zeitgeist cruiser like Perri Nemiroff, whose face freezes and whose eyes narrow into a skeptical squint when Sneider mentions me.
“Emotional” sometimes gets conflated with “divisive”. What I am, boiled down, is a devotional, storied (40 years and counting), richly seasoned, aspect ratio-attuned, well-travelled and still strongly relationshipped Film Catholic who’s (a) filing as passionately as always and loving the grind, (b) had a pretty great peak ride for nearly 30 years (early ‘90s to late teens) but (c) has also endured some fairly intense cash-flow trauma over the last three years due to woke fanaticism, hence Sneider’s use of the term “divisive.”
Excepting the sea-change event of embracing sobriety in March of ’12, I haven’t changed that much over the last 20 or 25 years. My film devotion has been steady and reverent since I got into this racket in the late ‘70s, and I still regard myself as a sensible center-left type, but there are some Robespierre loonies (especially those from the absolutist DEI brigade and the older-white-guy-hating #MeToo fringe vengeance squad) who began going over the waterfall in ‘18 and ‘19.
That mad fervor is starting to calm down as we speak. Will woke lunacy last as long as the rightwing Red Scare paranoia did in the ‘50s? Maybe but who knows? It’s very easy to just go along with the mob. Very few have spine or sand. Even I am doing whatever I can to groove along with the loonies — no point in getting into small slap fights that I can’t hope to win.
In sum I appreciate and admire Mr. Sneider’s fairness and his respect for my integrity. Yes, I sincerely meant it when I put Empire of Light at the top of my 2022 list. Ditto my other selections, 30 in all.
The piece has two titles — “The Final Campaign” online and, on the current New York cover, “Party of One.”
It’s a darkly amusing dig-down piece…fascinating content start to finish…one smirking, devastating paragraph after next. D-List MAGA types (including “Brick Man”) at the Mar a Lago announcement of Trump’s ’24 presidential campaign. Anonymous Trump adviser: “It’s not there. In this business, you can have it and have it so hot [but] it can go overnighty and it’s gone and you can’t get it back. I think we’re just seeing that it’s gone,. The magic is gone.”
The image of Trump basically being fat Elvis Presley during the tacky decline period of ’76 and ’77…this analogy will stick.
The Elvis observation is from 41-year-old Sam Nunberg, a Manhattan-based operator who was an on-and-off political advisor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and “was subpoenaed by a grand jury for testimony and documents relating to the Special Counsel’s Russia investigation.”
Jake Tapper: "It's interesting, so often during this Trump era, I think about I'm, you know, I'm a history buff, not an esteemed historian, but I think a lot about how will history remember people and this era, and it just seems like some of these individuals that are enablers of Trump, just don't even remotely think that way in terms of how is this going to look in 10 or 20 years?"
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In a 12.23 Free Press column by Nellie Bowles, she quotes David Mamet as he explains a renewed passion for cartooning and how he’s otherwise in “retirement” — an apparent allusion to having hung it up as a playwright or screenwriter or novelist. First, writers never retire, and Mamet knows that. And second, the Santa Claus cartoon isn’t that astute. Old-school liberals, centrists, center-rightists and respectable conservatives don’t get blacklisted for “crying” and “shouting.” They sometimes get shunned or cancelled for saying “I haven’t changed but you crazy-fuck lefties have.”
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.
