Russian lookalikes for Margot Robbie (Anastasia Prichinina) and Scarlett Johansson (Ekaterina Shumskaya). I’m imagining commercial possibilities.
Day: November 22, 2021
Robert Aldrich’s “The Last Sunset”
Give Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up a chance. I wasn’t Scott Mantz-ing when I called it “a crazy-ass Covid and climate-change comic allegory…a ballsy Strangelove-like satire that feels like an extended, gargantuan, improv-y, effects-laden SNL super-skit about massive self-delusion & self-destruction…really out there, righteously wackazoid, hits the mark a few times. As broad apocalyptic satires go, you certainly can’t say it doesn’t swing for the fences.”
Sunset at Calamigos Ranch — Latigo Canyon Road (near Kanan Dume Rd.) in deep Malibu — snapped a couple of hours ago by Tatiana.
Penelope Cruz Rules Roost
A handicapper friend assures me that Penelope Cruz, star of Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers — a film that is 15 times better than House of Gucci, 10 times better than Spencer and far more emotionally rewarding than Being The Ricardos — is almost certainly good for a Best Actress nomination.
I hope so. I would certainly think so. I realize Cruz might not win for reasons having nothing to do with quality of delivery. But she needs to be nominated, at least.
I’ve seen the Almodovar twice and I know Cruz’s performance is the shit this year. She’s the absolute queen of her category. No other lead female performance comes close to plucking the emotional chords that she owns the patent on. She’s given the best female performance of the year. Don’t debate it, no question, put it to bed.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has Penelope in 2nd place as we speak. Feinberg Frontrunners: Kristen Stewart (Spencer); Penélope Cruz (Parallel Mothers); Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos); Lady Gaga (House of Gucci) and Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter).
I realize that in the myopic and strangely calculating award-season culture that we live in that some people are insisting otherwise…that Penelope is in the rear somewhere. They’re saying that Nicole Kidman (Ricardos) or Kristen Stewart (Spencer) or Lady Gaga (Gucci) are somehow better or at least more likely to win, partly because they’re backed by some heavy-hitter agencies and expensive campaigns.
Which is why I suspect that the best Cruz can expect is a Best Actress nomination. Because Oscar races are not so much about merit as muscle and power and primal audience longings and identifications. If it were my call I would give Cruz the Oscar now but she at least needs to become one of the five…c’mon.
I know that Pedro’s film doesn’t open until 12.24 but the big critics groups will begin voting soon. Somehow or some way the award-season heat has to start building in Cruz’s favor. I hope she gets there — her performances ‘is obviously much better than Kidman’s, Gaga’s and KStew’s — but she might not make it. I can feel it — she’s just not in the conversation the way the others are.
Repeating: Cruz’s Parallel performance is somewhere between 5 and 10 and 15 times better than all the other performances put together. It’s one of the finest efforts of her career, and yet if you talk to certain people her name is barely in the conversation. (David Poland actually believes that Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim is one of the top three contenders.) As we speak Cruz is regarded as a peripheral player, and she’s not — she’s the top.
Most Actors Need To Stay In Their Corner
This kind of humility from a big-name actor is relatively rare, at least as far as quoted interviews go. But of course, all successful movie stars know what their wheelhouse is about and that they need to stay within it. That’s how their fans like it also.
Back in his heyday nobody wanted Steve McQueen to play Biff in Death of a Salesman or Jamie Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and they certainly didn’t want to see him in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (’78). They wanted him to be the Bullitt guy, the Great Escape guy, the Sand Pebbles guy.
He was great in the ’60s but in the ’70s McQueen made one huge mistake after another, turning down lead roles in Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now, William Friedkin‘s The French Connection and then Sorcerer, George Roy Hill‘s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Robert Altman‘s California Split, Don Siegel‘s Dirty Harry and Steven Spielberg‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Nobody screwed himself out of so many great roles as Steve McQueen.
Which big-name actors today have the same kind of reputation? Not actually McQueen-esque but known for being really good within a particular kind of film and playing a particular mode or color, but with a tendency to suck eggs if they step outside of their safe zone?
“Gucci” Reminder
Big-city residents will be able to catch the first commercial showings of House of Gucci tomorrow night; the moderately satisfying Ridley Scott film will open everywhere on Wednesday, 11.24 — one day before Thanksgiving.
For those who missed or didn’t bother to read my 185-word review, posted on 11.10.21:
Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (UA Releasing, 11.24) is a cool, muted, decently made docudrama about how the Gucci family business gradually went downhill in the ’80s and ’90s, and how the 1995 murder of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) by killers hired by Maurizo’s ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), seemed to signify this decline.
The problem for me was one of expectation. Goaded by the trailers and that Patrizia Reggiani-slash-Lady Gaga money quote — “I don’t consider myself to be a particularly ethical person, but I am fair” — I was expecting Gaga to deliver a ruthless, high-camp, carniverous dragonlady — a new version of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest.
Alas, despite what Team Variety and the fawning Twitter whores are saying, that’s not what this movie is. It’s not out to make Reggiani some kind of fang-toothed pit viper. It’s actually about trying to portray her in a half-sympathetic light. And so House of Gucci is basically about how an admittedly ambitious woman reacts when she’s scorned and bruised and cast aside.
Five Films Stood Out
I was not a huge fan of most of the big grossers of 1976 — Rocky, A Star Is Born, King Kong, Silver Streak, The Omen, The Bad News Bears. I wasn’t even that much of a big believer in Hal Ashby‘s Bound for Glory (although I respected it). For me there were only five films that mattered that year — Network, All The President’s Men, Taxi Driver, Assault on Precinct 13 and Marathon Man. I still feel that way.
This photo ran in the Wilton Bulletin in early August ’76. It accompanied a story about a then-upcoming Save The Whales concert, which then-girlfriend Sophie Black (on my left) and I co-produced, and which was held on a hilly 52-acre farm owned by Sophie’s parents, David and Linda Cabot Black. The focus of the story was that a portion of the proceeds would be donated by Camp PIP, a non-profit that offered recreational facilities help to lower-income kids.
I must say that I was looking pretty good for a three-year-old. I turned four on 11.12.76.
This Image Will Stick
For as long as he lives, Kyle Rittenhouse will be thought of as a kind of rightwing militia girlyman. If only he’d studied Point Blank and learned how to do the Lee Marvin thing…
Mystifying Carnage
I understand that in the horrific matter of yesterday’s Waukesha parade SUV massacre, the New York Times isn’t allowed to come within 100 yards of mentioning the ethnicity of the alleged driver-slash-perpetrator — 39 year-old Darrell Brooks.
Then again what happened doesn’t appear to have been motivated by anything more than raw, idiot-level nihilism. Brooks is reportedly a common criminal. True, Waukesha is an overwhelmingly white bedroom community, but there doesn’t seem to be any linkage between that fact and the recent Kyle Rittenhouse trial, which happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
