Jeffrey Wells

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.

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.

Posted on 8.19.21…

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.”

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.

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.

If nothing else the below image welcomely reminds that the William Bradley Pitt who stars in F1 bears no resemblance whatsoever to the “fat Pitt” guy who appeared on a flush Manhattan sidewalk a couple of days ago….thank God!!

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.

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.

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.

F1 Friendo: “In your 6.12 F1 riff you didn’t include my one reservation about the surprising over-reliance upon live voiceover race commentary…

“While F1 tells an affecting story, it would be impossible to follow were it not for the wall-to-wall, supposedly live stadium commentary during the multiple FI races…this is the only way for the audience to fully participate in 90% of it.

“It feels like they shot what they could of each race, edited the footage and then added race commentary to bridge the gaps and heighten involvement. All very effective, but F1 is obviously the first over-$200M film to rely on (at times) almost continuous voice over to explain key plot and action.”

HE to F1 Friendo: “Well, I didn’t want to pass along a quibbling comment. That sounds like a bit of a negative viewpoint.”

F1 Friendo: “Your regulars are complaining that your piece was too positive…that it was a puff piece.”

HE to F1 Friendo: “Well, it was a puff piece.  But if I’m going to post something contrary, it’s going to be based on my own viewing.  And I don’t think that wall-to-wall narration….well, maybe that IS a problem.  I just want to see it myself and go from there.”

F1 Friendo: “I’m not saying the loudspeaker narration is a problem. The film obviously works. It’s just that relying on wall-to-wall narration is a huge surprise for such a massive enterprise.”

HE pisshounds called me a slut for posting a few enthused paragraphs about F1, so in their eyes Griffin Schiller is presumed to be just another roadside prostitute…right?

Elite industry-ites were treated yesterday to a pair of F1 looksees (mid-afternoon and early evening) — Joseph Kosinski, Brad Pitt, Jerry Bruckheimer and Han Zimmer’s high-throttle gutslammer played at IMAX corporate headquarters in Playa Vista, and apparently in whoa-mama full IMAX (1.43:1) from start to finish.

Not even a capsule review, just notes: As you might expect and will be glad to hear confirmed, F1 delivers vise-like dramatic engagement with fully deployed, grade-A acting chops from consummate superstar Brad Pitt, Damson Idris (33 year-old Brit, excellent in the late John Singleton’s Snowfall series), the great Kerry Condon and the always on-target Javier Bardem …

All hail the great, still-youngish Kosinski, who has certainly matched and arguably topped his work on Top Gun: Maverick (‘22).

A 156-minute, 21st Century big-boy compadre to John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (‘66) and Steve McQueen’s Le Mans (‘71), F1 revs and rouses and vibrates your rib/soul cage, leaving you buzzed, breathless and all the rest of that classic race-car-movie stuff….you know the drill.

Does anyone wipe out a la crash-boom-bang? You don’t want me to answer this so let’s drop it. Okay, someone does but I’m sworn to secrecy, etc.

We all think of howling, high-speed track racing as an individual sport, but the high-torque F1 game can involve a one-team, two-car strategy with one driver running interference for another, depending on the situation. Plus it’s important to know the difference between hot and cold tires, and of course the drivers and pit crew are constantly jabbering while the loudspeaker guy narrates what’s happening…whew.

Pitt’s 50something Sonny Hayes is great company, a great hang. His dominance blends his cocksure Once Upon a Time in Hollywood stunt guy Cliff with, shall we say, a note of approaching-the-big-upward-slope anxiety…fear of not cutting it like he used to.

As hotshot British driver Joshua Pearce, Idris holds his lane and then some, becoming a no-fucking-around foil for Pitt’s old-school Sonny.

And Condon, a deliciously charismatic IRA psychopath in 2023’s In The Land of Saints and Sinners, is the sexy, brainy love interest for Braddy-waddy…a heart-of-gold gal who’s run a few laps around the track herself.

The Hans Zimmer score is said to be double-triple exceptional, especially during the final race when it all happens within a completely visceral, all-alone, immersive, this-is-it, you-are-there fashion without the element of loudspeaker narration or cheering crowds or anything peripheral.…

That’s enough for now. There’s a big all-media IMAX screening on Tuesday, 6.24, as well as a smattering of early-bird AMC fan screenings on Monday, 6.23, not to mention more nationwide advance showings on Wednesday, 6.25