It got my attention because roughly the same thing has been happening in the film industry for the last five or six years. I summarized the situation twice this year — on 9.9.21, and on 3.22.21.
Amazon synopsis: “Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before ‘fake news’ became the calling card of the right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore.
“That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including ‘antiracism,’ intersectionality, open borders and critical race theory. How did this come to be?
“The moral panic around race, encouraged by today’s elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. ‘Bad News’ explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.”
But there’s no way in hell that Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (which is being aggressivejy junketed right now at the Four Seasons) can even fantasize about winning the Best Picture Oscar.
Those insisting that it’s time for Campion to snag an Academy trophy might be able to push this notion through, but the film itself is a rancid bowl of grim about a mean and smelly closet case (i.e., Benedict Cumberbatch). The Gold Derby kiss-asses who are projecting a Dog Best Picture win are completelyoutoftheirfuckingminds.
And Anne Thompson, by the way, rating Dune higher than KingRichard? That’s crazy stuff!
But she doesn’t. She wimpsout. Probably because she knew N.Y. Times wokester thinking would just lead to a watering-down process so why bother?
The closest Dowd comes to justsayingit is to quote James Carville kvetching about “stupid wokeness”.
Here’s what she could have said: Goaded and justifiably alarmed by Donald Trump’s racist, dog-whistled taunts during the ‘15 and ‘16 campaign, doubly freaked by his defeat of Hillary Clinton, jarred by “The1619Project” (launched in August’19) and then carried along by the agonized George Floyd protests of May ‘20, Democrats embraced the woke progressive agenda lock, stock and barrel.
The time had come to not only push back against 300 years of systemic racism but to embrace anti–whiteracism as a counterweight. The tables had to be turned, and whites had to not only be confronted but condemned for a bedrock biological poison in their bones a la RobinDiAngelo. Which required stringent anti-racist education in not just colleges but public schools, and in some cases with young kids being taught this doctrine.
This led to suburbanparentalperceptions that wokesters had overplayed their hand — that the basic educational thrust in schools was that people of color are sainted figures and hothouse flowers and needed to be treated with scholastic kid gloves (equity vs. “racist” meritocracy) and that European-descended Anglo culture is rooted in cruel, dismissive, anti-persons-of-color attitudes.
Nobody has any arguments with frank teachings about the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and systemic governmental prejudice and neglect, but instructing kids that whites are infected with a fundamental evil gene was a bridge too far, and telling parents not to try and mess with school curriculums (as Terry McAuliffe did) was rubbing salt in the wound. Hence the decisive victory of Glenn Youngkin last Tuesday.
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy: “In September, I spitballed the Best Picture race that was starting to take shape post-Venice and Telluride. My conclusion was that Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast was the current de facto frontrunner. Five weeks later, I’m starting to doubt that assessment.
“Having seen Marcus Reinaldo Green’s King Richard, I can safely say it is the better and more effective crowd pleaser. It has the goods to go all the way. Rags-to-riches tale? Check. True story? Check. Inclusivity? Check. High-entertainment? Check.
“The film itself could get up to 4 acting nods, it’ll also be triumphant at SAG. Maybe the directors branch will be a little tougher on it since this isn’t really an auteur film, but it’s my current Best Picture winner. The film has already won five audience awards at film festivals. Astounding.”
#KingRichard is a knockout. One of the strongest and most soul-stirring sports dramas in years, with a brilliant balance of heart and humor. Will Smith is the best he’s ever been, Aunjanue Ellis is equally as electrifying, and Jon Bernthal is just a *blast*. Absolutely adored it. pic.twitter.com/B0tfg6kCHE
A month ago a trade reporter allegedly tweeted that “a major Oscar late-release” will run three hours. (I wrote the reporter in question to confirm yay or nay, but he didn’t reply.) I subtracted Licorice Pizza (133 minutes), Don’t Look Up (145 minutes) and Nightmare Alley (139 minutes). If the trade reporter was correct, that left Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story as the only possible elephant in the room.
I noted a while back Robert Wise’s Oscar-winning West Side Story (’61) ran 152 minutes. I said that “if Spielberg’s version runs shorter than Wise’s, I’ll be fucking flabbergasted.” Well, there we go.
A couple of hours ago I tweeted Malcolm Hollis about Laurent Bouzereau‘s “West Side Story: The Making of the Steven Spielberg Film” (due on 11.16) and asked if it mentions the running time. “I’m hearing it’s 180 minutes,” I wrote.
A half-hour later West Side Story star Rachel Zegler (occupying Natalie Wood‘s Maria role) replied “our movie is not 3 hours long.” Thanks, Rachel!
Tatiana has just told me she doesn’t want to attend this evening’s Licorice Pizza screening because the romantic couple in question, played by 29 year-old Alana Haim and 18 year-old Cooper Hoffman, isn’t attractive enough. They don’t have that swoony sexy-romantic charisma thing going on, she said.
“At least one of them should be attractive,” she emphasized, “but both of them unattractive? Oh no…”
Los Angeles Friendo: “This is like the reverse of Frankie and Johnny, that 1991 relationship drama with Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. Everyone said it was totally unbelievable that drop-dead beautiful Pfeiffer would be cast as a plain-Jane waitress…it didn’t wash.”
Back-east Friendo said a similar thing earlier today. Licorice Pizza, he said, “sounds like Paul Thomas Anderson‘s version of Moonrise Kingdom.” HE to Back-east Friendo: “Yeah. With two zero-charisma leads. One pushing 30, the other in his late teens.”
Back-east Friendo: “That’s the Moonrise formula! Two young lead characters that no one in his right mind could give less of a fuck about.”
Does anyone remember a 1945 film called The Enchanted Cottage? Robert Young played a disfigured war veteran and Dorothy Maguire was a very plain and (it is suggested) homely woman. They fall in love with each other, and gradually they become more and more attractive because we’re seeing their features through their eyes.
Another unlikely pair came along in Robert Altman‘s A Perfect Couple (’79). Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin as a vaguely dorky-looking couple, age-separated by 20 years.
Can anyone recall other funny-looking twosomes in noteworthy films?
It’s not just that Chloe Zhao‘s Eternals has shitty aggregate ratings (49% Rotten Tomatoes, 53% Metacritic) as well as the lowest-ever score for a Marvel film; it’s also being trashed because presumably toxic males don’t like it when a woman directs an action film. I haven’t hate-watched it yet — does Davis have a point?
After serving a 20-year term in Spandau Prison for exploiting slave labor during World War II, the urbane and well-spoken Albert Speer — Nazi armaments minister from ’42 through’45, grand architect and Adolf Hitler confidante — published two well-written, self-serving books about his Nazi experience.
“Inside the Third Reich” (’69) was the most widely read and influential as far as Speer’s reputation was concerned. He presented himself as a basically decent and civilized family man who made a deal with the devil and was therefore “inescapably contaminated morally” for his complicity with the Nazi regime…forever stained and doomed to carry a searing sense of guilt for the rest of his life. “”
Out of these two books Speer became known not as “the good Nazi,” as many have called him, but the “not quite as bad as the other Nazi fanatics” guy with at least some sense of moral self-awareness and regret…a man who hadn’t denied his guilt and had served his prison sentence, and was looking to somehow atone in the years he had left. Speer died at age 76 in 1981.
Speer Goes to Hollywood director Vanessa Lapa, producer Tomar Eliav — Thursday, 11.4, 1:40 pm.
Vanessa Lapa‘s Speer Goes to Hollywood (opening today) is a 97-minute argument that Speer wasn’t the urbane smoothie he portrayed himself as, and that he was aware of the extermination of the Jews, and that he was just as much of a Nazi shit as Himmler or Geobbels or Bormann or any of the others.
It is HE’s belief that Speer was definitely an ambitious, anti-Semitic, cold-hearted prick who engaged in a Faustian bargain for his own professional benefit. But it is also HE’s view that his saga is not anomalous, and that many seemingly or ostensibly civilized people have supported evil policies and homicidal regimes throughout history.
The Brazilian senate recently endorsed a report that accused president Jair Bolsonaro of the Covid-related murder of tens of thousands of Brazilians due to neglect, incompetence and anti-scientific denialism. How many tens of thousands of Americans needlessly died as a direct result of Donald Trump‘s similar response to Covid-19, and who would argue that Dr. Deborah Birx wasn’t at least partly complicit in these deaths? Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger knew that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, but they kept it going for three or four years after the Nixon administration took power in January ’69 and in so doing caused the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Vietnamese. 1.7 million people were murdered in the Cambodian killing fields — were the Khmer Rouge cadres who saw to these deaths born killers, or were they just loyalists who did what was expected? How many hundreds of thousands died in China’s Great Cultural Revolution? 17,000 were killed during the French terror of the 1790s. How many hundreds or thousands of present-day careers have been destroyed by woke terrorists?
Throughout history ambitious cutthroat types have done almost anything to get ahead or serve their superiors, and they’ve never given a damn how many innocent lives were sacrificed in the bargain.
How much different can Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story (20th Century Studios, 12.10) be from Robert Wise‘s Oscar-showered 1961 version?
Spielberg’s will presumably be woke-ier, for sure. (More critical of Riff and the Jets, more embracing of Bernardo and the Sharks as well as the general Puerto Rican perspective.) In the Wise version tenement back alleys and fire escapes were freshly painted in one or two scenes; Spielberg almost certainly won’t go there. Janusz Kamiński‘s partially desaturated cinematography will distinguish itself from Daniel Fapp‘s somewhat prettified capturings, and will doubtless seem snazzier and more sophisticated in terms of framing and cutting. And perhaps the performances in the new version (principally from Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez and Mike Faist) will feel stronger and more affecting that those from those from the old gang (Richard Beymer, Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris, Russ Tamblyn).
But these aspects aside, Spielberg’s film can’t help but resemble its cinematic forebear in countless ways. The story is the story, the musical is the musical.
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