To go by frame captures provided by DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze, the Criterion teal monsters are back, and this time they’ve desecrated Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Teorema.
Once again, natural or subdued blues have apparently been rendered with a garish teal-green tint. Look at the images. A year and a half ago I asked Tooze if there might be something off about the color tuning on his 4K Bluray players or 4K TV, and his emphatic reply was “I’ve been doing this 18 years, and it’s not me.”
So what is wrong with Criterion? This is vandalism, plain and simple. This is organizational derangement. This has happened three times previously with teal-tinted Blurays of John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy, Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham and Brian DePalma‘s Sisters. And nobody has complained except for Tooze (half-heartedly), myself and a handful of thread commenters. And now Teorema.
Early this afternoon Howard Hawks and I saw Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet together at the AMC Lincoln Square. It’s a slow, grim sit, all right…yes, it’s fair to call most of it “rural, less-than-hygienic Elizabethan misery porn”…but lo and behold the Globe Theatre performance finale turns on the feeling.
I actually began to melt, to be honest, and I sensed that hard-nosed Hawks was in a similar emotional place. When a powerful scene gets to you there’s no mistaking the effect. Your eyes slightly water, your throat tightens.
Especially when Jessie Buckley’s Agnes and several other serf-level patrons (i.e., huddled in the orchestra pit) offer gestures of compassion to a dying on-stage Hamlet (NoahJupe). Yes, Zhao is looking to jerk our emotional chains, but it works. Jupe sells it and Buckley grand-slams it.
Buckley has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag…period, no contest, done.
But Lordy, what a glum, boring, miserable, mostly unsanitary, toil-and-trouble life everyone lived in 15th Century Stratford. Did anyone ever take hot baths? You can almost smell the body odor. I respect the grimy, sweaty, greasy-haired realism that Zhao was determined to convey, but my God…did the serfs have any kind of soap back then?
Friendo #1: “Buckley absolutely deserves the Oscar. Her name is already engraved. The Globe climax is far and away thebestendingoutofanymoviethisyear. But does a great ending make a great movie?”
HEreply: “Honestly? I think the misery stuff is overbaked. It’s such a grim, grimey and anguished slog before that Globe theatre finale.”
HawkstoHE, Friendo #1: “It doesn’t have three great scenes and no bad ones. It has one great finale while Sentimental Value has at least three great scenes, if not four or five.”
Friendo #2: “The Globe theatre Hamlet sequence is beyond preposterous, but if you close your eyes and pretend that you know nothing about Hamlet, yes, it works in a rather fake but well-staged ‘Will showed his love and grief through his art!” Pavlovian tearjerker way.
And here’s why: The trailer offers a moment when a young Japanese girl (Shannon Mahina Gorman) not only overcomes her initial discomfort with her pretend daddy (Brendan Fraser) but rests her head on his shoulder. And then Fraser makes a typical actor’s mistake by looking at Gorman. I hate “looks” in tender scenes of this sort.
Let it in and feel it deep down, of course, but don’t fucking act it.
SentimentalValue has no emotional actorish “looks” at all. Every moment, every conveyance feels steady and bottom-line real.
Lemieux describes the Bernstein piece as a “horny profile,” and that kicks it off. 340comments as of 5:30 am eastern, and a fair-sized percentage are (take your pick) pithy, nauseated (as opposed to nauseating), hilarious, raw, tasty, sobering and at times head-turning.
I’ve been waiting for many weeks to dive into Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet (Focus Features, 11.26), and tomorrow oh dear Lordy that climactic encounter will finally occur. Sunday, 11.16 at 1pm. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, for it may toll for thee.
Is it, in fact, a fair or at least a semi-justified thing to apply “porn” terms (trauma, grief, misery) to this Elizabethan tale of the troubled marriage between William Shakespeare (PaulMescal) and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway (Jessie Buckley)? That is the question, oh my knaves.
Until HE has really and fully settled into Hamnet, this issue can never be truly clarified.
That said, I will not be approaching Hamnet with an attitude. When entering a theatre I am always open to a transcendent experience.
Tomorrow afternoon’s screening is important. The fate and the tilt of the 2025/‘26 Best Picture Oscar race will be affected one way or the other. On the face of it I’m more into the hypothetical fantasy of Hamnet beating the agitproppy OneBattleAfter Another than vice versa.
Does it have three great scenes? No. It has a few interesting or striking moments (like the finale) but forget “great”. I would’ve felt somewhat better if Emma Stone had side-stepped the head-shaving altogether. Jesse Plemons’ beekeeper/kidnapper is too greasy, and Aidan Delbis (i.e., Plemons’ moronic sidekick) is a blob of anti-matter. I “liked” or, you know, “respected” the Lanthimosianlunacy as far as it went, but Bugonia is minor.
And the fact — okay, not a “fact” but a realization that not only hit me in the stomach but came close to eliciting a tear when I saw Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly in Venice several weeks ago…
The fact is that this currently streaming, faintly melancholy Netflix mood trip flick has onlyonegreatscene, or more precisely a great moment.
It’s George Clooney’s titular character not asking a question as much as voicing a plea (as well as a refrain from the opening scene) — “Can I do it again?” Who among us has never said this to themselves (or to God) each and every day since they hit their mid 40s or early 50s?
All murder victims and their families are proverbial ingredients in the same profoundly tragic equation. They wanted to live, and were horrified by the sudden malice and brutality that ended their existence, and their loved ones were gutted and devastated by the loss.
Thud.
LeoTolstoy: “All murder victims are exactly alike, but each and every murderer is unique in this or that way.”
Gacy was a fat, gay sociopathic beast who had an amiable personality and liked dressing up like a clown, but who also murdered around 34 young men in the ’70s (mostly during the Jimmy Carter era)…he buried most of his victims in a crawl space under his home, and some under his garage’s cement floor. And he dumped a few in the Des Plaines river.
As long as McManus sticks to the Gacy investigation by the Norwood Park cops (and then the prosecution in the later episodes), Devil in Disguise is aces…gripping and fascinating and appropriately gloomy. It has story tension, realism, a strange Midwestern eeriness.
But when it starts veering into the lives of some of the victims and the anguish of their families after they’ve disappeared, you can feel the tension dissipating more and more…you can feel the narrative padding slowing things down.
HE to MacManus: We’d rather not familiarize ourselves with the young gay victims, and we really, really don’t want to deal with the grief of their parents. Bohhr-innnng! If you’d just stuck to the cops and the prosecutors and cut all the dramatic flotsam and jetsom, you’d have a perfect miniseries. Read the “investigation” section of Gacy’s Wikipage…it sucks you right in.
The girthy Michael Chernus, whose Gacy perf sorta kinda reminds you of John Candy in Uncle Buck and Planes Trains and Automobiles, is fairly great as this suburban monster.
The last time I wrote about Chernus was when he played the extra-marital boyfriend of Stephanie Allynne in a glum 2015 Sundance comedy called People Places Things. My basic thought was “why would the pistol-hot Allyne want to cheat on her husband with a not-all-that-handsome overweight guy?”
Let’s start with OneBattleAfterAnother. Identify the threegreatscenes. The final chase and shoot-out sequence on the rolling hills highway…that’s one. The French 75 assault on the migrant camp at the very beginning…that’s two. The failed French 75 bank robbery…that’s three.
But are there any “bad” ones? Hawks said you can’t have any. At all.
As far as it goes, HE sincerely laments the 11.11.25 passing of Sally Kirkland, who dined out for many decades off her justly praised, Oscar-nominated titular performance in Anna (Vestron), which opened on 10.2.87 and generated a great deal of award-season heat.
In early ‘88 Kirkland, then 47, won Best Actress trophies from LAFCA, HFPA (Golden Globes) and the Spirits.
So she peaked off Anna and not incidentally lived a long, mostly rich and persistently full life (60-year career, 250 film and TV gigs) that was launched, in a sense, by being the daughter of a fashion editor mom, Sally Kirkland, Sr., and was initially sparked, in a sense, by her mid ‘60s association with thejaded, haughty perversity thatwassynonymouswith Andy Warhol’s Factory scene.
Anna also heralded the big-time arrival of then-22-year-old model Paulina Porizkova, who played Anna’s usurper — a character based on Joanna Pacula.
My first reaction to news of Kirkland’s death was “wait, didn’t she pass three years ago?” But I was recalling Sally Kellerman, who resembled Kirkland or vice versa, and was roughly the same age (four years older).
Life passes by so very quickly, recollections tend to blend into ghoulash and every new year is more expensive than the previous one.
Visiting Jett, Cait and Sutton’s home in West Orange, New Jersey has been HE’s default Thanksgiving destination since I moved to Connecticut in ‘22. But not this year. Come 11.27 the Jersey crew will be dinner-ing in Massachusetts so Jody and I are outinthecold.
So last week I started looking around for a nice, home-styled, non-corporate restaurant (fireplace, candles, scent of cinnamon and pine needles) to savor a Thanksgiving dinner in, and guess what? They’re all fucking closed.
Okay, we found one place that’s turkey-serving in Silvermine (TavernatGraybarns) but they’re charging $150ahead plus extra required gratuities. No, thanks. That’s exploitive.
Right now our best (i.e., affordable) Thanksgiving option is Turkey McNuggets at McDonalds.
I think it’s shallow and rather ungracious of those nice local eateries (Westport’s Terrain, Georgetown’s Milestone) to shut their doors on Thanksgiving. They know there are many people like me with no soothing place to go. Restaurants should respect the customer base and open their hearts on this day of family togetherness.
