BilmBlog500

11: 24 PM Getting back to the In Memoriam section: I first remember seeing Maggie Smith in California Suite, a 1978 movie. That’s some fifty years ago.  That’s a dang long time to be giving good performances in all sorts of movies. Dabney Coleman - Nine to Five. Classic. Dick Pope was the primary cinematographer for Mike Leigh, and had a forty year career.  Any time you can bring it for that long, any time in this job you can have a relationship with a director where the director wants to use you over and over and over again over a very long period of time… Marshall Brickman worked on several of the best Woody Allen films.  And his own movie Simon isn’t all that good, but the trip into Manhattan to see that movie over holiday break in 1980 is one of the keynote days in my coming of age as someone who really, really, really loved going to the movies.  A movie at Cinema One, a movie at the Loews Astor Plaza with mind-blowing six track 70mm sound.  A great day. Mar...

 Around 72 hours until Oscar night, as I am typing, and it's an exciting year, with a lot of heated Academy Award races, a lot of good nominees, and a lot of excitement and anticipation. My best movie rankings of last year, you'll find here . The Best Picture field isn't bad. I can't complain about Wicked, which was extremely popular, and The Conclave, which checks a lot of Oscar boxes more than pleasantly enough but is more the Zan and Jayna Wonder Twins version of an Oscar movie than an actual Oscar movie.  I can't complain about The Substance.  I don't think it 100% works, largely because the ending felt like the place to go when the filmmakers didn't know where actually to go, so they picked a direction and just kept driving. The exact opposite of Anora, which ends brilliantly.  But if not perfect, The Substance has verve, vision, good performances. I'm Still Here, Dune Part Two, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist and Anora are all on my own list of b...

One of the Oscar nominees for International Film, and quite wonderful.  Like, even if I hadn't known Parasite was going to win the actual Best Picture prize, I'd have been rooting for Corpus Christi three weeks ago had I caught up with it before the Oscar ceremony. If you're going to do a melodrama, why not go all in! Start with a lead character who's getting parole from a violet juvie prison to work at a saw mill out in the countryside. Only, the parole thing -- they haven't made any arrangements for room & board, so have the lead character to to a church to hang out after work. Having left the prison swearing to arrive sober at the saw mill, have him go a wild night before bender and take a priest's collared shirt from one of the other partiers. Have him joke with an attractive teenage girl at the church, end up taking out the shirt to back up his joking boast about being a priest, and then Dear Evan Hansen style the deception just keeps going and going. N...

Most of the films I liked most didn't get anywhere near a nomination for Best Picture.  There is 0% overlap between the Academy and my Ten Best list , and if I get around to posting a "worth mentioning" there might be three from that list.  But there are lots of things to be praised in the selections. And just to note, I signed up around Thanksgiving for this social media site called Letterboxd where I am listing every movie I see, and expect to review a good chunk of them. Black Panther was one of the best superhero movies in years, but that's a deeply degraded standard since most of them aren't very good at all.  But Black Panther is the work of a major filmmaker, who made a superhero movie steeped in influences from major works in the cinematic cannon rather than other superhero movies.  Sure! BlacKkKlansman is one of Spike Lee's best movies, it boasts great performances, it's timely. Sure! Bohemian Rhapsody isn't a good movie, but the last twenty ...

Midnight:  Spotlight. 11:57  I like Leonardo DiCaprio a lot, liked him from when I first saw him in Gilbert Grape a very very long time ago.  In Wolf of Wall St., in Titanic, in lots of movies.  I just wish he wasn't getting an Oscar for The Revenant. 11:53 PM I would happily see Michael Fassbender or Malcom's dad or Matt winning for Best Actor.  But this is not likely to end happily.  Steve Jobs was a great movie, and Fassbender's performance is a huge part of that. Matt Damon was too good, made it seem too easy!  Trumbo better for me than for most critics. 11:45 PM Best Actress is a depressing category for me.  Saw 45 Years, and not a fan.  And not a fan of Brooklyn, or of Carol.  Didn't see Joy.  So I guess I'll hope for Brie Larson to win, as she is touted to do. 11:38 PM Not a surprise, but I so wish something or someone else would have won for Best Director.  What can he do next year in his quest for Best Award Bait? ...

When it comes to plot-driven media like books and movies, I'm an opinionated SOB. As such, Oscar season will never be my across-the-board favorite time of year.  There will be critical darlings that aren't actually very good. Worthy movies that are just that.  Frenzies, tulip bubbles, and more.  Usually there will be a few things, but only a few, that I haven't seen; after all these years I can do a good job smelling out the movies that will leave an aftertaste. I can't remember a year with as many of those movies.  And after making a dutiful effort to catch up, only one of them was considerably better than I feared or suspected. It sure isn't The Revenant.  12 nominations for a movie I never wished to pay for, and which I could stomach for just 30 minutes when I was finally able to plan it as part of a "double feature." The plot skeleton I studied thirty years ago this week when I was handed a copy of WRITING TO SELL by Scott Meredith on my first day at h...

Movies are the one, or at least the longest, constant in my life.  I can easily recall movie moments from my teenage years, even early in.  I was twelve when I saw Star Wars, and know that I saw it in Monticello.  So Oscar night is always special to me, the High Holidays of my secular religion. But this year has an off taste for me, part #OscarsSoWhite, discussed below, and part #OscarsSoTrite, which will be discussed in another post and/or within my live blog of this year's Oscar ceremony. A year ago, I thought Selma was a worthy movie, kind of like how I felt about Gandhi when I saw that 33 years ago, and how I've felt about quite a few biopics over the years.  With Selma nominated in the Best Picture category, with its elastic number of potential nominees, #OscarsSoWhite felt abstract to me. But in 2015, two movies, Love and Mercy and Straight Outta Compton raised the bar for the genre of the musical biopic.  Considering how many appreciably triter biopics h...

The first movie I ever saw at Walter Reade's Ziegfeld Theatre was Gandhi. It was Christmas break between my first and second semesters in college.  It was a sold-out show.  There were a lot of those at the Ziegfeld in the 1980s and 1990s.  I was not one of the first to arrive, and I found my way to a seat on the far right side of the theatre, fairly near to the front.  The theatre smelled of food; Gandhi was a very long movie, and people were prepared with more than popcorn. The Ziegfeld and Gandhi turned out to be very similar to one another.  They were worthy.  You couldn't not like Gandhi, could you?  I mean, it was a long epic biopic about an incredibly important historical figure,  You could learn so much of such importance about such an important personage.  Of course, it wasn't actually a good movie.  It was a quintessential biopic. The actual filmmaking by Richard Attenborough was kind of plodding. So it was with the Ziegfeld. ...

I saw around 100 movies that opened in 2014, which is a pretty typical year for me.  Rarely less than 90, hard to see more than 120. Of those 100 movies. Boyhood is the best. Here are the next dozen or so movies that I consider to be my 90th percentile for the year: 2.  Whiplash This is the one other film from 2014 that I've seen twice, though it's possible there are one or two others I'd try to see again. JK Simmons won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and the film also won Oscars for editing and for sound mixing. Simmons is the leader of the top ensemble at a Juilliard-like performing arts school, and Miles Teller is a student who yearns to be playing drums in this ensemble.  And the two are both crazy.  Simmons might be an actual psychopath, or he might just take a little bit too seriously the idea that you've got to tear down in order to build up.  Which, just to say, is the entire premise behind boot camp for the US armed forces.  But what would dri...

The Oscars forced me to sit down with my print-out of the movies I'd seen that opened in 2014, and without further ado... 1.  Boyhood The very notion of the movie is crazy.  The challenges in making a film with a 12-year shooting schedule go far beyond anything.  You can't even compare it to the 7/14/21/etcUp documentary series by Michael Apted that has followed a group of kids from 7 until very close to today with films every 7 years.  It's one thing to just get together every seven years and see what's happened.  You don't have to worry about what happened in the intervening, you just have to report on it.  And in any event, Boyhood director Richard Linklater has already replicated that with his Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight series of films with Ethan Hawke and Juliette Delpy. Let's look at this: You can't sign a contract for longer than 7 years for an actor/actress, so for your primary cast members, there's the chance that you could be ...

This fall season marks both my 50th birthday and the 20th anniversary of establishing JABberwocky Literary Agency.  To celebrate, I screened a film at the Museum of the Moving Image for a select group from virtually all phases of my life.  I didn't name the film in the invitation, though the invitations included references to enough of the catch phrases immortalized by the film that it wasn't exactly a state secret. Here, slightly edited, are the program notes I prepared: ---------------------------------------- When Jerry Maguire opened on Dec. 13, 1996, I sat down to see it projected (in 35mm, on part of the screen) on the Imax at the Loews Lincoln Square. I was expecting to like it. I didn’t realize that I was about as close to my autobiography as Hollywood is likely to get. The “expecting to like” is easy; it was Tom Cruise in a Cameron Crowe movie, with a decent coming attraction. Tom Cruise and I have very special relationship.  Top Gun is extra special to me. ...

It isn't often that I get to see a movie based on a huge bestselling novel that I had the good taste to turn down, but I got to do it tonight, when I headed off to the Ziegfeld after work for the 7:15 of The Maze Runner, based on James Dashner's novel of the same name. Which is worth your time. Spoilers follow: I think I might've liked the movie less if I'd read the book.  One of the things I enjoyed about the movie was that it held surprises.  I was able to make some educated guesses about what would happen in certain instances based on my experiences as a reader of fiction and a viewer of films.  When a group of 15 people heads off somewhere, and half of two-thirds of them are characters who haven't had a line of dialogue, it is safe to say that a good number of those characters aren't going to be around for the end of the movie.  Cannon fodder, they've got cannon fodder.  And if the arch nemesis is left behind someplace, the suspense is in wondering wheth...

Watching the premiere of 24: Live Another Day earlier in the week gets me to thinking where it is that I have heard the name of William Devane before... Once Upon a Time, 24 years ago strangely enough, in September 1990, a client of mine named Barbara Paul called to say that there was a TV movie on NBC by the name of Murder COD being previewed in TV Guide that sounded a lot like her book Kill Fee. The TV movie and a perfectly respectable cast.  Patrick Duffy, still on Dallas, starred as a police detective, and one William Devane was the bad guy.  Devane was on Knots Landing. And if it sounded a lot like Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee -- well, that's because it was. The book had been under option for a while.  The option had, if memory serves, expired on September 10, which was now a few days in the past.  The producers of the TV movie had not quite forgotten to pay the purchase price for the TV movie, which they should have done months before when the started filming ...