Month: October 2022

Yesterday’s Bill Murray news almost felt like an obituary. Per Eriq Gardner’s Puck report, the 72 year-old legend not only misbehaved on the Being Mortal set (i.e., straddled and mask-kissed a ‘much younger’female production staffer) but agreed to cough up $100K and change to make the issue go away.

In today’s woke-serpent world, this may mean that Murray is finished, at least for the time being. Unfair as this sounds, he’s suddenly the new Frank Langella…a soft predator who may or may not be an insurance problem because he can’t be trusted to play by the current rules. Too old to be saved or converted.

I don’t know how much of this “Murray is finished” talk is smoke and how much is mirrors, but it feels like such a shame that the mob wants him tossed…the latest name to be placed on the hit list. Maybe his alleged banishment isn’t permanent and he can slip back into film or streaming roles after a couple of years.

Friendo: “The fact that the media and entertainment industries want to assassinate Murray for doing…what’s the word? Oh, yes…next to NOTHING is most certainly a shame. Not to mention terrifying. Cancel culture is an addiction.”

Let’s pretend that Murray got hit by a truck yesterday and that it’s time for an obit. If I had an hour to grind one out I would insist that the most glorious year of Murray’s life happened in 1993, when he delivered his two greatest performances — a sardonic Chicago loan shark named Frank “The Money Store” Milo in John McNaughton and Richard Price‘s Mad Dog and Glory, and a sardonic TV weatherman in Harold Ramis‘s Groundhog Day. Murray was around 42 when he shot both.

Murray”s third-best performance happened five years later in Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore, in which he played Herman Blume, a wealthy Houston businessman (also sardonic) who falls in love with a grade-school teacher (Olivia Williams), and in so doing ignites a feud with a 15 year-old romantic rival, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman).

Some thoughts about Milo, which I posted three years ago:

“Mad Dog and Glory is about a curiously touching friendship between Milo and Robert De Niro‘s Wayne — a timid, lonely Chicago cop who specializes in forensics and crime-scene photographs. Milo is a Chicago mob guy who becomes a big brother and ‘friend’ of Wayne’s after the latter saves his life.

“Milo is a lot like Murray in many ways, just not internally. He’s angry and doesn’t really like himself or his friends or his life. He wants to be somewhere else. He’s seeing a therapist to try and deal with the hostility, and he performs a stand-up comedy routine at a place called the Comic-Kaze Club, which he owns. But he doesn’t want to lose the gangster life either.

“Frank and Wayne’s connection begins when Wayne — joshingly called “‘Mad Dog’ by his cop pals — saves Frank’s life during a grocery store holdup by calming down a jittery holdup man and sending him away without bloodshed.

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It broke my heart when I learned that Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight, 10.21) wouldn’t be screening at Telluride ’22. I knew it would be at least pretty good, and I couldn’t figure why Telluride hadn’t grabbed it. Probably some Venice Film Festival bullshit.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been hearing it’s a lot more than “pretty good”, and that it might even be a Fabelmans conqueror. And now that I’m hearing that a fair number of critics believe that Banshees might actually win the Best Picture Oscar, my heart is still broken as I won’t see it until 10.20, or the day before it opens.

Critic friendo #1: “I’m hearing that the movie that’s going to win Best Picture is the Martin McDonagh film. I’ve just heard it here and there. People adore this film.” Critic friendo #2: “Don’t miss Banshees…it’s A-plus. It made me realize how (1) filmmakers in America don’t really know how to tell good stories because they all want to write their own scripts and they’re not great writers. And (2) I’d forgotten how powerful a great story can actually be, and why they matter so much. McDonagh is such a great fucking writer.”

Critic friendo #2 response to Best Picture buzz: “I have to agree with that. Also Best Original Screenplay.”

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The new Women Talking trailer tells you it’s a quality-level thing for smart women…grim, somber, articulate, muted palette, lotsa dialogue. I can only tell you that as much as I recognized the pedigree and respected the aims of Sarah Polley’s film (UA Releasing, 12.2), I looked at my watch at least seven or eight times.

Posted on 9.9.22: Step outside the woke-critic realm and there’s a sizable body of opinion (or so I determined after speaking with Telluride viewers) that Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking is a static, dialogue-driven #MeToo chamber piece that could be fairly described as a “tough sit.”

Based on Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel, which is “loosely based on real-life events that occurred in 2011 at the Manitoba Colony in Bolivia,” Women Talking is about several women dealing with corrosive sexual trauma.

Set within an isolated American Mennonite community, Women Talking focuses on a nocturnal, seemingly dusk-to-dawn discussion inside a barn, and focuses on eight or so women debating whether to leave their community to escape the brutality of several men who have repeatedly drugged and raped them.

Fortified by several first-rate performances (most notably from Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara and Claire Foy) and currently enjoying a 92% and 90% approval ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively, the post-Telluride narrative is that Women Talking will probably be Best Picture-nominated and will certainly be in the running for a SAG Best Ensemble prize.

The other narrative is that this counted-on support for Women Talking will be largely emotional (particularly driven by the overturning of Roe v. Wade) and certainly political.

As I wrote in a 9.5 piece called “Telluride Hive Mind,” “The elite Telluride critic community feels it has no choice but to worship Polley‘s film…politically speaking there’s no upside to not praising it.”

I added that Women Talking is “sturdy and nicely handled as far as it goes, but sitting through it felt confining and interminable. For me, it was almost totally about waiting for it to end.”

The indisputably brave, lone-wolfish Kyle Smith of The Wall Street Journal: “Critically acclaimed as an oblique commentary on the #MeToo moment, it’s an example of a prestige film that is more focused on point-scoring than coherence.”

A sentence in Jordan Ruimy’s mostly negative Toronto assessment, however, gave me pause: “There were women sobbing all around me during the press & industry screening of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, so I assume the film will work with a large contingent of people. But it fell flat for me.”

Roe v. Wade plus Toronto “sobbing” means Women Talking isn’t going away and will command repeated salutations in award-season assessment articles between now and early ’23 (the Oscar telecast happens on 3.12.23). The bottom line is that, as THR‘s Scott Feinberg suggested during Telluride, a significant percentage of Academy and guild members will probably be less than enthused.

This won’t stop the wokester cabal, of course. They will push for Women Talking with the same fervor they used to (unsuccessfully) take down Green Book, and which some of them will use to diminish Sam Mendes‘ immensely affecting Empire of Light, which will absolutely be Best Picture-nominated…trust me.

This is two days old but HE is also jubilant that Iim Kardashian got booed during Sunday’s Rams-Cowobys game. There’s hope for this country yet.

Almost seven months later it’s finally been revealed why Aziz Ansari‘s Being Mortal stopped shooting last March and has never resumed, and costar Keke Palmer had nothing to do with it. 

It just didn’t seem logical or likely that a woman with considerably less power and status than Palmer could have made such a stink that the film was shut down. But that’s apparently what happened.

Puck’s Eriq Gardner has reported that the complainer was a “much younger” female production staffer whom costar Bill Murray “allegedly straddled and kissed through masks.”

After the anonymous woman lodged an official complaint, the parties entered mediation and eventually came to a settlement of just over $100,000.

Why the hell was this kept under wraps for over six months when so many people (myself included) were theorizing that by any rational industry mindset the complainer had to be Palmer? What exactly was the upside in keeping this touchy matter top secret for so long?

HE fully apologizes to Palmer for pointing to what seemed like a completely logical and likely assumption.

Can we trust Emancipation buzz passed along by Variety columnist Clayton Davis, who’s demonstrated time and again that he’s something of a cheerleader when it comes to BIPOC-related features and performances?

I’m not dismissing what Clayton is saying, of course, but it might be a good idea to take it with a grain.

What is Clayton asserting exactly? In a recent ‘The Take’ video Clayton says that Antoine Fuqua’s film (theatrical 12.2, Appl+ streaming on 12.9) is “supposed to be pretty great…Fuqua’s best, in fact…very gritty, very dark…even more graphic that 12 Years A Slave.”

The money quotes run from 3:42 to 4:14.

In short, Clayton wants to see the film nominated for Best Picture, Fuqua nominated for Best Director and…what can Will Smith be nominated for again? I’m not sure. If Emancipation were to win the Best Picture Oscar, Smith, one of the film’s four producers (along with Todd Black, Joey McFarland and Jon Mone), could technically stride onstage and co-accept the award…right? (Or do I have that wrong?) Smith can’t win for Best Actor because he’s resigned from the Academy…correct? But he can be nominated…is that right?

The “more graphic than 12 Years A Slave‘ remark suggests that Fuqua, whose aesthetic instincts have never been on the lofty Tarkovsky or Kubrick side, decided to out-gun Steve McQueen’s 2013 Oscar-winner with the graphic material because one thing he doesn’t want people saying is ‘it’s less graphic than 12 Years A Slave.’

Identical twin with longer hair: “I’ve seen TAR twice, and the first time I felt I didn’t have the best grasp on this film. One of the reasons is that [director] Todd Field is not giving us answers or telling us this is exactly where he stands. He’s presenting a lot more questions than answers, and that would be a helpful thing to keep in mind as you go into this movie.

“Because sometimes it does feel as if something is being said on one side and then there’s a point being made for the opposite side, and it’s kinda difficult for us to take away a central thesis. [Because] I don’t think we are being given a central thesis.

“And after both viewings, i did feel a little cold at the end. Like not sure if I care that much about what is happening. There are some things presented abstractly, and I was ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to do here.’ I didn’t feel like I was on the film’s wavelength the whole time. [The film] floated my boat, but not all the way to the surface. [The boat] was still kind of underwater, and I had to get a couple of buckets to get that water out.”

Identical twin with shorter hair: “The details are there for you to pick up on, and Todd Field trusts you to figure them out. He really, really respects the audience’s intelligence, and he almost makes you feel smart…”

Identical twin with longer hair: “Conversely TAR could make you feel quite dumb.”

Same observations said more concisely by yours truly on 9.4.22:

HE agrees that Park Chan-wook‘s Decision to Leave (MUBI, 10.14) “has some of the best direction and editing” seen in years. This assessment sidesteps the fact that the script (co-written by Jeong Seo-kyeong and PCW) is convoluted and overlong and sometimes infuriating, especially during the final hour. Calling it a “neo-noir puzzler” isn’t putting it strongly enough.

Here’s HE’s 10.5. assessment, essentially a re=boot of my 5.23.22 Cannes Film Festival review.

I’ve always liked Jack Lemmon‘s (C.C. Baxter‘s) pre-war, moderately spacious, one-bedroom residence in Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment (’60). And I’ve always enjoyed Baxter’s tennis-racket pasta strainer.

The address in the film was 51 West 67th Street, #2A. A NYC film location website (www.the culturetrip.com) reports that Wilder shot the brownstone’s exteriors at 55 West 69th Street, between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West.  It’s also been reported that the brownstone was re-constructed on a Los Angeles sound stage.

Baxter’s rent was $85 a month, which strictly translates on an inflationary scale to $850 in 2022 dollars. This, of course, is but a fraction of the actual likely rent today.

Zumper.com reports “the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Upper West Side, New York, NY is currently $4,564,” which reps a 15% increase compared to 2021.

The Peripheral (Amazon Prime, 10.21), a kind of adventure series about a virtual reality traveller (Chloe Grace Moretz), is based on a 2014 novel by sci-fi author William Gibson (Neuromancer).

The teleplay has been created-written by Scott Smith (A Simple Plan, The Ruins). Westworld‘s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are serving as exec producers, whatever that actually means.

People who’ve continued to endure HBO’s Westworld series know that Nolan and Joy are purveyors of the puzzlebox approach to teleplay writing…endless dingle-dangle plotting that goes on forever without actually getting anywhere.

The series costars Gary Carr, Jack Reynor, Eli Goree, Charlotte Riley, Adelind Horan, T’Nia Miller and Alex Hernandez.