Month: January 2025

Was it because both critics and ticket-buyers have rated Anora much higher than Emilia Perez, and so the Golden Globe journalist voters, unhappy with this disparity, decided among themselves that they had to “correct” these mistaken opinions by putting their GG thumb on the scale?

Does it mean anything to anyone that Anora has a 94% RT critic rating vs. Perez’s 76%? Joe and Jane Popcorn have given Anora a 90% rating while dismissing Perez with a 66% score. Do these assessments mean anything to anyone?

What happened last night was sickening, not just when it cane to Anora vs. Perez but the howling, Psycho-shower-shrieking, dog-barking absurdity of handing three major awards — Best Drama, Best Director and Best Actor — to The Brutalist, Brady Corbet and Adrien Brody, respectively.

Where is the sanity in this? The Brutalist is a shot of arthouse heroin into the forearm. It makes you slumber and sink into your seat…hell, collapse inside. It’s an epic slogathon, a thoughtful downer, a punishment flick, a psychological ordeal-and-a-half if I’ve ever endured one.

Last night Corbet boasted that “nobody was asking for a three-and-half-hour film about a mid-century architect on 70 millimeter.” And that’s still the case!

But after last night’s vote of GG affirmation, we’re all waist-deep in the mud of it…stuck with this great leaden load of big-movie pretentiousness…overture, intermission, a Lawrence of Arabia-type length …a godforsaken behemoth that takes much more than it gives.

I feel sick inside. Poisoned even.

And here we go…

11:14 pm: Emilia Perez (which I was okay with) has won the Best Musical or Comedy award…well, at least Wicked (which I was okay with) didn’t win. Why did I just say that? I don’t know. Let me mull this over. I don’t have a problem with either film but I just hate that my favorite, Anora, was completely blown off. Who are these GG voters? Mostly international types, right? Were they bought off or contact-highed or schmoozed off by Netflix? What happened?

11:04 pm: The damn Brutalist is going to win best Motion Picture Drama…dear howling, vomiting God. Yes, it has. Please punch me in the face, and then kick me in the ribs three or four times. If only The Brutalist budget had been significantly higher, this wouldn’t be happening. You did it so cheaply, o beautiful frugal Brady! “This movie is fairly punishing…monstrously bad filmmaking.” — Dale Launer.

10:55 pm: Best Male Actor in a Motion Picture Drama has to go to Timothee Chalamet…no? No — it goes to The Brutalist‘s Adrien Brody!! Did somebody put his or her thumb on the scale? Aaaaaggghhhh! Spit choke arrrggghhh! This is awful…I’m literally slapping myself. Angels are screaming…falling from heaven. This is awful!

10:51 pm: Best Female Actress in a Motion Picture Drama goes to Fernanda Torres in I’m Stll Here? Nobody’s seen it! Well, some have, obviously, but where’s it playing or streaming? Hearty congrats to Torres but this isn’t resonating. People are going “okay but huh?”

10:40 pm: Another Shogun award, this time for whatsername? And a fourth one for Best TV Series Drama? Repeat after me: “Shogun Shogun Shogun Shogun!!!”

10:29 pm: Hacks wins for Best TV Comedy….fine, whatever.

10:25 pm: The sickening, all-but-unwatchable Baby Reindeer wins a GG for Best Limited Series or Motion picture made for TV or Anthology? This show is becoming really awful. My internal organs are churning. “I can’t stand it” — Eric Clapton.

10:07 pm: Congrats to the Challengers music guys, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I don’t care about the Emilia Perez song that won. I don’t care about the GG box-office award. All I want to do is throw up over the Corbet win. Memo to Academy: Don’t let Jon M. Chu give any Oscar acceptance speeches. Please. The man won’t shut up.

9:54 pm: Best Director GG goes to The Brutalist‘s Brady Corbet? Get the fucking hell out of here, man! This is ridiculous. It’s a leaden, pretentious, all-but-impossible-to-sit-through slogathon. Pain in the brain. I’m kicking the furniture. I’m about to go into the kitchen and punch the refrigerator. Two absurd awards so far…Moore for The Substance, Corbet for directing that splitting headache of a period film.

9:47: Flow wins best Animated….great. I don’t care.

9:39 pm: I don’t care what anyone says…Sebastian Stan has won for his Donald Trump Apprentice performance as well as for his performance in A Different Man, which everyone respects and approves of but no one wants to sit through…please, no.

9:33 pm: Best Female Actor in a Drama GG goes to…Demi Moore?? For playing a wrapped-tight victim in a gaudy body-horror filM? HE respectfully disagrees. This is actually bullshit….I’m sorry but it is. Good, moving thank-you speech,. At least Karla Sofia Gascon didn’t win…whew.

9:19 pm: Best Female Actor in a limited series and whatever else — Jodie Foster for her excellent acting in the miserable-to-sit through Night Country.

9:16 pm: Colin Farrell wins for his Penguin makeup as well as his exceptional acting. Good man, great channeling. Wonderful shout-out for crafts services!

9:08 pm: Emilia Perez wins Best Int’l feature instead of All We Imagine As Light? C’mon! Is this a compensation award for Perez not winning Best Comedy or Musical?

9:01 pm: Ali Wong wins Best Standup Performqnce. Terrific…congrats!

8:57: Conclave‘s Peter Straughan wins for Best Screenplay! Approved! Doeds this indicate a general liking fo5 and perhaps even a preference for Conclave in certain other categories? I predicted Straughan’s win on my GG Gatecrashers ballot.

8:55 pm: The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White wins again? People are sick of Bear stuff always winning…enough!

8:50something pm: 8:41 pm: Baby Reindeer‘s Jessica Gunning wins a GG for her performance. Bates is living proof that Jessica can change whatever if she wants to go for it, but only if she wants to! Because she’s perfect as is!

8:44 pm: Tadanobu Asano wins supporting something-or-other GG for Shogun. Zero comment. Congrats.

8:38 pm: Kathy “Ozempic” Bates and whatsisname from In The Heights and Twister…right?

8:28 pm: Demi Moore‘s “what are you doing here?” repartee with Margaret Qualley is groan-worthy. The Shogun guy, Hiroyuki whatever, wins for acting. I’ll never, ever see Shogun….not a chance. Not with a samurai sword poking my throat.

8:25 pm: Best Supporting Actor award goes to…no surprise…Kieran Culkin for his Real Pain performance. No jacket, brightly colored tats on his right forearm. Obviously a guy with hyper hyper homina homina homina issues.

8:20 pm: I have no particular feelings, yea or nay, for Jean Smart or her GG Hacks in. Okay, congrats.

8:17 pm: Emilia Perez‘s Zoe Saldana wins for Best Supporting Actress. A good performance, but stop weeping. This had better not mean what I’m afraid it might signify in terms of other potential nominations. Way too much weeping! You’re being played off, man…for heaven’s sake! Note to Academy: Give your Best Supporting Actress Oscar to someone else….anyone else.

8:03 pm: Nikki Glazer: “Zendaya, you were so good in Dune….I woke up for all your scenes.” The Timothee Chalamet moustache joke…missed it. “My boyfriend’s boyfriend really loves Wicked.” “I give Babygirl two fingers up….so good.”

Look at the opening credits of David O. Selzneck and Charles Vidor‘s A Farewell to Arms (’57) — the words of the title do the same right-to-left horizontal crawl that Selznick’s Gone With The Wind used.

I’ve never actually watched all of this reportedly mediocre film, which is based, of course, on Ernest Hemingway’s drawn-from-real-life 1929 novel. But I’d like to see it regardless for the authentic Italian locations — the Italian Alps, Venzone in the Province of Udine in the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Lazio and Rome.

The Gary Cooper-Hleen Hayes Farewell to Arms Bluray is purchasable, but not the Hudson-Jones. The latter is on EBay, however, and there’s also a shitty-looking version on YouTube.

Selznick’s wife Jennifer Jones, then pushing 40, played the lead role of Catherine Barkley, a British nurse who was described by Hemingway as being in her mid 20s.

According to Carlos Baker’s 1969 Hemingway biography, the 58-year-old Hemingway was informed by Selznick that he would receive a $50,000 bonus from the film’s profits.

Unhappy with the Jones casting, EH replied: “If, by some chance your movie, which features the 38-year-old Mrs. Selznick as 24-year-old Catherine Barkley, does succeed in earning $50,000, I suggest that you take all of that money down to the local bank, have it converted to nickels, and then shove them up your ass until they come out your mouth.”

One of my favorite Los Angeles restaurants during the Bush and early Obama years was Typhoon, located adjacent to the Santa Monica Airport runway. The proprietor was Brian Vidor, son of director Charles. Excellent vibe, good people, delicious eats, exotic vibe…the kind of place that the characters from Only Angels Have Wings might have frequented.

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20 years ago in Park City, Utah, I went totally nuts for Craig Brewer‘s Hustle & Flow. And so did the Sundancers who caught it there. I watched it again last night and it still works beautifully in its own gritty-ass way, but guess what? If Hustle & Flow hadn’t happened in ’05 and ’06, it couldn’t be made fresh today.

One, it presents too much of a downmarket, even denigrating portrait of a poor African American community (it’s set in Memphis) — not positive enough in terms of cultural self-image. Two, even as a transformational moth-into-a-hiphop-butterfly story, Hustle & Flow dwells too much on the ugly, skanky aspects of pimping and whoring and dope-dealing. And three, throughout most of the film Terrence Howard‘s DJay is a violent, sexist, low-life pimp, and in today’s political atmosphere such characters are too mongrelish and distastetul, and guys like DJay are certainly anathema to the #MeToo community.

Howard, 35 in ’04, initially didn’t want to play DJay because of the lower-depths factor, but he eventually changed his mind because it’s basically a film about transcendence through the power of music.

Taraji P. Henson, 54, is too old these days to play Shug, but if she were to somehow magically de-age to 34 she still wouldn’t play such a character — not in today’s climate. Nor would a magically younger Taryn Manning (now 47) play Nola, a bargain-basement prostitute who services tricks in their cars. Neither of them would touch a Hustle & Flow-like film with a ten-foot pole todqy.

Hustle & Flow is a fable that sells ideas about life and creativity that may not be realistic, but people sure as hell want to believe them…I know that much. We’ve all got pain in our hearts and poetry in our souls, and it’s never too late to make your move, etc,

To say you’ve “seen this kind of film before” means nothing. The question must always be, “How well was it made, and how much did you care?”

It’s worth it alone for Howard’s D-Jay, a flawed, at times brutally insensitive guy in a classic do-or-die struggle to make it as a rap artist.

Anthony Anderson (now 54) is almost as good as Howard. Henson, Manning, DJ Qualls and Ludacris make it play true and steady and right as rain.

Every frame of this movie says, “You know what we’re doing…this guy wants to climb out of his crappy situation and maybe we’re gonna show him do that…but we’re gonna do it in a way that feels right to us.”

And once D-Jay hooks up with Anderson and Qualls and starts to put together a sound and record a few tracks, Hustle & Flow is off the ground and pretty much stays there, suspended.

Forget the funky backdrops and gritty-ass particulars — is there anyone out there who can’t relate to a character who feels stuck in a tired groove and wants to do more with his/her life? Is there anything more commonly understood?

Whatever you might expect to feel about D-Jay, he is, by the force of Howard’s acting and Brewer’s behind-the-camera input, utterly real and believable, and even with his anger and brutality you can’t help but root for him. And, for that matter, the film.

Brutalist haters unite! Here’s the whole thing but here, right here, are choice excerpts:

(a) “Heard great things about The Brutalist, [but] vou won’t find them here.”

(b) “Wanna see Adrien Brody with an (semi?) erection getting stroked by a hooker? You’ve come to the right place! As to where this fits into the story, it’s hard to say. But sex shows up here and there in [this] profoundly unerotic film.”

(c) “If you know me, you know I’m a fan of contemporary architecture so a story about Laszlo, a Jewish immigrant and his quest to make it in America, sounds like a great story. And that’s kinda what this is conceptually, except it fails to deliver on a number of levels.

(d) “For one, there’s a kind of filmmaking that’s now popular, which I think is weirdly, intentionally, inherently undramatic. Where big moments are left out and we cut ahead and instead of seeing conflict and struggle and adapting to that and, you know, creating and following a story — instead we leap ahead. It’s like they cut out the interesting parts. It feels like a series [that’s] missing half the story — the good half.”

(e) “Two thirds of the way in we see see a train…uhm…exploding? Apparently it was filled with blocks being used for [Laszlo’s] masterpiece and became derailed. We don’t see the wreckage. We don’t see the blocks. We see anger but it is misdirected anger. And it’s confusing. So the project is over! Why? Has everything been destroyed? We don’t know. We’re not really told. We don’t see it. There’s gonna be a lawsuit. Why? There’s a lot of anger that pretends to be a dramatic scene and someone says lawsuits, but we’re not exactly sure why. What should be a sequence of interesting, dramatic scenes, is told in a handful of sentences in one jumbled mess.”

(g) “I don’t think any of [of the scenes in this film] really work. None are memorable. Not one. There’s this tendency to hang on a take WAY too long – indulging the actor to do a lotta acting which doesn’t do much for the story but adds to their chance for an acting award. Yeah, your wife’s alive! Joy! Now cut! No…more joy! More and more! Please cut! Hanging in there doesn’t give us anything except adding time to an already too-long movie (3 and half hours).”

(h) “Then there’s a jump forward in time where we see a tracking shot (why?!) showing someone coming to visit the architect who is now a cog in the machine of a large architectural firm doing drafting work. The shot stops when they find Laszlo. But we don’t see why the guy went there. He apparently came with news that the project, which as been dormant for years, will go on. his masterpiece will be finished! But we don’t see that moment. God forbid you give the audience – who at this point is peckish for a little thrill of accomplishment – but the filmmakers deny us. Again.”

(i) “This movie is fairly punishing. [It represents] monstrously bad filmmaking. Do they not know how to construct an entertaining scene? Apparently [Laszlo] needs to go to Carrera, Italy, to pick out the marble. Here’s an opportunity to discuss marble, or materials and their importance to the structure, but naah. We’re told about some politics, then we run off to a party. And then Laszlo wanders off to get high (he’s a heroin addict) and gets raped by his benefactor. WTF? I guess it’s a metaphor for, uhm..being raped artistically, [but] it’s embarrassing.”

(j) King Vidor‘s The Fountainhead (’49) — a terribly flawed, absurd movie about similar struggles between art and commerce (so didactic it’s unintentionally hilarious) has far more content about architecture and the architect’s creative struggles that this overly- long mess. (there’s a rape scene too! De rigueur for architect movies! But this one is so politically-incorrect (she likes it!) it kinda becomes the highlight of the movie.

(k) “Anyway, some people love The Brutalist. I can’t imagine watching it again. Maybe at gunpoint.”

If Anora wins the Best Comedy / Musical award (which it won’t — Wicked has it in the bag), it’ll dilute some of the whiff of corruption. Not all but some.

If Anora‘s Mikey Madison takes the Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy…that’ll work.

Timothee Chalamet has the Best Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama totally locked down.

Note to National Society of Film Critic Dweebos: neither Nickel Boys nor The Brutalist will win fucking anything.

HE doesn’t do red-carpet commentary as a rule. Well, actually I could do that. I could once again remark at the Tinkerbell-sized Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande (who is still “with” her carrot-haired Wicked costar Ethan Slater) or express random revulsion at some of the sparkly, feather boa, excessively frilly, circus-tent-like bell-bottomed outfits worn by some of the dudes. But you know what? I think the LGBTQs and transies in particular are going to hold themselves in sartorial check this year. They know what general bumblefuck audiences are thinking (“Okay, guys…fine, whatever but, you know, tone it down”) and they don’t want to poke the bear.

4:55 pm: What did I predict a couple of hours ago?

3:15 pm: The National Society of Film Critics hasn’t chosen its Best Picture winner yet, but you know these holier-than-Joe-Popcorn elitists are going to go with The Brutalist or Nickel Boys. They’re coming from a basic anti-pleasure principle.

A majority of NSFC voters preferred to support Sing Sing‘s Colman Domingo (60 votes) and secondly Adrien Brody (51 votes) for Best Actor instead of Conclave‘s Ralph Fiennes or A Complete Unknown‘s Timothee Chalamet…you can always predict which way the dweebs will blow.

HE supports the honoring of A Real Pain‘s Kieran Culkin, and I respect giving the Best Actress trophy to Hard Truths‘ Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

It’s because they know deep down that Average Joes and Janes have come to despise them for the most part, and they don’t want the public’s hate to become too enflamed.

They know that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris not just because of the economy (which has actually been in fairly decent shape for several months now) and the border (which was too wide-open in ’21 and ’22, but was arrested in late ’23 and ’24) because they know that Averages Joes are sick to death of woke shit and therefore despise Hollywood wokeys with equal fervor, and they don’t want to exacerbate that situation.

Given this intense current of post-electoral loathing for Hollywood citizenry (but not the movies) they’re figuring it’s probably smarter to chill and sit on their hands and wait for the winds to shift.

Industry-ites are afraid to praise The Apprentice because they’re cowards…plain and simple. I’ve been saying for nearly eight months that it’s a truly excellent film with superb performances by Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, but they’re afraid to acknowledge the quality because they don’t want to be seen as supportive of anything bearing any kind of Trump stamp, even though the film’s second half is quite condemning of the former and future president.

This riff was inspired by Steven Zeitchik’s 11.3 THR story: