92 TIMES UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

A few weeks ago on Saturday Night Live, the comedienne Melissa Villasenor performed song summaries of several of this year’s Oscar nominated films. Each time, her summary closed by noting that the film in question was rooted in “white male rage.”

It’s arguable that, in some sense or another, white male rage is the single most pervasive theme in the history of American movies, maybe of movies worldwide. But Villasenor’s point is taken; from Joker to The Irishman to Jojo Rabbit to 1917 to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, white male rage seems particularly well-represented among this year’s Academy Award nominees.

Anyway, here are a few notes on the 92^nd annual awards, to be presented earlier than usual, tonight, Sunday, February 9:

Best Picture: My prediction to win—and that of Vegas, at this writing—would be the Sam Mendes WWI drama 1917. It’s an absorbing film, but my own favorite of the nominated pictures is Bong Joon Ho’s hilarious, horrifying, wildly original class satire Parasite, followed closely by Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and then by Scorsese’s The Irishman.

Best Actor: Probably the closest there is to a lock is Joaquin Phoenix as the title character in Joker, and it’s hard to argue with Phoenix’s achievement. But in a subtler way, Leonardo DiCaprio seemed just as good to me as the jittery cowboy star in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Snubbed Robert DeNiro did restrained, ultimately moving work in The Irishman, and Jonathan Pryce was great as one of the title characters in The Two Popes.

Best Actress: Renee Zellweger is heavily favored to take the award for her impressive turn as late-vintage Judy Garland in Judy. Again, I’d be hard pressed to dispute the greatness of her acting feat, whatever the shortcomings of the surrounding movie. But a word should also be said for Charlize Theron’s flawless impersonation of Megyn Kelly in the slightly underrated Bombshell.

Best Supporting Actress: I thought Florence Pugh’s Amy was the best thing about Greta Gerwig’s generally overrated version of Little Women. But Laura Dern is favored to win for her turn in Marriage Story, and I’ve always been a fan, so that’s what I’m rooting for.

Best Supporting Actor: The current favorite here is Brad Pitt as the unflappable stuntman in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and his easygoing performance was a delight. So was Anthony Hopkins as cranky, troubled Pope Benedict in The Two Popes, and Tom Hanks as a relentlessly compassionate Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. But Al Pacino’s grandly clownish Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman is his most memorable performance in years.

Best Director: Sam Mendes leads the pack for 1917, and will likely take home the Oscar unless the opinion takes hold that his one-continuous-shot approach on the film is a gimmick. I loved his quote dismissing this criticism, however: “We experience life as a single shot. We go through life with one unbroken take. It’s editing that’s the gimmick.”

The Show: Like last year, the show is scheduled to do without a host, opting instead for a procession of presenters. Presumably this was seen as the likeliest way to prevent controversy. It’s also the likeliest way to prevent entertainment.

Snubs: No doubt any number of omissions could be cited, but two leap to mind: First, how does Rami Malek win Best Actor last year for lip-synching Freddy Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, but the excellent Taron Edgerton, singing for himself, get overlooked for (the admittedly uneven) Rocketman? Second, Lulu Wang’s The Farewell was overlooked in general, but especially for Best Original Screenplay, for Best Supporting Actress for Zhao Shuzhen as the formidable Nai Nai, and for Awkwafina for Best Actress. No offense to anyone in that category, but I didn’t see five better performances than her’s this year.

Snack suggestions: Peaches and “Ram-don” (Ramen and Udon) in honor of Parasite. Pizza and Fanta pop in honor of The Two Popes.

One More Prediction: …also a boast; this past year, on this very blog, I predicted that the animated short film Hair Love, which showed before The Angry Birds Movie 2, would be nominated for an Oscar. I was right; now I’ll go out on a limb and predict that it will take the award. But I could be wrong, of course; the film is definitely, and refreshingly, not about white male rage.

BUT ALL JOKING ASIDE

Happy Friday everybody! Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Terminator: Dark Fate...

...and the documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound...

Also, Happy November everybody! Check out my "Four Corners" column on four new and newish restaurants around the Valley.

Hope everybody had a great Halloween; we counted just 13 trick-or-treaters at our door. I wore my wolf hat, and one young Spider-Man, after grabbing his handful of fun size candy, told me I looked scary. I thanked him even though I thought he was just being indulgent to an old man, and his Mom must have sensed this, because she said that no, really, from down the street, I made a rather unnerving silhouette sitting out by my front door. Glad to hear I still can.

Late Saturday evening this past weekend I was approaching the door of a Quik Trip when I glanced up to notice that The Joker was approaching the door from the other direction. By which I mean, not the campy super-villain from Batman comics or the ‘60s-era Batman TV show, but the Joker as played by Joaquin Phoenix in the Todd Phillips movie Joker, now in theaters.

I was momentarily startled; then I remembered it was the weekend before Halloween. I held the door and let the young man enter before me. But there’s no denying that his costume gave me more of a genuine chill than your run of the mill Halloween party hobgoblin.

As a cultural phenomenon, Joker appears not to be in any hurry to go away; four weeks after its opening, it returned to the number one spot at the U.S. box office, unseating another revisionist take on an iconic villain with Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. Even before its opening, Joker was the subject of anxious controversy for its perceived appeal to alienated young men. There was concern that it could even lead to violence akin to the horrific 2012 shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a midnight show of The Dark Knight Rises, by a man who reportedly identified with the character. This shooting killed twelve people and wounded dozens of others.

So far, thankfully, actual violence connected to Joker seems largely not to have materialized. But this doesn’t alter the concern of many social critics that the movie could be seen as validating, even glamorizing, the “incel” (“involuntary celibate”) sensibility and other angry, self-pitying and sometimes violent mindsets held by troubled young loners.

For those who haven’t seen it: The title character of Joker is Arthur Fleck, a young man who lives with his mother in a low-rent apartment in a run-down, monochrome, garbage-strike-stricken ‘70s-era version of Gotham City. Arthur suffers from a condition that makes him laugh uncontrollably and inappropriately. He’s a for-hire clown, work he loves and takes seriously, but which makes him the target of everyone from street thugs to treacherous coworkers. The guy can’t even playfully make faces to amuse a child on the bus without getting scolded by the kid’s mother.

In short, he’s a man more sinned against than sinning; a man who might legitimately wonder if fate somehow simply has it in for him. He suffers mightily and through no real fault of his own, and when he turns to violence initially, it’s in response to being abused by despicable strangers on a subway; for the most part he acts in self-defense. Eventually, as he self-consciously adopts the “Joker” persona, his crimes become more psychotic and calculated, but it isn’t hard to imagine the character’s actions seeming understandable and even justified to isolated, antisocial young men.

When I saw the film, about a week before it opened, what struck me was how powerful Phoenix was in the role, and how curiously unsatisfying the rest of the movie was. I certainly don’t think that Phillips and the other filmmakers had the slightest intention of justifying violence as a response to feeling lonely and persecuted, but by creating a character who suffers to such an improbably unrelieved degree, and so blamelessly, they’ve made a movie that can be read that way. It may not be what the film’s makers had in mind, but apart from showcasing a brilliant piece of acting, it’s hard to say just what they did have in mind, so this dark interpretation has naturally filled the vacuum in Joker’s thematic center.

The real, if grim, value of this movie may be to suggest how widespread this feeling of alienation is in our current angry, hectic, chaotic, social-media-driven lifestyle. Joker may be less a drama and more the description of a symptom: We’re hearing a lot of laughter these days, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of joy behind it.

RIP to the wonderful John Witherspoon, passed on at 77. I got to spend a couple of days with him in 2001 or 2002, when I worked at the Tempe Improv. Truly a lovely guy. He lamented that it had been so many years since he had seen the TV show Lost in Space and that he wanted to share the show with his kids, so I gave him a couple of VHS tapes I had of it. I’ve often wondered if he ever found time to watch them.

Finally, my beloved Mom would be 100 years old today if she hadn’t left us in 2008; Happy Century Mom! Everybody says they had the Best Mom in the World; my siblings and I actually did. Here she is, sometime in the ‘50s, on the steps of the Presbyterian Church in Vernal, Mississippi, where she and my Dad got married in 1939 (they met earlier that same year at Mardi Gras); that’s my sister Priscilla with them.

KINGS, QUEENS, JOKERS...

Happy October everybody!

It's the greatest month in the calendar, especially here in Phoenix. Check out my "Four Corners" column for the October issue of Phoenix Magazine, featuring a review of the new Medieval Times in Scottsdale, at which my pal Dave and I recently dined...

Also, happy Friday everybody! Check out my "Friday Flicks" scribblings about Joker...

...and the documentary Where's My Roy Cohn?...

Have a great weekend all!