“Roma” Wins Best Picture from the Broadcast Film Critics! Close ties with Gaga, no REALLY!Christian Bale wins TWICE!

“Roma” makes history at the Broadcast Film Critics tonight. It becomes the first foreign language film to ever win Best Picture. It also won Best Director for its genius helmer Alfonso Cuaron, and he also won for Best Cinematography. Altogether “Roma” won the most awards tonight as it also won Best Foreign Film.

History was also made when Glenn Glose for “The Wife” tied with Lady Gaga for “A Star is Born.” That is a combo I thought I would never in this life see onstage together ! Both WINNING!

For those who care about these things, Lady Gaga’s leading man/director/co-screenwriter/co-producer Bradley Cooper once again got  SQUAT! Nada. Nothing Zilch! Just like he also got completely shafted by the Golden Globes.

Gaga’s win here least keeps her in the race, to some degree. But the Academy, who hands out the Oscars is going to give it to 70-something veteran Glenn Close, who has six previous nominations and no wins.

Mahershala Ali nailed Best Supporting Actor once again for “The Green Book,” and he will probably go on to repeat his Golden Globe triumph at the Oscars. This category is now officially closed.

Regina King also won, AGAIN, for “If Beale Street Could Talk” but she won’t win at the SAGS because she wasn’t nominated there. Watch Amy Adams for “Vice” take that.

Christian Bale was TWICE tonight for his evil vice president in “Vice.” This makes him almost a lock now for Best Actor at the Oscars,

YEAR’S TEN BEST FILMS 2018

1.BOY ERASED

2.ROMA

3. MARY POPPINS RETURNS

4.YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

5. THE FAVOURITE

6. THE GREEN BOOK

7.THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS

8.THE ISLE OF DOGS

9.MAMA MIA,HERE WE GO AGAIN!

10.ORSON WELLES’ THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD

It’s Over 100 Degrees in NYC. Perfect Antidote Mhz’s “Antartica:In the Footsteps of the Emperor”

New York is melting in over 100 degree temperatures. It’s brutal out there. So why not stay inside In the air-conditioning and watch the latest from Mhz? “Antarctica: In the Footsteps of the Emporor”

This is a very different offering from Mhz who usually specializes in heavy duty European television crime dramas. A favorite of mine “Maigret,” but their new “Antarctica:In the Footsteps of the Emperor.” is something else entirely. It’s a delightful French documentary on the sub-Artic continent, by Luc Jaquet, who brought us the equally delightful “March of the Penguins” in 2016.

And once again, those penguins steal the show. This documentary focuses on the filmmaker/photographers themselves. An intrepid band of French Antarctic enthusiasts, who just HAVE to  photograph every single aspect of the frozen continent. Their journey is compelling because they feel that climate change has even affected this least approachable of land masses. It’s melting fast. And they show it.

They have found traces of human waste and pollution in the water and also in what the birds and other mammals are eating…And the penguins! How can one not love the most humanoid of birds, who all resemble Alfred Hitchcock? To me any way. And we are engaged in their struggle to survive the brutal arctic conditions. They upstage the filmmakers at every turn, but we form concerns, too, about this intrepid band of Frenchmen, who are so obsessed with Antarctica, they even want to photograph and record what’s BENEATH it. Have you ever seen the UNDERside of an iceberg? Well, you will here in this terrific doc.

Your heart is in your mouth as these daredevil deep-sea divers go  beyond the beyond. To depths of the oceans bottom that were unimaginable heretofore. Laurent Ballest and Vincent Munier and their crew attempt, and succeed where to bravely go where no man has gone before.

“It’s like walking on the moon!” They exclaim, in French, over and over. And you’ll feel like you’ve taken a really cool and cooling escape from the heat of planet earth, when you watch Mhz’s enchanting and thrilling “Antartica:In the Footsteps of the Emperor.” Emperor Penguin, of course. It’s the perfect summertime movie!

Agnes Varda, 89, Is Up, in More Ways than One @ the NYFF!

Everything is so up at the NYFF 55, it makes my heart sing! Not the least of which is their big tribute to the tiniest of French Grande Dames du Cinema, Agnes Varda. My latest review at Awardsdaily.com on the great French icon. I called it “Hot at 89” And it was published within minutes! Beautiful lay-out by Sasha Stone and her gifted editor Ryan Adams! Merci a tous, as Agnes would say.

http://www.awardsdaily.com/2017/10/01/hot-89-agnes-varda-nyff-french-cinema-icon-honored/

“Indecent” Glorious Lesbian/Jewish Musical Play

“Indecent” is Pulitzer Prize Winning Lesbian playwright Paula Vogel’s masterpiece. This great American playwright has finally found her voice at age 68 and her greatest triumph. “Indecent” is now at the Cort Theater on Broadway and long may it run. As long as “Fiddler on the Roof,” which it strangely resembles, though it is really a straight play with a lot, and I mean a lot, of  joyous songs and dances  in Yiddish . Perfectly, flawlessly executed under director/collaborator Rebecca Taichman’s masterful hand.

At this point in my LONNNNG, career as also a gay playwright, actor, director and critic, I thought I knew every gay and lesbian play backwards and forwards and inside out, four ways to Sunday and back again. But “Indecent” shocked me, not by its’ touching, almost reticent depiction of Lesbian-Jewish love at the turn of the last century. (1907 to be exact), but by the fact that “Indecent” is a play-within-a-play-within-in play and that play was the first successful lesbian play just about ever.

And it was written by a newly married heterosexual Jewish playwright Sholem Asch and called “Got fun Nekome” or “God of Vengeance.” “Indecent” is a celebration and almost a complete re-staging of this incredibly important, seminal, nearly lost GLBT play. We see scenes from it acted out and re-acted endlessly.

It’s certainly one of the best plays of the year, and the most pertinent in this era of incipient terror that is upon us. “Indecent” couldn’t be more timely, or more beautiful. And it’s simple, so simple, and yet utterly complex. So complex, it has sub-titles or super-titles above the action telling us what, when and in what language, the present scene is taking place. It’s a very nifty device, and the shifting Yiddish/English text is glorious in its’ magnificent execution.

It’s ensemble cast of seven, plus three on-stage actor/musicans,  is flawless. And the story and history of “God of Vengeance” is unbelievably dramatic and true.

Of course it was banned and the cast jailed when they LAST tried to do it on Broadway in 1923. By that time “God of Vengenance” had been a hit all over Europe and also in the Yiddish theater here in New York. But they hit the proverbial wall uptown when they were declared “Obscene, indecent, immoral and impure” and shut down immediately.

It’s ninety minutes and a harrowing delight. Let me add that the final song “Wiegala” heard near the play’s conclusion, was written by Ilse Klein, a nurse at the children’s hospital in Theresienstadt, one of the most notorious concentration camps. She sang this song as a lullaby for the children in the wards there before they were to be transported. It is said she sang this song in line to the gas chambers.Are you crying yet? I was. Yes, “Indecent” will move you to tears and to dance and sing and celebrate Paula Vogel’s breath-taking triumph of a life time.

Debbie Reynolds Dies One Day After Carrie Fisher “Brights Lights” both

Hollywood’s heart is surely broken forever with the devastating news of Legend Debbie Reynolds death the day after her beloved daughter Carrie Fisher’s death. I’m sad. I’m reeling. I just saw them featured quite marvelously in “Bright Lights” a doc on their tangled lives at the NYFF. And the thing that struck me so much about “Bright Lights” by Fisher Stevens, was how much they loved each other. How much fun they had and what a joy and a treat this documentary was.

It’s supposed to air on HBO, now probably sooner rather than later, but don’t miss it. It now has an air of tragedy hanging about it, that both Fisher and Reynolds dispel completely by their constantly being “On.” And entertaining us mightily and forever. It’s a fitting tribute to them, as they always say.

And they don’t hold back. It’s like they just couldn’t. But they loved each other and clearly couldn’t live without each other as events have sadly born out.

When I heard Carrie had died, I just KNEW in my heart that her death would kill Debbie, too, and it did. Their houses adjoined each other more or less “up a steep hill” as Carrie put it in Hollywood. They collected endless memorabilia from the Golden Days, and now Debbie herself, one of the biggest symbols of Hollywood’s hey day that there ever was is gone.

I can scarcely stand it. Debbie Reynolds played such a large role in my life, always the smiling, dancing teenager from “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Tammy” that song that never leaves your mind. And she was even nominated for an Oscar once for “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

Carrie had “Star Wars” a bigger hit financially than any of her mother’s films ever were. And her now iconic Princess Leia never really bowled me over. But her millions of fans disagree.

I loved her acerbic wit, which the film “Bright Lights” capitalizes on by starting with Carrie calling Debbie “tsu-Mommy,” but not to her face. When she enters the room with Debbie in it, it’s always “Mommy.” And the sweetness is not faked for the cameras.

With all her addictions and bipolar disorders, I always thought of Carrie as crashingly normal despite her upbringing and her surroundings. And so did she.

Debbie once said of Carrie “She’s genuine.” And she was. They both were.

We, the fans, are with them forever and are happy that they are together again in Hollywood Heaven. And we do have this great upcoming doc “Bright Lights” to watch over and over again as soon as it starts airing.

No Mommie Dearest relationship here. They truly loved each other. Don’t miss “Bright Lights.” Their bright lights will never go out.

#Debbie Reynolds Death

# Bright Lights doc

# Carrie Fisher Death

NYFF Opens with “The 13th” by Ava DuVernay

My review of the Opening of the 54th New York Film Festival with Ava DuVernay’s incredible doc, “The 13th” a veritable history of racism and descrimination in our country.

Here’s the link to the article at http://www.awardsdaily.com

http://bit.ly/2djnDC1

“The Royal Road” Must See Lesbian Doc

There’s something about intelligent lesbian lovelorn conversation that irrevocably holds me in its sway. And coming out very soon on DVD & VOD on Sept. 6, “The Royal Road” an unusual, innovative documentary is a must-see for every lesbian and gay and everyone else, who is reading this. It’s kind of a jewel, in its’ own unique, stubborn way.

Filmmaker Jenni Olson debuted “The Royal Road” to much acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival last year, but I’m just catching up to its’  challenging  beautys now. “The Royal Road” doesn’t make things easy for the viewer. Its’ esthetic is extreme. The 16 mm. camera NEVER moves and there is not one human being in the frame.Nor will there ever be. But there is an incredibly revealing and engaging voice-over by the filmmaker herself. It’s not a lesbian conversation. It’s a lesbian monologue, perhaps the longest one ever, as Olson confronts us with the daunting, relentless shot-after-shot of California’s decaying once pristine Royal Road or the Camino Real.

Once a uninterrupted trail from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the road itself is part of California’s repulsive urban sprawl and not romantic at all. While it is nothing to look at, Olson MAKES us look at it, and at the same time, because the images she’s chosen don’t move, you HAVE to listen to her. And you do. And it becomes mesmeric.

As a native New Yorker, who has still yet to visit the LGBT capital of the world, the City by the Bay, it was all news to me, as Olson wants to show us HER lesbian San Francisco and tell her own woman’s story of how she left her heart there.

And a large part of her story is wrapped up in Alfred Hitchcock’s Number One critically proclaimed film “Vertigo.” By the time, she gets to this part of “The Royal Road” I was completely hooked. I’d only re-watched “Vertigo” earlier this week!On Monday night! It’s a film that never leaves you. It’s its’ own obsession.

Olson  hooked me into her narrative, just as the hypnotic spell of Kim Novak’s Madeline Elster bewitches James Stewart’s stalwart, but vertically challenged policeman Scotty Ferguson in this classic movie of Obsession. And of secondarily, obsession with San Francisco.

She explains as she reads from an unheard, cut speech from the original “Vertigo” screenplay that Gavin Elster explains that his wife, Madeline(Novak) has fallen under the spell of old San Francisco and that it has driven her mad.So intense is her desire to find ole San Fran that she roams the city in search of it and stops whenever a piece of it jumps out at her.

Olson involves the viewer mightily with this ingenious piece of historical/cinematic   dialogue that I’d never heard spoken before. As research, it’s a find. It’s  breathtaking  and I’m not going to do “The Royal Road” the injustice of a complete speech quotation here. That would be tantamount to spoiling it,  but suffice it to say that it makes “The Royal Road” and also “Vertigo” at last make sense.

So I have to say thank you, Jenni Olsen, for finally elucidating this. She also audaciously makes Hitchcock a character in her monologue as she is trying to explain and examine HIS obsession with San Francisco and “Vertigo” and her own. For the first time, she claims “Vertigo” as an important lesbian movie in terms of the impact that the quest for character of Madeline, mirrored her own.

So she answers a couple of important, unresolved questions about “Vertigo,” including the fact that the quixotic name of the mysterious Madeline was probably  inspired by Proust! And of course, it’s Proust’s tasting a madeline cookie that sends him on HIS historic literary quest in “Remembrance of Things Past.” Just as Olson has taken us on a “Royal Road” into her own history, in her own unique. original way.

I loved this lovely little film and I hope you do, too!

#Vertigo # Royal Road # Lesbian# San Francisco # Documentary # Hitchcock # Royal Road

Provincetown Award Winners 2016

With great regret and sadness, due to circumstances beyond my control, I was unable to attend this year’s Provincetown International Film Restival. Though I was enthusiastically invited. Things that I don’t want to bore you all with stopped me, but suffice it to say, I look forward to attending NEXT year and going to to the Montreal and Toronto Film Festivals in August and September. It just killed me to miss two-time Oscar winner Ang Lee. who I adore /and whom I have so much to talk about with His”Brokeback Mountain” changed my life, as I always say. He was the guest of honor as this year’s “Fimmaker on the Edge.”

But anywho, here’s a list of the award winners that were announced last night.

NOW ANNOUNCING OUR FESTIVAL WINNERS HBO AUDIENCE AWARDS JOHN SCHLESINGER AWARDS BEST SHORTS FESTIVAL SPECIAL MENTIONS Visit Our Website! 2016 PROVINCETOWN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL WINNERS ANNOUNCED HBO Audience Award/Best Narrative Feature:  THE INNOCENTS directed by Anne Fontaine HBO Audience Award/Best Documentary Feature (tie): THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS: YO-YO MA AND THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE  directed by Morgan Neville POLITICAL ANIMALS directed by Jonah Markowitz and Tracy Wares HBO Short Documentary Award: TERRITORY directed by Eleanor Mortimer The John Schlesinger Award, presented to a first time feature filmmaker (narrative):  BLOOD STRIPE directed by Remy Auberjonois The John Schlesinger Award, presented to a first time feature filmmaker (documentary):  OFF THE RAILS directed by Adam Irving Here Media Award – Best Queer Short Film:  ONE LAST NIGHT directed by Kerem Blumberg Best Narrative Short Film: THUNDER ROAD directed by Jim Cummings Best Animated Short Film:  GLOVE directed by Alexa Haas and Bernardo Britto Best New England Short Film:  BLACK CANARIES directed by Jesse Kreitzer Best Student Short Film: THE MINK CATCHER directed by Samantha Buck Special Mention: ¡MAIS DURO! directed by Camila Saldarriaga Congratulations to all our winners and to all the hardworking artists and filmmakers on the edge who attended this year’s  18th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival! The Short Film Jury consisted of Ian Samuels (filmmaker, MYRNA THE MONSTER), Lisanne Skyler (filmmaker, BRILLO BOX (3¢ OFF)) and Kim Yutani (Senior Programmer, Sundance Film Festival). Save the date and join us for next year’s festival! June 14-18, 2017 Making Provincetown the Global Destination for Creative Exploration In Film! The Provincetown Film Festival| 508.487.3456| info@ptownfilm.org |www.ptownfilmfest.org/

New “Germans & Jews” Doc, trenchant, affecting look at Post-War Germany

The opening line of a harrowing new doc “Germans and Jews” is a very respectable looking young man saying “We were taught to believe that there were two kinds of people in the world, Jews and Nazis” and the film goes on to elucidate this. “Germans and Jews” just opened yesterday and deals with this enormous topic in trenchant, arresting ways.

This sharp, quickly paced documentary is a must-see for anyone contemplating the Holocaust on any level, and especially what came after. While there have been many, many films chronicling the atrocities committed under the Third Reich against Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and other minorities, “Germans and Jews” concerns itself with what happened to Germans, Germany and the Jews, AFTER the war was declared over.

“The National Trauma” as it is called here seems never-ending, for both sides of the equation. Yes, many thousands of Jews emigrated to the US and to the newly-forming state of Israel, the film also reveals that many Jews returned to German and that Berlin is noted to have the fastest growing Jewish population.

German today is NOT the Germany of Hitler, the filmmakers are careful to point out, and is considered quite the democratic, desirable country of choice decades later.

There’s also the question of denial, which evidently a large portion of the German population is holding to, even to this day. “It never happened.” “We don’t talk about it.” “It is never spoken of.” “We didn’t know.” We hear this from the non-Jewish Germans again and again as startling and shocking as these statements seem. All sides are represented of this very complicated question and “Germans and Jews” is essential viewing if only to see how clueless, even today, many ordinary Germans are.Or say they are.