Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

-- This is the first year I can remember where I have seen all the best-picture nominees on the day the nominations were announced.* That may be an indication that the academy, following the brouhaha over the announced-then-dropped "popular film" category,  still saw fit to nominate a lot of movies that the mass audience has seen. Only not everything. I've been searching for ways to see some of the nominees in other categories; "At Eternity's Gate" has a best-actor nomination for Willem Dafoe and, according to Box Office Mojo, was in less than 200 theaters nationwide at its peak distribution, and that was a month ago. -- The academy's expanding the best-picture category will never really work until, at the very least, the directing and writing categories are also expanded. There are eight nominees for best picture this year, but only four of those movies were also nominated for best director. (The fifth directing nomination is for "Cold War,...

Topics: a new Paul Simon biography, Michael Beschloss on presidents in wartime, Green Book, Aquaman, Roma, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, A Very English Scandal,  and more. As I mentioned before, I have used my school break to enjoy some reading, and I have managed to squeeze in a couple of more books before classes resume tomorrow. One was Robert Hilburn's biography of Paul Simon, noteworthy because Simon cooperated -- well, mostly; he declared questions about his children and about an incident with his wife Edie Brickell off-limits. There is still plenty to talk about, particularly when it comes to Simon's writing process and the changes in it. You get the details of the makings of his landmark songs, plenty about his complicated relationship with Art Garfunkel, Simon's forays into an array of musical styles (and the resulting debate over his work with South African musicians in the apartheid era) and a close look at his later, less...

When I was in college, between the end of Christmas break and the first-semester exams was  Reading Period, about 10 days where students were given a chance to prepare for their tests. These days, I still have a Reading Period of sorts, between Christmas and the resumption of my teaching at the University of Akron, when I just dive into books. The current stack is above. It's not that I cannot read the rest of the time; before tackling my post-holiday reading, I spent happy time with an advance copy of The Sopranos Sessions , a detailed examination of the landmark series by my friends Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, which is officially available in a week. I also read Thomas E. Ricks 's Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, and dipped into the Library of America's collection of Carson McCullers' s Stories, Plays and Other Writings, which LOA had made available at a nice discount. For a school project, earlier in the fall, I had read Tara Westov...

"Vice" is not quite a comedy, not quite a drama. It is an essay. Writer-director Adam McKay's previous "The Big Short" came close to the essay form in its examination of financial malfeasance but it still had a more linear, dramatic structure than "Vice," which freely skips biographical chronology and segues into oddities -- a startling mid-film closing note and credits, a Shakespearean conversation, an Everyman narrator with a twist -- all to make a point about Dick Cheney's conscience-free pursuit and retention of power. At one point a still-young Cheney asks his friend Donald Rumsfeld what they believe; Rumsfeld laughs at the notion. And it's never suggested that Cheney has a real ideology save to have to freedom to do whatever the hell he wants. An avid fisherman whose Secret Service code name was Angler, Cheney early on looked for the angles, and for the right bait to reel in his prey. He often did so as a seeming sidekick, for example...

We seem to have been on a run of celebrity deaths. Today had the news about the passing of Donald Moffat, a deft character actor who was especially good at arrogant, snobby types. He was the president in “Clear and Present Danger,” Ford Frick in “61*,” Lyndon Johnson in “The Right Stuff.” I especially liked his work in “Class Action,” where he went head to head against Gene Hackman in legal wrangling, Just before that we lost Penny Marshall, a funny actress in “Laverne & Shirley,” an able director for “A League of Their Own,” the delightful “Big,” “Renaissance Man” (worth seeing for the “Henry V” monologue, and the Christmas perennial “The Preacher’s Wife.” And it was a grin when she popped up at the end of “Get Shorty” as the director of its concluding movie. There was Ricky Jay, full of off-camera skills but a steady screen player who was a go-to for the formidable writer-directors David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson. There were people who guided my career, such as writer Will...

Notes on a few recent screen titles: "Boy Erased," written and directed by Joel Edgerton (who also plays a supporting role), is a wrenching look at the effects of kindly-intentioned intolerance. The result, in this case of gay-conversion "therapy," is not kind; in fact, it is devastating in this adaptation of the memoir by Garrard Conley. But what makes it especially horrifying is that the process is abetted by two loving parents (Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman) who want the best for their son (Lucas Hedges) -- but do not believe that the best includes his being gay. They send him off to a gay-conversion program and, as I said, it not only proves unhelpful, it is a horror for the young people forced to endure it. There is no true psychological knowledge at work in the camp, only a sense that Satan and a half-assed distillation of Freudian theory are at work in "choosing" to be gay. It's a fine, infuriating film, at once personal and issues based in...

It's that time of year when people binge on Hallmark's Christmas movies, and the House of Heldenfels is not immune. (There are limits, though. This is an unlikely addition.) That said, the movies are such easy viewing that sometimes the mind wanders. And this mind has wandered toward the idea of ... a Hallmark Christmas movies book. Sometimes the idea morphs into three books: the Christmas movies, the non-Christmas Hallmark Channel/Hallmark Movies & Mysteries films, and the classic, broadcast Hallmark Hall of Fame productions. Not that I have time to do any of these. But I have been thinking about what I would want in a Christmas movies book. Including: 1. A map of America with all those fictional small towns where the movies are set. 2. A list of the Canadian houses used most often for movie locations. 3. A list of noteworthy other roles by actors in the films.  Nyssa al Ghul! The Maytag repairman! 4. The time of the near-kiss in each movie. (The near-kiss, f...

The weather here in NE Ohio has been dreadful for a couple of days. There are puddles in the yard and the basement pump is getting a bigger workout than I came close to in the gym this morning. But so much rain also puts songs in my head, including the ones below. A lot of bumming there, but that's how it feels. Ann Peebles, "I Can't Stand the Rain" Willie Nelson, "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" Dramatics, "In the Rain" The Beatles, "Rain" Prince, "Purple Rain" Eurythmics, "Here Comes the Rain Again" Carpenters, "Rainy Days and Mondays"

Close to 20 years ago the ACLU released a report, "Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation's Highways."  It's not new. Neither, for that matter, is getting shot just for being black, too many times by police, on the flimsiest of excuses. But for too many people, there's no connection to those victims because the news audience does not see itself in the people who have been wronged. This is where the movie The Hate U Give, and the thematically similar third episode of the CW drama All American, titled "i," become important. Each takes its time to let us know the characters, to see lives, to understand fears -- before we see the terrible wrongs done to them. Although they are fictional, the characters force us to look at the real world. And it does not do it through allegory -- the way, for instance, Supergirl is a prolonged discourse on immigration -- but by direct presentation of incidents which should dishearten any audience. The...

When writing about director Damien Chazelle's "La La Land " back in 2016, I said, " Too often the homages seemed too calculated to generate real feelings, the lush settings overdone to the point that the eyes wandered away from the character." There's something of the same problem in "First Man," Chazelle's chronicle of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. Although it has some breathtaking visuals, it never gets an emotional grip on Armstrong, or a way to his interior life. For some, that is not the only problem. Articles such as this one  have pondered why "First Man" has not done as well at the box office as some expected. (Theories include conservatives' ire over the omission of a flag-planting scene, a comment by Ryan Gosling, strong competition from more obvious crowd-pleasers, and more.) None of those issues factored into my thinking. As the son of a NASA engineer*and a pre-NASA NACA mathemati...