In a new IndieWire poll, 137 critics have cited 15 films as the best they saw at four recent fall festivals — Venice, Telluride, TIFF and NYFF.
I am telling you straight and true that the failure of said critics to include Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard is incontestable proof that a significant percentage of these critics are living deep inside their own heads and anal cavities. Because King Richard, trust me, connects, and will almost certainly become a top Best Picture contender. The critics also included Spencer (a surreal, all-but-unendurable immersion into the misery of Lady Diana), Red Rocket (a respectable Sean Baker film that traffics in depravity and Texas trashitude), Bergman Island and Dune.
The #1 critics pick, Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog, is going to be hated by Average Joes and Janes. I called it “a chilly and perverse cattle-ranch drama that insists over and over that it’s a very bad thing for toxic males to suppress their homosexuality. Campion is a top-tier filmmaker but Dog‘s milieu is grim and stifling and melancholy, like the dark side of the moon. Yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as the enraged and closeted Phil.”
1. The Power of the Dog
2. Titane (HE says distinctive, respectably self-owned, overpraised by Cannes jury)
3. The Worst Person in the World
4. Drive My Car
5. Petite Maman
6. Memoria
7. Dune (HE alert)
8. Red Rocket (HE horror horn)
9. Bergman Island (HE alert)
10. The Tragedy of Macbeth
11. Spencer (HE horror horn)
12. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
13. Parallel Mothers
14. C’mon C’mon
15. The Lost Daughter
And yet there was a problem with the Criterion Some Like It Hot, and that was the 1.85 aspect ratio. It needlessly and nihilistically slices off the tops and bottoms of the image, which has been 1.66 since the beginning of time.
Very slight slicings, agreed, but why chop off perfectly good visual information? It’s nothing short of perverse and diseased, but that’s the occasional way of Criterion eccentricity. They can be serious jerks when they feel like it.
Open message to Kino Lorber: “Why not differentiate your SLIH release by offering more than just a 4K UHD version? Why not give Billy Wilder‘s film more height by using a 1.66:1 aspect ratio? That’s the a.r. that everyone went with before Criterion came along with their completely unnecessary 1.85 version. Aspect ratio obsessives like myself would be deeply grateful if you would oblige.”
If Hillary Clinton had won in ’16 she’d probably be in her second term now. The noise on the right would have been horrible every step of the way. But would we be three years away from a more-than-likely rightwing coup d’etat?
Overheard: “As Bill Maher, Robert Kagan and others have now demonstrated with far more eloquence than I have, Trump’s takeover is all but guaranteed. American democracy ends in January 2025. Because the fascist left and the fascist right are now working together. They are both cults that despise freedom of thought, and they both, increasingly, despise reality.
“The right is ahead on the reality score. On the 1 to 10 scale (1 being reality, 10 being total wingnut through-the-looking-glass fantasy), they’re at about an 8. The left is now a 4 creeping up on 5. (As Andrew Sullivan captured in his revelatory column this week, the trans issue is what’s pushing the left to a 6, 7, or 8.)
“But the bottom line is that they’re united. They both want to kill American freedom (just by different means). They are colluding, and they will succeed.”
In episode #4of MarySmithMetzler’s Maid miniseries (Netflix, streaming since 10.1), Margaret Qualley’s “Alex,” a recently split-up single mom, is asked by her daughter what Thanksgiving is.
Her answer basically means wokestersregardthislate–Novemberfamilyholidayasproblematic, due to the history of white settlers’ mistreatment of Native Americans. And yet…
History.com: “The [50 year] alliance between the Pilgrims and the {Massachusetts] Wampanoagtribe, remains one of the few examples of harmony between European colonists and Native Americans.“
“Regional Friendo” piped in with a gripe about abusive bosses and how gentle bosses are much better, and how respect is a two-way street.
HE to Regional Friendo: “I prefer mellow to agitated as well. But this is a tough town and snappy bosses are lamentably par for the course, at least in some corners. You basically have to man up, grim up and take it. Life in the big city.
“You remember Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, of course. Imagine if Sammy Glick had hired a team of snowflake employees. What a Daily Beast article that would make! ‘Sammy is a real prick and he’s hurt our feelings…waahhh!’
“Except they didn’t have sensitive snowflakes back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Well, they did but nobody voiced any complaints, certainly not to magazine reporters.”
Journalist Friendo: “LOL at Daily Beast trying to knock out a successful competitor. Fuck these crybabies. Go work somewhere else. Sharon is gruff and direct but you have to be to win in this town. She owns her own business so she can tell them to fuck right off.”
I was left with mixed feelings after catching George Clooney‘s The Tender Bar last weekend. Set in Manhasset and Connecticut in the ’70s and ’80s and featuring a steady, trustworthy performance from Tye Sheridan and an amiable supporting one from Ben Affleck, this is a warmish, working-class family saga about the usual dysfunctions and obstacles…in this case a fatherless kid nurtured in a bar + romantic college-age yearnings + toil and trouble + struggling to make it as a journalist.
The following day I ordered a copy of J.R. Moehringer‘s same-titled life saga, published in 2006 and the basis of William Monahan‘s screenplay.
Moehringer is a relaxed, colloquial, straight-up honest writer. The book is well sculpted, easy to read, no speedbumps or detours. It’s a compelling tale of a Manhasset kid who grew up fatherless (his radio talk-show dad was an absentee alcoholic asshat) but who was nurtured along by some surrogate dads at a Manhasset watering hole called The Dickens (later Publicans), and eventually went on to a Yale education and a career as a journalist with the N.Y. Times, Rocky Mountain News and L.A Times.
The film is not as good as the book, but it’s an agreeable, sometimes affecting in-and-outer. It keeps everything personal and local, and is basically a “this happens and that happens and then this happens” type of thing. I wasn’t levitated, but I wasn’t annoyed either. I went with it and so did Tatiana, who insists that Clooney’s film will affect people in the same way that Kenneth Branagh‘s Belfast, another turbulent family drama, did during Telluride.
Actually I was a bit irked from time to time.
Affleck charms as Uncle Charlie (no allusions to Joseph Cotten‘s doppleganger in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt), and despite playing this amiable bartender with a somewhat broad “Long Island accent,” which struck me as needless. Ben is an authentic Boston guy, and he doesn’t need to pretend. On top of which all Charlie does is hang out and share pearls of working-class wisdom. Nothing develops or builds with the guy.
There’s a father-son event at young J.R.’s school, and you naturally expect that Charlie will fill in for the absent asshat dad (Max Martini). Affleck stepping up to this plate would have meant something to us. But no — J.R.’s crabby, white-haired grandfather (Chris Lloyd) puts on a tie and attends instead. Which struck me as hugely unsatisfying.
And there’s a cancer scare subplot involving J.R.s mom (Lily Rabe) that goes nowhere. One minute Affleck is admonishing a young woman for even asking about Lily’s disease, and a scene or two later she’s older and cancer-free and completely out of the woods. And it’s like “whut?”
And I regret to say (and I hate having to spit this out, being an ardent admirer of Clooney, one of the better human beings in this town) that The Tender Bar is partly undone by a surreal casting decision that makes the first 40% of the film feel seriously out of whack.
I’m speaking of the casting of young Daniel Ranieri, a kid from an apparently Middle Eastern family (the last name is Italian but the lineage appears to be Lebanese, Iranian, Jordanian…somewhere in that realm), as the 10 year-old version of Sheridan, who, like Moehringer in actuality, is the biological son of a German paleface couple (Rabe and Martini). It would be one thing if Ranieri was adopted, but there’s NO WAY IN HELL this kid grows up to be Tye Sheridan.
I’m looking forward to the first YouTube report about the Academy Museum that at least mentions the fact that the “apology for 100 years of white Hollywood” angle constitutes a good 80% of the museum’s content, above and beyond the Miyazaki exhibit. The people who’ve covered it so far are all gladhanders.
Seriously, how could any fan of North by Northwest not be a little thrown by the “Backdrop: An Invisible Art” exhibit, which all but indicts Alfred Hitchcock, Ernest Lehman, Cary Grant and others who helped make this 1959 thriller for crimes against the Lakota nation?
And yet the Fox 11 reporter [below] waltzes in with her camera crew and goes “oh, what a paradise for movie fans! And there’s Bruce the shark!”
This Belfast poster doesn’t reflect an Academy-angled, award-season campaign; it’s aimed at general audiences. The idea is that JudeHill’s adolescent lead character lives in his own world, and that “the troubles” of 1969 Belfast (Irish vs. Protestant, anti-British occupation) haven’t made a dent. The smiling faces of his family indicate a similar buoyant attitude.
Journalist Friendo: “LOL at Daily Beast trying to knock out a successful competitor. Fuckthesecrybabies. Go work somewhere else. Sharon is gruff and direct but you have to be to win in this town. She owns her own business so she can tell them to fuckrightoff.”
HE to Regional Friendo: “She’s neurotic but then so am I. So are many of us.
“The article is a typical ‘sensitive Zoomer & Millennial snowflakes don’t like tough taskmaster boss’ story. It’s nowhere near as incendiary as Tatiana Siegel’s ‘ScottRudin is an abusive boss’ THR story. Not even in the same league. Hollywood’s business community is teeming with stories fueled by unhappy snowflakes who resent brusque, occasionally snappy bosses. Big deal.”
Regional Friendo to HE: “You seem okay with nasty bosses who verbally abuse their underlings. Well, I’m not a youthful snowflake but I don’t think you get the best work out of people when you abuse them. Not saying you have to pat them on the head and give them a Kumbaya moment, but respectisatwo–waystreet. I’ve had both kinds of bosses, and believe me, I appreciated the ones who treated me like a professional, not some piece of dogshit.”
HE to Regional Friendo: “I prefer mellow to agitated as well. But this is a tough town and snappy bosses are lamentably par for the course, at least in some corners. You basically have to man up, grim up and take it. Life in the big city.
“Remember Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? Imagine if Sammy Glick had hired a team of snowflake employees. What a Daily Beast article that would make! ‘Sammy is a real prick and he’s hurt our feelings…waaahhh!’
“Except they didn’t have sensitive snowflakes back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Well, they did but nobody voiced any complaints, certainly not to magazine reporters.”
