The great Daniel Craig has snagged the National Board of Review’s Best Actor trophy for his portrayal of a skittish, emotionally vulnerable yage man in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer….whoo-hoo!
Meanwhile the influence of the great Martin Landau was felt among the Spirit Awards’ gender-neutral Best Lead Performance nominees with the absence of The Brutalist‘s Adrien “cry me a river” Brody.
What does that tell you, that Brody’s a likely winner in the big game? The man wasn’t even nominated.
Anora‘s Mikey Madisonwas nominated in this category, however. Ditto Sebastian Stan for his performance as Donald Trump in The Apprentice….cheers!
Plus Anora snagged a total of six Spirit Award nominations, including one for Yura Borisov as Igor, the compassionate baldy with a soul.
On top of which the NBR guys totally blew off Emilia Perez.
Starting around the 11-minute mark, Jane Fonda feigns ignorance about crazy woke extremities (“I’ve never heard about men getting pregnant…who is the far left?”), and Bill Maher explains what they are, where they’re at and what they seem to believe in.
At the 1:33 mark, Martin Landau conveys his opinion about Adrien Brody‘s profuse first-act weeping scene in The Brutalist. Okay, he’s not talking about Brody but he may as well be.
“Only bad actors show you emotion. How a character hides his feelings tells us who he is. No one tries to cry in life. Everyone tries to hide it.”
And yet Brody was obviously excellent in The Pianist. So let’s get down to it — only bad directors urge their actors to openly cry, or allow their actors to do so. The bad guy, in short, is Brutalist helmer Brady Corbet, not Brody.
And Adrien Brody‘s performance as Lászlo Tóth, the period film’s profusely weeping, cigarette-smoking, heroin-shooting protagonist, has won the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Actor prize.
I’ve only seen the first half of The Brutalist (really couldn’t stand it) but I know what this performance primarily is, and this is an outrageous decision.
Virtuoso Nickel Boys auteurist RaMell Ross won for Best Director. If Ross had been handed some kind of Best Audacious First Film trophy, fine. But Nickel Boys doesn’t work and actually becomes quite tiresome. This was a broad consensus view at Telluride so don’t tell me.
I haven’t seen Mike Leigh‘s Hard Truths so no opinion about Marianne Jean-Baptiste winning for Best Actress…congrats.
A Real Pain‘s Kieran Culkin won the Best Supporting Actor trophy — the only NYFCC decision I wholly agree with.
Carol Kane was named Best Supporting Actress for playing music teacher Carla Kessler in Nathan Silver‘s Between the Temples. Call me superficial, but I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to invest in the once-svelte Jason Schwartzman playing a chunky-bod. (He’s even fatter in Queer.)
Sean Baker won a Best Screenplay awards for Anora….he should have won for Best Director, and Anora should have won Best Film….the NYFCC are really a bunch of eccentric assholes this year!
…against the descendants of all the senior producers and creatives on the original The Wizard of Os (’39). Elphaba is suing for damages in the hundreds of millions because the Margaret Hamilton version of the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West is defamatory, plain and simple. Everyone understands this, but Louis B. Mayer sure didn’t. He didn’t understand that young Elphaba was a wonderful person at heart…a school-age girl who was unfortunately treated with cruelty during her time at Shiz University.
And following in the path of Glenn Powell‘s character in Twister, relegated to the sidelines during the action-packed climax, there ain’t no savior prince in the new Snow White (Disney, 3.21) — this is apparently a militant, storm-the-barricades show aimed at progressive women of all ages. (The script is by Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson.) Okay, there’s the kind-hearted, mild-mannered Jonathan character (Andrew Burnap) as well as the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia)), but, like Powell, these are second-banana characters.
Blurry but funny. Peter O’Toole was 74 at the time. This was taped sometime in early December of ’06, the subject being Roger Michell‘s Venus. O’Toole passed in 2013 at age 81. The great PeterFinch (aka “Finchy“) died in ’77 at age 60….heart attack.
I don’t think often about the fun I occasionally had during my drinking days, but every now and then I do.
By “like this,” the drama teacher meant not slender or rail-thin, a physical state that all competitive actresses aspire to whether they want to admit it or not.
What the drama teacher also meant, I suspect, was that Winslet wasn’t so much “fat” as zaftig (curvy, fleshy, wide-hipped). During the filming of TitanicJames Cameron allegedly referred to Winset as “Kate weighs-a-lot.” I’ve personally never said an unkind word to any woman’s face for the misdemeanor of being a bit hefty or bulky, but I’ve held critical thoughts about such qualities for nearly my whole life. Everyone has.
Catherine Breillat made a film about a French obese teen and called it Fat Girl. Was that a size-ist slur or a statement of fact?
Things have changed over the last 30-plus years, but women of size and bulk are still not generally regarded as being in the 8, 9 or 10 categories…be honest. Nobody wants to be so impolite or coarse to put such women down for this, and it’s certainly permissible if this or that guy finds “big girls” attractive…knock yourselves out.
It’s noteworthy that the 60 Minutes interviewer (Cecilia Vega, who blends ardent feminism with standard obsequiousness) didn’t ask Winslet to explain or reiterate her own statement of self-condemnation for the crime of having worked with Woody Allen (Wonder Wheel) and Roman Polanski (Carnage).
Winslet: “It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful.” I’ll tell you what was disgraceful back in ’21 — knee-jerk #MeToo Stalinist sentiments from Johnny-come-lately, trying-to-curry- favor activist actresses.
Three months ago Edward Berger‘s Conclave played at Telluride Film Festival’s Werner Herzog theatre (8.30.24)…glorious. I sat in the second or third row…elated, throttled, tumescent. Now I’m watching it with headphones on my 15″ Macbook Pro…parked inside an under-heated food court cafeteria on the northbound 95 in Darien. I love it no less and am very happy that I own the Amazon digital file, but you know Berger is quietly weeping as he reads this.
