Once upon a time progressive liberals were on the side of brave hearts, humanitarian beliefs, freedom of expression, the first stirrings of post-war beatnik culture, the Marlon Brando acting revolution, Jack Daniels and ginger ale, live and let live, and not intimidating people with terror and sometimes destroying their careers. Back then the Republicans were bringing the terror, not the left. So don’t try to goad me into believing that if Humphrey Bogart,Lauren Bacall, John Huston, Gene Kelly, Jane Wyatt, Richard Conte, Sterling Hayden, Danny Kaye, Paul Henreid, Shepperd Strudwick and the other good soldiers of 1947 were suddenly time-catapulted into 2021…don’t tell me they’d be arm-in-arm with the wokesters.
An excellent dealing scene (John Travolta and Eric Stoltz are a great team) but the dialogue between 2:45 and 2:56 is, like, way out of bounds according to 2021 standards. Even by Quentin Tarantino standards. Flirting with the realm of Joe Rogan’s Planet of the Apes story. The early ’90s were the early ’90s.
Nobody’s watched very much, ongoing Covid pall, no Golden Globes, delayed Critics Choice awards, no sense of box-office momentum, no sense of in-person screenings and in-person conversations, “after a while the Zoom stuff gets really old,” the crashing and burning of Kristen Stewart, the pro-Lady Gaga mafia, etc.
Anne Thompson #1: “Nobody likes Spencer, let’s be honest…critics liked it but the guilds don’t like it, it’s an art film and an acquired taste.”
Anne Thompson #2: “Steven Spielberg and West Side Story are fragile, at best.”
Anne Thompson #3: “You could say Lady Gaga is the [Best Actress] front-runner, but I refuse to believe that. In interviews she tries to convince you that she’s giving you the real Gaga, but she’s totally fake.”
The Academy members, it seems, are too blind and obstinate to understand that Spider-Man: No Way Home deserves a serious “thank you” for levitating theatrical, not just in terms of revenues but from the buoyantspiritofthefilm and the overall joy factor…if they don’t understand that a single Best Picture nomination (oneoutoften!) is the least they can do to celebrate the fact that S-M: NWH delivered a spiritual booster shot that lifted all boats…if they’re too old and out of touch to at least recognize what this film managed to do and thereby give it a Best Picture nomination in tribute, then you know what? Tohellwiththem. The Oscars are an island unto themselves and whatever happens, happens.
That said, Sony did itself no favors by delaying streaming opportunities to industry voters, largely over fear of piracy.
Not too long ago the NAACP Image Award guys nominated Awkwafina for an “Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance,” partly for her doing a Black-speak thing. In formal professorial terms, Awkwafina’s crime is/was appropriating or making fun of African American Vernacular English, or AAVE**.
After being slapped around by humorless wokester scolds (particular Women of Color Unite founder Cheryl Bedford) for using a Blaccent for comic effect, Awkwafine has basically said ‘y’all can go fuck yourselves, and Twitter can blow me.”
Awkwafina: “Well, I’ll see you in a few years, Twitter — per my therapist. To my fans, thank you for continuing to love and support someone who wishes they could be a better person for you. I apologize if I ever fell short, in anything I did. You’re in my heart always.
“[But] I am retiring from the ingrown toenail that is Twitter. Not retiring from anything else, even if I wanted to, and I didn’t drunkenly hit someone with a shoehorn and now escaping as a fugitive. Also am available on all other socials that don’t tell you to kill yourself!”
…with people who pronounce Oregon as “Awrriginn.” It’s pronounced “OHRuhgone.” How could anyone possibly look at the spelling of that state and think “oh, yeah, sure…Awrriginn.” You’d have to be a bit of a cracker to say it that way.
[Posted on 11.22.18] When I watch Cary Grant in North by Northwest I’m always aware this was his crowning big-screen moment of the ’50s, his last great role and the last film in which he could make a case for looking late 40ish and perhaps a suitable sexual partner for Eva Marie Saint (he was 54 when Alfred Hitchcock shot NXNW in ’58 — she was 34), and after this he was more and more the silver fox and starting to go gently downhill with grace and elegance (nobody believed he was an appropriate romantic match for Audrey Hepburn in Charade) but heading there regardless, and of course destined to retire by the mid ’60s. So North by Northwest was really the last shining moment of his career…the last VistaVision moment when everything was truly in place.
Good or great movies deliver all kinds of payoffs. They don’t need a big feel-good finale — they can end quietly, modestly, shockingly, in a way that reaffirms the basics or like an Antonioni film. We all understand that this feel-good finish (from a film that opened a bit more than 25 years ago) is obviously not “real” — it’s a bowl of emotional showbiz soup. But it works, and if it had somehow opened last October or November (what contemporary movie star in his 30s could play the Tom Cruise role?) it would almost certainly be the leading Best Picture contender. Just ask Sid Ganis or Rod Lurie. It hit me just now that the only 2021 Best Picture contender that delivers something even close to what Jerry Maguire had (and obviously still has) is King Richard.
Hollywood Elsewhere is hereby requesting all motivated Photoshop enthusiasts to try and construct a movie poster for the re-christened version of Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Drive My Car, henceforth to be known as “Duuude, Drive My Car!”
The idea is to mimic or otherwise re-use the basic poster art concept of Danny Leiner‘s Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000) but nudging aside images of Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott in favor of Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tōko Miura and Masaki Okada.
The lead paragraph on the Dude, Where’s My Car? Wikipedia page says that “the film’s title became a minor pop culture saying, and was commonly reworked in various pop cultural contexts during the 2000s.” Indeed!
The basic idea is to make Justin Chang and the rest of the Drive My Car cabal seethe with anger.
I’m thinking of something a name-brand director and actor said during a discussion before press and WGA members when he was promoting a certain 2005 film.
He mentioned having recently stood before an infant girl in a crib, a baby who was bright-eyed and beaming and glowing with excitement over the joy of being alive, and this guy was feeling almost heartbroken knowing what she’ll almost certainly go through when she gets into her tweens and teens, the inevitable hurt, the possible encounters with cruelty or callousness…emotional stuff that will almost inevitably leave bruises.
I had the same thought today. I suppressed it right away, telling myself “why dwell on potential negatives? Focus on the joyful and push your sad thoughts aside.” But that director’s thought was in my head for a few seconds. The infant girl he spoke of is now 17 or 18, and probably doing okay or maybe great. But who knows? Life is fraught with peril, not a bowl of cherries, etc.
And here I am the next morning (Saturday, 2.5), sipping my first cup and finally paying attention…bullet time!
Arie’s montage shows Rogan using the racial slur roughly two dozen times in the clips, which were used by Arie to illustrate why she was withdrawing her music from Spotify, where Rogan licenses his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.
Rogan ASKED for this all on his own. He waved it all in. The whole thing started due to his spewing cavalier bullshit about Covid vaccines and now THE BEAST IS ON HIS BACK and DIGGING THE CLAWS IN.
Being double or triple-vaxxed won’t save you from Omicron infection, but the vast majority of people who are dying or greatly suffering from infection are those who haven’t been vaxxed. That’s a FACT. Plus the vast majority are those who are over 65 and overweight / obese. These are irrefutable facts that Rogan felt like fiddling around with and in some instances challenging, and new he’s dealing with the consequences.
Deadline‘s Bruce Haring: “It was reported today that [Spotify] has taken down roughly 70 Rogan podcasts without explanation. Many of the podcasts that were yanked involved other controversial commentators, including Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Owen Benjamin and Canadian writer Gavin Miles McInnes.
Rogan: “[This is] the most regretful and shameful thing I’ve ever had to talk about publicly,” alluding to the India Arie montage video that consists of “out of context” snippets from “12 years of conversations” on his show.
“It looks f–king horrible. Even to me.”
“I know that to most people, there is no context where a white person is ever allowed to say that word, never mind publicly on a podcast, and I agree with that now. I haven’t said it in years. Instead of saying ‘the N-word,’ I would just say the word. I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing.”
