Day: October 11, 2018

Crowd Pleaser, Obvious Hit

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For the most part Bohemian Rhapsody is a so-so, run-of-the-mill, by-the-numbers famous rock band saga, but I loved Rami Malek‘s appropriately showy performance as Freddie Mercury (especially during the last third) and being a longtime Queen fan I REALLY LOVED THE MUSICAL PORTIONS…hell, everyone will.

And of course (everyone’s been saying this) the film REALLY PULLS OUT THE STOPS for the Live Aid finale, and for this section alone the film is more than worth the price. It’s a guaranteed hit, of course, and a likely (all but certain?) Best Actor nomination for Malek.

(tapped out on iPhone, 10:15 pm…rain has stopped, streets are damp and reflecting)

Brody Fulfills Prophecy

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Two days ago a critic friend warned that First Man may come under fire “on the level of identity politics. It’s the portrait of a stalwart ’50s straight-arrow white man and his hand-wringing, stand-by-your-man wife. So therefore it must be hated. It will be interesting this week to see if critics carry the identity-politics ball on this, in which ‘too cold’ becomes a metaphor for ‘too much in the way of tight-ass straight white guy material.’”

Yesterday The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody walked right into this narrative in a piece called “Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong Biopic Is an Accidental Right-Wing Fetish Object“:

Significant passage: “Except for the protesters, First Man is whiter than a Fred-and-Ginger ballroom set.

“There are no Hidden Figures here; Neil, an engineer, does his own fancy calculations, thank you very much. The vast team effort to make the moon landing possible is reduced to background extras. The movie is centered on astronauts, who interact briefly with a handful of administrators and scientists; there are wives and children; and, otherwise, there are minions who line the corridor and cheer as Neil and his colleagues pass by on the way to the capsule. The moon mission was as much a matter of media as it was of science. The iconic moments of the moon landing are great television, and it took significant thought and labor on the part of NASA to figure out how to capture them.

“But Chazelle isn’t interested in process, or in how the facts were transformed into legend. Instead, he filters the legend to render it even more monumentally, unequivocally, inhumanly heroic.”

Owned by Roberts

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The invisible subtitle of Peter Hedges‘ Ben Is Back (Roadside, 12.7) is “oh, what a tangled mess we make of our lives when we trust our formerly drug-addicted sons and daughters to act like they’re past it and totally clean.” Doesn’t usually work that way. Julia Roberts’ too-trusting mom is the standout element; Lucas Hedges (heavier than in Manchester By The Sea and wearing a tennis–ball haircut) is the druggie son. A better-than-decent film that runs on a clock, the whole story unfolding within a 12-hour time period (or something like that).

Curious Golden Globe Strategies

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So what’s the thinking behind Warner Bros.’ A Star is Born and 20th Century Fox’s Bohemian Rhapsody being submitted as dramas for the 2019 Golden Globe awards, instead of the expected musical or comedy category?

I’m presuming that the Warner Bros. strategists are calculating that a Golden Globes comedy/musical category may result in a kind of Academy-mindset downgrade for A Star Is Born. They want Bradley Cooper‘s romantic musical drama to be regarded as a burnished, triple-A effort in all respects and therefore Best Picture material, and so they’re going for a higher grade of estimation.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Assessing Olivia Colman’s Best Actress Hoodwink

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Kudos to Deadline‘s Pete Hammond for implying that the Gold Derby community is full of shit for buying into the idea of that Olivia Colman‘s performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite is a Best Actress thing, and stating plainly that in a fair and just world she “should be in supporting.”

Hammond is 100% correct because Colman is not playing a lead protagonist but a mark, the victim of a kind of royal-court con. By the standards of The Sting, she’s playing Robert Shaw while Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone — the film’s actual leads — are playing Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

Anne Thompson agrees but also seems to be capitulating to Colman’s Best Actress narrative because, she says, “Fox is maintaining a kind of radio silence” about the Colman thing.

Nobody is a greater admirer of Olivia Colman than myself. I’ve mentioned this before, but don’t forget that I actually raised dough to fund screenings of Tyrannosaur so people could appreciate how great Colman was in that film.

Significant Tom O’Neill remark: “Poor Glenn Close. If she doesn’t get nominated for The Wife…” Hammond: “Oh, she’ll get nominated.”

Thompson on Can You Ever Forgive Me‘s Melissa McCarthy: “Talk about a narrative!”

Hamilton Schools Cruz, Rubio

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HE has issues with Jake “junket whore” Hamilton, but he’s completely correct here in pushing back against the anti-First Man tweets by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Plus he fails to mention a noteworthy flag-unfurling scene involving Neil Armstrong‘s son.

First Man director Damien Chazelle to Josh Rothkppf during last weekend’s Hamptons Film festival, as posted by Gold Derby‘s Bill McCuddy: “Art is an inherently political act. But there is a distinction beneath that as to certain choices. That wasn’t a political decision and I hope anyone who sees the movie knows there’s nothing political about it. The moonwalk is only eight minutes. This is about the eight years that led up to it, but in terms of that moonwalk I felt a responsibility to show people things they hadn’t seen.”

Flags aside, HE objects to Hamilton’s “Ron Burgundy” suit jacket.