Sam Mendes has reportedly tapped the 30-year-old Quinn (A Quiet Place: Day One, Gladiator II, Stranger Things) to play the quiet, mystical, sardonic George in his forthcoming Beatles quartet, which won’t be seen until,.,,what is it, 2027? The problem, obviously, is that Quinn doesn’t even remotely resemble Harrison.
First and foremost the late Beatles guitarist had rich brown hair and certainly wasn’t a ginger, which Quinn obviously is. Quinn and Harrison share the same color eyes (brown), but Harrison’s were big and round with a playful glint.
Again…Quinn as Ginger Baker? Fine. But the Harrison casting, if true, is horrifying.
…but you can’t trust most of the people who’ve posted opinions thus far, and I mean especially Clayton Davis. I’ll accept the praisings of Scott Menzel, fine, but I’m still trying to figure out what David Poland thinks of James Mangold‘s film, except that he needs to see it again, which he says about almost everything.
You can always trust HE as I have no hidden agendas. (I have put the Mangold episode of 2009 into a sealed box.) I’ll be catching A Complete Unknown on Monday evening (11.25).
Poland: “A Complete Unknown manages to tell us everything about Bob Dylan while telling us almost nothing about Bob Dylan.” HE: What the fuck does that mean? Poland: “The movie is ultimately about the power of the individual and talent and how what we all want can turn on a dime, repeatedly.” HE: What the fuck does that mean?
Poland: “Chalamet brings enormous power to this portrait of a man who just keeps leaving but then also keeps delivering surprises. Edward Norton’s turn is perfectly true to Seeger. Monica Barbaro delivers a Baez of many facets, from fire to ice. And Elle Fanning is destined to be underrated in a complex turn as ;the first NY girlfriend.’ I really need to see it again to fully negotiate all that is there and all that is not there by design.” HE to Poland: Spit it out!
Chris Gore: “Two friends who grow up to become enemies….I’ve seen the play four times, and it respected the original Wizard of Oz…Elphaba is Trump, and the Wizard is Biden…it’s very gay in a sense, but it’s mainly about female friendship….Elphaba and Galinda…having said all of that, in the backdrop of Shiz University’s diversity…gay, drag queens, straight…guys in skirts…Bowen Yang…the gayness of the film is in the background…this movie is very gay, and if you’re looking for that, you’re gonna see it. But if you kind of ignore this, it’s a beautiful story.”
The trolliest of Donald Trump‘s troll nominations has dropped out. Trump’s intention in nominating ludicrous, laughably unqualified people for cabinet posts was to say “bitches, bow!” to Capitol Hill Republicans. Gaetz’s withdrawal exposes a strategic stumble, to put it mildly.
Early this morniny this DOOMSCROLL discussion between host Josh Citarella and musician Matty Healy (the 1975) ate up two hours of my life. Fascinating. Posted on Posted on 10.22.24.,
But you know something? I really hate living in an alleged movie culture that can’t be bothered to support a film as brilliant, vibrant and super-charged as Sean Baker‘s Anora. It’s sold a fair amount of tickets so far ($10,971,651 domestic, $20,809,023 worldwide) but last Saturday night I dropped by a Westport AMC just before a 9:30 pm showing, and I counted eight or nine people in the theatre.
Dammit, what’s wrong with you guys? Anora is a firecracker standout — it’s dealing the real, live-wire goods like few other films have this year — and you can’t be bothered to catch a Saturday night showing? It would have been one thing if there were 25 or 30 patrons at the 9:30 pm screening, but eight or nine?
How abominable is the crime of sexually molesting minors? In a certain light, portions of the Hollywood community appear divided on the answer.
In the view of celebrities who’d like to see convicted parent-killers Erik and Lyle Menendez released from jail, the sexual abuse of minors is so heinous that it’s a semi-justifiable thing for sexual predators to suffer violent death as punishment.
The basic rationale on the part of famous Menendez friendos (including Kim Kardashian, Sonny Hostin, Rosie O’Donnell, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Cooper Koch) is that Erik and Lyle’e shotgun slaying of their late dad, music industry hotshot Jose Menendez and his wife Kitty, is semi-excusable because Jose repeatedly molested Erik, or so Erik has alleged.
At the very least the victims of such acts (Erik and Lyle) deserve a measure of leniency, the thinking goes, especially after having served almost 30 years in the slam.
Outgoing Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon: “I do believe that the brothers was subjected to a tremendous amount of dysfunction in the home and [from] molestation.”
On the other hand if we’re talking about a deceased child molester named Michael Jackson, a dynamic, iconic, hugely popular rock star who ruled during the ’80s and ’90s, perhaps diddling young boys wasn’t such a terrible thing. Or perhaps this alleged diddling might not have been as nakedly predatory or cut-and-dried as it seemed.
It was reported last March by Variety‘s Adam B. Vary that the makers of the biopic Michael (Lionsgate, 10.3.25) — principally director Antoine Fuqua, producer Graham King and screenwriter John Logan — are adopting a light-fingered, less-than-damning approach in the matter of multiple allegations that Jackson used his fame and power to groom prepubescent boys for sexual activity.
So which is it? An alleged sexual molester half-deserved to be shotgunned to death by his sons, or a world-famous sexual molester was such a great singer-dancer and pop-music God that a movie about his life can depict reported predatory behavior in a go-easy, turn-the-other-cheek, half-forgiving way?
All hail Paul Walter Hauser for supporting Sebastian Stan by agreeing to do an “Actors on Actors” discussion with him for Variety.
Stan delivers a brilliant performance as Donald Trump in TheApprentice (ditto Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn), but various chickenshit publicists wouldn’t allow their clients to chat with Stan out of fear that they might be stained by some kind of vague Trump association.
Stan: “I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me, because their publicists were too afraid to sit down and talk about this movie.”
But now goodguyHauser has stepped up to the plate.
You can call me a wimp or a sell-out but I was quite “impressed” by the enormity of John M. Chu and Marc Platt‘s Wicked (Universal, 11.22). I felt completely flooded, walloped, steamrolled, avalanche’d by it. That’s not quite the same thing, needless to say, as being intimately touched or tickled or deeply moved.
Directed by Chu with the same vigor that made In The Heights work as well as it did, Wicked is quite an eyeful, quite the visual deluge, quite the immaculate pageant, quite the overwhelming beat-down, quite the wealth-porn extravaganza.
Every frame of it looks super-costly, I mean. It exudes so much of a flush fantasy vibe by way of super-lavish sets, eye-bath production design, immaculate costumes, spot-on makeup and CG magnificence that it almost leaves you gasping for breath.
Wicked keeps pushing harder with that old Chu pizazz. Every shot is intended to be processed as a wowser knockout moment. It quiets down in one delicate dancing scene, and I for one could’ve done with more of this, but mostly Chu opts for splendorific dazzle.
What is this Wizard of Oz origin story actually about? What’s going on inside Wicked?
The stage musical, of course, is/was about the plight of the disliked, suspiciously regarded Elphaba…the nascent sorceress who hums to her own music and marches to a different drummer (Idina Menzel in the original B’way show, Cynthia Erivo in the film) and how the disdain, derision and cruelty thrown at poor Elphy during her time at Shiz University eventually leads her to become the Wicked Witch of the West.
Elphy is easily the kindest, wisest, most soulful, most perceptive and least egoistic Shiz student, and so OF COURSE all the elite, cool kid go-alongers despise and ostracize her.
Elphaba’s green skin is a metaphor for magical, insightful being and vision…for outside-the-box thinking…for sensitivity, artistry, inwardness and standing against the tide, of course, but with Erivo in the role the green skin is an obvious allusion to blackness or, if you will, even queerness.
A friend tells me I’m off on my own eccentric broomstick, but Chu’s Wicked is clearly a racial parable — a grandiose super-musical fantasy about smug, haughty, entitled whites treating an unusual woman of color like shit and thereby goading her to fulfill her Wizard of Oz destiny as a mythical broomstick witch.
I can’t see how Erivo’s Elphy could possibly morph into Margaret Hamilton‘s enemy-of-Dorothy. I really don’t see it. Hell, nobody will.
Ariana Grande’s Glynda, the young version of the good witch of the north played by Billie Burke in the 1939 original, is re-imagined and played to the absolute hilt as a gentle-mannered, glamour-gowned lass in the most superficial sense imaginable…an empty, priveleged, super-entitled debutante type.
But boy, does she look great! Pure dessert! Every single gesture, every line, every strand of golden hair and every shot of Grande proclaims unequivocally that she’s a glowing movie-star specimen…exquisite, porcelain, princess-like, to-die-for.
Glynda is clearly lacking in terms of depth and introspection but she’s perfectly poised and lighted and a seriously luscious pixie girl.
Do you want a truly affecting parable about otherness…a sad but affecting human-scaled tale about a young green person bullied and ostracized for being different? Watch Joseph Losey’s The Boy With Green Hair (1948). Idina Menzel and Cynthia Erivo? Meet the 12 year-old Dean Stockwell.
Friendo: “Wicked was never a racial parable. The fact that the Idina Menzel character is now played by a Black actress does not make it such.
“Sure, you can now read that overtone into certain stray moments, but there’s a big difference between an overtone and the essential MEANING of the material, as scripted and acted and directed. It is an allegory of outsider-ness, about someone who feels SINGULAR and UNIQUE in her outsider status.”
There’s a third-act line when Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard (played by Frank Morgan in the ‘39 original) regards the flamboyantly designed sets and the general sound-stage lavishness and quips “I think it’s a bit much.” I laughed out loud — the only time I did so during Wicked’s entire 160-minute length.
The plan, obviously, is for The Studio (Apple, 3.26.25), a half-hour series produced by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez…the plan is to try and serve as a 21st Century, going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket sequel to Robert Altman‘s The Player (’92).
Rogen’s Matt Remick: “I got into this because I love movies. But now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them.”
Remick seems at least partly based upon Jason Blum, whose name signifies everything about Hollywood product that I hate. His Blumhouse output has long been regarded as a pox upon movies.
Who else could Remick be based upon? I want names.
Every single Hollywood hotshot over the last half-century has claimed to be a devotional Movie Catholic who’s trying to fulfill a kind of cinematic spiritual calling. Even Hollywood’s most despised movie executive, David Zaslav, has spoken this way from time to time.
Bryan Cranston is apparently playing the chief villain.
Rogen is only 42 and 1/2 years old, and he looks at least 58 or 60, minimally.
And arguably Luca Guadagnino‘s greatest film…seriously.
“Queer is much more transformative than Call Me By Your Name…it may be Luca’s best film ever, or his most out-there or whatever…I’m not sure how to label it but Craig’s performance is staggering…purely a matter of heart and spirit and twitchy emotion…all I know is that he’s uncovered something fresh and alive…really something else.” — from my 10.7.24 NYFF review.
Queer will allegedly open in the U.S. on 11.27.24, but you’d never know it from the absence of hype and promotion.
Deadline‘s Matt Grobar is reporting that Frank Marshall will be producing some kind of definitive, fully-authorized Fleetwood Mac doc.
Long-of-tooth or passed-on band members Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks will “reflect on their fortuitous meeting in 1974” and the “50-plus-year history that’s followed, from their record-breaking recordings and tours to their trials and tribulations, personal resilience, musical dexterity,” etc.
In other words, the doc will mainly cover the super-hot, mid ’70s heyday (Fleetwood Mac (1975–1976) + Rumours (1977–1978), and the still-hot-but-slowing-down period (Tusk (1979–1980) and Mirage (‘82).
And if I know Marshall, the doc will barely acknowledge the scruffy, struggling early years (the first FM album was released in ’68) and may even possibly ignore one of the late Christine McVie‘s best songs ever — the melancholy, raggae-flavored “Did You Ever Love Me?” (’73), which was from the Penguin album (’73).
“Did You Ever Love Me?” was written by McVie and Bob Welch and recorded by them, with McVie delivering a sad and soulful lead vocal. It was also released as a single.
