“Jeff — I totally agree with Paul Schrader on Oppenheimer — it’s the best film I’ve seen come out of a major Hollywood studio in eons. Really fantastic for the entire three hours. Tremendous.” — gmail message, arrived at 11:21 am eastern.
Jeff Wells
Behind Alpha-Hoopla, Heaving “Barbie” Seas
Excerpted from Lovia Guyarkye’s THR Barbie review, posted at 4 pm: “Barbieland is feminist utopia as inversion of our patriarchal reality.
“Barbie and Ken are a version of Eve and Adam, if Eve were God’s favorite and Adam acknowledged as the liability he was.
“After an unplanned detour separates her from Ken, Barbie makes her way back home [from the real world]. ready to restore perfection to her routine. But her homecoming is a dour one; Barbie returns to see that Ken, armed with his newfound knowledge of the patriarchy, has transformed Barbieland.”
Wait…a JOE POPCORN-ISH REACTION from a 30something guy who saw Barbie earlier this afternoon:
“You have absolutely no idea how anti-male Barbie is. Wait until you see it — it’s a landmine of outrage waiting to happen. There will be heated debate…some people are going to HATE it. I mean, there’s a trans Barbie…”
HE to 30something Guy: “Is Ryan Gosling’s Ken a kind of villain figure or…?”
30something Guy: “He turns into a villain, yes. An alpha male who realizes he doesn’t need Barbie in his life and that he can control women.”
HE to 30something guy: “Are you telling me he’s not gay in the film?”
30something Guy: “He loves Barbie.”
HE to 30something Guy: “WHAT? All the guys in the film obviously look and dress gay, but they’re straight? Every single trailer and photo of Ken says ‘this guy obviously isn’t straight.’ The Ken doll with the cock ring….obviously not straight….c’mon!”
From Peter Debruge‘s Variety review: “In the year 2023, it would be a shock (and box-office suicide) if Barbie arrived without some kind of female-empowerment message baked in.
“This one checks all the right boxes, while making Ryan Gosling’s dumb-dumb Ken the butt of most of its gender-equity jokes. Boasting fresh tracks from Billie Eilish and Lizzo, the result is a very funny kids’ movie with a freshman liberal arts student’s vocabulary that tosses around terms like ‘patriarchy’ and ‘appropriation’ — pretty much everything but ‘problematic,’ which the movie implies without actually calling Barbie’s legacy.”
Letterbox’d, A.A. Dowd: “Barbie is practically the textbook definition of corporate feminism, but it knows that too, of course, and is earnest in using the platform of a big-budget toy commercial to speak to the audience about the patriarchy; there’s a big speech that recalls the one Laura Dern delivers in Marriage Story, which makes me wonder if Baumbach counterintuitively wrote this one or if Gerwig helped him write that one.
“Even its lionization of the woman behind Barbie comes with an asterisk. The whole thing is animated by neurosis more than joy, which is what I found most interesting about it: Is there a little of Gerwig’s offscreen wrestling with the assignment in Barbie’s onscreen existential crisis? Wish it was a little funnier.”
The Only Correctly Synched “High Noon” Montage
Just a reminder that seven and a half years ago HE was the first and only Hollywood column to post a fixed version of the climactic “noon train is approaching” High Noon montage in Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kramer‘s High Noon (’52).
On 12.2.15 I posted Matthew Morretini‘s version of the montage, which is more metronomically correct than the original 1952 version, which was assembled by editor Elmo Williams.
“The famous High Noon tick-tock sequence has always bothered me slightly,” I wrote. “It was edited to match Dimitri Tiomkin‘s music, and so every cut was supposed to happen at the precise instant of the final beat…except it doesn’t quite do that. Today editor Matthew Morettini wrote to say the reason for my slight irritation is that the picture is four frames ahead of the music.
“But now Morettini has fixed it.
“‘I’m a professional editor and had a few minutes on my hands today and re-synced the clip the way I always felt it should be,’ Morettini wrote. “And guess what? It’s better. Each and every picture edit was exactly four frames early.”
Compare the Morettini version (top) to the Elmo Williams version (below) — the proof is in the pudding.
Matthew Morettini 2015 version:
Elmo Williams 1952 version:
Boilerplate commentary: Rio Bravo (’59) and High Noon (’52) don’t share a “general genre” as much as they share a fairly specific plot/situation, which is an honest lawman (or lawmen) preparing to do battle with a gang of bad guys who will soon arrive in town and are out for blood revenge.
The films, in fact, are pretty much peas in a pod. Rio Bravo was in fact dreamt up as a response to what director Howard Hawks and star John Wayne saw as the pessimism and wimpishness of Will Kane, the resolute small-town sheriff played by Gary Cooper.
Both films are about a community’s response to the threat of lawnessness and violence, and about the lawman’s (or lawmen’s) code of honor and self-respect.
In Rio Bravo‘s case, the chief villain is Nathan Burdette. In the matter of High Noon, it’s a recently sprung prison convict named Frank Miller.
Rio Bravo is more optimistic or positive-minded in that the community (Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson) bands together to fight the baddies; in High Noon the community hides or equivocates or otherwise declines to help Kane form a posse so they can meet Miller and his three gunnies head on. They all say no for their own reasons, and Kane is forced to stand up to the gang all alone.
Chicken McCutlets
Before clicking on this link, please understand that HE is profusely apologizing for posting it. I have no excuse except for this: I’m fascinated by AI’s ability to own and manipulate the voice of Barry Lyndon‘s narrator, Michael Hordern.
The below scene, of course, is the one that has killed most viewers’ interest in Barry Lyndon over the decades. Specifically Ryan O’Neal blowing smoke into Marisa Berenson‘s face. The instant this act of sociopathic callousness happened, I checked out. The scene completely nullifies all emotional engagement in the tale until the death of Barry and Lady Lyndon’s son Brian (David Morley), which is followed by the climactic duel between Barry and Lord Bullington (Leon Vitali).
Now THIS Is A Pull-Quote!
Written by Letterboxd’s Doug Dillaman and initially highlighted by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, the following is one of the greatest negative pull-quotes I’ve ever heard in my entire life.
I can’t wait for the Average Joe & Jane anti-woke community blowback….I’m getting damp just thinking about it. And no, I’m not including the Christian Broadcast Network response, which sounds fringey.
Imagine The Derangement
Imagine how twisted and constipated a young hard-working banker would have to be to write the below confession. This sicko actually felt “uncomfortable” about being being given an early morning wake-up by his live-in-girlfriend, mainly because he hadn’t given prior “consent“, and so he “told her to stop” and then left their apartment without speaking, which led to the g.f. apologizing “countless times.”
Conclusion #1: Banker dude is beyond the reach of psychiatric therapy. Conclusion #2: The relationship is doomed.
Is Ken Gay? Uhm, Well…
When asked by Attitude magazine if Ryan Gosling‘s Ken is gay [start at 2:35 mark] and if the film is inclusive in this particular respect, Barbie star-producer Margot Robbie answers with a flabbergasting sidestep**:
“It is but they are all dolls…so they don’t actually have sexual orientations because they don’t have any organs or reproductive organs.”
Due respect, but that’s a dishonest reply. Ken is as gay as Liberace or William S. Burroughs ever were, and probably more so.
“They’re Kenning all over each other.” — Ryan Gosling.
“Ken Has Always Been Gay,” posted on 6.16.22.
Exposing IMAX Hoo-Hah
Hollywood Onramp‘s Jay Troutman (or is it Jake Troutman or Jay Cutler?) has spilled the visual beans on Oppenheimer. Sorry, fans, but it sounds like the same con as before….a wowser factor that is cool but limited.
A relatively small percentage of the viewing public will be watching Oppenheimer in a proper IMAX theatre on a massive screen. And it’s time to come clean: Like Tenet and other IMAX-shot Nolan films, only a certain portion of this upcoming film (7.21) will be projected within the boxy 1.43:1 aspect ratio.
A healthy-sized portion will be presented within a 1.9:1 or 2.2:1 aspect ratio — more or less 2:1 a la Vittorio Storaro. So all the “you absolutely must see it in true-blue IMAX!” hype is basically a shell game.
True-blue IMAX delivers a 15-perf, 70mm image with a boxy aspect ratio (i.e., 1.43:1 or a bit wider than 1.37:1, only much bigger) and a widescreen 1.9:1 or 2.2:1 aspect ratio for smaller, non-IMAX-scale screens.
“The thing is, the IMAX camera is big and loud, so it’s not great for scenes in small rooms with quiet dialogue. Sometimes [the editors] would be like ‘is there a lawnmower in this scene? Where’s the lawnmower coming from?” So Chris Nolan also used the Panavision System 65 5-perf format.”
Eric Kohn: “The bulk of Oppenheimer is men in rooms talking.”
In the shooting stage “both formats use the same film stock, but IMAX captures an image 15 perforations wide while System 65 captures an image five-perfs tall.
“In order to mix these formats together, the five-perf shots are optically blown up to 15 perf and the IMAX 15 perf shots are optically reduced in size.
“You can also see that the different formats result in different shapes, in what we call aspect ratios. The IMAX image is taller than the five-perf image. That means when you go to a proper IMAX theatre with a 1.43:1 screen, anything shot with an IMAX camera will fill the full screen while anything shot by the five-perf camera will have black bars at the top and bottom.
“If you go see the five-perf 70 millimeter print, which [Universal] marketing is calling 70 millimeter film, the image will have a 2.2:1 aspect ratio, and anything shot by the IMAX camera will have have the top and bottom cut off.
“Now you might think that would be a deal-breaker, but [Chris Nolan and his team] always had these different frames in mind. And the 2.2:1 frame is actually what Chris and editor Jennifer Lame were looking at through most of the editing process.
“We had both 2.2 and 1.43 footage in our AVID timelines so they could watch both to make sure everything was working, but the main aspect ratio we worked in was 2.2.”
“…And The Seven Magical Diverse Gender Nonconforming Creatures”
“This right here is the decline of western culture, summed up in a single image. And this movie is the literal personification of everything wrong with modern entertainment.” — from The Critical Drinker’s “Snow White Looks Hilariously Bad.”
