The basic idea here (and it’s not mine!) is that Shelley Winters‘ more-or-less innocent victim character in A Place In The Sun (’51) is irksome if not profoundly irritating, and that…well, read Mr. Ormsby‘s reaction.
Question to HE community: What other significant characters whose death or removal have you found yourself wishing for?
Official Showtime copy: “Super-Pumped is about “the roller-coaster ride of Uber, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful and most destructive companies, told from the perspective of the company’s CEO Travis Kalanick, who is ultimately ousted in a boardroom coup after tense internal and external battles that ripple with unpredictable consequences.”
If this was a one-off, Super-Pumped might be analogous to The Social Network — another story of a smart but obnoxious mover-and-shaker who launches an enormously successful company with a new idea. But no — it’s an anthology series from Brian Koppelman and David Levien, based on the same-titled 2019 book by Mike Isaac.
The strong cast includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kyle Chandler, Kerry Bishé, Babak Tafti, Mousa Hussein Kraish, Hank Azaria, Elisabeth Shue and Uma Thurman.
The source of these Sean Penn quotes from (a) an interview gave yesterday to The Independent‘s Annabel Nugent and (b) a 1.14.22 interview he did with England’s inews.
During her ascendant, hot-rocket period (’85 to ’92), Sinead O’Connor was one of the greatest rockers ever — a ballsy poet, provocateur, wailer, screecher, torch carrier…a woman with a voice that mixed exquisite style and control with primal pain. She was / is magnificent. I still listen to The Lion and the Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, and I still love “Madinka”, “Jerusalem”, “Troy” and “Nothing Compares 2 U”…all of it, the primal energy, the shifting pitch of her voice, the Irish punk banshee thing…wow.
It doesn’t matter that this happened 30 to 35 years ago, and that O’Connor has lived a convulsive, ebb-and-flow life ever since…one torrential spew or tussle or throw-down after another…or that she now performs in Muslim robes (having converted two or three years ago)…what matters is that from age 19 through 26, or for roughly eight years, O’Connor was a blazing art-rocker of the first order and an unstoppable historic force…like Bob Dylan was between ’61 and the motorcycle accident + Blonde on Blonde crescendo of ’66.
Kathryn Ferguson’s Nothing Compares, a 96-minute doc that I saw late yesterday afternoon, is mainly about O’Connor’s rise, peak and fall over that eight-year period. (The last 30 years are acknowledged but mainly in the credit crawl.) Sinead’s climactic crisis, of course, was that infamous mass rejection that followed her defiant “tearing up the Pope photo” performance on a 10.3.92 airing of Saturday Night Live, which then was followed by the booing she received at a Dylan 30th Anniversary tribute concert in Madison Square Garden about two weeks later.
She never recovered the magic mojo.
Ferguson’s doc says three important things. One, Sinead’s fiery temperament came from a horribly abusive childhood, principally due to her monstrous mother (who died in a car crash in ’86), and as a musician she radiated such a bruised, scarred and beat-to-hell psychology that…well, blame her awful mom and her shitty dad also. Two, her peak period was magnificent, and if nothing else the doc will remind you of this. Three, Sinead was right about the Pope, or rather the institutional abuse of children at the hands of pedophile priests, and so she was way ahead of her time. (The Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team made a huge splash with their ’02 report about the Catholic church hiding the criminal misdeeds of priests abusing Boston-area children, and of course Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight came along in ’15.)
O’Connor has soldiered on and kept plugging for the last 30 years, and obviously there’s an intrepid aspect and bravery in that, and yet Ferguson ignores the blow-by-blow — the lurching, shifting, sporadic turbulence that has marked O’Connor’s life ever since (not including the devastating suicide of her son Shane earlier this month, which happened well after the film had wrapped).
Side observation #1: The 55-year-old O’Connor doesn’t appear in the doc as an on-camera talking head, although she narrates a good portion of it. I have to say that the deep, guttural sound of her present-day voice — honestly? — sounds like a dude’s. Booze, cigarettes, whatever…the speaking voice she had in interviews from the late ’80s and early ’90s is gone.
Side observation #2: The Prince estate refused to allow Ferguson to use “Nothing Compares 2 U”, as the song was authored by Prince and owned by the estate. What a dick move! A low-budget doc that pays devotional tribute to O’Connor and the Prince estate refuses to allow her most famous recording to be heard? Jesus…this has to be one of the lowest scumbag moves in rock-music history.
Side observation #3: Who were those assholes who booed O’Connor at a Dylan concert, of all things? Her manner of conveyance was overly blunt, agreed, and she probably should have toned it down, but c’mon, her Pope protest was about protecting children from abuse and pain and thousands of Dylan fans fucking booed her?
Bad Day at Black Rock (‘55) is a good, strong John Sturges film except for one thing. Nobody in that tiny little desert backwater was doing Anne Francis?
It makes no sense that Francis would even BE there, as a woman this fetching would never settle for a grim existence in a dinky little ghost town like this. Life is short — you have to go for the gusto and the goodies.
But even if you accept that Francis’s “Liz Wirth” would be content to live in this dusty hell hole, human nature dictates that someone in that miserable hamlet would’ve stepped up to the plate and said to her, “I’m your man and we can make beautiful music together and have all kinds of nice plants on the patio.”
Someone always steps up and seals the deal in these situations. It happened in each and every cave settlement in prehistoric times, in every village in ancient Judea, in every clay-hut, grass-roof settlement in medieval Europe. Not that a knockout like Anne Francis would’ve rubbed shoulders with everyday European villagers or Judeans or cave-dwellers.
If I was Spencer Tracy, I would’ve sized things up and sauntered over to Robert Ryan or Lee Marvin or Walter Brennan or Wirth’s brother Pete, who works at the hotel, and said, “Are you telling me that no one’s giving Anne Francis the high, hard one, or at least trying to? Because that really goes against basic human nature.“
According to a recently-deleted CNN report, President Biden allegedly told Ukranian president Zellensky that a Russian invasion is “imminent”…virtually certain come February…and that Kiev could be “sacked.” There’s a suspicion that “journalists were covertly fed Russian intelligence disinformation, so [CNN] removed it once they realized the mistake.”
BREAKING: We have recovered the Ukraine call report that @JakeTapper and CNN just deleted
Please DO NOT RT this as they do not want anyone to see it! pic.twitter.com/vV67Jc1p7i
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 28, 2022
A bit less than 30 years ago I profiled Bridget Fonda for the N.Y. Times. The piece, largely based on my visiting the Arizona set of Bodies, Rest and Motion and sharing a nice dinner with her, ran in August ‘92. I liked Bridget a lot; I even felt what you might call a semi-profound kinship with her.
And so, three decades on, I have no comment about the alleged, recently snapped photos of her that have just surfaced. No comment except I literally cried out when I saw them. We all get older but…well, bear with me. Sorry but I’m startled, partly because she’s the niece of Jane Fonda and there’s a certain image or association that comes with that.
That said, I hope Bridget is happy. Maybe the Mail made a mistake. Saying no more.
But of course, Joe Biden‘s condescending, less-than-supportive attitude towards Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings is an episode he won’t want to revive by nominating her to fill Justice Breyer‘s seat on the Supreme Court.
Filed by N.Y. Times reporters Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Carl Hulse on 4.25.19: “On Thursday, the first day of [Biden’s] presidential campaign, his camp disclosed the call, saying[said that] the the former vice president had shared with Anita Hill “his regret for what she endured” 28 years ago, when, as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over the confirmation hearings in which she accused Clarence Thomas, President George Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court, of sexual harassment.
“But Ms. Hill says the call from Mr. Biden left her feeling deeply unsatisfied.
“In a lengthy telephone interview on Wednesday, she declined to characterize Mr. Biden’s words to her as an apology and said she was not convinced that he has taken full responsibility for his conduct at the hearings — or for the harm he caused other victims of sexual harassment and gender violence.”
I think Jimmy Kimmel’s suggestion that Anita Hill should be nominated for SCOTUS is perfectly brilliant! 💪🏽💙 How about you!?! pic.twitter.com/Qc9V5OSbkP
— Michael (@MichaelisNOLA) January 27, 2022
..I wont feel quite as despondent about the Best Picture situation.
Penelope Cruz IS going to be the surprise fifth Oscar nominee for Best Actress, just you wait. pic.twitter.com/SeMXXD0RS8
— Brian Rowe 🏳️🌈🍿🎃 (@mrbrianrowe) January 27, 2022
I’m suddenly feeling hugely depressed by the announcement of the five 2022 DGA Awards nominees. The Big Five are Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Licorice Pizza, Kenneth Branagh‘s Belfast, Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog, Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story and Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune.
Does this mean these films will come to be regarded as the leading Best Picture nominees? Not necessarily but quite possibly, and this is what has sent me into a howling tailspin.
Because among these five and in the eyes of the egalitarian Movie Godz, only West Side Story and Licorice Pizza are really and truly good enough in a genuinely discriminating, emotional, full-hearted sense to warrant top-five status, and yet we all know they probably won’t win because, according to conventional thinking, (a) WSS wasn’t really necessary to begin with plus it died at the box-office and (b) Licorice Pizza, which I liked for the most part, is regarded as too catch-as-catch-can, too meandering.
I’m also gloomed out because the DGA gang has rejected King Richard — HE’s pick for 2021’s finest film. Seriously, this is very, very upsetting.
Im short, it’s suddenly hit me like a waffle iron crashing into the left side of my face that the three films most likely to win the big prize are Belfast, The Power of the Dog and Dune. We all know that Dune can’t win (too many people hated it) so it’s down to Belfast and The Power of the Dog.
Here are HE’s picks for the ten best films of ’21 — King Richard, Parallel Mothers, West Side Story, Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Worst Person in the World, A Hero, Riders of Justice, No Time To Die, The Beatles: Get Back and Zola. The second ten are Cyrano, Licorice Pizza, The Card Counter, In The Heights, The Last Duel, No Sudden Move, Titane, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Drive My Car and Summer of Soul.
I can’t believe this is happening, but it is happening. I’m shocked, I’m stunned, I’m out of breath, etc. Some where in West Los Angeles, Sid Ganis is chuckling.
If these five are indeed the hottest Best Picture contenders, HE believes that the only truly justified winner in the eyes of the Godz would be West Side Story.
WGA Original Screenplay noms: Being the Ricardos, Don’t Look Up, The French Dispatch, King Richard, Licorice Pizza.
Adapted Screenplay noms: CODA, Dune, Nightmare Alley, tick, tick…BOOM!, West Side Story.
Drive My Car knows exactly what it’s doing, and it delivers on that mission and self-knowledge over a period of 179 minutes, which is unnecessary. A two-hour film that lasts 179 minutes can’t be uplifting or transcendent. Drive My Car is a thoughtful, melancholy slog for grief monkeys, and with way too many cigarettes smoked. It warrants respect but it shouldn’t leapfrog out of the Best Int’l Feature category. Meditative smarthouse material for Justin Chang-level elites and hoity-toities. Hollywood Elsewhere says “sorry but no Best Picture nomination.”
It is Hollywood Elsewhere’s contention that West Side Story‘s Mike Faist is the most deserving contender for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. He gave the only “wow!”performance…the only one that really popped or generated any excitement.
Most of the award-season sheep are predicting that The Power of the Dog‘s Kodi Smit-McPhee is the most likely winner of the Best Supporting Actor award. Basically for playing a deceptive little candy-ass…Benedict Cumberbatch‘s obscure object of desire and a passive, sneaker-wearing wimp with a hidden agenda up his sleeve. Are you telling me there was even a slight tremor of excitement about his performance after Dog popped last fall?
The sheep are resolute about Jane Campion winning the Best Director Oscar (we all understand this is totally locked-in), and just to fortify this they’re supporting as many Dog contenders as possible, and so Smit-McPhee gets a free ride on her coattails.
Bradley Cooper‘s “Jon Peters” in Licorice Pizza is not a supporting performance — it’s a cranked-up cameo. While Ben Affleck‘s congenial, low-key uncle in The Tender Bar is intermittently charming, his fake Long Island accent diminishes the performance — it reminds you that he’s acting. CODA‘s Troy Kotsur…if you say so. Because people have no taste, the broadness of Jared Leto‘s performance in House of Gucci makes it a likely nominee. Belfast‘s Ciaran Hinds delivered on auto-pilot — he could have played the kindly grandfather in his sleep.