Day: November 27, 2023

Melton Confusion

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May December‘s Charles Melton has won the Gotham Award for Best Supporting Performance. Good, fine and congrats, but may I ask where this Melton energy came from? Why did this happen? What voting bloc rammed this through? What is this?

It is Hollywood Elsewhere’s opinion, due respect, that no less than eight Gotham nominees in this category delivered far more arresting performances than Melton.

HE’s best-of-the-best is The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph, closely followed by BlackBerry‘s Glenn Howerton. HE’s #3, #4 and #5 picks are Ferrari‘s Penélope Cruz, The Taste of Things‘ Juliette Binoche and All Of Us Strangers‘ Claire Foy.

Then comes Jamie Foxx in The Burial (#6), Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (#7) and Ryan Gosling in Barbie (#8).

Then and only then comes the ninth–place Melton.

The Outstanding Lead Performance award went to Lily Gladstone in The Unknown Country, a film that no one relatively few have seen or reviewed, to go by general impressions. The urge to socially and culturally celebrate Gladstone’s Killers of the Flower Moon Oscar campaign was the motivating factor here. Congrats to her handlers.

The Best Feature award went to Past Lives…yeesh. The Gotham voters really and truly live on their own tight little island.

Posted on 10.24.23:

A “Get Out”-Resembling Comedy?

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Daniel Richtman is reporting that Jharrel Jerome is “in talks” to play the lead role of Mike in an untitled, racially-themed comedy from director Trey Parker and screenwriter Vernon Chatman.

Jeff Sneider reported about this last March. He noted that Parker and Matt Stone would produce alongside Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free.

Sneider: “Chatman’s script finds the past and present coming to a head when a young Black man who is interning as a slave reenactor at a living history museum discovers that his white girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his.”

This is an interesting plot hook? That a young black dude is…what, alarmed that ancestors of his white-ass girlfriend owned Mike’s ancestors during slavery? What is this supposed to be, an echo of Get Out or something?

Or a parody of the wokester currents that lay beneath Get Out?

Don’t look now but ancestral guilt is a totally meaningless notion. People behave according to the morals and ethics of the time that they live in…no more or less.

Remember the 2015 Ben Affleck embarassment when Finding Your Roots producer Henry “Skip” Gates, Jr. revealed that an Affleck ancestor had been a slave owner?

Affleck apparently feared that the wrath of outrage culture. Would it make a lick of sense for the p.c. crowd to scream “Affleck is descended from racists so he must be a closet sympathizer”? That would be a bone-dumb assumption, to put it mildly. But you know that at least some lefty wackazoids would have suggested this all the same.

HE excerpt: “‘Outrage culture‘ is running wild these days and Affleck, no dummy, is fully aware of the potential. Time and again the p.c. mob has read things in a cretinously simple-minded fashion and made absurdly broad conclusions as a result.

“For all Affleck knew, this ‘scion of racists’ idea could become an urban legend like Richard Gere putting a gerbil up his ass, and it could affect his financial and creative future.

“It’s nuts out there, really nuts. But Affleck didn’t want to characterize Twitter culture as stupid or deranged, which in itself could land him in hot water, so he decided to use the ‘really embarassed’ line, which is true, I’m sure, as far as it goes. Who wouldn’t feel shamed by this knowledge, but then again who was walking around during the early to mid 1800s with the moral convictions of a decent 20th Century person, let alone a veteran of our own time? Relatively few, I would imagine.”

Jerome is probably best known for his performance in Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight (’16). He played “Kevin”, the teenaged guy who gave that beach handjob to Ashton Sanders‘ Chiron.

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Projection Booth Action

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Last night “Bob Hightower” posted an anecdote about director Mike Nichols. Residing in the comment thread for an HE article titled “Son of New York Theatre Stories,” it concerns the summer movie-house run of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff? and particularly the behavior of a certain New York projectionist.

“When Nichols’s first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opened in late June of ’66, he went to a theater in New York one afternoon to watch it with a paying audience.

“The film was out of focus. It kept being out of focus. And of course, no one in the audience complained.

“Nichols frantically ran out and up the stairs to the projection booth. He banged on the door. No one answered. He banged again. Nothing. So he pushed open the door and found the projectionist on the floor banging an usherette. Nichols crept out and left the theater. As Gregg Toland once said, ‘The projectionist is the ultimate censor.'”

HE correction: Toland probably meant to say “the projectionist is the ultimate arbiter.” Showing a film out of focus obviously doesn’t constitute censorship, but vandalism.

Mark Harris informs that the anecdote isn’t from his 2022 Nichols biography, but says “it certainly sounds credible.”

Well, I don’t find the story credible.

HE to Hightower #1: With the urgent knocking why wouldn’t the randy projectionist have gotten up and seen who it was, especially if the door was unlocked? He surely understood that women hate it when strangers burst into a room with intimate activity going on. If the projectionist wanted to keep things going with the usherette he would taken proper privacy precautions. It would have been one thing if the projection booth door was locked, but it obviously wasn’t. You can’t tell me he didn’t hear Nichols knocking.

HE to Hightower #2: Projection booth floors are made of hard plastic tiles or plain cement. Who would attempt to make love to an usherette on one of those awful uncarpeted floors? What kind of usherette would submit to this? Women like their romantic encounters to be nice and soft and candle-lit. I would expect that most projectionists and usherettes would avoid the floor and attempt the deed standing up. Or perhaps with the usherette bent over the reel-spicing table, say.

One thing that’s always bothered me about Virginia Wolff is that George and Martha’s young guests — George Segal‘s Nick and Sandy Dennis‘s Honey — arrive around 2:30 am. The four of them have already been to a previous faculty party which presumably started at 8 or 9 pm, and now it’s five or six hours later and they’re about to start drinking and chit-chatting again? Even at the height of my most rambunctious youth I never showed up anywhere — a friend’s home or a bar or anything — at 2:30 am. During my drinking days I might’ve crashed at 2:30 or 3 am, but I never partied until dawn killed the moon…never. And I was a wild man, relatively speaking.

The Tom Hulce Factor

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As much as I respect Milos Forman‘s Amadeus (’84), I haven’t had the slightest desire to rewatch it over the last 39 years. This is due to my profound, never-forgotten loathing for Tom Hulce‘s performance as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Not to mention that awful white lion’s-mane wig that he wore. Perhaps others feel this way also.

But if I could somehow re-experience my viewing of the B’way stage version with Ian McKellen and Peter Firth, I would do so repeatedly.

From “Respect for Milos Forman,” posted on 4.4.18: “Sometime in ’81 I saw Peter Shaffer‘s Amadeus at the Broadhurst, and revelled in Ian McKellen and Peter Firth‘s performance as Salieri and Mozart. It was such a huge, radiant high that I had difficulty adjusting to Milos Forman’s film version, which opened in September ’84.

“It was a handsome, well-crafted thing and a Best Picture Oscar champ, of course, and like everyone else I…well, appreciated F. Murray Abraham‘s Salieri. But Forman’s film just didn’t have that same snap and pizazz, and I hated Thomas Hulce‘s giggly-geek performance as Mozart and flat-out despised Elizabeth Berridge‘s bridge-and-tunnel performance as Constanze Mozart (i.e., she called her husband “Wolfie”).

“Amadeus is a good film but the play was much better.”

“Total Banger”

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The VyceVictus praise is yet another measure of proof that Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (which begins streaming tomorrow) is happening with slightly older Average Joes. That doesn’t mean the assisted living crowd but anyone who thinks and feels outside the realm of Millennials and Zoomers…people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. Or X-factor under-40s, who exist in certain pockets. All hail ’70s filmmaking chops, which are just as great now as they ever were.