by Sam Juliano
Vaccines have been shipped to stateside destinations and are set to be injected to health care workers as early as Tuesday. Finally we have reason to be optimistic, though currently rising numbers remain fearful. Hoping many of our friends and readers are planning to avail themselves of this potentially live-saving proposition. On Friday the Supreme Court may well have put the final nail in the coffin by rejecting the absurd lawsuit filed by Texas aimed at overturning election results in battleground states in one of the most heinous assaults on democracy in our nation’s history. Though their final decision was really a no brainer, and anything but that decision would have turned the country upside down I still commend the conservative court for doing what was right and this included the three justices Trump appointed.
This past week film scholar and longtime site friend and contributor Duane Porter published a brilliant decade list that we so proud to have in our archives. Also, J. D. Lafrance posted a fabulous review on Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Bille August. Lucille and I saw a slew of films this past week and though I plan on elaborating for now I will just go with the five star rating scale for each and brief commentary. I expected so much more from Steve McQueen’s spectacularly-praised Lovers Rock, but alas I found it significantly overrated and one-note. Conversely I was never a big Kelly Reichardt fan so many others but now have finally found one that I thought exceptional, a film beautifully capturing the raw outdoors and one quietly enveloping (First Cow). The film adaptation of the Broadway musical The Prom, with Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman among others had its moments, but overall it was musically pedestrian and largely squandered an interesting premise. Spike Lee’s Vietnam War era set Da Five Bloods was largely gripping but also somewhat over the top, and it features a paranoia ridden great performance by Delroy Lindo, which for me echos in theme Humphrey Bogart’s in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The Italian film Martin Eden, which the New York Times called the best movie of the entire year has some standout scenes and was often beautiful to look at but it was too episodic and emotionally distancing for my taste, hence again a most overrated film.
I liked Mank but I see many colleagues in my friend circle did not. Great lead performance by Gary Oldman, an equally distinguished supporting turn by Amanda Seyfried, superlative monochrome cinematography, a fascinating context and some unforgettable scene like a drunken interlude at a dinner table are for me unforgettable but I do admit it doesn’t always work. Perhaps my eternal love for Citizen Kane prejudiced me a bit. Anyway………….
Lovers Rock ** 1/2 Amazon Prime (Saturday)
The Prom ** 1/2 Netflix (Saturday)
First Cow **** 1/2 Amazon Prime (Friday)
Da Five Bloods **** Netflix (Wednesday)
Martin Eden *** Lincoln Center Virtual (Tuesday)
Mank **** 1/2 Netflix (Monday)
- note: First Cow could well be elevated to 5 stars. I am thinking on this.
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So happy to see you are busy Sam, and have uncovered some worthwhile features. Good that you some good in Reichardt too! I plan on taking the vaccine as well.
Thrilled to hear you plan on taking the vaccine my friend. We’ll talk this over on message. Thank you as always!
First Cow is at the top of my list of must-see films. I love animal-as-silent -protagonist stories.
Cheers to The National Film Registry for adding Outrage and Cabin in the Sky to its list of enduring American movies. BTW, Ghostbusters made the list before Wanda did, and A League of Their Own before Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Deduce from that what you will. If one could replace The Dark Knight with Malick’s The New World I’d be a happy chappie.
The Music Box (James Parrott, 1932). The boys try to haul a piano up a flight of Odessa-like steps. Imagine the myth of Sisyphus as slapstick. Thirty riotous minutes of Laurel and Hardy chaos. A+
The eyepatch is traditionally a symbol of aristocracy, wisdom, and plain old cussedness. Conspiracy nutter Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) has single-handedly (or single eyedly) diminished the cachet of the eyepatch.
Fritz Lang, John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, and the man in the old Hathaway shirt ads must be thumping and writhing in their graves.
OK, I’ll shut up now.
Happy New Year Mark! You may have by now already seen FIRST COW, but either way I’d love to hear your response after you do see it. I’ll join you in cheering the National Film Registry for the addition of OUTRAGE and CABIN IN THE SKY! Love both and am also mighty pleased to hear that! LOL on making Ghostbusters a priority though. Absurd. Ditto A League of Their Own ahead of Virginia Woolf!!! I too would appreciate Malick’s masterpiece being sponsored! Yes A plus is also the grade I give to the L & H masterpiece THE MUSIC BOX, which vies with BIG BUSINESS as my favorite short from the boys. Yes Danny boy is a bonafide kook and your eye-patch correlation is spot-on. You certainly did bring the names of those of eye-patch pedigree there I must say! You forgot one other – Raul Walsh. You never have to shut up my friend, always delight in your commentary!
Sam, it will be interesting to see what your end of year list will be like. I just saw a trailer for the FX/BBC remake of ‘Black Narcissus’ – looks dreadful.
As for the vaccines, I’ve heard some real horror stories, anyone taking it will be destroying their health as absolutely as they possibly can. It usually takes 10 years to get a vaccine on the market, they’ve done it in 10 months, frequently saying that they are “rushing the science”. That is a recipe for disaster.
The one they developed and distributed from 1955 to 1962 for polio in the US and then in the rest of the world had a now acknowledged, in the medical journals, virus called SV40 (simian virus 40, there were 39 others before it), 98 million Americans were vaccinated with it in the shot and it was still in there for worldwide use till 1998/1999. ’60 Minutes’ did a two year investigation of the story but it was too hot to handle and they had abandon it. It finally aired in the distinguished Canada current affairs program called ‘The Fifth Estate’ in ’99. SV40 was producing huge tumours in all the lab animals they gave it to.
Out take footage was leaked from a PBS documentary on the history of medicine and health care and it is incendiary.
Here is Dr Maurice Hilleman, creator of more vaccines than anyone else in that out take footage.
I’d post the Fifth Estate segment but I can’t find online, though I have it downloaded and have used it for a documentary film I’ve made using everything I’ve learned from Ken Burns and Adam Curtis.
I’m also doing a documentary, using primary sources of the whole Covid story, which stretches back several years.
My advice is to be very weary of the cases numbers being cited as the PRC tests is notoriously unreliable, by a) giving false positives, and b) picking up dead debris from past infection in which the person was asymptomatic. The inventor of the test specifically stated it was never to be used for diagnosis. The only number to follow is those that died from Covid, not with. My training partner’s uncle passed away from a fall off a ladder, the head injury was the cause yet the death certificate said covid. There are numerous such instances being reported not just in the UK but across the board. Inquires confirmed that there has been pressure from hospital managers and many Drs have openly questioned this practice. because each covid case brings in funds from central government. I’ve heard the same for the US and if I recall, it’s $13,000 for a patient and $26,000 if they are put on a ventilator. I’m going to give you a link to some of the films I’ve been making privately, if that’s ok with you.
Hope you and your family are keeping healthy and safe and enjoying the festive season
So great to hear from you my friend, and my apologies for the (very) late response. I wanted to be sure I set aside a bit of time to respond though. My list of the best films of 2020 will be delayed a little this year because of the various extensions which have even changed the scheduling of the award bodies because of the worldwide pandemic.
I do completely understand your concern over the vaccine, and I have spent much of my time exploring the pros and cons of taking it. As a now 66 year-old man (yes time is passing by us) with Type 2 diabetes and still heavier than I should be I have for the better part of a year trying to cut down the chances that I would contract the virus. The same goes for my wife and five children (all of whom still live under our roof), and all of whom have been trying hard by mainly staying in to avert passing it on to us. By the present time (nine days AFTER you post your comment) the results of the vaccine administering seems better than it was originally by way of anticipation and as you know our 78 year-old President-Elect Joe Biden has taken it, as well as our 80 year old disease expert Anthony Fauci and Vice President Mike Pence. As to real consternation at this point in my life, I will say that the prospect of contracting a disease that has killed so many (and I do agree with you that the numbers may not or are not what they are posed to be), still supersedes any lesser risk that the vaccine would engender. I agree with you that in almost all cases it could take almost 10 years for a vaccine to reach the market, but in this case there was a real effort to move quickly, a life or death rush to avoid a global calamity of unprecedented proportions. It is still too early to say for sure how successful these vaccines are and even if I line up to take it I think it still won’t happen before April based on the priority list, so there is time to weight this all out.
That very sad ladder death, caused by a fall of course should never be attributed to COVID and I am aghast at that as I am over similar gross exaggerations. But I have not and will never joining the Trump train, which for a while was taking those statistics to equally unconscionable levels, as if to imply that there were no deaths attributable to COVID. There is some level of push and shove I know on both ends of the political-scientific spectrum. I greatly welcome your film links and wishing you a Happy New Year my friend! We will talk more on this for sure! Thank you!