Month: November 2022

Two days after The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg managed to apologize his way out of a #MeToo Harvey Weinstein kerfuffle, another incident has blown up with Wakanda Forever star Letitia Wright, due to Feinberg having written about Wright having award-season baggage due to allegedly promoting anti-vax messaging.

“You’re all incredibly disrespectful“, Wright has stated on Instagram. “This is vile behavior. Stop your disgusting behavior.”

It has to be acknowledged that Wakanda Forever is a very difficult sit (or at least it was for me), and that in a sane world no one would even be flirting with the idea of nominating Wright for anything….please.

Here’s how The Direct‘s Klein Felt reported the conflict:

In my limited white-guy mind rap and hip-hop didn’t really ignite until the late ’80s, mainly when NWA became popular in ’87. Musical scholars will also tell you that rap & hip-hop are generally understood to have originated in New York City in the 1970s.

And yet the very first time I associated the word “rap” with musical punch and propulsion was when I heard “The Rapper,” a lame flash-in-the-pan single from The Jaggerz. “The Rapper” was released in January 1970, or nearly 53 years ago.

“The Rapper” was also the first male-composed pop song that could be interpreted as sympathetic to women in a political sense, and even supportive of the nascent women’s liberation movement. It’s basically a “women beware” song that warns of insincere assholes who will turn on the charm spigot in order to get laid any way they can.

It’s my suspicion that the song’s author, Donnie Iris, wrote “The Rapper” out of resentment and jealousy. Iris probably saw himself as the soulful, sensitive type, and he probably became infuriated when he noticed that full-of-shit types were having better luck with women than he was — that hot women were falling for the puerile.

Iris to women of the late ’60s: “Don’t you girls understand that you’re making a mistake by blowing off sensitive soul men like myself in favor of Shallow Hals who have nothing on their minds except dipping their wicks? My song is telling the truth — these seducers are empty vessels, and they have nothing to offer. Please think it over and consider what you’re missing. I’m the kind of Frye-boots-wearing guy you want to go home with, and not those insincere jackals in their polyester shirts.”

HE to Feinberg and especially the wokesters who beat him with the same stick that the Turks beat Peter O’Toole with in Lawrence to Arabia: It’s perfectly allowable to simultaneously walk and chew gum while discussing Harvey Weinstein. Pre-#MeToo and in private suites Harvey was a brutal, beastly rapist (proven, no question) but he was also a canny distributor with brilliant, go-getter instincts. If he wasn’t a deranged criminal and not behind bars and running Miramax and the Weinstein Co. like he did between the mid ’90s and mid teens, Harvey might have managed a very respectable sell of She Said.

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Attorney Friend to HE: “Do you spend time with your family?”
HE to attorney friend: “Sure, I do.”
Attorney Friend to HE: “Good. Because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”

Jett and Sutton Wells, snapped early Sunday afternoon at Trader Joe’s in Millburn, New Jersey.

I’ll watch almost anything in black-and-white Scope, which I happen to be queer for, but I draw the line at Billy Wilder‘s Kiss Me Stupid. I tried to re-watch it last night (again), and I couldn’t do it, man. I just couldn’t.

(Oh, and I watched two full episodes of grubby, grimy, endlessly talky Andor on Saturday night, but more on that later.)

It’s not so much the overbearing lead performance by Ray Walston, who was hired at the last-minute when Peter Sellers suffered a heart attack, and Kim Novak is…well, not too bad even though Polly the Pistol is a pathetic character. It’s Dean Martin I can’t stand. He’s playing himself here — a rich, big-name Italian crooner who’s so smug and lazy he can barely say his lines without putting himself to sleep…thinks he’s the center of the universe but in fact is completely out of swing with mid ’60s culture and doesn’t know it and doesn’t care, and who has no funny lines…just a smug, oily-haired lech trying to bang Novak while getting half-bombed.

Kiss Me Stupid is torture to sit through — the sexual hang-ups and uptight vibe of middle-class guilt, denial and jealousy creates a terrible feeling of imprisonment. The imaginary hamlet of Climax, Nevada is a ghastly sound-stage gulag. A joke is made at Martin‘s expense about the Beatles, but the film totally misses the post-JFK assassination culture of ‘64, the year of the Beatles explosion, by focusing on (a) a pair of lost-in-the-past songwriters (Walston and that bear-like moustachioed guy, Cliff Osmond) who are as terrible as Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar, and (b) on lechy, slurry-voiced Vegas hotshot Martin and (c) poor, treated-like-dirt Novak. Nobody wanted to think about Walston as a sexually active fellow…good God.

(l. to r.) Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Dean Martin in a rare color snap from the set of Kiss Me Stupid.

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Sasha Stone on the theatrical death of She Said, a first-rate, totally approvable journalism drama: “Journalism changed completely in 2016, just like Hollywood did. The New York Times joined “the resistance” and lost its objectivity. Ditto high-minded Oscar fare. She Said tells the story as Hollywood always does, as though there is only one perspective on any of it. They just assume all of America agrees, or should because their word is the right one.

“Oscar movies aren’t bombing because they’re ‘woke,’ and many of them aren’t. The Banshees of Inisherin isn’t. It’s that Joe and Jane have been “’woked’ too many times, and so when a film comes along, they think ‘I’ll catch it on streaming.’ The last remaining group, to repeat, is likely staying home due to ongoing COVID fear. That isn’t everyone, but it’s enough to make a dent in the box office.

“I just got woked watching a movie recently that was kind of good overall. But its ultimate message was meant to make me, the viewer, feel bad about myself and my world because that is what they want you to feel. They want you to feel guilty and bad because they, the filmmakers, are noble and holy and are on the other side of it.

“I know lots of white people like this — or I used to, I should say. People who go around carping about ‘systemic racism’ and ‘white privilege’ as white people. That puts them on the other side and makes them seem “good” and “woke.” It gives them a sense of higher purpose.

“But the end result of this is always the same story. It’s like Christian Rock — no matter how good it is at the end of the day, it is always going to be about just that one thing. This movie I was watching, like almost every movie or advertising you see, was reminding me yet again of the hierarchy of race. White people are bad; everyone else is good.

“How can you ever expect actors of color — Black, Hispanic, Asian — to have any sort of chance to tell great stories if they’re trapped in the cocoon of white guilt and must always be portrayed as noble saints compared to the white heathens? Meanwhile, White people get all of the good parts because they are allowed to be imperfect, flawed, and corrupt. And ONLY THEM.

“I think personally that it betrays one’s sense of superiority ultimately, as does equity in Hollywood and the Oscars. They’re saying women and people of color can never be as good as white males, so they have to be ‘helped’ to win. But that robs them of their worth in the end because all it does is reward the whites who are giving it to them in the first place. See how good we are? See how ‘woke’ we are?

“Most people are sick of it, though hardly anyone will write about it because they will be slammed online.”

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I’ll catch an occasional film at a nearby AMC plex, but I never seem to remember to arrive 20 to 25 minutes late so I can avoid the torture of watching bubbly, extra perky Noovie personalities Maria Menounos and Perri Nemiroff, not to mention Nicole Kidman’s “we come to this place” AMC movie spot. Aaaagghh!

Each and every time these three lightweights and their respective shpiels send me into a pit of total depression.

It makes you wonder which paying customers out there are shallow and stupid enough to feel even faintly amused by this crap?

Pet Kidman peeve: “That indescribable feeling we all get when the lights begin to dim…” Indescribable on what planet? It’s easily describable. It’s the feeling of illogical, stupidly hopeful anticipation. Most of us know or at least strongly suspect that whAt we’re about to see will be an overlong, submental piece of shit, but when the lights go down we still revert to our seven-year-old selves and think “maybe…maybe.”

She Said is a very trim, smart, efficient, adult-angled journalism drama in the tradition of Spotlight and All The President’s Men. So what went wrong? Too downish? Joe and Jane don’t care that much about the appalling sins of Harvey Weinstein?

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Friendo: “I’m surprised that you bought into this narrative about The Menu‘s box-office performance. The Menu isn’t a horror film. It’s a sophisticated satire of foodie culture with elements of horror sprinkled in — totally a movie for adults. That means that its box-office gross this weekend, which will be close to $10 million, is a triumph. In a single weekend, in one fell swoop, it has beat all the other adult dramas of the fall.

“How is this a case of ‘hasn’t sold all that many tickets’? It’s going to be one of the only relatively small-scale hits of the fall. And I personally think it’s a terrific movie that, for once, has sold all those tickets for the right reasons.

HE to friendo:: “I was going by an assessment by Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro. He wrote that “with an estimated $30M production cost and $8.87M opening, possibly $9M, The Menu is not a bomb, bomb, bomb — but nothing spectacular.”

Friendo to HE: “Inaccurate. It did cost more than your average adult drama, but it’s not like its total gross is $9 million. This is the opening weekend. Right now it looks on track to gross somewhere in the neighborhood of at least $25-30 million domestic. And it has a major international appeal. This means that I think it will emerge, in the end, as a success for Searchlight. It’s certainly no bomb.

“But my point about the numbers isn’t simply related to whether it ultimately makes money for its studio or not. Maybe it will (I think it will), maybe it won’t. My point is: Here’s a movie for adults that people want to see.”

HE to friendo: “I thought it was actually pretty great for that reason.”

Friendo to HE: “I wasn’t sure how much you liked/didn’t like it. I think it’s tons more fun than anything Michael Haneke ever made. And with respectful disagreement: I think it’s a very funny movie. The horror stuff, you’re right, is just horror (though with a wild edge that you could certainly argue has a black-comic frisson), but the satire is delicious. It’s the rare movie that gave me honest laughs. At the end, when Ralph Fiennes called the smore “a fucking monstrosity,” I just about busted a gut.”

HE to friendo: “It’s essentially about malice and hate and unfettered loathing. Dryly or darkly satiric, okay, but not ‘funny.'”

At age 37, William Holden was too old to play Hal Carter, a youngish drifter, in Joshua Logan‘s film adaptation of William Inge‘s Picnic. A few weeks after Picnic opened on 12.7.55, Holden appeared on the cover of Time — a semi-official proclamation that he was peaking as a big-time movie star. Except the painting of Holden that Time used made him appear no younger than 45, which was really too old to play a guy who hadn’t yet figured out what to do with his life.

Holden and his Picnic costar Kim Novak had relatively short runs as super-duper movie stars slash sex symbols. Holden’s began with his breakout role in Sunset Boulevard (’50) and ended with his costarring role in The Horse Soldiers (’59). (He kept working until his death on 11.12.81, but the shining glory era lasted only a decade.) Novak’s Picnic performance made her a star, but her peak period lasted only until her lead role in Of Human Bondage (’64).