A 1.21 Lacey Rose piece in The Hollywood Reporter passes along two bombshell quotes from Nanette Burstein‘s Hillary, a four-part Hulu docuseries that will debut at Sundance 2020 and stream in March. One conveys Clinton’s negative view of Bernie Sanders, and another passes along President Obama‘s opinion of The Beast.
Hillary tells the cameras that Sanders “was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
In a THR interview Clinton is asked is the Bernie assessment still holds. “Yes, it does,” she says.
THR: “If he gets the nomination, will you endorse and campaign for him?” Clinton: “I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.
“I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you’re just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that’s a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions.”
In the doc Clinton vp running mate Tim Kaine is heard confiding that President Obama called the night before a debate and said, “Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist…you’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.”
In today’s Guardian (1.13) is a brilliant Jessa Crispin piece that basically says that critics have become so political-minded and have chugged so much virtue-signalling Kool-Aid that they’re not only opposed to telling the truth about films as a rule but are pretty much incapable of doing so.
The piece is called “Is politics getting in the way of assessing which films are actually good?”
Excerpt #1: “This was…the year media outlets like the New York Times and Vanity Fair insisted Little Women was mandatoryviewing to proveyou’renotamisogynist. Even GQ ran a piece implying how important it was men ‘support women’ by watching this film about some white ladies having a hard time during the civil war.
“Men’s supposed lack of interest in Little Women became the dominant narrative of the movie, implying it reveals the (alleged) lack of interest men have, in the words of the New York Times, in ‘see[ing] women as human beings’.
“It couldn’t possibly be that Little Women is just a bad movie — although it is. Little Women is one of those books that has been over-adapted, with five previous film adaptations, plus a miniseries, plus a theatrical production, plus an anime version, and on and on.”
Excerpt #2: “But if you insist that a movie is important, you don’t really have to deal with whether or not it’s good. You can shamepeopleintoseeingit as a political statement, rather than as an entertainment or cultural selection.
“Same with the ‘dangerous’ or ‘disturbing’ moniker, which got used on everything from Joker to the latest Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was marked down for everything from not giving its female costar Margot Robbie enough lines to its gratuitous violence against a female would-be murderer to its filming of women’s feet (fetishes are now dangerous, I guess).
“If a critic doesn’t like a film, labeling it as dangerous — and implying you might get killed if you go see it — is an attempt to keep people away.”
Excerpt #3: “Part of this language is the result of our commenting culture choosing to see everything through a politicallens. There must be a political reason for Tarantino giving so few lines to a female actor in his latest film, and that political reason must be he does not respect or have any interest in women. There must be a political reason this movie doesn’t have the correct number of roles given to actors of color, and that reason must be that the director is racist.
Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks measuring stick. 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.” Well, that lets Taika Waititi out!
How do the ten PGA-nominated films rate on the Hawks chart? Here’s my take:
Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman: This 209-minute film has at least 10 great scenes, but the last 30 to 40 minutes (suspenseful build-up to Hoffa shooting, Hoffa shooting, getting older, “Peggy hates me”, white hair, assisted living, buying the coffin, “leave the door open a bit”) amount to one of the most shattering finales in American cinema. With The Irishman it’s not a matter of choosing great scenes, but asking “which scenes aren’t great or good?” The answer is “none.” Plus: “It’s summer.”
Noah Baumbach‘s Marriage Story. Three great scenes: (a) Adam Driver singing “Being Alive” (although one could argue this is not really an integrated Marriage Story moment as much as a Stephen Sondheim time-out); (b) Laura Dern‘s rant about how the culture has unfairly regarded women over the decades; (c) the screaming fight between Driver and Scarjo in his apartment (although this is closer to a strong scene than a great one).
Sam Mendes‘s 1917. Three great scenes: (a) The smoking German biplane crash crashes into the wooden shack, the British soldiers pull the pilot out, etc.; (b) The scene with the brother (Richard Madden‘s Lieutenant Blake) at the very end; (c) the stand-down scene with Benedict Cumberbatch at the very end. I think the feeding-milk-to-the-baby scene is memorable but perhaps a little too calculated. There are many stirring, oh-my-God scenes in 1917, but they all kind of bleed together because it’s all a stream-of-movie-consciousness thing.
Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. Four great scenes: (a) The howling finale at Rick Dalton‘s Cielo Drive home, followed by the invite to visit and schmooze with Sharon and her friends. (b) Cliff Booth visits the Spahn Ranch. (c) Cliff dukes it out with Bruce Lee. (d) “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans” in the Musso and Frank parking lot.
James Mangold‘s Ford v. Ferrari. One great scene: when some Italian guy (or was it Jon Bernthal‘s Lee Iacocca?) tells Tracy Letts‘ Henry Ford II that Enzo Ferrari had called him fat and that Ford, an assembly-line manufacturer, is unworthy of the racing-car realm. The film has many good or very good scenes, but this is the only great one. I’m sorry but that’s how I see it. Plus it has one bad scene — the scene in the diner between Christian Bale and Matt Damon when they’re laughing about the absurdity of creating a competitive Ford race car in the span of several weeks, etc.
Todd Phillips‘ Joker. Three great scenes: Dancing down the Bronx staircase. Arthur Fleck’s big talk-show finale when he plugs Murray Franklin on-camera. Arthur escaping the destroyed police car and comes upon a riot of clown faces on the street. This film has no bad scenes. Everything works and is all of a piece.
Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite. Many pretty good scenes and always a sense of mise en scene aliveness and invention, but no great scenes. One fatally bad scene: The former maid Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun) shows up at the big swanky home in a rainstorm, rings the bell, asks to be let it. The four new employees, a family which managed to get Gook fired, is lying around drunk and bleary-eyed. Good has every reason in the world to expose their scam and ruin a perfectly good thing, so what does her replacement Kim Chong-Sook (Chang Hyae-jin) do? She does what no sane person would ever do. She lets Gook into the house. It’s called bad plotting.
Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women. No great scenes but two very good ones — the fantasy finale when Saoirse Ronan‘s Jo, encouraged by family and friends, chases after Bhaer (Louis Garrel) and stops him from going to California, and the scene when she negotiates copyright and royalties with Tracy Letts‘ Mr. Dashwood. Bad scenes: Florence Pugh’s snarly Amy burns Jo’s manuscript. Laurie has a change of heart and proposes to Amy minutes after telling Jo that she’s his everything. Returning from having given their food to a local poor woman, the March sisters return to find their dinner table loaded down with a banquet (provided by Chris Cooper) that would be enough to feed a Union regiment on a furlough. Bob (Better Call Saul) Odenkirk suddenly shows up with whiskery sideburns…the fuck?
Race is the principal reason that your Fox News bumblefucks are so blindly loyal to The Beast.
The U.S. was generally a European-descendant white country during the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th Century, and it technically still is with 60.7% of the U.S population composed of non-Hispanic whites. But by 2050 whites will only represent 47% of the population. The country is basically tipping in a pluralistic, multicultural direction. For a half-century the Republican party, which adopted a kind of Anglo Saxon Maginot Line mentality (the “Southern strategy”) and which today is represented by guys like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan, has been the party of white resistance.
And so lunatic righties see themselves as defending the Alamo, and they see Trump, for all his appalling ignorance, arrogance and self-destructive behavior, as a fat Jim Bowie or an orange-faced Davy Crockett mixed with a New York City crime boss.
This is their last stand and they know it, and he’s all they’ve got. They know that sooner or later General Santa Anna‘s troops (multiculturals, LGBTQs) are going to scale the walls and bayonet them to death and ravage their daughters and mitigate the bloodline all to hell.
On top of which they know that urban liberals not only despise them for their Trump allegiance but because they embody what has become a full-on racial epithet — “crusty older white person.” (Just ask Rosanna Arquette.)
So they don’t care. They’re the Wild Bunch shooting it out with General Mapache‘s troops. They’re dead men, but at least they’ll know the dark satisfaction of causing as much chaos and destruction as possible before they fall to the floor, bleeding and cut to pieces.
What’s the current U.S. population? Roughly 330,149,796 as of 12.16.19. In 1620 the non-Native (i.e., immigrant) American population was around 2300 persons. That number had grown to 2.5 million by 1776, and then 31 million by 1860, 76 million by 1900, 180 million by 1960 and 282 million by 2000.
White guys “settled” this country (i.e., stole, slaughtered, railroaded, plantationed, bulldozed, capitalized) fair and square. And now the non-elite, non-urban, under-educated sector of whitebread culture has been marginalized and discredited, and is on the verge of being finished.
This is why Michael Moore is saying that Trump, God help us, has a fighting chance of being reelected in 2020. Because they’ve latched onto an idea that they’re fighting for their very existence.
Bumblefuck despair and depression is the main reason that average life expectancy in the United States has been on a decline since 2014. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention cites three main reasons: a 72% increase in overdoses in the last decade (including a 30% increase in opioid overdoses from July 2016 to September 2017), a ten-year increase in alcoholic liver disease (men 25 to 34 increased by 8%; women by 11%), and a 33% increase in suicide rates since 1999.
Tatyana wanted to visit Top of the Mark, the 19th story bar-restaurant on the penthouse level of the Mark Hopkins hotel. I hadn’t visited since the mid ‘80s so what the hell. It opened in ‘39 and became quite the essential stopover for WWII officers (slender, nattily uniformed, in the company of classy ladies in bright red lipstick) bound for combat in the Pacific or returning from same.
The cultural atmosphere at the Top of the Mark is a little different these days. A few nice-looking people, sure, but also a fair amount of overweight, horribly dressed proletariat commoners wearing baggy jeans, knitted skullcaps and whitesides. A time-traveling anthropologist comparing the differences between 20th and 21st Century clientele would be struggling for the right politely descriptive phrases while conveying an honest assessment, as I am now.
The truth is that over the last 60 or 70 years certain aspects of American culture have not only gone downhill but sunk into the swamp. We’re talking about the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire here. Herb Caen would be in shock.
I was initially intrigued by Lucy Ellman‘s “Patriarchy Is Just a Spell,” a 12.26 N.Y. Times piece about Alfred Hitchcock‘s Spellbound. But the subhead — “I’m outing Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller Spellbound as a #MeToo film” — doesn’t really manifest.
Ellmann basically notes how the male characters in Spellbound treat Ingrid Bergman‘s character, Dr. Constance Petersen, like a sex object or otherwise disregard her authority as a psychoanalyst. Over and over and over, Gregory Peck included. That doesn’t make Spellbound a #MeToo film. It makes it a study of upscale 1945 culture and how almost all males from that realm were sexist assholes in one way or another, certainly by the standards of 2019.
Spellbound is, was and always will be a less-than-satisfying film. The psychological jargon has always felt gimmicky and simplistic, and Peck’s character, John Ballantyne, is, in fact, a brooding, hair-trigger jerk.
But the film has always held my attention for (a) the falling-in-love, opening-of-doors sequence when Bergman realizes she’s head over heels for Peck and vice versa, and (b) the fact that Bergman and Peck did in fact lock loins during production. Both were 29 at the time.
Peck to People‘s Brad Darrach in a 1987 interview: “All I can say is that I had a real love for her (Bergman), and I think that’s where I ought to stop. I was young. She was young. We were involved for weeks in close and intense work.”
Ellman #1: “Psychoanalysis has often despaired of women. Detailing the faults of mothers has worn out the velvet of many an analytic couch. Freud expressed mystification and exasperation with the uncharitable question ‘What do women want?’
“Well, maybe what women want is to steal the show, regain center stage, which is in fact their rightful place in the world — and in the movies. Echoes of the matriarchal cultures that dominated prehistory lurk in our collective unconscious. Female supremacy is alluring.”
I too find female supremacy alluring. This is probably the way to go, given the toxic tendencies of too many boomer, GenX and Millennial males. Things have to change.
Look at these humanoids, these Millennial and GenZ fashion plates in their jeans, T-shirts and whitesides, hopping up and down with anticipation of winning a free getaway in Ojai or whatever. I’d forgotten that Drew Carey has been hosting this show for 12 years now…Jesus. Salivating materialistic frenzy by way of a mosh pit. The American dream, the culture we live in, etc. What would Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis or Abbie Hoffman say?
Would it have killed Sal, the pizzeria owner in Do The Right Thing, to mount a few photos of African-American cultural heroes (Muhammud Ali, Malcolm X, etc.) alongside the usual portraits of Frank Sinatra, Enrico Caruso, Fiorello LaGuardia and Vito Corleone? It was Sal’s restaurant, sure, but his customers were mostly African-American and Fort Greene, at the time, was a mostly African-American neighborhood. Almost anyone would have realized that sharing the wall was a smart move.
But not Sal. Because he was a proud, mouthy, pugnacious, under-educated cannoli prole who tended to argue first and think about it later.
Which is why Spike Lee hired the late Danny Aiello to play him. Because Aiello exuded white, working-class Italian-American culture without saying a word. No matter who he played, Aiello always seemed earthy, a bit anxious, wary, unsettled and on the bulky side. His characters always had something to prove. He could have never played an effete university professor or a wealthy architect. Well, perhaps he could have but he never did.
The 86-year-old Aiello died today (or last night) at a hospital in northern New Jersey. He had a home in pricey Saddle River, but he came from a New York City background that was all pizza and meatballs and subway rides and snowcones. Born in Manhattan to a large family, raised in the Bronx…a New Yorker and a New Jerseyan through and through.
My favorite Aiello performance? One of the especially fucked-up guys in a 1984 (or ’85) N.Y. Broadway production of David Rabe‘s Hurlyburly.
HE’s favorite Aiello screen perfs: Moonstruck, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Ruby, Harlem Nights, Léon: The Professional, 2 Days in the Valley. I never ever saw his performance as Don Domenico Clericuzio in the miniseries The Last Don (’97).
I never understood why Aiello’s assassin said “Michael Corleone says hello!” just before he attempted to strangle Michael Gazzo‘s Frankie Pantangeli in The Godfather, Part II. The hit was ordered by the Rosato brothers, of course. Aiello’s assassin had every expectation that Pantangeli wouldn’t survive so what difference does it make if he believes during his final seconds of life that Corleone was behind it or not?
There’s one interesting thing about Jay Roach‘s Bombshell (Lionsgate, 12.13) that I haven’t mentioned, and it’s a pretty good trick when you think about it.
There’s no disputing that Fox News has been a malevolent cultural force in this country, generating rancid rightwing spin for over 20 years now, and that the late Roger Ailes did everything possible to trash President Barack Obama during his two terms and block every initiative of his center-moderate agenda. Worst of all, Fox News did more than any other entity to inflame rural bumblefucks and pump them up for the candidacy of Donald Trump.
Look where we are now, thanks to the Foxies — the country convulsing over the criminal reign of the most destructive sociopath president in U.S. history.
Megyn Kelly, Gretchen Carlson.
What Bombshell manages to do, then, is present lead protagonists Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) and Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) — a pair of charismatic on-camera professionals who contributed to the anti-Obama poisoning of the political waters and blew toxic rightwing smoke on a daily, dedicated basis…what Bombshell manages to do is make you forget that these women are no one’s idea of noble or heroic or even fair-minded as far as disseminating the news was concerned.
Any viewer would and should feel empathy for Kelly and Carlson’s situation with the sexually predatory Ailes, but it’s hard not to feel conflicted at the same time. Because Kelly and Carlson served an agenda that pushed racist, highly questionable, xenophobic propaganda.
Slate‘s Dana Stevens: “I can think of more important whistleblower stories than Megyn Kelly’s. A person with a platform that size who uses her on-air time to argue vehemently that Santa Claus is white just isn’t that exciting to root for. No one deserves to be harassed at work, and the fact these women banded together to bring down an enormously powerful and malignant man is admirable. That doesn’t mean I want to spend two hours gazing at Megyn’s seemingly poreless face as she wrestles with whether and how to tell her truth, while continuing to play a highly public part in a media ecosystem based on lies.”
Sundance 2020 (1.23 thru 2.2) will begin announcing this week. World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is hearing that Netflix may want to premiere Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods there. There’s also the possibility of seeing Josh Trank‘s Fonzo, Barry Levinson’s Harry Haft, Julie Taymor’s The Glorias: A Life On The Road, Dee Rees’ The Last Thing He Wanted, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks, and Benh Zeitlin‘s allegedly problematic Wendy.
So eight keepers plus the usual five or six docs (possibly including Todd Haynes‘ Velvet Underground portrait) — enough to make the trip worthwhile — fine. I’m naturally interested, but then again Sundance isn’t really classic Sundance any more, As I lamented last week, it’s become Camp Woke.
For a ten-day period in January, Sundance used to be the hippest and most vital winter wonderland and spiritual getaway in the world. It was like this annually-renewed, extra-cool reality TV series that took the temperature of the culture — you had to be close so you could breathe in the vapors and receive that special ahead-of-the-curve information. It was essential, necessary — a great way to begin the new year.
I know that Sundance ‘20 will probably deliver the usual five to eight…okay, ten noteworthy films that will be part of the early conversation, but the odds of another Manchester By The Sea playing there (or even another flash in the pan controversy like The Birth of a Nation) are slim to none. Or so it seems right now.
For Sundance has basically woked itself into a corner — it used to be one of the big three powerhouse festivals (along with Cannes and Telluride/Toronto) but now I’m not so sure.
Right now it’s flirting with being a larger, snowier but more politically secular version of SXSW.
Sundance is where films go to get their official badge and stamp of approval from the indie-woke-feminist-MeToo-identity politics-POC-LGBTQ, anti-white-patriarchy SJW comintern crowd. But then what?
The question is, what kind of serious cultural or commercial value does that badge deliver these days? The 2020 version of a Sundance breakout hit almost certainly means it’ll be received with muted enthusiasm (if that) when it opens, but of course most indie-level films don’t “open” any more — they go straight to streaming.
If you still haven’t seen Todd Douglas Miller‘s Apollo 11 in IMAX, please do so during the coming one-week re-engagement (starting on 12.6). And while you’re watching you might want to play a little game with yourself. There’s a whole lot of pre-launch footage of NASA technicians, VIP NASA guests, and Average Joe tourists waiting to see the launch. The name of the game is “Find the Obese People.” Because in 1969 they were all but nonexistent. You might spot one or two NASA technicians who could stand to exercise a bit more, but no Jackie Gleason types. Among the tourists it’s really hard to find a moderately fat person, and damn near impossible to spot any serious Jabbas. It’s just the way things were back then.
Otherwise, to go by Indiewire’s spitballing, we’re talking about the usual Stalinism in the snow…a festival that serves awareness as much as imaginings, observations, reflections and/or mind-bendings. The enforcement of visions of how the world needs to be, and the fulfilling of its own self-created image, and making real (at least temporarily) its own Neverland vibes.
Sundance is a default venue for progressive, Bernie and AOC-admiring Millennials and GenZ-ers with a smattering of wealthy boomers and GenXers…a place for the sharing of 21st Century, lefty-concentration-camp values…the right kind of legends…struggles and celebrations of women, LGBTQs, people and cultures of color, and a corresponding absence of anything that’s even a little contrarian in terms of, say, white-male experience or straight perspectives. The whole festival is a safe space, and anyone who’s afraid of being overthrown or cancelled or at least strongly challenged…well, it’s your call.
Last year there were eight Sundance films that mattered: Julius Onah‘s Luce, Dan Reed‘s Leaving Neverland, Gavin Hood‘s Official Secrets, Madds Brugger‘s Cold Case Hammerskjold, David Crosby: Remember My Name, Memory: The Origins of Alien, Steven Soderbergh‘s High Flying Bird, Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale and Blinded By The Light.
How many of these connected with Joe and Jane Popcorn?
I said this last year also, but I miss the old snide elitist Sundance vibe, that hippest-crowd-in-the-world clubhouse feeling that I remember oh so well from the ’90s and the aughts and…well, basically the Sundance that we all knew and loved up until People’s Central Committee vibes started to seep in around ’15 or thereabouts, certainly by ’16 and most definitely by the ’17 festival, more or less concurrent with Trump’s inauguration..
At the end of the day Sundance ’20 will screen at least four or five head-turners that will matter to those of us who appreciate conversational stimulation…they always do.
I’m sick of saying this repeatedly, but have you renewed your party membership card?…have you made friends with the Stasi agent who’s been following you on Twitter?
“You know you woke me…you woke me all night long.” — written by Muddy Waters, and recorded in ’62.