Day: October 7, 2021

All Hail Wright’s “Cyrano”

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The two finest films I saw at last month’s Telluride Film Festival were Joe Wright‘s exquisitely made Cyrano (UA Releasing, 12.31) and Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19). As things currently stand, these are also the most deserving Best Picture contenders…no question. Here, at long last, is the Cyrano trailer:

Posted on 9.2.21: “I’ve been watching filmed adaptations of Edmund Rostand‘s Cyrano de Bergerac for decades (Jose Ferrer‘s 1950 version, Steve Martin‘s Roxanne, the 1990 Gerard Depardieu version, and Michael Lehmann‘s The Truth About Cats and Dogs). Wright’s newbie — an inventively choreographed musical, fortified by first-rate production design and wonderfully lighted cinematography — is arguably the most spiritually and poetically buoyant version of them all.

The acting is top-tier, the musical numbers are arresting, the dialogue is as good as this sort of thing gets, and it’s a truly authentic time-tunnel experience (save for the presentism in the casting, which is par for the course these days).

Peter Dinklage has absolutely hit the jackpot with his titular performance — he’ll definitely be Best Actor-nominated. The film will almost certainly end up being Best Picture-nominated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the year-end consensus is that Cyrano is a “better” musical than Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story and Jon Chu‘s In The Heights combined.

Based on Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical of the same name (in which Dinklage and Haley Bennett costarred before moving onto the film version), Cyrano is easily Wright’s best film since Anna Karenina. Seamus McGarvey‘s exquisite cinematography reminded me of David Watkins‘ lensing of Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) — it’s a real trip just to watch and sink into on a visual level alone.

Kudos to Cyrano costars Kelvin Harrison Jr., Bashir Salahuddin and Ben Mendelsohn.

After-Party Social Protocol

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An invitational screening of a film has just ended, and you, a journalist, were not a fan. (You wanted to be, but the film wouldn’t let you.) And now you’re on your way to the after-party.

The general etiquette is as follows: (1) The journo is obliged to be as fawning and gracious and complimentary as possible when speaking to talent or studio reps, although he/she is not obliged to lie outright about his/her reaction to the film in question; and (2) It is permissible for journos to mutter their true opinion of the film with colleagues if they happen to be out of earshot of talent or studio reps.

Case in point: “Ringo Starr’s ‘The No-No Song'”, posted on 8.28.16.

HE Shed A Tear Last Night

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SPOILERS ALLUDED TO WITHIN THE FOLLOWING: Last night I watched Daniel Craig‘s last and final James Bond film, knowing full well what the storyline was and particularly what the ending would deliver.

And I enjoyed it thoroughly. I was never bored, and was seriously impressed with Cary Fukanaga‘s pacing, cutting, visual discipline and overall chops. There’s never any doubt that this is a grade-A package made by grade-A people. Plus it’s Craig’s best Bond since Casino Royale, and one of the best overall. And knowing about the ending didn’t fucking matter at all. There’s a difference between watching a film as an adult, and watching one as an infant.

The pleasure of any film is in the way it unfolds — that special-touch factor, the art of it, the timing, the polish, the undercurrent, the first-classiness of it all. How the story is told, not the story itself…right? Singer, not song.

Plus the whole plot is sitting on the film’s Wikipedia page. Al Pacino in The Insider: “The cat totally out of the bag…”

On top of which Craig doesn’t play a boorish old-school sexist. He never has really. He plays a good, decent, smart, non-arrogant fellow in No Time to Die, and when the big moment comes it’s rather sad and classically invested in. And that’s where I shed my single, solitary tear.

Let no one doubt that the ending of No Time To Die was written by people who are terrified of seeming tethered to the past (who isn’t?), and are triply terrified of wokester (especially #MeToo) wrath, and that the ending was written to make a point — i.e., we’re in a new world, and there’ll be no more of that old “shaken, not stirred” broth…that smooth, sexist, tuxedo-wearing, martini-sipping swagger. We’re ending that shit here and now.

And it’s completely foolish and stupid, by the way, for the film to say at the end of the closing credits that JAMES BOND WILL RETURN. No Time To Die is not a Marvel or a D.C. film.

Friendo to HE: “I can’t say for sure what the Bond producers will do, but there’s way too much money on the table for them to just say goodbye to James Bond. And Barbara Broccoli is on record as saying that the character won’t be a woman. Bond will be back, with a new actor (probably a Caucasian), and they’ll present it as a reboot.”

HE to Friendo: “But they’ve conclusively eliminated that possibility. The only way to get around this would be inject Marvel and D.C.-styled plotting.”

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HE to Jaclyn Moore: Chappelle Has Never Been “Goofy”

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The Stalinist prison guard living inside Dear White People showrunner and writer Jaclyn Moore has emerged. For she’s attempting to persuade Netflix to zotz Dave Chappelle‘s The Closer because his remarks about trans people, she feels, are prejudicial and uncool.

Last night Moore stated on Twitter and Instagram that she’ll no longer work with Netflix after watching The Closer. “After the Chappelle special, I can’t do this anymore,” Moore wrote. “I won’t work for Netflix again as long as they keep promoting and profiting from dangerous transphobic content.”

If I was a Netflix honcho, I would reply to Moore as follows: “I hear you. You’re not altogether wrong. Chappelle’s views on trans women certainly don’t mirror our own, and we hope you and your community understand that. This aside, we deplore Stalinist censorship and don’t approve of efforts by anyone to muzzle anyone, least of all a brilliant comic whose entire career has been about considering the view of persons like yourself and occasionally saying ‘nope, not me, sorry.'”

HE to Moore: Anyone who partially describes Chappelle as a “goofy” comic doesn’t really hear him or get where he’s coming from, no offense. He’s not goofy or wacky, and he doesn’t live in a doo-wacky, doo-wacky, wah-wah world.

Chappelle: “In our country, you can shoot and kill a n***a, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.”

HE to Vaccine Refuseniks

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Just a note to all the millions who lost their jobs over refusing to take the vaccine. I’m very sorry that you’re all idiots, and I sincerely hope that you will experience not just disruption but difficulty because of your decision. And if you get the virus and are sent to God…well, I’m not going to cheer for that outcome. But if the worst does happen, you can at least look in a mirror before you die and say “yeah, I bought that.”

Reminder About John Ford

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Besides being a supremely elegant filmmaker and one of the eternal Movie Godz in the sky, John Ford was brusque and cantankerous, a fucktard, a snarly prick, an alcoholic ass, flinty and cruel and a genuine shit. Occasionally.

On the other hand James Stewart, one of the greatest all-time actors and a phenomenally gifted raconteur, was apparently a bit of a racist. From a strict wokester perspective.

How else to describe one who uses the term “Uncle Remus” as an adjective (as recounted in the below excerpt from Directed by John Ford) and, worse, uses the term “negro” twice in the same clip. This was in ’69 or ’70, remember, at which point the culture had abandoned that term and moved on to “black.”

Certain films have been cancelled for disturbing racist attitudes (Gone With The Wind, Song of the South, The Birth of a Nation) — why not posthumously cancel certain actors whose past sentiments don’t jibe with present-day standards?

We need to create a Hollywood panel of fair-minded Stalinist judges who can review how out-of-line certain actors were when they said this or that back in the ’60s or ’50s or whenever, and if they fail the woke test, their careers and achievements can be erased on the Academy website and at the Academy Museum.

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