Best wishes, hail fellow and “hang in there” cheers to The Beloved Dude, whose lymphoma battle has resulted in a temporary shearing of his silver mane.

Chris Nolan‘s Tenet pops today on 4K Bluray and Amazon streaming. Both will presumably offer subtitles. So starting today, anyone on the planet can watch this thing with at least a fighting chance of understanding the particulars, not to mention the mostly obscured dialogue.

I didn’t even try to make heads or tails of the story when I saw Tenet in Flagstaff three and a half months ago (a late afternoon screening on Friday, 9.4).

First paragraph of Tenet‘s Wiki synopsis: A CIA agent, the ‘Protagonist’, participates in an undercover operation at a Kyiv opera house. His life is saved by a masked soldier with a distinctive red trinket, who ‘un-fires’ a bullet through a hostile gunman. After seizing an artifact, the Protagonist is captured by mercenaries. He endures torture before consuming cyanide. He awakens to learn the cyanide was a test of his loyalty; his team has been killed and the artifact lost.”

Last night Variety‘s Clayton Davis reported that Emerald Fennell and Carey Mulligan‘s Promising Young Woman (Focus Features, 12.25) “has been submitted to the Golden Globes in the comedy or musical categories.”

Every year some award-seeking distributor tries to expand the Golden Globe definition of what a comedy or musical might be. Trust me, swear to God, take it to the bank — there’s nothing the least bit amusing about Promising Young Woman, and I mean not “ironically”, not darkly comedic or comedy of horrors…none of that.

It delivers a certain dry, flinty attitude that some might interpret as arch, but arch has never been synonymous with funny. (Not in my book, at least.) The film is admirably dry and deadpan, true, but deep down it’s cold and frosty. It’s a feminist Death Wish but with a certain flair or flourish — Fennell and Mulligan are basically saying “death to all insensitive scumbags and date rapists out there, including a certain fellow who initially seems like he might be a decent human being.”

In his article Davis called Promising Young Woman “darkly comical” — a flat-out lie.

From “Promising Surprise“, posted on 11.22.20: “This is a really well-made film…carefully honed, brittle attitude, super-dry dialogue, well shot…rage, nihilism, chilly and icy but highly controlled…deliberate glacier-hood, calculating.

“It’s been described as a kind of #MeToo Death Wish thing, but it’s a much finer creation than Michael Winner’s 1974 film. And yet God, the ice water in its veins! So angry at chauvinist prick fuckheads that it can’t…well, it can see straight but it can’t cut anyone a break. The evil parties must pay and die, and the feeling of vengeance and wrath is such that it just HAS to splash over and soak Carey’s character…I’ll leave it at that.

“And yet one mark of exceptional artistic achievement is not being afraid to go all the way. PYW definitely goes for broke and then some. It doesn’t just despise the young male tribe of insensitive assholes out there — it wants them exterminated like insects.”

…about agreeing to star in a new Dungeons and Dragons film? Apart from the paycheck factor, I mean.

Pine is a formidable actor. He knows his craft. Twice I’ve watched him deliver like a pro at the Geffen Playhouse — in a 2007 production of Neil Labute‘s Fat Pig and in a 2009 production of Farragut North. Four years ago he was excellent in Hell or High Water. In August ’19 it was announced he’s “attached” to play Walter Cronkite in Newsflash.

I wouldn’t exactly call Pine’s willingness to do Dungeons and Dragons tragic. It’s basically just a financial portfolio move. He probably sees it as analogous to Harrison Ford starring in Cowboys & Aliens. But it does seem silly and wasteful.

When this or that celebrity expresses strong disapproval of some person or policy or behavior, the tabloids constantly use the transitive verb “slam”. To slam someone is to assault them with the verbal equivalent of a right cross…right? Except when criticisms are voiced or more often tweeted, they often feel more like taunts or glares or jabs. HE “slam” substitutes: backhand, side-eye, upbraid, zing, reproach, poke, scold, diss, badmouth, stiff-arm, ding.

…knows how to assemble a good trailer.

HE-posted on 9.12.20:

Attorney General William Barr, amply defined as Orange Plague‘s toady, enabler, spinner, protector and personal grudgemeister, has been whacked for not being sufficiently slavish and obsequious over the last few weeks.

Sin #1 was Barr’s refusal to officially agree with Trump’s bullshit claims of massive voting fraud in battleground states.

Sin #2, as reported last week by The Wall Street Journal, was Barr’s decision to keep the the Justice Department’s investigations into Hunter Biden under wraps. Trump allegedly believes that had this been made public, the 11.3 election might have swung in his favor.

Oh, and the electoral college officially ratified Joe Biden‘s win. That happened too.

I never knew any Vinnie Barbarino or Tony Manero “borough” types in the mid ’70s, but I’d known a few Italian-American guys during my painful upbringing in Westfield, New Jersey. They proudly called themselves “guineas”, wore pegged pants and pointy black leather lace-ups, radiated pugnacious vibes and seemed to live in their own angry little world.

And I knew that the bridge-and-tunnel chumps who came into Manhattan on weekends in the late ’70s, the ones who were too thick to realize that their chances of getting into Studio 54 were completely nil…those razor-cut slash polyester goons who radiated sartorial cluelessness in so many ways, and thereby indicating a certain myopic mindset…I knew these guys.

And so I believed Nik Cohn‘s “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” the 6.7.76 New York cover story that soon became the basis for Robert Stigwood and John Badham‘s Saturday Night Fever, which became a huge hit and cultural earth-shaker after opening on 12.14.77.

I loved the 2001 Odyssey dance sequences as much as the next guy, but I wasn’t a fan of the film itself, largely because I found John Travolta‘s Tony Manero an impossible asshole — chilly, closed off.

Yes, I know — that was who and what he was, being based on the “Vincent” character Cohn had written about and so on. But where was it written that I had to like Manero’s company?

I bought a ticket to see Badham’s film at Westport’s Post Cinema just before Christmas of ’77. I wanted to have an interesting and perhaps an eye-opening time, but almost immediately I was saying to myself “I have to hang out with this asshole?” On top of which FUCK DISCO…that was one of my foundational beliefs at the time.

What a shock, therefore, to discover 20 years later that Cohn had basically “piped” the New York cover story. He’d done a little research in Bay Ridge and poked around and talked to a few locals, but had more or less made it up.

And yet Cohn’s article felt genuine. I totally recognized (or felt that I recognized) his observations about a certain strata of young, under-educated Italian-American guys in their late teens and early 20s and their dead-end jobs and whatnot…it seemed to convey certain basic impressions of borough guys of that era. I bought it and so did Hollywood, Stigwood, Badham, Travolta and, down the road, tens of millions of fans of the film.

It just went to show that fiction could masquerade as honest reportage and vice versa. I re-read Cohn’s piece last night after watching the Bee Gees doc, and I had a good time with it. Even knowing about Cohn having admitted the truth in ’96, I bought it all the same. Good writing is good writing.

The competition henceforth is between a Democratic party, a party that believes in democracy, vs. an autocratic party of bumblefuck-kowtowing Alamo defenders…rubes determined to use their last reserves of gunpowder to fight the leftist Khmer Rouge comintern, the white cis male-hating #MeToo brigade, the BLM “defund the police” store trashers, etc.

Last night I caught Frank Marshall‘s How Can You Mend A Broken Heart? (HBO), the 111-minute Bee Gees doc. It’s a kick and a ride…always interesting, finely crafted…a deep-drill exploration slash celebration of the Brothers Gibb and their whitewater journey through the bruising rapids of ’60s and ’70s pop progression invention.

The BeeGees were all but drummed out of the business in the wake of the anti-disco backlash of ’79 and ’80 (one of my proudest all-time possessions was a black, Euro-style “Death to Disco” T-shirt) but they were fairly awesome in their spotty, in-and-out, up-and-down fashion.

I became a fan with ’67’s “New York Mining Disaster 1941” and “To Love Somebody,” and stayed on through “Lonely Days, Lonely Nights” (’70). Then I dropped out for a bit (or they dropped out rather), and then we reconnected with Main Course, their 1975 album that included “Jive Talkin'” and “Nights on Broadway.”

But I permanently checked out with the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack album. Hah-hah-hah-hah…hated that album, hated that album.

Marshall’s direction of the doc is sharp and fleet and comprehensive…the doc does almost everything you want it do and more, but that “almost” constitutes a major asterisk.

I’m referring to the fact that the voice and vantage point of 74 year-old Barry Gibb, the only surviving brother of the original trio (Maurice passed in ’03, Robin in ’12), is the dominant factor. The doc could (and perhaps should) have been titled Barry’s Story, As Told to Frank Marshall.

And so the constant friction between Barry and Robin, both personally and professionally over four or five decades, is downplayed. And, as I mentioned last Friday, the the big-screen debacle that was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the 1978 musical fantasy that starred the Brothers Gibb, is completely omitted. Because Barry said so.

For a doc that’s earned your trust and admiration for not hedging or playing games, the refusal to deal with this catastrophe iis like…what?

And yet the doc doesn’t shy away from the anti-disco thing, which was also ruinous for the group because of the Fever association. As long as Marshall and Gibb are allowing that ’78, ’79 and early ’80 ushered in the dark times, why not simply acknowledge the Sgt. Pepper calamity? So strange.

I’m especially glad for last night’s viewing because I hadn’t listened to “Nights on Broadway” for decades. I fell for it all over again.

I love the story about how the song, recorded in Miami, was originally called “Lights on Broadway”, and how Atlantic Records Ahmet Ertegun, upon hearing this early version, told them “no way guys…the song has to allude to wild nocturnal behavior and great sex and toots of cocaine.” And so “Lights” became “Nights.” And then Barry added some falsetto for the chorus, and suddenly they had this whole falsetto thing going, which became their signature.

The doc’s final line — Barry telling Frank that he would trade all the hits if his brothers could somehow return from the great beyond — is touching, and it feels right to end the film on this note. But I don’t think Barry honestly meant it. I think he just said it because it was in his aging heart at the moment, but serious, major-league artists almost never “nice” and “gentle” their way into fame and fortune. They make it to the top because of a burning drive and hunger, and the tension and turbulence that went along with that…it’s all part of the same package, the same psychological soup.

It may sound vaguely disrespectful or even dismissive to state that the career of John le Carre, the spy-novel maestro whose given name was David Cornwell, peaked with the publishing of his third novel, “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.”

Le Carre was a brilliant spinner of complex, morally ambivalent intelligence tales — an amazingly shrewd and skillful novelist, and a brilliant story strategist. But no Le Carre book had a greater impact than “TSWCIFTC”.

And from this came the excellent movie adaptation from director Martin Ritt and star Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, a British agent who pretends to defect in order to bring about the murder of a malevolent East German agent. Le Carre’s fake-out ending is the greatest in the history of espionage thrillers, bar none.

Cornwell re-peaked in the ’70s with a pair of masterful George Smiley novels — “Tinker Tailor Spoiler Spy” (’74) and especially “Smiley’s People” (’79).

I’ve always felt slightly under-served by the ending of “Smiley’s People”, in which Moscow Center honcho Karla is forced to defect and surrender to British intelligence in Berlin.

It wasn’t the finale itself that bothered me (far from it) but the fact that Le Carre didn’t provide an extra chapter or two about what happened after Karla crossed over. I needed to decompress and contemplate the whole history and ramifications. I needed to know what Karla told the British “Circus” boys, where he wound up living, how his schizophrenic daughter fared, and so on.

Cornwell also penned the highly respected “The Looking Glass War” (’65), “The Little Drummer Girl” (’83), “The Night Manager” (’93), “The Tailor of Panama” (’96), “The Constant Gardener” (’01), “A Most Wanted Man” (’08) and “Our Kind of Traitor” (’10)

In selecting their 2020 award-winners, the Boston Society of Film Critics did the more-or-less expected thing by giving the Best Picture prize to Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland, and the Best Director trophy to Zhao. They also handed their Best Cinematography award to Nomadland‘s Joshua James Richards.

I’ve attached a parenthetical classification to some of the BSFC winners — pure craft and quality (PCC) which means quality not necessarily augmented by politically woke currents. The wins by Nomadland, Zhao and Richards are all PCC.

Anthony Hopkins‘ poignant conveyance of dementia in The Father won for Best Actor (PCC), and that film’s director, Florian Zeller, won the BSFC’s Best New Filmmaker award (PCC).

Sidney Flanigan took the Best Actress award for her sad, somber, ultra-minimalist performance in Never Rarely Sometimes Always — a decision that I respectfully regard as a head-scratcher.

Sound of Metal‘s Paul Raci won for Best Supporting Actor (no opinion — still haven’t seen it), and Young Yuh-jung‘s luminous performance as an intrepid grandma in Minari resulted in a Best Supporting Actress win (PCC).

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom won for Best Ensemble Cast.

Charlie Kaufman won the Best Screenplay award for the justly admired I’m Thinking of Ending Things (PCC). And that film’s editor, Robert Frazen, won the Best Editing trophy (PCC).

Alexander Nanau‘s Collective won for Best Documentary. (PCC)

Here’s the rundown: