In our horrid world of 2024, who could be fairly described as brutish? How about the Trump-worshipping Evangelicals in Iowa?
Jeff Wells
Emma Stone Snags CC’s Best Actress Award!
With Emma “Bella Baxter” Stone having won the Critics Choice Best Actress award for her Poor Things performance, it now seems as if she stands a better-than-reasonable chance of snagging the Best Actress Oscar. Past Critics Choice votes have often been Oscar predictive so maybe. Here’s hoping.
This is even better than when Emma/Bella won the Golden Globe award for Best Actress — Comedy/Musical, because this time she was up against everyone else (Lily Gladstone, Carey Mulligan, Margot Robbie, et. al.) in the same category. It’s absolutely the right choice, of course, unless, like me, you were nursing special feelings for Mulligan’s Felicia Montealegre in Maestro, which led to turbulence and regret.
HE is not, shall we say, distressed that certain doubts and concerns about Gladstone’s Molly Burkhart performance were recognized and reflected, at least to some extent. Time and again I’ve said that Lily’s Molly Burkhart performance isn’t an appropriate Best Actress contender, considering that (a) Burkhart isn’t really a lead role and that (b) Martin Scorsese and Eric Roth‘s Killers of the Flower Moon script didn’t really give her any Best Actress-level scenes.
Not to mention the generally recognized view that quality of performance should always matter more than issues of identity.
Hearty congrats also to The Holdovers‘ Paul Giamatti for having won the Best Actor award.
Happy days are suddenly upon us!
Oscar Poker Engulfed By Shadow of Critics Choice Awards
Herewith the latest Oscar Poker (Sunday, 1.14.24), recorded hours before the Critics Choice Awards at Santa Monica’s Barker Hangar.
One question: Is there a chance that Emma Stone will overtake Lily Gladstone when the Critics Choice Best Actress award is announced this evening? Yeah, doubt it.
Diane English’s The Women, an ensemble farce about wealthy, ambitious ladies of privilege and particularity, was released in 2008 (i.e., over 15 years ago), and it truly represents a world that no longer exists. Sasha explains how it all changed while Jeff (who watched this remake of George Cukor’s 1939 original last night) patiently takes it all in.
Many of us recall when Roman Polanski won the Best Director Oscar for The Pianist in early ‘03, but a relative few recall the standing ovation (Scorsese, Nicholson, Nic Cage) that greeted this significant win. Today’s reactions are almost solely from the pitchforkers. With Polanski’s WWII-era drama about to be re-released next month, the torch-carrying villagers still want his head.
Again, the link.
Critics Choice bada-bing: All hail the Best Supporting Actress triumph of The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and all hail the defeat of May December‘s Charles Melton by Oppenheimer‘s Robert Downey, Jr., who gave a great Salieri performance.
Good Stuff Fallin’
Sunday, 1.14, 1:40 pm — Wilton Library.
5 pm update: The snow lost interest. No accumulation. Connecticut winter weather disappoints again.
MAGA Morons Don’t Want to Beat Biden
If they did, they’d get behind Nikki Haley in Iowa and elsewhere. Because she would almost certainly prevail against Biden in the general. But it won’t happen. Because their MAGA heels are dug in for The Beast. Reminder: HE is not a Haley supporter because of her statement about pardoning that criminal sociopath.
Watched “Killers” Four Times…God
A random, straight-from-the-shoulder discussion from earlier today (transcript):
Friendo: The biggest problem with Killers of the Flower Moon, which I’ve just watched for the fourth time, is that after all Lily has suffered and been through…after all that she doesn’t rip into Leo at the end of the film. The whole point of having the FBI involved is that we’re invested in their story so when they get the bad guy it’s satisfying. So we naturally expect some sort of catharsis from Lily. But it never comes.
HE: Correct. Lily is even gentle with dumb-ass Leo during their final scene. She gently caresses his cheek and listens to his regrets without saying shit, or saying much. Zero catharsis. Zero satisfaction.
Friendo: They set us up for a showdown at the end, which is the only reward for enduring her suffering. You need that scene…payback, revenge, retribution
HE: The idea seems to be that Lily’s spirituality doesn’t allow for any retribution or condemnation. It’s too coarse for her. She’s at one with the Spirit Gods.
Friendo: So either she’s ignorant and stupid. Or it’s bad writing.
HE: Inconclusive story strategy, I would say. Unsatisfying finale.
Friendo: Leo was in cahoots with men who killed her whole family, and then he poisoned her himself for months? Any intelligent person would flip out at a man who did that.
HE: Marty Scorsese and Eric Roth didn’t see it that way.
Ripoff: Gillette Proshield Cartridges
I flinch every time I buy Gillette Proshield replacement cartridges. Because they cost too much for what I’m getting.
The first shave is always very pleasurable, granted, but you can feel a very slight diminishment during the second shave — not as sharp or clean. And the third shave is the same or even slightly worse. The fact is that cheap plastic razors (also made by Gillette) work almost as well over the course of, say, eight or even ten shaves.
Why do I keep shelling out for these shitty, over-priced Gillette cartridges that are good for only one great shave? Because I like holding the metal Gillette shaving device. (What should I call it?) It feels good in my hand. I like the weight of it, and the little grooves and micro-bumps allow for a better grip. Otherwise the cartridges suck eggs.
Another Towering Inferno Scramble
From a 7.12.09 piece called “The Art of Paycheck Acting”: “The Towering Inferno was entertaining crap when it opened [in 1974], but Paul Newman and Steve McQueen are honorable and oak-solid in their starring roles. This is impressive given that neither actor has a real part to play — they were just paid to show up and go through the Irwin Allen paces. They knew it then and we know it now, but they deliver the goods anyway. That’s professionalism and star power.
“There are four ways that brand-name actors deliver straight-paycheck performances in mediocre big-studio films.
“One, they do it straight and plain and cruise by on chops and charisma, like McQueen and Newman. Two, they do it straight and plain and don’t cruise by on chops and charisma — they sink into the movie like quicksand and then suffocate. Three, they behave in an extremely mannered and actorish way as a way of telegraphing to the audience that they’re totally aware that they’re in a crap film. And four, they go beyond mannered and waaay over the top (like Jon Voight in Anaconda) and turn their performances into inspired farce.”
From a Pauline Kael New Yorker review, issue dated 12.30.74:
“In the new disaster blockbuster The Towering Inferno, each scene of a person horribly in flames is presented as a feat for our delectation. The picture practically stops for us to say, ‘Yummy, that’s a good one!’ These incendiary deaths, plus the falls from high up in the hundred-and-thirty-eight-floor tallest skyscraper in the world, are, in fact, the film’s only feats, the plot and characters being retreads from the producer Irwin Allen’s earlier Poseidon Adventure. What was left out this time was the hokey fun.
“When a picture has any kind of entertainment in it, viewers don’t much care about credibility, but when it isn’t entertaining we do. And when a turkey bores us and insults our intelligence for close to three hours, it shouldn’t preen itself on its own morality. Inferno knocks off some two hundred people as realistically as it possibly can and then tells us that we must plan future buildings more carefully, with the fire chief (embodied here by Steve McQueen) working in collaboration with the architect (in this case, Paul Newman, who appears to be also the only engineer — in fact, the only person involved in the building’s construction or operation above the level of janitor).
Too Friendly For Me
I always enjoy and often agree with N.Y. Times center-right columnist Bret Stephens, but I felt a little pissed off by what struck me as a Trump-friendly column (1.11.24), titled “The Case for Trump …by Someone Who Wants Him to Lose“.
I’m not going to re-hash the essay chapter and verse, but it’s fair to say that Bret’s opinions about wokesters (i.e., “the progressive left”) are mostly on-target.
True: “Academia, mostly liberal, became increasingly illiberal, inhospitable not just to conservatives but to anyone pushing back even modestly against progressive orthodoxy.”
True: “Trump and his supporters called this out, [and] for this they were called idiots, liars and bigots by people who think of themselves as enlightened and empathetic and hold the commanding heights in the national culture. The scorn only served to harden the sense among millions of Americans that liberal elites are self-infatuated, imperious, hysterical, and hopelessly out of touch.”
I also agree with Bret’s statement that Trump “shared the law-and-order instincts of normal Americans, including respect for the police, something the left seemed to care about on Jan. 6 but was notably less concerned about during the months of rioting, violence and semi-anarchy that followed George Floyd’s murder.”
Except it wasn’t months — the Floyd riots lasted four or five weeks, something like that.
But I really hate the way Bret has minimized, looked the other way at and otherwise normalized Trump’s sociopathic nature and his brutish, anti-democratic, flat-out criminal behavior.
Others feel this way or the Times wouldn’t have posted a follow-up dialogue between Stephens and Patrick Healy called “Three Questions for Bret Stephens About His Trump Column.”
Wrong Kind of Orgasm
Hugs and condolences for the family and friends of ’70s actress Tisa Farrow, who has passed at the age of 72. I knew her only from her brief performances in Woody Allen‘s Manhattan and James Toback‘s Fingers. Her line in Manhattan — “I finally had an orgasm, and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind” — is not the sort of line that you forget. It’s kind of legendary in fact.
PGA Zanuck Noms Announced
Ten nominees have been announced for the PGA’s Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures — American Fiction (Scott Feinberg and Clayton Davis breathe sighs of relief!), Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon (indigenous struggle), Maestro, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Poor Things and The Zone of Interest.
Ten is too many — not exclusive enough. If the list was a more proper five, it would/should be Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, Poor Things, Maestro and Barbie.