The vast majority of us (99.5%) accept and live by the idea of deferring or side-stepping to avoid any sort of physical conflict. Let it go, head down, duck and cover, etc. Alas, the below video falls under the heading of “regrettable but understandable racism.” Honest question: How is this young woman’s defiant, looking-for-trouble attitude substantially different from the attitude of young Liam Neeson during that notorious incident in the early ’80s, give or take?
Race obsessed tiktoker films herself walking around “not moving out of the way for white people” as a form of “reparations.” pic.twitter.com/iTWwbDCuPj
Kasi Lemmons‘ I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Sony, 12.21), a cradle-to-grave biopic of the late Whitney Houston, was screened last night in Las Vegas, and the word (I spoke to two viewers) is definitely on the approving side.
It’s longish (150 minutes, give or take) and technically incomplete, as is normal for any film that’s more than eight months from opening. And it covers almost all of the biographical basics for Whitney fans — definitely a fan-service presentation.
For what it’s worth one guy’s reaction is through the roof about Naomi Ackie‘s Whitney performance. I know nothing about Ackie except that (a) she’s British and (b) played the smallish role of “Jannah” in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
What kind of movie is I Wanna Dance With Somebody? Honest response: “It’s a TIFF People’s Award winner…it’s not a Venice or Telluride type of film…it’s been made for your hoi polloi faithful. And yet it’s intelligent and well-written as far as biopics go…screenplay by Anthony McCarten, shot by Zero Dark Thirty‘s Barry Aykroyd. Nothing wrong with that. It takes all sorts of films to make a world.
It’s basically a six-character drama — Ackie as Houston, Ashton Sanders as Bobby Brown, Stanley Tucci as Clive Davis, Nafessa Williams as Robyn Crawford (Whitney’s girlfriend), Clarke Peters as Whitney’s father and Tamara Tunie as her mom.
Houston’s Bodyguard costar Kevin Costner isn’t a character in the film.
Last night in front of a huge Cinemacon crowd inside the Caesar’s Place Colisseum, Don’t Worry Darling director Olivia Wilde was legally served with custody papers. The papers were from Jason Suidekis, her ex-partner and father of their two kids. The actual process server, probably a local, was presumably hired by Suidekis’s law firm.
I seem to recall that David O. Russell‘s officially-titled Amsterdam (20th Century, 11.4) was being referred to as Amsterdam a couple of years ago. Not in trade stories but in unofficial circles. And then came that perplexing, all-but-meaningless title of Canterbury Glass. And now we’re back to Amsterdam.
The long-gestating 1930s period drama, fortified with a cavalcade of big-name costars (including Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek, Zoe Saldaña, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Timothy Olyphant, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alessandro Nivola, Taylor Swift) and a story involving fraud and skullduggery…I don’t know what I’m saying but I should admit that I feel a wee bit concerned. I know nothing at all. Just an insect antennae signal.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), a Mexico City-based “nostalgic comedy” about a Mexican journalist and documentarian (Daniel Giménez Cacho) working his way through identity and cultural issues, is now an official Netflix release.
It will therefore receive the whole bucks-up, blue-chip Lisa Taback and Albert Tello red-carpet ooh-lah-lah treatment as part of a deluxe award-season campaign, with a likely launch at Venice/Telluride.
Shot on 65mm (love that aspect!) and costarring Griselda Siciliani, Bardo will debut in certain upscale theatre venues before streaming on Netflix.
Bardo is Spanish for “bard,” which most of us associate with William Shakespeare. The conventional definition is “a poet, traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular oral tradition.”
For several months I’ve been asking myself why Bardo sounds so familiar, but I couldn’t figure it out. This morning it hit me — Bardahl Motor Oil, which used to heavily advertise on TV in the mid to late 20th Century.
I have to be honest: When I read earlier today about Amber Heard’s alleged personality disorders, I immediately wondered if I suffer from any such maladies. Or if some of the HE regulars do. I don’t think I have any debilitating personality issues, but I had to look in the mirror and ask myself “well…do you?”
Guardian story: Shannon Curry, an expert in intimate partner violence, testified that her evaluation of Amber Heard revealed two psychiatric diagnoses –– (a) borderline personality disorder and (b) histrionic personality disorder.
“Curry said that Heard, 36, displayed a “reactive”, “overly dramatic presentation” and used words like “magical” and “wonderful” to describe events. Heard, she said, flitted between “princess and victim”.
“As sophisticated, “cute and girlish” as such people may present, Curry said, they “may in reality be very destructive”, “dramatic, erratic and unpredictable” and possessed of an “underlying drive to not be abandoned but also to be [the] center of attention”.
“Curry said borderline personality disorder represented an unstable personality, alert to rejection, with little access to self-regulation and marked by “a lot of anger, cruelty toward people less powerful, concerned with image, attention-seeking and prone to externalizing blame, a lot of suppressed anger that may explode outwards”.
The 4K Bluray release has been sourced “from a new 4K restoration completed by Warner Bros. with the cooperation of The Film Foundation.
“It was completed sourcing both the original camera negatives and protection RGB separation master positives for the best possible image, and color corrected in high dynamic range for the latest picture display technology. The audio was sourced primarily from a 1995 protection copy of the Original Magnetic Mono soundtrack. The picture and audio restoration was completed by Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services: Motion Picture Imaging and Post Production Sound.”
I’m naturally looking forward to the new disc, but keep in mind what blue-chip restoration guru Robert Harris said about the original Giant elements on 10.27.13 on Home Theatre Forum:
All I know is that if I was handed a “cold” gun for a scene that I’d be performing in, I would say to the armorer “are you 110% certain that this gun is cold?” After he/she confirms that it’s cold, I would then take the gun outside and fire it into the ground, just to make double sure. If the gun shoots a bullet, I’d know the armorer is an unreliable, unprofessional fool. If the gun shoots a blank, I’d know it’s safe and cool and there’d be no harm done.
The View‘s Sunny Hostin on Elon Musk‘s Twitter takeover: “When Elon Musk says this is about free speech, [he seems to be saying] that this is about the free speech of straight white men.”
Are you listening to this? Hostin is more or less saying that free speech for straight white men shouldn’t be a concern because we’re in a revolution right now, and straight white men need to sit their asses down in the back of the bus and shut the eff up…because they need to listen and learn. The world was run by straight white men for centuries, Hostin is more or less saying, and they’ve had their chance. Now it’s time for women, LGBTQs and people of color to reshape the world into a fairer, more considerate social environment, and if straight white men don’t agree with the new woke program that’s too damn bad.
Imagine the reactions if a famous straight white guy were to complain about free speech for women, LGBTQs or people of color.
Released just shy of 50 years ago, Michael Ritchie’s PrimeCut is primarily a diseased sexist fantasy (poor Sissy Spacek), and secondarily about conflicting gangster values — a violent standoff between a relatively urbane, moderate mannered Chicago enforcer (Lee Marvin) and a beastly, intemperate Kansas City gangster named Mary Ann (Gene Hackman).
We’re encouraged to side with Marvin, who is presented as more refined and civilized than the slovenly, low-born Hackman. But despite the pastoral Midwestern vistas, the package is too weird and perverse. I saw PrimeCut theatrically back in the day, and had an immediate urge to take a shower.
My Trump-access concern (postedyesterday) remains paramount, but otherwise I’m less in league with your pearl-clutching, sky-is-falling wokesters and more willing to let the chips fall and see how the Musk experiment plays out.
Cribbed from FoxBusiness, but otherwise quoted everywhere by everyone:
