The Big Screen in the Sky: RIP Albert Finney

A sad start to this Friday with the news that actor Albert Finney has passed. He seemed tailor-made to play a rebellious Brit at a time when youth culture exploded. But that sparkling deviltry never left his roles even as he aged in a film career that spanned almost sixty years. Finney earned five Oscar noms (never won- Geesh!) and a knighthood that he summarily rejected- a very Tom Jones thing to do. Finney was 82.






Lance's Werthwhile Finney Picks:

Tom Jones (1963)- This is the movie that shot Finney to international stardom and his first Oscar nomination. And why not? He's hot as hell in it- in a naughty British sort of way. I once dated a guy who looked like a young Albert Finney. I have very good taste in men.

Two for the Road (1967)- Finney and Hepburn make the perfect imperfect couple in this swingin' Stanley Donan dram-com.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)- In a cast crowded with stars like Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave et al., Finney's Poirot takes a backseat to none of them and earns another Oscar nom.

Under the Volcano (1984)- This character piece earned Finney his fourth Oscar nom as a drunk bureaucrat who is headed for the end- but doing it his way.

Erin Brockovich (2000)- While Julia Roberts (and her rack) may have been the focus of this popular little woman vs. the big guy flick, Finney is a wonderfully gruff counterbalance to the Roberts charm. It was the last time he would be announced as an Oscar nominee.

Big Fish (2003)- As the inveterate storyteller in Tim Burton's father-son masterwork, Finney's charm puts over every one of his tall tales, even the most un-swallowable of them.

Skyfall (2012)- He's an old groundskeeper with a shotgun who helped raised James Bond. What more could you want?

Oscar Nom-Nom-Noms 2019

I know everyone has been breathlessly waiting for my opinions on the recent Oscar nominations- but I've had a lot of feelings to sort through. And I've concluded that the Academy is very schizo this year.

On one hand they nominated blockbuster fare like Black Panther, A Star is Born, and Bohemian Rhapsody.

On the other hand, they nominated artsy and foreign flicks like Roma, The Favorite, and Cold War.

One one hand the diversity in the nominations is spectacular with Black Panther, BlacKkKlansmen, and Roma up for Best Picture.

On the other hand, there are the cultural lightening rods of Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody and Kevin Hart.

On one hand you have Lady Gaga.

On the other you have Yalitza Aparicio.

Whatever hand you're sitting on, here's what I think of some of my favorite Oscar categories this year.

Best Foreign-Language Feature

In a category that is perpetually a crap shoot for office Oscar pools since only a very few people actually watch all the nominees, this year there's a pretty good horse race. Roma is sucking all the air out of the room, but Cold War earned a Best Director for Pawel Pawlikowski. So maybe Roma's presence in the Best Picture category means that Cold War could grab the win in this category.

Best Animated Feature

The hugely popular Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse has a chance to break the Disney Pixar stranglehold on this category that it has maintained since Rango creeped in in 2012. It's nice to see Wes Anderson's crafty and delightful Isle of Dogs among the nominees.







Best Documentary Feature

To quote an old lady-crush of mine, "What? Did they have a hemorrhoid for breakfast?" This category missed the mark entirely. I'm sure RBG is great- and the beloved subject practically insures a win. But neither Three Identical Strangers nor Won't You Be My Neighbor? made the nomination cut. Strangers might be the most engaging film I've seen all year and Neighbor was a perfect antidote to the perpetual Trumpian news cycle. But apparently Academy members had heaping bowls of hemorrhoids for breakfast.


Best Costume Design

This year the contenders check all the boxes for fashion genre movies. Period Pieces- The Favourite and Mary Queen of Scots. Imaginative Fantasy- Mary Poppins Returns and Black Panther. The- Oh I guess that's all the fashion genre movie boxes. Somehow the Coen Brothers' Netflix Western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs managed a nod- but in my opinion, Black Panther has this. The design on this film is amazing and is one of the reasons it transcends the typical comic book blockbuster.

Best Adapted Screenplay
This category is anybody's guess. Too close to call. But if I had my druthers, it would go to BlacKkKlansman.

Best Original Screenplay
Roma will probably win this one- even though nothing interesting happens until 2/3 of the movie has unspooled. Anything but Green Book, I say.

Best Supporting Actor

First of all, how is Mahershala Ali not in the Best Actor category??? Is Green Book really about the white guy? Loved Adam Driver in BlacKkKlansmen- but Mahershala should make space for a second Oscar for Driving Dr. Shirley.

Best Supporting Actress

It's a The Favourite girlfight with Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz probably splitting the vote and allowing the win for one of the other nominees. Regina King preferably.



Best Actor

This year it's the battle of the biographical prosthetics with Christian Bale's Dick Cheney vs. Rami Malek's Freddie Mercury. I thought Bradley Cooper was the best thing about A Star is Born, and since he was denied a Best Director nomination, maybe the Academy will throw him an acting bone.

Best Actress

For the love of God give Glenn Close her Oscar! Seven nominations and no wins. Don't make her another Thelma Ritter. Her competition this year is not as stiff as some of her other go arounds, so I'm confident she will ascend to the stage. Sorry, Lady Gaga. It's an honor to be nominated. Next time star in a movie that doesn't turn out to be about your co-star. And I've loved Olivia Colman since she starred in British 80's science show spoof Look Around You.

Best Director

Alfonso Cuaron cause the massive Netflix PR machine has convinced everyone that Roma is the best thing since sliced queso. Glad to see Spike Lee in competition. Sad to not see Barry Jenkins.


Best Picture

There's something here for everyone which is a good thing. But I'm not sure there's one that my heart is really invested in. I'm super apathetic about Roma which I think had one amazing scene and the rest feels like watching your neighbor who you don't know that well show you a home movie about his terribly important childhood. Black Panther was a refreshing and exciting imagining of how a comic book movie can be transformed by other cultures- but it is still a Marvel movie. The Roma train seems to have all the steam, but who knows? Maybe Kevin Hart will jump on stage and declare Green Book the winner.

The only thing that is certain in this year's Oscars is the terror that will grip presenters who have to pronounce the names of nominees Yalitza Aparicio, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Pawel Pawlikowski.

Lance's Werthwhile Movie 2018 Movie Countdown

It's that time of year again when I look back at the movies I saw this year that made me all fuzzy, fractured, or freaked out.

Here (in no particular order) are the movies that made me squeee in 2018:

La Habanera (1937)/All That Heaven Allows (1955)/Written on the Wind (1956)

I went on a Douglass Sirk-et this year. Sirk is the Master of Melodrama! The Titan of Technicolor! The Sultan of Soap Opera! I hadn't seen two of his biggest films, Heaven and Wind, and they not only didn't disappoint, they enchanted me. So I jumped at the chance to see one of his very early Austrian works, La Habanera. Once you get past the fact that everyone's speaking German in Puerto Rico, this film proves that Sirk had an early affinity for the decadence of melodrama on film.

Shoeshine (1946)

I'm a hug fan of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). In particular, his postwar verite style really strikes a chord with me both visually and dramatically. When you're literally shooting your movie in the ruins of a war-torn city, it adds a little something' somethin'. It really works in Shoeshine. Two young Roman boys get by the only way they know how- shining shoes and dealing in contraband. It's a De Sica film, so they get caught and wind-up in a juvenile facility that mixes Lord of the Flies with Orange is the New Black. The film is tragic, and beautiful, showing the tenderness between young men who have nothing but each other... and a horse.

Three Identical Strangers (2018)

This documentary about three triplets who were separated at birth might actually be my favorite film of the year. (No, it's not you Roma (2018).) Director Tim Wardle expertly unspools this story in such a way that around every corner is a new, shocking surprise. I literally yelled at the screen when I saw it. Look for this one to give Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018) a run for its money for Best Documentary at this year's Oscars.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Richard Widmark, Maximillian Schell, and even a pre-Trek William Shatner and a pre-Hogan's Heroes Werner Klemperer. Now THAT'S a cast. I'd heard about Stanley Kramer's Oscar-winning drama about the infamous Nuremberg Trials, but the three hour running time often kept me from slipping it into my DVD player. I'm glad I finally did. The performances are a primer in film acting and the concentration camp footage wrenching. Before this film, the footage (some of which was shot by director George Stevens) had never been shown in public. The message of questioning what we are told to do when we know it is wrong resonates across 57 years so clearly. It makes this movie feel less like a history lesson and more like a warning.

God's Own Country (2017)

While everyone was falling over themselves about Call Me By Your Name (2017) this English gay indie gave me all the feels that were missing for me in Name. You can read all about my dirty thoughts here.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Director Taika Waititi hit a home run last year with Thor: Ragnarok (2017). But three years earlier he  directed, wrote, and starred in a real comic gem. What We Do is a mockumentary about a group of vampires living in New Zealand. The Real World meets Twilight as these roommates deal with girlfriends, chore wheels, and being undead. It's a bloodsucking hoot- and will soon be an FX TV show.

The future's so bright for Taika, he'd better wear shades.

Ex Machina (2014)

Ex Machina does what sci-fi does better than any other genre- expose our humanity (or lack thereof) through the lens of the machines we create. Caleb (the pleasingly pale Domhall Gleason) is a hotshot programmer who wins the chance to visit the wilderness compound of tech guru and self-imposed hermit Nathan (furry Oscar Isaac). Caleb is humbled to be tasked by this genius to help test his latest cyborg, Ava (the partially there Alicia Vikander.)

But he quickly discovers that he is just another one of the guinea pigs in Nathan's heartless experiment. The visual effects for Ava are perfection. But their Oscar-winning wizardry does not detract from the compelling performances and the harrowing story of a world perhaps not so far away from the technology-obsessed time we currently text in.

The Shape of Water (2017)

I've gotten a lot of flack from people I respect on this Oscar-winning movie. I stand by my original blog post. Shape of Water is beautiful to look at and is a loving opus to classic movies,  re-transmitting their power to stir our imaginations to a new generation. Add in uncharacteristic performances from Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, and Richard Jenkins and you have a film that I think is better than Call Me By Your Name... but maybe not Get Out (2017). I loved it. So there.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

Terrence Malik isn't so much of a film director, as a film poet. What he has done in each of his cinematic creations is transmit feelings and emotions not necessarily through a tight plot line, but through powerful, fragmented imagery.

The complicated and conflicted realities of the Vietnam War seem to be tailor-made for the Malik treatment: the loyalty of a commander to his men, the natural beauty of the country, the desire to help human beings, the urge to rip their bodies apart with machine guns, the fear of dying, and the power of hope- no matter how futile.

Thin Red Line is my favorite Vietnam war film with perhaps the exception of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987). The uber-talented cast under the guidance of this exceptional director brings the emotions of Vietnam to vivid life- not to shock us- but to allow us to experience them.

Coco (2017)

This one goes under the category of Films That Make Lance Bawl Like a Baby. Sure the animation that takes inspiration from Dia de Muertos and Mexican culture and art is ravishing. But it's the heart of this movie that stays with you. I challenge anyone to listen to little Miguel sing the song "Remember Me" to his failing great grandmother without getting misty. We all have family members that have passed on- and Coco reminds us that passing on what made them special is the only way to keep them with us.

Black Panther (2018)

I'm tired of the super hero genre. The stories all sound the same to me. The various origin stories that always portray conflicted heroes coming from a place of otherness while the supermodel bodies and faces of the heroes themselves make it impossible for me to relate. More things blow-up than you can keep track of. Superheroes save the entire planet, proudly standing over the unknown number of bodies of citizens who were vaporized without so much as a screen credit. And somehow I'm supposed to feel safer after this.

So imagine my shock when I watched Black Panther with utter and complete enjoyment. Maybe it's the amazing African-inspired styling of the costumes, set, and gadgets. Maybe it's the amazing black faces that we rarely see in such numbers unless we're watching a slavery epic.

Maybe it's the equal-pairing of women and men in this world- both sexes given the ability to rule and kick-ass. Maybe it's Michale B. Jordan's half-naked body. Whatever, it is- Black Panther feels fresh in a genre that needed a real shake-up. I suspect Black Panther will give A Star is Born (2018) some heavy competition at this year's Oscar's.
Wakanda forever indeed!

To all my readers and friends- may 2019 give you all the movie thrills you desire!

The Dietrich Effect

Dear LWM readers, I have a confession to make.

I've been cheating.

Yes, it's true. I have been cheating on my movie idol Joan Crawford with another movie idol. I've tried to keep my thoughts centered on Crawford's shoulders and eyebrows, but I have become obsessed with another set of eyebrows. And those pencil-thin works of art belong to none other than teutonic sex goddess, Marlene Dietrich.

Dietrich has always been one of my favorites. Her ability to draw focus by simply raising an eyebrow or blowing an erotic puff of smoke, her nonchalant accent both murdering and sensualizing her English dialogue, the distinctive angles of that camera-loving face- the Dietrich cinematic mystique is enthralling. I recently got the new box-set of her work with director Josef von Sternberg, and I've found my movie thoughts engrossed with the career of this tempestuous force of the silver screen.

The new box set contains Dietrich's earliest Hollywood product, and it's really interesting to watch how her acting style changed over time. In her first American film Morocco (1930) (The Blue Angel (1930) although shot first, wasn't released in America until after Morocco) Dietrich is still finding her way both in acting and with the English language. Legend has it that von Sternberg literally had her count moments and steps in between actions and dialogue. Her eye movements, her gestures, her dialogue- everything was planned out. Yet somehow her performance is electric with an intense freshness thanks to Dietrich's aggressively laissez faire screen presence and visible lust for that thing called movie stardom. Her musical numbers, in particular, flash and the famous tux kissing scene helped create the any-sexual persona that would dominate the rest of her career.

By the time Dietrich starred in her final film with von Sternberg, The Devil is a Woman (1935), her performance has gone from planned to crafted. She no longer has that bit of uncertainty counting beats. Every eyebrow motion and purse of the lips is part of the confetti-covered artwork that von Sternberg is making. It's beautiful to watch- but that spark of the unknown- the sexy danger of what Dietrich might do feels lost amongst the mantillas and masks. Von Sternberg's Galatea has become a statue again- an exquisite statue- but a statue nonetheless.

After Dietrich ended her artistic partnership with von Sternberg the debate heated up as to whether Dietrich needed von Sternberg, or von Sternberg needed Dietrich. The easy answer is Dietrich did just fine without von Sternberg. True she was probably never photographed as sumptuously as she was in Shanghai Express (1932) and The Scarlet Empress (1934), but from an acting perspective, her later works show a relaxed quality that von Sternberg's compulsively controlled direction didn't nurture. In Destry Rides Again (1939), A Foreign Affair(1948), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Touch of Evil (1958), and Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), Dietrich proved she didn't need von Sternberg to create an indelible acting performance.

Even in slighter faire like Tay Garnett's Seven Sinners (1940), Dietrich is so devil-may-care as the Sadie Thompson-esque Bijou, she brings a wickedly romantic sparkle out of the normally frontier-y John Wayne. Dietrich was the essential secret ingredient no matter who directed her.

Now if only there were a movie with Dietrich and Crawford in it...

The Other Side of the Other Side

No Hollywood auteur casts a longer shadow than the late, great director/actor/writer Orson Welles. His movies are spoken of with a reverence that borders on the obnoxious. His larger than life persona (and waistline) became the stuff of late-night talkshow and wine commercial legend. But during his lifetime, Welles' movie-making career suffered from extended bouts of un-studio cinematic ventures that ended in box office failure. "When's he gonna top Citizen Kane?" echoed through the head offices of Hollywood until he became a misunderstood genius who couldn't secure a sheckle to create his art.

By the end of his life, Welles failed to finish several movies- one of which was The Other Side of the Wind which was in production/legal purgatory from 1970 to well past the maestro's death in 1985.  But thanks to Netflix's deep pockets and urge to be taken seriously as a film studio, a team of editors using Welles' scripts and editing notes was able to put together the Welles film that almost wasn't over 40 years years after it was started.

Wind takes place on the final night of the life of  revered/despised director Jake Hannaford (a thinly-veiled version of Welles played with gruff relish by director and Welles pal John Huston.) Hannaford's latest movie is in big trouble, and the desert screening party that is planned to help him get the movie some much-needed buzz (and funding) quickly devolves into a drunken morass full of cameras, critics, directors, dummies, and midgets.

Intertwined with the party dementia, the film-within-a-film unspools in a riot of '70's counter-culture color and quick takes. Seemingly without plot, a nude-most-of-the-time woman (Welles muse Oja Kodar) is followed by a not-nude-enough  man (Robert Random) through a variety of abandoned MGM sets. (One of them is the train set Fred Astaire reminisces in front of in That's Entertainment! (1974).) The movie screening concludes at a drive-in movie theater where Hannaford leaves the assembled Hollywood menagerie to drive into the sunrise for the last time.

If this plot summary sounds befuddling, don't worry! Along with the film, Netflix has produced a documentary about the making of Wind called They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018). Filled with footage of Welles and many of those who worked on the film, I found that They'll Love Me helped turn Wind from a middling experimental film into a fascinating peek inside the impish mind of Welles.

What immediately made my little film nerd antennae jump while watching Wind was seeing wunderkind filmmaker and cineaste Peter Bogdanovich playing wunderkind filmmaker and cineaste Brooks Otterlake. Otterlake is a preening sycophant who loves to show off by doing imitations of his favorite Hollywood idols and yes-anding and speaking for Hannaford at every opportunity. So basically, Bogdanovich isn't acting. Welles was filming their friendship.

So why then, does the relationship between acolyte and mentor in the film combust in an outburst of spite and cruelty? The dynamic of the student that becomes too much like the teacher for the teacher's liking is not new in storytelling- but Welles is either prescient or sending Bogdanovich a message. In They'll Love Me, Bogdanovich cries as he speaks about the very public break between him and Welles that happened a couple years after the filming of Wind. Bogdanovich blames Welles' belittling of him on The Tonight Show with new friend Burt Reynolds cackling along. Other theories abound, but either way, art became life.

Welles is no more kind to Bogdanovich's then girlfriend Cybill Shepherd. Despite the fact that Welles was living in Bogdanovich's house with Shepherd, in Wind he gives Hannaford a young, blond, dim-witted girlfriend allegedly to express his opinion of Bogdanovich's younger movie star paramour. Even for the mercurial Welles, it's a mean touch to a movie whose fictional characters are all unflattering stand-ins for a coterie of Hollywood notables- a who's who of people Welles felt betrayed him. At it's heart, Wind is an arsenic-laced break-up letter to Hollywood signed, "Fuck you, Orson. P.S. Fuck you some more."

From that perspective- it makes Wind worth watching.

Farewell Film Scribe: RIP William Goldman

Screenwriters in Hollywood are often not given the props they so richly deserve. So when a screenwriter earns the status of being "talked about", you know that screenwriter is a major talent. William Goldman is one of those screenwriters. His resume is a list of must-sees: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Papillon  (1973), The Stepford Wives (1975), All the President's Men (1976), Marathon Man (1976), Magic (1978), The Princess Bride (1987), and Misery (1990). His talents were so respected that even if he wasn't involved in a project, directors cut out entire scenes from "finished" movies based on one phonecall from Goldman.
William Goldman passed away last night at the age of 87.
Perhaps he can give God some re-writes for our current situation...