Year: 2019

Hart Is Over. Again.

by

How does the Academy move forward on re-hiring Kevin Hart as the next Oscar host after all the pushback plus Don Lemon airing a special opinion piece that says “no can do, this doesn’t work, Kevin needs to walk away”?

From 1.5 edition of Richard Rushfield‘s The Ankler: “Why should we have [an Oscar] host? Who in their right mind would step into this mess? There hasn’t been a gig in showbiz as certain to take a wrecking ball to a performer’s reputation since someone hired a stand-up comic as a joke-telling mohel at Barry Diller’s grandson’s bris.”

Jig’s Up

by

“Nicole Kidman is indeed remarkable [in Destroyer], as rumor suggests, but mainly because you can’t stop remarking her. It’s an over-cover performance in an undercover role. Though aiming to blend in, she’s so dramatically busy that she ends up sticking out, like a chameleon who’s praying for an Oscar nod.

“The rule seems to be that the more makeup and prosthetics she piles on the more likely we are to cry out, in unison, ‘Oh, look, it’s Nicole Kidman!'” — from Anthony Lane’s review in the 1.17.19 issue of The New Yorker.

From “Pains of Hell,” my 9.1.18 Telluride review: “Destroyer is mostly about the way Kidman looks, like a combination vampire-zombie with dark eye bags and a complexion that suggests a heroin habit mixed with twice-daily injections of embalming fluid. Plus a Desolation Row, gray-streaked hair style. It’s also about the whispery way in which she speaks. I swear to God I missed over half of her dialogue.

“Kidman and Kusama are basically saying to us, ‘Have you guys ever seen such a badass, hardass undercover female cop in your moviegoing life? Even in a zombie movie?’ HE answer: No, I’ve never seen a cop character who looks this wasted, this dead-to-the-world, this gutted, this excavated, this George Romero, this Bela Lugosi-ish. Hats off.”

Read more

Know-It-Alls Freaking Over PGA Noms

by

This morning the Producers Guild of America revealed 10 nominees for their Best Picture prize (i.e., Daryl F. Zanuck award). The elite arbiters are freaking about the mildly mediocre but well-liked Bohemian Rhapsody being among them. For me the more appalling nominee is Crazy Rich Asians, which was included because of the all-Asian cast and the fact that it made boatloads of money. The other nominees are Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Green Book, A Quiet Place (another outlier), Roma, A Star is Born and Vice.

None So Blind As Those, etc.

by

If you wanted to be snide about it, which of the favored Best Picture contenders could be regarded as a kind of soap opera? A Star Is Born, The Favourite or If Beale Street Could Talk…right? So which is being referred to in this tweet?

Hart Seems Shifty, Slippery, Uncentered

by

2:40 pm Update: Variety‘s Matt Donnelly is reporting that “key parties involved in the annual Oscars telecast are open to the return of Kevin Hart as host, following an alternately contrite and defiant appearance on The Ellen Show on Thursday.”

Earth to Academy honchos: Did you guys read what Hart told Kris Tapley only hours before chatting with Ellen?

Sir Thomas More to Kevin Hart: “When you spoke to Tapley you said you wouldn’t host the Oscars…’it’s done, it’s done.’ Hours later you told Ellen you might want the gig after all. We must just pray that when your head’s finished turning, your face is to the front again.”

Previously: Hours before visiting with Ellen DeGeneres and suggesting to viewers that he’s re-assessing the Oscar hosting gig, Kevin Hart firmly told Variety‘s Kris Tapley that he would not host the Oscars…no way, no how, nopeski.

Hart #1: “Would I ever do it? No, it’s done. It’s done. The moment came and it was a blessing and I was excited at the opportunity and I still am.”

Hart #2: “In my mind I got the job, it was a dream job, and things came up that simply prohibited it from happening. But I don’t believe in going backwards. When I go on that stage, it will be because I’ve somehow figured out a way to win the Oscar. Somehow I’ll get to the stage but it’s not going to be in this way because it just comes with such a weird cloud at this point.”

So now there are two arguments about Hart filling the presumably-still-open Oscar gig. One, the LGBTQs have doubled-down on him for not really apologizing for those old ugly tweets and for generally being a bad fit in 2019. And two, he’s all kinds of shifty and dodgy about what he really wants, telling Ellen one thing and Kris another.

Very Small Quibble

by

Throughout most of Cold War, which spans about 14 or 15 years (1949 to the early-mid ’60s), Tomasz Kot‘s piano-man character wears hipster whiskers. Nobody and I mean nobody adopted this look until the debut of grubby-chic manbeards in the mid to late ’80s (GQ, Don Johnson, Miami Vice). Anyone who wore three-week-growth whiskers before that late-Reagan era was universally regarded as an alcoholic bum, a hobo, a down-at-the-heels loser.

Dance, Part 1

by

“War” is one thing and political conflict another, but there’s a certain amount of overlap. The slight irony is that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is probably more dug into the idea of pitched-battle politics than any of the new generation of Congressional legislators. To her credit, of course, but she’s certainly not averse to using social-media grenade launchers and other tools of political warfare. Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight.

Hart Actively Reconsidering Oscar Gig

by

Is this an even worse Kevin Hart debacle than the first one? I kinda doubt that the LGBTQ community is going to follow Ellen Degeneres‘ lead by saying ‘okay, Kevin…we forgive your homophobic tweets, host the show, all is well,” etc. Or am I misreading the situation?

Sopan Deb‘s N.Y. Times report contains the following Ellen quote: “So I called [the Academy]. I said ‘Kevin’s on.’ I said, ‘I have no idea if he wants to come back and host. But what are your thoughts?’ And they were like, ‘Oh my god. We want him to host. We feel like that maybe he misunderstood or it was handled wrong or maybe we said the wrong thing but we want him to host.’”

Go, Noomi

by

Vicky Jewson‘s Close looks and feels like a reasonably servicable bodyguard-protects-rich-client action flick. “Loosely inspired” by the actual exploits of Jacquie Davis, one of the very few women to excel in the male-dominated bodyguard profession. Pic began principal photography in August 2017. Netflix will debut Close on Friday, 1.18.

20 Years Is Enough

by

It’s time to finally stop saying “two thousand” when speaking of any 21st Century calendar year, and start saying “twenty.” We are now in the year twenty-nineteen, and not two-thousand nineteen. Year after year people (including news anchors for CNN and MSNBC) have stubbornly insisted upon “two thousand” this and that. I’m asking everyone to please stop it. For the next 80 years we’re going to be in the twenties, not the two-thousands.

The pronunciation of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey screwed things up for God knows how many millions. I realize that the first year of the 21st Century had to be pronounced two-thousand, and of course the following year had to follow the Kubrick. (Nobody in that 1968 classic ever said “two-thousand one,” by the way.) But for too many years people have been sticking to that absurd verbal tic, and after 20 years of living in the 21st Century I really think it’s time to stop it once and for all.

We’ve now lived through two full decades in which the year has begun with the number 2. For a century before 12.31.99, the year began with nineteen-something. When John F. Kennedy was elected president no English-speaker ever said the year was “one-thousand nine sixty” — they said “nineteen sixty.” Years are always pronounced as a pair of two-digit numbers. The Declaration of Independence was signed in seventeen seventy-six — not one thousand seven seventy-six. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in eighteen sixty-five, not one thousand eight sixty five.

People Who Make Clink-Clink Sounds

by

You don’t know what the term “aural torture” really means until you’ve been in a room with someone who’s slurping soup or eating yogurt and granola out of a glazed clay bowl, or who’s stirring a powdered drink in a glass.

I’m talking about a person who won’t stop stirring the soup over and over and rythmically at that…clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink. Or who feels the need to keep stirring and overturning the yogurt-granola mash…eat, savor, swallow and then clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink. Or someone who’s poured a packet of Emergen-C into a glass of water and then won’t stop stirring it…clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink.

I’m telling you that after listening to these clink-clinks for the 17th or 18th time and realizing that you’re going to be listening to them for the remainder of your life on this planet…this is when the insanity virus will begin to seep into your system, and after this point it will never leave you alone.

Falling Into A Deep Cave Is Too Much

by

“Five years ago, All Is Lost premiered at Cannes to deserved acclaim. But when it opened later that fall, the film was a noteworthy commercial disappointment, and the awards magic never happened for Robert Redford. I think I understood why. All Is Lost was ingeniously made, and a true experience, yet the stark fact is that it was slow. Arctic, as effective as it is, may face a similar challenge (at least in the U.S.), precisely because of the rough-hewn, trudging-through-the-tundra, one-step-at-a-time honesty with which Joe Penna works. [It’s] the anti-Cast Away. Yet that’s what’s good and, finally, moving about it. It lets survival look like the raw experience it is.” — from Owen Gleiberman‘s Cannes Film Festival review, posted on 5.10.18.