Month: November 2021

As I began to read Peter Debruge’s Variety review of Licorice Pizza, I knew he’d be giving it a pass. Not just because 95% of the the critics are dropping into Paul Thomas Anderson‘s lap, and not just because it’s a half-decent film that doesn’t warrant dismissal. My own view is “good enough, not bad, great ending.” I can’t imagine anyone saying it’s no good.

The critics know they have to show love or the PTA fanatics will slag them on social media. And we know that they know. Because when it comes to certain major directors, the fix is pretty much in. (The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney is the only one who held back and gave it a mild, yes-and-no assessment.)

But I knew Debruge would go easy on it either way. First and foremost because you can’t pan a major auteurist director’s film unless it really fucking stinks. But the bottom line is that Debruge knows the Hollywood waterfront and all the ins and outs. He’s a very sage and seasoned critic. And there’s something in his basic nature that likes turning the other cheek. When push comes to shove he tends to lead in the direction of “noblesse oblige.”

So when a major award-season film has been screened and I see that Debruge (rather than the occasionally scrappy Owen Gleiberman) has written the Variety review, I have a pretty good idea of what’s coming. Which isn’t to say that Debruge doesn’t write the occasional pan. He’s no Scott Mantz, nor is there anything “wrong” in being mellow and mild-mannered and accepting, etc. What matters in the end is how good a writer you are, and Debruge certainly qualifies as one of the best.

I finally got around to watching Rebecca Hall‘s Passing…mild groan. Okay, it’s a tolerable sit. I was mildly bored from the get-go but I got through it, and that’s saying something.

The gobsmacking Ruth Negga miscasting issue aside, it isn’t half bad…just a little boring. The contentious marital discussion scenes between Tessa Thompson and Andre Holland‘s upper-middle-class Harlem couple, Irene and (doctor) Brian Redfield, are sharp and well-modulated, and Ed Grau‘s monochrome cinematography, rendered in HE’s second favorite aspect ratio (1.37:1), is highly agreeable.

But the whole film hangs on a visual whopper that you just can’t roll with.

Based on a same-titled 1929 book by Nella Larsen and mostly set in 1920s Harlem, Passing is about a married woman of color — Ruth Negga‘s Claire Kendry, whose blonde hair and half northern-European features allow her to pass for white, which was deemed desirable 90-odd years ago. The story focuses on the reunion of Kendry and Irene and subsequent complications that lead to tragedy.

Tessa Thompson (l.), Ruth Negga (r.) during filming of Rebeca Hall’s Passing.

The problem is this: In real life (i.e., outside the forced woke universe in which we’re all presently dwelling) nobody and I mean nobody would glance at Claire and think “meh, ‘nother rich white lady.” The fact is that the dolled-up, blonde-wig-wearing Negga — smothered in paleface makeup, dressed to the nines in foxy flapper fashion — looks like a partially Afro-descended woman trying to look like a daughter of some European tribe with the aid of a veteran make-up person working for Netflix.

It’s one thing for a none-too-observant passerby to fail to notice the obvious. But it’s something else entirely when Claire’s racist husband Jack Belew (Alexander Sarsgard) believes her to be as white as Calvin Coolidge. This is what’s known in the motion picture industry as “a stumbling block.”

And I hate that Hall cast Negga when Gugu Mbatha-Raw (or an actress who resembled the young Marilyn McCoo, Lonette McKee or Lena Horne) would have been perfect. She knew that Negga, born to an Irish mom and an Ethiopian dad, wasn’t quite right for Claire but she did it anyway, and thereby undercut her own film.

I especially hate that Hall did this knowing that most critics would be too intimidated to mention the obvious, and that those who did mention it would have to dodge slings and arrows from hair-trigger wokesters, all of them pointing fingers like Donald Sutherland at the very end of Phil Kaufman‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’78).

I refuse to explain why Negga isn’t in the Gugu or Lonette or Marilyn or Lena universe because doing so would make me sound like Heinrich Himmler, and Hall knows that, and I really hate that kind of oblivious thinking, that “fuck you” calculation.

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It’s not the ignorance — that can always be corrected. It’s the casual presumption on the part of these women that the male version of perfume has the same spelling as the Panamanian seaport. Nobody googled it…brilliant.

In a recent discussion between Firing Line‘s Margaret Hoover and Chinese artist-activist Al Weiwei…

Hoover: “In your book, you describe the directive of Mao Zedung during the Great Cultural Revolution…that would be distributed publicly every night. And then you write — this is your quote — ‘these messages served a function similar to Donald Trump’s late-night tweets while in office. They were a director communication of a leader’s thoughts to his devoted followers, enhancing the sanctity of his authority.’ So do you see Donald Trump as an authoritarian?

Ai Weiwei: “Certainly [in] the United States, with today’s condition, you [could] easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, you are already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.”

Hoover: “How so?”

Ai Weiwei: “Many things [are] happening today in the U.S. can be compared to to the Cultural Revolution in China.”

Hoover: “Like what?”

Ai Weiwei: “Like people trying to be unified in a certain political correctness. That is very dangerous.”

In other words, wokester terrorism is just as bad as any other oppresive mindfuck movement…that it’s the same thing that created the French Terror in 1793 and ’94.

"Certainly the United States, with today's condition, you can easily have an authoritarian," says artist and activist Ai Weiwei — @aiww — who challenged China and became a political prisoner.

"In many ways, you are already in the authoritarian state. You just don't know it." pic.twitter.com/TODgkHaolp

— Firing Line with Margaret Hoover (@FiringLineShow) November 12, 2021

The still-unnamed granddaughter (I’ve been urging Hadlee or Wave) is expected to emerge four days hence (Thursday, 11.18). HE will fly to NYC on 11.26 and pay a visit a few days later. I’ll be in the NYC, New Jersey and Connecticut region for 16 days.

All my life I’ve been an existential mystical jazz cat samurai poet warrior Bhagavad Gita mescaline X-factor rumble-hogging be-bop Dharma Bum in a leather motorcycle jacket, slim jeans, Italian brown suede lace-ups and a black cowboy hat. In just a few days all of that will take a back seat to “don’t drop the baby, grandpa” and “you remember how to change diapers, right?”

Ridley Scott speaking to Deadline’s Michael Fleming about a portion of a chat with Clint Eastwood:

Variety’s Clayton Davis is shaking his woke turkey feathers at Javier Bardem’s Desi Arnaz portrayal in Being The Ricardos. Bardem’s big shortcoming, Davis feels, is his Spanish ancestry, which is an OUTRAGE because Arnaz was Cuban. Joe and Jane Popcorn (not to mention your average Academy and SAG member) don’t and won’t give a shit, but Clayton has a solemn duty to raise high the woke, ethnic-identity, social-casting-justice flag. (Thanks to Jordan Ruimy for the nudge.)

Today, I mean. Via Showtime app. In addition to (sigh, exhale) Rebecca Hall’s Passing.