Month: October 2021

Based Elena Ferrante‘s same-titled novel, The Lost Daughter (Netflix, 12.17) is the directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Olivia Colman is Leda, a middle-aged professor vacationing in Greece for a week or two. Her obsession with Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter causes Leda to reminisce about her own motherhood trials as a conflicted 20something.

Katie Smith-SWong’s Flickfeast review: “Gyllenhaal incorporates an [intensely] artistic approach that heightens the film’s psychological tone. Beautiful and visually affecting, this creates an unsettling but unnecessary sense of paranoia that [modifies] the sentimentality behind Leda’s emotional journey.

“Plus the heartbreaking dialogue in Gyllenhaal’s adapted screenplay isn’t helped by the close-up shots that border on pretentious and the drawn-out narrative that prolongs the suffering of its key characters.

“Overall The Lost Daughter is an ambitious directorial debut. Colman shines as Leda but its overlong runtime and uneven supporting performances cause its dramatic effect to falter for the sake of style.”

I could and should have seen The Lost Daughter during Telluride, but I couldn’t fit it in.

Update: I’ll say this much — the coolest hombre in Dune is Jason Momoa‘s “Duncan Idaho, the swordmaster of House.” Moma is beardless here, and so he looks a bit heavyish — as if Joe Don Baker had succumbed to a cheeseburgers and beer and pasta diet after the success of Walking Tall. But Duncan has that macho mojo Han Solo thing going on. They should have ignored the Herbert narrative and kept him alive. Born in ’79, Momoa is no spring chicken but he’s got what audiences want.

Earlier: I’ve been watching Dune for 35 minutes, and it’s obviously an intelligent, expensive, thoughtfully composed film of its type. But within the first ten minutes I was dying within, dying of cancer and almost weeping with sympathy for poor Timothee Chalamet. Strange as it sounds, Dune made me want to shelter Chalamet and protect him from the sand storms of corporate boredom. Dune is so slow and suffocating that, even stranger, I almost wanted to forgive him for throwing Woody Allen under the bus.

Kill me now, Paul Atreides. Kill me now, sand worms. Suffocate me with spice, Denis Villeneuve. This is the equivalent of cinematic waterboarding.  I just can’t stand the idea of watching another Joseph Campbell saga…a hero’s journey of self-discovery and heroic destiny…I’m choking on it.

George Lucas had obviously been influenced by Dune when he made Star Wars in ‘77, and that was 44, 45 years ago. The basic template has since been copied to death. It’s the same old Skywalker story, more or less. Only grimmer, and with ugly-ass worms, and from a political royal family perspective, and with tons upon tons of swirling dust storms, and actors dressed in olive drab sand rags.

155 minutes later, not counting phone breaks, food breaks, writing breaks and cat-petting breaks: Thank God it’s over. Yes, Chalamet’s performance improves as it goes along — the closer he gets to becoming “Paul Muad’Dib, the Fremen messiah”, the better he is.

I’ll never watch Dune again — that’s for damn sure. No way this thing becomes any kind of serious Best Picture contender…not a snowball’s chance.

Read more

If it was my call and I had absolute power (and I’m not exaggerating for exaggeration’s sake), I would put Donald Trump‘s fat, half-naked ass into a Roman Colisseum-like arena and make him face three ferocious tigers, just like Russell Crowe in Gladiator and Victor Mature in Demetrius and the Gladiators. Yes, I would allow Trump to defend himself with a short sword, but you know he’d die anyway.

It goes without saying that Steve Bannon should suffer the same fate.

I’m not kidding — these guys are sociopaths, animals…hellbent on anti-Democratic revolt and sparking anti-Democratic insanity among the rural bumblefucks. They’re truly insane, and the crimes they’re guilty of deserve the ultimate penalty. A firing squad would afford them too much dignity. They need to face what Christians faced under the rule of ancient Romans.

Alternate scenario: Trump is murdered — stabbed to death — by the Praetorian guard, and in a mimicking of John Hurt‘s death scene in I, Claudius, he weeps and wails as the knives plunge in and out.

Read more

From a q & a between Netflix honcho Ted Sarandos and Variety‘s Matt Donnelly, titled “‘I Screwed Up’: Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Addresses Dave Chappelle Fallout“:

Donnelly: “I want to circle back and ask definitively, do you personally and does Netflix feel that The Closer does not amount to hate speech?”

Sarandos: “Under the definition of ‘does it intend to cause physical harm?’ I do not believe it falls into hate speech.”

Donnelly: “So the special will remain on the service?”

Sarandos: “I don’t believe there have been many calls to remove it.”

Has anyone drawn a correlation between Dave Chappelle‘s The Closer and Richard Pryor‘s brief performance at a gay rights fundraiser at the Hollywood Bowl on 9.18.77?

Pryor talked about about having sucked a dick and “fucked some good ass-hole” back in ’52 (when Pryor was 11 or 12). And yet, angered by some racist behavior he’d witnessed backstage, Pryor also shared some harsh thoughts about his perceptions of racism (by way of indifference and whatnot) in the gay community.

Please read this excerpt from from Scott Saul‘s “Becoming Richard Pryor”, posted in the Guardian on 1.11.15.

By Pryor standards, Chappelle’s Closer material was a day at the beach.

Christine Ebersole is listed as playing Lucille Ball on the Licorice Pizza Wiki page so this lucylounge thing is apparently legit. (Thanks to worldofreel‘s Jordan Ruimy.)

Dune‘s Denis Villeneuve is a true film nerd….a believer, a devotional, a monk in robes. As Lawrence of Arabia‘s Dryden (Claude Rains) says to General Murray (Donald Wolfit), “He knows his stuff.”

But projection-wise, 70mm is not the best way to see Lawrence any more. Digital projection has surpassed it. There’s no question about this. I saw it digitally projected at the Salle du Soixantieme in Cannes so don’t tell me. In this respect Villeneuve is wrong.

Friendo #1: “For what it’s worth, I couldn’t get past page 50 of Frank Herbert’s Dune and thought the Lynch version dismal. But I have to say that the new Dune put me in The Zone in a way that I’m not accustomed to — I just locked into what Villeneuve was doing and more or less stayed that way to the end, quite admiring it all the way.”

Friendo #2: “Seeing Dune in a theatre is agony, an endurance test. Don’t do it. Choose the HBO Max option.”

Please listen to Joe Rogan‘s impressions of what’s going on right now. It cuts right through. The awfuls won’t listen, of course, because they’re hysterical, defensive and blind to anything but their own agenda.

Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, 15, attended last night’s Eternals premiere in a dress and looking like (gasp!) a young woman. Which is a switch, right? When she was two Shiloh told her illustrious parents that she wanted to be a boy named John. Kids with wealthy or stable parents do this, of course. They fiddle and faddle around with this or that fantasy or identity. And so Brangelina indulged her.

Now Shiloh is thinking she might be…well, who knows what she’s thinking? But “John” seems to be history.

Friendo: “Looks like little Shiloh is a female after all.”

HE: “Aided and abetted by insane parents, many kids these days decide their gender and sexual identity at very tender ages. Shiloh can always switch back in a year or two.”

Friendo: “I think she’s just outgrown it, as a lot of them do. Which is why parents should wait until after puberty to embrace or approve their children’s gender and sexual identity matters. This, of course, is totally verboten to say in woke circles.”