The reason, of course, is that the word “fat” has been banned from the cultural vocabulary by body-positivity advocates. Fat or obese persons no longer exist — there are only different people of different shapes, livin’ their lives and owning their bods.
You’re supposed to be tickled by Only Murders in the Building, which is now in its third semi-triumphant season. The producers and costars (Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez) want you to kick back and succumb to whatever…light-hearted chuckles, titters, the occasional guffaw.
Why have I never watched it? Because I knew I’d hate it.
One of my least favorite Woody Allen films is Manhattan Murder Mystery (’93), which is basically a faux-farcical black comedy about an older Manhattan couple (Allen, Diane Keaton) investigating the mysterious disappearance of a married neighbor in their Upper West Side apartment building. It was wittily written but felt labored and strained, and it wore me out within the first 40 minutes.
Plus I’ve never liked “amusing” murder-mysteries to begin with…sorry. And I always avoid anything Agatha Christie-ish. Killings + formula…later.
Which is why I’ve never given Only Murders in the Building so much as a single glance.
It’s about a wisecracking threesome — Charles (Martin), Oliver (Short) and Mabel (Gomez) — who reside in a swanky Upper West Side building and solve murders as a kind of…I don’t want to explain or even think about this crap. They run a true-crime podcast and need fresh murders, I suppose, for discussion material. It’s a really stupid premise.
The current season of Only Murders in the Building is focusing on the Broadway theatre milieu, and I wanted to sample Meryl Streep‘s performance. So last night and against my better judgment I gave it a try, but figured I should start with an introductory episode from season #1.
I felt instantly miserable. I was exhaling, groaning, truly hating my life. I didn’t feel tickled or tittered or tingled. I just sat there and asked myself “why am I watching this?”
I also wondered “why doesn’t Steve Martin look like he did when he co-hosted the Oscars with Alec Baldwin? (Answer: That was 13 years ago, and Martin is now 77.) And why is he wearing that awful little pork-pie hat? And why is the tone of the show so silly? And why does it feel so tepid and neutered, like it’s afraid to offend septugenarian viewers? And why have the whore critics praised it so? And why does the dialogue feel so tedious and lame? And why have they cast Michael Cyril Creighton as one of the building neighbors?”
I’ll be watching a couple of Streep episodes tonight or tomorrow, but my negative attitude isn’t going to change….just saying.
Posted three and one-third years ago (12.8.20): The greatest performances always allow for imperfect or awkward speech. Phrasing drop-outs, hiccups, stumbles, running out of breath, etc.
Prime example: Marlon Brando delivering Marc Antony‘s “friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Julius Caesar (’53). At 2:08 Antony, overcome with emotion, says “bear with me” to the crowd, and then “my heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must puh…pause ’till it comes back to me.” Brando stuttering on “pause” is deliberate, of course, but it sounds and feels right.
[From brenkilco] Brando in The Godfather: “It makes no…it doesn’t make any difference to me what a man does for a living, you understand.”
James Caan‘s Sonny beating up Gianni Russo‘s Carlo in The Godfather (’72). At 2:52, after kicking Carlo a few times in the ribs, Sonny says, “If you touch (beat, catching his breath) my sister again, I’ll kill ya.” I’m presuming this wasn’t planned…Caan was tired from the exertion and just ran out of wind, and director Francis Coppola liked the realism.
{From Vito Cabiria] Near the end of Paths of GloryKirk Douglas doesn’t quite have enough lung power to say the word “again” — he barely manages to squeak it out — when he’s telling Adolphe Menjou “and you can go to HELL before I apologize to you now or ever again!”
[From NephewOfAnarchy] Bill Macy‘s flubbed Boogie Nights line: “My wife’s on the driveway with an ass in her cock!” Paul Thomas Anderson left it in because it sounded like the kind of thing a genuinely flustered person would say.
In the early '80s I pitched a monthly colunn idea to Esquire -- a column called “Hollywood Weltschmerz: The Celebrity in Pain.” It went something along the lines of "every damn article about every celebrity is always about how great their life is...how productive, creative, exciting, challenging, etc.
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With BradleyCooper‘s Maestro about to stir the soup at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, it’s allowable, I feel, to look back at what happened when Cooper’s A Star Is Born premiered at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival, and why the lizards leapt and hissed.
The inciting incident was triggered by Variety‘s Kris Tapley, and it happened just shy of five years ago (on 9.4.18) and posting all of those “whoa, wait a minute…let’s have some perspective” essays was thoroughly exhausting, and I’m speaking only as one who merely joined the cause after Tapley declared that BradleyCooper‘s remake of a remake (‘76) of a remake (‘54) of a remake (‘37) was an historic humdinger to end all humdingers.
I genuinely admired the first half of Cooper’s film but not so much the second half, and those inner voices just wouldn’t stop. This well-made film had been over-praised to death, and it had to be cut down to size. Proportionality was all.
The people who brought the BulletTrain pollution — director David Leitch, screenwriter Zak Olkewicz, producers Kelly McCormick, Antoine Fuqua and Leitch again — are walking cancer cells…purepoison. Motive-wise I’m excusing the cast (a paycheck is a paycheck) but they were all reprehensible regardless.
