Day: October 24, 2022

So Will Smith had a recent private screening of Antoine Fuqua‘s Emancipation (Apple, 12.2), but he invited only celebs of color. The same thing happened with that recent D.C. screening, which reportedly was mainly composed of African-American groups. Why am I hearing that the earlybird audiences been racially segregated? It feels like Smith is going for a stacked-deck consensus. The advance word of mouth on Emancipation will not travel unless a certain percentage of tough white critics give it a thumb’s up. Non-invested critics, I mean, who have no particular dog, etc.

In his 10.20 piece called “Will She Said Hit Too Close to Home for Oscar Voters?,” Variety‘s Clayton Davis is trying to guilt-trip older Hollywood males into applauding this first-rate docudrama about how Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey took down Harvey Weinstein.

Except She Said doesn’t need Clayton Davis’s help — it stands confidently and efficiently on its own two feet.

If you ask me Davis has invalidated himself by putting quote marks around cancel culture in the third-to-last paragraph.

Quote marks bookending this term is a standard wokester move. It’s meant to suggest skepticism about the validity of the term itself. It’s the same thing as writing “so-called cancel culture.”

So let’s understand this clearly — by attempting to cast doubt or suspicion upon usage of cancel culture, Clayton has made it unambiguously clear that he stands with the bad guys.

Three oldies costar in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania —Michael Douglas, Michele Pfeiffer and an uncredited Bill Murray as a villain of some kind. I adored the original Ant-Man (’15) but not so much Ant-Man and the Wasp (’18). I’ll probably have difficult with this one also. Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Kathryn Newton, Jonathan Majors, Randall Park

I had to catch an 11:30 am train to Grand Central in order to arrive early for a 2 pm Bardo screening at the Paris theatre. It all happened according to plan.

Alejandro G. Inarritu’s 8 and 1/2-like epic about a filmmaker’s interior journey of guilt, love, identity, marriage, family and creative frustration is now 20-odd minutes shorter than the version that played in Telluride. I was mostly a thumbs–upper then and I liked today’s version even better. As you might imagine it’s now tighter, trimmer…a tad more concise.

Alejandro and leading cast members Daniel Gimemez Cacho, Ximena Lamadrid and Iker Solano sat for a half-hour q & a following the screening, which began at 2:15 pm and ended at 4:45, not counting closing credits.

I’ll amplify later on my reactions.

It’s now 6:30 pm. I’m sitting in the upstairs dining area at Smiler’s Deli (Madison and 54th) — no wall plugs, no wifi (Smiler’s don’t want no wifi bums) and attempts to use my iPhone as a personal hotspot have failed miserably. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss’s 42 year-old successor, will soon become the youngest Prime Minister in British history. He and wife Akshata, daughter of Indian billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy, have a combined fortune of $730 million and perhaps over a billion dollars.

Born on 5.12.80, Sunak would be a Millennial if he had begun life a year later. He’s technically a very young GenXer.

From a certain angle Sunak almost seems like a conservative JFK — young, slim, good-looking, loaded. The non-JFK factor, according to British broadcaster and former politician Nigel Farage, is that Sunak lacks charisma. “He’s very, very dull and detached, and doesn’t connect with ordinary folk,” Farage recently told Sky News.

Autocorrect is giving me all kinds of trouble when I attempt to spell the names of Rishi, Akshata and her father N.R. Narayana…stop pestering me!