I’ve been told that Broadway’s diversified, woked-up stage musical of Some Like It Hot isn’t doing so well commercially. No stars to speak of is one reason. Overly woke-icized may be another.

The show ignores the basic scheme of the Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic, making more than half the characters black with the Jerry/Daphne character (played by Jack Lemmon in the Wilder film) embracing transgenderism and yaddah yaddah. And the show buries the film’s final line — “nobody’s perfect.” Of course it does!

Directed by Casey Nicholaw and featuring Christian Borle (Joe/Josephine), J. Harrison Ghee (Jerry/Daphne), Adrianna Hicks as Sugar (called Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk when she was played by Marilyn Monroe) and Kevin Del Aguila as an Latino Osgood, Some Like It Hot opened just under three weeks ago — 12.11.22.

HE reader Des McGrath: “The Jack Lemmon character has been rewritten to discover that he is a trans woman over the course of the story.

“The immortal final line? Gone. Instead of Osgood Fielding responding ‘Nobody’s perfect’, he tells Daphne ‘You’re perfect just the way you are’ (or something like that).

“And the Marilyn Monroe character is no longer a dumb blonde but a strong black woman, who sings about how as a child growing up in a small town in Georgia she liked to go to the movies, but ‘could only use the balcony. Like the movies, life could be that black and white.’

“So now she wants to break the color barrier in Hollywood.”

HE to McGrath: “Like the film, the show is set in 1929. Sugar wants to break Hollywood’s color barrier in nineteen-twenty-fucking-nine? The new Some Like It Hot, in short, is another exercise in presentism — transposing the woke sensibilities of today to the jazz age.”

I’m imagining a chat with a Millennial-Zoomer pally about the Tudor exhibit at the current Metropolitan Museum. (The actual title is “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Rennaissance England.”) Since ’15 or thereabouts this fellow has seen features, plays and cable series set in the 19th and 18th Centuries as well as Elizabethan England, including Netflix’s Bridgerton, Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots, Lynsey Miller and Eve Hedderwick Turner‘s Anne Boleyn, B’way’s Hamilton, Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (set well before Elizabethan times) and so on. The casting of all these productions reflect the woke aesthetic known as “presentism”, and I’m telling this dude, who’ll be visiting the Met this weekend, that “The Tudors” doesn’t do the presentism thing because the paintings were actually painted back in the day. And this dude is looking at me going “wait…what do you mean?”

Now that we’re all up to speed on presentism, or the current industry-wide requirement that all historical films need to reflect present-tense diversity standards and enlightened present-tense attitudes, we can more readily understand why Green Book was so viciously attacked almost exactly four years ago.

Peter Farrelly‘s film was bludgeoned by wokesters because it adhered to the realm of 1962 rather than 2018. It told the story (i.e., a tour of the Deep South by African-American pianist Don Shirley and Italian-American bouncer Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga) according to the standards and mindsets of the Kennedy era.

In the eyes of Bob Straus and the Green Book condemnation squad, thus was the one unforgivable sin.

Casting presentism: “For the last four or five years Hollywood progressives have also insisted that all historical films have to adopt the practice of presentism in terms of casting. That means that all casts have to reflect social values as they should be in terms of inclusion and representation rather than how they actually may have been during the time of the story.”

“Spielberg, Hanks, Antropova,” posted on 4.6.21:

You could say that Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light is a past-tense, memory-lane, movie-theatre thing. But it isn’t really. Or not that much.

Set in rural England (Margate) in 1980, it’s about an interracial May-December affair — a strapping, good-looking black dude in his mid 20s (Michael Ward, the main protagonist) and a white, middle-aged, past-her-prime British woman in her mid to late 40s (Olivia Colman). Separated by more than 20 years. Such affairs are always short-term.

So it’s not so much about a Cinema Paradiso-type atmosphere (The Blues Brothers and All That Jazz on the marquee) as a stew of race and sexuality and mental health issues and callous paternalism. One could infer, even, that Empire of Light primarily occurs within the Mendes sensibility of here and now.

Colman is a movie-theatre manager with an unstable, schizzy temperament; Ward is working for her (selling and tearing tickets, selling popcorn). They eventually fall into a sexual relationship, but problems surface. Such affairs were highly unusual if not what-the-fuck-are-you-thinking? in working-class circles.

Colin Firth is a crusty theatre owner who exploits Colman sexually, casually, off and on. Anti-immigrant skinheads and an act of particular brutality figure into the narrative.

Things were a lot different in England and the U.S. in 1980, racially speaking. If you ask me the likelihood of such an affair pushes the limits of credibility, or certainly the 1980 norm. Honestly. I visited London in ’76 and ’80…such affairs just weren’t in the cards. Interracial, sure, but older white woman-younger black guy? There was certainly a lot of racism among brutish working-class types. Gangs of skinheads roaming the London Underground…I was there, I saw it, I felt it.

May I ask something? Why would a smart, good-looking dude like Ward be interested in an unstable white lady on the far side of 45? What about all those foxy 20something girls running around town? I don’t get it. If Colman was in her early 30s, maybe. (I was into women in their 30s during my early to mid 20s.)

However unstable and erratic, Colman’s character would have had to nurse a streak of serious self-destruction to engage in a May-December affair like this. But if the director-writer of a film depicting such an affair adopts an attitude of presentism, a Ward + Colman-type affair is well within the realm of possibility.

A totally woke movie in 2022 has to cover at least two of the three fundamentals — race, gender, sexuality — and if it’s a 1980 period film the old presentism thang figures in. Empire of Light doesn’t do gender, but it covers the other three, you bet. Or so it would seem. I won’t see it until Telluride.

About a week ago (2.25) I mentioned that the Santa Barbara Film Festival will present an on-stage interview with the five 2022 nominees for the 2022 Best Director Oscar — The Power of the Dog‘s Jane Campion, Drive My Car‘s Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Licorice Pizza‘s Paul Thomas Anderson, Belfast‘s Kenneth Branagh and West Side Story‘s Steven Spielberg.

It happens tonight at 8 pm. THR‘s Scott Feinberg will moderate. These SBIFF events are all about praise and softballs so it’s unlikely that Feinberg will ask anything the least bit challenging. However…

In my 2.25 piece I suggested that Feinberg ask Anderson the following: “As you know, for the last four or five years Hollywood progressives have has dictated that all historical films have to adopt the practice of presentism in terms of casting. That means that all casts have to reflect social values as they should be in terms of inclusion and representation rather than how they actually may have been during the time of the story. (Presentism anticipates the Academy’s representation and inclusion standards that will apply concurrent with the 2024 Oscars.)

Anderson question: “Late last year you were challenged on a racial insensitivity issue. Licorice Pizza has a couple of scenes in which a middle-aged white guy speaks to his Japanese wife (actually two wives in succession) with a bizarre Japanese accent. You responded that you think it’s more important to portray all the aspects of a given era accurately rather than default to presentism. Would you care to elaborate on this dispute and re-explain where you were coming from?”

I’ve decided to revise my suggestion. Feinberg should instead ask all five directors to answer this: “In your opinion, which is the higher calling in the making of a period film? Is it better to (a) follow the guidelines and dictates of presentism, which aims to reflect social values as they should be in terms of inclusion and representation rather than how they actually were during the time of a given story, or (b) present this or that historical era honestly, as it actually was and without any progressive sugar-coating?”

I’m still in West Hollywood as we speak (3 pm), but I’ve got five hours to play with. Drive up to Santa Barbara, pick up the press pass, unload my stuff at a nice SBIFF-comped hotel (Lavender by the Sea) and get up to the Arlington Theatre sometime between 7:30 and 8 pm.

The cast of Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth, a play about medieval Scotland, is pretty close to one-third African American. Presentism is par for the course these days, of course, but Coen and wife-producer-costar Frances McDormand seem to have moved beyond your obligatory woke casting requirements.

Which is a switch for Joel, at least compared to remarks he and brother Ethan made during an interview with The Daily Beast‘s Jen Yamato in February ’16 while promoting Hail Ceasar.

Yamato had brought up the issue of diverse casting and multi-ethnic representation. Even though Hail Ceasar was set in the racially illiberal early ’50s, her beef was basically #WhyIsHailCaesarSoWhite? Joel’s attitude was quite resistant and in fact fairly dismissive. Boiled down, his view was “why should I ethnically mix up my cast just for political reasons?”

It’s probably fair to say that a different Joel was at the helm when it came to casting The Tragedy of Macbeth. I know nothing, but I suspect that McDormand told him “you can’t really play it that way now, plus there are so many great actors of color out there…you should get in on this.”

Obviously Joel could have ignored the presentism requirement and made Macbeth as a traditional all-paleface play a la Roman Polanski and Orson Welles, and if anyone had complained he could have used the same argument he threw at Yamato. So why didn’t he? Because the Yamato mindset is industry-wide now, and he figured “well, I guess I need to get with the program…why make trouble for myself?…why not just embrace presentism and turn it into a plus?”

Kamala Harris’s electoral loss wasn’t a squeaker — outside of the northeast, the west coast and certain blue urban slivers she was totally clobbered.

I had hoped that her victory would usher in a sane, sensible, moderately constructive presidency…nope! I had been clinging to Michael Moore’s prediction that she had a decisive win in the bag…not so much! As it turned out Tuesday, 11.5 wasn’t so much a presidential preference vote as a national referendum on cultural resentment.

The bumblefucks didn’t so much vote for Trump as against woke progressives.

Lee Fang and Linda have said it all.

There’s only one way to straighten things out going forward…only one way to cleanse the Democratic Party of the wokester fanatics who apparently triggered the most devastating electoral landslide since 1988 or maybe even 1964, and that’s to recognize that these people did this.

What Linda has said hits home: “People didn’t vote for Trump — they voted against you.” Which means, arguably, that they voted against hoodie mobs ripping off department stores without anyone lifting a finger, against Lia Thomas, against the George Floyd vandalism riots of May and June of 2020, against elementary school drag shows, against the trans thing flooding the educational system, against presentism in historical films and the general woke consensus that younger white males are what’s wrong with this country.

@lexibunni.official #trans #transgirl #donaldtrumpisyourpresident #trump #2024election ♬ original sound – Lexi ️‍⚧️

N.Y. Times columnist Pamela Paul, 11.7.24:

Ever since the marketing klutzes at Apple TV+ blew off debuting Steve McQueen’s Blitz at the Venice, Telluride, Toronto or New York film festivals and went instead for a London Film Festival debut, the clear indication was that McQueen’s film was some kind of not-quite-there curio or shortfaller.

And then came confirmation of same from a recent smattering of negative reviews. A 76% RT rating doesn’t say “wipeout” but it does suggest the drag-down effect of certain issues and concerns.

Bullshit!

I saw Blitz last night, and I’m telling you that Apple should be completely ashamed of itself for all-but-burying — are you ready? — this superbly composed, oddball period war fantasy — an exquisitely crafted, richly imaginative, occasionally horrific, constantly engrossing “adventures of a young lad” movie.

And the critics who’ve panned it need to fall on the church steps and beg forgiveness from the Movie Godz.

Blitz is a violent cousin of Disney’s Toby Tyler (‘60) with a racially eccentric, super-woke casting approach plus a little Empire of the Sun seasoning, amounting to something that almost feels a little Wizard of Oz-y — a multi-chaptered child’s adventure flick that blends (during the third act at least) Coppola’s The Cotton Club with Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.”

Partly because of the musical ingredients, I mean. Blitz has a strong, excitingly intrusive score (Hans Zimmer) and a fair amount of tunes that are sung — yes, sung! — with such spunk and warmth, it’s almost (but not quite) a kind of musical. It’s open-hearted and super-carefully composed in a way that vaguely reminded me of Spielberg’s 1941, if you substitute the tone of beardo’s failed comedy for the occasional jolts of brutal realism that punctuate John Boorman’s Hope and Glory.

You almost expect one of the kids whom Eliot Heffernan’s George runs into during his perilous, days-long, trying-to get-back-home-while-dodging-bombs adventure…you almost expect one of the boys he befriends to sing “Consider Yourself,” the 60-year-old tune from B’way’s Oliver!

I’ve been griping about presentism for years, but McQueen’s commitment to re-imagining and recreating the racial composition of 84-years-old London is so surreal and unbridled and fantasy-soaked that you have to give him credit for saying “fuck it” and just taking the damn plunge.

I mean, if you leave out Brixton and similar nabes, London wasn’t this black even in the mid ‘70s or early ‘80s — I was there back then so don’t tell me — and Blitz, of course, is set in ‘40 and ‘41, when there was one person of color for every 3800 palefaces.

Here’s what I tapped out on the train last night:

“Wow….Blitz is much better than I expected…a grittily imaginative, superbly composed Swing Shift meets the London Blitz meets ‘Oliver Twist’ meets Spielberg’s 1941 within a multicultural fantasyland that the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock and Alexander Korda would be totally flabbergasted by if they could somehow see it…

“McQueen is such a great, ballsy filmmaker…this is what brave, phenomenally skilled artists do…they swan-dive into their own, self-created worlds.

“It’s almost a musical & is fairly amazing altogether and yet some half-panned it for being too square and conventional! What the fuck! All of that music and spirit & impressionistic imagery & a general current of adventure as seen and felt by a young lad…it’s a great smorgasbord of 1940s magical realism…it’s brutally realistic and quite violent at certain junctures and yet it almost feels at times like an old Disney film, and that’s what’s bold and robust about it.”

Friendo: “I didn’t see any of what you saw and got off on. I saw a movie that just kind of sat there, and I suspect it’s going to be a MAJOR commercial dud. I don’t think anyone is going to go see it.”

HE reply: “No argument there. Apple did as little as possible for Blitz. They suffocated whatever commercial potential it had.”

Steve McQueen‘s Blitz is obviously a curio — McQueen imposing a “presentism” take upon the London blitz — i.e., German bombing between 9.7.40 to 5.11.41. McQueen is too good of a filmmaker for the end result to be mediocre, but given the avoidance of Venice and Telluride one presumes it’ll probably underwhelm on some level. No reviews until the big London Film Festival debut (10.9.24). Limited theatrical bookings on 11.1., followed hy streaming on Apple TV+ on 11.22.24.

Steve McQueen‘s Blitz (Apple, 11.1 in theatres) has just been announced as the closing-night attraction for the 2024 New York Film Festival — Thursday, 10.10, Alice Tully Hall.

McQueen’s film is principally a mother-son relationship drama set against the ghastly German bombing of England, generally known as The Blitz, which began on or about 9.7.40 and lasted until 5.11.41.

There’s a sentence within NYFF Biitz page that gives me concern: “McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London, [one] too infrequently seen on screens.”

A “multicultural” London in 1940 and ’41 suggests that the film includes POC cast members other than just Eliott Heffernan, who plays George, the nine-year-old son of Saoirse Ronan‘s Rita, a working-class gal.

It’s one thing to consider the idea of Rita, a white woman, giving birth to a light-skinned POC son in the city that London was 93 years ago (1931). Life is always full of oddities and exceptions, of course, but this is obviously a stretch by historical social standards.

According to Wikipedia, in 1939 (a year before the bombing began) the total population of England was something in the vicinity of 38,084,321.

An IWM (Imperial War Museums) web page states that “before the first American troops arrived in 1942, the black population of Britain [was] around 8,000 to 10,000 people.” Let’s call it ten rather than eight.

In other words, in 1939 England there was one person of color for every 3800 palefaces. And yet two years after the start of the worldwide Great Depression with everyone scraping to survive, Ronan’s Rita zeroed in and mated with a POC fella within a nearly all-white culture that didn’t shirk from racist sentiments.

Okay, perhaps she adopted George but why?

I’m sorry but how can a rational, semi-informed moviegoer not conclude that casting-wise Blitz sounds like another case of presentism?

Last night I caught Greg Berlanti‘s Fly Me To The Moon (Sony, 7.12) at a local AMC plex — a ticket buyer’s sneak preview so all embargo bets are off. Any negative reviews or social media tweets you might read are probably harsh and unfair for this is definitely a reasonably decent romantic confection with perky performances (except for Channing Tatum‘s), some agreeably snappy, above-average dialogue and…okay, somewhat clumsy third-act plotting but not in a catastrophic sense.

Written by Rose Gilroy, Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn, it’s a lightweight romcom riff on the alleged faking of the 1969 moon landing legend — a decades-old myth — by way of early ’60s Rock Hudson and Doris Day movies.

It has a jaunty, vaguely farcical tone while being both accurate and oddly inaccurate in recreating the America of 55 years ago. But it also offers a slice of that same nostalgic feeling of national pride that Todd Douglas Miller‘s Apollo 11 (’19) conveyed. So it leaves you with wholesome emotions and a nice aftertaste.

I went right home and re-watched Apollo 11 on Amazon….an absolutely first-rate, visually beautiful documentary sans narration or talking heade.

Scarlett Johansson‘s Kelly Jones is the star of the show — glamorously presented, hoarding most of the clever lines, registering serious emotion. She’s a bit like Doris Day‘s advertising executive in Lover Come Back (’61), only much more savvy and Don Draper-ish and therefore more of an exercise in 21st Century presentism as women generally didn’t wield that kind of power a half-century ago.

Jones is hired by Woody Harrelson‘s Moe Berkus (i.e., the conniving bad guy) to commercially market the Apollo program and later to secretly organize the shooting of a faked moon landing in case the Apollo 11 mission doesn’t succeeed or ends tragically.

Channing Tatum‘s Cole Davis is an uptight NASA bigwig with a crush on Jones, a fat broomstick up his ass, acute feelings of guilt over the January 1967 launchpad deaths of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chaffee, and a strong distaste for Jones’ marketing of the Apollo program. He’s basically playing a chump — a secondary character who mostly reacts to stuff that he finds angering, confounding or surprising.

If Fly Me To The Moon inspires you to re-watch Miller’s Apollo 11, as it did me, you might want to play a little game with yourself. There’s a whole lot of pre-launch footage of NASA technicians, VIP NASA guests, and Average Joe tourists waiting to see the launch. The name of the game is “Find the Obese People.” Because in 1969 they were all but nonexistent. You might spot one or two NASA technicians who could stand to exercise a bit more, but no Lizzo or John Candy types.

Among the almost entirely white throngs of Cocoa Beach tourists it’s really hard to find even a moderately fat person, and damn near impossible to spot any serious Jabbas. It’s just the way things were back then.

“Weltschmerz of ’69 vs. Insanity of Now“, posted on 7.13.19:

Apollo 11 is truly great within its own realm — an immersive, suspenseful, larger-than-life, clean-as-a-hound’s-tooth revisiting of a momentous moment in world history. It’s moving and majesterial and as tightly wound as a Swiss watch — i.e., all the boring parts of an eight-day voyage removed for viewing pleasure.

Apollo 11 gets you emotionally in at least a couple of ways. In hindsight it’s almost sad to watch when you consider how good and unified everyone in the U.S. felt when the Eagle landed on the moon on 7.20.69. That feeling is gone for good now.

True, things were anything but peaceful in the summer of ’69 — the Vietnam War raging, the “silent majority” discomforted by anti-war demonstrations and a general loathing of President Richard Nixon plus counter-culture upheavals (pot, LSD, hippies, the Weathermen, Black Panthers, “whitey on the moon”, Woodstock, breakup of the Beatles). So life is never peaceful and strife and discomfort are often the orders of the day.

Nixon was a dark character but he wasn’t MAGA crazy. For all his dark currents and venal determinations Nixon at least understood and respected the system of checks and balances for the most part and, apart from “the plumbers”, generally operated within constitutional restraints. And he did push for environmental laws, a national health care system and the raising of labor wages. Five years ago Noam Chomsky opined that Nixon was “the last liberal president.”

As disturbing and discordant as 1969 was, it was a comparative garden of eden compared to what’s happening now.