Nothing to do with Barbie will ever be funny…ever. Certainly not in terms of Jimmy Kimmel‘s opening monologue this evening. What abotu this movie is the least bity amusing or laugh-worthy? Nothing. All I can think of is that famous shot of that reprehensible pink lampshade guy. Talk about depressing.
Barbie is not funny, and it never will be.
Problematic Bill McCuddy Barbie joke, written for Kimmel:
Kimmel: This year I’m on a first-name basis with every woman in the audience. I’ll prove it.
(CUT TO Margot Robbie) Hi Barbie.
(CUT TO Meryl Streep) Hi Barbie.
(CUT TO Octavia Spencer) Hi Barbie.
(CUT BACK TO KIMMEL, HE’S NOW JUST RANDOMLY POINTING AROUND THE ROOM)
Hi Barbie, Hi Barbie, Hi Barbie.
I also know some of the men. (sheepishly) Hi Ken. (CUT TO Ryan Gosling)
I also know Alan. Where’s he?
(CUT TO THIRD KODAK BALCONY)
(Michael Cera is waving his hands) Cera: “I’m up here!!!! Jimmy! Jimmy?” Kimmel: (IGNORING) I guess he couldn’t make it.
I fell hard for Cameron Crowe‘s Almost Famous nine or ten months before it opened in September 2000, or when I came across a 1998 draft of the script (called “Untitled”, 168 pages). I didn’t just like or admire it — I was blown away, head over heels.
I was generally delighted with the film but it didn’t get me off like the script did because it felt a little too compressed here and there. It ran 122 minutes, in part because Dreamworks producer Walter Parkes kept insisting on “shorter, shorter, shorter.” Plus the film didn’t include a “Russell Hammond confesses all to Rolling Stone editors” scene that I thought was perfect.
I’ve had Almost Famous on my best of the 21st Century list for two decades now as it’s 90% of a great film, but I didn’t completely tumble until the 162-minute “director’s cut” bootleg Bluray came out in 2011.
I attended a big Almost Famous press shebang during the 2000 Toronto Film Festival, and a moment from that event is burned into my memory. I was shuffling into the main restaurant where the party was taking place, and in a center booth I saw L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan chatting with Crowe and then-wife Nancy Wilson. And I was almost startled by a look in Turan’s eyes — a look of absolute rapture that reminded me of a ninth-grader swooning over his prom date and dreaming about some act of exquisite erotic kindness that might be in the offing later that evening.
Turan, in short, was making goo-goo eyes at Crowe…talking to the man of the moment was filling him with awe and joy and ecstasy, and his eyes…his eyes were doing ring-a-ding-ding backflips. Turan was in love…completely fluttering with feeling.
And at that very moment I made a mental note to myself, to wit: “Don’t ever give anyone slavish goo-goo eyes for any reason or under any circumstance…show respect and admiration but keep your cool…hold on to your dignity. Because if you don’t show a modicum of restraint the filmmaker will remember those goo-goo eyes, and if you don’t goo-goo him the next time he’ll know you don’t like the new film as much as the older one, or he’ll conclude that you were being a phony the first time.”
Let this be a lesson to us all. The next time you find yourself chatting with someone you genuinely admire, don’t flash the goo-goo eyes!
Remember that climactic boardroom scene in The Social Network when Mark Zuckerberg says to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (aka “the Winkelvi”) — “If you could’ve invented Facebook, you would’ve invented Faceook“?
Yesterday Tatiana Siegel’s shocking 3.9.24 Variety story explored a claim by Frisco author Simon Stephenson that The Holdovers director Alexander Payne and/or the film’s screenwriter, David Hemingson, plagiarized portions of Frisco almost on a scene-by-scene, line-by-line basis.
Hollywood Elsewhere’s response to Stephenson: “If you could’ve written The Holdovers, you would’ve written The Holdovers.”
HE read a 2013 draft of Frisco this morning, and I’m not claiming that Stephenson is totally out to lunch on this matter. Yes, there’s a cetain thematic similarity and similar story strands shared by Frisco and The Holdovers.
Frisco is essentially a spiritual rebirth story in which Jeff Willis, a morose 50something Seattle pediatrician, is reawakened by Amy Morrison, a 15 year old terminal cancer sufferer, and how it all comes together during a brief shared trip to San Francisco.
In certain ways The Holdovers tells the same kind of story — Paul Giamatti‘s Paul Hunham, an ascerbic classics professor at a private Massachusetts boys school, experiences a spiritual reawakening while looking after a bright but contentious senior, Dominic Sessa‘s Angus Tully, and how it all comes together during a late-second-act trip to Boston over the Christmas holidays.
And yet Frisco and The Holdovers are also strikingly similar to (a) Johanna Spyri‘s Heidi (i.e., young girl reawakens the humanity of her grumpy grandfather), (b) Gus Van Sant and Mike Rich‘s Finding Forrester (’00 — a talented young writer of color reawakens a hermit-like, J.D. Salinger-like writer, and (c) Martin Brest and Bo Goldman‘s Scent of a Woman (’92 — private-school kid reawakens the heart and soul of a bitter retired military man).
Another similarity that hit me this morning was (d) Morton DaCosta, Betty Comden and Adolph Green‘s Auntie Mame (“Live a little!”) except this time the Rosalind Russell role is handled by Amy, the cancer kid. But the mission is basically the same.
Just as Mame eventually saves Patrick Dennis (author of the original 1955 book, and played by Roger Smith) from a life of conservative suffocation, Amy the cancer victim saves the morose and timid Willis from a life of terminal resignation and boredom.
For me, the key difference between Frisco and The Holdovers is that the latter is wise and well written and recognizably human and specific in dozens of different ways while Frisco is somewhat generic and plodding, not to mention awkwardly written here and there and occasionally speechy in a way that almost makes you groan.
I was a script reader in the mid to late ’80s, and I’ve read hundreds of interesting but not-quite there scripts in my time. Frisco is definitely one of these.
It’s not awful but it is, I feel, on the mediocre side. It needs a major rewrite or whatever. And it’s really whorish, I feel, to use a terminally ill teenager as the driving spiritual engine of the piece. And to throw in the lore of San Francisco beat generation mythology (City Lights bookstore, Jack Kerouac, Neal Casady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Howl”) as icing on the spiritual cake….well, okay, but it struck me as a bit precious.
Frisco is primarily composed of a series of vaguely awkward, on-the-nose, “this is who I am and what I want or need” scenes…essentially a lot of cliched material about a midlife crisis of the spirit (including an impending divorce) and how a 50ish guy is gradually rescued.
The on-the-nose theme of Frisco is “stop being morose, celebrate your time here on earth, we’ll all be dead soon enough.”
I'm a bad handicapper as I always get too emotionally wrapped up in the nominees that I want to see win as opposed to those that seem fairly likely to win. So I asked Cait (Jett's wife, Sutton's mom) for her Vanity Fair ballot, and here it is...Cait is brilliant, highly analytical and always wins at board games. Consider her calls or not.
Login with Patreon to view this post
I’ve just finished reading a mind-blowing Variety article by Tatiana Siegel (posted on 3.9 at 10:13 am) that contains chapter-and-verse charges of plagiarism against either Holdovers director Alexander Payne or Holdovers screenwriter David Hemingson, or both.
The particulars are too voluminous to be recounted or even compressed here, but the basic allegation is that Payne read a very similar 2013 script by Stephenson called Frisco, which was on the 2013 Black List roster, and that (this is directly from the Siegel article) “Payne had [read] the Frisco script in both 2013 and again in late 2019, right before Payne approached Hemingson about collaborating on [The Holdovers]. That contention seems to be backed up by emails involving several Hollywood agencies and producers.”
The Siegel article contains a 33-page “Introductory Document” titled “FRISCO and THE HOLDOVERS,” and it pains me to admit that it seems — emphasis on the “s” word — fairly damning in its particulars.
Speaking for myself I find the mere suspicion of the great Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska, Downsizing, The Holdovers) having deliberately engaged in out-and-out plagiarism just inconceivable. It can’t be what it seems. It just can’t be.
First-rate auteurs and their collaborators simply don’t behave this recklessly and foolishly, especially when there’s a paper trail and chapter-and-verse evidence this vivid and specific. Stealing from a 2013 Black List script is just insanity…self-destructive insanity.
Showbiz 411’s Roger Friedman is “hearing rumors” that Kimberly Peirce (BoysDon’tCry, Stop/Loss) is either hoping or planning to direct a remake of Lawrence Kasdan‘s Body Heat, the 43 year-old, sexually charged, Floridian film noir that existed in a world that didn’t have air conditioners.
Heat costarred William Hurt and Kathleen Turner as thirtysomething lovers Ned Racine, a not-smart-enough attorney, and Matty Walker, a married, heavy-breathing sociopath who’s breathtaking in bed. Ted Danson, J. A. Preston, Mickey Rourke and Richard Crenna (as Matty’s rich husband) costarred.
Friedman speculates that Racine and Walker could be played by some hot hetero twosome. Perhaps Matthew McConaughey and Florence Pugh, he imagines.
But of course, if and when Peirce, a queer filmmaker, manages to arrange funding for a Body Heat remake, the extra-marital lovers would be women…certainly. Given the same-sex storylines being favored in elite film circles these days (Love Lies Bleeding, Drive Away Dolls), there’s no way the new Body Heat lovers would be straight.
Friendo: “First they did the ‘remake every movie with a black person’ and now they’re doing ‘remake every movie with a gay person’ You know what would be good with four gay people? Who’sAfraidofVirginia Woolf.”
HE approves of The Last Days of Saigon, a forthcoming five-part series about numerous desperate, last-minute scrambles to save lives as North Vietnamese forces approached the South Vietnamese capital in April 1975.
Phillip Noyce will direct with showrunner Stuart Beattie having written major portions of the script.
Noyce’s The Quiet American (’02), a first-rate remake of the 1958 original, was set and shot in Vietnam. The Last Days of Saigon will reportedly be shot mostly in Australia with some location work set aside for Southeast Asia.
The series will presumably play like a dramatic narrative rendering of Rory Kennedy‘s excellent doc, Last Days in Vietnam.
“I felt profoundly moved and even close to choking up a couple of times while watching Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam yesterday at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
“The waging of the Vietnam War by U.S forces was one of the most tragic and devastating miscalculations of the 20th Century, but what happened in Saigon during the last few days and particularly the last few hours of the war on 4.30.75 wasn’t about policy.
“For some Saigon-based Americans it was simply about taking care of friends and saving as many lives as possible. It was about good people bravely risking the possibility of career suicide by acknowledging a basic duty to stand by their Vietnamese colleagues and co-workers and loved ones (even if these natives were on the “wrong” or corrupted side of that conflict) and do the right moral thing.
“Kennedy’s incisive, well-sculpted (if not entirely comprehensive) 98-minute doc is basically about how a relative handful of Americans stationed in Saigon — among them former Army Captain Stuart Herrington, ex-State Department official Joseph McBride and former Pentagon official Richard Armitage — did the stand-up, compassionate thing in the face of non-decisive orders and guidelines from superiors (particularly U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Graham Martin) who wouldn’t face up to the fact that the North Vietnamese had taken most of South Vietnam by mid-April and would inevitably conquer Saigon.
“It was obvious as hell to almost anyone with eyes and ears, and yet Martin and other officials, afraid of triggering widespread panic, wouldn’t approve contingency plans for evacuation until it was way, way too late. So the above-named humanitarians and their brethren decided it was “easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask permission” and did what they could — covertly, surreptitiously, any which way — to save as many South Vietnamese as they could.”
Hugh Grant to the aggressively shallow, plus-sized Ashley Graham during last year’s red-carpet segment: “The whole of humanity is here…it’s vanity fair” — an allusion to William Thackeray’s 1848 novel about the social pursuits of quarter-of-an-inch-deep, upper-crust types in London…diversions of the idle and undeserving rich, signifying absolutely nothing.
Hulu intends to produce an eight-episode series about the wrongful prosecution and incarceration of femme fatale Amanda Knox, who will be played by Margaret Qualley.
The problem is that Qualley is too old for the part. Knox was 20 when Italian authorities in Perugia became convinced that she might have murdered her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in late ’07 — Knox was a foxy young flower back then, freshly bloomed. The attractive Qualley is 30 and looks it — she might have passed for 20 five years ago, but she’s no spring chicken now.
On top of which the Knox story has been thoroughly mined and explored over the last 13 years or so. How many times can average Joe and Janes be expected to show interest?
In 2011 saw the release of a negligible Lifetime TV movie, Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy. Two years later came “Waiting To Be Heard”, a Knox-authored memoir. In 2014 Michael Winterbottom‘s not-so-hot Face Of An Angel opened. In 2016 a Netflix documentary, Amanda Knox, appeared. And then, of course, came Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater (’21), which is largely based on the Knox saga.
The Hulu series is basically about Knox and husband Chris Robinson, who felt exploited by Stillwater, wanting to make some dough. They’re exec producing along with Qualley, Warren Littlefield, Lisa Harrison, Ann Johnson and Graham Littlefield. Monica Lewinsky is also exec producing.
McCarthy responded to the gist of Amanda Knox‘s complaint about Stillwater being fundamentally based on her 2008 murder conviction and subsequent exoneration, and her not having been consulted prior to filming. McCarthy also mentioned that her statements were somewhat undermined by the fact that she hadn’t yet seen the film.
HE response to friendo: “Seeing Stillwater would not be an ‘ideal date night’ and that’s why she still hasn’t seen it yet? But she would be amenable to seeing it, she said earlier, if Focus would invite her to a screening. The date night remark was playful, but she invites skepticism.”
Friendo to HE: “You have to admit that it’s hilarious when, in being asked at the outset in the new interview what his inspiration for the movie was, McCarthy says, ‘One inspiration was a relative of mine who had a fractious relationship with her father. I asked if she minded talking to me about it.” This after previously not being afraid to openly and preemptively acknowledge the Knox case was a springboard, before he had to worry [that Knox might be] endangering his Oscar campaign. Now Knox is incidental, he claims, while asserting that he was inspired by a friend. That kind of covering-one’s-ass (publicly and badly) is the hallmark of a really insubstantial person, or a scaredy-cat on the run.”
HE wants Poor Things‘ Emma Stone to win the Best Actress Oscar on Sunday night, and if not Stone then Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Huller…please.
I’m just looking forward to a day in which identity won’t count for that much in Oscar voting. If you dip into your soul and bring the stuff that matters, then you’re eligible to be nominated and perhaps even likely to win. Quality, quality, quality of delivery.
Academy members voting to reject commonplace prejudice or blanket dismissals in decades or centuries past is primarily about them and not the actor or performance in question. Wokesters have been playing this trendy little game for six or seven years now, and it’s time to shut it down.
When the day comes that quality is valued more than equity or virtue-signalling, actors like Lily Gladstone will have to sink or swim based on their own chops, instincts and abilities…whether or not they can bring the necessary craft, depth and soul…a performance constructed from deep within or not at all.
Does anyone think that Da’Vine Joy Randolph‘s locked-in Best Supporting Actress win has anything whatsoever to do with identity? Okay, maybe a little but she’s been winning all season long because of how good she is in Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers…period. I knew she was a slam-dunk Oscar nominee a half-hour after the film had begun screening in Telluride’s Werner Herzog theatre. I leaned over and muttered this to Sasha Stone.
Does anyone think that May December‘s Charles Melton was an early Best Supporting Actor favorite because he rode an identity horse (South Korean lineage + being a symbolic stand-in for underaged victims of sexual assault)? You’d better believe it, and thank God that nag gave out on him.
Does anyone believe that Sayonara‘s Miyoshi Umeki won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar over identity, way the hell back in 1958? She won because she played a selfless, devotional wife who died (along with Air Force husband Red Buttons**) due to racial prejudice. Plus her performance was significantly more affecting than the ones given by Carolyn Jones (The Bachelor Party), Elsa Lanchester (Witness for the Prosecution), Hope Lange (Peyton Place) and Diane Varsi (Peyton Place).
I realize that Gladstone’s identity campaign has stirred a sizable army of woke gladhanders and that the odds favor her winning, but this shit has to stop. It really does.
Posted by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy on 3.6.24: “Can Gladstone win the Oscar despite not being nominated by BAFTA and her role being a supporting turn? She appears in less than 1/3 of Killers runtime (56 minutes), whereas Stone is practically in every scene of Poor Things. If Gladstone had been campaigned in the Supporting category then she’d already have that Oscar in the bag.”
I’m not putting down Jack Black or Awkwafina for voicing the characters of Po and Zhen, respectively, in exchange for a sizable paycheck.
Sutton would never beg me to take her to see this DreamWorks parent punisher, but if she did I would give her a gentle hug and suggest that we watch instead…I don’t know, The Empire Strikes Back or something.
