Night Moves (1975)

Film: Night Movies (1975)

Stars: Gene Hackman, Susan Clark, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, James Woods, Melanie Griffith

Director: Arthur Penn

Oscar History: No nominations, though Hackman did get a BAFTA nomination so it was probably in the running.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

We're not quite done yet with our monthlong blog marathon.  While I initially wanted this to be only in June, the month slightly got away from me, and as a result I'm going to bleed into this weekend.  I owe you (after this article) five articles that I had said would be part of our month, and we'll get to all five of them by Sunday plus the kick off of our July star, which will officially end our anniversary celebration.  This is a part-time blog, after all, and I don't want to shortchange you, but I also have to admit that sometimes other priorities get in the way.  Today, we're going to move our film noir marathon firmly into the direction of neo-noir, with one of the quintessential dark detective dramas of the 1970's, Arthur Penn's Night Moves.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is focused on Harry Moseby (Hackman), who is a retired pro football player who now makes his money doing divorce cases & looking for runaways.  He finds out in the opening of the film that his wife Ellen (Clark) is cheating on him, largely because he's neglected her for his work.  Instead of tending to his marriage, Harry instead is working on his latest case, working for a drunken divorcee's daughter Delly (Griffith), who has run away from a terrible home...but her mother wants her back because she's her child support meal ticket.  This sets off a dangerous game, as we soon learn that the world that Delly has run into, filled with sexual depravity, art smuggling, & frequent murders, is far more than Harry could've bargained for.

One of the key distinguishers between the film noir of the 1940's & 50's and the neo-noir craze that would dominate the 1970's & 80's was the lack of the Hays Code.  This wasn't just a way to have more violence & nudity (which Night Moves has), but it's also a way to play with the formula.  Noir always had the bad guy get caught, the hero either live or die heroically, and the girl getting what was coming to her (either a big kiss, or if she was too evil, the wrong end of a bullet).  Neo-noir didn't have to play by these rules.  The femme fatale could get away with it, the villains might win, the detective might not be the better for it (or die trying to get to the truth).  You saw this in films like Body Heat, The Long Goodbye, and the greatest film of the era, Chinatown.

This is also the case with Night Moves, which slowly drowns Harry in this world, immersing him in a world obsessed with sex, particularly a number of leering older men driven to grave sin while lusting after a teenage Melanie Griffith (Night Moves would not be able to be made today without getting crucified on Twitter), and a duplicitous Jennifer Warren as a woman you can't pin down (it's not entirely clear even as she dies what she had planned next with a treasure about to board her ship, and a boat with only one other guy in the middle of the ocean).  The film ends in bright daylight, with Harry shot down by a man he'd assumed to be innocent but who is, in fact, part of the conspiracy he's stumbled across, and with Harry just inches away from a steering wheel that could get him home...except he can't reach it.  The film was seen as a metaphor for the end of Watergate, when a hopeless America didn't know what to think...but it also serves as a pretty shocking spin on the noir, with everything you understand being skewed enough so that by the twisty ending you can't trust anything that comes next.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Nightcrawler

Ranking the Lost Episodes

It is my birthday, and tomorrow we will be concluding our month-long 10th Anniversary celebration.  As a result, I wanted to do something extra-special on our penultimate day, and that of course meant we needed to do some ode to my favorite TV Show, Lost.

If you look at the tag at the bottom of these, you will find that I have written about Lost a lot.  It is not just my favorite show, it's also my favorite thing.  As a result, though, I only allow myself to rewatch it once every three years, and we are not scheduled for another viewing until 2023, so I can't try a new slant on it for this year's article with a fresh viewing.  So instead, I'm going to pay homage by revealing, for the first time ever on the blog, my definitive ranking of all of the episodes.

A couple of notes before you dive in.  First, I don't have recaps of these episodes, but you can read my full recap of every episode here: Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6.  I've also done a ranking like this for the mobisodes that you can find here.  I don't, therefore, have episode descriptions below (it's just the list) since you can find VERY in-depth looks at every episode there (if you haven't seen the show, I encourage you to watch it before clicking those links, though this post is the rare spoiler-free one for Lost).

Second, I will say straight-up that Lost is something I love, even at its worst.  I genuinely liked the finale, and think that the people who got super angry about the ending were either expecting too much (the philosophy of Lost poses questions that humans haven't been able to answer in the past 2000 years-I doubt a weekly ABC program could find the solutions) or are the kinds of people who only want things to end the way they wanted to (I suspect the Venn Diagram of people who really hated the Lost finale and hated The Last Jedi would resemble a circle).  As a result, this is just a ranking of episodes on the show...none of these episodes are ones that I skip when I rewatch, none of them are ones that I hate.  Even at its worst, Lost was usually the best hour of television on that week.

Finally, these are a personal list.  I understand qualitatively that some episodes are technically better than others, and while that bears out in the rankings (#2 is pretty much every Lost fan's favorite for a reason), it also means that I will favor episodes that center on certain characters more than others.  John Locke, Ben, Sawyer, & Sun are my favorite characters that regularly got their own episodes so they'll rank higher, and I tend to like some of the lighter fare because I know how serious the back-half of the series gets & I love getting to just hang out with these characters (#14, for example, moves up virtually every time I rewatch the series under this logic).  So if you have quibbles, bring them to the comments, but keep that in mind before laying into me for a personal favorite that feels slighted or an unsung hero that is way higher-than-expected.  And with that, here are my rankings:

1.    Through the Looking Glass (3.22)

2.    The Constant (4.5)

3.    Deus Ex Machina (1.19)

4.    The End (6.17)

5.    Exodus, Part 2 (1.24)

6.    The Candidate (6.14)

7.    The Incident, Parts 1 & 2 (5.16)

8.    Exodus, Part 1 (1.23)

9.    There’s No Place Like Home, Parts 2 & 3 (4.13)

10.  The Other 48 Days (2.7)

11.  Walkabout (1.4)

12.  Sundown (6.6)

13.  Greatest Hits (3.21)

14.  Tricia Tanaka is Dead (3.10)

15.  Live Together Die Alone (2.23)

16.  Ab Aeterno (6.9)

17.  The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham (5.7)

18.  Flashes Before Your Eyes (3.8)

19.  The Shape of Things to Come (4.9)

20.  Happily Ever After (6.11)

21.  Pilot, Part 2 (1.2)

22.  The 23^rd Psalm (2.10)

23.  The Man Behind the Curtain (3.20)

24.  The Man from Tallahassee (3.13)

25.  Solitary (1.19)

26.  Not in Portland (3.7)

27.  Dead is Dead (5.12)

28.  Ji Yeon (4.7)

29.  D.O.C. (3.18)

30.  Raised by Another (1.10)

31.  Orientation (2.3)

32.  The Substitute (6.4)

33.  LAX Parts 1 & 2 (6.1-2)

34.  The Long Con (2.13)

35.  Do No Harm (1.20)

36.  Confirmed Dead (4.2)

37.  Lighthouse (6.5)

38.  Whatever Happened, Happened (5.11)

39.  Confidence Man (1.9)

40.  …In Translation (1.17)

41.  Dr. Linus (6.7)

42.  The Cost of Living (3.5)

43.  The Whole Truth (2.16)

44.  Because You Left (5.1)

45.  Enter 77 (3.11)

46.  Man of Science, Man of Faith (2.1)

47.  Everybody Hates Hugo (2.4)

48.  Everybody Loves Hugo (6.12)

49.  White Rabbit (1.5)

50.  I Do (3.6)

51.  A Tale of Two Cities (3.1)

52.  One of Us (3.16)

53.  LaFleur (5.8)

54.  Lockdown (2.17)

55.  There’s No Place Like Home, Part 1 (4.12)

56.  Numbers (1.18)

57.  The Glass Ballerina (3.2)

58.  What They Died For (6.16)

59.  Outlaws (1.16)

60.  Jughead (5.3)

61.  Dave (2.18)

62.  The Lie (5.2)

63.  Pilot, Part 1 (1.1)

64.  Across the Sea (6.15)

65.  Recon (6.8)

66.  Catch-22 (3.17)

67.  What Kate Did (2.9)

68.  The Variable (5.14)

69.  S.O.S. (2.19)

70.  316 (5.6)

71.  House of the Rising Sun (1.6)

72.  The Economist (4.3)

73.  Every Man for Himself (3.4)

74.  Maternity Leave (2.15)

75.  Left Behind (3.15)

76.  The Last Recruit (6.13)

77.  Par Avion (3.12)

78.  Two for the Road (2.20)

79.  The Beginning of the End (4.1)

80.  Special (1.14)

81.  Cabin Fever (4.11)

82.  Expose (3.14)

83.  Further Instructions (3.3)

84.  Hearts + Minds (1.13)

85.  All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues (1.11)

86.  Tabula Rasa (1.3)

87.  The Brig (3.19)

88.  This Place is Death (5.5)

89.  The Hunting Party (2.11)

90.  The Other Woman (4.6)

91.  Something Nice Back Home (4.10)

92.  Homecoming (1.15)

93.  Collision (2.8)

94.  One of Them (2.14)

95.  Meet Kevin Johnson (4.8)

96.  The Package (6.10)

97.  And Found (2.5)

98.  He’s Our You (5.10)

99.  Whatever the Case May Be (1.12)

100. Namaste (5.9)

101. The Moth (1.7)

102. Follow the Leader (5.15)

103. Eggtown (4.4)

104. Some Like It Hoth (5.13)

105. ? (2.21)

106. The Little Prince (5.4)

107. Born to Run (1.22)

108. The Greater Good (1.21)

109. What Kate Does (6.3)

110. Adrift (2.2)

111. Abandoned (2.6)

112. Fire + Water (2.12)

113. Three Minutes (2.22)

114. Stranger in a Strange Land (3.9)

The Crimson Kimono (1959)

Film: The Crimson Kimono (1959)

Stars: James Shigeta, Glenn Corbett, Victoria Shaw

Director: Samuel Fuller

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

As I mentioned when we discussed Murder by Contract earlier this week, film noir as a genre closed most of its doors in the late 1950's.  At that point, stars like Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson, & Humphrey Bogart who had defined film noir were either well past their prime or (in Bogie's case) dead, and they hadn't really been replaced.  Today we're going to talk about a film at the tale end of film noir, and in the next two days we'll close our month-long tribute to film noir with two pictures from the neo-noir revival of the genre that occurred in the 1970's.  The Crimson Kimono, directed by Samuel Fuller (who also directed House of Bamboo which we discussed this month-all links to past film noirs listed below), doesn't star any particularly recognizable actors, and in the 1959 the biggest name in this cast would've been James Shigeta, who was part of a small group of Asian actors like Nancy Kwan, France Nguyen, & Shirley Yamaguchi who gained fame in the late 1950's & early 1960's as marquee stars despite Hollywood's still overarching racism toward Asian actors, who even in this era were regularly played by white actors in yellowface.  What makes Crimson Kimono so intriguing to me upon revisiting it this month for the first time is the way that Fuller handles a potentially racist plot with sensitivity and grace...all on a tight, shoestring budget.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film opens with the murder of a gorgeous stripper named Sugar Torch, played by Gloria Pall but clearly meant to evoke the fading beauty ideal of Jayne Mansfield & Mamie van Doren (a big-breasted, oversexed blonde).  Though most think of Sugar as "trash," and not worth the detective work, two police officers: Joe Kojaka (Shigeta) and Charlie Bancroft (Corbett) investigate her murder, and seem to uncover a criminal ring which leads them to Christine Dowes (known in the movie as Chris, known in real life as Victoria Shaw).  Chris is an artist who painted Sugar, and as the movie continues both men start to fall for her, setting up a rare interracial love triangle that would've been impossible to imagine just a few years earlier on big screens.  As the film progresses, we learn that most of this criminal world is a red herring (the killer is in fact one of the women they'd met along their investigations, killing Sugar because she thought she was sleeping with her lover), but the main story becomes whether or not the partnership between Joe & Charlie can outlast them both being in love with Chris.

While the Hays Code was still partially in effect by 1959, we had started to see in the late 1950's the use of interracial relationships between actors of different races more frequently in studio films.  Whereas at the start of the decade you'd catch, say, Ava Gardner playing a black woman in Showboat, the first onscreen interracial kiss between Harry Belafonte & Joan Fontaine in 1957 set off a surprisingly robust group of films showing grown-up, true romances between white actors and actors of color including Sayonara, South Pacific, The World of Suzie Wong, and The Crimson Kimono.  That the film ends with Shigeta's Joe getting Shaw's Christine, rather than Corbett, is a sign that Fuller understood the changing times that would come in the 1960's, and had a bit more vision than you'd expect from an on-the-cheap Columbia film noir of this era.

The plot itself is relatively good.  As we enter the 1960's, a lot of the tropes about film noir had started to fade.  While Chris is a "woman in danger," she's not really a "dangerous woman" in the way we'd expect from a femme fatale, and so this movie, while billed as a film noir, is really more of just a crime drama than a film noir.  It doesn't help the case that while the plot handles Chris & Joe's romance well, all of the chemistry is between not Shaw & Shigeta but Shigeta & Corbett, playing off of each other in early scenes like a married couple.  In a truly different era, it would've been appropriate for these two to end up together, but alas, that wasn't in the cards in 1950's Hollywood quite yet.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia,The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Nightcrawler

Murder by Contract (1958)

Film: Murder by Contract (1958)

Stars: Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi, Caprice Toriel

Director: Irving Lerner

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

You'll notice at the bottom of this article that I have broken out the noir films into the 1940's, 1950's, & Neo-Noir.  This isn't to say that these are the only eras of noir.  Noir films existed, at least in some state, in the late 1930's though they were usually less reliant on the "dangerous woman, seedy underbelly, lots of plot" motif, and instead were more akin to the gangster films of the decade like Scarface or Little Caesar.  And it's not like noir totally evaporated in the 1960's...the neo-noir movement was more a thing of the 1970's but the genre didn't totally dissipate.  But by the late 1950's most of the stories had been told, as well as the big stars of the genre had either died or had aged out of it, and so it was on its last legs.  Really, when you think of noir you can kind of think of it as bookended between The Maltese Falcon and Touch of Evil, a 17-year run in Hollywood.  A lot of the elements of noir would not disappear as we entered the 1960's, though, but be absorbed by the French New Wave, specifically Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.  While it's obvious that Welles and other filmmakers influenced Godard & Robert Bresson in the coming years, I don't know that I've seen a movie quite like Murder by Contract, whose approach feels exactly like a French New Wave film...except in English.

(Spoilers Ahead) Like a lot of the New Wave, the plot here isn't super concentrated (the biggest departure between film noir and some of the crime films of the New Wave was that the plots became lighter).  But essentially we have Claude (Edwards), a contract killer who is saving up to buy a house.  He is hired by an unseen crime boss to start doing killings, which he does mercilessly.  He is then assigned to kill Billie Williams (Toriel), whom initially he doesn't realize is a woman (the name is a clear misdirect), which he gets angered about because killing women "costs extra."  He has a consistent moral quandary before he finally does it...and then it turns out that he actually killed a policewoman-Billie is still alive.  At this point he thinks he's jinxed, but he still has to do it, knowing that his own life is on the line if he won't go through with killing her.  In the end, Claude does get into Billie's house, but he can't go through with it, with her begging him not to kill her, and in the chase out of her house, he is gunned down by the police.

The film's approach is unusual.  It has a narrator, which isn't rare in film noir (Laura, for example, has it), but it's not common either.  Claude is unusual as a leading man because he's gruff.  There's no real effort to be made to try to flesh him out as anything but ruthless.  Even when he won't kill Billie at first, it's not a moral quandary but a fiduciary one-he thinks he's being undervalued for his work.  It's also worth noting that in this movie, while the actress playing Billie is attractive, she's decidedly not the sex object like you'd assume in a film noir: it's Claude himself.  With thick hair, bulging biceps, & a face that kind of resembles a young James Caan, Edwards is hot in this movie, and the director leans into it.  There are extended scenes at the beginning where the actor is doing pushups in a white tank top, and later in the movie he pulls up for a swim on the beach in short shorts, resembling in some ways Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.  This switchup works really well...kudos to the casting director for finding the exact right fit for this film.

The movie, though not a hit in 1958, was highly influential not just on the French New Wave, but one American director in particular.  Martin Scorsese has spoken publicly about how this was one of the biggest influences on his career, and you can definitely see that in the pacing of the film, the way that Murder by Contract combines the mundane with the shocking.  The workout scene feels most reminiscent of what Scorsese would do with Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, sexualizing this unlikely protagonist before the audience can understand if he's a "good guy" or a "bad guy."  All-in-all, this is a well-edited, surprisingly modern film that came out of Columbia's vault at the tail-end of the film noir trend.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia,The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Nightcrawler

Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960)

Film: Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960)

Stars: Doris Day, David Niven, Janis Paige, Richard Haydn, Spring Byington

Director: Charles Walters

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Spring Byington: click here to learn more about Ms. Byington (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Jumping from 1948 to 1960 is a big gap in Spring Byington's career, and a large part of that jump happens because during that time, Byington found the sort of leading lady stardom that had alluded her in her career in movies.  In 1952, Byington had started to work on the CBS radio program December Bride, where she plays a woman who has been widowed, but is intent on finding a new husband (hence, becoming a "December Bride").  Desilu Productions thought that this would make a good companion to I Love Lucy, and brought the radio show to television, putting it on immediately after I Love Lucy, which meant it was a Top 10 hit for the first four seasons it was on.  This allowed Byington, now in her seventies, to be the lead in one of the most-watched shows in America.  Byington even got two Emmy nominations for the series (losing both to Jane Wyatt on Father Knows Best), but when the series moved out of the comfy slot behind I Love Lucy, it tanked and was quickly cancelled.  Byington would only briefly return to one last movie after that, today's film Please Don't Eat the Daisies.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Kay Mackay (Day) a housewife with four sons who is living in a cramped New York apartment with her drama critic husband Larry (Niven).  The two find out that they're being evicted, and rather than stay in the city, they move to a dilapidated old house in the middle of the country, with Kay's mother Suzie (Byington) in tow.  This causes friction in their marriage, with Larry leaving the city frequently, and letting his newfound fame as a viper-tongued critic go to his head.  This is particularly a problem when an actress he lambasted, Deborah Vaughn (Paige) initially makes a scene, slapping him at a restaurant, and then realizing the publicity this could get both she & Larry, starts to coordinate moments for more publicity, trying to start an affair with him.  Suzie eventually convinces Kay that she needs to fight for her husband, and she does, with the two of them making up, now happily settled into their country domesticity.

Your mileage with this film will largely depend on your thoughts on Doris Day as a leading woman.  Few actresses enjoyed the kind of sustained success that Day did from the early 1950's to the late 1960's, and Please Don't Eat the Daisies was no exception (it was a huge hit for MGM), but I get that her movies tend to be a bit repetitive and somewhat reductive (that the onus on fixing her husband's wandering eye falls to Day's wife rather than Niven's character is not lost on me).  But I generally like Doris Day's movies, and this is cute.  Janis Paige is fun (as always) as a vamp, and I think it's always enjoyable.  There should've been more antics from the sons (particularly the adorable baby obsessed with Coca-Cola), and more singing from Day (she only does the film's bizarrely-monikered title song), but this is enjoyable.

It's also a fitting sendoff for Byington, playing yet another charming mother character.  Though she'd live until 1971, dying from cancer at the age of 84, she'd never make another movie, working in television instead on programs as varied as The Tab Hunter Show, Dennis the Menace, Mister Ed, The Flying Nun, and in a recurring role on the western Laramie.  Next month, we're going to switch gears a little bit as we focus on an actress who, unlike Byington, was not only a leading lady, but throughout the 1930's & 40's was a big star...but whom modern audiences, if they remember her at all, recall her for her immaculately-bedecked television show in the 1950's.

The State of the House

I promised you a State of the Senate, House, & Governors as part of our 10th Anniversary celebrations this month, and I intend on delivering those (Governors is almost done, and should be published in the next couple of days), but I have to provide a caveat for our conversation about the House-I can't do it in the usual "rank the Top 10" way.  The reasons for that are pretty simple.  While this is a challenge in most years (simply because the House has 435 seats, and as a result there are always seats that will flip in an election), in a redistricting year this becomes more complicated.  Thanks to gerrymandering, there are seats that are going literally from Solid Blue to Solid Red (weirdly, none in the opposite direction by my count proving yet again how the court system is gamed to help Republicans).  So for today's conversation, we're going to sort our conversation into four categories-the certain flips, the probable flips, the majority makers, & the stretch seats.  I will try to be somewhat comprehensive without seeming like I'm listing a bunch of numbers, but bear with me if we get a bit wonky today.

Rep. Al Lawson (D-FL)

The Certain Flips

As far as I'm concerned, there are no seats in 2022 that are guaranteed to go to Democrats.  The New York redistricting case throwing out the Empire State's clear gerrymander basically cost the Democrats a few seats that they were guaranteed to flip (like the Staten Island seat that now is Safe R, Max Rose going from certain comeback to certain defeat), and while there's 1-2 races we'll get to in a second that are probably going blue, none are guarantees.  This isn't so for Republicans.  Florida was gerrymandered to the hilt thanks to Ron DeSantis, and so the open seats held by Stephanie Murphy & Charlie Crist will both go red, and while he's technically running in a member-vs-member race, Al Lawson will also lose.  In the future, Republicans will struggle to hold this gerrymander (particularly Florida-27 is ripe for a flip in a presidential year), but this year DeSantis will get his wish.

Texas's 15th will also go (Rep. Vincente Gonzalez is seeking reelection in the 34th district, which we'll discuss in a second), and Democrats will lose AZ-2, AZ-6, MI-10, NY-19, & WI-3 due to the environment.  Some of these (specifically MI-10) might be salvageable in a non-wave year, but this year, Republicans will end up with nearly an entire majority solely based on certain flips (I'd have them at 213 seats, just five short of the majority, proving how badly the Democrats are positioned).

Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA)

The Probable Flips

In terms of probable flips, we've got a couple on both sides.  Democratic incumbents in Cindy Axne (IA-3), Tom Malinowski (NJ-7), and Susan Wild (PA-7) all have a chance on their own.  Even in wave cycles, seats like these occasionally stay with their incumbents due to personal popularity.  But the redistricting wand and the fact that they're up against good candidates in a rough cycle...I think they're all goners, and the question becomes how many of them attempt comebacks in 2024 (which, while more common than it used to be, is still very difficult to pull off-if you lose once, you probably are out of politics).  So move Republicans up to a surefire 216 seats.

This is also where I think we'll see two Democratic pickups.  The first is in Illinois-13, the closest the Democrats have to a gerrymandered flip.  Rep. Rodney Davis skipped running here, and that basically means that the Democrats have a clear path to get former Obama administration official Nikki Budzinski into the House.  In Texas-34, in one of only two member vs. member general elections, the advantage is probably in favor of Rep. Vincente Gonzalez against newly-elected incumbent Mayra Flores, though it's not a total lock.  Neither of these seats are guaranteed to last the decade (the changing demographics here favor the Republicans), but in 2022, it's probable the Democrats win.  This puts them at 187, underlining the challenge for the Democrats-they'd need to win virtually all of the remaining seats we're going to discuss in order to win the House.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)

The Majority Makers

By my count there are somewhere in the vicinity of about 25-30 tossup House seats.  Most of these seats rely upon Democratic incumbents running in either redder territory or marginal territory.  The races kind of run the gamut for these incumbents, from longtime incumbents to first-termers.  In some cases, Democrats caught a lucky break.  Rep. Marcy Kaptur, one of the longest-serving members of Congress, is facing off in marginal territory against a January 6th-attending QAnon activist; this seat's lean would've made Kaptur winning against a Generic Republican unthinkable, but here she has a chance.

But the GOP hasn't screwed up everywhere.  Rep. Elaine Luria is going against the best possible candidate for the GOP in State Sen. Jen Kiggans, and redistricting made Rep. Sharice Davids' chances in Kansas much harder.  If I'm counting accurately we've got thirteen incumbent Democrats (Kaptur, Luria, Davids, Jared Golden, Dan Kildee, Elissa Slotkin, Angie Craig, Chris Pappas, Susie Lee, Matt Cartwright, Henry Cuellar, Abigail Spanbarger, & Kim Schrier) that are in true Tossup territory.  Democrats need pretty much all of them to win to hold the majority; adjusting for expectations, a good night would probably see about half of them stay blue.

Open Democratic seats are also a problem for the party.  CO-8, IL-17, NC-13, NY-3, NY-18, OH-13, OR-5, & PA-17 are all open due to being new seats, incumbents losing primaries (looking at you Oregon's Kurt Schrader), or incumbents retiring/seat-shopping.  These run the gamut between seats that favor Democrats in most circumstances (Colorado, Illinois, & Oregon, specifically, are only Tossups because we're looking at a wave election-if the wave is more of a splash in November, they'd all stay blue), while others (principally North Carolina & Ohio) are going to be more challenging.  Again, Democrats need all of these to win the majority...they'd be lucky to get half based on the current environment.

Republicans are looking at a much smaller pool of potential flips, but they do have a couple.  The recent California primaries exposed that David Valadao (CA-22) and Mike Garcia (CA-27) are very vulnerable.  Democrats got State Reps. Rudy Salas & Christy Smith to run here, and while Republicans did pretty well in California in 2020, I think at least one of these seats falls (my gut says Garcia loses to Smith, which is going to be ironic given Smith lost to Garcia-twice-in 2020, yet she might persevere on a night where many other Democrats who survived 2020 lose).  Other seats that were drawn to be tough but feature Republican incumbents include Peter Meijer's (MI-3), Yvette Harrell's (NM-2), & Steve Chabot's (OH-1).  Meijer is locked in a primary battle, and if he loses this goes from Tossup to Lean Dem overnight, but right now I think they all are slightly-favored due to the environment.  The same can be said for NY-22, which is an open seat (Rep. John Katko is retiring) that would normally be a blue convert without the popular Katko, but right now I'd say is a Tossup situation.

Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV)

The Stretch Seats

I've got five seats sort of earmarked right now as probably going to the Democrats, but if they start to fall we're in for a truly bad night.  The dynamics for incumbents Sanford Bishop (GA-2), Frank Mrvan (IN-1), Dina Titus (NV-3), & Steven Horsford (NV-4), as well as State Sen. Don Davis (running in the open NC-1) indicate races that the Democrats should be favored.  These are all areas that, despite some shifting demographics, have historically been very kind to the Democrats.  But if they start to go, and they could, it'll show that not only did the Democrats suffer massive defeats in the House in November, but they also saw problems in their coalitions, specifically with blue-collar White & Latino voters, both of which were problems for Joe Biden in 2020 compared to Barack Obama & Hillary Clinton but held enough that he was able to win.

In 2022, the Republicans don't really have to worry about a lot of stretch seats.  The ones I listed in Tossup, at this point, are probably the stretch seats for Democrats.  It's worth remembering, though, that the median House seat currently is a Biden +2 seat.  While that's not representative of the country (it's a couple points too red given Biden won nationally by 4.5 points), it does put Democrats in a position to win back the House again in 2024.  In particular, it feels like Republicans overextended themselves in Florida & Iowa in such a scenario, and there's a lot of opportunities in California and maybe even Colorado against incumbents that are safe this year.  But right now, I don't see a path for the Democrats to get an upset unless a scandal breaks.

Final Thoughts

Looking at this map, if you're a Democrat who wants hope, I've got none. Short of a true miracle that we haven't seen in politics since the late 1940's, I don't see a path for the Democrats to retain their House majority.  Even with the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, which opens up a conversation that I honestly think is going to be hard to grasp its political implications, it's difficult to see Democrats pulling this off, particularly given enthusiasm is going to be tough to codify Roe even with a current majority in both houses.  The bigger question is how much they can minimize the damage.  A House where Republicans can't, say, get above 225 seats (unlikely, but not impossible) would enter 2024 as not only a tossup, but probably a Slight Democratic situation.  Republicans start moving too far north of 230 seats, though, and you've got a lot more work to do.  That's honestly where the Democrats eyes should be congressionally-finding a way to hold the Senate (by any margin) and keeping the Republican House caucus low enough that they can take it back in 2024.

OVP: Director (2020)

OVP: Best Director (2020)

The Nominees Were...

Thomas Vinterberg, Another Round

David Fincher, Mank

Lee Isaac Chung, Minari

Chloe Zhao, Nomadland

Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman

My Thoughts: We are heading to the close of our 10-year anniversary celebration on the blog (still at least 11 articles remaining, and I might have one last trick up my sleeve to round it to a dozen), and so we are also nearly done with our 2020 Oscar Viewing Project.  Today we're going to tackle the Best Director category, which saw an historic first for the category-the first time ever that the majority of the category was not white men, and the first time ever that two women were cited for Best Director.  Since I'm always looking for a bridge into the article, let's start with one of those women, the one who ended up victorious: Chloe Zhao.

Zhao's films have an instant, singular vision.  In movies as diverse as The Rider, Nomadland, and Eternals, she starts off with her camera distinct from the picture itself, almost as if she's just observing...but you slowly realize as the movie progresses that she's guiding the audience to an eventual destination, which might be right where we started in a lot of ways (Fern is still on the road at the end of Nomadland), but it's also proving that the journey changes you even if you are where you were meant to be.  The profound beauty of Nomadland is that Fern finds what she was looking for on the road, even if she understands that absolution about her trauma (the loss of her husband & her home) will never actually be realized.  There's a beauty in that, and I love the steady way that Zhao handles this conversation.

I feel like Lee Isaac Chung tries to do that, with slightly less success.  It doesn't help that I liked Nomadland overall as a movie better, but I felt like Minari was a bit too tidy, never really finding a way to blend the sentiment of the film in a cohesive way with the introverted, quiet approach Chung takes to this autobiographical picture.  This isn't to say Minari isn't good (this is a good lineup-all of these nominees get a thumbs up from me in one of the better recent directorial lineups Oscar assembled), but it also means that I have to be picky as we're talking about the best-of-the-best.  Minari is refreshing, but it doesn't quite land some of the bigger ideas about family & the many shared experiences that result from living & loving a collective unit.

Mank is definitely the film that I have taken a more positive stance on than virtually any other film writer I read regularly, but I stand behind it, particularly when it comes to Fincher's nomination.  Fincher has a great way of having one person slowly, steadily, descending into their fate (frequently for the bad), and the way that Mank is framed is genius in that regard.  I love the way that we see all of these corollaries to the story that Mank is writing, the way that Citizen Kane echoes not just William Randolph Hearst, but also Orson Welles & Herman Mankiewicz himself, showing that all men can fall to the fate of their own hubris.  It's gorgeous, visually stunning, and Fincher doesn't go for easy payoffs (notice the way that Welles is backgrounded until the precise moment he needs to move from God to Man).  It's a towering achievement, and while it's not Fincher's best...that's an unfair metric to hold one of the best directors of our time toward.

Similar to Fincher, Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman feels like a distinct vision onto itself-there's no confusing this work as a "director for hire" job.  Fennell's best work is, like Mank, hiding the fact that we're seeing one character go to her fate, even as there are clear off-ramps onto easier or perhaps even healthier courses-of-action.  The way that Fennell frames what is ultimately a thriller with horror and romantic-comedy elements is deceptive; you feel gut-punched in the same way Cassie does by some of the ways certain characters disappoint.  If you want to get picky I think the film needed more perspective into who Cassie is to really get a specificity of what is lost (i.e. how she was a "promising young woman"), but that's being picky about a very good film from a director I can't wait to see more from.

Four of these films we'll get to one more time when we talk about Best Picture this weekend, but Another Round we will be bidding adieu to today.  Another Round's direction is maybe its best attribute, so kudos to the Academy in citing it here.  The scenes where we watch them get drunk feel appropriately a detachment from the rest of the movie (as any good bender feels like you're leaving reality), and the juxtaposition between the first & second halves (and what is at stake) underlines the damage of this experiment.  But Vinterberg never collects the film's ideas about alcohol with its own issues with toxic masculinity, particularly given the kind of gross "life is for the living" aspects of the final scenes.  An intriguing premise, but I don't think it's always successful.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes went with Zhao as their winner, and in a first picked a majority female lineup with Fennell and Regina King (One Night in Miami) joining Fincher & Aaron Sorkin (The Trial of the Chicago 7).  BAFTA also picked a majority lineup of female directors with Zhao besting Vinterberg, Chung, Shannon Murphy (Babyteeth), Jasmila Zbanic (Quo Vadis, Aida?), and Sarah Gavron (Rocks), while the DGA picked Zhao against Sorkin, Fincher, Fennell, & Chung.  I did pretty poorly in my predictions when I guessed this initially, leaving out both Vinterberg & Fennell in favor of King & Sorkin, and of the latter two I think Sorkin was closer, particularly considering that King couldn't make the Best Picture race.  I'll guess him for sixth, though there are 4-5 names you could argue were in the running for the slot that ultimately surprised for Vinterberg.

Directors I Would Have Nominated: We'll get to the My Ballot next week, so I won't telegraph more than to say I was more of a fan of subtitles than Oscar was in this category.
Oscar's Choice: Chloe Zhao stampeded throughout the season, and even if she had lost Best Picture, the Best Director trophy was inevitable for her.

My Choice: I said Fincher at the time, and while I think this is a closer race for me than it was in 2021 when I finalized my picks, I'm still going with him as I think there's slightly more style in his direction than Zhao's, which aids his movie better...it's very close though, and there are days I'd give her the trophy.  Fennell, Chung, & Vinterberg follow, in that order.

Those were my thoughts-how about yours?  I suspect I'm alone here, but does anyone want to join me on Team Mank, or is everyone sticking with Nomadland?  Fennell, Chung, & Vinterberg all had big splashes here-which one gets another shot at an Oscar nomination in the future?  And was it Sorkin, King, or perhaps Florian Zeller (The Father) in sixth place?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Also in 2020: Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, International Feature Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound, Original Score, Original Song, Production Design, Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Previously in 2020

Past Best Director Contests: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019