Earlier this year the Gold Derby “experts” embarassed themselves to death by all-but-unanimously predicting that The Brutalist‘s Brady Corbet would take the Best Director Oscar. This is because the GD members are easily intimidated sheep…no balls, no moxie, no backbone or belief, no critical integrity…a certain herd instinct manifests and then “baaaahh!”
Again, the Gold Derby guys know absolutely nothing. They’re on the Sinners train solely because of the social safety factor. They’re afraid not to predict a Sinners Best Picture win or at least a Best Director nomination for Ryan Coogler.
Friendo (speaking this morning): “But a Black director has never won a Best Director Oscar…how long can this continue?” HE to friendo: “The Best Picture Oscar that went to 12 Years A Slave in 2014 was obviously owned by the great Steve McQueen. 12 Years A Slave was and is an epic, humanistic masterpiece. Sinners is an under-lighted, sex-and-blood vampire exploitation film.”
HE can think of nothing better or more glorious than to die on this hill: A Sinners Best Picture win would raise high the banner for the progressive degeneration of cinema in the 21st Century…a process of decline which began to manifest in the ’90s and has been gathering more and more steam since….oh, 2010 or thereabouts, or the year of Ironman.
A bus driver (Matthew McConaughey) has to navigate a bus carrying children and their teacher (America Ferrera) to safety through the 2018 Camp Fire, which became the deadliest fire in California history.
It looks and sounds pretty damn good to me (witty, urbane, self-aware plus Ethan Hwwke‘s Lorenz Hart ie obviously spot-on) but it’s been ages since it opened in Berlin and I haven’t heard of any earlybird screeings since….nothing.
Gavin, Rahm and Pete are basically agreed that all of the crazy, French terror woke crap that began to poke through in the mid teens and went totally crazy in 2020…all of that insanity has to seriously downshift if not leave the room altogether. That or Democrats are going to become a permanent minority party.
And you know who wants the woke crap to continue regardless? Black, The View-watching, over-35 lefty women. Progressive white women with ivy-league degrees and jobs, seemingly on anti-depressants or perhaps in need of same. And LGBTQs.
Which means that Democrats ARE going to become a permanent minority party. Because these demos are not going to back off even slightly.
…to Just Jared for running the first photo of a bewigged BradPitt as Cliff Booth in DavidFincher and QuentinTarantino‘s currentlyfilming TheAdventuresofCliffBooth (Netflix).
Pitt/Cliff appears to be wearing the same kind of yellow Hawaiian-style shirt that he wore in QT’s OnceUponaTimeinHollywood, which in itself conveys a basically traditional / conservative attitude.
The moustache, however, is a mistake. Tens of thousands of blonde-haired guys wore these ‘staches in the ’70s in order to ape the Robert Redford in Butch CassidyandtheSundance Kid mystique.
Redford‘s mustachioed gunslinger was cool but the imitators weren’t. Clean-shaven Cliff was cool in OUATIH, but now he looks dorky.
SuggestiontoFincher: Have Cliff wear a “Death To Disco” T-shirt at one point or another.
Speaking as one who proudly and joyously refuses to sink into the fetid fanboy swamp that is The Fantastic Four: First Steps, are there any honest HE readers out there who can trash it with class and intelligence?
American Eagle’s official slogan — “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” is code for “Sydney Sweeney has great tits” or “Sydney Sweeney has a great ass.” Obviously.
And all the sexless, Stalinist wokesters are howling about this….(a) “Eugenics!”, (b) “They’re weird…like Nazi weird…like fascist weird…dog-whistle shit.”
We do, however, have an ongoing interest in the future-tense lives of Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot. The latter, by the way, has resigned from Astronomer…no choice, c’est la vie, etc.
Bottom line: Andy and Kristin need to embrace their notoriety, not run from it.
2nd by-the-way: The Paltrow Astronomer video was created by Ryan Reynolds‘ Maximum Effort.
Sacha Jenkins‘ Sunday Best (Netflix, now streaming) is a heartfelt, somewhat simplistic tribute to the late variety show host Ed Sullivan and particularly a celebration of Sullivan’s defiance of racist norms in this country back in the ’50s and early ’60s by booking top black performers on The Ed Sullivan Show (1948 to 1971)
If you’d asked me for a capsule description of Sullivan before viewing this 87-minute doc, I would have said something like “famously stiff-necked TV host with a sharp eye for emerging stand-out performing talent…particularly Elvis Presley in 1956 and The Beatles in ’64 and ’65…whatever and whomever was beginning to attract big attention, Sullivan booked them on his one-hour Sunday night show (CBS, 8 pm), always leaving them bigger names than before they’d appeared.”
But to hear it from Jenkins (who passed last May at age 53), Sullivan’s proudest historical achievement was his support of black entertainers. In this respect Sullivan was damn near revolutionary or at the very least bold as brass, Jenkins is saying.
Within this country’s generally racist whitebread culture during the eras of Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, JFK and even Lyndon Johnson, Sullivan was way ahead of the social curve — impassioned, color-blind, conservative but adamant.
Sullivan biographer Gerald Nachman: “Most TV variety shows welcomed ‘acceptable’ black performers like Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey and Sammy Davis Jr….but in the early 1950s, long before it was fashionable, Sullivan was presenting more obscure black entertainers…Bo Diddley, Jackie Wilson, Fats Domino, the Platters, Brook Benton, the Supremes, Nina Simone.”
TV critic John Leonard: “There wasn’t an important black artist who didn’t appear on Ed’s show. [The Irish, Harlem-born Sullivan] defied pressure to exclude black entertainers or to avoid interacting with them on screen. Sullivan had to fend off his hard-won sponsor, Ford’s Lincoln dealers, after kissing Pearl Bailey on the cheek and daring to shake Nat King Cole‘s hand.”
If you search around there are several anecdotes that suggest Jenkins’ portrait of the straightlaced, somewhat prudish Sullivan is less than fully candid, if not sugar-coated. (Read his N.Y. Times obit, which is much tonally dryer and more circumspect than Jenkins’ cheerleader approach.)
Of course it’s partisan! Jenkins’ film is sharing a cultural-political viewpoint that many boomers (kids during the show’s heyday) probably haven’t considered, which is that in terms of encouraging liberal thought and condemning racism, Sullivan, by ushering scores of black performers into America’s living rooms, was as much as a positive social influencer, in a certain sense. as Martin Luther King.
Over the last 60 or 70 years Sullivan’s default associations have been Presley and the Beatles, slam dunk. Ask anyone. Jenkins doc, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in ’23, pushes the “ballsy racial reformer” portrait much more than any colorful side sagas or anecdotes about white performers.
How good is Sunday Best on a craft or audience-absorption level? Passable, not great.
Last night I watched the second half of Billy Joel: And So It Goes, and honestly? I didn’t like it as much as Part One, which is like the first half of Lawrence of Arabia — troubled beginnings, difficult development, Joel’s relationship with wife #1 (Elizabeth Weber), the gradual finding of success in the ’70s and then up, up, up into the early ’80s…pow!
The second part is about basically about the pressures and difficulties of life at the top — 1982’s Nylon Curtain album, trying to connect with his emotionally remote father, the initially very happy Christie Brinkley years and the arrival of his first daughter Alexa, getting financially ripped off by his manager Frank Weber, “We Didn’t Start The Fire“, the Katie Lee Biegel marriage, serious alcohol abuse (Joel dried out at Silver Hill in ’02 or thereabouts), the marriage to Alexis Roderick and their two daughters, but gradually running out of gas and losing the drive to write new songs, etc.
Hell, the documentary runs out of gas. The general narrative drift is “things are harder, more complicated, boozier as the creative fire gradually dims,” etc.
Being married to a driven creative type with a turbulent emotional past is never a day at the beach…guaranteed.
It’s a bummer to think that the most recently composed Joel song that I’ve really liked is The River of Dreams (“In the middle of the niiiight”), which came out in July ’93. There hasn’t been an album of original songs since. 32 fucking years ago, man. Joel explains that songwriting-wise he’d become a burnt-out case, “tired of the tyranny of the rhyme,” etc.
