In HE’s judgment, the decision of the Critics Choice members to ignore the obviously superior Babygirl in the Best Picture category, not to mention failing to nominate Nicole Kidman and HarrisDickinson in their respective acting categories, is a bad thing.
It is, in fact, conclusive proof that they’re mostly a congregation of prissy little status quo cowards ….subservient suck-ups, I mean, who haven’t the character or courage to stand up for a film that really and truly excites and provokes.
“Americans get the willies when it comes to strong sexual content,” a friend remarks. People like this are what’s wrong with the film world.
Conclave and Wickedlanded 11 nominations each, and Anora — clearly the best of the bunch — only landed four noms.
Wicked is fine — I felt agreeably rocked when I caught the NYC all-media — but please don’t drop to your knees and give this YA girl fantasy the top prize…no!
The CC empties nominated The Substance for Best Picture but blew off The Apprentice? We all love Hugh Grant but nominating his Heretic performance while blanking Sebastian Stan‘s Donald Trump, not to mention Jeremy Strong‘s Roy Cohn in the supporting category? C’mon!
Quentin Tarantino: “What’s the difference between television and a good movie?
“The first season of Yellowstone is like a good movie, and I ended up watching three seasons of it. While I was watching it, I was compelled. I was caught up in it. But at the end of the day it’s all just a soap opera. A buncha characters, you know their back-stories, but it’s the compelling-ness of a soap opera. You’re caught up in the moments as you’re watching them, but you won’t remember it five years from now.
“The difference is, I’ll see a good western movie” — Winchester 73, The Bravados, High Noon, The Wild Bunch — “and I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. I’ll remember this scene or that scene, and the fact it builds to an emotional climax to some degree, and that there’s a payoff. There’s not a payoff to this [Yellowstone-resembling] stuff.”
…in a way that totally contradicts or negates or at least counter-balances the way Paul Mescal is uncool. Look at Harris Dickinson barely holding his contempt for red-carpet journos in check.
And at 6’2″, he’s significantly taller than the 5’11” Mescal, who will play Paul McCartney to Dickinson’s John Lennon in Sam Mendes‘ extremely scary-sounding quartet of Beatle movies. Lennon and McCartney were roughly the same height, or in the general vicinity of 5’10”.
“Babygirl is an erotic thriller that is, unlike so many which came before, both erotic and thrilling. But what makes it novel is that the thrills are derived from the eroticism itself.
“Sure, much of the narrative thrust (hah) is borne of our lead not wishing to be caught by her family and colleagues in a sordid workplace affair, but that’s an afterthought to the focus of the film: two horned-up adults messily trying to reconcile their mutual animal attraction while also navigating and negotiating one another’s kinks.” — Scullyvision, 12.7.24.
Bob Dylan’s huge sprawling Malibu home (7118 Birdview Ave., which is close to Point Dume) is not presently threatened by the ongoing Malibu Fire (aka Franklin Fire).
The Franklin fire had been in the general vicinity of Malibu Canyon, Serra Retreat and Pepperdine University, but who knows what’s happening now?
The fire ignited just before midnight last Monday, and had consumed nearly 2,600 acres as of noon today. At one point it nearly tripled in size in just one hour. The containment factor is zero as we speak.
…in favor of a grayish hat that…I don’t know, kinda looks better. I need a head-warmer for the next few months and I just got sick of the black hat…time to let it go.
Two weeks ago (11.26) I posted a Twitter reaction to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (Searchlight, 12.25). I was free this morning to post a longer review but I couldn’t get into it. I felt I’d already said what was important in concise form, and that expanding with more words and sentences wasn’t full necessary on this particular day. Maybe tomorrow.
A Complete Unknown has at least three great scenes (more actually) so it definitely meets the Howard Hawks test. The first knockout is when Dylan sings “Song for Woody” to Woody Guthrie in his hospital room. The second is Dylan trying out a half-writt4n song before Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and his family. The third is Dylan playing “Blowing in the Wind” to Joan Baez in his or her Manhattan apartment, which is preceded by her “you’re kind of an asshole” line. The fourth is when the chorus of boos and howls greet Dylan and his electric bandmates at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival. I could go on.
“A Complete Unknown is a drama of scruffy naturalism, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as lope right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. Yet the feel — the effect — is that of a musical. You’d assume that might be true of any classic rock biopic, but in this case the film, with its beautifully haphazard song-cycle structure, truly is about Dylan and his music, and how the music changed everything.
“Each new song is a dramatic episode, whether it’s Dylan performing ‘Masters of War’ in the Gaslight Cafe just after the Cuban Missile Crisis or trying out ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with Baez in [her] living room or singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ at Newport, where the audience, by the end, sings along as if it was a song they always knew.”
This morning a friendo shared the excitement conveyed in Gleiberman’s rave. I asked him “what say ye to the pisshounds who are calling it a folkie jukebox musical or a lounge-act movie?”
Friendo response: “I only know that I loved watching it and am haunted by it. I haven’t read any of the other Complete Unknown reviews, but here’s what what the pisshounds are saying — they’re saying that boomer culture must be bashed, and that white-male rock culture must be bashed — we must take this all down a peg. So they’ll find a reason.”
My pre-Thanksgiving reaction was that I felt compelled to forgive its primarily structural, non-lethal shortcomings. I certainly felt an urge to brush them aside while chatting with a smattering of the AMC Lincoln Square cool kidz (including the Hoboken-residing twin OscarExpert bruhs) while outside theatre #7.
The tail end of the final sentence should read “so much of Unknownisspot–on, the real thing, a bell ringer. I was sorta kinda emotionally melting during the first half hour or so — literallyonthevergeoftears. Yes, I’ve been deeply invested in Dylan my entire life so I’m especially susceptible but still…
My second viewing of A Complete Unknown will be on Wednesday, 12.18 on an IMAX screen at the AMC Kips Bay in Manhattan.
Luigi Mangione, am intelligent guy, presumably understood all along that cameras are everywhere in NYC (including youth hostels), and that if he wanted to escape capture after shooting Brian Thompson in the back on 12.4.24, he needed to wear a blonde Beatle wig, dyed eyebrows, a paste-on blonde beard and tinted glasses at all times.
Did he wear a disguise? Of course not, and so yesterday he was popped at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. It’s almost as if he wanted to get caught.
The common theme is that Average Joes (subway riders + health-challenged people getting raw deals from United Health) are angry about the elite constantly giving them the short end of the stick.
People are not so much suffering these days from shitty health coverage as they are from obesity, sedentary life styles and poor eating habits.
20 minutes into last night’s viewing of Babygirl, I texted a friend who’d seen it a while back.
HE to friendo: “Babygirl is pretty good!” Friendo to HE: “Kidman amazing.” HE to friendo: “Halina Reijn is a really good director!” Friend to HE: “And Reijn wrote it too. Kidman heard about the script and sought it out. The trouble is that Americans have problems with sexual situations in movies.” HE to friendo: “It’s wild!!! I felt lit up inside….crazy, slurpy, over-the-waterfall sexual films are still being made. George Michael‘s ‘Father Figure’, INXS‘s ‘Never Tear Us Apart’…man! When sex is really good, it constitutes a form of madness. Babygirl doesn’t feel histrionic…it feels real and conversationally casual and verite…but at the same time it’s so highly charged during the sex scenes that I forgot about Nicole’s juvoderm injections…totally forgot about that.” Friendo to HE: “Nicole had a nicer, larger, more luscious ass in Eyes Wide Shut.” HE to friendo: “And your package is just as wang-schlongy as it was when you were 28? She’s doing just fine for 58.” Friendo to HE: “And poor Antonio Banderas.” HE to friendo: “When you get older and you’ve been with someone for 20 or 25 years, the hormonal magic just isn’t there anymore, and if your wife or partner is one of those ‘okay, I’m here so service me and no moody, half-staff erections’ types, sex can feel Sisyphusian…like digging ditches.” Friendo to HE: “When the husband confronts the extra-marital lover, it’s time to rassle!”
The thing I loved about the first two Robert Eggers films (The Witch and The Lighthouse, respectively released in 2015 and 2019) was the sense of restraint and subtlety, the slow-build aesthetic, getting freakier and freakier but on a very gradual basis, etc.
Then along came The Northman (’22) and it suddenly seemed as if the restraint aesthetic had largely been tossed out the window. I wasn’t a fan — it felt as if Eggers had fallen off a cliff.
Last night i tried watching Eggers’ Nosferatu (Focus, 12.25) and I was immediately alienated by the fact that it tries to bury you from the get-go in thick, gloopy horror atmosphere…an atmosphere of such foreboding, a vibe so thick and severe that all you get from it is a feeling of being smeared…an atmosphere that is so forced and extreme that nothing seems to really make sense.
I hated this idiotic vampire movie almost as much as I hated The Brutalist, and that’s saying something.
My random-ass notes don’t fully convey the annoyance I was feeling. Here they are:
“Lily Rose Depp looks too much like Johnny. What is she, 4’10” tall? Most of the color scheme is the same old bluish gray that dozens of other films have used. Dreary. The Carpathian villagers are stupidly eccentric. Same old Dracula shit.
“The voice of Orlok is labored, dopey, ridiculous. Eggers has forgotten about the necessity of a slow build. Nosferatu is so on the nose that it’s almost dull. Eggers really lays it on too thick.
“Irrational story. Portentous to a fault. Wait, hold on…I liked the naked teenage village girl on the horse! But Emma Corrin is too lezzy to play a straight married housewife.
“You’re right — Orlok has one humdinger of a moustache. Too much howling, wheezing, groaning and moaning. Simon McBurney biting off the head of a pigeon. Give me a break.
“You know who Orlok looks like a little bit? Luca Guadagnino if he were wearing horror makeup. Lily Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter has ony one color, one mood — complete submission to shuddering hysteria. In a word, boring.”
