Day: November 17, 2013

Yesterday HE commenter “Morpheus” and HE’s own LexG (i.e., “Ray Quick”) briefly discussed the differences between the Best Actor and Best Actress realms. Please understand I am not signaling 100% agreement with Lex’s comment but he’s hit on something worth sharing, I think.

Morpheus: “It’s sad how year after year it is far more exciting to talk about the Best Actor field than it is to talk about the Best Actress field. It’s so weak [and] has been so weak that Streep needs only make a movie to be in contention. If Daniel Day Lewis was a woman he’d [have] won it for not only Gangs Of New York but also for The Crucible.”

Ray Quick: “That’s because the field is exclusive year in and year out to the same campy blowsy hens who eschew romcoms or visual sexiness to give ball-busting BIG performances — Streep, Blanchett, Winslet, Adams…all the same CANNED FUCKING HAMS while subtler, nuanced [performances] like those from Brie Larson or Saoirse Ronan get overlooked, and we all coo and awwww around the yearly inevitable BA/BSA ‘fifth’ spot for some newcomer/flash-in-the-pan, hot chick, kid with weird name who just cut to the front of the line like an Armenian guy at an airport queue.”

Lex is referring, of course, to Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchpoulos.

If I was back in Los Angeles I would be at the Dallas Buyer’s Club party at Craft in Century City, which began about an hour ago (i.e., 1:30 pm). I’m there in spirit! The last time I checked Focus Features was still stiffing award-focused Hollywood sites with a “sorry, no ads” policy, but this has no bearing on our enthusiasm for the film, of course. Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, Jennifer Lawrence in attendance along with screenwriters Craig Borten and Melissa Wallack and producer Robbie Brenner, among others.

It’s 5:05 am on Monday morning, and I’ve been awake since 3:30 am. I’m sitting in warm, quiet darkness on the rear deck of a Ha Long-based “junk.” The ship is gently bobbing in the not quite placid waters. The white lights of other craft are softly beaming in the distance. A full moon is peeking through cloudy skies. Large, craggy, bullet-shaped mountains surround the bay. The junk guys have shut off the generator so it’s just me and my thoughts and the soothing, pre-dawn solitude. Along with my iPhone and fully-charged MacBook Pro, I mean. Thank God for the Viettel connectivity — two bars but it’s good enough.

USA Today stepped into shit today when one of their presumably older, less-hip editors ran a box-office story with a racially gauche headline: ” ‘[Best Man] Holiday’ Nearly Beat ‘Thor’ as Race-Themed Films Soar.” The tweets hit the fan and so the newspaper changed “Race-Themed” to “Ethnically Diverse.” What they meant to say was “Mildly Shitty Romcom (64% On Rotten Tomatoes) Primarily Aimed at ‘Urban’ Audiences Does Almost As Well as Mildly Shitty , CG-Driven Comic-Book Bullshit (66% RT) Primarily Aimed At Under-40 Primitives.” USA Today‘s obviously clumsy headline was a reverse-case cousin of the classic Variety headline “Stix Nix Hix Pix” as it sought to summarize a box-office response to a film in ethnic and/or cultural terms — a huge no-no in today’s politically correct environment. The sin was in the insensitive wording. Malcolm D. Lee’s film earned $30.5 million vs. $38.4 million snagged by Thor: The Dark World.