Those Goofy Golden Globes

By Steve Evans

Let's not Monday morning quarterback last night's Golden Globes, beyond the observation that the awards remain the biggest con job in Hollywood. Most everyone knows the Hollywood Foreign Press Association controls the outcome of this lesser event (Oscar is still the gold standard, naturally). Fewer may realize that the Globes are chosen on the votes of less-than-100 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press. They are hardly arbiters of taste or quality in the cinematic and television arts. Yes, but the Globes deliver something the Oscars do not: a looser atmosphere fueled by an open bar. Through the years I've seen celebs stoned as monkeys during this show. Liz Taylor was trashed at the 2001 awards. Jack Nicholson stuck his ass out at the audience three years later during his acceptance speech for About Schmidt.

This is all a jolly lark, of course, and makes for good television (you can still check out Liz and Jack on YouTube), but the idiosyncratic nature of  the HFPA makes the Globes a lousy bellweather for the Academy Awards.

Although La La Land took a record 7 Globes last night, Moonlight will win the Oscar for Best Picture on Feb. 26. This is a political reality as certain as Meryl Streep dissing some asshole who was elected president by a bunch of -- yep -- gullible assholes.

Trump is an easy, though deserving, target. Whether Moonlight deserves to win Best Picture next month is a separate issue from the fact that it's going to win -- because Hollywood will have to deal with the banshee screaming that will result if it doesn't.

Let me be clear: I absolutely agree that Hollywood can do a better job of inclusion by employing people of all creeds, races and persuasions both in front of and behind the camera. I reject the notion that entertainment awards should have a quota system so that X number of minorities or other underrepresented groups are sure to get an Oscar. If films and talent cannot win on merit, then let's abolish awards.

And yet a boorish buffoon has won the presidency in the absence of merit, talent, appeal or even basic human decency. Is it obscene to compare silly awards to the Democratic process? Perhaps not if we drill down to a common motivation between the HFPA and the president-elect. It is this:

The Hollywood Foreign Press, ever-slick as weasel shit, manages to avoid hot-button issues of racism, sexism and quota-based awards by maintaining a ludicrous number of award categories, though especially the top two. They gave Best Drama to Moonlight and Best Comedy or Musical to La La Land. Equal, safe and predictable. Everybody goes home happy after the Globes. By eschewing controversy while allowing celebrities an open mic to blabber drunkenly about whatever comes to mind, the people behind the Globes last night not only solidified their reputation for irrelevance but managed to underline it at least three times, all for the sake of ratings and their own unquenchable thirst for self-aggrandizement. What irks me today is how they reveal themselves to be similar to the scary clown soon to take the oath of office. Whether you're the purveyor of a hokey awards show or a billionaire con artist, it's all about money and attention. Always has been. Dare I say, always will be.

Michael Cimino (1939-2016): An Appreciation

By Steve Evans
Today let's talk about promises unfulfilled. This is mostly an excuse to scribble a bit about the director Michael Cimino, who died July 2 with his age in dispute. He told interviewers through the years that he was born in ’52, but sometimes he said ’48, while official records state his birth as Feb. 3, 1939. That would have made him 77.

The essential thing anyone needs to know about Cimino is he produced, directed and co-wrote The Deer Hunter (1978), which took five Academy Awards, earned Christopher Walken an Oscar, put Meryl Streep on the map, was John Cazale’s final film (he never saw the finished picture) and ranks among Robert De Niro’s greatest work. The Deer Hunter is one of the best films ever made and has been on my own Top 10 list since I first saw it 38 years ago on opening week. Now, if you absolutely had to know two things about Cimino, the other would be he also directed Heaven’s Gate, which did not win any Oscars, lost many millions of dollars, destroyed Cimino’s career and contributed to the collapse of United Artists, one of the original Hollywood studios. UA was founded by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, so it had been around for awhile.

Explaining the failure of Heaven’s Gate is an essay unto itself and others have explored this topic better than I, with my limited time and lack of inclination. I will note only that the film is worthy of viewing and ripe with great moments, though as a whole undone by Cimino’s notorious hubris, an inflexible and obsessive pursuit of excellence, and unchecked access to studio money, which financed an ungodly complex and multilayered plot that audiences, with their gnat-like attention spans, did not want to see. That's the short version of the folly that became Heaven's Gate. (For a deep dive into the fallout, read Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Steven Bach's Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists.)

So Cimino’s professional life, it can be said, is one of disappointment and unfulfilled promise. He never again hit the artistic triumph of The Deer Hunter and the failure of his follow-up essentially doomed him. I encourage you to read about the last years of Michael Cimino. Variety.com ran a good obit this morning.

On the flip side, Cimino never promised me he’d surpass The Deer Hunter. I’m not sure anyone could. I’d like to explain why this is an essential film, though mostly why it impaled itself through my mind, and that is why I pay tribute to Cimino today. His career was like a bottle rocket – burning fast, red hot and quickly extinguished.

Unlike most critics and film historians, I never thought The Deer Hunter was “about” the Vietnam War. Rather, it is about three men of identical working-class backgrounds but with markedly different personalities, and how they each cope with horrific, life-altering circumstances as a consequence of going to war. It’s really a look at masculinity, of what it means to be a man and how a man responds to impossible situations.

Seeing the Deer Hunter, I most wanted to be like Robert De Niro’s character and nothing like John Cazale’s character, Stan, who doesn’t even go to war.

Stan represents the weak male, the ineffectual hanger-on whose identity depends on the men he can surround himself with. The central characters played by De Niro, Walken and John Savage (a last minute replacement for Roy Scheider, who quit the production and opted, instead, to star in Jaws 2, for crissakes) -- all present variations of masculinity and how war either defines or destroys it.

While the film itself remains a devastating emotional experience, it also has the distinction of containing the single greatest sequence of unbearable intensity and suspense in the history of motion pictures. Period. I refer, of course, to the infamous sequence where De Niro, Walken and Savage are held in a Vietcong POW encampment, forced to play Russian roulette for the gambling amusement of their captors along the most desolate stretch of rat-infested river ever seen in film. They are slapped and taunted repeatedly, guns held to their heads, as the lead tormentor screams “Mau!”

I should mention that I have seen close to 15,000 motion pictures during a lifelong love affair with the cinema. Never have I seen a more terrifying and emotionally exhausting sequence than the Russian roulette tortures endured by the protagonists of this film. It ranks among the most brilliantly constructed 15 minutes of film in the history of the medium.

This picture is unusual for its time in the intensity of its patriotic fervor and religious faith, core pillars of the steel mining town the protagonists call home. But neither God nor country offers salvation. It comes only through De Niro’s daring rescue of his friends and downriver escape. Again, that Russian roulette sequence. I actually cheer when De Niro blasts a hole through the head of his hateful captor and all hell breaks loose.

And after the war, their patriotism remains undaunted, though there’s little evidence to suggest their country remembers the sacrifice.

I saw this picture when I was 15 years old and it haunted me for days afterwards. Whenever I’ve seen it in the 38 years since, I’ve found myself in the same vise-grip of total involvement. The Deer Hunter holds up.

It seems every time I view the film I challenge myself to a different question. Three decades ago, as a boy, I wondered how I would handle myself in the same circumstances as these men. Today I know the answer. The film helped me understand the only motivation a man needs to survive. Not for God. Not for country. For my children, my friends and myself. When art helps us achieve that level of clarity, the artist has really accomplished something.

When the world screams "Mau!"

I say, "Yeah? Bring it."

Thank you for a masterpiece, Mr. Cimino. I’m no longer wondering what you might have done, only grateful for what you did.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2016 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.