How had I never seen...“While You Were Sleeping”?

by Cláudio Alves

Some films prove their greatness by challenging the audience. Some engage the mind, others spellbind the senses, immersing those who watch them in formalistic dreams of celluloid and digital beauty. Abrasive, cerebral, immersive, cinema can be a wonder, but we shouldn't suppose there's a single path to cinematic glory.

Don't get me wrong, I love my slow cinema, my European art-house hits, and Philosophical reveries. To cry with Carol is magic, to wander through Stalker's desolation is like dreaming with open eyes and to see New York, New York is to applaud its spectacle of ambition. But a cinephile can yearn for simple pleasures, too. Sometimes, one just wants to forget life's troubles and escape, to enjoy the goofiness of a nice comedy or the sweetness of an impossible romance. Sometimes, one just needs a hug.

And I've only just discovered that While You Were Sleeping (1995) fulfills that need with the warmest of embraces…

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Podcast: The Irishman, Terminator Dark Fate, and Oscar Buzz

with Murtada Elfadl & Nathaniel R 

Index (60 minutes)
00:01 Murtada's New Fest jury duty
03:00 Martin Scorsese's The Irishman and why it should have been called I Heard You Paint Houses.  Thoughts on the running time, Thelma Schoonmaker's editing, the de-aging visuals, and the performances of Anna Paquin, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino. And a trend in 2019: directors revisiting their favourite themes reflectively this year: Scorsese, Almodóvar, and Tarantino
23:30 The Best Supporting Actor Oscar race: Pacino versus Brad Pitt? Plus tangents about Marriage Story, Ford V Ferrari, Dolemite is My Name, Just Mercy and Honey Boy
43:00 Best Actor and Best Director races and what The Irishman's true competition is
50:00 Terminator Dark Fate  and Harriet
57:45 The Best Actress race - is Cynthia in?

READ: A thoughtful positive review of Harriet from K Austin Collins
SHARE: Two tweets we mention...

Harriet is not my favorite film of the year but if you gave hours of your life to see Darkest Hour and The Theory of Everything, you have time for a Harriet Tubman movie.

— Murtada Elfadl (@ME_Says) October 29, 2019

TERMINATOR DARK FATE not giving us an ass shot of Gabriel Luna (the first time traveller not to get one in the franchise) is homophobia. pic.twitter.com/5bR2hgcxGl

— Nathaniel Rogers (@nathanielr) October 23, 2019

 You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

I Heard Scorsese Paints Houses

What did you see this weekend?

Weekend Box Office [ESTIMATES] Nov 1st-3rd 🔺 = New or Expanding / ★ = Recommended
W I D E	PLATFORM / SPECIALTY TITLES
1 🔺  TERMINATOR DARK FATE  $29 *new*	1 🔺 PARASITE $2.6 on 461 screens (cum. $7.5) PODCAST ★
2 JOKER $13.9 (cum. $299.6) REVIEW	2 🔺 JOJO RABBIT $2.4 on 256 screens (cum. $4.2) TIFF WINNER ★
3 MALEFICENT 2 $12.1 (cum. $84.3)	3  HOUSEFULL 4 $463k on 315 screens (cum. $1.7)
4 🔺 HARRIET  $12 *new*	4 PAIN AND GLORY $348k on 111 screens (cum. $2.1) REVIEW, PODCAST ★
5 ADDAMS FAMILY $8.4 (cum. $85.2)	5 LINDA RONSTADT... $90k on 94 screens (cum. $3.9) REVIEW

The latest in a long line of attempts to keep the Terminator franchise going opened below expectations and will have trouble breaking even given its enormous budget. They shouldn't have messed with the mandatory ass shot! In other news Harriet performed above expectations which bodes well for Cynthia Erivo's Oscar campaign which had been losing some lustre after decent but hardly inspiring reviews for the film. Parasite continues to be a smash hit in limited release and is in a ton of markets now on 461 screens.  It'll be the second highest-grossing subtitled picture this year within a week (with only The Farewell left to conquer)

99 days til Oscar - let's get drunk

The number 99 always makes us think of that roadtrip sing-a-long "99 bottles of beer on the wall" which naturally leads to the question... what's the best booze-soaked performance of all time? 

In recent years our answer would totally be Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine (2013) who justly careened right into her second Oscar. Screen drunks are actually rather commonly beloved by the Academy factoring into many Oscar-nominated roles but the list of winners is shorter. After the jump a (complete?) list of completely inebriated Oscar wins. How would you rank them? 

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Streaming Roulette, Nov: The King Lives by Night

As is our practice we've selected a handful plus of new-to-streaming titles and frozen them at utterly random moments without cheating (whatever comes up comes up!). What should you queue up for NOVEMBER 2019 ? (★ means we definitely recommend catching) 

Let's get started...

-Meet me in the garden tomorrow

The Thief of Bagdad (1940) on Criterion Channel
This fantasy adventure based on The Arabian Knights won 3 Oscars in its year (Special Effects, Cinematography Color and Art Direction Color). Fill in those Oscar gaps! Weird trivia note: NONE of those categories it won had the standard 5 nominees. It took the Academy awhile to settle on the "five per category" rule that dominated the Oscars for decades. There were 14 films nominated for Special Effects that year -- the visual effects category in particular has had multiple strange incarnations and volatility. 

I'm going to ask you to deliver this message to France given your... familiarity with its recipient.

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