…that Omicron is kind of a paper tiger that brings mild symptoms and could mainly be described as more of a pain in the ass than any kind of worrisome affliction. Am I missing something?

Hollywood CEO to The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield:

Yesterday Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman called Joe Wright‘s The Woman in the Window one of the worst films of the year. The fifth worst, to be exact. I agree for the most part, although I did find the first 45 minutes fairly engaging. Poor Tony Gilroy — producer Scott Rudin brought him in to rewrite portions and try and save the film, but at the end of the day critics blamed Gilroy as much as the others.

Anyway, re-reading my review triggered a nearly 40 year-old memory. Sometime in the late summer of ‘82 I was heading uptown on the IND and somehow missed my 96th street stop. I was daydreaming. I got off at 116th street and went up top and crossed the street to go back downtown. Almost immediately I was challenged by a youngish dude of color who angrily wanted to know what I was doing in that neck of the woods, or, as he put it, in “our” neighborhood. I shrugged and kept walking.

Racial climate-wise the ’80s were a bit flinchy. Plus that part of town wasn’t as attractive. Today the Central Park West and 110th street neighborhood has its own this-and-that flavor. At the same time it feels less traditionally Manhattan-esque. Columbus and Amsterdam avenues aren’t as sexy and boutique-y in that region, especially with those towering project-style apartment buildings. Ditto 125th Street, but even 125th (which I visited a couple of weeks ago) feels a bit lacking in terms of cultured Manhattan coolness.

The general thing these days is that you can’t have mixed opinions about any West Side nabe north of 100th street. If you do you’re a racist. Residence-fantasy-wise, my favorite Manhattan nabes are still West Village / Soho / Tribeca, Chelsea, East Village, Murray Hill and the Madison Square Park region. Just like the old days.

The Woman in the Window begins with Amy Adams, Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman living in nice brownstone apartments on West 124th Street — apartments that face each other. But even with Harlem gentrification having begun around 15 or 20 years ago (much to native dwellers’ discontent) I simply didn’t believe that those three would live on West 124th.

The Harlem thing struck me as “woke precious” — playing it politically safe, Wright and Gilroy and Rudin performing for their woke colleagues in the film industry, etc.

I’ve mentioned this minor point before, but HE continues to regret Kino Lorber’s decision not to re-think the aspect ratio of its forthcoming 4K UHD version of Some Like It Hot. This will be the first time that Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic has been released in this format (3840p x 2160p). Standard Bluray resolution is 1920p x1080p, of course.

The Kino transfer will be the same beautiful version that Criterion released in November 2018, complete with their perverse decision to needlessly and nihilistically slice off the tops and bottoms of the SLIH image, which has been 1.66 since the beginning of time.

Before the handsome Criterion Bluray version came along the entire civilized world had agreed that Some Like It Hot is a 1.66 film. That included Kino Lorber itself, which released a Some Like It Hot Bluray with a 1.66:1 a.r. in May 2011.

Read more

After being under-valued, barely acknowledged and even ignored by too many film critics and pundits, Twitter forecasters, Joe Popcorn industry veterans, award-bestowing critics groups and award-season prognosticators (not to mention the less-than-prescient Critics Choice Association), Parellel Mothers‘ Penelope Cruz has been awarded LAFCA’s Best Actress trophy.

A reputable critics group has finally stood up for the finest female performance of 2021.

Hollywood Elsewhere insists upon taking partial credit for Cruz’s LAFCA win — no other columnist-critic has pushed Cruz as hard as I have over the last several weeks…nobody. You can’t say that Hollywood Elsewhere’s never-say-die advocacy didn’t help to move the needle a little bit in Cruz’s favor.

A little more than three months ago Cruz’s Parallel performance also won the Venice Film Festival’s Volpi Cup for Best Actress.

The Worst Person in the World‘s Renate Reinsve was voted the first Best Actress runner-up in the LAFCA voting.

LAFCA has given Drive My Car their Best Picture award.

3:35 pm: Otherwise the other LAFCA foodie winners fell into right line with the “living in a separate universe” aesthetic. The Best Picture winner hasn’t been announced as we speak but…

With few exceptions every non-comedic or non-surrealistic movie that tells a story, however fantastical or familiar or outlandish or brilliant or self-subverting or satirical, sticks to or “lives in” its own self-regulated realm. The laws and limits of this realm are described in the “Dramatic Integrity Rulebook“, which is published and updated every year (usually in late March or early April). All the guilds have been signatories for decades.

Decade after decade and era after era, the creators of almost every non-comedic or non-surrealistic movie have stated the following to their audiences: “This is a world of our own making and design…we’re at liberty to throw in any kind of unexpected twist or shocking surprise or any kind of bullshit…we can use any kind of holy-shit element or imaginative leap that we want because we built this private asylum and we make the rules.”

At the same time (and this is written in an introductory essay in the 2021 edition) filmmakers also agree that they can’t throw out the Dramatic Integrity Rulebook (DIR) entirely because at the end of the day the DIR is the terra firma upon which filmmakers and their creations stand.

Surreal put-on comedies like Blazing Saddles can go hog wild and double-back and break the fourth wall, yes, but not superhero flicks, dramas, sci-fi programmers, thrillers, action adventures, romantic comedies, etc. They can’t suddenly say “the hell with it” and step out of their own realm and ignore their own rules. They have to carry the ball on the playing field until the clock runs out. They can’t just…whatever, jump into a mini-helicopter and fly out of the football stadium and take a private jet down to Turks and Caicos — they have a game to play and they have to finish it, and all players are required to wear a helmet with face guard, shoulder pads, a jersey, etc.

If No Time To Die‘s Daniel Craig had suddenly been assisted at a crucial moment by the 32 year-old Sean Connery as he appeared in Dr. No, and if The Spy Loved Me‘s youngish Roger Moore had stepped in a few minutes later…if there had suddenly been three Bonds on the same team, it would have been mind-blowing, psychedelic, giddy, stunning, fall over backwards, somebody pinch me, etc. But at the same time No Time To Die would’ve stopped being a movie.

You can knock audiences for any kind of loop you care to, but you can’t bring in time-warp guest stars for the hell of it. Well, you can but once you start playing the multiverse game all bets are off.

On the other hand once you’ve committed to multi-verse concepts and storylines, the possibilities are pretty crazy.

I’m not speaking disparagingly or disrespectfully of the crowds who are surging into theatres this weekend to see Spider–Man: No Way Home with the above headline. Well, maybe a little.

I’m just referencing that old showbiz or advertising maxim about how you can’t make dogs eat a certain brand of dog food if they don’t like how it tastes. (Famous Sam Goldwyn variation: “If people don’t want to see something, you can’t stop them.”) This morning’s Spider–Man numbers tell us that the reverse is suddenly and startlingly true right now, even with Omnicron hovering over everyone and everything.

You know what this tells me, above and beyond the cheering crowds? It tells me that aside from your older fraidy cat moviegoers, Omnicron didn’t have that much to do with the flopping of West Side Story. It also tells me that younger audiences could stand to upgrade their taste buds and let a little Shakespeare and music into their life.

Questlove’s Summer of Soul is an engaging, well-cut documentary about a series of Harlem Cultural Festival concerts held in Marcus Garvey Park during the mid to late summer of 1969. It’s not my idea of a thematically unified, shoot-and-assemble “documentary” as much as a savoring of found footage — footage that sat in a cellar for decades, and was finally restored and cut just right and punctuated with talking heads.

I love the performances — Stevie Wonder, The 5th Dimension, The Staple Singers, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, Sly and the Family Stone, Chambers Brothers). You can feel the heat and humidity and smell the beer and cigarette smoke. It’s a living, breathing cultural document. A sampling of the mood and politics of ’69. An atmospheric high.

But let’s not kid ourselves — Summer of Soul has been winning Best Documentary awards left and right because critics and industry types want to vote for the right thing. Because it’s not really a doc as much as great-looking found footage plus commentary. I wouldn’t say the award-givers are afraid not to honor a half-century-old celebration of black culture, but they know Summer of Soul is the easiest choice to make from a political perspective, and that they’ll all earn virtue points. So there it is.

I don’t want to make too much of the faintly similar endings of Heaven Can Wait and Spider-Man: No Way Home. It should be said upfront that Heaven‘s ending is a bit more stirring and heart-melty, and it pays off better. And Tom Holland…all right, let’s not go there. But the unrecognized and unspoken recognition thing exists in both. That’s all I’m saying.

“West Side Story’s unsuccessful release tells us that we have undergone a fundamental shift in how we watch movies in America. And the entertainment industry should see it for what it is. Many thought as the pandemic spread and the theaters closed that it would all snap back as soon as the pandemic was over. People would flock back to do what they’ve been doing for more than a century, not only out of habit but tradition: They’d go out to the movies.

“But a technological revolution came; the pandemic speeded up what had already begun, just as it speeded up the Zoom revolution that is transforming business and office work.

“People got streaming services and watched movies at home. They got used to it. They liked it. They’d invite friends and stream new releases together. Or they stayed in their pajamas and watched it.

“I never thought movie theaters would go out of style, but I see that in the past few months, since New York has loosened up and things are open, I have gone to Broadway and Off-Broadway shows five times and to a movie not at all, except this week for this column. Like all Americans, I really love movies. But I can watch them at home.

“The old world of America at the movies, of gathering at the local temple of culture, the multiplex, is over. People won’t rush out to see a movie they heard was great but that’s confined to theatrical release; they’ll stay home knowing it will be streaming soon.

“Movie theaters won’t completely go out of business; a good number will survive because people will fill them to go to superhero movies and big fantastical action films. People will want to see those on the screen together and hoot and holler. But it will never again be as it was, different generations, different people, coming together on Saturday night at the bijou. The bijou is at home now, on the couch or bed, streaming in UHD.” — from Peggy Noonan‘s “West Side Story and the Decline of the Movie Theater,” Wall Street Journal, 12.16.21.

For the sin of praising Dave Chappelle and The Closer, Terry Gilliam was recent hammered on British Twitter by wokester inquisition Stalinists (i.e., the “Old Vic 12”). You don’t want to bore yourself with all the ins and outs; suffice that Gilliam has rebounded, Chappelle is alive and well, and wokester witch-hunters gonna hunt like they used to do back in Salem, Massachusetts.

Sutton Wells is today celebrating her month-old life — cupcakes, candles, party hats. Born on 11.17.21. Now that she’s looked around and lived a little, she has some perspective to draw upon.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is hearing that The Matrix Resurrection, which was tweeted about last night, is “not fan service at all…in some quarters Matrix fans are PISSED.” Press screenings are happening this morning.

HE: “So the fans want a certain thing from Neo or his arc, and it doesn’t give them that?” Ruimy: “It apparently doesn’t give them any of that. Some fans feel that Lana’s gone cuckoo.”