Four days ago I declared that Kristen Stewart‘s Best Actress campaign is all but finished after being excluded from the 2022 SAG Award nominations. A couple of hours later I asked “What Took KStew Down?”
The latest thing, suggested by Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, is that KStew is now an underdog, and may slip into Best Actress contention on the basis of people feeling sorry for her.
I’ve been a KStew admirer for a good 15 years, give or take. Her greatest, most culturally resonant performance is in Personal Shopper. (Olivier Asssyas!) But right now Stewart is almost certainly toast as a Best Actress Oscar nominee. “I don’t give a shit” did that, I suspect. Plus (I hadn’t considered this at first) there may be a hintofhomophobia out there (not very much but a little bit).
The bottom line is that Spencer is a fairly ridiculous film. That AWFUL moment when Diana stumbles into the cafe and says “excuse me but I have to get somewhere….where am I?” Even as a metaphor for something or other, eating the sauce-covered pearl at the dinner table was appalling, and that drop-in-the-bucket Sally Hawkins moment (“By the way, speaking as a servant I love you”) was ghastly. Plus Stewart over-whispered her dialogue. Plus…I can’t continue.
Spencer simply isn’t likable or enjoyable (except during the final music sequence). It was AGONY to sit through. I wanted to throw fruit at the screen. Worse, I was surrounded by an adoring, cheering Telluride audience inside the Galaxy theatre. Torture.
I’m not cheering the deaths of tens of thousands of unvaccinatedidiots who’ve willfully put themselves in harm’s way. At the same time I can’t honestly say that I’m sorry they’ve gone to heaven (or possibly, if God was a judgmental Old Testament hard-ass, to hell). No offense but I regard these no-longer-with-us folks as deadweeds. The grassy lawn is better for their absence. They were toodumbtosurvive, and nature has had its way.
The things that happened in this country between late 1963 (or very early ‘64) and late ‘68 constituted a massiveculturaltransformation.
Within a mere fiveyears this country experienced (a) a complete altering of traditional male thinking, behavior and appearance (long hair, more inward-looking, a lessening or diluting of traditionally aggressive attitudes**) + (b) increasingly unmodified or unbridled sexual behavior & liberation + (c) a significant trend toward the abandonment of puerile top-40 music and the introduction of poetic, socially reflective rock music lyrics with complex, avant-garde musicianship + (d) the all-but-total collapse of traditional religious authority as pot, mescaline, LSD & transcendental meditation redefined American spiritual life + (e) anti-Vietnam War consciousness and massive street demonstrations + (f) notions of convulsive political revolution or at least primal changes in terms of the shattering of political norms.
Before 11.22.63 this country was basically still thinking and behaving according to the ethos & norms of the relatively sedate 1950s — but soon after the country all but completely wentoffthecliff on every front, and everything exploding within this comparatively brief chapter, or by the fall of ‘68.
Not that the convulsions didn’t continue into the early to mid ‘70s, but those five years, glorious and turbulent and fundamentally transformative as they were, are what ushered in Richard Nixon, the “Southern strategy”, lawnorder and the whole cultural counter-reaction. Joe Sixpack and Susie Homemaker were scared shitless.
Nothing that happened in the ‘70s, ‘80s or ‘90s was as jolting or mind-blowing or primal (“Something’s happening’ here, what it is ain’t exactly clear”) as what happened during those 60months. Which isn’t a long time in the grand scheme of things.
** The complete altering of female behavior happened a lot more in the ‘70s and beyond.
Two years ago I posted a nice monochrome snap of a Times Square wraparound billboard for Robert Siodmak and Mark Hellinger‘s The Killers (’46). The odd thing was that The Killers, which opened in late August, wasn’t showing at the Mayfair but at the legendary Winter Garden theatre. United Artists had briefly turned the decades-old venue into a movie palace between ’45 and ’46.
Last night I happened upon a somewhat blurry if richly colored snap of the same Mayfair Killers billboard along with a shot of the RKO Palace marquee, which had recently opened Orson Welles‘ The Stranger, a Nazi-hunting drama that costarred Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young. It opened on 7.11.46.
Decentcolorsnaps of 40s-era Times Square marquees are very hard to come by.
For years and years Variety‘s Steven Gaydos was an HE friendo, but over the last two or three he’s become…well, a tad judgmental. Okay, more than a tad. Okay, he’s become a woke scold. Which goes hand in hand with being a politically adaptable fellow working for a woke trade, and knowing which way the winds are blowing and who’s buttering which side of his bread, etc.
All to say that Gaydos recently tweeted about “sharing notes” with “recent” viewers of The Power of the Dog, “most of them young,” and that these young ‘uns, like Gaydos, feel that Jane Campion‘s 1920s cattle-ranch saga is “an upper.”
Repeating: Some youngish weirdos are telling Gaydos that the most melancholy gay western of the 21st Century and easily the draggiest downer of the 2021 Best Picture race…they’re saying it put a smile on their faces and made them giggle and skip down the sidewalk like schoolkids….whee!
We all understand that Dog is brilliantly composed in its own deliberate, unhurried fashion, but that’s not what Gaydos is talking about. He’s saying that Campion’s screenplay, which is based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, made his little Millennial pallies feel good.
They were turned on, in other words, by the story of a pretty young gay guy named Peter Gordon (Kodi Smith McPhee) who gradually gets around to murdering Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), an ugly, stinky, foul-tempered closet case. Phil has made life miserable for Peter’s mom, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), an alcoholic who’s come into unfortunate contact with Phil due to having married his chubby, ginger-haired brother, George (Jesse Plemons). And so Peter does what he feels he needs to do, for his mom’s sake.
And so that’s the thing — good young gay guy (delicate, soft-spoken, makes tiny paper flowers) kills the bad older gay guy by poisoning him with anthrax. And Gaydos’ young chums are going “whoo-whoo!…Phil is fucking dead, all right! Hey, let’s get on Facebook or Twitter and tell that Variety guy how cool we think this is!!”
There’s no question that Phil Burbank is a mean, snarly asshole, and that his death is, at the end of the day, no great loss to the planet earth, but the world is full of miserable people in denial about something or other (including their sexuality), and it’s not as if Phil had murdered anyone or tortured a dog to death or molested a child. He’s just a crueldickhead who’s making his brother’s new wife very unhappy and turning her into a drunkard. Does he deserve to die for this? Campion clearly thinks he does, and Gaydos’ young pally-wallies are overjoyed by his killing.
I’m sorry about the death of Diva helmer Jean-Jacques_Beineix, who was 75. And I can’t quite believe it opened in France 41 years ago (March ’81) and in the States 13 months later. Rave reviews led to Diva becoming the hottest big-city film anywhere (did it even play in rural areas?). I remember with absolute clarity that it was essential to see Diva as soon as possible after it caught on. Color, design, black humor, wonderful Parisian atmosphere. One of the images that has lingered over the decades is the stressed interior of the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord (37 bis, boulevard de la Chappelle, 18th arrondissement, near Gare du Nord).
I’ve been there. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just a matter of recognizing that you’re a slave to booze and then walking away from it, if you’re able to do that. I did one or two AA meetings, couldn’t take the religious aspects and just cold-turkeyed all on my own. There’s nothin’ to it but to do it. Ya gotta have heart.
I love this snap of the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration as 1963 gave way to ’64. What a seminal moment in which everyone and everything was about to change. A huge social tremor had either begun to be felt or would soon be felt. The whole world was about to shake and shudder.
JFK had been murdered only five weeks earlier. The Beatles were slated to arrive in New York City five weeks later (on 2.7.64). Bob Dylan had began to shake off his folkie and protest movement attitudes and would record Another Side of Bob Dylan in May ’64. The best films of ’63 pointed to social complexities and shadowed ambiguities (Hud, The Haunting, This Sporting Life, The Servant, Lilies of the Field, Contempt, The Birds, 8 and 1/2, The Leopard, Billy Liar, From Russia With Love). The Gulf of Tonkin incident was exactly eight months away. Roughly a year later Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement began, and thereby kicked off the wave of student protests that defined much of the ’60s and early ’70s.
The era of Doris Day was finished and she probably didn’t know it at the time, although Move Over Darling! costars James Garner and Chuck Connors (playing the Cary Grant and Randolph Scott roles) probably had an inkling.
No more cultural earthquake moments would happen during the remainder of the 20th Century. But three would happen during the first 17 years of the 21st Century — the 9/11/01 World Trade Center attacks, the election of Barack Obama in November ’08, and the election of Donald Trump in November ’16.
Since that last milestone life in these United States has been a steady drip-drip-drip of hell, more or less. I would almost have the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s all over again. Did we live in a calmer, more humane, less anguished country back then? Perhaps not, but every so often I dream of a life without wokesters or Covid, and a tear forms in my eye.
HE comment #1: Weiss is not part of what Poland calls the “right-wing managerie.” She is a sensible centrist, which is very slightly to the right of a sensible left-leaning moderate, which is what I call myself. Poland knows that today’s rightwing menagerie is a complete insane asylum, and that Weiss’s anti-woke postures hardly qualify as right-wing credentials. Sensible people of all beliefs and persuasions despise wokesters. The right has tried to adopt or co-opt woke loathing as their own brand, but they’re just hitching a ride.
HE comment #2: Poland allows that Keifer and Savodnik are correct to a certain degree. That is because, as Poland writes, “there is a thing going on” in this town, and “a lot of anxiety among the previously and currently empowered” and “there is a lot of scarlet lettering going on, especially [on] Twitter.” Gee, David…no shit? By “scarlet lettering” Poland means cancelling and Donald Sutherland banshee-shrieking and Robespierre finger-pointing — i.e., “the terror.” Poland knows full well that this same exact shit happened in Paris between 1793 and ’94, and in Hollywood during the red scare period of the late ’40s and ’50s. He knows this as well as you or I do, and he prefers to call it “scarlet lettering.” Nice tippy-toeing, ya candy-ass.
HE comment #3: I admire the frankness of this comment.
HE comment #4: And I admire the fundamental human decency conveyed in this portion of Poland’s piece. It follows that no one should hold his or her breath while waiting for this to happen. Not in this fucking town.
…and is therefore wrong, wrong and terribly wrong for having stated that Spider-Man: No Way Home is one of the six Best Picture “longer shots” (right behind the list of six “possibilities“) on his THR checklist.
In strictly numerical terms, Feinberg has Spider-Man: No Way Home in 19th place. Let me explain something right here and now — that movie is not in 19th place!! It’s in sixth or seventh place among ten. Maybe even in fifth! Because it’s the Sony savior movie…the jackpot movie…the film that has lifted all spirits and raised all boats. And Feinberg cannot shit on this film….he can’t!
To my way of thinking Feinberg’s spitball picks are directly a result of listening to too many elite snooties, and we know who and what I’m talking about.
At times I’m persuaded that snooties are sworn enemies of emotional fulfillment and satisfaction (and I’m including the kind of spiritual payoff movie that Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed was) and too many are supporters of status-quo kowtowing and path-of-least-resistance wokeness, and right now they’re all striding around with big Power of the Dog and Drive My Car buttons on their chest.
This is fine and good except for the fact that both of these films are (a) homework, (b) depression pills and/or (c) detention class films that you need to endure because they’re well crafted and their directors (Jane Campion and Ryusuke Hamaguchi, respectively) are justifiably respected.
Bottom line: Snootie favorites are to be regarded askance unless HE agrees with them. The snooties often convey excellent taste but they also have a way of bringing everyone down or at least boring us to tears. The snooties are an across-the-board problem now…they’re knowledgable and sophisticated and a pain in the ass. I’ve said this many times but we all need to recognize that the snooties live in their own cloistered little realm, which is a polite way of saying Camp Rectum.
And as far as Spider-Man: No Way Home is concerned they’re too snobby and haughty to acknowledge the obvious, which is that the second hour of that recent Sony release delivers something emotionally extraordinary, and in so doing has generated the kind of once-in-a-decade response that is already the stuff of box-office legend. The snooties deserve community condemnation for looking down their noses at this film.
As far as the Best Actress race is concerned, the snooties (in this case the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association) have been correct in declaring that Penelope Cruz‘s performance in Parallel Mothers is the year’s best. And so in this respect Feinberg is once again dead wrong in stating that Cruz is a Best Actress “possibility”, and behind CODA‘s Emilia Jones yet…c’mon!
One of Feinberg’s Best Actress “frontrunners” is completely erroneous, and I’m speaking, of course, of Spencer‘s Kristen Stewart. In the wake of the SAG nomination blowout she’s totally and completely finished…just ask Clayton Davis! C’mon, Scott…put Cruz into KStew’s slot!
The other four frontrunners are Being the Ricardos‘ Nicole Kidman, The Lost Daughter‘s Olivia Colman, House of Gucci‘s Lady Gaga and The Eyes of Tammy Faye‘s Jessica Chastain. I find it deeply, horribly depressing that Gaga might win, but the lowlifes (i.e., SAG-AFTRA) love her to death. The most likely winner, I suppose, is Kidman, who was pretty good as Lucille Ball, the only problem being that her features look like carved porcelain soap.
