Later today I’ll be watching Kira Kovalenko‘s Unclenching the Fists, which won the Un Certain Regard award at last month’s Cannes Film Festival. I’m told it will screen at Telluride ’21.

Directed and written by Kovalenko and produced by HE’s own Alexander Rodnyansky, pic is about the life of Ada (Milana Aguzarova), an Ossetian girl planning an escape from her life in a small town of Mizur in Northern Ossetia, Russia. Located in the general region of Georgia, north of Armenia, southeast of Ukraine. Alik Karaev and Soslan Khugaev costar.

LA-to-Gallup begins tomorrow at 6 am, give or take.

In order to convincingly play the fiendish Linda Tripp in American Crime Story: Impeachment (FX, 9.7), Sarah Paulson gained 30 pounds and wore a modest fat suit. (She also donned a blonde wig and wore prosthetic teeth.) Photos show that Paulson and the show’s makeup specialist did it right. She looks a lot like Tripp (who passed last year from cancer) did in the late ’90s.

And that’s not cool, according to certain complainers. The producers should have hired an actual fat actress instead of Paulson because fat suits are “incredibly anti-fat and perpetuate anti-fat bias,” as one person tweeted. Former Buzzfeed journalist Kristin Chirico wrote that “this could have been a fat actor. This could have been their big breakout role. This could have been their Golden Globe or their Emmy nod. This could have been their paid off student loans or their first house. Instead it’s Sarah Paulson in a fat suit.”

And so Paulson, not wanting to seem dismissive of or disrespectful towards persons of weight, is saying that she’s sorry for the realism, but not entirely. Half sorry, half proud. She regrets “not thinking about it more fully,” whatever that means. She’s also said that “I wouldn’t make the same choice going forward.” Meaning what? That she won’t wear a fat suit again?

Paulson quoted on 8.26 by L.A. Times interviewer Yvonne Villarreal: “There’s a lot of controversy around actors and fat suits, and I think that controversy is a legitimate one. I think fat phobia is real. I think to pretend otherwise causes further harm. And it is a very important conversation to be had. But that entire responsibility I don’t think falls on the actor for choosing to do something that is arguably — and I’m talking about from the inside out — the challenge of a lifetime.

“I do think to imagine that the only thing any actor called upon to play this part would have to offer is their physical self is a real reduction of the offering the actor has to make. I would like to believe that there is something in my being that makes me right to play this part. And that the magic of hair and makeup departments and costumers and cinematographers that has been part of moviemaking, and suspension of belief, since the invention of cinema. Was I supposed to say no [to the part]? This is the question.

“I think the thing I think about the most is that I regret not thinking about it more fully. And that is an important thing for me to think about and reflect on. I also know it’s a privileged place to be sitting and thinking about it and reflecting on it, having already gotten to do it, and having had an opportunity that someone else didn’t have. You can only learn what you learn when you learn it. Should I have known? Abso-fucking-lutely. But I do now. And I wouldn’t make the same choice going forward.”

You can tell right away that Nia DaCosta‘s Candyman isn’t horror crap — that it’s a cut or two above your generic slasher gruel.

It’s quietly spooky, trippy, impressionistic, nightmarish. Largely unreliant on brutal shock cuts. A mix of the meditative and the assaultive, Obviously gorey here and there, but that’s the territory. The buzzing bees made me twitch and whatnot, but that was the intention. I got a little tired looking at Chicago’s Cabrini-Green project over and over, but what was I gonna do?

And I enjoyed the vibey assurance of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Bobby Seale in Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7), Teyonah Parris and Colman Domingo.

DaCosta, 31, is a first-rate filmmaker — she has the focus of a professional, a steady hand. She knows how to frame and compose, when to hold and cut away, when to move and hold still.

[SPOILER] And boy, did I love the concluding scene when Parris’s character, Brianna Cartwright, looks at her reflection in the rearview mirror of a cop car with a thuggish white officer in the driver’s seat, calls for Candyman five times (a different emphasis given to each call-out) and before you know it all the boys in blue (who might as well be stand-ins for the killers of George Floyd) are slashed and bloodied and cleavered to death.

Do I want to sit through Candyman again? Naah, that’s okay. Once was enough. But it didn’t annoy me (and for me that’s saying something) and I respected the experience. I’m glad I saw it. My horizons have been slightly broadened. Oh, and DaCosta needs to escape the horror genre. She’s better than that.

John Lennon + Yoko Ono, Sean Ono Lennon, Wes Anderson, Jared Gilman, Scott Coffey, It Takes Three, Hollywood Elsewhere…seven degrees, unbroken circle. My HE riff on It Takes Three appeared on 8.27.

I have this terrible suspicion that the vast majority of vote-eligible Californians aren’t even aware of, much less paying attention to, the 9.14 recall vote, and that something horrible could potentially happen.

Here’s an edited version of a Reddit reaction to Robert Eggers‘ The Northman (Focus Features, 4.22). It comes out of a recent research screening in Dallas.

Excerpt #1: “I was extremely impressed with it. There’s a lot of brutal action and violence, and it overall had a very authentic Norse feel to it. It is a revenge tale slash Viking epic. I’d place it right above The Witch and just below The Lighthouse.”

Excerpt #2: “Honestly, this was Alexander Skaarsgard’s movie. [Note: Skarsgard plays Amleth, a Nordic prince whose allegedly truthful saga was used by William Shakespeare to create Hamlet.] AS is truly a beast [in this] and has given his most impressive performance yet.”

Excerpt #3: “As Queen Gudrun, Nicole Kidman was great also. Anya Taylor-Joy does give a [distinctive] performance, and she’s in one of my favorite scenes of the movie. Bjork plays a somewhat pivotal role [i.e., ‘Slav witch’], but only has one scene — lasts about five minutes.”

HE interjects: What about Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe?

Excerpt #4: “Jarin Blaschke‘s cinematography is stellar. Most of the lighting seemed to be from natural light sources. They said the color grading was still in progress. One or two scenes were in black and white, plus a lot blues, greens, greys, dark shadows. A few VFX shots that were pretty damn great and even a bit trippy at times.”

Excerpt #5: “More accessible than The Green Knight, The Lighthouse or The Witch. It’s basically a revenge/avenge tale and also probably like a lot of Viking legends out there, but the story was so well told. I thought the pacing was actually quite tight — there weren’t really any scenes I would trim or take out. I wish I could’ve understood certain bits of dialogue a bit better. Bjork’s scene is all whispers so it was hard to make out what she was saying but all in all it was pretty epic, pretty dark, very intense.”

I’m not saying the fearsome Hurricane Ida isn’t a very serious threat to life and property, but it’s now 2:30 pm New Orleans time and I’m glad to report that things don’t…obviously I know nothing but right now it seems as if the news outlets have oversold it to some extent…emphasis on the “s” word. I wish I was there right now just to experience the drama and discomfort. I hope no lives are ultimately lost, that no one will be hurt, that the “hit” won’t be as bad as forecasted.

Ed Asner (aka “Lou Grant“) has passed at age 91. He was an excellent, no-bullshit actor and a proud liberal activist. I never spoke to him and I don’t even know someone who knew or dealt with him slightly, but Asner was a real-deal humanist-activist liberal, which is to say he almost certainly didn’t hold with the illiberal wokesters, and if he did hold with those monsters, please don’t tell me about it.

Condolences for friends, fans, colleagues, etc. Asner was a gifted adult actor — diligent, focused, thoughtful and smart as a whip all the way down the line. He lived a good, honorable life, and now he sleeps. His voice performance in Up was the fourth or fifth thing I thought of when I heard the news, if that.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has posted a reaction to Matt Reeves‘ The Batman (Warner Bros., 3.4.22).

And if (I say “if”) it indeed turns out to be a “very scary” genre horror film, great. Reeves’ version needed to do something else, go cuckoo-ass, jump the rails — it couldn’t just follow in the glum-dirge tradition of the Affleck imprint.

At the same time you can’t trust fanboys who’ve seen something early, especially when it’s a big brand thing. They’re too pleased with themselves for simply managing to see it. They’re emotionally unstable to a certain extent. You have to take what they say with grain of salt. They’re suddenly imagining themselves as Reeves’ collaborators, to a certain degree. They’re giving him friendly “notes.”

“Very graphic, very dark, very scary,” says Ruimy’s fanboy. And yet the first thing out of his mouth is not to praise RBatz (i.e., Robert Pattinson‘s lead performance) but to enthuse about Paul Dano‘s Riddler performance — “fucking crazy, so fucking scary, I loved every second.”

But his favorite character by far, he says, is Zoe Kravitz‘s Catwoman. “There’s a scene at the end that literally had everyone SCREAMING, everyone gasped…like it was a big NO WAY for everyone…the biggest mike drop.”

Somewhere in the middle he says that Pattinson’s Batman voice is “perfect,” whatever the hell that means.

Against my better judgment I’m off to submit to fucking Candyman, and if it turns out to be half as unsubtle as some have told me it is, or if I should be shot by a policeman whils strolling through the Grove or if, God forbid, I’m struck by a bolt of lightning, then I’m going to blame some of the people on this thread. And that I do not forgive.

Friendo re Strauss: “Yeah, that’s pretty spot-on. Frankly, the film’s POV — the black characters have been victimized, and a number of corrupt/evil whites get comeuppance — feels like an iteration of classic liberal Hollywood. It’s not a chip-on-the-shoulder ‘take that, whitey!’ movie.”

HE to friendo: “I’m so terrified of sitting through anything that uses a sledgehasmmer.”

Friendo to HE: “It ain’t Ozu. But it is an interesting, curiously ambitious slasher film that plays with the tropes of the post-George Floyd world in a genuinely engaging (if at times overly programmatic) way. I was held by it. And it’s just 90 minutes! It’s nothing to be scared of.”