Jeff Wells Gina Prince Bythewater‘s The Woman King hasn’t tanked — it’s actually performing fairly decently. Analysts are projecting $18 million by Sunday night. For a 19th Century African war film starring a distinguished actress who’s barely a movie star, the box-office response isn’t half bad.
HE to Blonde spoiler whiners: This post discusses the August 1962 death of Marilyn Monroe, which is what Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix streaming, 9.28.22) ends with.
HE to friendo #1: “Yesterday I slogged my way through Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, which I regard as artful torture porn. And then I happened upon a Matt Lynch tweet that analogized Blonde and a landmark 1988 film, and the instant I read it I said ‘yes!'”
“I’m thinking not just of the incessant dismissals and degradations and spiritual uncertainties, but the anguished and agonized relationship between the main protagonist and the elusive ‘father.’
“Just as Willem Dafoe sips a goblet of sacramental wine before submitting to his final fate, Norma Jean swallows alcohol and barbiturates before her final episode of passion at her Fifth Helena Drive abode (the delivery man, the fuzzy tiger, the shattering note). And like Dafoe’s Jesus, a spectral Marilyn smiles and separates from death, and greets the immortality that she still enjoys today a la Andrew Dominik.”
Friendo #1 to HE: “That’s a brilliant interpretation. Celebrity is in its own way like religion. It still is. The fandoms online are like churches. Which says more about us than it does Marilyn. Lynch is saying we treat her like a kind of deity. Very smart. The myth is the truth.”
Friendo #2 to HE: “Well, there’s no doubt that she was a supreme martyr of 20th-century feminine glory and trauma. But the Jesus comparison feels a little abstract to me. What I think you’re possibly leaving out is that Blonde, dark as it is, is not torture porn. It’s a movie that’s trying to capture who Marilyn Monroe really was.”
HE to Friendo #2: “I really do think it’s primarily torture porn of an artful nature. Yes, it does capture who Monroe really was, but at what a price! Yes, it’s about the MYTH, or precisely THE TRAGIC but TRANSCENDENT MYTH. Marilyn suffered for our sins, but she’s lived eternally ever since and, in an underlined and undeniable sense, more splendidly and blessedly over the last 60 years than she did in her own biological life span, which lasted only a mere 36 years.
“The last thing Marilyn does, after dying, is become a happy ghost…she separates from her body as she smiles delightedly at the camera. As if to say, ‘The torment is finally over, and now the eternally blessed myth takes over, and I will revel in the glory of that myth for ever and ever.’” Or, if you will, “It is accomplished.”
Friendo #2 to HE: “That’s what I liked about Blonde. It’s probably the best account of what was truly occurring inside Monroe’s mind. Other depictions have failed in trying to convey the inner torture she was feeling.”
HE to Friendo #2: “Oh, it was torture, all right!”
Friendo #2 to HE: “I think it’s torture psychodrama. That’s what’s fascinating about it. She’s one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and I found the spectacle of what was happening inside her quite gripping. The cornerstone of her trauma, remember, isn’t all the men who exploited or didn’t understand her. It was her insanely abusive upbringing. It’s boring to say but that, in a nutshell, is why she was so fucked up.”
HE to Friendo #2: “Agreed. The mother and the father were demonic.”
Friendo #2 to HE: “Not just because the Hollywood system was patriarchal and exploitative and oppressive. But because the Hollywood system crumpled this already broken person.”
HE to Friendo #2: “After meeting and hanging with Montgomery Clift, Monroe told a friend ‘I’ve just met someone who might be as fucked up as I am, and maybe more so.'”
Friendo #2 to HE: “I don’t see how all of that, portrayed truthfully and with a fair degree of artfulness (although there are a number of things in the film I didn’t care for), adds up to ‘torture porn.'”
HE to Friendo #2: “Artful torture porn.”
Friendo #2 to HE: “And the bottom line is — this is the grand paradox the movie captures — Marilyn’s search for ‘daddy’ became the cornerstone of her art.”
HE to Friendo #2: “Good point. Especially the squinting, Arthur Miller-like daddy figure she speaks of in Some Like It Hot. Not to mention Clark Gable (The Misfits), Louis Calhern (The Asphalt Jungle), George Sanders (All About Eve), Laurence Olivier (The Prince and the Showgirl), and even, in a stretch, Charles Coburn and Cary Grant in Monkey Business.”
Henry Silva‘s most memorable role was “Chunjin”, a Korean guide and turncoat, in John Frankenheimer‘s The Manchurian Candidate (’62). Silva’s biggest scene was a martial-arts duke-out with Frank Sinatra in the Manhattan apartment of Laurence Harvey‘s “Raymond Shaw”, for whom Chunjin was working for as a servant, cook and driver. (Angela Lansbury, playing Harvey’s malevolent mother, calls him “Chu Chin Chow.”)
Silva, however, was of Sicilian and Spanish descent, so he would have had a tough time playing a Korean under today’s woke theocracy.
During his ’50s and ’60s heyday, Silva also played a Mexican peasant farmer who confronted Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata (’52), a Manhattan heroin dealer in A Hatful of Rain (’57), a generic bad guy in The Bravados (’58), a forest-dwelling Venezuelan in Green Mansions (’59), a Vegas sharpie in Ocean’s 11 (’60), a Native American in Sergeants 3 (’63), a Sicilian assassin in Johnny Cool (’63), a Japanese detective in The Return of Mr. Moto (’65), and an Apache in Five Savage Men (’70).
Silva died two days ago (9.14) at the Motion Picture & Television Fund home in Los Angeles. He was 95. Respect & condolences. Woke fanaticism never touched him, and he lived a bountiful life for that.
Bill Maher to Aaron Rodgers, starting at 1:12 mark: “The Republicans are actually more dangerous, and they’re certainly more…I can’t say the word anymore but it begins with ‘r’…we’re not allowed to say it anymore, which is why I hate woke because we need that word desperately because the country is…but the woke side is so much more obnoxious…the level of hate that they engender in me, with the kind of shit that they do…is like…”
Rodgers to Maher: “Why would they not move to the middle? They would get everyone on their side!”
Maher to Rodgers: “I say that every week. If they just would shed this skin…this woke skin of pregnant men and [equity over meritocracy] and ‘let’s make crime legal’…math is racist…whatever nonsense they’re into…all that shit, and it would be so easy to just leave it behind, and they would win every election.”
Initially posted on 4.27.22: Kasi Lemmons‘ I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Sony, 12.21.22), a cradle-to-grave biopic of the late Whitney Houston, was screened last night in Las Vegas, and the word (I spoke to two viewers) is definitely on the approving side.
It’s longish (150 minutes, give or take) and technically incomplete, as is normal for any film that’s more than eight months from opening. And it covers almost all of the biographical basics for Whitney fans — definitely a fan-service presentation.
For what it’s worth one guy’s reaction is through the roof about Naomi Ackie‘s Whitney performance. I know nothing about Ackie except that (a) she’s British and (b) played the smallish role of “Jannah” in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
What kind of movie is I Wanna Dance With Somebody? Honest response: “It’s a TIFF People’s Award winner…it’s not a Venice or Telluride type of film…it’s been made for your hoi polloi faithful. And yet it’s intelligent and well-written as far as biopics go…screenplay by Anthony McCarten, shot by Zero Dark Thirty‘s Barry Aykroyd. Nothing wrong with that. It takes all sorts of films to make a world.
It’s basically a six-character drama — Ackie as Houston, Ashton Sanders as Bobby Brown, Stanley Tucci as Clive Davis, Nafessa Williams as Robyn Crawford (Whitney’s girlfriend), Clarke Peters as Whitney’s father and Tamara Tunie as her mom.
Houston’s Bodyguard costar Kevin Costner isn’t a character in the film.
…and is more or less ready to be shown commercially, what would your reaction be if you were a distributor in a position to purchase distribution rights?
I can tell you what my reaction would be. My reaction would be “this is such a good film that we need to not release it for another 15 or 16 months, just to be on the safe side….we need to put it on ice and let things just cool off and simmer down. Let’s not go into this situation half-cocked.”
I’m kidding. That wouldn’t have been my reaction. That was Focus Features’ reaction when they bought Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.
A guy (or guys) who saw The Holdovers last Sunday (i.e., five days ago) in Toronto shared reactions with TheWrap‘s Brian Welk
Reaction #1: “Outside a screening of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto on Sunday, one attendee left feeling that he had seen the best movie playing at the festival, even though it wasn’t an official selection of TIFF, and almost no one knew the screening was happening.”
Reaction #2: “[An] individual close to the project described it as touching, funny and very emotional, blending comedy and drama in the way that Sideways or Payne’s other films have managed with ease. Not only does The Holdovers reunite Payne with his Sideways star Paul Giamatti, the film fits snugly into Payne’s larger repertoire, moving away from the high-concept social satire Downsizing and instead evoking Payne’s humanism and the frustrations about ‘life being bewildering.'”
…is whether or not WBHE’s Casablanca 4K Bluray (11.8) will resemble my all-time-favorite version, which is the slightly DNR-ed 2008 Bluray. If it has that clean and velvety look, fine. If it doesn’t and instead resembles the unfortunate 70th anniversary 2012 Bluray, which is crawling with billions and billions of digital mosquitoes, I will (a) be unhappy and (b) do what I can to spread the word.
I know that grain is integral to celluloid images, but I hate it all the same. Especially when it comes to black-and-white. I don’t want to know from grain, ever. Grain is a pestilence. I want clean, pristine, silvery images that look exquisite by present-day standards.
The new 4K Casablanca “was restored and remastered from a 2022 4K 16bit film scan of the best-surviving nitrate film elements. The 4K-scanned digital images went through an extensive digital restoration process to clean and repair the picture for an unprecedented and pristine ultra-high-resolution presentation. The restored images were then graded in High Dynamic Range for today’s premium 4K display experience, providing the highest fidelity in image contrast and detail retention. This work was meticulously handled by Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging. The original theatrical mono audio has also been newly restored as well, providing a richer and broader frequency response than previously possible.”
I think it’s fair to ask Variety‘s Clayton Davis if he’s finally seen Casablanca. If he has, fine, but he should submit to extensive questioning. If he hasn’t, he needs to be a man and admit that.
Oscar Expert (singular) stands for identical twins who are 24 or 25, and for my money they’re fairly sharp and articulate as far as their age and experience has taken them. (I still haven’t determined their actual names.) What’s interesting is that they’re simultaneously obsequious and ambivalent about The Fabelmans. Just listen.
…you’d better not miss.
“This all points to a collapse of Russia. All sorts of other other peripheral actions in the Russian zone of influence will be curtailed as a consequence of Ukraine.” — General Richard David Shirreff, a retired senior British Army officer and author. From March 2011 to March 2014 he served as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe.
All the British tabloids are going with the “Putin’s limo attacked” story:
Chief Putin assassination ringleader to key trigger man [transcribed]: “Just remember that when you fire the projectile, you need to aim straight for the front left tire of his limousine…get that tire or we’ll all be in trouble. Blow that tire to shreds!”
Blend the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic Beer Run scores and you’ve got a bracing 35%! You know what this does? It prepares people for a piece of shit, but when they go to see it and realize it’s nowhere near as bad as these scores suggest (just ask Kate Erbland!), they’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Excerpt from Erbland’s IndieWire review:
Now that we’re all up to speed on presentism, or the current industry-wide requirement that all historical films need to reflect present-tense diversity standards and enlightened present-tense attitudes, we can more readily understand why Green Book was so viciously attacked almost exactly four years ago.
Peter Farrelly‘s film was bludgeoned by wokesters because it adhered to the realm of 1962 rather than 2018. It told the story (i.e., a tour of the Deep South by African-American pianist Don Shirley and Italian-American bouncer Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga) according to the standards and mindsets of the Kennedy era.
In the eyes of Bob Straus and the Green Book condemnation squad, thus was the one unforgivable sin.
Casting presentism: “For the last four or five years Hollywood progressives have also insisted that all historical films have to adopt the practice of presentism in terms of casting. That means that all casts have to reflect social values as they should be in terms of inclusion and representation rather than how they actually may have been during the time of the story.”
“Spielberg, Hanks, Antropova,” posted on 4.6.21:
Now that Peter Farrelly‘s The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Apple+, 9.30) has premiered in Toronto (last night at 6 pm), the scenario that I’ve been predicting all along has come to pass, or so it seems.
The woke Stalinist critics who did everything in their power to take down Farrelly’s Green Book four years ago have come out guns blazing against Beer Run, partly to punish Peter for winning the Best Picture Oscar despite their best efforts to prevent that from happening,
They also don’t care for the meathead mentality of Zac Efron‘s “Chickie” (Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman is calling him “the beer whisperer“) and his stupid plan to give his ‘Nam-serving buddies a beer hug.
Well, from what I’m gathering from the reviews, the film doesn’t seem to admire Chickie all that much either. Certainly not by the end of the film. Because he’s a changed, beaten-down man by then.
The arc seems to be “naive patriotic idiot goes to Vietnam to show love to buddies stuck in the war machine, and gradually learns what an absolute horror the Vietnam War is and what a ludicrous and lethal lie the Pentagon is selling.” So he finally comes to see, through hard experience, what his war-protesting sister was on about in Act One.
And some viewers seem to approve. Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, for one. He was a Green Book champion also Here’s his review:
And guys like Raven Brunner #TIFF22, who said last night that The Greatest Beer Run Ever “is SPECTACULAR…a topical story set to the Vietnam War that addresses the conflict between news media & the public, & the casualties of war. Zac Efron charms as Chickie who navigates the war zone with optimism & a gag mission. #TIFF22 pic.twitter.com/61itIX5xWM
The Beer Run team was never going to get the elite critics to like this film, not with the Green Book history. Posted on 8.17.22: “A film about a New York working-class paleface with a meathead accent travelling thousands of miles to bring beer to his Vietnam War-serving bruhs in ’67 and ’68 is going to be attacked six ways from Sunday…too white, too apolitical and not guilty enough for starters.”
But something is telling me that Joe and Jane Popcorn may take a shine to it. Maybe.
Hammond: “This is the rare Vietnam film seen from the POV of a civilian, a key reason it works as well as it does.”