Friendo who attended last night’s CAA screening of Luca Guadagnino and Daniel Craig ‘s Queer:
“Unless the movie itself doesn’t accumulate sufficient enthusiasm (it’s a pungent, sensual trip movie and anything but bland), it will be hard not to nominate Daniel Craig‘s emotionally vulnerable tour de force performance.”
It’s obviously historical — James Bond going homo. The bravery alone. The audacity.
HE will be seeing Queer at the NYFF on Monday, 10.7.
In a post-screening discussion with a Vanity Fair guy whose name escapes, Craig said he’d spent a year getting his mind “wrapped up into the character.”
HEtofriendo: “Who was the guy sitting in front of you with the big fat head?”
…I would probably be inclined to vote for him/her over Kamala Harris. But of course they haven’t. They’ve nominated an animal, and that’s why standing by Kamala is a necessity.
If you go to movies hoping for quaalude highs, Joker: Folie a Deux is definitely not a Lemmon 714. But you have to respect it. Really–it’s anything but a throwaway.
In all my years of searching for tantalizing color snaps of Times Square marquees from the ’40s, ’50s and 60s, I’d never once glimpsed a shot of The Guns of Navarone marquee at the Criterion (B’way at 44th). But I did this morning. Hat tip to GorillsaDontBlog.
The Carl Foreman-J. Lee Thompson pic was press previewed on 5.16.61 (the screening curiously began at 8:30 pm). It opened at the Criterion on 6.23.61 and lasted through the summer.
Gung-ho, super-confident progressive team captain Michael Moore is predicting a decisive loss for DonaldTrump on Tuesday, 11.5. He’s saying, in fact, that Trump is “toast.”
But in what universe is a KamalaHarris 270 electoral vote tally over 268 for The Beast…in what realm is this not an all-time squeaker?
Most men involved in heated hetero relationships have two personas — (a) the dynamic achiever, performer, stick-man and breadwinner, which usually satisfies or at least placates wives and girlfriends, and (b) the young lad or adolescent child who wants to be loved unconditionally, as he might be by his mother or, in sexual terms, by an exceptionally passionate lover he’s only been with a short while.
All men of maturity understand that the young lad kind of love is a dream, even if most men long for this kind of thing in their heart of hearts. And yet most fellows of experience realize they can’t hold onto a girlfriend or wife for very long unless unless they achieve and perform and go into an impressive song-and-tapdance now and then…rules of the game.
Joker: FolieaDeux is about a man with two personas — Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the abused and traumatized child who wants to be loved and adored for who he is deep down, and the giggling sociopathic showboat known as “the Joker” (also Phoenix).
Both Arthur and his alter ego delight in fantasies of singing and dancing with his new lover (Lady Gaga‘s Harleen “Lee” Quinzel). Alas, Lee is primarily in love with the dynamic criminal, clownface sociopath and crazed performer of legend.
The big emotional climax of Joker: Folie a Deux arrives when Arthur Fleck confesses who he really is and that “Joker” is an inauthentic, sensationalized media persona, and subsequently realizes that Lee doesn’t have much of an attachment to the traumatized child and is entirely attracted to the eccentric and generally venal Joker.
The only portions of the film that deliver feelings of peace and serenity are the musical dream sequences with Arthur and Lee singing and dancing to a series of classic love songs.
The thematic import of Joker: Folie a Deux is a hard one. You could call it cruel. Todd Phillips and Scott Silver‘s film is essentially saying that glorious, fanciful, all-accepting love — the kind that young naive men might long for — is a nice dream but basically for the birds.
Because women tend to prefer the rogue, the conqueror, the operator, the headliner, the charismatic personality. This is the basic way of relationships, the film is saying.
Joker: Folie a Deux is therefore a massive downer of a movie, and yet it has to be respected for its refusal to entertain (except during the song-and-dance sequences) and for the general integrity of the scheme.
It’s a movie that’s impossible to love, but you can’t accuse Phillips and Silver of not dealing straight cards. It really is a “fuck you” to the escapist attitudes of D.C. fanboys, and I for one respect what it’s up to. It’s a serious art film, defined by a certain morose integrity. It’s going to be hated by almost everyone. But it’s not trash. Far from it.
For me, a shorter length would have improved matters. 110 or 115 minutes as opposed to 138.
Incidentally: I was more than a little bothered by Phoenix’s cigarette smoking in the film. In almost every damn scene he’s got one going, and I suspect this is because Phoenix himself is a heavy smoker, and that he collaborated closely with Phillips and that before anyone realized it Folie a Deux had become a lit-cigarette movie with ashes dropping all over the place.
Hollywood Elsewhere is about to attend a late-afternoon screening of Todd Phillips and Scott Silver‘s Joker: Folie a Deux. Let the chips fall, but this is what my day is about…please allow me to find my way into this, God…I don’t want to join the throng of haters.
Two or three days ago the writers of five scripts where honored as recipients of the 2024 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. A total of 5,500 scripts, from 80 countries, were submitted for the 2024 competition. Please scan the following quickie synopses of the five winning scripts and tell me there isn’t something in the water that’s causing strange behavior. Please indicate which screenplay you think will turn into the most painful film.
1. “Miss Chinatown”, written by Alysha Chan and David Zarif (Los Angeles, CA). Capsule description: Jackie Yee follows in her mother’s footsteps on her quest to win the Los Angeles Miss Chinatown pageant.
2. “Fake-A-Wish”, written by Colton Childs (Waco, TX). Capsule description: Despite their 40-year age gap, and the cancer treatment confining them to their small Texas town, two gay men embark on a road trip to San Francisco to grant themselves the Make-A-Wish they’re too old to receive.”
3. “Gunslinger Bride”, written by Charmaine Colina (Los Angeles, CA). Capsule description: “With a bounty on her head, a young Chinese-American gunslinger poses as a mail order bride to hide from the law and seek revenge for her murdered family.”
4. “If I Die in America”, written by Ward Kamel (Brooklyn, NY). Capsule description: “After the sudden death of his immigrant husband, an American man’s tenuous relationship with his Muslim in-laws reaches a breaking point as he tries to fit into the funeral they’ve arranged in the Middle East. Adapted from the SXSW® Grand Jury-nominated short film of the same name.”
5. “The Superb Lyrebird & Other Creatures”, written by Wendy Britton Young (West Chester, PA). Capsule description: “A neurodivergent teen who envisions people as animated creatures, battles an entitled rival for a life-changing art scholarship, while her sister unwisely crosses the line to help.”
“I’m glad Josh Greebaum made the doc and I’m glad I watched it, but like a lot of reality TV, it’s a tad dishonest. Harper Steele is afraid how the middle-of-the-country types will treat her, and the doc makes clear that they are actually very accepting. Occasionally in the doc, Steele enters these establishments without companion/costar Will Ferrell, but there is always a camera present. Obviously.
“That camera presence, no doubt, inhibits people from expressing their real, deep-down opinion. Often in the doc restaurant servers and others call Steele ‘sir’, and she has to correct them. But if she weren’t sitting next to a movie star, how would these people react? The camera is too strong and unrecognized a force in this narrative. Then again, would I have read a memoir titled ‘Harper Steele’? No.
“The doc made me like Ferrell a lot. There’s a sadness, though, in how often he tells Harper that she is ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful.’ Did he ever feel the need to tell the previous male version of Steele that he was ‘handsome?”
…for acknowledging in an ad what everyone has been saying since last May , which is that Francis Coppola‘s Megalopolis is more nuts than audacious. This is called “getting in front of the controversy, and then owning it.” This is a little bit like MGM marketing’s decision to acknowledge the fact that counter-culture viewers of 2001: A Space Odyssey were tripping (in some cases literally) through the lightshow finale, and adopting an audience-friendly slogan: “The Ultimate Trip.”
