A screening of Andrew Haigh‘s much-celebrated All Of Us Strangers just ended an hour ago, and I’m…well, I’m a dissenter to some extent.

I’m sorry but as rooted, refined, well-written and emotionally palatable as this film is, being about a present-tense gay relationship in London, it’s slow as molasses (as in largely or at least somewhat boring) and the often whispered and mumbled dialogue is hard to make out, and when you boil it all down Strangers is basically 135 minutes of beard stubble rendered in widescreen close-up.

And yet it’s primarily about three or four conversations with ghosts.

Story-wise it’s kind of a gay Midnight in Paris, except instead of hanging with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway the time traveller in question (a screenwriter named Adam, played by the mid-40ish Andrew Scott) spends a lot of time with his late parents, who are miraculously alive and their old glorious selves, and played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy.

Their get-togethers allow Adam, of course, a chance to explain to them both (well, his mom) that he’s been gay (he doesn’t relate to queer) for decades but that being so inclined is no longer the socially uncertain, vaguely uncomfortable thing it was when mum and dad died in a car crash, back in the ’80s.

Strangers is certainly a classy, ultra-swoony, top-tier capturing of an intimate gay relationship. Then again I’m trying to imagine a hetero love affair portrayed or paced in this fashion (i.e., not much of a narrative, mostly about the past by way of dead-parent conversations) and I can’t.

Scott is a subdued, gentle-mannered, first-rate actor with classically handsome features and dark watery eyes (he once played Paul McCartney), and Harry, his lover, is played by the 27-year-old Paul Mescal, an HE non-favorite who wears a moustache and Van Dyke goatee in this thing and has generally horrible taste in clothing. Their performances are flawless; ditto the acting by Bell and Foy.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that watching Mescal and Scott get down with this and that intimate activity…beard-stubble eroticism with drooling kisses and leg rubbings and tender hair-stroking is…there’s no way to honestly react to the physical intimacy stuff without sounding like a conservative rube, and so, yes, I’m fully aware that I’m “not allowed” to say that such scenes are not my cup of tea.

Plus I’m used to gay sex scenes a la Brokeback Mountain or Call Me By Your Name…you know, the old-fashioned, straight-friendly kind.

But there’s no questioning the quality of it all. This is an honest, mature, sophisticated film about serious intimacy and the unpeeling of the usual layers.

Bottom line: If you’re going to make a film that vaguely borrows from Midnight in Paris, you should probably try to make it as diverting as that 2011 Woody Allen film.

I don’t care what the orientation of a pair of given lovers might be, but it’s generally not a good idea to make a boring love story… a love story in which nothing really happens between the here-and-now lovers (except for some fucking early on). All that happens is “gee, my dead parents are back in the old house and so I can talk to them about everything, and maybe introduce them to my boyfriend,” etc.

It goes without saying that All Of Us Strangers will play best in blue coastal cities, and that the kind of rapturous reception it’s gotten from major-outlet critics thus far reflects a certain form of self-protective political posturing (i.e., show approval or be branded a homophobe) that no one will admit to. But then most of us knew that going in.

Posted in response to HE’s Saltburn review:

I’ve just come out of Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn, and it’s all about diseased psychologies and relentlessly dislikable people except for the delectably good-looking Jacob Elordi…it reeks of class hatred, oddness, perversity, arch upper-crust attitudes, callousness and class resentment, the slurping of dirty bath water, a nude Greek satyr finale featuring a fairly sizable schlongola, “wrong time of the month” fingering + cunnilingus, high-impact visual punctuation for the sake of high-impact visual punctuation. Or, if you will, bold style amounting to absolutely nothing except bold style.

Yeah, it’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, all right — Barry Keoghan, owner of the most famous and obtrusive bee-stung nose I’ve ever been forced to contemplate in film after film, is Matt Damon, and the incredibly beautiful Jacob Elordi is Jude Law, and the Keoghan-the-interloper is one slinky, clumsy, weird-ass sociopath who hates himself, his parents, rich people, all people….he loves only Elordi except he’s not gay as much as (quoting Alison Oliver‘s Venetia character) a moth…a moth attracted to a glittery, super-wealthy flame.

Saltburn is deeply divisive, inspiring intense like-hate reactions…fans so far include Matt Neglia, Erik Anderson, Clayton Davis, Greg Ellwood. Haters include myself, David Ehrlich, Peter Debruge, David Rooney.

I despised it so much that I took a 10-minute lobby break around the 70-minute mark.

TheWrap‘s Tomris Laffly: “Saltburn works as a distinct and wildly entertaining probe into familiar waters of privilege, rather than the definite word on it.” Except it’s not a “distinct and wildly entertaining” anything unless you have some kind of incurable aesthetic cancer festering inside you.

I’m catching Anatomy of a Fall at 1 pm, and then the widely praised All Of Us Strangers at 7:30 pm.

The last time I bolted out of a theatre because a character had yanked or otherwise torn off a fingernail was during a January 1993 screening of Lodge Kerrigan‘s Clean, Shaven. For the following 30-plus years I enjoyed a moviegoing experience that was free of fingernail trauma, but then along came Christos Nikou‘s Fingernails, which I saw last night.

Officially described as a “science fiction romantic psychological drama”, Fingernails is also a kind of dry absurdist comedy. I would also call it an odd form of psychological stress. It’s basically saying that aggressive technology and innovation are preying upon romantic couples, and that this situation is basically fucked up.

It’s about a cohabiting couple, Jessie Buckley‘s Anna and Jeremy Allen White‘s Ryan, and how their relatively healthy relationship runs aground when Anna lands a job at an institute that helps romantic couples determine if their relationship is on solid footing and fated to last. The institute’s clients are asked to submit to eccentric and occasionally bizarre exercises that will presumably reveal true emotional leanings or priorities.

Anna is assigned to work with Amir (Riz Ahmed), a soft-spoken, senior-level trainer. You know from the get-go that Ann and Amir (who has a steady girlfriend) will hook up and that the usual turbulence will result. But that’s nothing compared to the turbulence I went through last night during not one but two fingernail-yanking scenes. I made it through the first but freaked out during the second. I grabbed my computer bag and escaped.

It's just a feeling. Try to hold it in.

Enjoy this first look at Fingernails, a new Apple Original Film starring Jessie Buckley, Jeremy Allen White, and Riz Ahmed. pic.twitter.com/fU7dnDiUDp

— Apple Original Films (@AppleFilms) August 29, 2023

It’s also worth nothing that during my 70 minutes of viewing my attention was constantly divided between (a) the usual elements (plot, dialogue, milieu, vibes) and (b) Buckley’s intensely annoying chopped-off hipster haircut. I’m sorry but it bothered the shit out of me.

Official synopsis: “Anna and Ryan have found true love, [and] it’s been proven by a controversial new technology. There’s just one problem: Anna still isn’t sure. Then she takes a position at a love testing institute, and meets Amir.”

Fingernails is produced by Cate Blanchett, Andrew Upton and Coco Francini for Dirty Films and Lucas Wiesendanger for FilmNation Entertainment. Executive producers are FilmNation Entertainment’s Glen Basner, Milan Popelka and Alison Cohen, alongside Ashley Fox, Kevin Lafferty and Jerome Duboz.

Supporting cast members include Annie Murphy, Luke Wilson and Nina Kiri.

The official world premiere happens at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival, followed by a limited theatrical release on 10.27. Apple TV will begin streaming it on 11.3.

“Then I awoke / Was this some kind of joke? / Much to my surprise / I opened my eyes” — from Bill Wyman‘s “In Another Land“, a track from “Their Satanic Majesties Request.”

Silly me for observing a plain fact over the past six or so years. What I’ve said repeatedly is that woke flavors, sympathies and constitutions have been a ticket to Oscar glory by way of the New Academy Kidz. Movies about ethnic, non-white or outside-the-usual-mainstream characters and subject matter and/or films made by women or non-Anglos…good to go.

In the Best Picture category alone the winners have fit this paradigm…(1) the middle-class Asian family meets a Marvel-esque nerd sensibility in Everything Everywhere All at Once, (2) the hearing-challenged family in CODA, (3) the homeless woman saga, directed by a female Asian (Chloe Zhao), that was Nomadland, and (4) Parasite, the lacerating social drama directed by a South Korean genre nerd (Bong Joon ho). Green Book‘s Best Picture triumph was an exception to this pattern (and was fiercely condemned by woke critics and columnists) but Moonlight (Black director-writer, focus on Black gay males) adhered to it.

You can argue that all these Best Picture winners attained Oscar glory because they were simply very good or great films…you can claim that but as Quentin Tarantino would probably say, sell that bullshit to the tourists. Woke ideology has taken over, and everything is measured by this.

Yesterday morning (Thursday, 8.31) I was chatting with a couple of journo columnist acquaintances (i.e., not strictly critics) who, for political reasons or whatever, have seemingly bought into woke theology, or at least seem to have decided that siding with the wokesters is the safest way to go. The subject turned to Killers of the Flower Moon and my previously-stated view that Lily Gladstone, who plays the deceived and maligned Mollie Burkhart, will not only be Oscar-nominated but may win, partly for the quiet intensity of her performance but largely, be honest, because of her Native American heritage. Because a Native American has never won an acting Oscar before.

I opined that in terms of her actual performance Gladstone delivers sufficiently, although she isn’t allowed much in the way of emotional range and is given precious few lines. Mostly she stares a hole into the camera lens…quietly enraged, guilt-trippy, “God will get you,” etc.

Immediately upon saying that Gladstone’s ethnicity will be a significant factor in landing a nomination, one of the journos said this was “insulting” and that “I won’t have it…I won’t tolerate this.” He was essentially saying that my opinion was racist, although qualifying this with the fact that we’ve known each other for decades and that he likes me personally but this kind of talk (harumph) will not be allowed in his presence.

4:25 am: Forget whatever impressions the trailer for Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (Focus Features, 10.27) may have instilled. That was an attempt to charmingly compress and whittle down a 133-minute movie that needs to breathe and unfurl on its own step-by-step, line-by-line terms. For in actual, bottom-line terms this is a high-end, whipsmart, skillfully seasoned, middle-class gourmet movie par excellence — the kind of brainy heart-and-soul flick, I was reminding myself over and over last night, that “they” refuse to make these days.

They’ve literally hung up a sign on their storefront windows that says “all right, yes, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away we used to be in the business of at least trying to make movies this good — smart, wisely constructed, finely crafted in every department, carefully finessed, character-rich dramadies.

“But that was back in the 20th Century, and for the 67th time you guys really need to absorb the ground-level fact that we’re literally no longer no longer in this business. Seriously — we’re not even trying to crank out films of this calibre so please stop complaining about their absence in theatres.”

Not to sound overly scolding, they’re saying, but what is it about the words “the film industry that you used to know and at least occasionally tried to make this kind of film no longer exists“…what is it about this blunt, straight-from-the-shoulder statement that you don’t understand?

The industry that every so often would hit triples or whack it out of the park in this fashion, back when character-driven movies like The Last Detail would at least occasionally surface…forget all that and shake it off and adapt to the way things are and have pretty much been since the Marvel/D.C. plague and Covid and the streaming of couch-potato product re-ordered the basic terms.

In fact to organically (i.e., not conspiratorially) enforce and regulate the present system, nature or God or the system of natural selection has created a whole strain of hugely annoying critics like David Ehrlich who will say stuff like “hmm, not bad as it gets some things right here and there but at the same time it’s too Scent of a Woman-ish and too thin according to my own grading system…not audacious or envelope-pushy enough,” blah blah.