I’m trying to think of an established, marquee-brand actor of color who would be a worse fit for this role in Antoine Fuqua‘s Emancipation, a fact-based, Civl War-era chase thriller currently being promoted as a Cannes Virtual Market title.
It’s not that the 51-year-old former superstar couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver a respectable performance, but the idea of the loaded, charismatic, alpha-vibey “Will Smith” attempting to merge with the real-life saga of an escaped African American slave, not to mention the subject of an historic photograph that not only showed he’d been horrifically beaten but opened the eyes of the would to the evils of slavery…I’m sorry but I just can’t buy the notion of Smith becoming this guy, no matter how hard he tries or what kind of approach or technique he pulls out of a hat.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael B. Jordan, Chadwick Boseman, Denzel Washington, Mahershala Ali, Don Cheadle, Samuel L. Jackson, Idris Elbva, Terrence Howard, Jamie Foxx — I could and would buy any one of these guys as “whipped Peter” without the slightest hesitation. But not Smith.
Working from a script by Willam N. Collage, Emancipation will reportedly begin shooting early next year.
Director-screenwriter Lewis John Carlino enjoyed a 15-year peak career period, starting with his screenplay for John Frankenheimer‘s Seconds (’66 — an adaptation of David Ely‘s same-titled novel) and more or less ending with the widely acclaimed The Great Santini (’79), which Carlino adapted and directed and which starred Robert Duvall.
In between were screenplays for The Fox (’67), The Brotherhood (’68), The Mechanic (’72), Crazy Joe (’74), The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (’76, which Carlino also directed), and screenplays for I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (’77) and Resurrection (’80).
Putting aside matters of taste and sensitivity, Jimmy Kimmel felt free to do blackface skits 20-plus years ago (Comedy Central’s The Man Show, a song from a 1996 comedy Christmas album) because he thought they were reasonably funny and nobody would say boo. Which is what happened until recently. The same calculation and risk assessment was made by Robert Downey, Jr and Ben Stiller when they made Tropic Thunder. And then the culture changed and now everyone who attempted this kind of risque comedy has to apologize. Not a biggie and certainly not an indication of toxic essence. The goal posts have simply been moved. Burt Lancaster wore black-guy makeup in Scorpio, a 1973 Michael Winner spy film. Big deal.
The other day I was driving and listening to “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” and marvelling at Country Joe McDonald‘s smooth twangy croon and Barry Melton‘s super-clean, sharp-as-a-blade guitar and that wonderful boppin’ organ, etc. “And finally blow out my brains…”
Bad relationship songs have cut both ways for a long time in the pop realm. Irritating or bad-vibe girlfriend songs by male blues singers and macho rock groups surged in the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s, but have pretty much disappeared this century. (Or am I not paying attention?)
Are bad-girlfriend songs even allowed these days? I can’t think of any but what do I know?
Classic-era bad girlfriend (or irksome women) songs: “You Talk Too Much” (Joe Jones, ’60), “Black Hearted Woman”, “Every Hungry Woman (The Allman Brothers, ’70), “I Hear You Knockin’” (Smiley Lewis, ’55), “Stupid Girl,” “Under My Thumb” (Rolling Stones, ’65), “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” (The Byrds, ’65), “96 Tears” (Question Mark & The Mysterians), “I Can See For Miles” (The Who, ’67), etc.
I don’t have the time or energy to explain what I’m on about. I’m not even sure if I know myself. This is basically a Chris Willman piece that I accidentally stepped into out of enthusiasm for Country Joe and “Martha Lorraine.”
GOP consultant Mike Murphy: “Biden is doing very well with older voters. Florida is…I don’t care if Wisconsin snaps back or somehow you say it’s Michigan…put aside the trouble in Arizona, which would be a big win for the Democrats…Florida will break [Trump’s] political neck so it oughta be priority #1. [And[ there’s absolutely no doubt that the state is in play now in a big way.”
HE agrees that Jon Stewart‘s Irresistable (Focus Features, streaming on 6.26) is bit too mild-mannered for its own good. It lacks provocation, nerve, now-ness. It’s not just that this rural political-spin comedy is set in ’17 or thereabouts, but the film itself seems to be have been made two or three years ago. Or 10 or 15. And yes, I agree that it’s not especially funny. It is, however, mildly amusing in an LQTM sort of way. And it’s a smooth package by any fair standard — nicely shot, performed, paced, edited.
So I don’t see the big problem. It’s something to stream (or not) this weekend if you’ve nothing better to do. You and your wife or girlfriend or pallies sit on the couch, pay the money, etc. And yet the critics have ganged up and beaten the shit out of this poor, harmless little film. The Rotten Tomatoes gang has rendered a 39% rating, and the Metacritics have given it a lousy 50% score. People will watch what they want to watch, of course, but score-wise this puppy is basically D.O.A.
I would only repeat that it’s not a criminal offense to be a tepid, mildly diverting chuckler or, you know, a nice, meh-level, ripple-free distraction. You know what I mean. It’s not a bother to watch it. It doesn’t irritate or piss you off. It just does the old soft shoe and wraps things up (credits included) within 102 minutes.
Set in some small town in rural farm country (Wisconsin? Iowa? does it matter?), it’s about an election for mayor of said town that becomes, for curious reasons, a wildly expensive, nationally hyped super-show.
Steve Carell and Rose Byrne are hot-shot political operators (Democrat and Republican respectively) who descend upon this small hamlet and stir things up. Chris Cooper is the soft-spoken candidate you want to see win, etc.
Stewart’s script was “partially inspired by the 2017 special election for Georgia’s 6th congressional district, where the Democratic and Republican parties and groups supporting them spent more than 55 million dollars combined — the most expensive House Congressional election in U.S. history.”
Agreed — watching Carell deliver another variation on his standard screen persona (a neurotic, intensely focused, clenched-fist fussbudget with a spoiled, effete attitude) has felt old or at least over-deployed for some time. I still think his peak moment happened in Little Miss Sunshine (14 years ago!) and that his last well-grounded, fully-charged performance happened in The Big Short (’15). But I didn’t mind him in Irresistable. I was just “okay, here we go again, not bad, whatever.”
And the film does deliver a hidden-card ending that’s…well, somewhat unexpected. At least it’s not Welcome to Mooseport.
Remember Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear“, which happened on the Washington mall in October 2010? (And which I attended.) The focus was on politics as usual, and the idea was more or less that “we, the people are better than all the left-right rancor so let’s calm down and listen to each pther.” Or something like that. Irresistable is drawn from a similar well.
The Irresistable supporting players — Byrne, Cooper, Mackenzie Davis, Topher Grace, Natasha Lyonne, Will Sasso, et. al. — are fine. Bobby Bukowski‘s cinematography and Bryce Dessner‘s score are fine. It’s all fine. It was partly filmed in Rockmart, Georgia, which is roughly 30 miles northwest of Atlanta.
28 years ago this scene from Abel Ferrara‘s Bad Lieutenant was par for the course. Harvey Keitel‘s bad cop is just another felon, etc. The little girl might report the details to her father (or grandfather) when he returns, but Keitel will skate regardless. Could anyone make such a film today? Probably not. If they did the two teenage thieves could no longer be African American, of course. How about young white ayeholes with ugly tats and shaved heads?
Two days ago a Winona Ryder interview, written by Laura Atkinson, appeared in the London Sunday Times (6.21). It contains two iffy quotes about Hollywood anti-Semitism, on top of which William Earl‘s 6.23 Variety piece about same omits the historical context regarding one of them.
Quote #1: Ryder tells Atkinson “there was a movie that I was up for a long time ago, it was a period piece, and the studio head, who was Jewish, said I looked ‘too Jewish’ to be in a blue-blooded family.”
HE question: What if this producer has told Ryder that she doesn’t look WASPy enough? There is such a thing as a fair-skinned, blue-eyed, descended-from-European royalty, to-the-manor-born appearance, no? Or is such an observation considered racist by today’s standards? Either way aren’t industry Jews allowed to say this to other industry Jews? It’s one thing for a WASP or Nordic or German-descended Hollywood hotshot to say “too Jewish,” but surely people of the tribe are allowed to share this opinion with one another…no?
Quote #2: Ryder repeats a mid-’90s story about running into a drunk, cigar-smoking Gibson at a Hollywood party (possibly at agent Ed Limato‘s annual Oscar shindig), and Gibson saying to Ryder, “You’re not an oven dodger, are you?”
HE comment: Obviously racist-creepy to the max, but Earl’s rewrite allows the lazy reader to presume that Gibson might have said this recently. In fact the same Ryder story appeared in a 12.16.10 GQ story by Alex Pappademas, to wit: “I remember, like, fifteen years ago, I was at one of those big Hollywood parties. And he was really drunk. I was with my friend, who’s gay. He made a really horrible gay joke. And somehow it came up that I was Jewish. He said something about ‘oven dodgers,’ but I didn’t get it. I’d never heard that before. It was just this weird, weird moment. I was like, ‘He’s anti-Semitic and he’s homophobic.’ No one believed me!”
So it happened around ’95 or thereabouts. Gibson suffered a career meltdown 11 years later when he was popped in Malibu for drunken driving and was famously quoted as having told a cop that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!” For what it’s worth, Gibson allegedly went into rehab soon after and apologized for his racist remarks and tried to mend fences. Not that anyone believed him.
This morning Gibson denied saying what Ryder has claimed.
In addition to a statue of the slave-owning George Washington being trashed last weekend, there is also some thought being given to allowing Lakota native Americans to do whatever they want with Mount Rushmore. The memories and legacies of all 19th and 18th Century slave owners are being trashed. Remember the statue-toppling that happened during China’s Great Cultural Revolution of the mid ‘60s?
A new Sony 4K UHD Bluray player with HDR/Dolby Vision arrived early this afternoon, and so I took a couple of mildly frustrating hours to set it up. It’s a fine, first-rate unit for the most part, but all TV tech pisses me off in one way or another. It’s actually the TV that’s bothering me but I’ll work out the kinks.
I love Jenny Slate but I’m also inclined to duck movies costarring Zach Galifianakis. (Okay, Birdman excepted.) So this is an ixnay, I’m afraid.
To go by descriptions, David Wnendt and Rebecca Dinerstein‘s The Sunlit Night (Quiver, 7.17) is a total Sundance flick — “a twee running-from-romance-only-to-find-it comedy set at that far Northern remove…the kind of movie that Sundance audiences love (the opening-night crowd laughed in all the right places) but hardly anyone goes to see in general release…the kind of crowd-pleaser that will be lucky to find a crowd.” — from Peter Debruge‘s Variety review, filed on 1.26.19.
