Back in ’51 a gifted artist in the employ of 20th Century Fox created an alternate version of The Day The Earth Stood Still. He/she added (a) a giant, dark gray mummy’s hand and (b) Gort carrying a screaming Las Vegas blonde dressed in a pink-champagne gown instead of Patricia Neal in a dark business suit. No one complained when the film opened on 9.18.51 and everyone realized that neither of these elements were in the film. Because artists were allowed to…wait for it…use their imaginations!
A few months later an Italian poster artist followed suit with similar art for Me Secreto Me Condena, which is what Alfred Hitchcock‘s I Confess was called in Roma, Siena, Venice, Genoa, San Remo, Montepulciano, Firenze, Milano and Brindisi. (Google Translation: “I Secretly Condemn Myself.”) Montgomery Clift was no longer a priest, and the same gown-wearing blonde from The Day The Earth Stood Still poster was back, only this time wearing a semi-transparent black outfit and lying before Clift in a posture of shame and degradation.
Tina Fey, Amy Poehler opening remarks (2:55): “The Golden Globes are given out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association…made up of around 90 international, non-Black journalists who attend movie junkets each year in search of a better life.” (4:38) “Nomadland is about a lady played by Frances McDomand who travels across the desert in her van and poops in a bucket.” (5:46) “Soul is a beautiful Pixar animated movie in which a middle-aged black man accidentally get knocked out of his body and into a cat. The HFPA really responded to this movie because they do have five cat members.”
6:10 pm: HE is unable to invest any interest in animation, but respectfully believes that the HFPA giving a Golden Globe in this category to Pete Docter‘s Soul in an odd call. Posted on 11.29.20: “Despite an absolute avalanche of charm and energy and whimsical, wild-ass associations, Soul is just not good enough. Too fast and busy, too scattered, too all over the place, too hyper. And because it pushes a fundamentally false or at least conflicted concept of life. And because (this is minor but significant) it tries to normalize obesity with the casting of the fattest animated cat you’ve ever seen in your life.”
6:35 pm: Congrats to The Trial of the Chicago 7‘s Aaron Sorkin for winning the 2021 Golden Globe for Best Screenplay, Motion Picture. Posted on 9.22.20:
7:15 pm: Congrats to Minari for winning the Best Foreign Language Feature Golden Globe award. The only problem is that it’s not really a foreign-language feature. It’s a totally American film, set in the Midwestern heartland and featuring a scene in an American small-town church and costarring a Jesus freak (played by Will Patton). It happens to focus, yes, on characters who happen to speak Korean because that’s their native language. But it’s not a foreign-language film. Not in the usual sense.
7:45 pm: Congrats to The Mauritanian‘s Jodie Foster winning a GG for Best Supporting Actress, but where did this come from? And why, again, was Mank‘s Amanda Seyfried shafted? The Father‘s Olivia Colman gave the most compelling performance in this category, but she didn’t win because she won the Best Actress Oscar two years ago for The Favorite…right? Zip for Hillbilly Elegy‘s Glenn Close. I just don’t get (and I don’t “mean” anything by this) where the Foster vote came from. What drove it? Where was the big rationale?
8:10 pm: Congrats to Nomadland for winning Best Motion Picture, Drama; ditto Chloé Zhao winning for Best Director. Congrats all around.
Andra Day delivered an excellent performance in The United States vs. Billie Holiday — no question about that. But what she brought was significantly better than the film itself. Usually the film has to be well-liked or at least well-respected for a major category acting win to happen — not this year. You have to admit that Day winning is a surprise.
The bottom line is that HFPA members are seemingly terrified about possibly getting canceled or blackballed by the woke crowd. Hence the Boseman win (pure sentimental tribute trophy) + Kaluuya (I honestly feel that Sacha Baron Cohen really nailed Sorkin’s enhanced version of Abbie Hoffman, and I could’ve accepted a win for Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami) + Minari.
HFPA to Hollywood community (per friendo): “Just because we are an all-white voting body does not mean we are not woke. We get it. Please understand this. Because we do.”
Friendo: “Oscar-wise it’s Nomadland vs The Trial of the Chicago 7 for Best Picture. I think Boseman will probably win the Oscar for that goofy performance.”
Congrats to Daniel Kaluuya for winning a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture. Kaluuya’s win for his performance in Judas and the Black Messiah was the kickoff announcement at this evening’s Golden Globe telecast. Kaluuya is totally fine as the late Fred Hampton, but HE respectfully believes that his costar Lakeith Stanfield should have won instead.
Because they’re regarded as patronizing. Now that I think of it, this might be true all around. I know that if anyone in a business context offers me a flattering comment (as in “boy, you sure do know a lot of people!”), that’s a signal that I’m not going to get what I’m looking for. If they toss you a bone, you’re a dead man. I’d probably feel the same if someone was to call me “smart”, “clever” or “brilliant” in a business meeting. My eyebrows would rise and I’d immediately mutter to myself, “This person is fucking with me.” So a word to the wise — don’t go there.
Legendary Australian helmer Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Barbarosa, Plenty, Roxanne, A Cry in the Dark, The Russia House, Six Degrees of Separation, The Eye of the Storm) is doing just fine, thanks. Young in spirit, full of vim and vigor, etc. But for a few moments last night, there was a seeming cause for concern.
It started and mercifully ended with a Jack Morrissey tweet that said “rest in peace, Fred Schepisi.” I immediately wrote a friend who knows Schepisi and asked if he’d heard anything. He asked me what was up, and I forwarded the Morrissey tweet. Morrissey had been Twitter-conversing with a Los Angeles-based journalist, and the subject of A Cry in the Dark (aka Evil Angels) came up, and somehow or some way the words “rest in peace” popped out.
Maybe Morrissey’s idea was that Schepisi’s work on this film was so good that he didn’t need to worry about anything more and that he could rest in peace, etc. Or something like that.
Journalist explanation to Schepisi pally (late last night or this morning): “One of Variety‘s TV critics tweeted that Saturday Night Live used the phrase ‘a dingo ate my baby’ and said that A Cry in the Dark has a long legacy. I tweeted that I love the film, and its depiction of armchair punters who are convinced they know details of a case, based only on the news. A third person tweeted in response ‘RIP, Fred Schepisi.’ I love his work. I love your work too. Let me know if there’s anything I need to do here.”
The play and the film called Mister Roberts were based on Thomas Heggen’s same-titled 1946 novel, which was inspired by Heggen’s World War II endurance in the South Pacific. Heggens was 27 when the novel came out, and 29 when the play opened on Broadway. The poor guy died at age 30.
Explanation: “Bewildered by the fame he had longed for and under pressure to turn out another bestseller, Heggen found himself with a crippling case of writer’s block. ‘I don’t know how I wrote Mister Roberts,’ he admitted to a friend. ‘It was spirit writing’.
“Heggen became an insomniac and tried to cure it with increasing amounts of alcohol and prescription drugs. On May 19, 1949, he drowned in his bathtub after an overdose of sleeping pills. His death was ruled a probable suicide, although he left no note and those close to him insisted it was an accident.”
HE to Heggen in heaven: I feel your anguish, bruh, but all writing is spirit writing. If it ain’t spirit writing it’s probably not very good, and in some cases it’s just typing.
Nobody gives a damn about a 73 year-old Tony Award-winning play called Mr. Roberts. Well, a few boomers do, I suppose, but everyone hates boomers (polluted the planet, took all the money, condemned Millennials to a lifetime of economic anxiety) so fuck them and the play together. Whatever merits the play (co-written by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan) may have radiated during the Truman administration, they’ve long since seemed to matter.
But speaking as someone who long ago watched a degraded pan-and-scan version** of the 1955 Warner Bros. CinemaScope adaptation with Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell and Jack Lemmon in the lead roles, I’ve always been mystified why anyone in the mid ’50s ever thought Mr. Roberts, regarded as some kind of ace-level heart comedy in its heyday, thought it was any good.
A WWII Naval chuckler set aboard a backwater cargo ship called “the bucket” (and based upon some short stories written by Heggen about his war experiences), it’s basically a serving of coarse service humor, sentimentality and painfully sodden slapstick.
And yet the stage version of Mr. Roberts, directed by Logan, won a Tony Award for Best Play. I’ve never read the Heggen-Logan original, but the film must have coarsened the material considerably. It just stands to reason. Broadway sophistos have rarely celebrated the above-described behaviors in any form.
The central idea of the film version is that the enlisted men are eight-year-old children who love their kindly father (Fonda’s Mr. Roberts, a Lieutenant JG) and despise the petty, neurotic and tyrannical Captain Morton (Cagney). Over and over the film conveys what a rollicking pleasure it is to taunt or belittle Morton or better yet make him so furious that he throws up.
Oh, and what a hoot it was to watch nurses undress through binoculars from a distance of several hundred yards. And to make your own liquor with various rotgut ingredients…hilarious!
With the exception of one amusing scene in which the under-educated Morton rants about how much he hates snooty college boys like Roberts and how they treated him when he worked as a bus boy in the 1920s (“Oh, bus boy! It seems my friend here has thrown up all over the table…fetch a mop and clean up the mess, bus boy, will ya?”), there’s nothing the least bit funny in the entire film. You can see what was intended to be funny but none of it lands.
The lead performances are fine in and of themselves (Lemmon won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), but the crew is just awful. The simpleton behavior and mentally-stunted emotions…God.
The principal reason for the failure of Mr. Roberts was John Ford, the genius-level, Oscar-winning director who was also a lifelong alcoholic and a surly old cuss who always brought the material down to his own unpretentious and irreverent level, especially when it came to films about men in uniform. Ford worshipped the idea of getting loaded and being insubordinate and snarly and generally sour-facing everyone.
Alleged Cagney quote: “I would have kicked his brains out. He was so goddamned mean to everybody. He was truly a nasty old man.”
