Jeff Wells

A large Tyrannosaurus Rex might be be able to smash a cheaply-made bedroom door by shattering the door frame, but a big bear wouldn’t be able to do that…sorry. So right away the credibility is out the window. Plus the CG stinks. If only Werner Herzog had written and directed this…seriously.

Cocaine Bear (Universal, 2.23) stands ready to fling damp fecal matter upon our cinematic temple and lower the levels of cultural discourse. It’s the new Snakes on a Plane, and that piece of cheap exploitation blew chunks to begin with.

The tone, obviously, is one of absurdist action humor of the lowest possible order.

There’s clearly no opportunity to buy into the fantasy — every shot in this trailer says “don’t believe this crap!…are you a moron because only stoned morons would derive the slightest enjoyment from a film this idiotic and ludicrous. I mean, it’s not even good enough to be called perverse.”

Universal Pictures, director Elizabeth Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden aren’t the core problem here. They’re just looking to make a buck and pay the bills. The skeevy, scurvy, bottom-of-the-barrel chumps out there in megaplexland who find this live action-meets-Wile E. Coyote-type humor funny or even slightly amusing…they’re the problem.

An actual Georgia-residing bear (a guiltless creature of basic instinct and no ulterior motives) died of self-ingested cocaine poisoning in 1985, and 37 years later a movie company has made a dark comedy out of this…A COMEDY!! If this isn’t a searing indictment of a thoroughly rancid and morally corrupted lower-middle-class culture, I don’t know what could be.

You know who’s going to like this film and tweet about it endlessly? Trumpies!

I’ve changed my mind — Banks and Warden need to answer for this. After Cocaine Bear is released and streaming to great profitability, they’ll need to check themselves into a moral rehab facility.

Today I caught two year-end films at Dolby 24 (1359 Sixth Avenue, 28th floor) — Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith‘s Emancipation at noon, and then Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light (Searchlight, 12.9), which I initially saw in Telluride three months ago.

I’m sorry but despite a certain over-calculated tidiness and occasional on-the-nose moments that pop through now and then, Empire of Light remains my favorite film of the year — the most romantic, the most emotionally delicate and soothing and subtle and soft-touchy, and filled with satisfying and at times even sublime performances.

The great Olivia Colman towers above all, but Michael Ward, Colin Firth, Tanya Moodie (as Michael’s mom), Toby Jones and Tom Brooke…everyone is just right.

I’ll share some Emancipation thoughts later this evening.

If you’ve seen Ruben Oastlund‘s The Square you’ll recall that the downfall of Claes Bang‘s “Christian,” curator of Stockholm’s X-Royal art museum, is caused by a risque video ad.

A promotion for an art installation called “The Square,” it shows a very young white ragamuffin blonde girl being blown to bits. The video quickly goes viral for obvious reasons, and before anyone knows it media types, religious figures and Average Joes are calling for Christian’s head.

A similar child-related scandal erupted five or six days ago over a pair of Balenciaga ads that seemed to blend images of little girls with suggestions of BDSM, conveying a perverse and icky mentality that many felt had crossed an ethical line. Teddy bear purses, bondage accessories, etc.

Bakenciaga reps have apologized for both ads and removed them from their social media. Nonetheless angry reactions have resulted in a Balenciaga store in Beverly Hills being trashed and graffiti’ed. Celebrities who’ve promoted Belnciagia product, including Kim Kardashian, Isabelle Huppert and Nicole Kidman, have been pressured to cut ties, etc.

Here’s an 11.29 timeline piece by insider.com’s Samantha Grindell.

The Balenciaga uproar is strikingly similar to the one depicted in The Square…just saying.

I’m still deeply uncomfortable about Mike White‘s anal fixations (analingus, suitcase pooping), but last night I marched through episodes $2, #3, #4 and #5 of season #2 of The White Lotus, and I was impressed. I was vaguely irked by the wealth porn (alright already!), and Tanya McQuoid-Hunt (the wide-faced, buffalo-shaped Jennifer Coolidge, who looks like a dude in a blonde wig) is still pathetic and her husband Greg (Jon Gries) is still cruel and aloof, but otherwise I found the randy characters mostly appealing and compelling. And I thought “what a pleasure to take the measure of all these wealthy travellers…what great adult stuff.”

The 30something Ethan and Harper Spoiler (Will Sharpe, Aubrey Plaza) are easily the most miserable couple — hung-up, uptight, haunted. And their opposite number — the morally unconstrained Cameron and Daphne Sullivan (Theo James, Meghann Fahy) are the most accepting of their basic natures and seemingly happier for it. Poor Bert Di Grasso (F. Murray Abraham) laments that he’ll never see a naked woman again. His grandson Albie Di Grasso (Adam DiMarco) has a passonate fling with Lucia (Simona Tabasco), a local sex worker. Lucia’s friend Mia (Beatrice Granno), who has a great lounge-singing voice, winds up accidentally dosing the hotel’s resident piano player (a 50ish dude) with “Molly.” And the hobbit-sized Quentin (Tom Hollander) turns out to be the kindest and wisest of the bunch. It’s all good, (almost) every bit of it, and I can’t wait for the remaining episodes.

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Adam Sandler‘s Gotham Awards speech (starting around the 6:10 mark) made me laugh early this morning, and then I forgot about it. But this version is a drag because is starts with six minutes of the Safdie brothers (balding Josh, cute Bennie) doing a painfully long-winded introduction. Which films and filmmakers won Gotham trophies last night? Nobody cares. Okay, Everything Everywhere All at Once won two — the Best Feature Award as well as the Outstanding Supporting Performance award, which went to Ke Huy Quan (i.e., Short Round). Nobody cares.

Will Smith: “I was gone, man…I was gone…that was rage that had been bottled up for a really long time…it was a mess.”

Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith‘s Emancipation opens in four days (12.2), and Apple is still being cagey and selective about showing it to the critical community. Several Manhattan critics saw it on Monday. I’ve spoken to two who’ve seen this saga of Whipped Peter, this 19th Century escape-and-survival tale, and their reactions were on the slumping or downbeat side. Critic to HE: “Meh, middling, a slog.” HE to critic: “So it doesn’t totally suck eggs? it’s sorta kinda half good? Not awful? Moderately tolerable?”

Posted only a few hours ago (Monday evening, 11.28), “What Each Best Picture Winner Tells Us About Hollywood” is one of the most perceptive and sweeping assessments of the whole 94-year history of the Oscar awards — what they’ve meant or symbolized or reflected on a decade-by-decade basis. How not just the business but American culture has gradually evolved from the late 1920s to today. And before the era-by-era recap begins, the first six minutes and 50 minutes deliver an excellent reading of where things stand now and have recently been. The only thing it doesn’t really get into is woke Stalinism and the general demonizing of older white males.

The guy who put it together is allegedly named Dalton, but his YouTube handle is “All Talking Pictures.”

A few days ago Next Best Picture‘s Matt Neglia tweeted that he was feeling “gutted” after he and his parents had sat down to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once. He was feeling bummed because his dad had walked out during the film’s “emotional climax” (whatever that refers to).

On one hand I agree that Matt’s dad acted inconsiderately and that he shouldn’t have missed the film’s best moment, which comes at the very end in the IRS office. On the other I can relate to his father’s reaction (I mostly hated this godawful film) and I admire his resolve — he knew his son had a great amount of affection for EEAAO and yet he just couldn’t stand it and felt he had to leave in order to maintain his sanity.

Babylon director-writer Damien Chazelle “wanted to plumb the lower depths — to juxtapose La La Land’s gorgeous, Hollywood-glam set pieces and Whiplash’s darker examination of ambition’s toll. “It was really a wild West period for these people, this gallery of characters, as they rise and fall, rise, fall, rise again, fall again,” he says, adding that “the thing that they’re building is springing back on them and chewing them up.”

“Everything is shifting underneath people’s feet and I became really fascinated by the human cost of disruption at that magnitude, at a time when there was no road map, when everything was just new and wild.” == Vanity Fair‘s Rebecca Ford, 9.7.22.

In a 9.2.22 Vanity Fair piece about Babylon, Rebecca Ford described Margot Robbie‘s character (“Nellie LaRoy”) as “an amalgam of early stars like Clara Bow, Jeanne Eagels, Joan Crawford and Alma Rubens.”

But in a May 2019 draft of Damien Chazelle‘s screenplay, Robbie’s character is flat-out identified as Clara Bow, and right now there doesn’t seem to be much of an effort on Chazelle, Robbie or anyone else’s part to deny that LaRoy is modelled upon this spunky, irrepressible, flapper-type actress who came to represent the wild-ass, bathtub-gin spirit of the 1920s Hollywood.

From “Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Clara Bow, ‘It’ Girl.” by Hairpin‘s Anne Helen Petersen:

“Clara Bow doesn’t look like a relic. She doesn’t look like she belongs in the ’20s, or even in black and white. She looks nothing like the other stars of the silent era, who either seemed frozen in puberty (Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish), outrageously “exotic” (Theda Bara, Pola Negri), or untouchably glamorous (Gloria Swanson). This girl’s got something like whoa.

“Look at her. She looks so…MODERN. Like she could be a star today, right? When I show footage of Bow to my undergraduates, who generally consider the viewing of silent film as the sixth level of hell (trumped only by the viewing of Soviet silent film) they can’t take their eyes off her. It’s her movement, her eyes, the way she flirts with the camera.

“But it’s something else, too – something Billy Wilder once referred to as ‘flesh impact,’ a rare quality shared only with the likes of Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Flesh impact meant having ‘flesh which photographs like flesh,’ flesh you felt you could reach out and touch — or flesh with which you would very much like to have sex.

“That desire made Clara Bow a star, but would also make it easy to tell outrageous stories about her, and for people to believe those outrageous stories. In 1927, she was the No. 1 star in America. When she retired in 1931 amid a tangle of scandals, she was all of 28 years old.”

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