“Why don’t you and others who cover NY theatre just spit it out about Beanie FeldsteinbailingoutofFunnyGirl eight weeks before the scheduled end of the run?
“Why the kid gloves? She wasn’t Streisandy enough, right? Which basically means she wasn’t quite knockout enough (a pretty but thin voice, couldn’t belt the songs like Streisand), which means that the producers made a mistake in hiring her.
“Plus she didn’t feel good about the reactions (no Tony nom) plus she kept missing shows, which indicates she wasn’t feeling a great deal of confidence, and so she either quit or was nudged aside. I’m presuming that nudged is closer to the truth.
“What’s this weird omerta I’m sensing from everyone? You all seem to be saying ‘we need to handle this story with kid gloves in order to let Beanie down easy.’ New York theatre is a tough realm, and sometimes shows and performances don’t work out.”
Having watched episode 2 of Impeachment: American Crime Story, I feel compelled to repeat my basic view...hell, everyone's view: It's simply not believable that President Bill Clinton -- prime of his life, a notorious hound, pick of the litter since he was Arkansas governor -- would select Beanie Feldstein, by any measure a meek and seriously chubby chipmunk, as his occasional lover.
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Pic will focus on Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton, and the impeachment trial that most Americans were either bored or appalled by. (“Impeach Clinton for lying about getting a blowjob in the Oval Office?…please!”) Beanie Feldstein as Lewinsky, Sarah Paulson as the duplicitous Linda Tripp and Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones. No word on who will play Bill and Hillary.
Feldstein doesn’t strike me as the right actress to play Lewinsky. ML was 24 or 25 at the time and maybe a tiny bit zaftig, but she wasn’t exactly a Beanie. By which I mean she wasn’t…am I allowed to say chubby without getting jumped on?
Presumably it’s going to be about a selfish, super-powerful, silver-haired dude preying on a semi-innocent victim, but my understanding has always been that Lewinsky flirted ardently with Bill and that he flirted right back. ML wasn’t some baahing little lamb in the woods — she made an ambitious and calculated play for him, and then scored, and then was dumb enough to blab it all to Tripp, whom she had to know was in with the righties.
It would make a fascinating story if Murphy brings in all the contradictions and complexities. But as a straight-from-the-shoulder #MeToo saga? Life isn’t that simple.
“Booksmart has been compared to Superbad (2007), and it’s not hard to see why. They’re both raucous but heartfelt stories about two teenage friends trying to make the most of a big night out before setting off on different paths that will probably pull them apart. But there’s another movie that comes to mind when looking at Beanie Feldstein’s Molly — Alexander Payne‘s Election (1999), and its dogged would-be class president Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), another eyes-on-the-prize striver whose ambitions have kept her apart from the rest of her classmates.
“In Booksmart, Molly, the Tracy equivalent, gets placed front and center, given a best friend and a good time. In some ways (though not in their politics), Molly feels like Tracy Flick, set free.
“And yet Booksmart can’t entirely separate itself from the kind of “you think you’re better than me” resentments that Election‘s teacher protagonist harbors toward Tracy (who does, of course, think she’s better than everyone). Molly experiences a mild comeuppance regarding her own superiority complex, but it rests on the assumption that college acceptance is a pure meritocracy, and that she’s misjudged everyone.
“Realistically, it’s more likely she misjudged the resources that those classmates had available to them. The idea that most of us really do have to work that hard to compete with those who have advantages that we never will — and that we still might not get what we want — is less comfortable as the stuff of comedy. But it’s a lot closer to the truth.” — from Allison Wilmore‘s “Booksmart Has A Blind Spot When It Comes To Class,” posted on 5.24.
Ethan Coen‘s Drive Away Dolls (Focus Features, 9.22) seems like a harmlessly broad innocents-in-jeopardy road comedy. Innocent lesbians, that is, which Ethan had to commit to, given the times and the culture. The only alternate option would have been to focus on a gay or trans couple. The original title was Drive Away Dykes.
It seem like an apparent riff on a No Country-like chase plot among some dumbshit lower-class types, written and performed in the usual deadpan Coen style.
A youngish couple inclined toward despair and glumness (Margaret Qualley with a yokel accent + Geraldine Viswanathan, a good actress with a last name that no one will be able to spell much less pronounce) accidentally get hold of a MacGuffin suitcase (money, drugs, whatevs) and it’s off to the races.
The rotund Beanie Feldstein is the sardonic cop (i.e., a philosophical perspective stand-in for Tommy Lee Jones?) who’s keeping tabs, following the situation. The mere presence of Pedro Pascal, who has a significant role in just about every damn film being made or released these days, is driving me crazy. Further deadpan humor from Colman Domingo, Bill Camp, Matt Damon, etc.
Here I am on a Sunday morning, sipping coffee and feeling glum as hell about the films of Joel and Ethan Coen no longer being part of our world. They haven't been, really, since Inside Llewyn Davis, the last bona fide Coen Bros. flick (low key, early '60s folkie vibes, slurping cereal milk, Schrodinger's cat). It opened almost exactly a decade ago (May '13) in Cannes.
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One of the factors behind Beanie Feldstein’s decision to leave Funny Girl early (her last performance will be on 7.31) was her history of having missed performances due to this, that and whatever. And now…tonsilitis!
…that no one and I mean no one will have the nerve to ask during this evening’s post-screening q & a.
Thanks There’s no disputing that Beanie Feldstein‘s performance as Monica Lewinsky (particularly that look of shock and intimidation and primal fear) is fully present, and obviously skillful and affecting.
But for a miniseries in which the makeup department used every trick in the book to make the actors look as much as possible like the character they were playing (especially in the matter of Sarah Paulson‘s Linda Tripp), they were given a hopeless task when it came to Beanie. I’ve seen all seven episodes thus far, and her lack of resemblance has thrown me each and every time. Why then?
The apparent idea was to emphasize Beanie/Monica’s victim status…the huge gulf between mousey little Beanie and Clive Owen‘s silky Bill Clinton…doubling-down on Clinton’s opportunism and sexual exploitation. But if a gifted actor with at least a slight physical resemblance to Lewinsky had been cast, the miniseries would have been that much better.
I caught Stephen Karam‘s The Humans (A24, 11.24) early yesterday afternoon. It won’t open for another six or seven weeks, but it was reviewed out of Toronto so it’s fair to jump in.
This is a highly respectable, surprisingly “cinematic” adaptation of Karam’s 2016 play, which he’s filmed unconventionally by emphasizing distance and apartness and narrow hallways and deep shadows, with a particular emphasis on material rot inside the apartment walls and a general sense of architectural foreboding and claustrophobia.
All the performances are top-notch, especially Jane Houdyshell‘s. Her performance as the maritally betrayed, care-worn mother of two grown daughters (played by Beanie Feldstein and Amy Schumer) is almost Oscar-level. It needs an extra “acting” scene or two, but she’s very good.
As usual I had trouble understanding all of Feldstein’s dialogue, as she always seems to emphasize emotional tonality and a certain sing-song manner of speaking as opposed to adhering to the old-fashioned practice of (I know this is a bad word but I’m going to say it anyway) diction.
Oh, and I didn’t believe for a single millisecond that South Korean heartthrob Stephen Yeun would partner with Feldstein, a seriously overweight woman in her late 20s…a woman who is headed for serious health problems down the road if she doesn’t follow in her brother’s path and drop some serious pounds. Feldstein and Yeun just aren’t a match, not in the actual world that I’ve been living in for several decades, but along with “presentism” and color-blind casting it’s also become a “thing” to cast obese actors in this or that role and then require their fellow cast members to pretend that obesity is fine and normal and “who cares?”
Schumer is fine as the depressed older sister.
The warmest emotional moment comes when the murmuring, blank-faced, Alzheimer-afflicted June Squibb (as grandma) joins in and says grace. Twice. This plus the Thanksgiving “what we’re thankful for” moments at the table are the only emotional touchstones in the whole film.
Richard Jenkins, Houdyshell’s husband, confesses to having lost his job (and therefore — did I hear this wrong? — his pension and insurance) due to an apparently brief affair with a coworker. In short, after being with a company for X number of years, they decided to cut his head off and destroy his life because of a single workplace sexual episode. And then the two daughters, after hearing of this, have to lay their #MeToo-ish judgments on withered old dad, along with their natural resentment for his having hurt their mother’s feelings, etc.
May I say something? 74 year-old Jenkins is too old to have had an affair. The workout club manager he played in Burn After Reading, maybe, or the guy in The Visitor or the gay FBI agent in Flirting With Disaster but his Humans dad is way, way past it. Grey haired, paunchy, neck wattle…forget it. In movies as in life you’re allowed to have crazy extramarital affairs up until your early 60s (if you look good), but not beyond that.
Let’s be honest here — this is an “artfully” shot (oooh, look…80% of the time Karam keeps the camera a good 20 to 30 feet away from the actors!) but VERY morose film about some seriously depressed people whose lives are almost certainly on the way down with no hope of escape or redemption. It isn’t long before you feel stuck — imprisoned — in this apartment, and in Karam’s play. No tension, no gathering story strands….it’s just slow-paced conversational misery and confession and gloom.
The Humans is certainly not comedic. Yes, there’s an element of horror in the building itself — it’s a terrible, TERRIBLE place to have a Thanksgiving dinner in, much less reside in, what with the groanings and stompings and filthy windows and pus bubbles and canker sores on the walls. And it’s not just this family of seven that’s stuck in this horrible environment — we’re all stuck in it, and there’s no getting out.
Below are three comments (two from VictorLazloFive, one from Kristi Coulter) about a piece I posted earlier today called “Feldstein’s Lewinsky Is A Lie.”
It states what is obvious to anyone who’s seen the series and is able to Google photos of Monica Lewinsky as she looked in the late ’90s — Beanie Feldstein not only doesn’t resemble Lewinsky in any persuasive way, but she was obviously cast with an idea that Feldstein would represent, within the mindset of the series, an alternate version of Lewinsky — smaller, rounder, less vivacious, more of a fawn-in-the-woods quality.
Which is ironically at odds with strenuous attempts on the part of the producers to make other cast members resemble the Real McCoys as much as possible.
There’s no disputing this — the producers went for absolute look-alike realism when it came to choosing various actors to play Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp, Paula Jones, Hillary Clinton, Ann Coulter, George Stephanopoulos, Michael Isikoff and everyone else (and then gave them makeup, hair stylings and whatnot that would complete the effect) but they had a whole different standard in mind when it came to casting an actress to play Lewinsky. Obviously. And yet the following comments appeared:
