Pike Bishop vs. “Sinners” Schlock-Mongers

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Earlier this year the Gold Derby “experts” embarassed themselves to death by all-but-unanimously predicting that The Brutalist‘s Brady Corbet would take the Best Director Oscar. This is because the GD members are easily intimidated sheep…no balls, no moxie, no backbone or belief, no critical integrity…a certain herd instinct manifests and then “baaaahh!”

Right now 14 Gold Derby-ites are spitballing their Best Picture preferences, and wouldn’t ya just know that seven of them have Sinners at the top of their lists?

Again, the Gold Derby guys know absolutely nothing. They’re on the Sinners train solely because of the social safety factor. They’re afraid not to predict a Sinners Best Picture win or at least a Best Director nomination for Ryan Coogler.

Friendo (speaking this morning): “But a Black director has never won a Best Director Oscar…how long can this continue?” HE to friendo: “The Best Picture Oscar that went to 12 Years A Slave in 2014 was obviously owned by the great Steve McQueen. 12 Years A Slave was and is an epic, humanistic masterpiece. Sinners is an under-lighted, sex-and-blood vampire exploitation film.”

HE can think of nothing better or more glorious than to die on this hill: A Sinners Best Picture win would raise high the banner for the progressive degeneration of cinema in the 21st Century…a process of decline which began to manifest in the ’90s and has been gathering more and more steam since….oh, 2010 or thereabouts, or the year of Ironman.

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Never Underestimate Paul Greengrass

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Apple has finally locked in a release date for The Lost Bus — Friday, 9.19 or a bit more than seven weeks hence.

Based on Lizzie Johnson’s “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire“.

A bus driver (Matthew McConaughey) has to navigate a bus carrying children and their teacher (America Ferrera) to safety through the 2018 Camp Fire, which became the deadliest fire in California history.

Newsom, Emmanuel and Buttigeig Are Pretty Much on the Same Page

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Gavin, Rahm and Pete are basically agreed that all of the crazy, French terror woke crap that began to poke through in the mid teens and went totally crazy in 2020…all of that insanity has to seriously downshift if not leave the room altogether. That or Democrats are going to become a permanent minority party.

And you know who wants the woke crap to continue regardless? Black, The View-watching, over-35 lefty women. Progressive white women with ivy-league degrees and jobs, seemingly on anti-depressants or perhaps in need of same. And LGBTQs.

Which means that Democrats ARE going to become a permanent minority party. Because these demos are not going to back off even slightly.

@briantylercohen No punches pulled @Gavin Newsom ♬ original sound – briantylercohen

Corrections

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The Lost Generation (i.e, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Zelda Fitzgerald) were young strivers and explorers in the 1920s. But they didn’t stop being born in 1900 — figure more like 1905 or even 1910.

The Greatest Generation (i.e., suffered through the Depression in their teens, fought in WWII…Woody Guthrie, JFK, Burt Lancaster, Tyrone Power, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Alan Ladd, Frank Sinatra) began to pop out around 1912 and not 1901. Their birth era drew to a close around 1928 or thereabouts.

The name for the so-called “Silent Generation” (born between 1929 and 1945…Woody Allen, Dennis Hopper, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty) is actually the “Baby Bust” generation…born and reared as very young kids during the Depression, mid-teen puberty when WWII ended, young and hungry and fancy-free 20somethings in the ‘50s.

I am not a boomer — I am an existential X-factor Zen samurai jazzcat with no particular ties to the Woodstock generation except for my musical tastes and preferences. Otherwise I’m free of that shit.

Nobody calls them Generation Z —the common default term is Zoomers.

My granddaughter Sutton (DOB: 11.17.21) is a junior Gen Alpha.

More IMAX Lying?

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Chris Nolan has not only shot The Odyssey entirely in full-screen (1.43:1) IMAX, but the apparent intention is to project the entire film in this boxy, super-tall aspect ratio.

Does anyone believe this? I don’t. Because it’s never happened before. Because IMAX films always wind up being projected in 1.85. Even in theatres capable of presenting a full IMAX image, it’s always a cheat. Because it’s a marketing scam. Because it’s all a lie, or has been so far.

Posted on 5.16.25:

Tip of the Hat

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…to Just Jared for running the first photo of a bewigged Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth in David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino‘s currently filming The Adventures of Cliff Booth (Netflix).

Pitt/Cliff appears to be wearing the same kind of yellow Hawaiian-style shirt that he wore in QT’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which in itself conveys a basically traditional / conservative attitude.

The moustache, however, is a mistake. Tens of thousands of blonde-haired guys wore these ‘staches in the ’70s in order to ape the Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid mystique.

Redford‘s mustachioed gunslinger was cool but the imitators weren’t. Clean-shaven Cliff was cool in OUATIH, but now he looks dorky.

Suggestion to Fincher: Have Cliff wear a “Death To Disco” T-shirt at one point or another.

Each Dawn I Die

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I was told yesterday that a University of Chicago student is looking to write an essay about prison movies. I was asked if I’d be willing to share some thoughts about this genre. Here’s what I sent along:

First and foremost, I don’t want to know from prison movies as a rule. Prison movies are almost always — inevitably — about systemic suffocation or more precisely and ominously a kind of state-imposed death…repression, resignation and the turning off of spiritual lights.  

I realize that the best ones address the age-old question “why does a caged bird sing?”

And speaking of birds…yes, I know that John Frankenheimer’s Birdman of Alcatraz (‘62) is about a kind of liberation within this hellish suffocation, but it’s still set in a place of grim, gloomy, concrete regimentation.  

Prison movies are generally bad for the human soul.  So much of real life and standard-issue drama is about spiritual or economic confinement. I am currently living in a prison of my own making, and every day I’m trying to bust out.

You know what a good “prison” movie is/was? Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman — both the Lee J. Cobb and Dustin Hoffman versions. Or Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. Or Prince of the City..

I admired Jacques Audiard’s The Prophet (‘10) but I’ll never re-watch it because it simply lacks sufficient oxygen.

And yet I was deeply moved by Lazio Nemes’ Son of Saul (‘15), arguably the grimmest, most hopeless WWII concentration camp film ever made.

I respect Buzz Kulik’s Kill Me If You Can (‘77), but mainly for Alan Alda’s ace-level performance as Caryl Chessman. Ditto Lawrence Schiller’s The Executioner’s Song (‘82) with Tommy Lee Jones. And yet both are primarily legal strategy films.

The best “boy, it sure is fucking miserable living in a U.S. prison” flick is Robert M. Young’s Short Eyes (‘77), which is based on a stage play by Miguel Pinero. (It’s the only prison film I’ve seen more than once, and possibly even thrice.) 

The only ones I want to even think about watching or re-watching are prison escape movies:  Escape From Alcatraz, Call Northside 777, The Great Escape, The Hot Rock, Ben Stiller’s Escape From Donnemara.

If I never watch The Shawshank Redemption again, it’ll be too soon.

I loathe The Green Mile with every last fiber of my being.

Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing is a “lemme the fuck outta here!” film. I felt bored and drained by the set-up and especially by Colman Domingo’s soulful lead performance. The more emotion the prisoners summoned from within, the more bummed-out I felt. While sitting through it I was thinking “where is James Cagney and his Cody Jarrett break-out routine when you really need it?”

Oh, and I really hate Franklin Schaffner and Steve McQueen’s Papillon (‘73). Ditto Life Is Beautiful.

Quality of the Journey

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If you’re flying to Europe on the reasonably-priced Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), you’ll have to accept a stopover in Stockholm, Oslo or Copenhagen. So on my way to the Venice Film Festival (the outgoing JFK red-eye leaves late Saturday afternoon, 8.23) I’ll be staying in Copenhagen for 25, 26 hours…something in that vicinity.

But the next day I won’t be flying straight to Venice’s Marco Polo airport. Just for the eye-filling splendor of it all, I’m flying instead from Copenhagen–Kastrup to Luca Guadagnino’s Milan (haven’t stood before the Duomo since ‘92) and then taking a late-Monday-morning train to Katharine Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi’s Venezia San Lucia. Just for the visual-sensual-spiritual-atmospheric aspects.

I’ve visited Venice as an X-factor traveller-tourist six or seven times, and have never stayed for more than two or three days. Next month’s visit will last 12 days.

I’ll be hitting Milan for nearly a full day on my way back