As I’ve said two or three times, I didn’t feel a great deal of affection for or emotional alignment with Andrea Riseborough’s performance as an all-but-incorrigible drunk in To Leslie, which relatively few have seen. Released by Momentum Pictures on 10.7.22, the film has earned a bit more than $27K so far.

To Leslie is, however, being re-released this weekend in the wake of Riseborough landing a Best Actress nomination, which was totally surprising and seat-of-the-pants. But there’s an odd (do I mean oddly hysterical?) side angle to this.

Hold onto your hats, but certain industry voices and at least one industry analyst are viewing the Riseborough insurgency with a degree of SJW alarm, suggesting that there was something (no invention or exaggeration) bluntly racist about it. “Racially-tinged cronyism”! A grass-roots campaign fortified by “a network of powerful (and, let’s be honest, white) friends in the Academy”!

From Matthew Belloni’s latest “What I’m Hearing” column:

If you have any sporting blood you have to at least half-admire the fact that Team Riseborough (led by actress Mary McCormack, wife of To Leslie director Michael Morris, with vigorous assistance from Frances Fisher) managed to land Riseborough a Best Actress nomination. They basically mounted a grass-roots social-network campaign, but one that may have been “illegal,” according to Belloni.

If the general consensus was, in an alternate universe, that the Riseborough campaign had elbowed aside a couple of deserving paleface actresses instead of Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler, does anyone think that Belloni or anyone else would be talking about illegality?

Renegade Oscar campaigns go all the way back to The Alamo’s Chill Wills. It’s sometimes a rough and tumble game, and there are always questions and quibbles about tactics and line-crossings. But from this moment on, Andrea Riseborough is a name, a star, even a legend.

Comment thread repulsion: “I was convulsing with misery and dying to escape but boiled down EEAAO isnt so much about generic verse-jumping (although it is) or the IRS audit or Ke Huy Quan’s nerd husband wanting a divorce or James Hong’s grandfather Gong Gong or the hot dog fingers, etc.

“Boiled down the central story tension is about the discomfort and denial that Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn, a laundromat owner, is going through about her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) and her lesbian relationship with Becky (Tallie Medel) and particularly Becky’s annoying hair style — a situation reflected in the multiverse by Joy’s Jobu Tupaki vs. Alpha-Evelyn and Jobu’s threatening, Darth Vader-ish behavior (“omnicidal” in the multiverse) blah blah.

“The big EEAAO catharsis manifests not so much with a resolution over the audit (although that’s welcome) as much as Evelyn’s ultimate acceptance and embrace of Joy’s queerness. Evelyn has travelled outside of and within herself to find peace with Joy not being straight.

“Kill me now with a steak knife.”

Friendo: “EEAAO has everything that Woke Twitter needs to feel safe. Bad white lady vs. good older Asian woman at the nominal center, augmented or flavored by a neutered dweeb-husband type plus gay daughter representing how people SHOULD think.

“The whole movie is the gay daughter chasing her mother around saying ‘why are you like this?’

“It’s basically everything we’ve all lived through from 2020 onward. CG purée made out of woke dogma. Or, alternately speaking, a 2013 Tumblr thread made into a movie.”

In a 1.23 World of Reel post that riffs on a 1.13.22 Daily Mail interview, Empire of Light director-writer Sam Mendes laments the bombing or under-performing of not only his own film** but other auteur-stamped features that opened during 2022’s award season.

The comment thread that follows is fascinating, but I was particularly stirred by a post from “Andrew”, who compares the Miramax-dominated realm of 1998 (when well-educated boomers and GenXers were avid followers of critically-approved award-season flicks) to the coarse downmarket reality of today.

Mendes:

Andrew:

** Empire of Light is HE’s choice for the best film of 2022. And I’m far from alone in my admiration.

<>/p>

Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale is a strange and shadowed study of self-imposed confinement. Brendan Fraser’s Charlie is a suffering sad sack, all right. I felt for the poor bloated guy, but what a tragedy. What a ghastly, grotesque experiment in plumbing the depths of regret and self-loathing, not to mention the drip-drip process of slow suicide.

Charlie’s choking-on-a-sandwich scene is one for the ages; ditto his eating binge + vomiting scene. Ditto his sweat-soaked, white-light death scene (i.e., my favorite moment in the film). James Whale and Todd Browning would be impressed; so would Montgomery Clift.

Obviously an intelligent filmed play, and mildly pleasurable for that. Fraser’s performance is a whopping, tearful freak show, but I felt the heart of it. And I was moved by that final gasp (partly a cry of release) when he finally goes to God. And yes, I’m proud that I got through it. I‘ve been terrified of watching this film for months, and now I’m past that hurdle. And I’ll never have to watch it again.

Robert Evans on aging, spoken directly to HE back in ‘96 or thereabouts: “Your hair turns gray, your nose gets softer, your ears get longer and your teeth get smaller.”

But noses don’t change their basic shape. Or at least mine never has. If you have, say, a button nose as a 22 year-old, you’re not going to end up with a Basil Rathbone nose when you’re 70.