Remember “Minari”?

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Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari premiered during the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. The well-reviewed film has since collected many award nominations, and is finally opening today (2.12). I reviewed it on 10.30.20 — here are portions of what I wrote:

A hard-knocks family drama about a South Korean family trying to succeed at subsistence farming in 1980s Arkansas, Minari qualifies as a “modest” Spirit Awards thing. And yet something about Steven Yeun’s complex character (i.e., Jacob) and performance really got to me.

I’m speaking of a proud, obstinate man determined to make a stand and not be pushed around by bad luck. In moments of stress and self-doubt he’s clearly weighing two ways of responding to the situation. He may have chosen the wrong path, but he’s determined to stick to it regardless. That makes him a possibly tragic figure and definitely an interesting one.

I’m not sure if Yeun’s touching performance will yield a Best Actor nomination, but it could. Or should I say “should”?

A while ago Variety‘s Clayton Davis was all excited about the possibility of Yeun possibly becoming the first Asian actor to be Oscar nominated for a lead role. That’s the wrong emphasis. Yeun has given a very strong and sad performance in a pretty good film, and he might snag a Best Actor nom for his trouble. But his South Korean heritage should be anecdotal, not a cornerstone of his campaign. Wokesters see it differently, of course.

I loved the grandmother (Youn Yuh-Jung) and the two kids (Alan Kim, Noel Kate Cho). Especially the little boy.

And Paul (Will Patton), a flaky but good-hearted Jesus freak whom the somewhat insensitive Yeun doesn’t sufficiently respect. I dislike Christians for their evangelical leanings and support of Donald Trump, but if I was acquainted with one and he/she offered to pray for me, I would respond with respect and gratitude. Because such a gesture would mean a lot to them.

Jacob’s wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) is a good person but not exactly a portrait of steadfast marital support. She has this shitty, dismissive “I don’t like this” attitude from the get-go. They’re in a bad marriage.

I didn’t get the water situation. Jacob has bought (or rented?) a place with no water supply or sewage system? Isn’t is super-expensive to install your own sewage system and septic tank? Jacob presumably buys his own water heater, but in one scene he doesn’t have $500 to pay a professional well digger? Jacob has drilled his own well with Patton’s assistance, but the water supply is limited — not enough to nourish the crop and also provide shower water, kitchen water and whatnot.

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Deadly Venora Factor

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A couple of nights ago I re-watched Michael Mann‘s The Insider (’99) for maybe the sixth or seventh time. Oddly enough I noticed a couple of things for the very first time.

One is that the movie stops dead in its tracks whenever Diane Venora, portraying the brittle, fragile wife of Russell Crowe‘s Jeffrey Wigand, has any dialogue. “Liane Wigand” expresses the same damn thing in scene after scene — “I’m scared, I’m upset, this is intimidating, what about the children?, I feel threatened” — over and over and over, and after a while her vibe becomes really and truly deadly.

The second thing I noticed is that this 158-minute film doesn’t really kick into gear until the 90-minute mark, which is when Wigand testifies against Big Tobacco at a hearing held by the state of Mississippi. Before the 90-minute mark it’s an in-and-outer — always interesting and well-crafted but less than riveting from time to time, largely because of Diane Venora mucking things up. One of the reasons the final 68 minutes is so great is because Venora has disappeared, and thank God for that!

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Limp “Rifkin” Against Scenic Backdrop

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Last night I streamed Woody Allen‘s Rifkin’s Festival, and I’m afraid I can only echo what critics who caught it during last September’s San Sebastian Film Festival said in unison — it’s a bowl of mild, occasionally prickly porridge that’s simply not good enough. I wouldn’t call it a waste of time, but it certainly won’t enrich anyone’s appreciation or contemplation of their all-too-brief time on this planet. And that’s too bad.

Shot in the summer of ’19 against a simulation of the San Sebastian Film Festival (which actually happens in September), it’s a pallid, lamenting, ummistakably dreary sitcom about being cuckolded while shuffling along with a septugenarian sourpuss attitude. It putters and schmutters with occasional dreamscape tributes to classic ’60s cinema (Fellini’s 8 1/2, Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Bergman’s Persona and The Seventh Seal), which fit into the milieu, of course, but in a decidedly tired, “no longer part of the world” way. The film never bores but never really turns on the current. And I’m sorry for that.

It’s about Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn), a crabby 70something Jewish gnome from Manhattan who used to teach film, and his having accompanied Sue (Gina Gershon), his fetching 40something film publicist wife, to the festival, and how he immediately senses a current between Sue and her top client, a younger, mildly pretentious director named Philippe (Louis Garrel).

Rather than skulking around and seething with suspicion, fortune smiles when Mort visits a beautiful 30-something doctor named Jo (Elena Anaya) and promptly falls head over heels. No, Mort doesn’t make any overt moves (thank God!), but he does get involved in her turbulent marriage to a tempestuous artist Paco (Sergi López, whom I haven’t laid eyes on for a good decade or so). Mort talks to Jo (and to the audience) about working on an ambitious novel, but if you haven’t written your big novel by age 77 you should probably hang it up.

Vittorio Storaro‘s cinematography constantly glows. Every shot of San Sebastian is luscious and inviting.

After seeing the Rifkin’s Festival trailer last September I wrote that casting Wallace Shawn as a dismayed romantic protagonist is not what anyone would call audience-friendly. Shawn is pushing 80, for God’s sake, and the size of a Hobbit. By any semi-realistic biological standard he’s “out of the game.” It would be one thing if, say, Allen had cast the 75-year-old Steve Martin as a WASPy version of Mort. But it’s completely impossible to accept a bald Bilbo Baggins as a hormonal stand-in, and especially one who walks around with his mouth half open all the time. It was difficult enough to accept Shawn as Diane Heaton‘s ex-lover in Manhattan, and that was during the Carter administration.

I wrote that Shawn’s character “would naturally feel wounded and disoriented by Gershon’s temporary infidelity, but it’s all but impossible to relate to him in this context. My first reaction was that this is like John Huston casting Lionel Barrymore in the Humphrey Bogart role in Key Largo.”

I’ve been saying this for years, but if the 84 year-old Allen intends to keep churning them out he needs to work with a younger writing partner — some 40something whippersnapper who could punch up the material and lend a certain 21st Century edge. There’s nothing diminishing about such a scenario. Allen worked with Marshall Brickman on Annie Hall, after all, and with Douglas McGrath on Bullets Over Broadway.

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Stephens’ Spiked Column

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A Bret Stephens column about the week-old firing of N.Y. Times reporter Donald McNeil was recently spiked by Times publisher AG Sulzberger, mainly because Stephens quoted a previously published remark by ‘80s Republican attack-dog Lee Atwater that mentioned the “n” word. Khmer Rouge-minded staffers would’ve presumably had a fit if Stephens’ piece, which emphasizes intent as a key journalistic focus, had been published.

Here’s an excerpt:

Okay, But What About The Stupids?

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You can lead horses to water, but you can’t make them drink.

Posted on 2.10.21: “Nearly 1 in 3 people in the United States said that they definitely or probably will not get the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new survey. The poll, released Wednesday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that 15 percent of survey respondents said they will “definitely” not get a coronavirus vaccine. Seventeen percent said that they will ‘probably not’ get the inoculation.”

Friendo: “So 1/3 of the country doesn’t get vaccinated? This is where the vaccine confirmation cards come in.  They won’t be allowed into restaurants, bars, sporting events, movie theaters…hell, extend it to grocery stores. Let’s see how long they can hold out off the vaccine grid.”

King Vidor’s “The Crowd”

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Lewis Allen and Richard Sale‘s Suddenly (’54), a thriller about an attempted Presidential assassination, runs only 82 minutes with credits — a very tight ship.

Frank Sinatra plays John Baron, possibly the most talkative and emotionally exposed psycho hitman in movie history. His best moment is a confessional speech that begins around 50:25…a bit that ends with Sinatra walking right up close to the camera lens and staring straight into the audience. (Here it is.) His death scene is great also; he’s almost weeping as he whimpers “no…no,” dejected and heartbroken. John Hurt‘s Caligula died the same way in I, Claudius.

Sterling Hayden to yours truly, sometime in late ’78: “We shot it in early ’54. before Sinatra won the Oscar for From Here To Eternity. So during filming he was still ‘down’ in a sense. But he still had the old kezazz.”

Summit of Gleason Admiration

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John Herbert Gleason was 44 years old, give or take, when he played Minnesota Fats in Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler (’61). He was absolutely mythic in that film…a portly, chain-smoking Greek God in a three-piece suit…chubby fingers, carnation in his lapel, light on his feet. By the same token I felt embarassed for the poor guy when he costarred in the Smokey and the Bandit series as Buford T. Justice…loud and coarse and painful to be around…constantly fuming, a genuinely boring performance. A shame.

Update: It just hit me that by 21st Century standards, the Jackie Gleason of 1961 isn’t even “fat”. Yes, he was hefty, ample, a guy with a gut. But he was no Jabba, and couldn’t hold a candle to the garden-variety sea lions we see shuffling around shopping malls today.

Duvall Along The Pedernales

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A Seth Abramovitch interview piece with Shelley Duvall appeared this morning on the Hollywood Reporter website.

Dr. Phil’s 2016 interview with Duvall heartlessly exploited her eccentric manner and skewed mentality; Abramovitch is just as observational but more accepting and certainly less judgmental.

The 71 year-old actress has seemingly declined in more ways than you can shake a stick at, and she certainly radiates eccentricity. Gray-haired, heavier, bag lady-ish, never leaves her car (which is jammed with stuff), somewhat scatter-brained and at the same time lucid, a chain-smoker of Parliaments (ugghh….my mother used to smoke those).

But she has a life of sorts, living somewhere in the Texas hill country west of Austin, sharing a home with former Madonna band member Dan Gilroy. Surviving, a bit wiggy, hanging in there.

The fact that Duvall barely resembles her 1980s self (much less Wendy Torrance in The Shining) is vaguely distressing, I suppose, but aging can be a cruel process. The basic takeaway is that Duvall is, after a fashion, more or less okay. An odd duck but a woman with her own spiritual presence. Leave well enough alone.

Is there any chance that HBO Max will stream a boxy (1.37:1) HD version of The Shining, as they did last year with Full Metal Jacket?

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Missing Pedro

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Pedro Almodovar‘s The Human Voice, a 30-minute short that premiered at last September’s Venice Film Festival, will “open” theatrically in Los Angeles, Miami and New York on 3.12.21. And streaming also? (No one has been inside a Los Angeles theatre or screening room in 11 months.) Tilda Swinton front and center, based on a Jean Cocteau play. Shot around nine months ago. Also played at last October’s BFI London Film Festival; also the NYFF. Released theatrically in Spain on 10.21.20. On the 93rd Oscars shortlist (live action short film). 89% Metacritc rating.

“Knick-Knick” Started It All

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Judging by the visible gear strapped to Wyatt’s Harley, Jack Nicholson‘s George Hanson has brought nothing with him except a football helmet. No bag of clothing and underwear, no toiletries, no sleeping bag…nothing. Which means hygiene standards I’d rather not think about.

Nicholson is 83 now — 84 in April. Somewhere within his just released Mike Nichols biography or in a related interview, Mark Harris notes that Nicholson was one of the very few Nichols collaborators (Carnal Knowledge, Heartburn, Wolf) who wouldn’t grant an interview. We can all guess the reason. I’m very sorry.