Jeff Wells

The new Women Talking trailer tells you it’s a quality-level thing for smart women…grim, somber, articulate, muted palette, lotsa dialogue. I can only tell you that as much as I recognized the pedigree and respected the aims of Sarah Polley’s film (UA Releasing, 12.2), I looked at my watch at least seven or eight times.

Posted on 9.9.22: Step outside the woke-critic realm and there’s a sizable body of opinion (or so I determined after speaking with Telluride viewers) that Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking is a static, dialogue-driven #MeToo chamber piece that could be fairly described as a “tough sit.”

Based on Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel, which is “loosely based on real-life events that occurred in 2011 at the Manitoba Colony in Bolivia,” Women Talking is about several women dealing with corrosive sexual trauma.

Set within an isolated American Mennonite community, Women Talking focuses on a nocturnal, seemingly dusk-to-dawn discussion inside a barn, and focuses on eight or so women debating whether to leave their community to escape the brutality of several men who have repeatedly drugged and raped them.

Fortified by several first-rate performances (most notably from Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara and Claire Foy) and currently enjoying a 92% and 90% approval ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively, the post-Telluride narrative is that Women Talking will probably be Best Picture-nominated and will certainly be in the running for a SAG Best Ensemble prize.

The other narrative is that this counted-on support for Women Talking will be largely emotional (particularly driven by the overturning of Roe v. Wade) and certainly political.

As I wrote in a 9.5 piece called “Telluride Hive Mind,” “The elite Telluride critic community feels it has no choice but to worship Polley‘s film…politically speaking there’s no upside to not praising it.”

I added that Women Talking is “sturdy and nicely handled as far as it goes, but sitting through it felt confining and interminable. For me, it was almost totally about waiting for it to end.”

The indisputably brave, lone-wolfish Kyle Smith of The Wall Street Journal: “Critically acclaimed as an oblique commentary on the #MeToo moment, it’s an example of a prestige film that is more focused on point-scoring than coherence.”

A sentence in Jordan Ruimy’s mostly negative Toronto assessment, however, gave me pause: “There were women sobbing all around me during the press & industry screening of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, so I assume the film will work with a large contingent of people. But it fell flat for me.”

Roe v. Wade plus Toronto “sobbing” means Women Talking isn’t going away and will command repeated salutations in award-season assessment articles between now and early ’23 (the Oscar telecast happens on 3.12.23). The bottom line is that, as THR‘s Scott Feinberg suggested during Telluride, a significant percentage of Academy and guild members will probably be less than enthused.

This won’t stop the wokester cabal, of course. They will push for Women Talking with the same fervor they used to (unsuccessfully) take down Green Book, and which some of them will use to diminish Sam Mendes‘ immensely affecting Empire of Light, which will absolutely be Best Picture-nominated…trust me.

This is two days old but HE is also jubilant that Iim Kardashian got booed during Sunday’s Rams-Cowobys game. There’s hope for this country yet.

Almost seven months later it’s finally been revealed why Aziz Ansari‘s Being Mortal stopped shooting last March and has never resumed, and costar Keke Palmer had nothing to do with it. 

It just didn’t seem logical or likely that a woman with considerably less power and status than Palmer could have made such a stink that the film was shut down. But that’s apparently what happened.

Puck’s Eriq Gardner has reported that the complainer was a “much younger” female production staffer whom costar Bill Murray “allegedly straddled and kissed through masks.”

After the anonymous woman lodged an official complaint, the parties entered mediation and eventually came to a settlement of just over $100,000.

Why the hell was this kept under wraps for over six months when so many people (myself included) were theorizing that by any rational industry mindset the complainer had to be Palmer? What exactly was the upside in keeping this touchy matter top secret for so long?

HE fully apologizes to Palmer for pointing to what seemed like a completely logical and likely assumption.

Can we trust Emancipation buzz passed along by Variety columnist Clayton Davis, who’s demonstrated time and again that he’s something of a cheerleader when it comes to BIPOC-related features and performances?

I’m not dismissing what Clayton is saying, of course, but it might be a good idea to take it with a grain.

What is Clayton asserting exactly? In a recent ‘The Take’ video Clayton says that Antoine Fuqua’s film (theatrical 12.2, Appl+ streaming on 12.9) is “supposed to be pretty great…Fuqua’s best, in fact…very gritty, very dark…even more graphic that 12 Years A Slave.”

The money quotes run from 3:42 to 4:14.

In short, Clayton wants to see the film nominated for Best Picture, Fuqua nominated for Best Director and…what can Will Smith be nominated for again? I’m not sure. If Emancipation were to win the Best Picture Oscar, Smith, one of the film’s four producers (along with Todd Black, Joey McFarland and Jon Mone), could technically stride onstage and co-accept the award…right? (Or do I have that wrong?) Smith can’t win for Best Actor because he’s resigned from the Academy…correct? But he can be nominated…is that right?

The “more graphic than 12 Years A Slave‘ remark suggests that Fuqua, whose aesthetic instincts have never been on the lofty Tarkovsky or Kubrick side, decided to out-gun Steve McQueen’s 2013 Oscar-winner with the graphic material because one thing he doesn’t want people saying is ‘it’s less graphic than 12 Years A Slave.’

Identical twin with longer hair: “I’ve seen TAR twice, and the first time I felt I didn’t have the best grasp on this film. One of the reasons is that [director] Todd Field is not giving us answers or telling us this is exactly where he stands. He’s presenting a lot more questions than answers, and that would be a helpful thing to keep in mind as you go into this movie.

“Because sometimes it does feel as if something is being said on one side and then there’s a point being made for the opposite side, and it’s kinda difficult for us to take away a central thesis. [Because] I don’t think we are being given a central thesis.

“And after both viewings, i did feel a little cold at the end. Like not sure if I care that much about what is happening. There are some things presented abstractly, and I was ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to do here.’ I didn’t feel like I was on the film’s wavelength the whole time. [The film] floated my boat, but not all the way to the surface. [The boat] was still kind of underwater, and I had to get a couple of buckets to get that water out.”

Identical twin with shorter hair: “The details are there for you to pick up on, and Todd Field trusts you to figure them out. He really, really respects the audience’s intelligence, and he almost makes you feel smart…”

Identical twin with longer hair: “Conversely TAR could make you feel quite dumb.”

Same observations said more concisely by yours truly on 9.4.22:

HE agrees that Park Chan-wook‘s Decision to Leave (MUBI, 10.14) “has some of the best direction and editing” seen in years. This assessment sidesteps the fact that the script (co-written by Jeong Seo-kyeong and PCW) is convoluted and overlong and sometimes infuriating, especially during the final hour. Calling it a “neo-noir puzzler” isn’t putting it strongly enough.

Here’s HE’s 10.5. assessment, essentially a re=boot of my 5.23.22 Cannes Film Festival review.

I’ve always liked Jack Lemmon‘s (C.C. Baxter‘s) pre-war, moderately spacious, one-bedroom residence in Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment (’60). And I’ve always enjoyed Baxter’s tennis-racket pasta strainer.

The address in the film was 51 West 67th Street, #2A. A NYC film location website (www.the culturetrip.com) reports that Wilder shot the brownstone’s exteriors at 55 West 69th Street, between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West.  It’s also been reported that the brownstone was re-constructed on a Los Angeles sound stage.

Baxter’s rent was $85 a month, which strictly translates on an inflationary scale to $850 in 2022 dollars. This, of course, is but a fraction of the actual likely rent today.

Zumper.com reports “the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Upper West Side, New York, NY is currently $4,564,” which reps a 15% increase compared to 2021.

The Peripheral (Amazon Prime, 10.21), a kind of adventure series about a virtual reality traveller (Chloe Grace Moretz), is based on a 2014 novel by sci-fi author William Gibson (Neuromancer).

The teleplay has been created-written by Scott Smith (A Simple Plan, The Ruins). Westworld‘s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are serving as exec producers, whatever that actually means.

People who’ve continued to endure HBO’s Westworld series know that Nolan and Joy are purveyors of the puzzlebox approach to teleplay writing…endless dingle-dangle plotting that goes on forever without actually getting anywhere.

The series costars Gary Carr, Jack Reynor, Eli Goree, Charlotte Riley, Adelind Horan, T’Nia Miller and Alex Hernandez.

The Hollywood Reporter has revealed its core philosophical allegiance in Alex Ritman’s story about John Cleese‘s decision to become an anchor-commentator on England’s GB News, a recently launched station which is roughly analogous to the Daily Wire. (I thinj.)

THR/Ritman: “John Cleese, the former Monty Python heavyweight and more recently a vocal campaigner against so-called wokeism and cancel culture, is set to become a regular presenter on GB News, the right-leaning news channel that launched in 2021.”

Ritman’s use of the term “so-called” means that THR is highly suspicious of even the existence of wokeism and cancel culture, which is a total wokester dodge tactic.

in a 9.2.21 piece about Johnny Depp appearing at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Variety tipped its hand in the exact same way:

Cleese: “There’s a massive amount of important information that gets censored, both in TV and in the press. In my new show, I’ll be talking about a lot of it. You should be prepared to be shocked.”

Despite the GB affiliation, Cleese has described himself as “an old-style liberal.” Since the emergence of “the terror” I’ve been calling myself a center-left moderate….same difference.

Cleese said he would be working with the existing GB News presenter Andrew Doyle, a comedian who used to write scripts for the fictional “Jonathan Pie“, aka Tim Walker.

I feel truly sorry for people who are living large off and within the film / TV industry and at the same don’t really get the love and worship factor.

Ask Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino: Film is a faith — a religious order, and either you wear the monk robes or you don’t. I never detected the slightest indication that the hard-nosed Nikki Finke understood or believed this.

At their best (5% or 10% of the time) movies are vessels of art and joy and nurture, and before the terrible plague of the last few years (relentlessly empty, soul-smothering Millennial/Zoomer streaming “content” + flooding of farmlands with Marvel/D.C. fanboy crap + mass suffocation from the pandemic + woke gulag Stalinism) theatres were hallowed places of communal worship and self-recognition or at least some form of intimate observance.

To regard and define Hollywood (filmmaking, promotion, distribution) strictly as a dollars-and-cents power game is a philistine distraction. To many of us the game, or more precisely the calling, is much bigger and deeper than that.

East Coast Friendo: “My wife and I went to see Bros at our local multiplex; 4pm show on a weekday, so there were fewer than five other people. We thought it was very funny, smart and moving.

“As I was thinking about why it’s been such a box-office flop, I think the idea that it feels too woke and preachy misses the mark. When you get right down to it, it was so obviously gay that I understand why it didn’t find a mass audience.

“It’s one thing for Will & Grace, essentially the minstrel version of gay people, to be popular. But I don’t think most moviegoers are ready to watch men kissing, simulating sex and making jokes about ‘your gigantic penis and my tiny little anus.’ I laughed, but I think it would make many people in the flyover squirm.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a mainstream Hollywood film which included an explicit romantic sex scene w/men having face-to-face intercourse while lying down (something you see in hetero romcoms all the time). I’ve also never seen one in which the role of ‘the bottom’ is as explicitly laid out as it is here, where the top says, ‘I want you to fuck me tonight.’

“I would imagine there are a lot of people who are interested in the film but wouldn’t want to be seen attending it or even be known to have watched it. So maybe it will find its audience when it streams and moves to the other platforms.”

West Coast Friendo: “You don’t see much sex in romcoms either. That’s the point. They’re basically grown up fairy tales for heterosexual women. The genre is called ROMANTIC comedy, not sex romp. Thrillers tended to have more sex in them, although even that has been purged.

“No romcom would have Tom Hanks with his hands on Meg Ryan’s boobs or ass on the poster.

“Bros. should have been put on Streaming or HBO where it would have been devoured by its target demo.

“Why didn’t it debut on streaming? Because it’s a missionary movie — its aim is not entertainment but conversion.

“I couldn’t even get a black gay friend to see it with me. ‘It looks stupid,’ he said.”

HE to East Coast Friendo: “Ahh, the joys of gay sex! You brought up Bros sex so allow me to continue the thread…

“What about the fat gay guy telling Eichner that some guy peed on another guy? Did you find that bit amusing or even appealing?

“I rolled with the graphic sexual behavior depictions in Bros, but I can’t honestly say they were particularly welcome.

“Like I said in one of my riffs, at times the depictions almost approached the graphic levels of Frank Ripploh’s Taxi Zum Klo.

“40-plus years ago Eddie Murphy’s ‘Mr. T in a gay bar’ routine was hilarious FOR A REASON. Apart from Murphy’s unfortnate use of the “f” word, it’s still funny. And the funniest line? Mr. T growling ‘I want you to come on over here, and fuck me in the ass.’

Hilarious then, but if you so much as snicker at such a scenario now you’re probably a homophobe and (who knows?) a possible candidate for cancellation.

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