Yul Brynner owns this scene in The Ten Commandments. Poor Anne Baxter is defeated by the grotesque dialogue, but somehow Brynner isn’t bruised. His deep baritone voice, buff bod and sexual confidence (he was 34 or 35 at the time) rule.
I wonder if this scene would be written, much less go before the cameras, in today’s climate. Things have gotten so political. I’m trying to imagine the reaction to a scene in a big-budget, major-studio film in which an arrogant sexist ruler (a) professes a complete lack of interest in whether or not his presumed future wife loves him and (b) is only interested in conjugal rights once she becomes his queen.
From Scott Tobias’s 9.11.17 Variety review: “In the wake of the 2008 recession, some investors looking to recoup their losses from the subprime mortgage crisis traded one fraud for another, turning the inflated value of China’s economic boom into another bubble destined to be popped. Jed Rothstein’s wildly entertaining The China Hustle blows the lid off another multibillion-dollar heist built on complex financial instruments and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.
“Though it resembles the docu-journalism of Alex Gibney films like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Rothstein’s irreverent, can-you-believe-this sense of humor makes the anti-capitalist message go down even easier.
“Far from a postmortem, the film uncovers a scandal that’s still ongoing, with parties on one side bullish about promoting Chinese stocks and parties on the other looking for empty stocks to short. And as with the widespread malpractice that torpedoed the housing market in 2008, there are no rules or incentives for investment banks and brokers to stop perpetuating shady deals, so long as the commissions keep rolling in.
“’There are no good guys in this story, including me,’ says Dan David, the charismatic whistle-blower who serves as the film’s prevailing voice and de facto tour guide.
“Working at a tiny investment firm in small-town Pennsylvania, David and his brother took a massive hit in the 2008 collapse, but resolved to stay in business and figure out creative ways to earn back their clients’ investment dollars. What they discovered was something called a ‘reverse merger’: Because Chinese companies couldn’t be traded directly in U.S. stock exchanges, hundreds of them were ‘merging’ with American shell companies that still had a presence on the New York Stock Exchange or other trading floors. In theory, American investors could then seize on the opportunity to profit from the gains of an ascendant economy.
A couple of weeks ago Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and Eric Kohnrevealed something interesting about voting for contenders in this or that category on year-end ballots. They both spoke of “gaming” the system in order to favor artists of color. They discussed this during a “Screen Talk” podcast (#176) that posted on 12.8.17.
Thompson (starting around the 8:28 mark): “This is a horrible way to put this, but I know when I was filling out my Critics Choice ballot, there were a couple of categories where I did lean into a couple of movies including Get Out and Mudbound and Shape of Water…where I wanted to make sure there were some people of color on my ballot…I did! And you probably did too.”
Kohn: “Of course. I will cop to that, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think this would be a problematic tendency if the quality wasn’t there. But [it is], and so this is a year in which you can lean into those options without feeling guilty.”
Thompson: “What I noticed I did…what I did was that I made them higher. On my ballot. In each case. I moved them up to make sure that it was recognized. As opposed to putting them as #4 or #5 or something like that. Academy members are going to do the same thing.”
I’m mentioning this because of a comment posted yesterday by Australian HE reader Jeffrey Edwards, to wit:
“As a result of the #Oscarssowhite hysteria, regressive leftists are seemingly expecting Oscar voters to consider a potential nominee’s skin color as a primary factor when deciding who to vote for,” he wrote.
Edwards then imagined their thought processes being something akin to “Well, I would like to vote for Michael Stuhlbarg for Best Supporting Actor because I think his performance truly merits a nomination. However, all the actors I nominate for that category will be white so instead to avoid outrage I’d better vote for Jason Mitchell in Mudbound because even though I thought he was just solid and would prefer to vote for Stuhlbarg, I’d rather avoid incurring the wrath of hysterical people on [Twitter].
I’m still advising HE readers to catch it this weekend. It’s not a typical “burn” but a sometimes brilliant disappointment. It delivers, in fact, a very good-to-excellent first act and a reasonably decent second act. But it commits hari-kiri in the third act, and in so doing destroys the initial good will that it had during the first…oh, 35 or 40 minutes. I’m truly sorry. My respect to Mr. Payne and his collaborators. Everybody drops the ball once in a while.
Here’s how I put it four and two thirds months ago (“Downsizing Deflates, Treads Water in Telluride”):
“Everyone knows the boilerplate. A futuristic setting and a dazzling, astonishing scientific discovery from Norwegian scientists that allows humans to reduce themselves to five inches tall. In so doing small volunteers live much more luxuriously and lavishly (their financial holdings are worth much more) while hundreds of thousands if not millions of carbon footprints are sharply reduced, and a far healthier environment results. Or so it seems at first.
“The story is about shlumpy physical therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his shallow wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) deciding to get small and live lavishly inside a downsized tiny town. A controlled environment inside a plastic dome, safe from birds and cats and other predators.
“The truth is that Downsizing starts off like a house on fire (loving it! yes! so great! Christoph Waltz is a hoot!) and then it starts to droop around the 40-minute mark, and then it really droops and sags when the movie moves to Norway. (No, I’m not going to explain what means, just that the film goes there during the final act.)
The brilliant aspects of this justly praised scene from Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, apart from the dialogue and Michael Stuhlbarg‘s exquisite delivery, are (a) the very slow zoom-in as Stuhlbarg begins speaking, (b) the subtle rumble of thunder at the :22 mark, (c) the gentle addition of Sufjan Stevens‘ piano at the 1:56 mark, and (d) the way Timothee Chalamet refrains from melting until the very end. Clip editor’s note: Things should’ve faded to black before Chalamet asks “does mom know?”
Yesterday on FacebookPaul Schrader threw some left-handed shade upon Steven Spielberg‘s The Post, which opened yesterday in New York and Los Angeles. And then Bret Easton Ellis followed suit.
The Post, said Schrader, “feeds the myth that the system actually works. That the events of 1971 could be repeated today. I can hear Trump/Fox chuckling: yeah, let Hollywood and the media believe that myth if it keeps them pacified. We fixed that. It will never happen again.”
Ellis: The Hillary Clinton of prestige movies: lost in a bubble, smug, completely clueless, made by the establishment. [And conveying] a refusal to understand Trump’s appeal. This is the kind of lost and naive movie that unknowingly explains exactly why the mainstream media are where they are now — this story from 1971 has absolutely nothing to do with what is going on in 2017 (we are in a much more complicated moment) and yet it pushes a theory that is so flattering to journalists that despite the glaring weaknesses of the movie (and its thesis) they are going crazy over it. The Post is a myth only left-wing millionaires could buy.”
Village Voice critic Bilge Ebiri: “I disagree that The Post is all that convinced it can happen again. The hazy nostalgia with which it depicts bustling newsrooms is very pointed — it’s making a case that the kind of journalistic institutions that allowed for this kind of reporting are dinosaurs. It’s a very sad movie, in that sense.”
Excerpt from HE review, posted on 12.6: “A smartly written, well-performed tale of how and why Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) decided to man up and a grow a pair in the thick of the Pentagon Papers episode of June 1971, The Post is far and away my favorite Spielberg film since Saving Private Ryan. Call it Spielberg’s best, certainly his least problematic, in two decades.
“The critical verdict hasn’t been unanimous but I fell for it, and I mean all the way through and not just during the manipulative third act, which, if you have any stored-up sentiment about the glory days of 20th century dead-tree journalism, will definitely melt you down. I knew I was being sold a Spielbergian bill of goods but I bought it anyway. I gushed out some thoughts the day after, and a New York friend replied, ‘Calm down, Tonto…it’s very good but not great.'”
Another critic friend: “It never made me tingle the way Spotlight or All the President’s Men did. Plus it has too many Spielberg-y touches: the little girl selling lemonade (Jesus!), that [redacted] ending. It all felt forced rather than organic, despite strong performances from Streep and Hanks.”
“It was also two hours of people going ‘We can’t do that!’ and others saying ‘We have to do that!’
This Oswald family footage, taken on 11.22.62 or Thanksgiving Day, is indistinguishable from tens of thousands of home movies taken that very same afternoon. Family celebrations are pretty much all the same, and are always about facades. The insisted-upon emotions of these gatherings (happiness, contentment, alpha vibes) always mask the undercurrents. The likelihood on this pre-Christmas weekend is that everyone in your clan is doing reasonably well or at least trying to do better, and planning for the best. But you never know. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Note: I’d never seen this 8mm footage before this morning.)
