Many of us are deeply grateful to Dave Chappelle for being a staunch realist and a dedicated foe of wokester terror. In my heart of hearts and dream of dreams, Chappelle leads us out of this horrible nightmare. Not in a militant sense, but simply by being cool and sensible and unruffled.

The two finest films I saw at last month’s Telluride Film Festival were Joe Wright‘s exquisitely made Cyrano (UA Releasing, 12.31) and Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19). As things currently stand, these are also the most deserving Best Picture contenders…no question. Here, at long last, is the Cyrano trailer:

Posted on 9.2.21: “I’ve been watching filmed adaptations of Edmund Rostand‘s Cyrano de Bergerac for decades (Jose Ferrer‘s 1950 version, Steve Martin‘s Roxanne, the 1990 Gerard Depardieu version, and Michael Lehmann‘s The Truth About Cats and Dogs). Wright’s newbie — an inventively choreographed musical, fortified by first-rate production design and wonderfully lighted cinematography — is arguably the most spiritually and poetically buoyant version of them all.

The acting is top-tier, the musical numbers are arresting, the dialogue is as good as this sort of thing gets, and it’s a truly authentic time-tunnel experience (save for the presentism in the casting, which is par for the course these days).

Peter Dinklage has absolutely hit the jackpot with his titular performance — he’ll definitely be Best Actor-nominated. The film will almost certainly end up being Best Picture-nominated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the year-end consensus is that Cyrano is a “better” musical than Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story and Jon Chu‘s In The Heights combined.

Based on Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical of the same name (in which Dinklage and Haley Bennett costarred before moving onto the film version), Cyrano is easily Wright’s best film since Anna Karenina. Seamus McGarvey‘s exquisite cinematography reminded me of David Watkins‘ lensing of Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) — it’s a real trip just to watch and sink into on a visual level alone.

Kudos to Cyrano costars Kelvin Harrison Jr., Bashir Salahuddin and Ben Mendelsohn.

An invitational screening of a film has just ended, and you, a journalist, were not a fan. (You wanted to be, but the film wouldn’t let you.) And now you’re on your way to the after-party.

The general etiquette is as follows: (1) The journo is obliged to be as fawning and gracious and complimentary as possible when speaking to talent or studio reps, although he/she is not obliged to lie outright about his/her reaction to the film in question; and (2) It is permissible for journos to mutter their true opinion of the film with colleagues if they happen to be out of earshot of talent or studio reps.

Case in point: “Ringo Starr’s ‘The No-No Song'”, posted on 8.28.16.

SPOILERS ALLUDED TO WITHIN THE FOLLOWING: Last night I watched Daniel Craig‘s last and final James Bond film, knowing full well what the storyline was and particularly what the ending would deliver.

And I enjoyed it thoroughly. I was never bored, and was seriously impressed with Cary Fukanaga‘s pacing, cutting, visual discipline and overall chops. There’s never any doubt that this is a grade-A package made by grade-A people. Plus it’s Craig’s best Bond since Casino Royale, and one of the best overall. And knowing about the ending didn’t fucking matter at all. There’s a difference between watching a film as an adult, and watching one as an infant.

The pleasure of any film is in the way it unfolds — that special-touch factor, the art of it, the timing, the polish, the undercurrent, the first-classiness of it all. How the story is told, not the story itself…right? Singer, not song.

Plus the whole plot is sitting on the film’s Wikipedia page. Al Pacino in The Insider: “The cat totally out of the bag…”

On top of which Craig doesn’t play a boorish old-school sexist. He never has really. He plays a good, decent, smart, non-arrogant fellow in No Time to Die, and when the big moment comes it’s rather sad and classically invested in. And that’s where I shed my single, solitary tear.

Let no one doubt that the ending of No Time To Die was written by people who are terrified of seeming tethered to the past (who isn’t?), and are triply terrified of wokester (especially #MeToo) wrath, and that the ending was written to make a point — i.e., we’re in a new world, and there’ll be no more of that old “shaken, not stirred” broth…that smooth, sexist, tuxedo-wearing, martini-sipping swagger. We’re ending that shit here and now.

And it’s completely foolish and stupid, by the way, for the film to say at the end of the closing credits that JAMES BOND WILL RETURN. No Time To Die is not a Marvel or a D.C. film.

Friendo to HE: “I can’t say for sure what the Bond producers will do, but there’s way too much money on the table for them to just say goodbye to James Bond. And Barbara Broccoli is on record as saying that the character won’t be a woman. Bond will be back, with a new actor (probably a Caucasian), and they’ll present it as a reboot.”

HE to Friendo: “But they’ve conclusively eliminated that possibility. The only way to get around this would be inject Marvel and D.C.-styled plotting.”

The Stalinist prison guard living inside Dear White People showrunner and writer Jaclyn Moore has emerged. For she’s attempting to persuade Netflix to zotz Dave Chappelle‘s The Closer because his remarks about trans people, she feels, are prejudicial and uncool.

Last night Moore stated on Twitter and Instagram that she’ll no longer work with Netflix after watching The Closer. “After the Chappelle special, I can’t do this anymore,” Moore wrote. “I won’t work for Netflix again as long as they keep promoting and profiting from dangerous transphobic content.”

If I was a Netflix honcho, I would reply to Moore as follows: “I hear you. You’re not altogether wrong. Chappelle’s views on trans women certainly don’t mirror our own, and we hope you and your community understand that. This aside, we deplore Stalinist censorship and don’t approve of efforts by anyone to muzzle anyone, least of all a brilliant comic whose entire career has been about considering the view of persons like yourself and occasionally saying ‘nope, not me, sorry.'”

HE to Moore: Anyone who partially describes Chappelle as a “goofy” comic doesn’t really hear him or get where he’s coming from, no offense. He’s not goofy or wacky, and he doesn’t live in a doo-wacky, doo-wacky, wah-wah world.

Chappelle: “In our country, you can shoot and kill a n***a, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.”

True story: “I was driving along Melrose Ave. near Doheny in late 1983. (Or was it early ’84?) I noticed that a new BMW in front of me had a framed license plate that came from a dealer in Westport, Connecticut, where I had lived only five years earlier and which is next to my home town of Wilton.

“I pulled alongside the Beemer and saw right away that the driver was Anne Baxter, who looked pretty good for being 60 or thereabouts. I rolled down my window and said, “Hey, Westport…I’m from Wilton!” And Baxter waved and smiled and cried out “Hiiiiii!” [Originally posted on 2.8.13.]

I realize that many Millennials and Zoomers have no idea who Baxter was, but eventually a generation will come along that has never heard of them. I can’t recall the name of the Westport dealership where Baxter bought her Beemer. For decades Baxter lived at 25 Knapp Street in Easton.

When it comes to nude scenes, women don’t have to worry about whether they’re showing attractive equipment when the director shouts “action!” But guys do, of course. In Terry Southern‘s “Blue Movie” a coarse, Joseph E. Levine-like producer named Sid Krassman is persuaded by a Stanley Kubrick-like director named Boris to perform in a sex scene, and Krassman is very worried about not having enough “heft” before filming begins. We’re all familiar with “some show, others grow.” We all want to be horses but male biology has never been especially obliging in that regard.

I caught Stephen Karam‘s The Humans (A24, 11.24) early yesterday afternoon. It won’t open for another six or seven weeks, but it was reviewed out of Toronto so it’s fair to jump in.

This is a highly respectable, surprisingly “cinematic” adaptation of Karam’s 2016 play, which he’s filmed unconventionally by emphasizing distance and apartness and narrow hallways and deep shadows, with a particular emphasis on material rot inside the apartment walls and a general sense of architectural foreboding and claustrophobia.

All the performances are top-notch, especially Jane Houdyshell‘s. Her performance as the maritally betrayed, care-worn mother of two grown daughters (played by Beanie Feldstein and Amy Schumer) is almost Oscar-level. It needs an extra “acting” scene or two, but she’s very good.

As usual I had trouble understanding all of Feldstein’s dialogue, as she always seems to emphasize emotional tonality and a certain sing-song manner of speaking as opposed to adhering to the old-fashioned practice of (I know this is a bad word but I’m going to say it anyway) diction.

Oh, and I didn’t believe for a single millisecond that South Korean heartthrob Stephen Yeun would partner with Feldstein, a seriously overweight woman in her late 20s…a woman who is headed for serious health problems down the road if she doesn’t follow in her brother’s path and drop some serious pounds. Feldstein and Yeun just aren’t a match, not in the actual world that I’ve been living in for several decades, but along with “presentism” and color-blind casting it’s also become a “thing” to cast obese actors in this or that role and then require their fellow cast members to pretend that obesity is fine and normal and “who cares?”

Schumer is fine as the depressed older sister.

The warmest emotional moment comes when the murmuring, blank-faced, Alzheimer-afflicted June Squibb (as grandma) joins in and says grace. Twice. This plus the Thanksgiving “what we’re thankful for” moments at the table are the only emotional touchstones in the whole film.

Richard Jenkins, Houdyshell’s husband, confesses to having lost his job (and therefore — did I hear this wrong? — his pension and insurance) due to an apparently brief affair with a coworker. In short, after being with a company for X number of years, they decided to cut his head off and destroy his life because of a single workplace sexual episode. And then the two daughters, after hearing of this, have to lay their #MeToo-ish judgments on withered old dad, along with their natural resentment for his having hurt their mother’s feelings, etc.

May I say something? 74 year-old Jenkins is too old to have had an affair. The workout club manager he played in Burn After Reading, maybe, or the guy in The Visitor or the gay FBI agent in Flirting With Disaster but his Humans dad is way, way past it. Grey haired, paunchy, neck wattle…forget it. In movies as in life you’re allowed to have crazy extramarital affairs up until your early 60s (if you look good), but not beyond that.

Let’s be honest here — this is an “artfully” shot (oooh, look…80% of the time Karam keeps the camera a good 20 to 30 feet away from the actors!) but VERY morose film about some seriously depressed people whose lives are almost certainly on the way down with no hope of escape or redemption. It isn’t long before you feel stuck — imprisoned — in this apartment, and in Karam’s play. No tension, no gathering story strands….it’s just slow-paced conversational misery and confession and gloom.

The Humans is certainly not comedic. Yes, there’s an element of horror in the building itself — it’s a terrible, TERRIBLE place to have a Thanksgiving dinner in, much less reside in, what with the groanings and stompings and filthy windows and pus bubbles and canker sores on the walls. And it’s not just this family of seven that’s stuck in this horrible environment — we’re all stuck in it, and there’s no getting out.

If they could somehow convince Dave Chappelle to host the ’22 Oscar telecast, and I mean with the understanding that (a) he gets to say any damn thing he wants in the opening monologue, and (b) that there might be two or three subsequent monologues during the show, depending on what comes to mind…

If they were to do that I swear to God the show would be saved from that horrible Soderbergh after-stink that has been in the air since last April. With “I have my own way of seeing things” Chappelle hosting, most of that deranged woke shit would just fly out the window.

This morning HE commenter “LAislikenowhere” wrote the following: “Blacks. 13% or 14% of the population. But look for 85% representation in every award category (nominated or presenting). Because woke. Most people are right to be a bit WTF about this overcorrection. I swear this shit is fermenting more racism than existed three years ago.”

But you know what Chappelle has said about this? I don’t have the exact quote but it goes something like “400 years of black people being shit on…we’ve earned a little over-correction.” I swear that Chappelle in white sneakers and smoking a cigarette could restore the Oscar brand — all by his lonesome he could save it. They should sign him for five years straight.

So I can speak with authority when I riff on George Clooney‘s adaptation of J.R. Moehringer‘s The Tender Bar (Amazon, 12.17), which debuts at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday, 10.10.