I respected Get Out in a limited sort of way. Over and over I called it a racially-stamped riff on Ira Levin‘s The Stepford Wives — no more and no less. My basic reaction was “it’s good enough but people need to calm down, especially those drooling lunatics who are claiming with a straight face that it should win the Best Picture Oscar….good God.”
That all happened a year ago. Seems weird in hindsight, no? Now it’s early ’19 and in the wake of those Us trailers and the newbie for the forthcoming CBS All Access Twilight Zone, people are starting to walk back their Jordan Peele enthusiasm. To some extent at least. I can sense it with my insect antennae. I think Josh Hadley’s anti-Peele YouTube rant overdoes it, but after being kicked, jeered and spat upon by the Get Out crazies it’s a relief to hear someone go 100% negative without any hesitation or qualms.
A producer friend recently spoke with an Academy voter (a guy) about Roma and the Best Picture crunch:
“He said there’s a strong contingent of Academy members voting against Roma, because of Netflix. The feeling was that by giving Netflix the Best Picture win, it could be a vote for streaming and against theatrical releases. He felt that Netflix would use the win to pull more and more films into the streaming universe and thereby be voting for the beginning of the end of theatrical film releases. He also said there was a lot of resentment for the amount of money spent on ads by Netflix (30$ million?) which even in a typically ferocious campaign season, felt like someone trying to buy his vote.”
An anonymous editor speaking to Indiewire‘s Bill Desowitz: “I haven’t seen Roma because Alfonso Cuarón took an editing credit without ever having touched the Avid and that offended me so deeply that I won’t go near the film. It was non-union so he, not being a member of MPEG, was able to get away with it.
Also: “I think the lousy field of candidates for this year’s Best Picture Oscar could be a result of that push to include people who really have not yet developed the taste level or artistic maturity that comes with experience.” He’s referring, of course, to the “New Academy Kidz.”
Ex-Monkee Peter Tork has died at age 77. I’m glad he lived a relatively long life and enjoyed a degree of financial comfort, but God, the poor fella — famous in the mid to late ’60s (actually ’66 to ’71) for being one of the ignoble Monkees, but eternally branded, despite having worked as an actual musician, as a kind of buffoon — an amiable performer who’d forever be tainted as a sell-out.
Tork’s Wiki page: “Stephen Stills had auditioned for the new television series about four pop-rock musicians but was turned down because the show’s producers felt his hair and teeth would not photograph well on camera. They asked Stills if he knew of someone with a similar ‘open, Nordic look,’ and Stills suggested Tork audition for the part. Tork got the job and became one of the four members of the Monkees, a fictitious pop band in the mid-1960s, created for a television sitcom written about the fictitious band. Tork was the oldest member of the group.”
The latest alt.sexuality acronym is LGBTQIA. Remember the good old days when it was just LGBT? Then along came Q — questioning — which I never really understood. Every gay person I’ve ever known has told me they knew their orientation when they were five, six or seven. So if you’re “questioning” you’d have to be…what, three or four? That or extremely indecisive. It just doesn’t seem as if adults walking around and questioning their sexual identity could ever be all that numerous. Now the culture has added I — intersex — and A — asexual or allied. I’m sorry but what’s intersex? I’m honestly stumped. I understand asexual and allied.
It’s been suggested that the sooner Jussie Smollett offers a full mea culpa and falls on his sword, the better. Issue an unqualified apology to all the actual victims of racist or anti-gay hate attacks and also (I know this sounds extreme but he may as well be comprehensive) to the reprehensible MAGA community. He just needs to come clean, drop to his knees, weep, beg forgiveness, and announce that he’s entered therapy. Then he needs to write a magazine article about what happened. And then go on a talk-show and speaking tour. After he pays the fine and serves the time, he needs to move to Paris or Barcelona or Berlin. He could become a stand-up comic, billing himself as Jussie “lying ayehole” Smollett.
Raising myself off the couch to a standing position is too horrible to contemplate, and so I sit for hours on end. Everything is anguish and occasional agony. If I drop something on the floor I leave it there — it’s too painful to bend over and pick it up. (Yesterday my iPhone sat on the living room floor for three hours.) I don’t speak words any more — I moan and groan and occasionally wail like a 17 year-old kid who’s been bayoneted on the battlefield. Yesterday I went to a nearby West Hollywood chiropractor, but he told me there’s no real chiropractic solution for bruised ribs — I just need to wait until they heal. I’m stuck. If only I was friendly with a couple of drug dealers. Even one.
5:50pmupdate: Okay, it doesn’t hurt quite as much as it has over the last two days.
An intensely orange, Dick Tracy-like trenchoat over a red shirt and red, heavily-pleated pants? Worn by a guy who has red fucking hair? Remember when GQ cover subjects would model clothing you could actually see yourself wearing in this or that social milieu? This is pathetic.
After his debut in 1939’s Golden Boy, William Holden became a mid-range Paramount contract player who appeared in generic fare throughout the ’40s. The legend is that Holden broke through at age 32 in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard (and he did to some extent), but his career didn’t really take off until Stalag 17 (’53), for which he won a Best Actor Oscar. After that Billy Wilder film Holden was regarded worldwide as a major heavyweight movie star.
Over the next six years he made ten films that definitely mattered — The Moon Is Blue, Executive Suite, Sabrina, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Country Girl, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Picnic, The Proud and Profane, The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Horse Soldiers. He kept working until his death in ’81, but from The Horse Soldiers on (or over the next 22 years) Holden only made six genuinely good films — The Wild Bunch, Wild Rovers, Breezy, Network, Fedora and S.O.B. Okay, seven if you want to count The Towering Inferno.
The idea of a guy nudging 80 becoming President…I’m sorry but it just doesn’t feel right. It’s not who Bernie is or what he stands for. Bernie started something big and persuasive three or four years ago, and now he’s not the only Democratic contender who believes in socialist-style approaches and remedies for the usual social ills. Full respect and stiff salute, but the Bernie brand can’t work again in ’20.
Together we can defeat Donald Trump and repair the damage he has done to our country. We need leadership that brings us together – not divides us up. pic.twitter.com/iCSNhM2FXD
After reading those brusque comments supplied by Scott Feinberg‘s “Brutally Honest Oscar Voter,” I found an even lazier, more intemperate, more short-fusey Academy member (his identity is so secret I can’t even mention the branch he belongs to) and got his reactions to Feinberg’s guy.
Rocketman (Paramount, 5.31) might approach the success of Bohemian Rhapsody, but I doubt it. It certainly won’t match or exceed it. Because while Rami Malek sounded almost exactly like Queen’s Freddie Mercury (his “voice” was a mixture of his own, Freddie himself and a gifted imitator), Taron Egerton sounds like a mediocre Elton John wannabe singing on a cruise ship. The effect doesn’t work, and the movie is going to suffer because of it.
On top of which I hate Egerton’s face — one look and I knew it needed punching — and I really hated those two fucking Kingsman movies and that godawful Robin Hood movie, which earned a 15% Rotten Tomatoes score and lost møney besides.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted an oral-history piece about how Harvey Weinstein‘s hard-charging and in some ways ethically shady Best Picture campaign for Shakespeare in Love overwhelmed the campaign for DreamWorks’ Saving Private Ryan.
It’s called “‘Harvey Always Wanted More’: Weinstein, Spielberg and the Oral History of the Nastiest Oscar Campaign Ever.”
Hollywood Elsewhere doesn’t dispute that Weinstein’s Oscar-season blitzkreig was a key factor in Shakespeare in Love winning the Best Picture Oscar, but I’ve always suspected that the main reason was the fact that Saving Private Ryan caused its own defeat.
One, Ryan actually did peak during the 24-minute D-Day Omaha Beach sequence, and two, director Steven SpielbergCHEATED HIS ASS OFF with that early time-jump cut that suggests the old coot having an emotional breakdown in the Omaha Beach cemetery is either Tom Hanks or Edward Burns.
“Hanks is dead, the awful pretentious voice of the actor playing General Marshall is treacling away, we hear ole Honest Abe’s letter again and I am now waiting for the shot of Ed Burns with the big-boobed girls back at the cemetery.
“Why do I know that is coming? Well, only two members of the squad are left [at the end of the film], Burns and the cowardly translator, and I know it can’t be him because he was not with Hanks and the squad during the twenty-four minutes of glory at the start of the film. So ithastobeBurns standing there among the graves.
“Now the morphing shot comes, and I am looking at the old face of Matt Damon at the cemetery.
“Well, you can’t do that. Don’t you see, hewasn’tfuckingthere. He knew nothing of the attack on the beach, knew nothing of the odyssey that followed, and he never had a chance to hear about it. The only spare moment he had was when he was telling us all about his brothers and the ugly girl and setting the barn on fire.
“When he was great, and he was great, Spielberg was a phenomenal storyteller. All gone. That or he doesn’t care.”
“The greatest offense comes from Harrison Young‘s awful over-acting as the 75-year-old Ryan. His face is stricken with guilt as he shuffles through the Omaha Beach cemetery, and he walks like a 90-year-old afflicted with rheumatism.
