Within the last couple of days Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans suffered two savage bird pecks, the combination of which may prove fatal. First, Variety's Clayton Davisprinted a reaction to The Fabelmans from "a prominent member of the [Academy's] producers’ branch", to wit: “I really didn’t like it.” And secondly, the five BAFTA nominations for Best Film didn't include The Fabelmans.
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My life doesn't feel quite whole and nurtured without Real Time to look forward to on Friday nights. This is how I feel.
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Joyce Carol Oates, author of “Blonde: A Novel”, isn’t altogether wrong about Steven Spielberg’s TheFabelmans, and there’s no arguing that in terms of delivering a tough, unsparing biopic within an artful impressionistic realm, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is a lot more probing and less inclined to turn the other cheek. But almost everyone dislikes Dominik’s film for its heartlessness, and that’s always the bottom line. Heart always wins.
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It was announced a few hours ago that Sara Dosa's Fire of Love (Neon/National Geographic) has won the North Carolina Film Critics Association award for 2022's Best Documentary. The same award was handed out last month by the Chicago Film Critics Association. I respect Dosa's film as far as it went, but it's not as good as all that. Here's my 7.13.22 review:
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I would never dispute that Andrew Dominik's Blonde isn't a serious art film. It's intensely dislikable but completely, paradoxically respectable. It can be accused of exaggerating the dark aspects in Norman Jean Baker's life, as Joyce Carol Oates' 22 year-old source novel did, as well as inventing some out of whole cloth. But it was all of a piece -- a pitch-black downer.
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James Cameron‘s Titanic opened on 12.19.97 — almost exactly 25 years ago. I had seen it on the Paramount lot in mid November and knew it was a meltdown and a humdinger, but it took a while for the word to get out. The social media factor was zip back then — online reporting was just starting to happen (my first online column appeared in October ’98) with most of the world still following print.
It’s not commonly recalled that while it opened very strongly, the super-thunderous business didn’t happen immediately. Theatres didn’t begin to sell out until the end of that weekend. The first weekend earned $28,638,131 in 2,674 theaters, but the following weekend it made $35.6 million, for Chrissake. After 40 days in theatres Titanic hit $300 million. It finally wound up with $659.4 million domestic and 2.195 billion worldwide.
I haven’t re-watched Titanic since the 3D re-release, which I wasn’t floored by. The 3D effect was….well, modest.
Most people paid no mind to the 1.33 “boxy” Titanic that was released on Pioneer laserdisc on 10.13.98. It retailed for $49.98. Cameron’s film had been shot on open-matte super 35mm, allowing it to be cropped to widescreen proportions (2.39:1) for theatrical. I owned a laserdisc player back then, but I never saw the boxy. Just for fun I’d like to watch a 1080p version of this.
The HFPA has done everything possible to atone for past sins and it’s still not good enough — the twitter wokesters (Tomris Laffly, Clayton Davis, et. al.) want them suppressed and blacklisted to death.
I’m in a skin clinic undergoing a basel-cell cancer removal procedure**, but the woke Stalinists are trying to suffocate the Golden Globe awards by telling everyone (publicists in particular) not to mention this morning’s GG nominations.
Here’s what Sasha Stone posted a little while ago:
One of the reasons the wokesters are trying to suppress the Golden Globes is because the HFPA didn’t adhere to the feminist quota system — i.e., no women directors were nominated. For this and other reasons the GGs must be punished!
Here’s a complaint from Variety’s #1 wokester Clayton Davis:
Carol Theresa East (aka “Sister Carol” is still with us. A Jamaican-born American reggae recording artist and actress, she’s also gone by Black Cinderella and Mother Culture. Born on 1.15.59, Carol was 26 when she appeared in Jonathan Demme‘s Something Wild (’86).
The 2022 Sight & Sound poll popped earlier this afternoon, and we all knew what the results would reflect, right? Not so much with films directed by older white guys (especially OWG directors with a somewhat dicey or shady reputation), and up with films directed by women and POCS. And so Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxel, a 201-minute film about duty, survival, sex working, regimentation and repetition, and which ends with a “john” getting stabbed in the throat with a pair of scissors, was named #1.
In other words, (a) down with the insensitive asshole patriarchy, (b) up with chopped onions carefully mashed into ground beef, and (c) hooray for Delphine Seyrig finally having an orgasm.
In 2012 Jeanne Dielman ranked #36 on the BFI list…fine. But how did it manage to suddenly vault up to the #1 position? Admired films tend to move up gradually, no? It feels to some of us like Dielman won because of an organized campaign among feminist-minded critics. If Dielman had landed in the 10th or 12th spot in the 2012 poll, today’s win would have seemed more of a natural thing. But to go from 36th place a decade ago to #1 in ’22? It seems to me like the fix was in.
You can’t argue or complain with the BFI critics, who are primarily a bunch of highbrow snoots trying to out-snoot each other.
So 60th-ranked Moonlight has edged out Casablanca (#61), Goodfellas (#62) and The Third Man (#63). I’ve seen all four, and I’m telling you straight from the shoulder that there’s no way Moonlight deserves, deliberately or haphazardly, to be ranked above the other three…NO WAY ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH.
Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo is now ranked second, and I honestly thought it would take a bigger hit than that. I figured the legend of Hitch having allegedly made Tippi Hedren‘s life hell during the making of The Birds and especially Marnie…okay, let’s drop it, but I’m slightly surprised.
Three indisputably great 20th Century films about conflicted white males dealing with disillusionment and corruption — David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (’62), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (’74) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (’69) — were booted off the critics’ list of the top 100. Polanski had to pay for his sexual indiscretions of the ’70s and ’80s, I suppose, and Peckinpah had to be banned for his notorious misogyny. But why did the saga of T.E. Lawrence get the shaft? What exactly did Lean or Lawrence do to earn the heave-ho? Was it the old arrogant British imperialism thing, or the fact that women are barely seen and certainly not heard seen in that classic desert epic?
1. “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxel” (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
2. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
3. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. “Tokyo Story” (Ozu Yasujiro, 1953)
5. “In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai, 2001)
6. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. “Beau travail” (Claire Denis, 1998)
8. “Mulholland Dr.” (David Lynch, 2001)
9. “Man with a Movie Camera” (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
10. “Singin’ in the Rain” (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1951)
Although I've sampled color clips, I'v never actually sat down and watched William Wellman's Nothing Sacred ('37). There -- I've admitted it! I don't own the 2018 Kino Bluray, I've been too damn lazy to stream the HD version on Amazon, and I never saw the "experimental" restoration** that screened at MOMA for two weeks in August '21.
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Magic Mike's Last Dance (Warner Bros., 2.10.23) will hopefully be the last installment. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Reid Carolin, produced by Channing Tatum and costarring Tatum and Salma Hayek (who replaced Thandiwe Newton when Tatum canned her). Tatum is 42 -- too old for this racket.
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Last Thursday (11.3) an official trailer for Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre's Lady Chatterly's Lover (Netflix, 12.2) appeared. The trailer is decently cut but it obscures a basic problem that I had with the film, which I caught a couple of months ago in Telluride.
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