Imagine you’re one of the 13 Gatecrashers, trying to decide which Best Picture contenders deserve this or that proper ranking.

You understand that despite an entrenched argument against Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value being favored because only one foreign-language feature (i.e., Parasite) can be a hot Oscar ticket in our current decade, you understand deep down that there’s a right thing to do.

Imagine in the same way that the late John Lennon imagined a brotherhood of man over a half-century ago…

Imagine calculating that the Samuel Z. Arkoff-level Sinners and the agreeable but low-Metacritic–rated and nothing-to-really-write-home-about Wicked: For Good are more likely to win the Best Picture trophy than Trier’s obviously superior and sublimely performed family drama…

Imagine the deep-down contempt and loathing you need to feel for Academy members to honestly suspect that they’ll be sufficiently coarse and primitive-minded to place Ryan Coogler’s drooling, racially-stamped musical vampire film and Jon M. Chu’s eye-filling musical finale to 2024’s Wicked higher in your Gatecrasher ballot…

Imagine this kind of Jean-Luc Godard-level contempt surging through your veins.

Yesterday Variety’s Zack Sharf, an adamant Stalinist wokester, once again showed his colors by placing scare quotes around a four-letter word that (a) begins with “w” and (b) alludes to a kind of hyper-judgmental progressive leftism that is closely associated with cancel culture.

Sharf:

HE-posted in 2021:

Variety’s Peter Debruge rarely lays it in the line —his deft phrasings often seem to skirt or hint at his actual, true-blue reactions —.but his real feelings about Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: For Good are evident in the first paragraph of his 11.18 review, as well as in the final one.

It’s not exactly a rave when you say that a film prompts you to think “whew, he didn’t blow it!”

At the very end Debruge says that most of the film is generated by and represented by Hollywood’s “apex of artificiality…for better or worse.” Isn’t that a bit like a dude telling his girlfriend that while she’s nominally pretty, much of her attractiveness is due to expensive, artfully applied make-up…”for better or worse”?

This is not an expression of wondrous rapturous delight!

It’s generally accepted that Pope Leo is a savvy, intelligent, well-educated fellow who’s not only been around but knows the spiritual ins and outs of transcendent cinema. This is partially indicated by Leo calling Ordinary People one of his four all-time faves. But including The Sound of Music and Life Is Beautiful in this quartet…uhm, sorry but nope.

HAL 9000 response: “Stop, Leo. Will you stop, Leo? Stop, will you?”

But at least Leo understands and embraces the idea of movie plexes existing, after a fashion, as debauched churches…once-holy places of occasional spiritual contemplation .

Sexy, stand-alone movie theaters are, of course, nonexistent these days…existing only in boomer and GenX memory banks…once regarded in some quarters as lights-out havens for spiritual contemplation, but now mostly degraded into gladiator arenas. People used to sit in single-screen movie theatres for 95, 105 or 115 minutes or longer and actually pay attention for the most part!

Now the only way to savor really good films in a theatrical environment with Pope Leo types…people who ‘get’ it and love the worshipful aspect, that is…the only way to sample this kind of secular high is to (a) attend an upscale film festival (Venice, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, Berlin, New York, AFI Fest in Los Angeles, Sundance, Savannah) or (b) catch films at smarthouse cinemas in big cities.

The church thing was killed by (a) coarse, ball-scratching, brain-fart audiences, (b) elite Hollywood wokethink propaganda movies (2017 to 2024) that all but smothered the art of cinema itself, (c) Millennial and Zoomer couch potatoes submitting to streaming feeds, (d) AMC theatres showing 20 to 25 minutes of trailers before each and every feature, and (e) old-fart GenXers and geriatric boomers who submitted to understandable pandemic terror five and two-thirds years ago, but who will never, ever return en masse due to (a), (b), (c) and (d) plus lingering squeamishness.

That older married woman I spoke to a few weeks ago who’d never even heard of Anora…good God.

Leo again…

Repeating: The art of cinema and the faith of cinematic churches is alive and well if (a) you can attend the above-named major film festivals or (b) if you restrict yourself to connoisseur movie houses (Film Forum, New Beverly, Vista, etc.) and upscale, movie-friendly museum forums like MOMA, LAFCA, London’s Princess Anne, etc.

In a 11.15 N.Y. Times discussion between Tina Brown and interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro, the latter mentions an old Julie Brown Miami Herald piece about Jeffrey Epstein. Garcia-Navarro says that “one of the stories in that series was headlined ‘Epstein’s Society Friends Close Ranks’, and someone in the piece said that “a jail sentence doesn’t matter any more,” adding that “the only thing that gets you shunned in New York society is poverty.”

Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar’s Train Dreams (Netflix, 11.21) is a handsome, inoffensive spiritual snore of a period eye–bath film.

I sat there like a sack of Idaho potatoes in my IFC Center seat. Not bored but waiting for some sort of narrative edge or obsessive psychology or story tension angle (like the “dirt-poor scruffs hustling a clueless rich guy” scheme in Days of Heaven) to manifest. But nothing happens. Pretty to look at, sure, but what’s that?

I began my viewing as a human being of flesh, blood and bone, but by the time Train Dreams had finished with me I had gradually dissolved into a bowl of soggy, half-warm granola. I didn’t dislike watching it — fine, fine, plodding along — but at the same time I was feeling more and more like 2001’s HAL as Dave Bowman disengaged his logic and memory terminals.

I knew Train Dreams would just shuffle and chop and saw and do the old beast-of-burden thing as it follows the early 20th Century logging life of Joel Edgerton’s Robert Grainier as he submits to a relentlessly exhausting, back-breaking, year-in-and-year-out regimen that will shorten his life and cut him zero breaks as he grows older and older and just mutters and putters and ponders…all of it happening in good old Idaho and the generally splendorific Pacific Northwest region…a life that guarantees black gunk under your fingernails and includes unfortunate brushes with sudden violence and racist ugliness and offers random samplings of shit–sandwich fate…a life that fills Robert’s nostrils with pine-needle and wood-chip scents and gives him eyeball orgasms on a daily basis but to what fucking end, bruh?

The truth is that I know a whole lot more about this naturalistic realm than wussy, flabby-bellied film critics because I used to work as a tree-climbing, ornamental-pruning, rope-carrying, spike-wearing, pole saw- and chainsaw-wielding tree surgeon, and that work is solely for young strapping guys, lemme tell ya, as it gradually wears you down and kills your spirit as you get into your 30s and certainly your 40s.

Plus poor Grainier is restricted to axes and hand saws for most of the film (far more grueling than working with chain saws), and it’s sorta kinda like watching a not-bright-enough doomed guy commit slow suicide. You really, really don’t want to do this shit for a living…trust me.

Plus Robert is far too lucky with women, especially for a bearded mook (he’s no Gary Cooper) with zero education and without much access to bar soap or deodorant or dabbings of Aqua Velva.

First he lucks into a loving marriage with Felicity Jones’ Gladys (an actress-pretty buttercup, she pretty much drops into his lap), and a daughter soon follows. Then shit happens (no spoilers) but fortune again smiles as Robert slides into a nice, easygoing thing with dishy, 40ish Kerry Condon. And then a feral woman who may be his long-lost daughter turns up, and she’s rather pretty also.

Where are the homely women with disagreeable personalities and fried-egg breasts and feet badly in need of a pedicure? Robert is two or three steps removed from being a well-behaved gorilla, and yet he’s basically a young Errol Flynn…a babe magnet. Why? Does he give good cunnilingus or something? Being an uneducated logger of few words, does he even know what giving good head is, or what it can amount to?

Oh, and that “please see this on a big movie screen because you won’t get the full effect watching it on Netflix in your living room”? Bad advice because there’s no understanding at least half if not two-thirds of the dialogue (I heard Jones say “saw mill” to Edgerton but that was about it), and so you kinda need those Netflix subtitles.

Am I saying “don’t watch this”? No — it’s a gently touching, mildly engaging film here and there. It never quite bores, but it’s also nothing to jump up and down about. I’ll take Jeremiah Johnson over Train Dreams any day of the week.

Posted on 1.31.20:

To go by frame captures provided by DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze, the Criterion teal monsters are back, and this time they’ve desecrated Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Teorema.

Once again, natural or subdued blues have apparently been rendered with a garish teal-green tint. Look at the images. A year and a half ago I asked Tooze if there might be something off about the color tuning on his 4K Bluray players or 4K TV, and his emphatic reply was “I’ve been doing this 18 years, and it’s not me.”

So what is wrong with Criterion? This is vandalism, plain and simple. This is organizational derangement. This has happened three times previously with teal-tinted Blurays of John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy, Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham and Brian DePalma‘s Sisters. And nobody has complained except for Tooze (half-heartedly), myself and a handful of thread commenters. And now Teorema.

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