A24 is opening Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley‘s Sing Sing, a spiritual rehab prison drama, on Friday, 7.12 — less than two weeks hence. A fair-sized crowd saw it in Toronto last September, but I’m not hearing about upcoming local screenings.

Oscar! Sing Sing has Oscar written all over it! It’s an Oscar movie, especially in the case of presumed Best Actor nominee Colman Domnigo.

Hotshot critic #1: “I haven’t seen it yet, but I think it looks vaguely terrible. Like some outdated gritty-but-facile-black-dude-saint movie from 1993. Who knows, right? I only know that every time I see the trailer, I cringe. And I love Colman!”

Hotshot critic #2: “Who says it’s a Best Actor slamdunk for Colman?”
HE: “The chorus of praisers who saw it in Toronto last September…no?”
Hotshot critic #2: “I don’t know if they know what they’re talking about. If it was that great, or even just better than Rustin, why didn’t they put it out last fall? And why put it out now in July?”
HE: “Good question. Beats me.”
Hotshot critic #2: “I love Colman and hope it’s great, but these hosannas seem suspicious.”

Posted on 6.9.24: I somehow hadn’t watched the Sing Sing trailer when I tapped out last Friday’s Best Picture projection piece, but now I’ve seen it and am persuaded…well, certainly that Colman Domingo will be right at the top of the Best Actor nominees list but also that Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley‘s allegedly spirit-lifting prison drama, about a wrongfully imprisoned guy putting on a play alongside other cons, will probably end up with a Best Picture nom. Maybe.

Based on a true story about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program at New York’s Sing Sing prison, pic follows the friendship of two RTA alumni, John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo) and Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (Clarence Maclin himself) as they work together to stage an original production. Vulnerability, trust, integrity, pride, etc.

Sing Sing will open limited on 7.12.24. Pic will expand in August.

I speculated on 5.7 that 2025’s strongest Best Picture contenders will probably be those that don’t feel especially woked-up or agenda-driven (i.e., POC narrative, #MeToo-assertive, LGBTQ- or trans-promotional).

That doesn’t mean there won’t be any agenda-driven nominees. Emilia Perez (Netflix) will almost certainly be nominated upon the shoulders of musical fans as well as gay and trans celebrationists.

I’m actually not detecting anything especially wokey about Sing Sing. Okay, it focuses on a mostly black cast with two or three white guys (including Sound of Metal‘s Paul Raci) on the side, and given the setting it has to be a little bit gayish…no? But mostly I’m sensing soulful and heartwarming.

Plus it automatically earns an extra five points for presenting itself within a 1.66:1 aspect ratio.

Over the years Academy and guild members have been trained like dogs to focus only on award-season releases (Labor day to Christmas) for potential Oscar contenders, but exceptions pop up every so often. Sing Sing may be one of them.

I am therefore projecting that the following eight films have the best chances of being nominated for Best Picture:

Todd Phillips‘ Joker: Folie à Deux (Warner Bros., 10.4)
Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez (Netflix)
Steve McQueen‘s Blitz (Apple, undated but surely opening during award seaeon)
Sean Baker‘s Anora (Neon, 10.18)
Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley‘s Sing Sing
Edward Berger‘s Conclave (Focus Features, 11.15)
Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator II (Paramount, 11.22)
Robert Zemeckis‘ Here

…the wavering Black fence–sitters — i.e., the 2020 Joe voters who’ve been nursing doubts about firmly standing by him a second time and have even flirted with Trump alignment — will, in greater numbers, simply stay home on 11.5.24.

Joe committed political suicide last Thursday night, and there’s no undoing this. The sand is draining out of the hourglass and it can’t be replaced

And this will mean the death of Joe in the battleground states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania). We all saw him — he’s a withered old nag on his way to the glue factory. The Beast will win, and democracy as we’ve known it will exist mostly as a memory.

…and thereby make life miserable for God knows how many thousands of innocent, considerate, responsible drivers…these are bad people, and if you ask me the obstructionists should be severely punished.

I’m talking 60, 70 hours of picking up roadside garbage, minimum, while wearing orange jumpsuits. Supervised by Cool Hand Luke guards in aviator shades

I don’t dare suggest a more brutal penalty. Okay, I’ll mention it. Don’t be alarmed but I’m thinking of the mass crucifixion of Spartacus’s slave army along the Appian Way. Theatrical “pretend” crucifixion, I mean. No nails or spikes or blood but tied to crosses alongside highway signs and forced to bake in the sun for hours on end. Drivers would be permitted to throw eggs and tomatoes.

Are you going to sit there and tell me that Frodo (aka Nico and Schnitzel) isn’t the single coolest element in A Quiet Place: Day One?

Are you going to sit there and tell me that Frodo isn’t the Clint Eastwood of cats?

And what do you think of it? I know Kevin Costner‘s multi-part, big-swing western isn’t doing very well commercially (earned a lousy $4 million yesterday) but it’s a big, sweeping thang by a major-league director, and attention needs to be paid.

Here’s what I wrote after catching it in Cannes…”Horizon Broke My Heart“:

I went into this morning’s Horizon screening totally pumped. I wanted to embrace and celebrate a classic-styled American western, which is what the advance-word crowd has been calling it. I wanted to see Open Range 2: Westward Ho The Wagons. Give it to me, bruh…make it happen!

Alas, it pains me to admit that Kevin Costner‘s big-swing western isn’t all that good.

Costner said during today’s lunch-hour press conference that Horizon “is a journey…it’s not a plot movie.” But that’s exactly what I wanted! I wanted a solid, gripping wagon-train saga with a commanding narrative — the kind of movie in which characters say and do what they must because of who they are and what they need and so on. And that didn’t happen, and I’m all but weeping as as result. Seriously…real tears.

I don’t hate Horizon — it just doesn’t do the proverbial thing, and I feel crestfallen about that.

Costner’s 181-minute film is kind of a mess, truth be told. It feels like the start of a ten-part miniseries, and it just feels odd to be sorting through several characters and locales and situations over a three-hour period and asking “when is the actual movie going to start?”

Because this is a Hulu or Paramount Plus or Apple miniseries with a big movie star (i.e., Kevin), and his Gary Cooper-like character, Hayes Ellison, doesn’t show up until the 65-minute mark and he really doesn’t do or say a hell of a lot throughout the whole film except shoot a crazy-evil guy (played by Jamie Campbell Bower) at the halfway mark.

Maybe the “movie” will kick in when Part Two rolls along in August, but with the exception of a couple of rousing action scenes (my favorite is a moonlit horseback chase) the film I saw drifted and meandered and dragged at times. It does a whole lot of talk-talk-talking and scenery-gaping, and I felt kinda trapped watching all these unfamiliar faces rambling on and on.

Why am I listening to you guys trying to sort stuff out? Who are you? Why should I care what you think about anything? You mean nothing to me.

If the last 36 hours are any indication, doddering Joe Biden is apparently committed to ushering in a second Donald Trump term.

He’s no longer a sensible and decent man with practical inclinations. Barring an electoral miracle, he’s becoming the circumstantial, cliff’s-edge architect of our democracy’s demise. He’s the decrepit gatekeeper who could, if so inclined, at least try to orchestrate a scenario that might marshall our best resources and with God’s help hold back the yokel barbarian hordes…but he won’t do it.

He knows he’s too old and doesn’t give a shit. Post-debate Joe knows the chances of defeating Trump are almost nil, and he doesn’t want to hear it. He’s determined to charge forward atop his Old Paint and somehow muddle through.

His primary offense is (switching from horse-riding to sea-faring or Cincinnati Kid metaphors!) not so much that he’s doggedly determined to hold the course and perhaps go down with the ship. It’s that he’s determined to gamble on a hand that almost everyone (excepting he and Lady Macbeth and a handful of reality-denying, inner-circle loyalists) knows is weak and Jimmy Carter-ish and almost certainly doomed.

It’s that his Irish, mule-headed tenacity has bullied the shrewd or at least seasoned card player aspect of his nature into submission.

God help us but the post-debate, “what, me worry?”, damn-the-torpedoes Joe Biden has, by all apparent appearances, become a kind of delusional banshee. This wretched bastard has determined that tens of millions who believe in sanity and decency — the blue or blue-purple flock, the fair-minded, non-MAGA faithful — may have to suffer for his hubris, and so be it. Four years of hell (1.20.25 to 1.20.29) and perhaps longer than that.

Joe is showing his true colors, and they are not the colors of a patriot. He’s no longer the proverbial good guy.

If the worst happens on 11.5.24 and The Beast takes back the reins, it will be small comfort knowing that Joe’s ignominious and reprehensible place in the annals of American history will be locked in and branded deep like the Red River D. Damn this obstinate great grandpa…damn his old-coot, drooling sponge brain all to hell.

Perfect. Eloquent. Spot on.

…there’s always someone eyeballing the shooter (i.e., me) with an expression that says, “Uhm, are you stealing a little piece of my soul?”

Here we are in hipster wokester Brooklyn, and the philosophy of Anthony Quinn’s Auda Abu Tayi still has a foothold.

The restaurant is Fan Fried Rice Bar, 740 Driggs Ave., Brooklyn, 11211.

It took the N.Y. Times editorial board a full working day to post this urgent plea — President Joe Biden needs to man up, smell the coffee and pack it in.

If he refuses to do this and if Donald Trump wins on November 5th, Biden will surely be reviled by historians as the blindest, most egotistical and reprehensibly selfish U.S. President in U.S. history.

In Pablo Larrain’s Maria, Angelina Jolie will play a twitchy, headstrong, tempestuous performer…no day at the beach!

Lonely, unhappy and temperamental, Maria Callas spent her last years living largely in isolation in Paris. She died of a heart attack at age 53 on 9.16.77.

Who dies at 53 from a heart attack? A non-obese person, I mean.

A funeral was held at St. Stephen’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral on rue Georges-Bizet, Paris on 9.20.77. Callas was later cremated at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Her ashes were ultimately scattered over the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Greece, in the spring of ‘79.

During a 1978 interview, Callas’s friend John Ardoin said the following:

“There are times, you know, when there are certain people who are blessed and cursed, with an extraordinary gift, in which the gift is almost greater than the human being. And Callas was one of these people.

“It was almost as if her wishes, her life, her own happiness were all subservient to this incredible, incredible gift that she was given, this gift that reached out and taught us all – taught us things about music we knew very well, but showed us new things, things we never thought about, new possibilities.

“I think that’s why singers admire her so; I think that’s why conductors admire her so; I know that’s why I admire her so. And she paid a tremendously difficult and expensive price for this career.

“I don’t think she always understood what she did or why. She knew she had a tremendous effect on audiences and on people. But it was not something that she could always live with gracefully or happily.

“I once said to her, ‘It must be very enviable to be Maria Callas.’ And she said, ‘No, it’s a very terrible thing to be Maria Callas, because it’s a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand.”

Jordan Ruimy has polled over 100 reputable film critics about the best of ’24, and the winner is Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune: Part Two.

That’s a respectable preference. I paid no attention to the story but I loved the cinematic penetration aspects — the look and the flavor and the rhythm of it.

The Ruimy critics chose George Miller‘s Furiosa as their #2…not so much on this end. And Luca Guadagnino‘s Challengers is in third place.

I really, really don’t get why Richard Linklater‘s Hit Man came in fourth. I didn’t love hut certainly respected the fifth-placed Love Lies Bleeding.

Among the second five (#6 through #10) only Alex Garland‘s Civil War and Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera really rang my bell.

Here are HE’s Top 12 2024 films, posted on 6.6.24: