Jeff Wells And why an alarming percentage of them, against all concepts of reason and decency, are talking about voting for The Beast. It’s because of this shit.
There isn’t a single line in this essay (“Identity Politics Is Ruining Entertainment“) that isn’t truthful, and yet the Hollywood Elsewhere community of psychotic reality deniers (Castor Oil, etc.) will almost certainly come after this with a hammer and chisel.
Last night I caught Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s Bob Marley: One Love, a biopic of the legendary Jamaican raggae singer‘s last few years (early to late 1970s). It’s somewhere between half-decent and “soft”, as in worshipful, friendly, appealing and mild-mannered. I didn’t hate it but it never really builds or pays off. It focuses on the spirit behind Marley’s music, which is good and welcome, but it mainly just ambles along. It’s a “hang” film.
The main problem is that Marley and the Wailers are all mumble-talking in standard Jamaican-rasta style, mon, and I couldn’t understand very much. Okay, an occasional word or phrase but not much more than that. At first I was thinking “what the fuck are they all saying?” but I soon relaxed into the idea that this is native and real-deal, of course. I sure as shit didn’t want Marley to talk like me or Bill Maher or some middle American dude — I wanted him to sound authentic, and he does as far as his theatrical effort goes. But I’m gonna have to rewatch this thing with subtitles.
Most of the critics won’t mention this, of course. They don’t want to be accused of being xenophobic so they’re all going to pretend they could hear the dialogue perfectly.
Kingsley Ben-Adir‘s performance as Marley is good and genuine. He’s much better looking than Marley ever dreamed of being, and more muscular. Plus he’s prettier than most of his female costars. I would be down with Ben-Adir being hired as the new 007. He’s audience-friendly.
The film deals with Marley’s cancerous big toe but doesn’t dramatize the poor guy’s death at age 36. Marley could have saved himself by amputating the damn toe but he refused. And the film barely glances at his vigorous womanizing. 11 kids! This is typical music superstar behavior, of course. And it doesn’t really drill into the political currents. It’s one of those films that you need to research on your phone after watching it.
Bob Marley: One Love not a top-tier biopic at all, and perhaps not even a second-tier biopic, but it’s moderately okay for the most part. It didn’t try my patience or piss me off or prompt me to cover my face with my hands.
The thing that interested me was the curious genesis of Marley’s Exodus album. Sometime during ’76 one of the Wailers is shown entering Marley’s home with the soundtrack album for Otto Preminger‘s Exodus (’60), composed by Ernest Gold. Somehow this inspires Marley’s Exodus, but why is a 16-year-old vinyl album (initially released in ’60) suddenly of interest to Marley and friends? Plus it’s quite a coincidence that the Gold theme song is used as background music for a bodybuilder show in Bob Rafelson‘s Stay Hungry (’76). Think about it.
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Criterion will be releasing a Girlfight Bluray on 5.28.04. Great film, excellent news.
Before the Sundance Film Festival woked itself to death, it was the indie pathfinder and trailblazer — the greatest-ever springboard for American indie cinema. And in my 24 diligent years of covering that January celebration (’95 to ’18), one of the most exciting Sundance premieres was Karyn Kusama‘s Girlfight on 1.22.00.
A great boxing flick, a first-rate relationship drama and the film that launched Michelle Rodriguez, it won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize and the Best Directing Award in dramatic competition. Produced for $1 million, Girlfight‘s distrib rights were bought by Screen Gems for $3 million.
I saw a proud and tough feminist film, and one that could really connect with Latinas and women of color along with indie film fans.
Girlfight opened eight months later (9.29.00) and promptly flopped. Latinas and women of color stayed away in droves. After a five-week run it had tallied a total domestic haul of $1,565,852 plus a lousy $100,176 overseas. I’ve never understood why this happened. I’ll bet that a fair percentage of HE readers never even saw it.
Two days before pre-production was set to begin Girlfight‘s financier backed out, and so producer Maggie Renzi and director John Sayles coughed up the $1 million themselves. Screen Gems acquired the film for $3 million so at least Renzi and Sayles were made whole.
I would never wash any man’s feet…never ever, under any circumstances, forget it….even if I had a special squeegee-sponge-on-a-pole that would allow me to wash their feet from a distance of, say, 36 or 48 inches.
I would only wash slender, well-pedicured women’s feet, which means I would politely and respectfully decline if I was asked to wash the feet of women on the other end of the appearance spectrum.
Imagine if a red-robed Jesus Christ came down from Heaven and brought you to Donald Trump‘s hotel suite and told you to wash his feet as a gesture of universal love, charity and brotherhood. Can you imagine even looking at Trump’s fat, fungus-y pig feet? Jesus, now I can’t unthink this image….help!
You may have read that roughly six years ago there were two competing Leonard Berstein film projects, Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro and Jake Gyllenhaal and Cary Fukanaga‘s The American, which focuses mostly on Lenny and Felicia Montealegre‘s early years and deals specifically with Lenny’s dishonesty and duplicity about boyfriends along with Felicia’s telling him in so many words that she won’t be humiliated if they marry, etc. Not to mention their break-up and reconciliation.
Here’s Michael Mitnick‘s nearly six-year-old draft for the Gyllenhaal-Fukanaga Bernstein project, dated 5.21.18. The subtitle is “A Musician in Five Movements.” And it’s only 89 pages!
The Gyllenhaal project collapsed when Cooper landed the music rights.
Remember that moment in Goodfellas when Joe Pesci shoves an ice pick into the back of the head of Chuck Low‘s “Morrie” Kessler, the hugely obnoxious wig guy who was part of the Lufthansa heist? And Morrie goes “ahrgggghhh“?
That’s what happened this afternoon to Madame Web on Rotten Tomatoes. Not to mention Metacritic.
The Sasquatch makeup is pretty good, I have to say. I’m pretty sure I can spot Jesse Eisenberg under the stringy hair and prosthetics but I can’t identify Riley Keough. (Her name accompanies an image of one of the beasts, but I can’t “see” her.) The other two actors are Nathan Zellner and Christophe Zajac-Denek.
Sundance, Berlin, SXSW…Bleecker Street will release Sasquatch Sunset on April 12th.
Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin posted on 1.19.24:
I was never into Playstation and I certainly didn’t pay attention to Spyro the Dragon, a 1998 platform game developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. (25 years ago!) But during a word game a few years ago my chronic hearing problem resulted in my sincere mispronouncing of the name as “Spyro the Jacket.”
The kids laughed at me and still bring it up on occasion, but let me explain something. Nonsensical as it sounds, Spyro the Jacket is better than Spyro the Dragon. A meme that makes no sense but at the same time transcends and in fact leapfrogs over the original.
Sometimes life flips on its side and bingo You have to be able to say “of course! and turn on a dime. Odd accidents sometimes open the doors of opportunity.
Spyro the Jacket isn’t just “better” than that Clinton-era Playstation game — it’s 10 to 15 times better. If I could afford it I would create a logo and manufacture “Spyro the Jacket” T-shirts and, yes, jackets.
I wasn’t paying attention to this “Dunkin’ The Dunking” ad during the Super Bowl…
1:40 mark:
Teenager to Ben Affleck: “Jennifer Lopez‘s husband…that’s cool.”
Affleck to teenager: “I had an influence myself.”
Teenager: “So what do you do?”
Affleck: “Aahhh, I do some…acting and writing and directing of movies, which were a kind of longform entertainment popular in the…20th Century.”
Jennifer Lopez is 54 (born on 7.24.69) and she doesn’t look a day under 32. Ben is 51…no biggie.
The expression on Mark Ruffalo‘s face in this Zodiac interrogation scene…his expression alone in this 5 minute, 48-second scene is ten to fifteen times better than his whole performance in Poor Things. Better in that it conveys an immense amount of information…he doesn’t move a muscle but his face is quaking with emotion and arousal and implication.
And that vaguely moaning, faintly growling sound we hear as the suspicion factor begins to build…fascinating. And the watch.
My God, what a brilliant film Zodiac is! All four guys in this scene are note perfect — Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Elias Koteas, John Carroll Lynch.
Plus Ruffalo is at least 20 to 25 pounds lighter in Zodiac than he is in Poor Things so there’s that also.
14:33 mark: “One thing we know for certain is this — we have two candidates who are chronologically outside the norm of anyone who has run for the presidency in this country, in the history if this country. They are the oldest people ever to run ever to run for president, breaking by only four years the record that they [themselves] set in 2020. They are objectively old…[and] are both stretching the limits of being able to handle the toughest job in the world.
“What’s crazy is thinking that we’re the ones, as voters, who must silence our concerns and criticisms. It is the candidate’s job to assuage concerns, not the voter’s job not to mention them.”
16:30 mark: “Look at me. Look what time hath wrought. [Stewart is 61.] Look at this. Give the kids the treat of a lunar surface here. I’m 20 years younger than [Biden and Trump]…this. Look at this. They wish.”
Talk about a total Barbie promotion. Looking to influence voters much, guys? It would have been a lot crazier and more visually exciting if this ad had used a Poor Things template…think of it. Jimmy Kimmel‘s head attached to the body of a golden retriever, stuff like that. But I do have to say that, once again, America Ferrara brings it with a rant about how difficult is is to be an Oscar host.
Funniest bit comes when Ryan Gosling says “that’s not gonna happen” regarding his chances of winning the Best Supporting Actor race…Downey Downey Downey.
Why didn’t they get Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie to participate?