Month: December 2023

The romantic intrigue in Phillip Noyce‘s Fast Charlie (Vertical, 10.8) is the thing. The blam-blam is fine the laid-back, settled-down relationship drama between Pierce Brosnan‘s Charlie, a civilized, soft-drawl hitman who loves fine cooking, and Morena Baccarin‘s Marcie, a taxidermist with a world-weary, Thelma Ritter-ish attitude about things…that’s what holds you. Is he too old for her? (Call it a quarter-century age gap.) Does it matter if he is somewhat? Nobody makes any overt moves, but you can feel the simmering.

Charlie reminded me of Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, sprinkled with a little Elmore Leonard sauce. One of those smooth older guy + middle-aged woman ease-and-compatibility deals.

Most of us are down with these pairings. Especially if the older guy looks fit and trim (flat abs, decent muscle tone, no jelly belly) and hasn’t allowed thinning hair or bald spot issues to get out of hand, and still has that old sparkle in the eye, which generally translates into a suggestion of sexual vigor.

If you like the older guy for his spiritual and emotional qualities, falling in love with a compatible younger woman (and vice versa) can seem like a good thing all around…thematically such pairings suggest renewal and revitalization…a second chance at life.

But in order to accept or approve of such relationships moviegoers have to be able to imagine the couple still happening five or ten years down the road. There has to be a credible future of some kind.

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I prefer the idea of Poor Things or Maestro or The Holdovers taking the Best Picture Oscar because they’re such grand buffets…because they combine lavish and concurrent servings of cinematic nutrition and dessert, fascinating novelty and invention in the case of the first two and well-constructed involvement (endless emotionalism and irony, thematic richness, abundant imagination and just-right-ism, and inescapable leakage in the case of Maestro’s ending)…because they flipped me over and held me in their grip.

Oppie on the other hand…that oppressive college-lecture hall delivery and horrible, aching sense of frigid isolation (stuck in that godawful makeshift New Mexico isolation camp and that suffocating D.C. committee testimony room with the killer combo of Nolan’s dialogue and that soul-stifling, cold-eyed, alien-from-planet-Tralfamadore performance from Cillian Murphy, whom I now never, EVER want to watch in a film ever again….please.

I’ve begun to rewatch Oppie on Amazon and the subtitles do help to some extent, but I once again felt caught in a long, punishing endurance test…that same feeling I had during my two theatrical viewings…DEAR GOD I’ll never forget that feeling of entrapment and interior devastation…those volumes upon volumes of dialogue pages and a running-time clock that proceeded at a snail’s pace, only to chickenheartedly avoid the obvious and inescapable climax of those Hiroshima and Nagasaki infernos.

Oppie is obviously a smart, well-crafted, full-court-press film for smarty-pants viewers with greater intestinal fortitude than I, but it killed me to slosh through that Murphy-Oppie swamp…that dense narrative thicket, that after-school detention feeling…wading through a three-hour technical briefing that murdered my spirit and killed my legs and made me feel like Winston Smith’s head in a rat cage…a steady, plodding, scene-by-scene procedural that was always about Nolan saying “I won’t be coming to you because you have to come to ME”…an intellectually freeze-dried process if I’ve ever endured one.

And I’m supposed to feel somehow knocked out, by the way, by Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as the Salieri-like Lewis Strauss and those 16 or 17 repetitions of that outdoor Einstein-Oppie-Strauss scene that Nolan diabolically keeps cutting back to over and over and over again?

I’m glad that Oppie is so well liked and has enjoyed great financial success, and if it wins the Best Picture Oscar…fine.. But it compressed and suffocated and held me down on the wrestling mat, and is basically, for me, this year’s TAR.

Posted within the last 24 hours:

HE-posted on 10.17.20: Wokesters have banished the “f” word as flatly, decisively and eternally as the “n” word and other hateful epithets. I understand that, of course, and I know that the preferred term is “person of size” or, if you will, non-svelte. Many years ago I tried using “calorically challenged” but people looked at me sideways. Their expressions seemed to say “what are you trying to be, some kind of smart-ass?”

Yes, I’ve used the “f” word a few times — Fat Thor, Fatzilla, etc.

In late May of ’07 I was standing on a small bridge in Venice when I noticed a morbidly obese fellow and his wife reclining in a passing gondola, and the combined weight was such that the gondola was almost taking on water.

“Wow, look at that fat guy,” I muttered to Jett, who was standing next to me. I knew I had misspoken. My voice had echoed slightly. Jett’s immediate response was to touch my forearm and go “sshhhhh.’

I’m not so stupid as to not understand that avoiding the “f” word is advisable. I get it. Of course I do. I’m just trying to get along. I am not a harshly judgmental person as a rule. I simply err on the side of offhanded candor from time to time.

The annual American Film Institute best of the year list is about as stolid and measured and steady as these things get. They never go for outliers, always stay within the safe zone, no surprises, always high-fiving the consensus comfies, etc.

Blowing off Napoleon and Saltburn were easy calls, but you’d think that for diversity and fellowship’s sake they might include The Color Purple. Nope.

By including May December on his ten-best-of-2023 list, Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has broken my heart. He’s crushed it like a grape. To think that a smart sharperoo could watch this campy-ass thing and actually drop to his knees.

I used to love Todd Haynes back in the day, but over the last few years he’s taught me…well, not to hate him but to think negatively.

Posted on 5.21.23:

John Waters on Oppenheimer:

Ten years ago 3.5% of Americans said they identified as LGBTQIA, and today 7.1% are so identifying — a 100% increase, mainly due to Zoomers and Younger Millennials wanting to mingle with the crowd and be trendy.

Boiled down we’re talking one out of nearly 15 people. Which means, of course, that nearly 14 out of 15 Americans identify as straight.

Do this year’s Best Picture contenders represent this approximate gay-to-straight proportion? Of course not. Do they tilt in the direction of gay-themed or gay-seasoned subject matter? No, they do not “tilt” — they lean heavily in this direction. Two-thirds to a third.

If you accept there are twelve top award contenders (and you really can’t count Napoleon among them), you’ve only got four that are completely, unregenerately, hot-dog-with-a-brewski, Travis Kelce, low-thread-count T-shirt straight with nothing the least bit gay or even gay-flirting among them — Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon and Past Lives. And three of these (Oppie, Holdovers, Killers) are period pieces.

On the other hand eight of the twelve award-season contenders have gay characters or gay sex scenes, or they satirize or belittle straight males.

1. Maestro (famous gay conductor lovingly married to beard wife, with whom he’s sired three children), 2. Barbie (dozens upon dozens of might-as-well-be-gay buff-bod Kens — the only overtly straight males are played by Michael Cera and Will Ferrell and the Matell board members), 3. American Fiction (Sterling K. Brown as Jeffrey Wright‘s gay brother, Clifford Ellison), 4. Poor Things (mostly hetero but with a lesbian oral sex scene in a Paris brothel), 5. Anatomy of a Fall (Sandra Huller admits to having had same-sex affairs outside the bonds of marriage to her late husband), 6. Rustin (charismatic gay civil leader of the ’60s), 7. Nyad (lesbian long-distance swimmer) and 8. The Color Purple (partly about lesbian-tinged relationship relationship between Celie and Shug, based on a book by bisexual author Alice Walker).

Summary: On-screen this season we have eight gay or gay-tinged films vs. four that are flat-out straight. In real life nearly 14 out of 15 folks are non-LGBTQIA.

What does that tell you about where Hollywood is coming from, and to what extent that they’re making films for the vast majority of moviegoers? At least as far as the ’23 award season is concerned? I’ll tell you what it means. It means that within industry culture, it seems safer or cooler to make gayish films or those with a little gay flavoring, It neans that industry culture sees Average Joe straight culture as crude or tedious or troglodyte-ish.

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Sidenote: You can apparently buy original paperback editions of Matt Bradley‘s “Homo Hill”, a respected, relatively trim account of urban gay life during the JFK era. It first hit the stands on 1.1.63.

If I was told “okay, this is it — who among these four is your immediate, no-going-back choice to take the oath of office tomorrow?…decide right now,” I would say Christie or Haley, no question. Neither has a chance against The Beast, I realize…

HE isn’t 100% persuaded in terms of the Disqus poster’s identity, but it may the same Lily Gladstone with whom we’re all familiar,

Either way I have two replies — (a) thanks for the recognition and the for the implied limited respect therein, and (b) thanks for expanding my horizons with a Navajo term I wasn’t familiar with — da’alzhin, which means ayehole.

The HE comment in question appeared late last night. It was in response to yesterday afternoon’s “Lily Wins Again…Yeesh” riff. I’m mentioning it for posterity’s sake as her Apple handlers will most likely be urging @lilygladstone to delete the post, if (and I say “if”) the authorship is indeed genuine.

HE statement: I don’t have an issue with Lily Gladstone per se — not in the least. She’s fine within the realm of her own talent, and there’s nothing wrong per se with wrapping herself in a Native American identity blanket on the campaign trail.

Gladstone is simply out of her depth in the current Best Actress race compared to Emma Stone and Carey Mulligan’s guns-blazing performances in Poor Things and Maestro, respectively. Her Mollie Burkhart performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, good as it modestly is, is a supporting thing —it simply lacks the necessary scope, depth and intensity that is commonly associated with an award-aspiring lead performance.

Alas, Lily has been running an effective woke identity campaign (a three-pronged one, one could argue), and it’s obviously working with the rank-and-file. Such efforts have been yielding award-season fruit since the Great Awokening kicked in four or five years ago.

For what it’s worth, I’m a passionate fan of Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction (or at least the first half) and Jeffrey Wright’s lead performance in particular. I’m surprised it hasn’t attracted more praise.

What can I add in the way of commentary to the overwhelming terra cotta color scheme? Nothing. George Miller returns to the Australian wasteland…bingo. The dust, the dust…wash rinse repeat. Opening worldwide on 5.24.24, probably debuting in Canb=nes.