My Top 10 Motion Pictures (+10) For 2019
January 17, 2020
January 17, 2020
January 13, 2020
January 11, 2020
People adjust. People with multimillion budgets adjust easily. The February 9 date of this year’s Oscars have led to whining beyond all whining. “People don’t have time to see all the movies!” “It’s all happening too quick!” “All the other shows are bunched up!” And here is the issue for The Academy. Who cares? The […]
January 7, 2020
The IrishmanProducers: Jane Rosenthal & Robert De Niro, Emma Tillinger Koskoff & Martin Scorsese Jojo RabbitProducers: Carthew Neal, Taika Waititi JokerProducers: Todd Phillips & Bradley Cooper, Emma Tillinger Koskoff Knives OutProducers: Rian Johnson, Ram Bergman Little WomenProducer: Amy Pascal Marriage StoryProducers: Noah Baumbach, David Heyman Once Upon a Time… in HollywoodProducers: David Heyman, Shannon McIntosh, […]
January 5, 2020
January 5, 2020
I was at an event for a distributor, celebrating its Golden Globes nominees and a friend in the industry asked me, “So who is going to win?” Without much thinking, I said, “It doesn’t matter. At all. The Globes aren’t actually a thing.” He was taken aback and frankly, I was taken aback by how […]
December 31, 2019
Voting for nominations is now two days away. Voters may watch another movie or two before they enter the six-day window of voting, but with such a short window, my guess is that even more voters than usual will get their votes in early in the process. It’s hard to imagine that even 20% of […]
December 28, 2019
Christmas Day has come and gone and some distributors are happily sleeping, their bellies filled with the comfort of their films’ position. Others are — or should be — getting twitchy. The most comfy of all should be Netflix, for whom absolutely nothing has changed since this holiday window began last Friday the 20th. This […]
December 27, 2019
There is a disease in Hollywood that is also found in many places, more so in 2019 than in the past… though it has certainly been there in the past as well. When it’s about someone else, gossip is fun, even if it might be untrue… but if people are saying it, there must be […]
December 23, 2019
It was Bill Condon who coined the phrase, “The Great Settling.” And I have used it every year since I heard it. Because even in a shortened season —perhaps more so — there is a point at which the power to try to convert voters disappears from the efforts of the often-brilliant salespeople (whatever their […]
December 20, 2019
The Non-Spoiler Review is here. After chewing on this for a bit, I am just going to make a list of things I feel about the film. And I will look forward to added such issues from others. Let me start with the couple of things I loved in the film. I loved the “They […]
December 18, 2019
I never liked the show, “Cats.” Critics never liked the show, “Cats.” More than 73 million people have bought tickets to the show, “Cats.” And even if just half of them liked it and one-quarter loved it, that’s over 36 million people who will enjoy this movie. Tom Hooper and co-writer Lee Hall didn’t transform […]
December 18, 2019
The Spoiler Review is here. Just to lay down a sense of my standards for Star Wars… I am a fan, not a fanboy. I have seen all the previous films multiple times. I saw Star Wars on opening weekend 42 years ago. I didn’t hate The Phantom Menace, but I do find Jar Jar […]
December 12, 2019
I support women directors and the fight to push the industry to embrace them moving forward. I have argued for years that seeding the industry with at least two films a year directed by a woman at every major, as well as pushing for more women in crews. This seems to be taking place this year and it continues in the upcoming year. Progress, albeit slow progress.
December 11, 2019
It’s easy to imagine the dramatic version of this story. But this is a Taika Waititi film, not the sad, solemn Holocaust drama we have seen literally dozens of times. Instead of delivering the adult perspective on the horrors of the moment, Waititi tells the story from the perspective of a 10-year-old.
December 11, 2019
And now, ladies and gentlemen, The SAG Nominations. This award season is a corkscrew. Maybe it’s because of the relative brevity. The timetable, except for Oscar, isn’t all that different. Yet, it feels more compact and each group voting for awards seems less influenced by the others. On the other hand, the shape of the […]
December 10, 2019
Around a month after the launches of Disney+ and AppleTV+, the complexity of change continues to rear its ugly head all over Hollywood. Don’t misread me… there have been very few days, weeks or months in my experience of the industry known as Hollywood that are not in a state of endless hysteria about the […]
December 10, 2019
When we finally got to shoot it, the year 2000 was ten years away, but it was still fun to project ourselves into the future of the audiovisual revolution that had just started,” Wenders observes on the Criterion edition. “The word digital was still only known to some technofreaks. Nobody had any idea that everything was going to be digital: images, text, our whole lives.”
December 8, 2019
This is what is so tricky about this business of writing about the status of awards races, all of which lead to Oscar, which is ultimately the only thing that truly matters. I promise, no one whose intro graph includes “Golden Globe Winner” would not prefer it say “Oscar Winner.” Not one. Not even a little.
December 8, 2019
Okay, once and former Hot Bloggers… here is space for you to communicate amongst yourselves. We are working on a permanent space for this. If you have any subjects you want set up, let me or Ray know. Have a good time!
My Top 10 Motion Pictures (+10) For 2019
| January 17, 2020
The State of Oscar. Nomination Morning, 2020
| January 13, 2020
The State of Oscar. 011119. The Fast & The Furious
| January 11, 2020
PGA Awards: 1917; "Chernobyl," "Succession," "Fleabag," Toy Story 4
January 18, 2020
ACE Eddies: Parasite, Jojo Rabbit
January 18, 2020
“It’s not racism. We’re the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe. It’s so easy to just throw your charge of racism at everybody and it’s starting to get boring now. I can’t help what I am, I was born like this, it’s an immutable characteristic, so to call me a white privileged male is to be racist — you’re being racist."
English Actor Laurence Fox On BBC Question Time
January 18, 2020
Bad Boys For Life directors, Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah
| January 16, 2020
DP/30 Audio: Bombshell, Jay Roach
| December 13, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Jonathan Majors
| December 4, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Mustang, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
| December 4, 2019