On 10.11 I passed along some positive reactions to Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight, 10.21), and quoted a critic friendo who’d been told by a couple of eccentric colleagues that Banshees might win the Best Picture Oscar…”people adore this film.”

This prompted another critic friendo to pass along the following:

Last night I saw McDonagh’s film. Five minutes after emerging from the 1350 Sixth Avenue screening room I wrote the Los Angeles guy as follows:

“In some respects a lovely metaphorical lament about Irish anguish and turbulence and the general impermanence of things, and fortified by excellent dialogue, fine acting (especially by Colin Farrell and Kerry Condon), handsome cinematography and so on, but in other respects a bizarre, brutal thing that struck me as borderline diseased.

“You were right — the New York people who said that The Banshees of Inisherin might win the Best Picture Oscar are out of their fecking minds….INSANE.

“There were three or four sane characters in that film, Farrell’s Paddy Súilleabháin (at least initially) and Condon’s Siobhan (i.e., Farrell’s sister) being the sanest. Certain measures of rational behavior are also noticable from, I suppose, Sheila Flitton’s old crone, Pat Shortt’s bartender and one or two others.

“But Brendan Gleeson’s Colm Doherty and the mad priest and the belligerent cop and Barry Keohgan’s local loon (a counterpart to John Mills’ village idiot in Ryan’s Daughter, which also occurs in a rural Irish seaside village roughly a century ago), are all lunatics of one kind or another.

“It’s a film about rage and nihilism and futility and banality and bloody finger stumps.

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The “rage against the Supremes killing Roe” bump is apparently subsiding. Biden’s bad numbers are returning; ditto projections about likely Republican gains. I modestly, half-heartedly approve of Joe’s job performance save for his kowtowing to the wokester wing. But the fact is that something awful might happen if he runs again. A younger, credible and compelling left-centrist Democrat has to primary him.

— from Common Sense / TGIF columnist Nellie Bowles, posted on 10.21.

— “The Point,” Chris Cillizza, 10.19.22.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t see this coming. I doubt if anyone did. Then again…

If I had been on the jury, I would have felt piqued by the time factor. The alleged incident happened in ‘86 when Kevin Spacey, now 63, was 26, and his accuser Anthony Rapp, now 50, was 14. I would have said “why are we dealing with this so many years after the fact? It happened 36 years ago.”

I experienced a few awful, hurtful things in my teens. Do I still feel angry or wounded about some of them? Yeah, but they happened a long-ass time ago. Move on, be here now.

Based on a Wikipedia link to figures from the California Film Division, I recently reported that Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (Paramount, 12.23) cost $110 million. That’s wrong, I was told today by a Paramount spokesperson. The tab was actually $78 million. Okay then.

Despite my admiration for all things Tony Gilroy, I still have yet to watch the seven-episode Andor. It is my solemn belief that doing so would be bad for my soul. Plus I don’t care for brown-and-beige color palettes.

Prince Charles and Lady Diana were the same height — 5′ 10″ — but not so much in Season 5 in The Crown (Netflix, 11.9).

Dominic West, who plays Charles, stands six feet even while the stork-like Elizabeth Debicki tops him by three inches. The obvious solution would have been for West to wear elevator shoes. Apparently that option was discarded.

The previous four Crown episodes have always been strong, classy and well-sculpted, but after Spencer who among us doesn’t feel Diana’ed out?

“Like 1917 before it, and like the better films that continue to inspire a concentratedly grisly mode of war picture (the epochal Russian film Come and See is explicitly referenced at least once, as is the more recent, and more problematic, The Painted Bird), All Quiet on the Western Front is state-of-the-art in shoving your nose in realistic-seeming carnage and possibly inducing hearing damage in laying on the ear-splitting aural experience of a firefight.

“The in-the-trenches tracking shots that Stanley Kubrick crafted for Paths of Glory (a movie that culminated in a point that actually made sense, unlike this muddle) are now steady hand-held digital panoramas of exposed viscera and agonized writhing. Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning ‘war is hell’ into a ‘can you top this?’ competition.” — from Glenn Kenny’s 10.14 review.

Netflix will begin streaming Edward Berger‘s All Quiet on the Western Front on 10.28.22.

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But without street gangs or guns, and probably without a violent ending. Hanks’ Otto to new neighbor: “Ever notice how every once in a while you come across someone you shouldn’t be fucking with? That’s me”….not.
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Sony will release A Man Called Otto on 12.25. Produced by Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Rita Wilson, and directed by Marc Forster. Based on a 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove, directed by Hannes Holm. Shot earlier this year in Pittsburgh.

I for one really admired Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington‘s The Equalizer 2 (’16), and I have no problem with them making another one. We’re all cool, I’m presuming, with The Equalizer 3 currently filming on the Amalfi Coast — Atrani, Ravello, Minori. Bring it on, bruh.

There’s nothing wrong with being a respected, Sam Fuller-ish or Robert Aldrich-y hack who does genre films and efficiently at that**.

But it’s fair, surely, to ask if this might reflect upon the presumed prestige factor that some are attaching to Fuqua’s allegedly Oscar-calibre Emancipation (possibly “Fuqua’s best” according to Variety‘s Clayton Davis)? Runaway slave saga on one hand, whupass on the other…what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

** Although I hated, hated, HATED Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven.

If only failed or otherwise repudiated chiefs of state could be ejected this swiftly in the U.S. Here’s a N.Y. Times recap.

In my book, the very first stirrings began in the early ‘80s (i.e., tits and zits). Things got worse in the ‘90s, especially with the release of deplorable crap like Jan DeBont’s Speed 2: Cruise Control. But the most corrosive and definitive dumb-down began with the ascent of Marvel and D.C. in the early 20teens.

Things have been dumbing-down all over…