Jeffrey Wells …with a little touch of Pietro Annigoni’s JFK portrait for Time magazine back in ‘62 or thereabouts This is what Bell’s Palsy has done since last weekend. For the time being my looks are destroyed — I can’t smile, my right eye sags, dogs howl when I pass by.
Anne Thompson’s cautious and temperate instincts have led her to rank Lily Gladstone as a fifth-place contender in the Best Actress race despite Lily’s recent Gotham and NYFCC wins. This means something. Thompson is no provocateur in the HE mode, no radical firebrand. She never walks upon unsafe ground.
That’s how long I need to determine whether a film is any good or not. Actually closer to two or three minutes. Same thing when reading a script — the first five to ten pages tell the tale.
Many people (some from the HE commentariat) say “no!…ignore your intuitions and instincts and tough it out…you owe this to the filmmaker.” Well, that’s one way to respond but it’s a terrible thing to sit through a film that you know is doomed from the start.
Many times I’ll perceive early on that a film is iffy or unsure of itself but is nonetheless up to something interesting or thoughtful or even a bit strange. These are the movies I’ll stay with despite the speed-bumps.
In a 2015 New Yorker interview with John Lahr, May December star Julianne Moore explained her acting strategy: “I always have to find the place where a character cries,” she said.
I became so annoyed by Todd Haynes’ half-campy, Savannah-based domestic drama that I quickly stopped caring why Moore’s character, Grace, who is somehow able to afford a fairly flush lifestyle in a beautiful seaside home on the modest earnings of a dessert-baking business, was upset about anything.
But Moore’s first crying scene is definitely weird because she’s weeping hysterically over one of her clients canceling a cake order. My first thought was “a cancellation hiccup causes a major meltdown? God, she’s a borderline psycho.”
Regional friendo (received last night):
HE answer: There’s no way SAG/AFTRA and the New Academy Kidz would give a Best Actor Oscar to a white Italian actor playing a brute beast who slaps his wife around.
Because of this turgid, drooling, over-baked capsule review of May December (and I’m saying this as someone who’s struggled manfully to restrain my own turgid tendencies), I’ve decided to regard askance anything written by Travis Woods. He’s one of those writers who just jumps off the high-dive board and goes kersplash!! And I’ve suffered through May December so don’t tell me.
I’m not dumping on Woods out of malice, but to explain why I’m not buying this Brian DePalma story…no way.
Two days ago Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted to having read the proverbial writing on the wall and more or less bullhorned the following “whoa, Nellie!” message to Disney wokesters, which I’ve conveyed here in HE-styled rhetoric:
“All right, enough, dammit…we have to face facts…the Critical Drinker has been right all along and we have to acknowledge the state of things, or at least I do…the new Disney law is “no more woke propaganda in our movies”
“We’ve clearly alienated Joe and Jane Popcorn in the parenting community and we really have to get back to being good old family–friendly Disney, and in case you’re not reading me, we’ll henceforth be re-assessing the advisability of using LGBTQIA and maybe even progressive femme-bot material in our animated features. We’ll be taking it one step at a time.”
Sidenote: All hail Le Monde’s Arnaud Leparmentier, whose 11.29 article laid the situation on the line in a way that Variety or The Hollywood Reporter would never do.
Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a Reagan appointee, was a moderate rightie — a “constitutional conservative” — but she was no Amy Coney Barrett. Nor was she Ruth Bader Ginsburg. My hazy recollection is that she wasn’t too bad overall. Regrets about O’Connor’s passing, but then again she led a full life and made it to age 93.
HE agrees wholeheartedly with Michael Sherman, but his 12.1 anti-Disney Substack article doesn’t mention their forthcoming Snow White movie, which has been described by Rachel Zegler as being about Snow White becoming a leader in the medieval struggle for feminine fulfillment. New song lyrics: “If I’m lucky a prince will never save me / and I will then shape my own destiny.”
I’m not saying that yesterday’s sudden loss of control of the facial muscles on the right side of my face and my mouth in particular…I’m not saying I look like Charles Laughton in The HHunchback of Notre Dame (‘39) but half of my facial features, which were fairly top-of-the-line when I was younger and at least pleasant in recent years…my looks are pretty much gone now, and if I was scheduled to see Sutton today I would be worried about alarming her. In the space of 24 hours I have suddenly become a mildly grotesque figure…I am now Richard III…dogs bark and howl as I pass by.
Before:
After:
Bonus points for anyone who can identify which film the above monster-in-the-mirror images are from. No, it’s not Martin Scorsese’s The Big Shave.
The exact same cosmic or celestial shift in the cathedral of the soul was experienced by Joseph Goebbels, Moses, Mouse (my Siamese cat who died of pancreatic cancer over 20 years ago), Amelia Earhart and Mother Teresa. Ascended or descended…the soup is hot, the soup is cold.
