What does it mean when a plurality of mainstream media types decide that a certain critically lauded, high-profile biopic by a major-brand, boomer-aged filmmaker…a film that Average Joes & Janes are not exactly rushing out to see (the reception so far has been West Side Story-ish)…what does it mean when a film that, by the measure of Howard Hawks, has three good scenes (Judd Hirsch rant, Nazi war film shoot in the Arizona desert, John Ford barks out lesson about horizon lines) and several meh ones…a “good” but subdued Amarcord film that unfolds in a reasonably compelling fashion but isn’t, on its own story terms and minus the Spielberg coat of arms, what anyone would call a fascinating tale…

What does it mean when the go-along media bros decide nonetheless that this is the safest, most reliable, most steady-as-she-goes Oscar pony to get behind?

I’ll tell you what it means. It means that elite brand fortification matters to a lot of people. Speaking as one who’s been proud to self–identify as an honorary Jew since the ‘70s, I understand it all.

Will Smith: “I was gone, man…I was gone…that was rage that had been bottled up for a really long time…it was a mess.”

Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith‘s Emancipation opens in four days (12.2), and Apple is still being cagey and selective about showing it to the critical community. Several Manhattan critics saw it on Monday. I’ve spoken to two who’ve seen this saga of Whipped Peter, this 19th Century escape-and-survival tale, and their reactions were on the slumping or downbeat side. Critic to HE: “Meh, middling, a slog.” HE to critic: “So it doesn’t totally suck eggs? it’s sorta kinda half good? Not awful? Moderately tolerable?”

A few days ago Next Best Picture‘s Matt Neglia tweeted that he was feeling “gutted” after he and his parents had sat down to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once. He was feeling bummed because his dad had walked out during the film’s “emotional climax” (whatever that refers to).

On one hand I agree that Matt’s dad acted inconsiderately and that he shouldn’t have missed the film’s best moment, which comes at the very end in the IRS office. On the other I can relate to his father’s reaction (I mostly hated this godawful film) and I admire his resolve — he knew his son had a great amount of affection for EEAAO and yet he just couldn’t stand it and felt he had to leave in order to maintain his sanity.

Babylon director-writer Damien Chazelle “wanted to plumb the lower depths — to juxtapose La La Land’s gorgeous, Hollywood-glam set pieces and Whiplash’s darker examination of ambition’s toll. “It was really a wild West period for these people, this gallery of characters, as they rise and fall, rise, fall, rise again, fall again,” he says, adding that “the thing that they’re building is springing back on them and chewing them up.”

“Everything is shifting underneath people’s feet and I became really fascinated by the human cost of disruption at that magnitude, at a time when there was no road map, when everything was just new and wild.” == Vanity Fair‘s Rebecca Ford, 9.7.22.

I didn’t care for season #1 of The White Lotus because of the shallow or otherwise odious characters, the general atmosphere of greed, indifference and insensitivity, and especially the focus on men’s anuses — Murray Bartlett‘s Armond performing anilingus on Lukas Gage‘s Dillon, and Armond later defecating into a suitcase owned by Jake Lacy‘s Shane.

What I mean is that early on I inhaled the perverse or otherwise depraved imaginings of series creator Mike White, and I didn’t care for the odor.

After season #1, I swore to myself that I will never again watch a sex scene imagined or directed by White — I don’t want the term “sexual behavior”and Mike White to ever again cross paths in my head. And I’ll certainly never watch another Mike White scene in which a drunken guy takes a dump in another guy’s suitcase. I’m sorry but that’s a hard and fast rule.

Alas, some more Mike White sexuality slithered through the gate in last night’s White Lotus episode…episode #5, season 2, set in Sicily. It involves Quentin (Tom Hollander), an older gay guy who lives in Palermo, and his supposed nephew Jack (Leo Woodall) and Tanya McQuoid-Hunt (Jennifer Coolidge).

First Quentin, Jack and Tanya attend an opera, and then they all drive back to Quentin’s lavish Palermo villa. Late at night Tanya peeks her head into one of the rooms and is surprised to find Jack engaged in incest with Quentin, ass-pumping his uncle with extra vigor.

You know what I keep getting from White and his sex scenes? A little touch of Pier Paolo Pasolini and particularly a Salo vibe. There was a lot of anal in that 1975 film, I can tell you. Salo was Pasolini’s metaphor for the brutal degradations of fascism; it was also about his enjoyment of young curly-haired men with tight buns. White has been indulging his own predilections in The White Lotus, trust me.

White: “There’s a pleasure to me as a guy who is gay-ish to make gay sex transgressive again. It’s dirty…men are having sex and you have this ‘Psycho’ music underneath. I just think transgressive sex is sexier. I guess I’m old school. There’s this Gothic vibe of walking through a haunted hotel or haunted house and people are having sex behind closed doors.”

Hollander has spoken to Variety‘s Ethan Shanfeld about pretending to be fucked in the ass in a way that looks and sounds convincing.

“It’s more technical than anything else when you’re actually doing it,” Hollander says. “You know, ‘Is this the right angle? Does this look right?’ But there was a mutually respectful energy between us, too. And on the set, the production was very tender around those moments. It certainly was around that one. We just wanted to do it right.

“There is fantasy, and you’re going through your head going, ‘I hope I look good.’ But when they say action, in a way that goes, and you actually just find yourself thinking, ‘I want this to be a true representation of an intimate moment between two people.’ You just want to do it right,” Hollander said.”

This is HE’s least favorite all-time quote by an actor about performing a sex scene.

The plan is for Jett and Cait to bring one-year-old Sutton into Manhattan this Saturday (i.e., five days hence) with a special interest in showing her the big Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.

In the same sense that kids can’t really appreciate the unique cultural pleasures of Europe until they’re ten or so, tykes probably can’t really “get” the midtown holiday splendor thing until they’re two or three. Plus I’m not looking forward to mingling with suffocating masses of bridge-and-tunnel tourists.

That isn’t stopping us, of course. Sutton might be taken aback at the size of that 80-foot-tall tree or the ornamental lights and whatnot, and the mere possibility of such an impression is enough.

I was three during my first visit to Manhattan. The tree aside, the focus back then was eyeballing the window displays at Sak’s Fifth Avenue and visiting Santa Claus at Macy’s.

The first Rockefeller Center Xmas tree was erected in 1931. It was only 20something feet tall and was paid for, notably, by construction guys who were building 30 Rock.

During a just-posted Club Random chat with Dave Rubin, Bill Maher discussed his dislike of Stephen Colbert and vice versa. But he doesn’t totally trash him and leaves the door slightly ajar.

Maher: “Colbert and I are not friends. He doesn’t like me and I don’t like him, and we don’t deny it.”
Rubin: “But he’s nothing. He’s just giving the machine what it wants all the time while you…”
Maher: “That is well said. Giving the machine what it wants. I wish I had thought of that phraseology. That’s exactly right. [But] maybe we’ll become friends one day…who knows? I’ve had that happen before. You get off on the wrong foot [with someone, but then it cools down or gradually turns a corner]. He’s the very opposite of me…a married Catholic,” etc.

I’m not suggesting this is Jack Benny vs. Fred Allen or that anyone needs to care in the slightest, but when did this contretemps first pop through? Or is it just some animal dislike thing (i.e., Charles Laughton vs, Laurence Oliver)?