In the latest episode of The Hot Mic (recorded on 2.9), the incisive Jeff Sneider and the blustery, gravel-voiced, Seth Rogen-aspiring John Rocha discuss anti-Black racism in the industry and particularly the sore-loser attitudes of Gina Prince-Bythewood, Danielle Deadwyler, Till dierctor Chinonye Chukwu and the Woman King allies (3:02).
They also discuss the Jeff Sneider-vs.-Don Murphy thing (39:45).
Rocha sounds to me like an insufferably woke accusational shrieker. Like he’s stuck in 2019 or ’20. Everyone’s sick of this schtick, and in a year or two wokesters (“white people are hopelessly bad!”) will be searching for tall grass. God….he sounds like a male gurgly “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo. Plus Rocha completely ignores the ELEPHANT IN THE “WOMAN KING” ROOM, which is that the African nation of Dahomey was a slave-trading nation….he ignores it!! And so does Sneider!
And what about proportionality? What does Rocha want, half of all nominees to be African American? The US population is 13% African American. What’s the percentage of African Americanas in the film/TV industry? An ASU study says that “recent studies show that Black actors comprise 12.9% of leading roles in cable-scripted shows (proportionately reflecting the overall Black population of 13.4%). The numbers behind the scenes aren’t as encouraging, though. Only 6% of the writers, directors and producers of U.S.-produced films are Black.”
Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks grading system. The legendary director is famed for having said that a good movie (or a formidable Oscar-seeker) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”
Hawks also defined a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.” I don’t want to sound unduly harsh or dismissive but I’m afraid that the Daniels’ direction of Everything Everywhere All at Once…’nuff said.
How do the leading 2023 Best Picture contender films (numbering ten) rate on the Hawks chart? Here we go…
1. Edward Berger‘s All Quiet on the Western Front (Netflix): I’m thinking of several good or very good scenes that happen during the last 20 or 25 minutes, but no great ones. Paul (Felix Kammerer) and Kat (Albrecht Schuch) steal a goose from a farm they’d stolen from earlier, but Kat is shot by the farmer’s young son and dies. General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow) maliciously orders an attack to start 15 minutes before the 11 am ceasefire. And during the final battle Paul is killed with a bayonet, only a little before 11 am. AQOWF is indisputably urgent and compelling and often jarring, but I can’t honestly say that it contains a great scene, much less three of themk.
2. James Cameron‘s Avatar: The Way of Water (Disney): The climactic 45-minute battle aboard the sinking bad-guy craft — I think it’s fair to call this a great scene. But that’s the only one. Everything in this film is highly involving and proficient and certainly eye-filling, but emotionally and thematically it doesn’t really stay with you. Hawks shakes his head.
3. Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight): It has a few weird scenes and a couple that stand out in a certain off-kilter way, but none that really sink in — not in a way that really kicks up the dust and feels great. If you disagree please tell me what I’m missing or have forgotten. The cute little donkey choking to death on one of Brendan Gleeson‘s stubby fingers? That was just weird. Kerry Condon gently rejecting Barry Keoghan‘s proposal to become Mrs. Village Idiot…kind of a gulp moment. Condon’s dialogue aside, everything said in this film is eccentric and moody and nhilist. And yet it stays with you after it’s over. How many great scenes? I’m sorry but none.
4. Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis (Warner Bros.): The first very good scene is when Colonel Parker (Tom Hanks) realizes that the unknown Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) is perfect rocket-fuel — a white guy who sings black, and who also has an intense sexual rapport with the girls in the audience. The second keeper is Presley’s 1968 NBC comeback special. The third is when fat Elvis sings “Unchained Melody” at the very end. These are certainly standout scenes, but I can’t honestly call them great. Hawks is underwhelmed.
5. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s Everything Everywhere All at Once (A24): This alternate-universe hellscape subjects viewers to cruel and unusual punishment, regardless of whichever universe it may be happening in. For this is a 139-minute excursion into mind-boggling, brain-taffy torture. And yet it has one excellent scene, which happens inside Jamie Lee Curtis‘s IRS office at the end. Michelle Yeoh‘s Evelyn briefly slips into a daydream about her alternate selves and the multiverse blah blah, and when Deirdre asks if she’s paying attention Evelyn says, “I’m sorry…were you saying something?” Perfect! This is the only great scene though.
6. Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans (Universal): Three strong scenes — Sammy giving direction to a young actor prior to shooting Nazis vs. good guys war footage, Judd Hirsch delivering his bedroom rant about destiny, and Sammy explaining to his dad that he created a muzzle-flash effect by sticking pins into certain frames in the celluloid. The one great scene is when blustery and cantakerous John Ford barks at Sammy about what constitutes interesting vs. shit-level horizon lines. Overall The Fabelmans isn’t a bad film, but it flunks the Hawks test.
7. Todd Field‘s Tár (Focus Features): One great scene: at Juilliard Lydia (Cate Blanchett) exchanges challenging, brittle words with Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist) about his disdain for white cisgender composers like Johann Sebastian Bach. Intriguing creepy scene #1: Running through a Berlin park, Lydia is startled by a woman screaming in the woods, but she never explores what happened or who it was or anything. Intriguing creepy scene #2: While searching around in a dank basement of a rundown Berlin apartment building, Lydia is freaked by the sight of a huge black dog, or maybe a timber wolf. She runs up the concrete stairs and falls on her face. Shocking scene: The dismissed Lydia slips into a live performance of Mahler’s Fifth and violently assaults her replacement, Eliot (Mark Strong). Alas, Tar‘s one great scene equals a failing grade.
8. Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer‘s Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount): In a way the entire film is filled with “great” scenes, if you accept the idea that Maverick is perfectly fused and calculated — every scene is part of a single unpretentious, super-glammy, crowd-pleasing whole. Okay, it has no great scenes but is filled with dozens of good and very good ones. TG:M is the most satisfying, least problematic film of the year, plus it earned a shitload of dough.
9. Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness (Neon): An ascerbic social satire that has a few stand-out moments, but no great scenes…sorry.
10. Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking (UA Releasing): It’s a decent dialogue-driven film that should have been called Decision To Leave, but it has no great scenes…sorry. I don’t even think it has any extra-good ones. It’s just a sturdy, workmanlike thing with good performances all around.
In sum, not one of the ten Best Picture nominees satisfies the Hawks definition of a really good film. But of the ten, Top Gun: Maverick is easily the “best”.
I’m very sorry about the death of David Crosby, 81, but he enjoyed one of the most amazing, up-and-down-and-back-up-again runs of any legendary rock star-slash-troubadour-slash-crazy man. I loved his truth-telling with all my heart. Sail on, brother.
“Triple grade-A doc…the antithesis of a kiss-ass, ‘what a great artist’ tribute, but at the same time a profoundly moving warts-and-all reflection piece…hugely emotional, meditative, BALDLY PAINFULLY NAKEDLY HONEST…God! There’s a special spiritual current that seeps out when an old guy admits to each and every failing of his life without the slightest attempt to rationalize or minimize…’I was a shit, I was an asshole, how is it that I’m still alive?,’ etc. Straight, no chaser.
“And this isn’t because I’m partial to boomer nostalgia flicks or because so many are being shown here, or because I grew up with the Byrds (12-string twangly-jangly), JoniMitchell, Crosby, StillsandNash and thatwholelonglyrical–frazzledhistory. It’s about the tough stuff and the hard rain…about addiction and rage and all but destroying your life, and then coming back semi-clean and semi-restored, but without any sentimentality or gooey bullshit.
“For me David Crosby: Remember My Name has EASILY been the most emotional experience of the festival thus far. Not to mention [Crowe’s] best creative effort since Almost Famous.”
Crowe: “SO HAPPY you were there, thrilled at your reaction. How amazing that Crosby got up there [after the screening] and shared his total shock at what we’d put into the movie. Such a real moment. He was emotionally devastated up there for a good three minutes — I don’t know if you could see that. Felt like the audience wrapped their arms around him at that point, and then he was okay. Amazing.”
From Steve Pond’s Wrap review: “As much as the film celebrates Crosby’s creativity and gazes unflinchingly at his failings, it also functions as a valedictory, almostarequiemofsorts. Think of it as the film version of the final albums made by Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, who made wrenching final statements that they likely knew would be their last.”
A fascinating hypothesis from sex & intimacy expert Shan Boodram to Bill Maher at 2:23 mark: "If somebody said to me 'if there are 100 men that you are physically attracted to, how many of those would you have sex with?'"
Login with Patreon to view this post
In Laurent Bouzereau‘s two-hour Making of ‘Jaws’ doc, director Steven Spielberg says that John Williams‘ creepy leviathan score is responsible for half of the film’s effectiveness. Same deal with Invaders From Mars, which is chiefly distinguished by William Cameron Menzies‘ production design but would still amount to very little without Glickman’s input.
Glickman’s Martian choir music injects a profoundly creepy vibe…a sense of hovering otherworldliness…”a bleak acapella that conjures visions of a dying Martian landscape or the wailing of frightened minds in hell,” to quote from a 1986 Cinemascore article by WilliamRosar.
And poor Glickman, sub-contracted by Raoul Kraushar, didn’t even get screen credit — Kraushar claimed that honor. On top of which Glickman died of a heart attack two months before Invaders From Mars opened in April 1953. He passed on 2.27.53 at age 54.
It’s been asserted for years by people seemingly in the know that the actual composer of the famously eerie Invaders From Mars score is not Raoul Kraushar, as I’ve stated a few times on HE, but longtime Republic Pictures composer Mort Glickman.
Reporting has it that Kraushar was a Hans Zimmer-like operator and compiler who would hire guys to ghost-write scores, which Kraushar would then take credit for.
I’ve been persuaded that the claims about Glickman may have merit. Okay, that they’re probably legit.
I am therefore apologizing if in fact (as it appears) I have passed along bad intel. Kraushar was apparently not the Invaders From Mars composer, and I apologize for previously failing to report that Glickman, a stocky, bespectacled guy who looked like a 1950s grocery-store clerk and could have played a behind-the-counter colleague of Ernest Borgnine‘s in Marty…Glickman was the maestro!
Three people have made the case — (1) David Schecter, co-producer of MonstrousMovieMusic, a “series of re-recordings which feature a wealth of classic music from many of everyone’s favorite science fiction, horror and fantasy films”, (2) Janne Wass in a 2016 article for scifist.wordpress.com, and (3) William H. Rosar, author of a 1986 CinemaScore article titled “The Music for Invaders From Mars.”
Two award-season signifiers are making my blood run cold and unleashing Beetlejuice shrieking. I’m left with no choice but to drop to my knees and beseech all HE readers with a semblance of spine and aesthetic perspective to stand tall and firm against the apparently genuine possibility that Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s Everything Everywhere All At Once might win the Best Picture Oscar.
I’m totally okay with either Avatar 2: The War of Water (which I won’t even see for another couple of days) or Top Gun: Maverick taking the top prize, but the idea of EEAAO winning…the symbolism of such an event would be devastating….my soul would be crushed flat.
I know I shouldn’t allow myself to get all wound up about such a possibility…it would mean that the wrong people are running the circus…that Millennial standards have more or less taken over…I know that many people out there despise EEAAO, but if a win were to happen there would be a greatshatteringcry heard across the land…oh, the A24 of it all!
What percentage of Academy voters are male and over 50? Because that’s the demographic that will absolutely not vote for EEAAO. They hate this fucking film and, speaking from experience, went through the pains of hell trying to watch it. Only Millennials and Zoomers like it. What does the HE commentariat think? What’s the conversation?
I'll watch almost anything in black-and-white Scope, which I happen to be queer for, but I draw the line at Billy Wilder's Kiss Me Stupid. I tried to re-watch it last night (again), and I couldn't do it, man. I just couldn't.
Login with Patreon to view this post
JasonP. Frank and Rebecca Alter’s “49TrueFactsAboutLydia Tar” is brilliant. But in a vaguely cruel way. Okay, not cruel but certainly subversive. And yet it fits right into the film. Because it’s basically saying, humorously, that Lydia Tar’s banishment and ruination wasn’t such a bad idea.
In other words, Frank and Alter are a pair of cold icepicks who privately salivate at the idea of taking down a dynamic talent who’s long revelled in an elite celebrity orbit but who holds the wrong (i.e., politically brusque, anti-woke, vaguely amoral in the manner of many X-factor genius types) views and — this is the really damning part — has treated Columbus Ave. Joe Coffee baristas rudely.
Friendo: “This is part of why democracy is ending in America in four days. The point of that piece is: ‘We hate Lydia Tar.’ Translation: ‘Our Marxist absolutism trumps ambiguity in art.’”
Saturday night, sometime after 1 am, decades ago. We'd been passing the hash pipe around, and Swamp Fire, a 1946 Buster Crabbe-meets-Johnny Wiesmuller film, was on the box. About as bad as a C-grade programmer gets, but we were goofing on it.
Login with Patreon to view this post
My Policeman (Amazon Prime, 11.4) is a tepid and morose gay tragedy, set in late 1950s England. And Harry Styles‘ rote performance as Tom Burgess, a sexually repressed gay policeman, is not a burnisher. Ditto David Dawson‘s as Patrick Hazlewood, a museum curator who becomes Tom’s lover and a rival for his affections in the matter of Emma Corrin‘s prim and proper Marion, who Tom marries because he needs a beard, which is a shitty thing to do.
But Marion evens the score down the road. Shittily, I mean.
Give Styles credit for bravely and energetically committing to some fairly graphic sex scenes with Hazlewood (kiss-slurping, panting, blowing, ass-fucking) but as I said in an earlier post, Styles is hot but Hazlewood isn’t, or at least not hot enough for me.
There are some pretty guys whom straight guys can at least imagine having some kind of vague intimate contact with. Mick Jagger in Performance was one. In True RomanceChristian Slater‘s Clarence Worley says that he could’ve fucked the young Elvis Presley. But one look at Hazlewood and I went “nope.” Cold eyes, dorky haircut, emotionally needy and greedy.
I had a good laugh, however, when Dawson/Hazlewood hooks up with some anonymous guy and they decide to get down in an alleyway. They’re busted by a pair of bobbies before anything happens, but just before Dawson is about to drop to his knees the recipient drops a magazine on the damp pavement so Dawson won’t chafe his knees and his trousers won’t get wet. Thoughtful.
To be perfectly honest, My Policeman struck me as a stacked deck — basically a gay agenda film by way of an indictment of straight British society and the cruel repressions of the immediate post-war era.
It basically says that while being gay in 1957 Brighton was often a lonely and miserable thing, it was infinitely preferable to holding down a dull civil service job (Styles is a bobbie) while enduring a dull and regimented married life with a woman you don’t love and don’t really want to fuck either (the sex scenes between Styles and Corrin are grim and sad). And it absolutely revels in the joys of gay sex, over and over. Oh, the rapture, the ecstasy and the muscle tone!
I was ready and willing to be engaged and transported, but less than five minutes in I was muttering “oh, shit” to myself. I knew this ploddingly pedestrian, dull-as-dishwater drama would be trouble during the opening credits, in fact. I can always smell trouble coming ‘round the bend.
While most of My Policeman is set in ’57 and ’58, about 35% or 40% is set in the late ’90s when Styles, Dawson and Corrin’s characters are in their mid to late 60s. They’re played, respectively, by Linus Roche, Rupert Everett and Gina McKee.
Honestly? McKee, who plays the least obliging and most clueless character, struck me as the most appealing. Her manner is gentle, her eyes are kind and she has a nice smile. Plus she doesn’t push it.
I was sitting in the third row in a nearly vacant theatre (two older women were sitting 10 or 12 rows behind me), and so I decided to keep my phone on and text my reactions to a friend as the film went along. Just watching it would have been unbearable. I had to fight back with my fingers and thoughts. Here are some of them:
“Watching Policeman. Totally tepid.
“The older guy who’s had the stroke (Everett) doesn’t look like either Styles or Dawson so who is he? Okay, fuck it — I’ll look it up on Wikipedia.
For decades I tried to catch the most highly-regarded Manhattan plays, and I’m very grateful that I made the effort. We all realize that the last Broadway era for great playwriting ended between 20 or 25 years ago. (It’s all musicals now, and damn the sappy tourists for making this happen.) For me the mid ’70s to mid ’80s was close to a golden stage era. Which isn’t to say it was the greatest by the measure of any Broadway-veteran perspective, but simply a time when I was living near or in Manhattan, or often flying there from Los Angeles. Things were happening and I knew I had to get what I could.
It was a time in which certain well-reviewed plays (and one glorious musical, Sunday in the Park With George) seemed to speak directly to me and my experience…written by the youngish lions of that era (David Mamet, Simon Gray, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer) and focused on anxious, unsatisfied white guys whose situations seemed to echo my own…taunted by various urban anxieties, ambitions…by aloneness, sex/love, existential voids, “who am I?”, “what’s it all about?” and “will my life always seem this much of an uphill thing?”
It almost makes me weep to reflect on that period, which for me began in ’76 and started to wind down in ’85. (I lived in Manhattan for a bit more than five years — ‘early ’78 to ‘mid ’83.) Film-wise and quite sadly for many of us, the last third of the ’70s marked the beginning of the end of the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” period, and the early ’80s would became known as an era in which “the bottom [had] fallen out of badness in movies,” to borrow from Andrew Sarris.
But the quality of the plays seemed wonderful; ditto the culture (mostly pre-AIDS) itself. Life was hard, of course (my finances were mostly a shambles until ’87) and the wrong people were in power and writers were stuck with typewriters and white-out, but compared to today it almost seems as if I was living a kind of half-charmed life. I could live and work and run around (my batting average was around .350, give or take**) and write without fear of wokester death squads, for one thing.
I wouldn’t say that my future seemed especially rosey or brilliant back then, but it certainly lay ahead. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
The Reagan-era play that lifted me up and melted me down like none before or since was Tom Stoppard‘s The Real Thing (’84). Sappy as this sounds, it made me swoon. Okay, not “swoon” but it struck some kind of deep, profound chord. Partly because I saw it at a time when I believed that the right relationship with the right woman could really make a difference. That was then and this is now, but I was in the tank for this stuff in ’84. The play used the Monkees’ “I’m A Believer” as mood music, and I pretty much was one at the time.
I’m speaking of the original B’way production, of course, directed by Mike Nichols and costarring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. My admiration for Irons’ performance as Henry, a witty London playwright who resembled Stoppard in various ways, was boundless. Close, whom I was just getting to know back then, was truly magnificent as Annie. N.Y. Times critic Frank Rich called it “not only Mr. Stoppard’s most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years.”
(I went to see the 2000 B’way revival and was bitterly disappointed by Stephen Dillane‘s uncharismatic lead performance, which wasn’t even close to what Irons had brought.)
I was also floored that same year by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim‘s Sunday in the Park With George, which opened at the Booth theatre on 5.2.84. It was one of the few B’way musicals that really reached inside, and it still makes me choke up when I watch it on YouTube.
I’m just going to list some of the plays that really hit the sweet spot between ’76 and ’85…I’m bypassing a few but here we go regardless:
Peter Shaffer‘s Equus, which I saw in London in the early summer of ’76. The great Colin Blakely was magnificent in the lead role of psychiatrist Martin Dysart (and better, I have to say, than Richard Burton was in the Sidney Lumet film version). I saw Anthony Perkins play the role in a B’way production of Equus in ’77, and I’m sorry to say that he underwhelmed.
A Broadway production of David Mamet‘s American Buffalo in early ’77. Directed by Ulu Grosbard with Robert Duvall, Kenneth McMillan and John Savage costarring. Four years later I saw it again (twice) at the Circle in the Square with Al Pacino as Teach. Pacino wasn’t a robot — he played certain lines and scenes a bit differently at times…experimentally, if you will. I was in heaven.