slider

A pre- and post-Civil War saga of the expansion and settlement of the American West.

Or perhaps a 21st century version of How The West Was Won…something along these lines?

There’s been some confusion about how many parts but I guess it’s down to two.

An apparently questionable passage from Kevin Costner‘s Wiki page reads as follows: “In August 2022, Costner began production on Horizon: An American Saga, a Western epic that will be split into at least four films, each just under three hours in length“…uhhm, no?

“Costner plans on the films being released over a series of months,” the excerpt explained. “Costner will act as director of the project and said the film was [first] proposed as an event television series. Production on the first film was expected to last at least 220 days, but was completed by November 2022. Production of the next films was underway by May 2023.”

The Horizon Wiki page calls it “an upcoming two-part American epic Western film co-written, produced, directed by and starring Kevin Costner. Costner also leads an extensive cast comprising of Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Michael Rooker, Danny Huston, Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Jeff Fahey, Will Patton, Tatanka Means, Owen Crow Shoe, Ella Hunt, and Jamie Campbell Bower.

“Described as a two-part event, Chapter 1 will be released on June 28, 2024. Chapter 2 will later be released on August 16, 2024.”

Read more

This striking Vogue cover photo is about as good or glammy as it will probably ever get for Lily Gladstone…photography, lighting, the right angle, wardrobe…it all came together.

Leo looks great also…pushing 50 in actuality, he looks like his mid to late 30s.

After being attacked by Bobby Peru for allegedly diminishing Gladstone and her Killers of the Flower Moon performance, I responded thusly:

My conveying an honest, thought-through reaction to Gladstone’s KOTFM performance is not an act of diminishment. It’s a fairly rendered opinion.

My choosing to ignore the New Academy Kidz mindset…an attitude that rewards social-justice bonafides over traditional acting or film-making standards…this is not an attempt to diminish Gladstone. The white-guilt wokester choke hold has been an active political ingredient since 2016 or ’17, certainly by ’18.

My stating plainly that Gladstone talks with a rural (aka “shitkicker”) Montana accent…that’s a fact. You can call it diminishing but I wouldn’t point fingers if someone said that I speak with a slight northern New Jersey twang (which I do). Was it diminishing to say that JFK spoke with a Boston accent**? Or that Stephen King speaks with a reedy Maine accent? Or that Flannery O’Connor sounded like Savannah? Or that Jimmy Carter has a rural Georgian way of speaking? Or that LBJ sounded like the Texas hill country?

My stating an obvious political fact, which is that wokesters like Clayton Davis are promoting Gladstone for Best Actress, and that this is primarily about an opportunity to celebrate her Native American identity — my calling a spade a spade in this regard is not a form of diminishment. It’s a fact.

I’ve said over and over that Gladstone is good enough in KOTFM but she’s certainly not wowser. Mainly because all she mostly does is glare and seethe and lie in bed. Because the script doesn’t give her any big crescendo moments. She doesn’t even get to slap Leo’s face or sharply condemn what he and his evil uncle have done to some of the oil-rich Osage natives.

** It would be diminishing if I wrote that JFK spoke with a pretentious Hahvahd or Boston Irish clam-chowder-slurping accent.

I still say that a towering Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) and a teeny-weeny Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) is visually jarring. They just look weird together. Director Sofia Coppola should have cast to minimize height disparity — a shorter Elvis or a taller Priscilla.

The real-life Elvis and Priscilla were separated by eight inches of height — Elvis was 6’0″ and Priscilla was (and presumably still is) 5’4″. But in the film, the former Priscilla Beaulieu (later Presley) is played by the 59-inch-tall Spaeny (roughly the size of an eight-year-old) and Elvis is played by the 77-inch-tall Elordi.

Read more

Shawn Levy and Steven Knight‘s All the Light We Cannot See (Netflix limited series, 11.2) is a danger-fraught World War II saga. Set in Paris and Saint-Malo, it’s mainly about four characters — Marie-Laure Le Blanc (Aria Mia Loberti), a blind French teenager; her father Daniel Le Blanc (Mark Ruffalo); a teenaged German lad named Werner Pfennig (Louis Hofmann); and Marie-Laure’s great uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie).

Levy and Knight adhered to woke casting requirements by not choosing the best skilled actress to play Marie-Laure (wokesters feel that traditional acting or “pretending” is ungenuine), but Loberti because of her real-life “legal” blindness.

Wiki page: “Loberti landed the part after a global search for a blind and low-vision actor. A fan of the book, she auditioned after learning about the search from a childhood orientation and mobility teacher. Despite no acting training, Loberti beat out thousands of submission to secure the role; it is her first ever acting role and was her first audition.”

The critics are hating it.

HE to community: One of the below sploogies has called Poor Things a “sex positive” film, and that’s fine. But what exactly does this mean? Can a film be “sex negative,” and if so how does it qualify as such? A woman in an ‘80s or ‘90s Woody Allen film asked “Is sex dirty?”, and Allen’s character answered “It is if you do it right.”

And 100% proud of having crafted this identity or calling card or however you want to describe it.

Will RFK, Jr.’s reported independent presidential candidacy siphon away more votes from Trump or Biden? That is the question. Let there be no doubt that RFK’s alleged plan to become the new Ralph Nader or Ross Perot is a total dick move. Odious, self-aggrandizing, shameful.

I don’t regard most of moviedom’s stand-out female villains as odious or reprehensible. Because most of those that come to mind are cartoonish — broadly drawn, lacking any semblance of realism or subtlety…fiendish stereotypes, outlandish behavior, etc.

Glenn Close‘s Cruella DeVille, Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked With of the West, Angelina Jolie‘s Maleficent are histrionic, flamboyantly written comic-book figures…satirical cliches, basically created for children.

In Get Out, I didn’t believe Alison Williams‘ evil racist girlfriend for one single millisecond. Kathy Bates‘ “Annie Wilkes” from Misery (’90) is another over-the-top fanatic. Even Louise Fletcher‘s Nurse Ratched isn’t “real” — she’s more of a personification of a drab and repressive system that stifles the human spirit.

If you eliminate the third-act murder of Neil Patrick Harris, Rosamund Pike‘s “Amy Dune” from Gone Girl is slightly more real-worldish; ditto Close’s Alex Forrest from Fatal Attraction, although Alex isn’t demonic as much as tragically demented.

Honestly? When you tabulate all the thousands of films I’ve seen, the female character I’ve despised the most in terms of actual life-resembling behavior is Diane Venora‘s “Liane” Wigand, the spineless wife of Russell Crowe‘s Jeffrey Wigand in Michael Mann‘s The Insider.

The 1999 drama depicts Liane as a shallow, insulated security queen who leaves the embattled Wigand, taking their kids with her, when the going gets too tough.

Sidenote: Liane is a fictional creation — 23 years ago the ex-wife of the actual whistleblower, named Lucretia Nimocks, told N.Y. Post journalist Jeane MacIntosh “that’s not the way it happened at all.”

Liane is at the top of my list because I regard cowardice and disloyalty as the most abhorrent human qualities on the planet earth.

Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix, 11.22) is an even-steven two-hander about the occasionally turbulent marriage between conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Both are obviously playing leads.

I still haven’t seen it, but performance-wise the buzz since Venice has been that Mulligan decisively outpoints Cooper.

Netflix’s Maestro one-sheet clearly states that Mulligan owns the spotlight.

It sounds as if IndieWire‘s Ryan Lattanzio has seen the film, given that he’s written that “the show is stolen from Cooper by Mulligan.”

And yet two days ago Variety‘s Clayton Davis sugggested that Mulligan should go for Best Supporting Actress. This is advisable, he feels, because the competition from Killers of the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone is too formidable.

Davis doesn’t mention, of course, that Gladstone’s campaign is pretty much about the woke identity militia, and that her actual performance is no more than sufficient. She certainly has no “big” moments. I could even call it an underwhelming performance (i.e., she mainly just seethes and glowers and lies in bed during the film’s second half) but the woke mob would resort to their usual inferences.

This, thank God, is the beginning of the nascent “Stop Barbie!” movement. Enough with the Oscar talk, in other words. Nominations are fine but no above-the-line wins. It’s great that Barbie and Oppenheimer performed so well commercially, and in so doing revived the relative fortunes of exhibition. But c’mon, seriously…calm down on the Oscar front.

“There were two actors who managed to perform in The Ten Commandments without disgracing themselves — Yul Brynner and Edward G. Robinson. He realized the perverse comedy in the part of Dathan. DeMille was completely baffled by what Robinson was doing, and wanted to fire him. if it hadn’t been location shooting I suspect he would have.” — John Ellis on Facebook, recently.

HE comment #1: Every Robinson scene was shot on the Paramount lot — zero location work. HE comment #2: Charlton Heston didn’t embarass hiumself — he obviously knew a lot of what he was called upon to perform was swill, but he got through it with dignity. HE comment #3: Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Vincent Price also played their lines with perverse humor.

I don’t know when I’ll be able to stream Woody Allen‘s Coup de Chance. A streaming bootleg will probably be available before too long, but I’d love to catch it in a nice theatre somewhere. Alas, the #MeToo Stalinists won’t permit it.

How does it feel to suppress art, guys? To still the beating of a pulse? I’ll bet it burns your ass that Woody is alive and thriving.

The new #WoodyAllen film #CoupDeChance opens in France Sept. 27th. Great poster. pic.twitter.com/r43o5gjrDt

— Whit Stillman (@WhitStillman) September 24, 2023