I had one strong thought in my head after seeing Mimi Leder‘s On The Basis of Sex (Focus Features, 12.25), a well-meaning but mediocre saga about the formative years of legendary Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones).

That thought was that Betsy West and Julie Cohen‘s RBG, the hit documentary about Ginsburg’s life and career, is a much better movie — smarter, more engrossing for sticking to the facts, no callow tricks or formulaic finessings. And yet it gets you emotionally.

On The Basis of Sex is a Ruth Bader Ginsburg primer for none-too-brights — a frequently unsubtle, Hollywood-style treatment that clumsily tries to milk or manipulate every emotional occurence or, failing that, charm the audience at every turn.  

At every juncture the story seems to have been dumbed down to appeal to (what’s a tactful way of putting this?) viewers whose lips move at they read supermarket tabloids.

Clunky, on-the-nose dialogue.  Rote direction.  Cardboard characterizations. Over-acted, hamfisted performances, particularly by the sexist male villains.  (Sam Waterston!) Trite plotting, predictable strategies and, in one climactic instance, the use of cliched dramatic invention that made me twitch and groan in my seat.

The term “charm offensive” has never been more grossly demonstrated than a moment in which Justin Theroux, portraying ACLU legal director Mel Wulff, greets Jones with a kind of pep-rally song that involves vigorous thigh-slapping.

Bader speaks with a fairly distinctive Brooklyn accent, so how is Jones at imitating this? Not so hot. I couldn’t really hear “Brooklyn” in her speech patterns. What I heard was “British actress doing a decent job of sounding American but not really trying to get the Brooklyn thing right.”

Believe it or not there’s a sex scene between Jones and Armie Hammer, playing Ginsburg’s attorney husband Martin. Ruth Bader Ginsburg doing the nasty? Please…cut away! It was this utterly pointless detour that told me On The Basis of Sex wouldn’t be panning out. My hopes actually started to sink less than 10 minutes after it began.

The aliens are the alt. right Trumpies — corporate, anti-human, reptilian fiends.

From sea to shining sea and even in the rural, red-state regions, there’s a rule that everyone understands and lives by. You can use the term “the N word” but never the word itself. Because verbalizing that term, even for an instant, somehow bestows a brief spurt of cultural oxygen, and the rule is that this term must be kept in an airless, vacuum-sealed box inside a concrete underground bunker, never to be exhumed. Which is clearly how it should be.

The night before last Green Book costar Viggo Mortensen, participating in a Film Independent discussion at the Arclight, said the actual, two-syllable N word. I strongly doubt that anyone suspects Mortensen, a gentle, thoughtful, well-liked guy occasionally given to long-winded explanations of feelings and undercurrents, of even being an unconscious R-word person. He just said a stupid thing. Viggo has thoroughly apologized (“I will not utter it again”), but this was a lulu of a verbal blunder.

I hate to say this — I would certainly like to imagine otherwise — but Viggo may have possibly torpedoed his chances of winning a Best Actor Oscar. Or maybe not.

I think people should consider that many actors, especially the brilliant ones, have a naturally open, expansive, dig-down-to-the-bottom-of-things nature, and that Viggo’s instinct to be vivid and/or dramatic briefly overcame his sense of social decorum. Has anyone out there ever blurted out some crude, outre expression for the sake of dramatic emphasis, and then immediately realized that too much emphasis was used? That’s all that happened here — an actorly instinct collided with a strict social taboo.

In a statement given to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and Gregg Kilday, Mortensen said the following: “In making the point that many people casually used the ‘N’ word at the time in which the movie’s story takes place, in 1962, I used the full word. Although my intention was to speak strongly against racism, I have no right to even imagine the hurt that is caused by hearing that word in any context, especially from a white man. I do not use the word in private or in public. I am very sorry that I did use the full word last night, and will not utter it again.”

Mortensen added, “One of the reasons I accepted the challenge of working on Peter Farrelly’s Green Book was to expose ignorance and prejudice in the hope that our movie’s story might help in some way to change people’s views and feelings regarding racial issues. It is a beautiful, profound movie story that I am very proud to be a part of.”

From a journalist friend: “I had a conversation tonight at the premiere of On The Basis of Sex with a prominent Academy member who was one of the producers of an Oscar-nominated Best Picture last year. We talked movies and he brought up Roma immediately, which he had recently seen at the Academy. I expected him to say nice things, but instead he emphatically said he HATED it. ‘There was no one I could remotely identify with’, he said. He thought it was beautifully shot but that’s about it. Interesting.”

HE reaction: Was this the same guy who stopped watching All Is Lost after 25 or 30 minutes? Sounds like him.

Put this prominent producer into a time tunnel back to the early ’60s, and he would have emphatically HATED L’Avventura also. Ditto L’Eclisse, La Notte and Red Desert. Obviously these Michelangelo Antonioni films are coming from a much more emotionally neutral or distant place than Cuaron’s film, which clearly cares for its two women leads — Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira — and pulses with familial affection start to finish.

The problem this producer seems to have is with arthouse films that are essentially meditative in nature, that don’t nudge the viewer toward embracing a certain emotional reaction…films which take their time and allow the viewer to assemble their moods and realms on a bit-by-bit, scene-by-scene, gradual accumulation basis.

There is mild irony in the fact that On The Basis of Sex, which I didn’t care for, is the anti-Roma, in this sense — a film that emphatically goads and prods you into feeling what it wants you to feel.

Critic friend, having read this exchange: “To invoke one of your favorite phrases, I personally think that the whole critical world needs to calm down about Roma. I stand by my positive but tempered review of it. There’s something detached about the film. It’s a cinematic coffee-table book.”

This is a day-old controversy, but I’ve only gotten around to studying the Jim Acosta vs. White House intern videos this morning. The differences, I mean, between the original raw video and the doctored video created by Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson, a British alt.right YouTube partisan. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders used the Watson video, which indicates that Acosta’s left hand briefly lingered on the intern’s arm, to justify cancelling Acosta’s hard pass. “We will not tolerate the inappropriate behavior clearly documented in this video,” Sanders said — a flat-out psychotic lie.

The real title of this post is “Fights I’ve Been In But More Often Chickened Out Of.” When I was younger a few drunken guys wanted to take a poke at me and some made good, but when you get right down to it I’ve only been in three actual fights in my whole life. I sometimes fantasize about victorious encounters but this is reality, Greg. I’ve always been more of a politician and a turn-the-other-cheeker than a pugilist.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

From a critic friend: “Just saw Roma. WOW! Alfonso Cuaron is a master of long takes and complicated tracking shots. The set pieces — the forest fire, the birth, the sea rescue — are simply amazing. Great cinematography. And a very human story, with a great character in the center. I’ve been to Mexico many times (going back again in January) and the whole mise en scene of this film really resonated for me.”

The first thing I said when I watched this trailer was “more family-market crap.” The second was “over-acting by CG beasts.” The third was “sub-par CG, like it was made 15 or 20 years ago.”

Did you know there are millions of women out there who live and think locally, who are mainly interested in getting a spread of butter on their bread, and who don’t give that much of a damn about gender politics? How many millions of women have supported unregenerate bad guys (Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, Ron DaSantis, Brian Kemp) in recent elections? And why?

Could it be because they’re cowed, mule-stubborn, under-educated, racist or just flat-out stupid? Like their dumbshit boyfriends or husbands, they’d rather push back against coastal liberals and multiculturals than vote sensibly or logically, and they don’t give a flying fuck about supporting women’s rights or female candidates.

You want the real truth? An African-American actor friend said this to me a couple of decades ago, and if he were to post this on Twitter he’d be ripped apart by wild dogs: “Many women will bow down to the conqueror.”

From Goldie Taylor‘s “Dear White Lady, What Are You Doing to Us?“, posted on 11.8:

“If we’re going to be sisters, the first rule has to be: Do no harm. [But when you elected] Trump to the White House, you broke that rule. Now, I figured that after nearly two years of this debacle on Pennsylvania Avenue that you would see just how wrong you were about him. I thought it might upset you when the president nominated Brett Kavanaugh for a seat on the Supreme Court and stood behind him even after a highly credible alleged victim, or more than one, said Justice Kavanaugh often drank more than his fill and had sexually assaulted them. I assumed it would make your stomach churn to see families separated at the border and children caged for weeks in makeshift camps. I assumed it would only be a matter of time before you abandoned the prospect of a presidential ‘pivot.’

“You didn’t.

Remember when mass murderers had motivations, however dark or twisted or fanatical? Islamic radicals doing the bidding of ISIS (seven such attacks since 2014), racially motivated murders (the 2015 Charleston church massacre), miserable loner shootings (Parkland, Sandy Hook), INCEL shootings (Isla Vista), attempted political assassinations (Gabbie Giffords, Alexandria baseball game shooting), homophobic slayings (the 2016 Orlando massacre), etc.

Then came the first significant mass murder that was completely unmotivated and made no apparent sense to anyone (and still doesn’t) — the 2017 Las Vegas slaughter by Stephen Paddock.

Last night’s Thousand Oaks slaughter was the same kind of thing — carried out by a guy (28 year-old ex Marine Ian David Long) who had no apparent axe to grind, didn’t love ISIS, didn’t hate gays, wasn’t against this or that politician, etc. The victims of both massacres were country-music fans, and in both instances the shooters killed themselves.

This country has become a never-ending horror film. And it’s mainly the nutter conservative gunnies…the crazy right-wingers who feel they have to push back against the libertines, the lefties, the wily pathan, the multicultural hordes and the Godless pagans.

Before last night’s On The Basis of Sex guild screening I sat down with Bill McCuddy and Neil Rosen of “Talking Movies.” The topic was mainly the Broadcast Film Critics Association documentary awards, which are happening on Saturday in Brooklyn. A few docs that should have been at least nominated were blown off, for some reason. Eugene Jarecki‘s The King, a transcendent doc about Elvis Presley and American culture, was ignored. Matt Tyrnauer‘s 100% brilliant Studio 54 was also given the go-by…why? Ditto a pair of HBO docs — Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind and Susan Lacy‘s Jane Fonda in Five Acts. Why didn’t they nominate Divide and Conquer, the phenomenal Roger Ailes doc?

Judd Apatow‘s The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling, my absolute favorite doc of 2018 and arguably the best film Apatow had ever made, has been nominated for Best Limited Doc Series. What does that mean? It’s not a series but simply a long film (i.e., 270 minutes).

I was torn over which film to choose in the MOST COMPELLING LIVING SUBJECT OF A DOCUMENTARY category. The nominees are Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, RBG, Free Solo, Bad Reputation, Quincy, Three Identical Strangers, John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection and Filmworker. I kept flip-flopping between Scotty Bowers and Leon Vitali, and finally went with Scotty because Leon wouldn’t answer my numerous inquiries about the 4K 2001: A Space Odyssey doc.

My first thought after hearing about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg breaking three ribs last night was “good God, no…not another Supreme Court vacancy with Trump nominating another Kavanaugh-like partisan…Jesus, please!”

My second thought, of course, was concern for Justice Ginsburg’s well-being. It’s one thing to crack a couple of ribs in your 40s or 50s, but people in their 80s don’t hold up as well. I was actually heartened to read a N.Y. Times account that says Ginsburg “went home after her fall” in her Supreme Court office. In short she didn’t immediately call a doctor because she’s made of sterner stuff. I know it’s not appropriate to call her “a chip off the old Lee Marvin block” but this is how I would handle a fall if I was in her shoes — take the pain, suck it in, brush it off.

But Ginsburg “experienced discomfort over the night” and “was admitted to George Washington University Hospital, where doctors found three broken ribs on her left side,” according to a spokesperson. My head is worried but my heart tells me she’ll get through this.

I suppose I felt particularly startled because last night I watched Justice Ginsburg perform a heroic walk-on at the finale of Mimi Leder‘s On the Basis of Sex, the Ginsburg biopic that will premiere at AFI fest tonight. I attended a guild screening at the SVA theatre on West 23rd Street. The embargo lifts after tonight’s showing.