Last night I finally went to see Matt Walsh‘s Am I Racist?
Walsh’s low-key manner, gravelly-gurgly voice and logical trains of thought make for an engaging package. And the film certainly comes to the right conclusions, of course — since ’19 or thereabouts and certainly since the George Floyd summer of 2020 many of us (wealthy liberal women in particular) have been prodded and besieged by maniacal race-hustlers.
But the amiable Walsh struck me as being a little bit afraid of sounding too snippy and smart-ass. I could have punched up Matt’s narration if asked. I got a distinct feeling that he didn’t want to let his inner white guy off the leash.
Am I Racist?, in short, plays it a little too gently. It seems to skirt and soft-pedal — it’s a little too low-key. Too much respectful listening and not enough eye-rolling.
Matt’s strategy is to let the race-hustlers hang themselves, which mostly succeeds as far as it goes. But I wanted more of a Ricky Gervais or an Adam Carolla or a Bill Maher-like attitude. Why couldn’t Matt just say what the woke cultists seem to believe, which is that POCs are generally angelic figures with halos and white males (especially the older ones) are more or less demonic Trumpies who need to be shunted aside?
Friendo responds: “But that’s the whole point. It was the same with What is a Woman?. Walsh made it in such a way as people could not write it off as mocking or vicious. People expected it to be a Bill Maher thing but it wasn’t. That was the brilliance of it.”
Jesse Eisenberg‘s A Real Pain (Searchlight, 11.1), a quirky, shifty dudes-travelling-through-Poland thing, is going to connect because of Kieran Culkin‘s richly eccentric and occasionally unhinged character, Benji Kaplan…one of those hyper, live-wire guys whose irreverent, unfiltered energy most of us can’t help but enjoy or even get off on in short bursts.
But Culkin’s stoned-jumping-bean manner is also a bit much after repeated exposures. And knowing that Benji is doomed to some kind of arduous instability later in life…a poet who’s fated to “die in the gutter,” as Bob Dylan might put it…is, of course, quite sad.
Everyone has encountered a Benji or two in their life, and this is the film’s big irresistable draw. A Real Painhas to be seen for the Culkin effect. I had heard quite a lot about his firecracker turn, and yet Culkin didn’t disappoint in the least. God, what an amazing, infectious asshole…love his shpiel! And I adore the fact that he loves to sit in airline terminals and study the travellers.
Pic is basically about a pair of tristate-area Jewish cousins, crazy Benji and anxious, straightlaced, somewhat dull David (Eisenberg, who is strangely being campaigned for Best Actor with Culkin going for a Best Supporting nom) embarked on a group holocaust tour in Poland. The usual intrigues and complications ensue.
On top of which Dirty Dancing‘s Jennifer Grey, 63 years young when the film was shot in mid ’23, is also a participant. (The others are like lumps of mashed potatoes.)
“David is a sweet but conventional middle-class drone, whereas Benji is a loose cannon — a bro who never grew up, the kind of dude who says ‘fuck’ every fifth word, who advance-mails a parcel of weed to his hotel in Poland, and who has no filter when it comes to his thoughts and feelings. He’ll blare it all right out there. Since he’s a brilliant and funny guy who sees more than a lot of other people do, and processes it about 10 times as fast, he can (sort of) get away with the running monologue of hair-trigger nihilist superiority that’s his form of interaction. He can also be quite nice, and knows how to play people.
“Benji is a hellacious man-child the world should shun, only he turns out to be the life of the party. But at heart he’s an anti-social misfit, one who’s clinging to the recklessness of youth just at the moment he should be leaving it behind.
“[And] yet Culkin, for all his crack timing, is not giving a ‘comedy’ performance. He’s doing a sensational piece of acting as a compulsive wiseacre addicted to the ways of one-upmanship. Benji has the personality of a hipster slacker crossed with that of a corporate dick. He’s funny, he’s rude, he’s charming, he’s manipulative, and he will suck the life out of you. Yet Culkin makes him real, and the movie, which Eisenberg has scripted with an ear for the music of ideas and for contrasting voices, presents the story of these two cousins — how they interact, what they mean to each other, how their past intersects with the present — in a way that’s so supple you can touch their reality.
“To put it as Benji might: This, people, is what fucking filmmaking is about.”
A couple of days ago a friend attended an early-bird screening of Halina Reijn‘s Babygirl (A24, 12.25), a B & D variation on the “Type-A cougar has it off with a hot young dude” genre. Costarring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Sophie Wilde, Antonio Banderas, etc.
Last weekend’s CAA screening followed a TIFF showing on 9.10 and the Venice Film Festival debut on 8.30.
Friendo is calling it “a groundbreaking investigation of female sexuality by a female writer-director.” Kidman said afterwards it would have been a “completely different movie if a man had made it.”
Pic drew a “sensational response” from an elite audi4nce, he says. Attending were Brad Pitt, Olivia Wilde, Peter Dinklage, Catherine Hardwick, Rooney Mara, Charlie Hunnam.
There was q post-screening discussion between Kidman, Reijn and THR‘s Scott Feinberg, followed by a schmoozy wine gathering. Nicole stayed very late.
CAA honcho Bryan Lourd was there; ditto Nicole’s agent Chris Andrews.
Pic will gather multiple noms, he says — Best Actress (Kidman), Best Actor (Dickinson), Best Direction and Writing (Reijn).
“Don’t underestimate A24…at this time last year I had the same feeling about Poor Things. And previously about All Quiet on Western Front, Parasite, Cold War.
Another eccentric (older this time, nudging his 60s) apparently wanted to killDonald Trump yesterday but this time didn’t even fire a shot.
Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, is the would-be Florida golf course shooter. Trump was untouched and unfazed and not even in the immediate vicinity. He’s extremely thankful for the attention, of course.
Sunday’s incident might have made for a semi-alarming story as a one-off, but it pales alongside the attempted Pennsylvania assassination of two months ago, which resulted in a bloody ear and a bandage on the stage of the Republican National Convention.
I’m presuming that most average Americans are unimpressed, and are most likely reacting with a “what, again?” Or, if you will, “been there, done that.” This tinderbox country is teeming with well-armed nutters. What else is new?
TimBurton’s BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice (Warner Bros., 9.6) not only screens tomorrow in Venice but opens domestically a bit more than a week hence. Where’s the buzz? I’m not feeling it. Nobody wants to sit through a cash-grab experience. I adore the 1988 original. Please don’t mess this up.
Variety‘s Alex Hitman is reporting that Cooper Hoffman (Saturday Night, Licorice Pizza) will play a would-be “sexual muse” to an artist played by Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex.
Written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, pic is described as a “provocative thriller” that “blithely explores desire, domination and fantasy.”
I’m sorry but nobody wants to see a film in which Cooper (son of “Philly” Hoffman**) performs sexually in any way, shape or form. Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off. He’s just not sexy or good-looking enough….sorry.
There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.
In fact Paddy Chayefsky wrote a teleplay (and then a movie version of the same script) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that we was on the verge of giving up. It was sad but 1955 audiences understood his predicament because the actor who played the butcher was Ernest Borgnine.
** I’ll allow that the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman was briefly shown slamming ham with Marisa Tomei in Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, but that was a very fast and quick one-off.
…is the 1.37 aspect ratio. Debra Paget (still with us at age 91) may have been at her fetching peak in 1959, but boxy aspect ratios have always been and always will be mesmerizing. Look at all that head room…acres of it! And all hail director Fritz Lang, by the way — Metropolis, M, Fury, The Return of Frank James, Man Hunt, Scarlet Street, Cloak and Dagger, Rancho Notorious, The Blue Gardenia, The Big Heat, Human Desire, While the City Sleeps and, last and least, The Indian Tomb.
[Something has gone really screwy with WordPress coding. The first two words of the next sentence are supposed to read WilliamHolden and not just William, but the coding won’t cooperate.]
William Holden didn’t have to end up dead in GloriaSwanson‘s swimming pool. And he really didn’t have to submit to self-loathing when he began to fall in love with Nancy Olson’s Betty Schaefer, a fellow screenwriter.
Don’t forget that the second half of Billy Wilder’s SunsetBoulevard was largely driven by self-revulsion — a young male screenwriter (Holden’s Joseph C. Gillis) feeling morally sickened by his willingness to sexually satisfy a 50 year-old former silent-era star (Swanson’s Norma Desmond) in exchange for a swanky lifestyle.
1950 was one sexually uptight year, you bet. It saw both the release of SunsetBoulevard and the widespread condemnation of Ingrid Bergman for having had Roberto Rossellini’s baby outside of wedlock. In the eyes of the general public there was nothing more odious than unsavory sexual behavior…any kind of hanky panky outside the usual proper, middle-class boundaries.
But Gillis could have have just laid his cards on the table as he explained to Schaefer, “Look, I was broke…the finance company was about to take my car away. I’m not evil…I’ve simply been using Desmond and living off her largesse while I figure out my next move.
“Plus I did what I could to finesse her awful Salome script. What’s so terrible about that? Okay, so I’ve been to bed with her a few times. I’ve laid there while she rides me like a stallion…big deal.”
Schaefer: “Don’t worry about it, Joe. You did what you had to do in order to survive. Now pack your things. You’re moving in with me.”
Gillis: “But we haven’t even been intimate yet. And what about your devoted fiancé, nice-guy Artie (Jack Webb)?”
Schaefer: “I don’t love him, not really. Largely because he’s too possessive plus he’s not from the creative side, and writing is my lifeblood. We’re not a great match. I’ve submitted to his sexual advances on occasion but he doesn’t turn me on. I’ve never once blown him and I’m sorry but that means something. This may sound cold but all’s fair in love and war.”
Did Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (’13), which was filled with brutality and sadism, qualify as black misery porn?
No, it didn’t. Not once did I think to myself, “This is a real downer.” Partly because Chiwetel Ejiofor‘s “Solomon Northup” was and is a great character, and because McQueen’s film amounted to much more than subject matter — it was and is a masterful, deeply affecting human drama.
