Day: November 12, 2017

Matsuhisa Moment

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Following today’s Detroit schmoozer and then a 6pm outdoor gathering for Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water on the 20th Century Fox lot, Hollywood Elsewhere and TatyanaAntropova had dinner at Matsuhisa with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino plus editor Walter Fasano, director Ferdinando Filomarino and Amazon exec Scott Foundas. The food was delectable; the conversational vibe couldn’t have been more soothing, stimulating, spontaneous, warm, etc. Thank fortune for happy times.


(l. to r.) Ferdinando Filomarino, Tatyana Antropova, Luca Guadagnino.

Detroit Schmoozer

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A portion of the Detroit team greeted journalists during a two-hour schmoozer earlier today at Nerano (9960 Santa Monica Blvd., just east of Century City). By “portion” I mean that the only above-the-title guy to attend was producer-writer Mark Boal, and the only familiar faces among the cast were Will Poulter, who played the most belligerent of the racist cops, and Algee Smith, the good-looking guy who played musician Larry Reed. Questlove, the composer of the closing-credits tune “It Ain’t Fair“, was also there.

Not in attendance were director Kathryn Bigelow plus senior cast members John Boyega, Jacob Latimore, Jason Mitchell and John Krasinski. Producer Megan Ellison, owner and CEO of Annapurna Pictures, didn’t show either; ditto Annapurna marketing honcho Michael Tritter.


(l. to r.) Detroit cast members Malcolm David Kelley, Nathan Davis Jr., “It Ain’t Fair” composer Questlove, Kaitlyn Dever Chasity Saunders (from The Knockturnal), Will Poulter, Leon Thomas III, Joseph Davis Jones (“Jojo”).

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Liz Smith Passage

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I don’t have any personal recollections about legendary New York City gossip columnist Liz Smith, who passed earlier today at age 94. But she more or less ruled the roost for about 25 years. Not as a tough, occasionally adversarial, opinion-driven columnist but as a friend to the rich and famous. Smith always worked with and for the powerful, and did a good job of not ruffling feathers.

Except, that is, when it came to rival publicist Bobby Zarem, whom I briefly worked for in the mid ’80s. Zarem so didn’t like Smith that he kept a feud going with her for decades.

Smith wrote an essential N.Y. Daily News column from the ’76 to ’91, and then did the same for Newsday from ’91 through ’95. She then worked for the New York Post as well as Fox News for seven years (including stints on Fox & Friends). There was apparently some overlap or carry-over between columns and employers She left Newsday in ’05 over a contract dispute, and then the Post stopped running her column in early ’09.

John Leland wrote an excellent profile of Smith for the N.Y. Times on 7.28.17, titled “The Rise and Fall of Liz Smith, Celebrity Accomplice.”

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Wonder Living Up To Early Buzz

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A little more than two weeks ago a friend who’d recently seen Stephen Chbosky‘s Wonder (Lionsgate, 11.17), a little-kid-with-a-disfigured-face movie with Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson and Jacob Tremblay, said it was “better than expected” and that he was “surprised at how likable it was.”

This afternoon Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman posted a similar opinion. He’s saying, in fact, that in the realm of disfigured protagonist dramas, Wonder belongs in the company of David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man and Peter Bogdanovich‘s Mask.

“It’s an honest feel-good movie” and “a very tasteful heart-tugger…a drama of disarmingly level-headed empathy that glides along with wit, assurance, and grace. Of all the films this year with ‘wonder’ in the title (Wonderstruck, Wonder Woman, Wonder Wheel, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women), this is the one that comes closest to living up to the emotional alchemy of that word.”

The downside, says Gleiberman, is that “the film never upsets the apple cart of conventionality” and therefore “lacks the pricklier edges of art.”

Thanks

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I don’t “do” birthdays as a rule, but thanks for all the good wishes. Ever since I developed an acute sense of encroaching mortality (or sometime in my mid 30s), birthdays have been an official signifier that I am one year closer to the final curtain and the eternal black nothingness of death. I would much rather focus on the thousands upon thousands of profound delights, lessons and comforts afforded by being vigorously alive. Tatyana suggested yesterday that I should instead regard birthdays as a celebration of the sum total of my life and the fact that I’ve made it this far in good health and without any maladies, aches, neck wattles or bald spots to speak of. So okay, fine — I’m happy about that part of it.


Snapped during last night’s AFI Fest Call Me By Your Name after-party at the Hollywood Roosevelt.

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Island of Lost Souls

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My critical riffs about Craig Gillespie‘s I, Tonya (A24, 12.8) since catching it in Toronto have been a bit heated, so here’s an attempt to tone them down. I’ve said repeatedly that the film’s satirical brush is coarse and vulgar. Those two words are a fair description of the Harding family and their ne’er-do-well allies, but also the film’s supercilious mocking of these lost souls. As HE commenter Bobby Peru put it, “Aren’t we hilarious making fun of these local yokel shitheads?”

You could argue that I, Tonya’s satirical strategy is somewhat akin to an anti-pornography satire that buries the viewer in a torrent of X-rated footage. A closer analogy is The Wolf of Wall Street (’13), in which Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio broadly satirized ravenous Wall Street bottom feeders. The difference is that Wolf’s brand of outrageous black humor frequently connects, at times hilariously so. (The quaalude overdose sequence.). In my humble view I, Tonya (a) isn’t nearly as funny or even amusing, and (b) could conceivably give you cancer.

Am I voicing a minority opinion? Certainly. Satirically speaking, does I, Tonya have a kind of rough-hewn integrity? Yes — it sticks to the battle plan of looking down at these seething, cigarette-smoking, not-smart-enough losers. And it doesn’t attempt any manipulative emotional outreach strategies except by way of Margot Robbie’s anguished lead performance. Agreed, Robbie and Allison Janey will probably snag Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Oscar noms, respectively, but what else is new?

One-Way Street

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A Universal film called Girls Trip opened last June and pulled in $137 million. I wouldn’t know but terrific. Regina Hall, Queen Latifa, Jada Pinkett Smith and Tiffany Haddish costarred. Haddish hosted Saturday Night Live last night, and in her opening monologue the two stand-outs were about sexual harassment (“If you got your thing-thing out, and she got all her clothes on, you’re wrong…wait ’til she takes her own clothes off, then pull your thing-thing out!”) and Donald Trump‘s hair — dusty material, easy target. Haddish said she gets all her news “from the beauty shop” — brilliant — and noted that the girls are saying “dang, who is doing Donald Trump’s wigs? His lace fronts are off the chain! What kind of glue is he using?”

Not to defend Trump in any context, but that’s a sexist crack. Imagine a male comedian telling a joke about a 60-plus actress wearing a great-looking wig or hair extensions. The room would become Edgar Allen Poe‘s The Tomb of Ligeia, and then he’d be apologizing the next day to the club owner. Longish pompadours look weird on older guys, agreed, but there’s something dictatorial about the fashionistas ridiculing same.

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