During a press conference held yesterday in Spain, Woody Allen allegedly told French TV that his next film will be a dark drama a la Match Point, and that it’ll be shot in Paris.
This comes from World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, who caught a live stream of the press conference. Apparently no U.S. media reps were in attendance.
One presumes that the plot would deliver another variation on familiar Allen themes — life is a grim bowl of cherries, betrayal lurks around every corner (especially in the realm of relationships), and your worst enemy is more often than not yourself.
If I were Allen I wouldn’t sidestep or pull punches. I would take certain familiar elements from my life over the last decade or so and transform them into a fictional narrative. A film, for example, about a flawed but in one instance falsely accused protagonist a la Polanski’s J’Accuse. If he doesn’t create something that echoes the Mia/Dylan thing to some extent, what would be the point?
Six years ago I posted a piece about the great and very good films of 1971 (“They Won’t Forget”). Before assembling it I’d never quite thought of ’71 as one of the truly legendary years in American cinema, but now I do — it was arguably as rich and bountiful as 1939, 1962 and 1999 were.
Now it’s time to add 1979 to the list of standout years. At least 27 films released that year were seriously top-tier, compared to the same number in ’71. The mythical ’70s, in short, were still going great guns in the decade’s final year.
Herewith are the top 27 along with (b) 21 that were fully admired and respected in their time and still are today but have perhaps lost a bit of steam here and there, plus (c) eight that I wouldn’t call stinkers but are certainly among the least enduring (most bothersome, hardest to-rewatch, most listless or underwhelming). And in these orders:
Top Ten:
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
Hal Ashby’s Being There
Woody Allen’s Manhattan
Ridley Scott’s Alien
Peter Yates’ Breaking Away
Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia
Paul Schrader’s Hardcore
James Bridges’ The China Syndrome
Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer
Carroll Blanchard’s The Black Stallion
11 to 27 (17):
Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz
Lewis John Carlino’s The Great Santini
Stephen Frears’ Bloody Kids
George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead
Arthur Hiller’s The In-Laws
George Miller’s Mad Max
Martin Brest’s Going in Style
Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz
Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career
Ted Kotcheff’s North Dallas Forty
Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae
Terry Jones’ Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Albert Brooks’ Real Life Richard Pryor: Live in Concert
Alan J. Pakula’s Starting Over Alan Clarke‘s Scum Jerry Schatzberg‘s The Seduction of Joe Tynan
Foreign Language Picks (5)
Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Siberiade Shohei Imamura‘s Vengeance Is Mine Volker Schlöndorff‘s The Tin Drum Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s The Marriage of Maria Braun Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Stalker
Respectable Second Tier, Pretty Good, Holding On, Fading A Bit (21):
Peter Bodganovich’s Saint Jack
Harold Becker’s The Onion Field
Blake Edwards 10
Richard Lester’s Cuba
Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time Walter Hill‘s The Warriors
Douglas Hickox’s Zulu Dawn
Fred Walton’s When a Stranger Calls
Sydney Pollack’s The Electric Horseman
John Badham’s Dracula
Ivan Reitman’s Meatballs
Robert Aldrich’s The Frisco Kid
Milos Forman’s Hair
Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Carl Reiner’s The Jerk
William Richert’s Winter Kills
John Huston’s Wise Blood
Jonathan Demme’s Last Embrace
George Roy Hill A Little Romance
Peter Weir’s The Plumber
John Schlesinger’s Yanks
The following excerpt from Sasha Stone‘s “94th Oscars — It’s Time to Rethink Oscar Coverage” (4.30) doesn’t once mention the “w” word. Nor does she mention the legacy of Maximilien Robespierre or allude to new-styled blacklists or HUAC committees, etc. So HE readers who get upset or annoyed or threaten to abandon this site when the concept of woke terror is mentioned can rest easy:
Sasha: “Where bloggers were once the outspoken ones, the ones willing to puncture the status quo and say what couldn’t be said, now they have become hamstrung and silenced out of fear.
“If, say, Scott Feinberg or Kyle Buchanan or even Anne Thompson ever dared speak out about the things that all of us see going on [every day] ** — if they ever started to puncture the status quo the way bloggers used to do way back when — they’d be out of a job by the end of the day. If Next Best Picture’s Matt Neglia or Will Mavity stepped outside of the Twitter ideology for even a minute, both would be viciously attacked and eventually tossed onto the shunned pile.
“No one in the real world cares all that much about their online platform but if you work in any kind of media, content or entertainment you have to. You are under the thumb of the hive mind. You have only one option: total compliance. ‘When you have ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.’
“Not only is dissent not allowed in film coverage — it isn’t allowed in news either. Even if the regular person out there doesn’t pay attention to Twitter, what they’re seeing around them is shaped by Twitter — CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post — all of it is under the thumb of the tiny minority of Twitter users who control 80% of the content.
“They are purists, they are strident and they will come for you if you slip up even once. Sure, you can offer the withering apology. That is always an option but in general, they will keep coming at you, scrutinizing your past for any offense and going in for the career kill.
“Even the little bit of pushback I have been doing has essentially blackballed me from Film Twitter. David Poland has been likewise purged and shunned from Film Twitter for having slightly controversial views. Jeff Wells has been stripped of his Broadcast Film Critics membership for posting an anonymous conversation that was deemed offensive. I have to wonder what David Carr would make of today. Would he pander to the hive mind out of fear? Would he be outspoken? Would he be fired?
“Wells and Poland were among the few who helped launch Oscar blogging in the early days” — late ’90s. “It isn’t that they’ve stopped writing what they think — they do. It’s just that Twitter pays little attention to them because what Twitter wants from them is something they can no longer give, and it’s something I can no longer give: total compliance. It’s just not happening for those of us from a different generation who remember what it was like to get noticed for being controversial.”
A little less than two years ago I posted a story about a toll-booth lawbreaking incident on the Connecticut turnpike. It never got any traction despite being about an everyday ethical issue that anyone could relate to. Here it is again:
Highway tolls are collected via E-ZPass (created in ’87) or by throwing coins into a metal bin. Human toll-collectors — people dressed in some dull gray uniform whom drivers literally hand coins to — are still around, I guess, but not, I would guess, for much longer.
Back in the pre-automated ’70s manned tollbooths were fairly common. On the Connecticut turnpike a red traffic light would beam as you approached the toll station. You would come to a halt, hand over 50 or 75 cents to the guy/gal, the light would turn green and you’d gun it.
One dusky evening in ’77 I was approaching a West Haven toll station on the Connecticut turnpike. I was driving my 1975 LTD station wagon, which always got lousy gas mileage. I realized a mile out that I didn’t quite have the full 50 cents, and no cash in the wallet. I was counting the coins as I approached…a quarter, a dime, a nickel and six pennies…no, seven pennies! Three cents short.
I sure as shit wasn’t going to pull over and accept some kind of traffic summons for being three cents light…c’mon. So I decided to be Steve McQueen in The Getaway.
I pulled up to the booth and handed the guy the 47 cents. I started to inch forward as he was counting and saying out loud “35, 40…hold on, hold on.” I hit the gas and the guy freaked — “Hey, wait a minute, whoa!” There was no gate so the red light and the violation alarm (ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!) would have to go fuck themselves. I was Clyde Barrow after a bank robbery.
The booth guy went into fury mode…”Hey, hey…stohhhhp!…whoooaaa!” I looked in my rearview as I pulled away. Toll-booth guy had stepped out of the booth and was standing in a half-crouch position…”whoooaaa!!”
I contemplated my situation as I drove away. I had just broken Connecticut state law and didn’t feel good about that. But there was something a bit wrong with that guy. I wasn’t a criminal. It wasn’t like I’d given him 12 or 13 cents or something. Who screams and shouts over a three-cent shortage? Within seconds I’d completely shorn myself of any guilt over shortchanging the state, and decided that the toolbooth guy…that howling uniformed goon was the asshole in this situation, not me.
Did the toll-booth guy get my license plate? (This was before instant photographic capture.) Would he put in a call to the state police, telling them to pull over a young long-haired guy in a brown LTD wagon? I considered getting off the turnpike and driving for a few miles on local roads, just to be safe. Then I realized how loony-tunes that would be. The toll-booth guy was just an oddball with a temper, an obsessive without a life. I stayed on the turnpike and all was well.
But that haunted feeling of being a lawbreaker on the run is still with me.
Five and one-third years ago Woody Allen saved George Stevens‘ Shane from an aspect-ratio slicing that would have rocked the classic cinema universe and resulted in a great hue and cry from the Movie Godz. When all is said and done and the Chalamets of the world have all been put to bed, this is one of the events that will burnish and solidify Allen’s legacy.
On 3.16.13 I revealed that George Stevens, Jr. and Warner Home Entertaiment restoration guy Ned Price were intending to release a Bluray of the classic 1953 western using a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, which would have cleavered the tops and bottoms of the original 1.37 photography by dp Loyal Griggs. I howled and screamed in my usual way, but nothing seemed to change until Allen, the only top-dog, world-class director to step into this fray, shared his opinion on 4.4.13.
Later that day Price threw in the towel and announced that WHE’s Shane Bluray would be released in the original 1.37 aspect ratio. I’ve long believed that Allen’s opinion was the crucial factor in rectifying this situation.
I’m sorry but Oslo (HBO, 5.29), J. T. Rogers and Bartlett Sher‘s film (originally a 2016 play) about the backchannel process that led to the Oslo Peace Accords of ’93 and ’95 strikes me as Israeli propaganda, or not much more than that.
However welcome and applauded they may have been 26 and 28 years ago, the Oslo Accords were an incremental step in a long process that has steadily been about Palestinian disenfranchisement, oppression, humiliation and generally getting the shit end of the stick.
The Oslo Accords ratified a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, founded upon recognition by the Palestine Liberation Organization of the State of Israel (as in “the right to exist”) and a recognition by Israel of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people (“self-rule”) and as a partner in negotiations, etc.
The Oslo process was significant in its day, but since then there has been a steady encroachment and usurpation of Palestinian West Bank territory by Israeli settlers and the Israeli military, and the Palestinian pie slices have gotten thinner and thinner.
In 1975 U.N. resolution 3379 declared that Zionism was “a form of racism,” and even though 3379 was renounced in ’91, the ’75 resolution stands as a historical statement of widely-shared opinion.
Today Israel controls well over 60% of the West Bank, and Palestinian economic development has been stymied and/or obstructed. Please watch “Israeli settlements, explained | Settlements Part I,” a 2016 Vox report.
So according to Esquire‘s Tom Nicholson, a British writer, the top two Best Picture Oscar winners — the most highly placed, best liked and most revered by today’s standards — are Moonlight and Parasite. This is how things are right now.
I’m telling you right now Nicholson needs to be straightened out and maybe even slapped around. This kind of thinking…words fail. I worship Hitchcock’s Rebecca but it can’t be proclaimed as the fourth-best…stop it! Amadeus and The Shape Of Water in the top 20? Get outta here! And Moonlight at #1? This is almost too asinine to take potshots at. Nicholson’s list is beyond ridiculous — an expression of woke mental illness.
Herewith is my own Best Picture Oscar Winner list, and I’m certainly going to use the criteria that most…okay, a significant percentage of winners have fulfilled or satisfied to some degree, at least in an aspirational sense in addition to the usual political motives and moment-in-time considerations…
Not just (a) films that sought to achieve (and in some cases DID achieve) a stand-alone, movie-craft refinement or at least a kind of declarative, honed-down clarity or wholeness on their own terms, or…
(b) Films that captured or reflected something poignant (at least in passages) about the times in which they were made, but most fundamentally…
(c) Political winners-of-the-moment that hit or touched certain emotional G-spots that moved large swaths of the culture (not just the Hollywood community but moviegoers all over), movies that said “this, to some extent, is a concise, respectable and in some cases profound presentation of who and what we are, or at least what we’ve recently been through or would like to be…this Best Picture winner contains pieces of our saga, shards of our collective soul, elements of who we believe we are or would like to be deep down.”
The difference between then and now, of course, is that the “large swaths of nationwide movie culture” aspect has been removed — today’s Oscar nominees are totally about the uncertainties and preferences of a small community of terrified political sidesteppers who don’t know what to say or think but are totally terrified by what might happen if they say (or even think) the wrong thing. The sentiments of the rest of the country has been a side issue for a good 20 to 25 years…be honest.
Reasons to disagree or tell the Esquire guy to go fuck himself…
In some respects Gone With The Wind is a racist relic, obviously, but it still matters and is, in fact, still great because of the last half of Part One (the agony of battered Atlanta to “I’ll never be hungry again!”) and because it is NOT, in a deep-down sense, a saga of the Civil War but a reflection of the deprivations and terrible hardships of the Great Depression. And so I will certainly include Gone With The Wind somewhere in the top 30….you can beat me with bamboo sticks all you want but Hattie McDaniel‘s Mammy, at least, was a vivid and passionate human being who took no shit from anyone, least of all from Scarlett O’Hara.
Green Book is not a great film, but I will not dismiss or degrade it in any way, shape or form. It also belongs in the top 30.
And I must again remind that the last third of Moonlight (and particularly the casting of Trevante Rhodes) doesn’t work at all (sustained for years by one adolescent handjob on the beach!) and that it won largely if not entirely because of a collective, politically-driven, industry-centric need to refute the #OscarsSoWhite meme.
And I will certainly not give Parasite a high ranking because of the stupidest plot turn in the history of Best Picture winners…because of that drunken family of con artists deciding to admit into the home THE ONE PERSON ON THE FACE OF THE PLANET WHO COULD & ALMOST CERTAINLY WILL BLOW THEIR SCAM OUT OF THE WATER…cut the shit and admit that Parasite won because the industry wanted and needed to celebrate a filmmaker of color as well as a charming genre purveyor (monsters! a giant pig! a runaway train!)…a director who was a much better fit in these times of necessary wokeness than Martin Scorsese and his aging goombahs and his “Wild Strawberrries with handguns”…nope.
Last night I finally got around to visiting the new Amoeba store at the corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Argyle (6200 Hollywood Blvd.). My last visit to the previous store (6400 Sunset) was sometime in February 2020, and I guess I wanted to say “hello again” to those old retail vibes. I thought it might get my blood going on some level.
I went straight to the Bluray section, of course, and discovered that their total inventory is but a small fraction of what they used to offer. Worse, DVDs and Blurays are mixed together in the shelves. I was close to tears.
I suddenly felt sorry for the place, and decided on the spur to buy something in order to help out. Then it hit me — the Help! Bluray! I’d seen this 55 year-old film exactly once, and for good reasons. But it’s been decades, I told myself, and it’s never been streamed, and I’d read that the disc reps a nice restoration effort so what the hell. But what a disappointment.
I’d forgotten how boring it is. Not for a single moment is the absurd premise — the inability of Ringo Starr to remove a huge valuable ring from his left-hand ring finger, and the inability of some “funny” Kali-worshipping fanatics to forcibly remove it — the least bit involving, much less amusing. Joke after joke and physical gag after physical gag just lie there. I watched it open-mouthed — “Jeez, this isn’t just weak…it’s partly awful.”
John Lennon‘s snide improvs (particularly some brief banter between he and a high government official played by Patrick Cargill) and the song sequences are the only things that work. Okay, I also like the bit in which a gnome-ish, Chico Marx-like gardener is shown to be living with the lads inside their spacious four-door condo, and who even steps in as a flute player during a performance of “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away.”
The Beeyattles were reportedly high during filming, but it doesn’t feel like a stoner movie. Imagine if the marijuana-for-breakfast thing had been deployed in some capacity — that at least would’ve delivered something or other. What a waste. They should have gone with the Joe Orton script.
“Rudin is one of the most successful producers in entertainment history, having won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and 17 Tony Awards. His films include No Country for Old Men, The Social Network, Lady Bird, The Firm and The Truman Show. He was still active in the prestige space, recently acquiring the rights to the best-seller ‘Shuggie Bain,’ but no longer had the major studio support that he once enjoyed.
“Tastes [have] shifted from the pedigreed dramas and comedies that Rudin preferred to make in favor of superhero fare, though he’s continued to work regularly.”
Rephrasing: “Taste in movies has shifted from movies written and directed by the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, Greta Gerwig, Sydney Pollack and Peter Weir to blow-the-doors-off popcorn fare directed by Zack Snyder, James Gunn, Taika Waititi, Jon Favreau, Adam Wingard, Ryan Coogler, etc.”
HE reaction: Stab me in my carotid arteries with a pen knife.
Variety‘s Matt Donnelly and Brent Lang are reporting that Searchlight co-chairpersons Nancy Utley and Stephen Gilula are “retiring” — i.e., have been shown the door by Disney management.
Another way to put it is that Gilula and Utley have been whacked like Joe Pesci‘s “Tommy” in Goodfellas. Disney management comment: “And that’s that. We had a problem, and there wasn’t nothin’ we could do about it.”
Gilula-Utley will be replaced by David Greenbaum and Matthew Greenfield, who are now co-presidents. They will report to Disney Studios Content chairman Alan Bergman and chief creative officer Alan Horn. Disney purchased Searchlight as part of its 2019 deal for the Murdoch family’s entertainment assets.
Intro: Much of the credit for Fox Searchlight’s remarkable performance must go to Gilula and Utley, co-chairmen of the studio since July 2018. Twenty-year veterans of the company, they were named presidents in 2009, succeeding Peter Rice, who took the helm in 2000. Now they’ve entered a new era with Disney’s acquisition of Fox this past March. Gilula, a former exhibitor who co-founded Landmark Theatres, recently took time out of his busy schedule to talk about Searchlight’s latest chapter and its highly successful run.
Lally: Here we are, nine months into the merger with Disney. Can you give me a status report on how things are going and what has changed?
Gilula: Well, the status report is all signs are really positive. It’s been really quite good. At a top-line level, as far as the kinds of movies we’re making and acquiring and how we’re releasing them, there’s a hundred percent unequivocal support. What was represented to us in the year-plus before the deal closed has all come true—everything that Disney indicated that they liked about Searchlight they want us to continue.”
HE comment: Either things suddenly changed or Gilula, not surprisingly, was wearing a “political” hat when he spoke to Lally.
Gilula: On the practical side, the logistical and organizational side, as with any merger we’re working through all the bureaucratic and administrative things in terms of policies that we operate under. But the core business of the kinds of movies we make, how we release them, and what our campaigns are, we have full support and we continue to have the same independence that we had under Fox. So that’s been fantastic.”
HE comment: I think it’s fantastic that things were so “fantastic” 14 months ago.
Bergman and Horn statement to Variety about the booting of Gillula and Utley: “Thanks to the stewardship and pitch-perfect creative instincts of Steve Gilula and Nancy Utley, Searchlight has cemented itself as one of the finest film studios in history, and we commend and thank them for their incredible leadership, especially throughout the integration of Searchlight at Disney. They are leaving the studio in the talented hands of Matthew Greenfield and David Greenbaum, who have been a critical part of Searchlight’s success over many years and we’re confident they will continue to set a course that keeps Searchlight on the industry’s leading edge.”
HE comment: Whatever prompted Disney to eject Giulula and Utley, Bergman and Horn aren’t inclined to share at this point in time. They felt a certain rapport with Greenfield and Greenbaum that was lacking with Gilula-Utley?
It’s no longer a matter of censure and condemnation — over the weekend an impression began to take hold that the goal of the burgeoning theatre-community movement against producer Scott Rudin is nothing less than career termination. They don’t want him chastised and repentant — they want him lashed, defrocked and gone.
Fairly or unfairly, this sentiment will probably be exacerbated by a video posted yesterday by David Graham-Caso that claims Rudin’s abuse of his late twin brother, Kevin Blake Graham-Caso, in late 2008 and ’09 while working for the producer was a significant factor in Kevin’s suicide last fall.**
DG-C: “You berated and demeaned, bullied and intimidated and harassed [Kevin] for eight solid months. It was so intense that he developed anxiety and depression and post-traumatic stress, and like many survivors of traumatic abuse, he soon found himself in another abusive relationship later on in his life. It was so intense that last October, he took his own life.”
“Earlier this week Equity, along with SAG-AFTRA and American Federation of Musicians Local 802, issued a joint statement condemning harassment, bullying and toxic environments and pledging ‘to hold accountable those who violate human and legal norms of fair, respectful and dignified conduct in the workplace.’ The statement did not specifically name Rudin.
“Some members of Equity have been calling upon the union to place Rudin on the ‘Do Not Work’ list, and have spread word on Instagram of a March on Broadway this Wednesday to protest Rudin as well as social justice issues related to the Broadway industry.”
“The undercurrent of A Bigger Splash is gently mesmerizing, and that was enough for me. I can’t wait to see it again, or more precisely go there again. I felt like I was savoring a brief vacation. I’m not saying the dramatic ingredients are secondary, but they almost are.”
“You feel so nicely brought along by Yorick Le Saux‘s sun-speckled afternoon cinematography and Walter Fasano‘s disciplined cutting, and by the nostalgic Stones vibe (there’s a lip-synch dance sequence that made me fall in love all over again with ‘Emotional Rescue’) and especially by Ralph Fiennes’ giddy-ass, run-at-the-mouth, rock-and-roll madman performance that I was going ‘wow, I almost don’t even care what may or may not happen in this thing.’
“Well, I did as far as the plot unfolded. When the heavy-ass, third-act complications arrived I was…well, not uninterested. They’re definitely intriguing as far as they go, especially when the law steps in and starts asking questions. But I just liked being there.” — from “Much Better Splash Than Expected — Perverse, Noirish, High-Style, Sensual,” posted on 4.11.16.
“In short, Luca Guadagnino has made something rare and disconcerting: a genuinely pagan film. It rejoices not just in nudity, male and female, but in the classical notion of figures in a landscape, and of the earth itself demanding frenzied worship. That is why Harry (Ralph Fiennes), having put on a Rolling Stones LP, begins to dance to ‘Emotional Rescue’ and then, clearly fettered by interior space, bursts out onto the rooftop and continues his display under a scorching haze. Who would have thought that an Englishman, of all people, would prove to be such a natural Dionysian?” — from Anthony Lane’s 5.2.16 New Yorker review.