Ten nominees for the Producers Guild of America’s Daryl F. Zanuck award have been announced, and Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking — a dialogue-driven film that wokester critics have been touting as a Best Picture contender since it premiered in Telluride — didn’t make the cut.
I’ve been saying all along that Women Talking is a non-starter, and THR‘s Scott Feinberg tweeted during Telluride that he’d be surprised if it catches on among male industry veterans.
And yet Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, a film that more than a few gentle souls are terrified of even watching, is among the ten…go figure.
The ten PGA nominees: Avatar: The Way of Water (20th Century Studios); The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight Pictures); Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Marvel Studios); Elvis (Warner Bros.); Everything Everywhere All at Once (A24…no!); The Fabelmans (Universal Pictures); Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Netflix); Tár (Focus Features); Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount Pictures); and The Whale (A24).
HE to Friendo #1: “Are these Next Best Picture guys crazy? Women Talking is in third place among Best Picture contenders? On what planet?”
HE to Ruimy: “The truth is that almost every pundit has Women Talking in their predictions, but don’t be surprised if it misses out on a nomination. I’d say right now 60/40 it gets nominated.”
Friendo #2 to HE: “When it comes to Women Talking, the fix is in. A Best Picture nomination is going to happen whether people want it to or not. You could see that in Telluride.”:
HE to Ruimy: “Because of #MeToo tokenism and the fact that the one male character (Ben Whishaw‘s “August Epp”) is passive and tearful?”
Friendo #1 to HE: “The critics will have to drive this movie to Oscar nominations, and I don’t think they’re all on board.”
This is a six-day-old story so feel free to ignore, but on 1.6.23 an avaricious pair of Daily Beast reporters — Diana Falzone and Justin Baragona — tried to get Billy Bush re-cancelled for making a hot-mike “woody” crack about Kendall Jenner‘s “Jessie the Cowgirl” costume on 10.31.22.
Yes, over two months ago. Some vigilant observer who works (or worked) for Extra provided the Beast-ies with a video clip of Bush’s “objectifying” comment when the subject of Jenner’s Halloween costume came up.
Bush said the following: “Kendall goes as Jessie and, believe me, there were a lot of woodies.”
This was basically a so-whatter — a no-big-deal allusion to Tom Hanks‘ Woody character in Toy Story 2, the 1999 film in which the Jessie character (voiced by Joan Cusack) made her debut.
As far as Kendall Jenner is concerned, her brand is precisely and entirely about being objectified. That’s what she does in order to make money — guys get woodies and younger women are made to feel envious (and sometimes try to imitate her).
Bush, who got into trouble six years ago for giggling at Donald Trump‘s hot-miked “grab women by the pussy” remark, shared a mild crack about Jenner being an object of common sexual attraction…big deal. And a couple of months later a staffer or stringer on the Extra set tried to add to Bush’s angst by feeding the video to the fanatics at the Daily Beast.
In some media sectors the woke climate is nothing less than psychotic. This is but one example.
I’m in a nice friendly cafe, and I happen to sitting near a couple of seemingly gay women who are just getting to know each other. Maybe they’ve “met” via Lesly and are speaking for the very first time.
I’m mentioning this because I can’t help overhearing their yappity-yap-yap and absorbing their amorous energy. The same kind of expectant singles-bar hormonal hoo-hah that we’ve all heard and felt. I radiated the same hundreds of times in my heyday.
I’m just thinking to myself “these two are so into impressing each other…they’re trying so hard to be funny and sharp and witty that I’m gettingexhausted just listening to them. It’s none of my business and I should try harder to not listen, but an inner voice is saying ‘Jesus, fellas…maybe you don’t have to try so hard? Give yourselves a break and turn it down a bit.'”
Posted from Honlulu on 11.19.12: “I landed in Honolulu at 10 pm local time (or midnight LA time) after a 5 and 1/2 hour flight. My Tokyo flight leaves tomorrow at 1 pm so I’m staying at an airport-vicinity dump called the Pacific Marina Inn (2628 Waiwai Loop, Honolulu , HI, 96819), which is located among a cluster of drab warehouses and small businesses with two ugly gas stations the only beacons (apart from the PMI) of people-friendly commerce.
“Aloha! Good to be here! The skanky industrial regions of Oahu can be just as ugly if not uglier than the skanky industrial regions around LA or Newark or Orlando.
“As soon as the bags were in the room I stepped outside and breathed in the Hawaiian night air with the idea of going for a nice walk. But about 70 feet away in the darkness of the parking lot there were two curvy, bordering-on-plus-sized girls leaning against a car and making out, and every time I stuck my head out they turned around and gave me this look that said ‘so are you going to stare at us all night, pervy, or do we get a little privacy here?’ So I began to feel intimidated. Like it or not, the girls had laid claim to the parking lot and intruders were not welcome.
“Then I told myself I had just as much of a right to enjoy the parking lot as these girls did. Then I asked myself, ‘What would Ryan Adams do? He’s a sensitive guy, writes for Awards Daily, stands up for gay rights. He’d know what to do. I’m fairly certain he wouldn’t call these girls ‘lesbos’ but would he just roam around and take pictures and do what he wants or would he hide inside the motel room like me, unsure of his next move?'”
Titanic has already been re-released in 3D, but this forthcoming re-release (2.10.23) is being presented in high-frame-rate format, presumably 48 fps. Smoother, more fluid action. That might be interesting to see.
Never forget that that last August the IndieWire gang ranked Titanic as the eighth best ’90s film, and that David Ehrlich, IndieWire‘s hardnosed, often contrarian senior critic, said the following: “Titanic is as personal and cohesive as any film a fraction of its size. Each character, from the card-playing Swedes on the docks of Southampton all the way up to Jack and Rose themselves, is endowed with a lifeforce all their own, enough so that it feels like a family reunion 84 years in the making when you see their ghosts crowding around the first class staircase in that immortal final shot.”
Owen Gleiberman in 2012: “Once the ship scrapes up against that iceberg, Jim Cameron‘s filmmaking turns humanly brilliant, as the prospect of sudden death unmasks — in the most touching and shocking ways — who each and everyone on board really is. Jack’s death scene in the water has the shuddery majesty of the greatest silent films, because it’s a moment that touches how vulnerable and precious life really is. To watch Titanic again is to do nothing less than enter a movie and come out the other side, with one’s spirit feeling just a little bit larger.”
I still say that playing Celine Dion‘s “My Heart Will Go On” over the closing credits was a terrible thing. It added a pop schlock feeling to a film thaty had ended on a beautifully solemn and even transcendent note. And the CG needs a George Lucas-style upgrade.
Lawrence Tierney in Reservoir Dogs: “So you’ve had a few bad months. You do what everybody else does. I don’t care if it’s J.P. Morgan or lrving the tailor. You ride it out.”
Michelle Williams may land a Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Fabelmans, but SAG having blown her off for a Best Actress nom obviously spells trouble.
Congrats to Blonde‘s Ana de Armas, who gave Andrew Dominik all the pain and anguish she could muster — precisely what he wanted from her. Congrats also to Till‘s Danielle Deadwyler for her Best Actress nom; ditto Viola Davis for her Woman King turn. SAG’s Best Actress award will be most likely won by Tar‘s Cate Blanchett. It’s my personal opinion that EEEAAO‘s Michelle Yeoh did herself no favors during her GG acceptance speech last night — she sounded a little too casual, even a bit smug.
SAG’s Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
Babylon The Banshees of Inisherin…NECK & NECK WITH FABELMANS. Everything Everywhere All at Once….no! The Fabelmans Women Talking….NOT A SNOWBALL’S CHANCE IN HELL
SAG’s Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
Cate Blanchett (Tár) Viola Davis (The Woman King) Ana de Armas (Blonde) Danielle Deadwyler (Till) Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once)
SAG’s Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role
Austin Butler (Elvis) Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin) Brendan Fraser (The Whale) Bill Nighy (Elvis) Adam Sandler (Hustle)
SAG’s Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role
Angela Bassett (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) Hong Chau (The Whale) Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin)…DESIGNATED WINNER Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All at Once) Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All at Once)
SAG’s Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role
Paul Dano (The Fabelmans) Brendan Gleeson (The Banshees of Inisherin) Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once)….OBVIOUSLY FATED TO WIN Eddie Redmayne (The Good Nurse)
Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone gets name-checked at the 5:11 mark: “I love this woman, Sasha Stone, who’s come on this show and does Awards Daily,,.,.she’s been writing about Hollywood forever, and this is the point she’s been making, which is that they’re [all] so woke-ified now in Hollywood with gender-merging all the [acting[ categories, good luck to all the men.”
Flame-haired actress Patricia Owens (1.17.25 – 8.31.00) had been playing supporting roles in Hollywood films since ’43. And then in late ’56, her career suddenly caught fire. Five films of serious merit, one after another…bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
And then, after the July ’58 release of The Fly, in which Owens played her most iconic role, that of Helen Delambre, wife of David Hedison‘s eccentric scientist André Delambre, the fire went out.
During her hot streak Owens played top-billed supporting roles in four grade-A films from major helmers — Robert Rossen‘s Island in the Sun (6.12.57), Martin Ritt‘s No Down Payment (10.30.57), Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (12.5.57, portraying Marlon Brando‘s unsettled fiance) and John Sturges‘ The Law and Jake Wade (6.6.58)
Then came her penultimate role in Kurt Neumann‘s The Fly (7.16.58). And then something turned, and before you knew it Owens was no longer in demand. Or at least not in the eyes of the grade-A gang.
Was it because the characters she played seemed too…I don’t know, too bland and middle-class wifey-wifey? Because she was approaching her mid 30s and, by the sexist standards of old-boy Hollywood, deemed somewhat less desirable…maybe a little too PTA-ish??
Owens kept working until the late ’60s, but the party was over. She passed from cancer at age 75. She’s very, very good in Sayonara, by the way. She’s obviously a highly skilled actress, and more than holds her own in her scenes with Brando and costar Ricardo Montalban.
Some are sensing vague parallels between Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid and Charlie Kaufman‘s Synecdoche, or at least the appearance of same. Okay, I’ll be blunt about it — the analogy is actually all over town, lighting up the internets, etc. So here, without further ado, is HE’s review of Kaufman’s film, filed on 5.25.08 — five and a half months before the election of Barack Obama and my subsequent move to NYC. My sister had died from cancer two months earlier; my dad would pass the following month.
Posted on 5.25.08: There’s no way around saying that Charlie Kaufman, the director-writer of Synecdoche, New York, is a gloom-head. A brilliant and, in his past screenplays, hilarious one (by the standards of dryly perverse humor), but a gloom-head all the same. Who, for now, has put aside his sense of humor. The problem with Charlie’s film, which I loved in portions, understood the point of and was intrigued and somewhat amused by in the early rounds, is the damn moroseness of it.
And the title is impossible. I would actually say commercially suicidal. I finally learned how to pronounce the damn thing — Syn-ECK-duh-kee — but if the folks who wind up distributing believe that average moviegoers are going to do anything but run in the opposite direction when this puppy opens, they’d best think again. Titles should always convey something that your average dumbass can understand — this one doesn’t. And they sure as shit can’t be tongue-twisters on top of this.
I nonetheless said to myself during the first 50 minutes or so, “This is my kind of deal.” Okay, maybe into the first hour. Smart-guy material, wise and witty, at times almost elevating, at times surreal, performances that strike the chords just so.
But it began to wear me down. I could feel my interest ebbing. This had something (okay, a lot) to do with the archness and obsessiveness of the characters caught up in various fickle head trips and never saying “uncle.” I didn’t hate what was going on — it’s an imaginative Alice in Wonderland-type thing — but I found myself wishing nonetheless that all these dithering neurotics (Caden especially) would get over themselves and…I don’t know, go rob a bank or move to rural China or something. The story tension in Synecdoche, New York is zilch.
And later with the shots of pink urine and bloody stools sitting in the toilet. I don’t care how lame this makes me sound, but I’ll put up with no more than one human waste shot in a film. Here there are three.
Kaufman doesn’t do “comedies,” per se, but he should have (and could have, if he were so inclined) made it all funnier. And a bit shorter. In the realm of, say, 110 minutes rather than the 124-minute version shown in Cannes.
This might sound like a thoughtless suggestion for a film that follows its characters for a good 30 or more years, staying with them into old age and serious decreptitude. I only know that for all the rich ideas and fully worked-out totality of it, for me it started to drag big-time.
Kaufman said at the post-screening press conference that he began writing it in response to feelings of oncoming decay and death. That’s what 49 year-old gloom-heads do, I guess. They’re most likely looking at another 35 to 40 years of life, if not more, but they feel threatened about the depletion of the organism and the curtain coming down.
The shorthand buzz before Friday’s screening was “quality material, tough sit.” I was intrigued and semi-into what it was doing, but I didn’t and couldn’t submit like Kaufman wanted me to. That said, it’s certainly worth a tumble. Only two hours and four minutes of your time, and a promise of at least some satisfaction.
I was especially wowed by a sermon scene that happens sometime in the last third. It’s just some young bearded clerical letting go with the gospel according to Kaufman (we live in a gloomy, fearful universe), but the way it was written and performed made me feel alive and re-engaged.
After the press conference I asked Kaufman and producer Anthony Bregman if I could be sent a copy of this speech to give HE readers a taste of what’s really good and special about the film. Kaufman passed me along to Bregman, who said, “Do you have a card?” No, I’m cardless, I said, but you can easily send me the dialogue through the website. I knew then and there I’d never hear from him. If anyone has a copy of the script, please get in touch.
I was far from delighted with Paul Mescal‘s performance in Aftersun. My thought was “I’m stuck with this guy?” But now we’re really stuck with him.
It was announced yesterday that Mescal (whose cheery voice isn’t deep enough) is “in talks to play Lucius Verus (son of Connie Neilsen‘s Lucilla, grandson of Marcus Aurelius) in Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator sequel. Mescal is also replacing Blake Jenner in Richard Linklater‘s Merrily We Roll Along film…Jesus.
Friendo: Did you rewatch Aftersun after seeing it in Cannes [last May]?
HE: No.
Friendo: I’m not sure how a Critics Week sidebar flick made it this far into awards season. That’s never happened before. You would presume that Cannes competition and the Quinzaine passed on it before it ended up n Critics Week.
Extreme weather always causes random deaths, and so far at least 12 Californians (including a five-year-old boy) have breathed their last under the current California onslaught. I’m very sorry for any and all suffering, but at the same time I’d be evading if I didn’t admit to a certain dark fascination with catatstrophes, natural and otherwise. Something about major disruptions in the natural ebb and flow of things…something about this grips my throat. Okay, I’ll just say it: I wish I could be Montecito right now so I could stand near the Ellen Degeneres rapids and go “wow.”
Montecito is under mandatory evacuation. We are on higher ground so they asked us to shelter in place. Please stay safe everyone. pic.twitter.com/7dv5wfNSzG
After arguing with Ari Aster about the length of his latest film (three or four hours? Two and a half?), A24 has decided to release the anxious, mondo bizarro, wimpy-sounding Beau Is Afraid on 4.21.23. I’m sorry but this WTF pre-Cannes release date tells us damn near everything.
It tells us first and foremost that Beau Is Afraid is a problem film. Obviously. No distributor releases an epic-lengthed, major-league auteur film in late-April unless they’re totally confused and off-balance and scared shitless about what it is or how to sell it.
If A24 had any balls they would open Beau Is An Old, Terrified, Mommy-Traumatized Candy-Ass on the Cote d’Azur, but no — they’re too chickenshit! Afraid of what the international critical community (especially the Brits) might say!
Aster wanted to release a four-hour version, remember. Imagine watching a four-fucking-hour version of this trailer. You know Beau is going to be a slog….you know it.
It would be one thing if this surreal, memory-injected old man’s psychological horror film was 110 or 120 minutes, but you know that at 179 minutes Hollywood Elsewhere is going to be flailing around on the floor and howling and hyperventilating and possibly shrieking. David Ehrlich will probably call Beau is Afraid a perverse masterpiece but he’ll bend over for almost anything nervy or provocative. Amy Ryan will probably receive the NYFC’s Best Supporting Actress trophy.
It’s either Ari Aster‘s Synecdoche (a tip of the hat to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy for coming up with this brilliant analogy) or an angry, terrified old man’s Wizard of Oz saga, complete with a wicked-ass witch (his own mom, played by Amy Ryan). Every character in this film (except for the kid version of Joaquin) is some kind of smooth ghoulish predator.
Beau Is Afraid (formerly Disappointment Blvd.) is probably going to have its big debut at South by Southwest, a festival that is committed before-the-fact to giving a warm, giddy embrace to any oddball film that premieres there. I’m not kidding about that alternate title: Beau Is An Old, Terrified, Mommy-Traumatized Candy-Ass. HE to A24: Seriously, give this some thought.
Initial texted comments: “So Phoenix is wearing balding, old-fart, liver-spots makeup throughout the whole thing? What happened to Beau being some kind of dynamic entrepeneur or whatever? Now we know why A24 was unhappy with the length.”
At one point Aster described Beau is Afraid on the IMDB page as “a sickly, domestic melodrama in the vein of Douglas Sirk.” That settles it — Glenn Kenny and Richard Brody are going to do cartwheels in the lobby. These two are Maynard G. Krebs in reverse. When Maynard heard the “w” word, he went “work!” When Kenny and Brody hear the name of Hollywood’s most celebrated German-born director of lavish ’50s soap operas, they go “Sirk!” except they mean it lovingly.
