The enhanced, un-muddied, cleaned-up sound is terrific (love the bass tones!), the black-and-white footage looks like new. and the editing is obviously first-rate.

Posted on 10.14.24:

…HE regulars are hereby required to post opinions about it, and to especially opine whether they believe Karla Sofia Gascon is (a) playing a lead or supporting role (Netflix has decided that she’s not supporting), and (b) whether or not Gascon deserves to beat out Anora‘e Mikey Madison for the Oscar.

Here’s an opinion shared this morniny by an HE friendo: “It’s a really audacious film –a trans musical romance set in the world of Mexican cartels. Very stylishly directed by Jacques Audiard, and the three female leads are uniformly excellent. I wasn’t bored for a second, but after a while I started to feel that this film was having an identity crisis, that it didn’t really know what it wanted to be: a musical? A trans romance? A cartel tale set to music? And that violent ending seemed really out of place, something from another film entirely.

“It’s a very offbeat, interesting work, but missed its opportunity to be a great one.

“There’s a very powerful musical number in the middle of the film, ‘Aqui Estoy’ (Here I am), sung by people searching for their loved ones. It shows what Emilia Perez’ could have been if it had gone full cartel tragedy, and avoided any romantic issues.”

HE to friendo: “Okay, bu6 Emilia Perez is definitely not ‘set in the world of Mexican cartels.’ We don’t see any of the ugly nitty-gritty…we don’t see anyone or anything involved in drug trafficking, murders, flamboyant millionaire lifestyles, bribes, torture, evading the authorities, digging tunnels in and out of jails, etc.”

HE-posted last August:

(1) Emilia Perez is nothing if not audacious but there’s no believing the central conceit (i.e., that a macho cartel king would want to transition into womanhood in order to escape his violent world) and so it falls short of being a knockout musical masterpiece, as some have called it, and…

(2) Karla Sofia Gascon, who plays the titular character, gives a striking supporting performance. If she campaigns for a Best Actress Oscar, fine, but it won’t result in a win. Identity campaigns (like Lily Gladstone’s) get a lot of attention from wokester journos, but rank-and-file industry types are less taken with the razzmatazz.

“Which comes about due to the lack, often, of a coherent vision. On top of which Hollywood has a real attitude about masculinity. Masculinity unblurred or untrammelled by Hollywood writers who are aloof toward or simply not aware enough of the proclivities and frames of reference of mainstream men…proclivities that have a certain itch or menace, and when that is brought forth in films like No Country For Old Men or There Will Be Blood, it radiates through the screen.

“Having sci-fi or adventure shows or films with bland iterations of masculinity and cast with gender interchangibility and lack of distinction creates a flatness of tone. male characters 3ho are frustratingly unrelatable and increasingly unrecognizable.” — Echo Chamberlain.

John Krasinski is a nice-looking, well-tended guy as far as it goes, but he’s always seemed a little bit nerdy with those brown, marble-sized eyes and the slightly swollen Polish-prole nose and grubby beard stubble.

And his tepid response to HE and Richard Brody’s Quiet Place social theory (i.e., the brown spider monsters are metaphors for wokesters pouncing on anyone who says the wrong thing) indicated that he might be intellectually lazy or, you know, stunted.

So he really can’t qualify as People’s Sexiest Man Alive. He seems pleasant enough but he just doesn’t have that supreme alpha-dude thing going on. He’s far from “Warren Beatty in the 70s” pretty, and is just this side of schlumpie…due respect. Agreeable, nice-guy vibes but no cigar.

Okay, if he’d paid lip service to the Quiet Place theory I might feel differently…