You talkin' about De Niro? You talkin' about De Niro?

It's a performance episode of "Contrarian Corner". Here's Ben Miller...

The narrative has been pushed.  Robert De Niro is back! Al Pacino is back! Scorsese and Netflix are a match made in heaven! The Irishman is the Best Picture frontrunner.  I'm not here to disagre with the critical acclaim.  But, we need to have a talk about what is going on with Robert De Niro.  

There are three main problems...

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The AFI Lists

The AFI are now in their 20th year so they're as old as our own Film Bitch Awards ;) Each year they choose 10 American movies to honor and 10 American television programs and then usually make one nod to non American things as they did this year with shoutouts to South Korea (Parasite) and the UK (Fleabag). Their nominating jury is made up of critics, movie people, and other luminaries and changes each year. But regardless of the individual voters you usually end up with something like the Oscar list. This year leans VERY December as if no other months held movies so the jury had extremely short attention spans. That said at least The Farewell and Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood are surviving those very very very short attention spans that always plague voters.

Here is the full list of this year’s honorees who will be honored at a luncheon in January...

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"The Irishman" takes NYFCC

Another day, another prize for The Irishman. Following its NBR win, the Martin Scorsese epic takes the much more prestigious top prize from the New York Film Critics Circle. This is Scorsese’s second movie to win the NYFCC. The first was Goodfellas (1990). 

Here are the winners and a few comments...

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Doc Corner: 'At the Heart of Gold' prizes the voice of survivors above all else

By Glenn Dunks

It has become somewhat unkind to describe a documentary as old fashioned or traditional. It seems to be that talking heads intercutting a single, linear story is somehow considered by some to be stodgy and boring. If you watch enough of them, you see recreations and animations and all sorts of gimmicky tricks to, I suppose, dazzle the viewer into thinking they are watching something that is more ‘cinematic’ than it is (whatever such a term may mean to you). They don’t always work, and in those time that they do in fact not work it can often harm a film, distracting from what could have been a, yes, simple, but usually better film. You could call it old fashioned or traditional.

Thanks heavens then that director Erin Lee Carr didn’t try any of that nonsense in the HBO documentary At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastic Scandal.

Even its title is so meat and potatoes that those who expect works of non-fiction to have evolved beyond the classical form will probably zone out just hearing the name. But Carr’s movie is one of such harrowing despair that anything other than clear, direct, unfussy filmmaking would have been all wrong.

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Soundtracking: Blue Valentine

by Chris Feil

“You and me, you and me. Nobody baby but you and me...”

Ryan Gosling’s Dean breaks a makeout session and produces the romantic gesture lost to our time: a playlist burnt to a cd. It’s the ultimate young love gesture and met in kind with wide-eyed affection by the young woman its meant for, Michelle Williams’ Cindy. He’s chosen a song for them, in the tradition of all romances, one that will belong just to them. Before the soulful murmur of “You and Me” by Penny and the Quarters, Dean acknowledges the cliche of it as quickly as he shrugs it off. They will be different from all those other couples going honoring the ritual, he promises her. They will be special.

Blue Valentine charts the degradation of such romantic fantasies, showing us how painfully average their broken love will become, with music the embodiment of that fading vision of romance...

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