World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy suspects that down the road there may be an SJW backlash against Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite. When someone describes the film in November as a drama about three lesbians being horrid to each other, a Twitter brigade may respond that this kind of negative representation is unhelpful and even arguably homophobic.

I don’t see this happening as the film is obviously delivering a certain kind of dry black comedy that requires venal behavior for the humor to kick in, but never underestimate the snowflake capacity for taking offense. The scheming, viper-like nature of Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone‘s characters is, of course, just an aspect of the same perverse, mean-spirited shit Lanthimos puts in all his films.

Earlier today Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil asserted that I’m predicting Melissa McCarthy‘s performance in Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me? to “win” the Best Actress Oscar. Nope — I’m just saying that right now MM’s unaffected, often riveting performance feels like fresh fireworks, and that she’s suddenly even-steven with The Wife‘s Glenn Close.

Emphasizing: I did not bump Close down to third place. Well, I did but that wasn’t the intention. The Gold Derby format doesn’t allow for ties and, as noted, I’d just seen Can You Ever Forgive Me? when I voted and was feeling a Telluride contact high.

Repeating: I put The Favourite‘s Olivia Colman into my #2 slot, but Colman’s performance doesn’t belong in the Best Actress category. She’s totally supporting. If you regard The Favourite as a kind of palace-intrigue con movie, Queen Anne is the “mark” while Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are the con artists. Colman is being played the whole time, and lead actors are always the players, not the played.

I’m not saying Weisz and Stone are hoodwinking the queen a la Robert Redford and Paul Newman conning Robert Shaw in The Sting, but ask yourself this: If you were in charge of The Sting‘s Oscar campaign, would you put Shaw up for Best Actor?

I missed Lee Chang-dong‘s Burning in Cannes, but caught it late last month in Manhattan. A chilly Patricia Highsmith-meets-F. Scott Fitzgerald drama about class envy and resentment, Burning is creepy, thoughtful and mystifying in a good way. It percolates and resonates and stays with you.

But it’s a half-hour too long (148 minutes) and suffers, I feel, from an underwritten protagonist (Jong-su, played by Yoo Ah-in) who’s allegedly a writer but doesn’t talk like one, and who regards everyone and everything with a kind of dazed, open-mouthed stupor.

Fitzgerald and William Faulkner are referenced by Jong-su, but he looks and behaves more like a lazy student than a writer hungry to say something. At one point he notes that South Korea is full of Jay Gatsby types — that’s the sum total of his insights shared in the entire film. Plus he dresses poorly and has a dorky flat-top haircut. Sorry, bruh, but will you close your fucking mouth, please?

The film starts intriguingly when Jong-su falls for Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), whom he vaguely knew and found unattractive as a teenager, but he soon realizes she has a rich, blase. socially connected boyfriend named Ben (Steven Yeun) who drives a Porsche.

Jong-su, Hae-mi and Ben became a kind of odd trio, hanging out and going to parties, etc. Around the halfway mark Ben casually reveals he’s into burning rural greenhouses, presumably as an expression of sociopathic contempt for the middle and lower classes. Then Hae-mi disappears, and Jong-su begins to wonder if Ben might have killed her for sport.

Based on “Barn Burning,” a 26 year-old New Yorker short story by Haruki Murakami, Burning will open in New York on 10.26 and in Los Angeles on 11.2 before opening nationwide on 11.9.

It wasn’t for lack of trying, but I missed this morning’s 9:15 screening of Yann Demange‘s White Boy Rick. I packed last night (the Mountainside requires an evacuation by 10 am) but not entirely, and I didn’t rise early enough. My energy levels were probably lessened on some level by the not-so-hot reviews thus far. I’ll just have to see it in Toronto.

I’ll be catching a noon screening of Olivier Assayas‘ Non-Fiction at the Pierre, and then a 3:45 pm screening of Ed Zwick‘s Trial By Fire at the Herzog. Maybe. Presumably.

Chris Willman and I will be heading out of town by sometime around 6 pm, give or take. I have this idea about driving all the way to Monument Valley, which should take around four hours. The idea would be to stay at Goulding’s or The View and awaken to all that John Ford splendor. And then drive all day Tuesday and into the evening before reaching Los Angeles.

Memo to Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil: Suddenly and out of the blue, Can You Ever Forgive Me‘s Melissa McCarthy is 2018’s leading Best Actress contender. Easily, no question, hands down. But Gold Derby editors are a bit confused about the contenders in The Favourite. Colorfully eccentric and emotionally affecting as Olivia Colman‘s performance as Queen Anne is, her role is essentially supporting. The queen is the object of everyone’s attention, but she’s malleable, flighty, unstable and bed-ridden half the time. The lead protagonists, the duelling characters with steel and assertiveness, are played by Rachel Weisz (Sarah Churchill) and Emma Stone (Abigail Masham). You’ve got to move Colman into the Best Supporting Actress category (I currently have her as the second-rated Best Actress contender but she belongs in supporting, where she would be the top contender) and move Weisz and Stone into Best Actress competition.