Repeating: Halina Reijn‘s Babygirl (A24, 12.25) is reportedly a B & D variation on the “Type-A cougar has it off with a hot young dude” genre.
Friendo #1: “Actors will love it. Nicole is raw and great (as always) and it is HER show…she’s stunning, but whether it goes beyond that Oscar-wise remains to be seen. I also loved Antonio Banderas as her husband. Weird story…kinda Last Tango-ish with clothes mostly kept on, or 9 1/2 Weeks in some ways. Not at all romantic.”
Friendo #2: “Pic will gather multiple noms — Best Actress (Kidman), Best Actor (Harris Dickinson), Best Direction and Writing (Reijn).”
Honestly? People have been remarking for quite a while about a look of stretched tightness in Nicole Kidman‘s facial features, and in particular around her eyes. For whatever reason I never shared this reaction. But when I saw this Babygirl trailer, my first thought was “whoa, her face looks tight as a drum.”
I’ll give you a gut reaction. Nicholas Hoult‘s Justin Kemp character has to come clean and face the music, and if he doesn’t audiences will hate this movie. Plain and simple.
Juror #2 (aka Juror No. 2) will premiere at L.A.’s AFI Fest on Sunday, 10.27, and then open commercially on Friday, 11.1.
Last weekend the Three Amigos (Alejandro G. Innaritu, Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro) had dinner at KOL, a trendy Mexican-British fusion restaurant in London’s Marylebone restaurant (9 Seymour Street), with Tom Cruise, who’s currently collaborating with Inarritu on a mystery project that Cruise is starring in and producing. The costars in the Cruise-Inarritu are Sandra Huller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde and Riz Ahmed.
The blonde is HE’s own Kim Morgan, GDT’s wife and screenwriting collaborator; the guy on the right is KOL chef Santiago Lastra. Guillermo was with a cane because he’d broken a toe.
You’ll notice that with the exception of Lastra they’re all wearing thick-soled, leather lace-up boots. Even Morgan is wearing Doc Martin lace-ups. Was it because damp weather was expected or something? Because otherwise I don’t get it. If I had been there I would’ve eiher worn my brown suede Beatle boots or my suede, Italian-made hush puppies. I believe in sleek, unobtrusive footwear. Mostly the kind of dapper shoes that Cary Grant or Fred Astaire would’ve worn. Boots are klumpy things. They’re about dominance, power, alpha-male attitude.
So it’s reasonable to presume that some kind of feisty slap-around might happen from time to time. Presumably Walz has prepared some zingers a la Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle (“Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy”), and I mean something more here-and-now than just calling Vance “weird.” Vance will lie his ass off, of course.
Barring a limo trip to JFK or LGA, HE expects to live-blog this evening’s 9 pm debate, airing on CBS and coming from the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues).
HE friendo BillMcCuddy sent this problematic man-ped photo from his high-security, five-star fortress in…he didn’t say but most likely Fez or Marrakech. (The last time I visited Casablanca it was a sprawling industrial hell hole.)
HEreply: “Swimming pool, palm trees and flip flops. You could be in Palm Springs or Acapulco.
“I’m presuming you’re in Marrakech but with a strict avoidance attitude — no conversations with locals, no roaming through the Medina, no snake charmers, no exotic Moroccan cuisine, no posing with camels, no camping out in the desert, no horse-drawn carts, no DarelBachaPalace, no visiting the ManWhoKnewTooMuch shooting locations (LaMamouniahotel), no conversing with French-accented Louis Bernard types, none of that.
“Please correct if I’m wrong but you seem to be enjoying a well-protected Kardashian experience. At least you’re not wearing Ali Babaandthe40Thieves curled-toe slippers.”
McCuddymessageaccompanyingphoto: “Hope you didn’t just eat.”
It was the middle of March in 2012, and I was talking to Prague’s Esthe Plastika about having some touch-up work on my eyelids, eye bags and neck wattle. I explained what I wanted, and they asked me to take some close-ups of my face and neck area and send them along.
So I did, and when I looked at those horrific snaps I went into catatonic shock. I was looking at the features of a bloated, wine-drinking manatee.
The first thought that hit me was “okay, that’s it for the evening sips of Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon Blanc…I’m done.” The shock of those photos was so great that I stopped that very night. I haven’t touched a drop since.
My 12-year sober anniversary was celebrated on 3.20.24.
HE to Feinberg: I’m not putting down Tim Fehlbaum‘s September 5 — it’s a very decently constructed historical procedural about ABC’s Munich coverage of the 1972 Olympic Games / Black September tragedy — but I’m not understanding why it’s sitting at the top of your current Best Picture Oscar forecast. It’s good but not that good. John Magaro has more screen time than Peter Sarsgaard, but he doesn’t have much X-factor charisma — a sturdy actor but a tiny bit dull.
You’ve got Emilia Perez in your #2 slot, and I get it. Putting it farther down your list might trigger the fanatics and possibly start a whisper campaign that you (and by extension The Hollywood Reporter) might be transphobic on some deep-down level. So you’re playing it safe, and I totally understand and sympathize with this strategy.
That said, the most significant driver of the Emilia Perez bandwagon is woke identity stuff — you know it, I know it, the HE commentariat knows it. It’s a good, verve-y film in many respects, but while the beginning section is pretty great the ending disappoints. Sooner or later the tent will begin to deflate.
Right now there are four deserving heavy hitters — Conclave, Anora, All We Imagine as Light (get behind this snubbed masterpiece, Academy members!), and A Real Pain. Emilia Perez brings the total to five. I still haven’t seen The Brutalist but I’ll probably include it as a sixth-place contender after I finally catch it on Friday, 10.11.
Bad on Scott for relegating TheApprentice, Ali Abassi’s excellent Trump-Cohn period drama with a truly brilliant supporting performance from Jeremy Strong, to 23rd place…really bad! By any fair standard this movie delivers carefully cured, blue-chip goods.
Feinberg ranking The Substance and The Piano Lesson in 25th and 26th place = adios muchachos!
Here’s hoping that James Mangold and Jay Cocks‘ A Complete Unknown joins this modest fraternity, and maybe Babygirl also for a total of eight noms. Okay, maybe September 5 will slip in and occupy the ninth slot.
Forget Sing Sing, Saturday Night, Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot, Walter Salles‘ I’m Still Here, The Room Next Door, The Seed of the Sacred Fig (good but not good enough) and Civil War (I was a huge fan but too many people didn’t like it).
The basic drill is that too many campus Zoomers have succumbed to woke tyranny, and that “many problems on campus have their origins in three ‘great untruths’ (a) “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”; (b) “always trust your feelings”; and (c) “life is a battle between good people and evil people”. The authors argue that these untruths not only contradict modern psychology but ancient wisdom from many cultures.
Hollywood Elsewhere is clearly representative of the baddy-waddies, and I am beaming with pride over this.
It happened at a Bob Dylan tribute concert on 10.16.92. Kristofferson said to the crowd, “All right, I gotta tell ya…I’m real proud to introduce this next artist, whose name has become synonymous with courage and integrity. Ladies and gentlemen, Sinead O’Connor!”
A “playful” photo op from the 1953 Venice Film Festival, just over 71 years ago. 37 year-old KirkDouglas was bearded for the forthcoming filming of Ulysses (’54), a cheesy adaptation of Homer‘s “Odyssey” by way of pulp sword-and-sandal aesthetics, courtesy of producers Dino de Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti.
Woody Allen once nonsensically said he’d like to be reincarnated as Warren Beatty‘s fingertips. I would settle for being reincarnated, just as nonsensically, as Douglas’s felt-tip pen or, failing that, Douglas himself.
The first significant thing I noticed about getting stoned was dry mouth. The second thing was succumbing to uncontrollable laughter. The third thing was the munchies. But the fourth thing was the most interesting. I’ve since come to identify it as short-term memory loss, otherwise known in my head as the Chris NolanMemento effect.
Basically when you’re blasted you tend to follow curious thoughts and left-field observations into a mental rabbit hole. These thoughts and observations can take hold of your mind and feel so compelling and enveloping that whatever your rudimentary activity of the moment may be — walking, making coffee, driving, ordering food at McDonald’s, taking out the garbage — you emerge at the other end of the tunnel with no recollection of what’s just happened. And you say to yourself, “How did I get here?”
You could have just ordered small fries and a Coke, but when you come out of the Paul McCartney / “Day in the Life” dream you have no memory of having done so.
And then another dream comes along and you drop into another rabbit hole, and it keeps going like this until the THC finally wears off.
Guy Pearce in Memento: “What am I doing?…oh, I’m chasing this guy. (beat.) No, he’s chasing me.”
