Jeffrey Wells …if Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (Columbia/Apple, 11.22) was still called Kitbag? I haven’t loved a movie title this much in a long time. Imagine those hundreds of thousands of Joe and Jane Popcorn types reacting in the usual ADD dumbshit way…”Kitbag…fuck is that?…let’s see something else.”
The Kitbag title was abandoned sometime in January ’22, or roughly 21 months ago.
Frank J. Lauta, the father of my ex-wife Maggie, passed a little more than a week ago. Maggie and our sons Jett and Dylan are attending a memorial service for Frank in Hamlin, New York — a suburb of Rochester. I’ve been watching a live–stream for the last hour or so. I’ve just posted the following on the church’s website:
“Frank was a good citizen, a kind soul and a compassionate human being. He was the father of my ex-wife, Maggie, and therefore ‘family’ for roughly four-plus years (‘87 through ‘92). We had sporadic contact for a few years. We all vacationed in the summer of ‘91 in Cape Cod when his grandsons (Jett and Dyian) were toddlers. I was honored to know him and his wife, Jeanne.
“I’m sorry that Frank never met his great-granddaughter, Sutton (daughter of Jett), but she’s part of him and he will always be part of her. Goodbye and farewell, Frank…you’re part of the infinite stream now.”
…when a brazen envelope-pusher has been heavily hyped in overlapping festival pressure-cooker environments like Venice and Telluride, and then Jeff Sneider comes along and goes “wait…whut?”
Allow me to clarify — Poor Things is Barbie meets a heterosexual Victorian British empire version of Fellini Satyricon.
Let no one say L.A. Times critic Justin Chang isn’t a man of character. For he’s panned Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, the almost universally praised, odd-couple prep school comedy with Paul Giamatti as a curmudgeonly ancient history professor, and newcomer Dominic Sessa as a bright malcontent student. Chang may be an outlier in this regard, but it takes balls to stand against the majority. I should know.
Chang slams The Holdovers for being insincere (“flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic”) but also, it seems, because of an incident of racial animosity between two minor characters — a snotty white kid named Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner) and a fragile Korean student named Ye-Joon Park (Jim Kaplan).
Early on Kountze belittles Park, you see, by calling him “Mr. Moto” — apparently a trigger in more ways than one.
Chang: “In reducing Ye-Joon to such an abused prop, is The Holdovers really any better [than Kountze]? Can anyone watch a scene this callous and then be honestly moved by [Giamatti’s] speech about the injustices of American racism, classism and white privilege?”
In short The Holdovers, which is mostly set in December 1970, is guilty of a 2023 woke crime. In Chang’s head, I should add.
…but since Jeff Mclachlan already has, there’s no harm in commenting. Both men were somewhat overweight during filming. Plemons has since dropped a ton of weight (he’s almost skinny now) and Leo has also slimmed down. Plus Plemons never takes his cowboy hat off, and that camoflauges or offsets his facial appearance.
During last May’s Cannes Film Festival N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, who’s become an unbridled celebrator of feminist-brand cinema in recent years, praised Todd Haynes’ May December (Netflix, 12.1), an underwhelming (to put it kindly) attempt at blending the Mary Kay Letourneau saga with a semblance of a re-heated Persona. Dargis actually went apeshit, predicting Oscar glory. I wouldn’t say that reactions to the recent N.Y. Film Festival screenings of Haynes’ film have necessarily put the kibbosh on this fantasy, but I would say that the general lack of excitement is palpable.
HE’s most recent May December piece appeared on 9.26.
This is some kind of optical photographic distortion. Richard Burton (5’10”) seems too large compared to Clint Eastwood (6’4″). Elizabeth Taylor was only 5’2″ — a stature sister of Kamala Harris.
Not to mention that slender, physically glowing quality. And yet I was fairly full of despair at 17 and 18. I felt no real hope and excitement about anything until I hit 25 or 26. And then slowly and very gradually, the pieces of the puzzle started to fit together.
That white-ish, elephant-collar jacket adorned with primitive paintings of divebombing bluebirds and whatnot…that plus the douchey whitewall buzzcut, the troglodyte stubble ‘stache and nascent beard, the open-collar white shirt and those godawful brown pants.
Life is nothing if not style choices, and when you wear a light brown double–breasted suit jacket for an SNL hosting gig, you’ve pretty much confirmed that you’ll never, ever “get it.” Amiable aw-shucks personality aside, your future is mapped out, bro…you’ve pretty much cancelled your own ticket.
