Donald Trump talks a tough game, but deep down he’s a fat pussy…a twitching, fluttering. sabre-rattling, falsetto-voiced twinkle toes…and the Iranians know this.
Posted an hour ago (1:45 pm) by N.Y. Times staffers:
Jeffrey Wells
Humidity More Than The Heat
Sweltering temps begin today. I love 92 in the shade in the dry lower desert, but not so much in muggy-ass Connecticut or Manhattan.
You’re Telling Me?
As a veteran of countless back-and-forths between Fairfield and Westchester counties and NYC-area airports (JFK, LGA, Newark), I’m acutely aware of how agonizing and soul-draining congested highway travel can be (particularly on the 678 through the Bronx and Queens).
Don’t buy any bureaucratic b.s. about the massive JFK reconstruction project proceeding at a reasonable pace — month after month the seeming absence of churning machinery and busy-bee workers by the roadside has been obvious — it’s mostly a slow-motion exercise in urban hellscape obstruction.
Take a train to Manhattan and then grab a Howard Beach-bound A train plus the JFK Air Train (the fare will be cut this summer by 50%!)…only way to travel.
F1 Trans Fans in Stands?
Only in the N.Y. Times could you find a nod to the trans community in a sentence about the growing presence of women within the F1 fanbase.
In an F1: The Movie fan–review piece by Luke Smith and Madeline Coleman (“Fast, Loud, Very Hollywood — But Will Race Fans Love It or Hate It?”), a parenthetical appearing inside the second sentence in paragraph #36 reads as follows: “Around 40 percent of the F1 fanbase identify as women”.
In other words, Smith and Coleman are allowing for the possibility that this particular fanbase is composed of biological women (almost certainly the majority congregation) as well as an unspecified percentage of biomales presenting themselves as women…right?
Paragraph #14, by the way, contains a major spoiler about Damson Idris’s Pearce character.
Tied With “Annette” In Terms of Subjecting Audiences to Mental Torture by Way of Acute 2021 Wokeism…Re-Living The Four-Year-Old Nightmare of “The Green Knight”
Almost everything was awful in ‘20, ‘21 and early ‘22…peak wokeism + the pandemic…the dreariest and darkest years of our lives.
One of the lowest, most despairing episodes in my industry-covering life was watching the beyond-awful Union Station Soderbergh Oscars — people still shudder at this memory, an epochal event that convinced the moviegoing public that progressive filmmakers were giving the finger to ticket-buyers …that they were committed to the guilt-tripping, misery-spreading business like never before.
But then three months later (July ‘21) along came David Lowery’s The Green Knight…a dank, sodden enterprise that stood up to the Soderbergh lethargy and said “hold my beer….you don’t know what a misery pit is.” And then Leos Carax’s Annette opened a month later, plunging movie culture into an even blacker realm.
Lo, a swirling devil cloud had descended, and only now can we understand that it was this four-month nightmare (April to August ‘21) that more or less slit the throat of the movie industry…that convinced Joe and Jane Popcorn that modern cinema was up to something menacing and awful and deeply insane.
Like a strange virus I had absorbed but hadn’t yet settled into my system, I could feel my latent loathing for David Lowery‘s The Green Knight early on. I didn’t watch it when it first came out because I “knew” (i.e., strongly sensed) I would hate it.
I finally streamed this fucker late last night, and I felt smothered in thick, swamp-like boredom within seconds. Drugged, oxygen-starved, submerged in medieval muck, and facing a terrible two-hour slog.
I will never forget The Green Knight, and I will never, ever watch it again. It’s an exacting, carefully crafted, “first-rate” creation by a director of serious merit, and I was moaning and writhing all through it. I can’t believe I watched the whole thing, but I toughed it out and that — in my eyes, at least — is worth serious man points.
The Green Knight is a sodden medieval dreamscape thing — a trippy, bizarre, hallucinatory quicksand movie that moves like a snail and will make you weep with frustration and perhaps even lead to pondering (not my idea but the film’s) the idea of your own decapitation.
What would I rather do, I was asking myself — watch the rest of The Green Knight or bend over and allow my head to be cut off? Both would be terrible things to endure, I reasoned, but at least decapitation would be quick and then I’d be at peace. Watching The Green Knight for 130 minutes, on the other hand…
It’s a kind of Christmas movie or, if you will, about a game of strange beheadings. Dev Patel‘s Gawain is one of the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table — a drinking, whoring fellow who sweats a lot and often smiles when spoken to and regards much of what he sees with his mouth half open.
It must be said that Gawain splashes water onto his face and hair a lot…he’s often dripping.
The film more or less begins with the Green Knight, a intimidating ghostly figure, appearing at King Arthur’s court on Christmas Day and declaring — bear with me here because this makes no sense — that anyone can cut his head off as long as the head-chopper will agree to let his own head be sliced off by the Green Knight a year later, at the Green Chapel.
What kind of blithering moron would say “okay!” to a suggestion this ridiculous?
Why is Patel, the son of British-residing Indian Hindus, playing Gawain, a medieval Englishman with the usual Anglo-Saxon characteristics? You could just as well ask why Patel was cast in the lead role in Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield (’20). Because in today’s realm it’s cooler to embrace “presentism” than to adhere to any sense of general historical reality, or at least the historical reality that filmmakers tended to prefer before anti-white wokester Stalinism became a thing. Call it subversive casting, if you want.
Everything that happens is dream-logical. None of it adds up or leads to anything else. You could claim that Lowery’s film is about character and morality and karma and facing the consequences of one’s own actions, and I would say “okay, sure…if that works for you, fine.”
There’s a talking fox. There are giant bald women seen in the misty distance. Patel’s head explodes in fire at one point…whoa.
Barry Koeghan, an Irish actor with tiny rodent eyes and a deeply annoying swollen nose, plays a scavenging asshole of some kind. Alicia Vikander plays two roles, a commoner with a Jean Seberg-in-Breathless haircut, and a married noblewoman who has sex with Gawain at one point. You’re thinking “gee, she’s bringing Patel to orgasm…am I supposed to give a shit one way or the other?”
DECAPITATION SPOILERS: There are three beheadings in The Green Knight, and a promise of a fourth. The big ugly Green Knight (played by Ralph Ineson) loses his head early on. A ghost character named Winifred (Erin Kellyman) loses hers at the midway point. Patel’s Gawain, the ostensible hero, loses his at the end. And then he wakes up and realizes he’s been dreaming, but then is asked to submit to an actual beheading…this is presented as some sort of satisfying ending.
The finale is a complete failure, a wipe-out. It’s so completely off and miscalculated that it inspires you to mutter “seriously….that‘s the ending?”
Five minutes after The Green Knight began I understood why Average Joes have generally given it poor reviews. It’s obviously a visually inventive, high-style smarthouse thing about ultra-peculiar realms, made by a director who believes in imaginative leaps of fancy and fantasy, but watching it makes you feel fucking awful.
I can’t tell you how depressed I was at the half-hour mark when I realized I had 100 minutes to go.
Film critics generally don’t acknowledge audience miserablism. For most of them visual style is 90% to 95% of the game. If a director shoots a film with a half-mad, child-like sense of indulgence with a persistent visual motif (i.e., everything in The Green Knight is either muted gray or brown or intense green)…bathing the viewer in mood and mystery and moisture (filmmakers like Lowery adore mist, fog, rain, mud, sweat, rivers, streams)…that’s it and all is well.
There are dozens of details I could get into, but I’m not going to because what’s the point?
I had read several reviews, of course, but before watching Lowery’s film I read the Wiki synopsis of the source material, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th Century epic poem. Right away I was muttering “dear God…no, please.”
I’m completely mystified why British film director Stephen Weeks would make two films based on the Sir Gawain legend — Gawain and the Green Knight (’73) and Sword of the Valiant (’83).
Friendo: “The best reviewed movies of the year so far are The Green Knight, In the Heights and Pig. We are fucked. American cinema is dead.”
Okay with Aaron Pierre as 007
The new Bond just has to be British…that’s the main thing. I’m okay with Aaron Pierre, 31, filling the slot. He’s an above-average actor (admired him in Rebel Ridge) with great eyes and a buff bod.
But nobody cares about the Bond franchise, do they? The concept of a stand-alone Bond film has been all but terminated with Amazon intending to strip-mine 007 for all he’s worth.
I think the current was destroyed when (a) Daniel Craig was killed for absolutely no reason, and then (b) the toxic, deeply loathed Jennifer Salke stalled the development process interminably.
IndieWire Film Crew Self-Indicts With Eccentric, Bordering-on-Deranged Rankings of “100 Best Films of 2020s”….Sick Puppies!
I’m not saying we need incontrovertible proof that IndieWire’s cinematic soothsayers are living on a separate rarified planet…I think most of us have absorbed this repeatedly over the years, particularly since Team IndieWire went wacko wokey starting in the late teens….
But if you want proof of this, read no further than their “100 Best Movies of the 2020s” rundown, which posted yesterday (6.16).
I’m not going to nitpick the entire list, and yes, I’m either agreeing or am largely comme ci comme ca with a fair amount of their selections. These guys are nutty but not completely untethered
But at the same time they’re saying with a straight face that Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (which plague-dogged us wih the insufferably sensitive weepy-ass Paul Mescal) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Drive My Red Saab (primarily an ode to Parliament cigarettes)…they’re saying these films deserve third- and ninth-place rankings. C’mon!
They’re also declaring that Jordan Peele’s Nope (#12), Jane Campion’s stifled, soul-draining (if visually handsome) The Power of the Dog (#14) , Martin Scorsese’s colossally miscalculated Killers of the Flower Moon (#29), The Daniels’ mostly infuriating Everything Everywhere All At Once (#36), David Lowery’s all-but-unwatchable The Green Knight (#45) and the Wachowski’s 100% unbearable The Matrix Resurrections (#49) deserve special consideration among the top 50 films…lunacy!
They’re also saying that these eight migraine-inducers are better than five incontestably superior releases from the same era…Janicza Bravo’s Zola (#59), Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (#62). Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Eva Victor’s Sorry Baby (#77) and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (‘88)..
I’m going to slap together HE’s own roster of the best films from the first half of the ‘20s. Give me a couple of hours.
Not Saying A Thing
Here’s Paul McCartney’s son, James McCartney. The 47-year-old James is a serious musician (but man, what a generational burden) as well as a vegetarian; his mom is the late Linda McCartney. Hail fellow well met.
Arguably Lamest L.A. Snap in Art-Gallery History
Dennis Hopper took this famous photo, titled “Standard Standard”, sometime in the early 1960s. He was driving south on Doheny Blvd. and making a left turn onto Santa Monica Blvd just before the Melrose Blvd. right-leaning juncture.
Look at this photo — it’s nothing. I know, that’s the point — flatness, gas station, billboards, parked cars, and those stark, scarecrow-like telephone poles and streetlamps — but there’s “nothing, really nothing to turn on”…nothing to contemplate or meditate upon except the general blandness of West Hollywood before it turned gay.
Okay, the large, bulky phantom car in the rearview mirror adds a certain intrigue. Peter Sellers’ Clare Quilty could be behind the wheel.
Posthumously cancel Van Johnson (who stood 6’2″ in his prime) for hanging with Roman Polanski? Joan Crawford is already a villainous figure. Mia Farrow has been a steadfast Polanski friend all along.
Even AI bullshit should have higher standards than this.
Obviously Unfunny, Hand-Me-Down Humor
If there’s one genuinely funny gag in this whole film, I’ll eat my gray, Chinese-made cowboy hat. Because it’s understood that this reboot will lean heavily on the same kind of gags that defined the old Leslie Neilsen versions. We know the newbie won’t even flirt with being truly subversive.
Witness testimony from a guy who’s seen it: “The O.J. Simpson gag is ostensibly the biggest laugh in the film, but I will give credit to a protracted sequence centering around Liam Neeson and Pam Anderson innocently making dinner in a kitchen while being observed through infrared surveillance equipment that makes it look like they’re having wild, savage sex. When they bend over an oven, the device translates it into something really funny visually. That bit felt fresh while the majority of the jokes are Antediluvian Marx Bros. one liners like ‘Would you like a chair?’ and ‘No, I have one at home’, and set within uninspired, rote situations.
“And there’s really no social commentary on law enforcement, save for one passing gag in a bar that hints of race relations. This entire film smacks of Seth MacFarlane’s patented derivativeness. He was obviously brought aboard to imitate instead of create. The studio wanted a redo of the first film and got that.
“Neeson< seems too old to start lampooning his serious action career, so there’s a sadness in watching him in this, but Anderson does really well. Her character isn’t a dimbulb like Priscilla Presley since she possesses a personal vendetta against the villain, a tech giant, and wants payback. THAT felt like an update.
“What I groaned at most were some puerile toilet jokes, something the original films never reveled in, as well as misplaced attempts at ‘warmth’ as Neeson pines for his lost ‘old man’ meant to dovetail affection for the late Leslie Nielsen. At least Neeson doesn’t mug as much as Nielsen increasingly did. Oh, there’s a touch of topicality from a driverless car and AI references. The bag guy invokes Elon Musk, and not just his technology but personal life.
“At one point, they were going to call this NAKED GUN: DREBIN’S INFERNO, which hints of where the finale goes. This is a cheapjack ‘in name only’ sequel. There’s some breaking of the fourth wall in the third act that aficionados will recognize as lifted from a few Monty Python episodes. This film looks so cheaply made that they’ll probably eke out enough money the first weekend, especially if there are review embargos, but this feels very much like the sort of sequel that normally Netflix would debut since a living room couch is more forgiving than a theater seat. Consider this a warning shot for the 2nd SPACEBALLS as well.”
“A Great, Proper, Big-Screen Dad Movie”
So says F1 watcher Raleigh St. Clare**, who caught an unfinished earlybird preview a few months back.
Back in the ‘90s Jerry Bruckheimer said he makes Chateaubriand guy movies as opposed to hamburger-level — a money quote that stuck.
** The spelling of Bill Murray’s Royal Tenenbaums character was Raleigh St. Clair…just saying.