Month: January 2019

Everyone understands that Roma‘s Alfonso Cuaron is going to win the 2018 DGA award for feature film directing…right? You know that, I know that, we all know that.

Cuaron was nominated this morning for Roma along with A Star Is Born‘s Bradley Cooper (hangin’ by a thread!), Green Book‘s Peter Farrelly, BlacKkKlansman‘s Spike Lee and Vice‘s Adam McKay.

Cooper also landed a second nomination for best first-time director, which he’ll almost certainly win in a post-Golden Globes debacle sympathy vote.

The next big bellwether will be the January 13th announcement of the Critics Choice Awards.

When asked about Donald Trump‘s blizzard of bullshit about “the wall”, Sen. Kamala Harris, who’s definitely running for President in 2020 (hence the new book “The Truths We Hold”), said, “I was a prosecutor for many years including California attorney general, and I specialized in trans-national criminal organizations…that wall ain’t gonna stop them!”

The last six words got a huge response from the View audience, mainly because Harris briefly broke out of her tough prosecutorial persona and said them like an earthy, no-bullshit woman of color.

How black is Harris? The answer is “partly to somewhat.” She’s the daughter of an Tamil Indian mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris (1938–2009), a breast cancer researcher and daughter of an Indian diplomat, and a Jamaican-American father, Donald Harris, a Stanford University economics professor. You certainly can’t call her “street.”

This week’s bravery badge has been earned by The Stranger‘s Christopher Frizzelle, author of “I Am a Gay Man, and I Liked Bohemian Rhapsody“:

“Did you know Freddie Mercury died of AIDS? Did you know he lived in a time when gay sexuality was criminalized in most jurisdictions? Did you know he liked gay sex? Did I mention he died of AIDS?

“Those are the only important things to know about him, according to the cool kids. Vox’s review gave the movie 1.5 stars out of 5. Why? ‘Bohemian Rhapsody was made with the cooperation of Queen’s surviving members, but they reportedly were only willing to sign on if it wouldn’t be R-rated, and thus it’s scrubbed clean of much of the content that might round out a film more committed to accuracy regarding the lifestyle of its characters.” Shorter version: needs more gay sex, needs more AIDS.

“Memo to the moral crusaders: Mercury did not want to be known as an AIDS icon. He wanted to be known for his art. Your insistence that he is an AIDS icon, that what was meaningful about him was his AIDS, and that only a movie that dwells on his AIDS and how he got his AIDS is acceptable is frankly disgusting.

“The sub-headline of a negative Stranger review: ‘It’s a ballad of tragic gay cliches.’ Actually, it’s not. It’s a movie set in a time before you were born; there’s a difference. And if you want more AIDS, more bathhouses, more dick, more repression, more orgies in the dark, etc., well, you’re asking for more ‘tragic gay cliches,’ not fewer.”

From “Straight-Washing Concerns,” filed by yours truly on 11.3.18:

“There are some fellows who are a bit irked that Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t depict Freddie Mercury‘s amorous escapades in franker terms. It’s not gay enough, they mean. Too sanitized. Why not a heifer-ramming scene or a splooge shot a la Taxi Zum Klo?

“There’s no question the film feels a bit chaste — it probably needed to be a bit ruder, darker, crazier. And maybe a little Mine Shaft action. Hard to say. Then again if Bohemian had been shot in a way that would have been gotten a Guy Lodge stamp of approval it probably wouldn’t have earned nearly $50 million this weekend.”

All hail and all heed the following just-posted Golden Globes commentary from The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield:

“I’m sorry to break it to Oscar Twitter, but Bohemian Rhapsody is a genuine international phenomenon. And the audiences don’t seem to care that it was partially made by a director over whom there is a cloud; you’re free to tell them they are wrong. For a musical biopic to do numbers rivaling a mid-range Marvel film is astonishing, and for people to suggest that this is something Hollywood should turn their backs on, rather than taking the good and leaving the bad, shows you how deep into the internal narrative the commentariat has driven itself.”

This next paragraph in particular should be printed out, framed and hung on office walls all over town:

“And while we’re at it: if you wanted to show visitors from the future what the atmosphere was like in and around and about Hollywood in 2019, you’d only have to show them Green Book and tell them that this likable, good-hearted film provoked the biggest, fiercest backlash of the year.

“With both these films, there has been this complaint that they are soft-peddling their respective social issues — i.e., not giving audiences the full, unwashed bleakness of the true situation. It’s this continuing sense that giant mega-conglomerate entertainment producers should be making movies to satisfy the farthest thresholds of the sensibility of the media elite class; that there is nothing to be gained in finding a broadly digestible version that will draw in audiences in the tens and hundreds of millions.

“To that end, I noticed a little boomlet among in the Oscar Twitter last night, suggesting that the Academy now needs to respond to the outrages perpetrated by the HFPA’s best pic awards by unequivocally, by acclamation, bestowing the Best Picture award on Roma.

“Now, I liked Roma [quite a lot]. It might (or might not!) by my personal favorite of the nominees.. But if anyone thinks that Oscar getting in the habit of giving its big prize to tiny intimate films seen by a handful of people is a long-term or even medium-term strategy to Save Our Show…they are off their rockers.”

The Roma diss aside, Rushfield is saying in effect that most of the critics who are wringing their hands over Bohemian Rhapsody‘s Golden Globes win and particularly the haters who went the extra mile to try and torpedo Green Book (Variety‘s Guy Lodge, L.A. Daily News‘ Bob Strauss, Vox‘s Alissa Wilkinson, The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody, Globe and Mail‘s Barry Hertz, A.V. Club‘s A.A. Dowd, N.Y. Times A.O. Scott, Slate‘s Ingkoo Kang) have, for lack of a better term and at least as far as mildly populist over-35 sensibilities are concerned, encamped themselves inside their own anal cavities. They are all filing from inside a very deep and dark politically correct cave.

Definitely an interesting Fosse/Verdon trailer. Smokey-red lighting, sultry backstage atmosphere, a series of carefully placed static shots, fast cutting, Cabaret-like. Partly a stylistic nod to Fosse’s dance-montage sequences in All That Jazz, partly a recalling of Fosse’s Sweet Charity.

We’re talking about an eight-part limited series, debuting on FX in April. Sam Rockwell as the legendary dancer, choreographer and film director; Michelle Williams as red-haired Broadway superstar and Fosse’s longtime partner Gwen Verdon.

Please include a sequence in which Rockwell and Williams perform “Who’s Got The Pain?“, just like Fosse and Verdon did in Damn Yankees.

Based on Sam Wasson’s 2014 biography, Fosse/Verdon will chronicle the couple’s tumultuous relationship — flirtation, collaboration, love affair, marriage, infidelities, uppers, etc.

Filming began two months ago; still shooting as we speak. The apparent director of at least half of the episodes is Thomas Kail. Exec produced by Kail, Steven Levenson and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Read more

From Guy Lodge’s 1.30.18 Variety review: “The water’s warm and inviting, and that goes for precisely nothing else in Holiday, a low-temperature, high-impact debut from Swedish-born writer-director Isabella Eklöf that impresses with its clinical construction and still, penetrating gaze into male violence.

“Scratch past its smooth, sun-whitened surface, however, and messy questions lie at the nominal heart of this glassy, nasty study of a Danish gangster’s moll caught between the material rewards of her position and the abusive price she pays for it.

“It’s up for vigorous debate whether Holiday‘s most shocking material offers substantive commentary on the toxic behavior it portrays, or simply eye-searing observation thereof; a steady female gaze behind the camera tilts the film’s politics in unexpected, deliberately discomfiting ways.

“The club of contemporary cinematic provocateurs to whose brand of formalism Holiday is likeliest to prompt comparisons — Ulrich Seidl, Michael Haneke, even Gaspar Noé — is an awfully male-dominated one, and one senses that hegemony is not far from Eklöf’s mind in her gutsy first feature. Perhaps not since Julia Leigh’s undervalued Sleeping Beauty has a distaff auteur film so brazenly tested the limits of how women’s bodies may be used and abused on screen, muddling empathy with exploitation in one pristinely composed shot after another.”

The awards-for-Rami Malek movement actually began two days before the Golden Globes, when the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts staged its eighth annual AACTA International Awards at the Hollywood Mondrian. 48 hours before the HFPA gave Malek their Best Actor award for his Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, the Aussies did the same. Mahershala Ali, also awarded last night with a GG trophy, won a AACTA Best Supporting Actor award for his Green Book turn as Dr. Don Shirley.

Now it’s The Curse of Kris Tapley’s Premature Seal of Oscar Inevitability. Or something like that.

Apple copy: “Introducing Liquid Retina display on iPhone XR — the most advanced LCD in the industry. An innovative backlight design allows the screen to stretch into the corners…true-to-life color from one beautiful edge to the other.

I’m happy with my iPhone 8Plus. If I was going to upgrade I would get the iPhone XS Max, but that starts at $1100 and I need 256 gigs. Keep in mind also that the iPhone XR is not the most technologically advanced iPhone — many of the cooler components are reportedly exclusive to the iPhone XS Max.

The song is “Come Along” by Cosmo Sheldrake.

Among the 2019 Writers Guild Awards nominations, Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed screenplay has been given the cold shoulder — an all-but-unforgivable oversight. Schrader’s morally anguished script, in my judgment his best since Hardcore and one that Robert Bresson would have understood and approved of, has been Best Screenplay-nominated by both the Spirit and Critics’ Choice awards.

Scripts that made the WGA cut include BlacKkKlansman, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Eighth Grade, Green Book, If Beale Street Could Talk, A Quiet Place Roma, A Star Is Born and Vice.

WGA ineligibles include Cold War, Caoernaum, The Favourite, Leave No Trace, Sorry to Bother You, The Death of Stalin, At Eternity’s Gate and Shoplifters.

The Bohemian Rhapsody screenplay was eligible but blown off.

The 71st annual Writers Guild Award winners will be announced on Sunday, 2.17.

Correction: HE made an error earlier about Black Panther not being nominated — it was and has been nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.

From Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Whatever happens seven weeks from now, the Globes, last night, registered as strongly as they ever have as an agenda-setter, a kind of casual dry run for the Academy Awards that, in more categories than not (indeed, in nearly every one of them), had the effect of asking: What would it feel like on Oscar night if this happened?

“In that light, the Globes sent out several key messages — like, for instance, the re-establishment of Green Book as a contender voters can support with pride. For a while, the movie felt like tainted goods. Despite a slew of good reviews and an early reputation as a crowd-pleaser, it had become the object of critical controversy, accused of adopting a decades-old approach to racial historical drama that now (in the eyes of some) seems patronizing. When the Viggo Mortensen N-word flap happened, it seemed to lend a kind of support to the notion that there was something ‘unenlightened’ about Green Book.

“But last night, when it picked up three awards, the shift away from that dynamic seemed more or less complete. Green Book was a player again, and not just because it had won. Mahershala Ali’s speech for best supporting actor was a model of grace and affection, and the way he honored the character he portrays — the jazz innovator Dr. Don Shirley — helped to dissipate the criticism that Shirley’s life had been somehow de-authenticated by the movie.

“Last night the Golden Globes helped restore Green Book to what, in my book, it always was: An artfully enchanting movie that may come off as a little old-fashioned in form, but not in a way that justifies giving the movie a moral slap.

“And speaking of momentum, is that something Glenn Close now has? And that Lady Gaga, so exquisite to see in her cotton-candy blue hair, has less of?

“That’s a tough call, but what’s undeniable is that we’ve come a long way from the days when the Golden Globes were nothing more than the vulgar, downscale, champagne-bucket-at-the-table cousin to the Oscars that no one took seriously. They seem, more and more, like a dress rehearsal for the real thing — and a rehearsal, in some cases, where the understudy goes on instead of the expected star, and steals the limelight. You can agree or disagree with the Globes’ movie awards, but what leaps out about even the eyebrow-raising ones is that they’re connecting with currents that are out there and giving them added life.”