Day: July 4, 2023

Three days after HE’s summary of recently departed female DEI execs (“Dropping Like Flies”), another diversity lassie has been cut loose.

Variety‘s Clayton Davis has dutifully filed a protest piece about this.

Friendo: I’m not saying that Greta Gerwig intending to make a Narnia movie necessarily suggests anything about the nature or character of Barbie.  But what are the odds that Barbie and her forthcoming Narnia film are completely and utterly unrelated?

SPOILERS FOR SLUGS WHO LIVE UNDER ROCKS: I’m repeating myself as I often do, but now that everyone (and I mean everyone) in every continent on the globe has seen Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, I need to again emphasize something important:

Failing to allow poor wounded Indiana Jones to remain in 212 B.C. Syracuse and in the glorious company of Archimedes was a huge mistake, as that would have been a perfect finale all around.

I wasn’t just disappointed about Phoebe Waller Bridge slugging Harrison Ford and somehow dragging him back to 1969 New York City, I was crestfallen. Hell, I was on the verge of tears — “They just blew a perfect ending!”

GQ‘s David Zazlav profile was definitely yanked, according to The Washington Post‘s Will Sommer.

Here’s the allegedly pulled GQ article, dated 7.3.23:

Posted on 12.2.11: Steve McQueen‘s Shame demands a spinach-eating looksee from all non-Eloi viewers, but hoowee, it’s a bucket of bleak.

Here’s my 9.5. Telluride Film Festival review: “Steve McQueen‘s Shame is a prolonged analysis piece that’s entirely about a malignancy — sex addiction — affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into the light.

“Michael Fassbender plays a successful Manhattan guy with a sex-addiction issue. He’s into slamming ham like a vampire is into blood-drinking, minus any emotional intimacy whatsoever. And at the end of the day, all the film does is show you how damaged and deranged he is. The guy is lost, tangled, probably doomed.

“Act One: Fassbender is one smooth, obsessive, fucked-up dude. Act Two: Fassbender really is a twisted piece of work, you bet. Act Three: Boy, is this guy a mess!

“This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do. But Shame has a point, delivered with a methodical intensity, that sinks into your bones. And part of the point is that suppressed memories of incest…I can’t do this.

“But Shame has integrity, and is one of those films, like A Dangerous Method, that you might not like as you watch it but you think about a lot in the hours and days and weeks afterwards.

“The sex scenes are grim and draining and even punishing in a presumably intentional way. Fassbender walks around with his dick hanging out and flopping against his upper thigh, and I suppose it ought to be acknowledged that he’s fairly well hung.

Carey Mulligan, who plays his effed-up sister, has (a) a longish nude scene in a shower and (b) a song-singing moment that goes on for three or four minutes.”

Chilly and clinical as it is, it’s all but impossible to not think about Shame, a lot, after it’s over. Failing to see it means hanging your head in shame the next time an intelligent film discussion occurs in your circle.

On 9.30 N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis called Shame “another example of British miserablism, if one that’s been transposed to New York and registers as a reconsideration of the late 1970s American cinema of sexual desperation (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Hardcore, Cruising, etc.).”

From 11.10: “What if Michael Fassbender’s sex-addict character was called ‘Shame’? And if everyone called him that — all the girls he picks up, his sister (Carey Mulligan), his charmless boss at the office and so on? And what he if struck up a relationship with a 10 year-old kid who lives in his building, and what if the kid found out he was a sex addict and said, ‘I’m ashamed of you, Shame!'”

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Last posted on 7.10.20, originally posted on 12.8.06: “Not long ago, the Bagger was at a restaurant event with a major film writer and director and ended up in a booth with him for several hours. He admired the man tremendously, [but] did not like his last project. Finally, the subject came up and the Bagger told the truth, after which there was suddenly very little to say.

“Later, Carr asked an experienced colleague if he, Carr, had been wise to speak his mind. ‘No, that was profoundly stupid,’ he was told. ‘They really don’t want to know the truth.’” — from David Carr‘s “Ten Things I Don’t Hate About You, or At Least Your Movie,” also posted on 12.18.06.

“Carr’s friend was right, but I’ll never forget my initial reaction to Michael Bay‘s Armageddon after an Academy screening in June of 1998. It gave me a headache because of the machine-gun-like cutting. As Variety‘s Todd McCarthy famously said at the time, the pace felt like that of ‘a machine gun locked in the firing position.’ This over-accelerated editing, I was later told, was a result of a deliberate Michael Bay strategy of cutting out as many frames as possible in each scene order to make the film play as fast, hard and compressed as possible — i.e., ‘frame-fucked.’

“In any event, when I saw Bruckheimer in the lobby after the screening I did the usual chickenshit industry thing — I half-lied. I told Jerry that the film ‘rocked’ or felt like ‘rocket fuel.’ (Which wasn’t a total lie — it did feel like that, sort of.) As soon as I said this, however, Bruckheimer cocked his head and gave me a ‘look’. He knew I was snowing him, and I knew that he knew. I felt like a snivelling coward, possibly due to the fact that I was being precisely that. He didn’t look at me for the rest of the evening.

“I later shared this moment with a director friend, and he told me one of his own. A very big (one could use the word ‘legendary’) producer told him that an actress in a scene he was directing was ‘fucking smiling‘ too often, ‘just like fucking Tom Cruise…always smiling, always with the teeth. Tell her to cut it out.’ The director later spoke to the actress, who had seen him speaking with the big-name producer. ‘Did he say anything about me?’ she asked. The director replied, ‘He compared you to Tom Cruise.'”

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…during the six-week period between the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and the film’s opening on the Independence Day weekend (6.30 to to 7.3)…whatever she and her handlers may have expected or hoped to happen, it’s fair to say that the whole promotional bandwagon didn’t bear fruit…it certainly didn’t connect with Joe and Jane Popcorn, particularly the under-35s. The whole effort amounted to a whiff. It hurts when this happens, I realize, and I’m not gloating at anyone’s failure.

…and lived in a primary state, I would vote for Chris Christie. Yes, I’ve said this before. Not a perfect candidate, but he has character and gumption and doesn’t shrink from saying “that man is a sociopath.”

Posted on 6.10.23:

The first and only super moon of 2023 rose last night — Monday, July 3. But there were no clear skies in my neck of the woods, and in fact lightning, thunder and heavy showers ruled by 9 pm. Sio much for that visual opportunity.

I therefore won’t be seeing it until Thursday afternoon (7.6). If anyone did catch it last weekend, please share.