Democratic Presidential hopeful Dean Phillips spoke earlier today with All-In’s Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg.
HE commenters can crack wise and be shitheads and piss all over everyone and everything as usual, but Phillips is a steady, all-right guy. He’s just trying to wake everyone up to (God help us) the potential tragedy of the ‘24 Biden candidacy, the expanding candidate field and (God help us) the potential Trump ascendancy.
Kim Jorgensen on Facebook: “Saltburn (Searchlight, 11.17) is my film of the year. We’re talking cinema, baby — attitude, style, irreverence, confidence, rebellion. It’s out there.
“I didn’t care for Emerald Fennell’s previous effort, Promising Young Woman, but this one makes up for it. She’s the most accomplished new European voice since Ruben Östlund.
“I really hate to harp upon our wonderful critics, but they gave it only a 58 Metacritic score. Most of them saw it at Telluride, where it screened AFTER the rhapsodically received All of Us Strangers (91 score), and they seem to have expected the same boring, method-acting, nuanced, character-driven piece of politically correct gay banality.
“[But with Saltburn] they got an expressionist opera: Brideshead Revisited meets Idol/Euphoria and Tom Ripley (with a dollop of Barry Lyndon). Giving away the plot would rob you of the constant unexpected twists, including the truly inspired last shot.
“Unlike Searchlight’s Strangers and its low-to-nonexistent theatrical potential, Saltburn at least has the feel of a possible commercial arthouse hit (to the extent that such creatures are not extinct). Here’s hoping.”
HE to Jorgensen: As you know, the Telluride reactions to Saltburn were sharply divided. I hated it so much that I had to take a brief lobby break. You can actually call it an extended bathroom break mixed with buying popcorn. I
I liked hanging with good-looking Jacob Elordi but that’s where it stopped. I spent most of the time staring at Barry Keoghan’s bee-stung nose. And the bulbous nose isn’t his only sizable characteristic, by the way, as the final naked Greek satyr scene makes clear.
Fennel can tell us that England’s wealthy and corroded elite are sick in the head…jaded, poisoned, appalling…until she’s blue in the face, but the conceit is standard woke positioning and the design is…okay, it’s inventive but also shallow and gaudy. I hated everyone except Elordi, and the film basically feels arch and perverse and eventually dull. Did I mention suffocating and oppressive? Well, I have now.
When Saltburn finally ended I let out a HUGE sigh of relief.
That said I agree with your remarks about All of Us Strangers.
Several days ago The Marvels director Nia La Costa shared some disapproving sentiments about Marvel fanboys with Variety‘s Angelique Jackson.
Now, wrote Jackson, The Marvels is “flooded with comments criticizing Disney for ‘going woke’ and rooting for the film to flop.”
Some of what La Costa said seemed to echo the complaints of last February’s sore-loser quartet — Till director Chinonye Chukwu and lead actress Danielle Deadwyler, along with Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood and its star, Viola Davis — all of whom claimed that their films got blanked by embedded white elitism or misogynoir or some other racist variant.
“Andrea Riseborough + Duelling Concepts of Meritocracy vs. Equity,” posed on 2.15.23 or nine months ago:
We’re all familiar with the recent complaints about the Oscar nominations by the sore-loser quartet — Till director Chinonye Chukwu and lead actress Danielle Deadwyler, along with Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood and its star, Viola Davis.
In their minds they all got blanked by embedded white elitism or misogynoir or some other racist variant.
In response Everything Everywhere All At Once‘s Michelle Yeoh, a Best Actress nominee, suggested that they should cool their jets and wait their turn.
Prince-Blythewood: “There is no groundswell from privileged people with enormous social capital to get behind Black women. There never has been.”
Deadwyler: “We’re talking about misogynoir. It comes in all kinds of ways. Whether it’s direct or indirect, it impacts who we are.”
The essence of the lament seemed to be “we’re looking for some equity here and we haven’t received it…progressive Academy members know that the BIPOC narrative is about giving us the respect and adulation that is our due for the work but also in a payback sense, considering the decades upon decades of racist exclusion in this industry…we know we delivered first-rate work and yet we got shut out…some of you won’t say what happened but we can smell it in the wind…Andrea Riseborough‘s white supporters pushed her though but perhaps at our expense, or so it seems.”
In short, the sore losers were saying that in this time of revolutionary overhaul and the diminishing of Hollywood’s white-male heirarchy, equity needs to count as much as meritocracy (and perhaps even a bit more) in terms of handing out Oscar nominations.
On top of which it’s more than a couple of days old…a mind-blowing Zoomer blow-up.
…the whore-ish, kiss-ass reactions of the early-bird crowd. I haven’t seen The Color Purple (Warner Bros., 12.25) but if you read between the lines…well, try doing that.
Purple’s Danielle Brooks is a likely Oscar contender and an apparently serious threat to The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
But overall the only reactions you can probably trust are from the hard-nosed veterans, two of whom — Dave Karger and Greg Ellwood — are hilarious in their descriptions.
Ellwood flat-out faults the “script, direction, editing.” When Karger praises the “costumes and the choreography,” you know what he means.
