Has anything changed as far as the Best Picture Oscar death of Everything Everywhere All At Once is concerned? Since last Friday morning, I mean? Unless I’m missing something, I don’t think so. THR‘s Scott Feinberg killed its chances last Thursday (12.29) when he listed Top Gun: Maverick as the #1 likeliest winner. That was it, end of story, guillotine drop.
The following morning we hashed it all out. Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and myself, I mean. Here it is, all 43 minutes worth.
I’ve been told that Broadway’s diversified, woked-up stage musical of Some Like It Hot isn’t doing so well commercially. No stars to speak of is one reason. Overly woke-icized may be another.
The show ignores the basic scheme of the Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic, making more than half the characters black with the Jerry/Daphne character (played by Jack Lemmon in the Wilder film) embracing transgenderism and yaddah yaddah. And the show buries the film’s final line — “nobody’s perfect.” Of course it does!
Directed by Casey Nicholaw and featuring Christian Borle (Joe/Josephine), J. Harrison Ghee (Jerry/Daphne), Adrianna Hicks as Sugar (called Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk when she was played by Marilyn Monroe) and Kevin Del Aguila as an Latino Osgood, Some Like It Hot opened just under three weeks ago — 12.11.22.
HE reader Des McGrath: “The Jack Lemmon character has been rewritten to discover that he is a trans woman over the course of the story.
“The immortal final line? Gone. Instead of Osgood Fielding responding ‘Nobody’s perfect’, he tells Daphne ‘You’re perfect just the way you are’ (or something like that).
“And the Marilyn Monroe character is no longer a dumb blonde but a strong black woman, who sings about how as a child growing up in a small town in Georgia she liked to go to the movies, but ‘could only use the balcony. Like the movies, life could be that black and white.’
“So now she wants to break the color barrier in Hollywood.”
HE to McGrath: “Like the film, the show is set in 1929. Sugar wants to break Hollywood’s color barrier in nineteen-twenty-fucking-nine? The new Some Like It Hot, in short, is another exercise in presentism — transposing the woke sensibilities of today to the jazz age.”
If the kid (actor Philip Tanzini) had been, say, 12 or 13 or even 14, I might not feel altogether comfortable watching Demi Moore (19 at the time) give him a hot-mama kiss. But 15 is cool. Plus he was a showbiz kid. Plus he looked like a nerd — that doesn’t mean he wasn’t ready to slam ham at the drop of a hat.
Plus it was 1981 — the dawn of the tits ‘n’ zits era of movies (Losin’ It, All The Right Moves, Risky Business). Everybody knew the score, and the era of woke prudery was several decades off. Tanzini is now 56 years old and probably melting down over the memory.
I was 15 once, and my hormonal surges were like bodily volcanoes…Krakatoa, East of Java. I would’ve dropped to my knees, gotten out a hymn book and praised God if a hotsy-totsy 19 year-old actress had kissed me like that.
I was taking sneaky Saturday trips into Manhattan when I was 15, remember, and occasionally getting goosed by 40ish, creepy-looking gay guys on 42nd Street, and I more or less shrugged that shit off.
One day when I was 15 my mother told me to watch out for older women who might try to take advantage of me, and my only thought was “please…please, God…arrange for an older foxy woman to try to bring thoroughly immoral, anti-Christian sexual rapture into my life!”
Needless to add, Hollywood Elsewhere stands with the 32.9% of Twitter responders who have no problem with this.
Actress Demi Moore being especially “friendly” to a 15 year old kid. pic.twitter.com/HwmJRFhGBw
— Ian McKelvey (@ian_mckelvey) December 28, 2022
There’s something hugely joyful about reuniting with my mail-order John Wayne Red River brass belt buckle. The fact that I’m happy to once again have it in my possession means, of course, that I’m just as much of a racist swine as Wayne was during his lifespan, and has nothing to do with my loving the 1948 Howard Hawks western (which, as the buckle points out, was actually shot in ‘46).
HE is reminding that the next big Bedford Marquee event is a special 4K screening of William Cameron Menzies‘ recently restored Invaders From Mars (’53). A special master class instruction from restorationist Scott MacQueen will also occur. It’ll happen three weeks hence on Sunday, 1.15.23 at 11 am.
How keen will local film buffs be about catching a sci-fi classic on a lazy Sunday morning? Understand this: This will be the only first-rate screening in a AAA first-rate theatre (which the BP definitely is) of an absolutely mint-condition restoration of perhaps the most influential Eisenhower-era space invader film ever made. This will almost certainly never happen again…trust me. Hot chocolate served in the indoor cafe. The more, the merrier!
New York‘s Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi, 29, who writes as sharply, knowingly and unpretentiously as Michael Wolff, has penned a devastating “Intelligencer” profile of a withered, blathering and clearly declining Donald Trump.
The piece has two titles — “The Final Campaign” online and, on the current New York cover, “Party of One.”
It’s a darkly amusing dig-down piece…fascinating content start to finish…one smirking, devastating paragraph after next. D-List MAGA types (including “Brick Man”) at the Mar a Lago announcement of Trump’s ’24 presidential campaign. Anonymous Trump adviser: “It’s not there. In this business, you can have it and have it so hot [but] it can go overnighty and it’s gone and you can’t get it back. I think we’re just seeing that it’s gone,. The magic is gone.”
The image of Trump basically being fat Elvis Presley during the tacky decline period of ’76 and ’77…this analogy will stick.
The Elvis observation is from 41-year-old Sam Nunberg, a Manhattan-based operator who was an on-and-off political advisor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and “was subpoenaed by a grand jury for testimony and documents relating to the Special Counsel’s Russia investigation.”
My God, Avatar 2: The Way of Water rerally romps and stomps like nothing I’ve seen in a long while, and the astonishing CG realism (which I couldn’t settle into at first — it took me 10 minutes to find my way into it) is quite the thing, and there’s no beating that last 50- or 60-minute aquatic pitched-battle, breaching-whale, pulse-rifle-burst, arrow-piercing “woo-woo!” destructathon.
A family that fiercely fights together loves all the more…The Poseidon Adventure meets a return-to-Titanic sinkathon + The Abyss drowning trauma + weeping death scene + the wildest, craziest, most vigorously sustained battle lollapalooza ever…worth the price and then some…pays off like a motherfucker.
James Cameron is a drop-dead brilliant action director…let no one ever challenge that statement.
And I’m now determined to practice my Navi cat howl-Māori battle cry.
But so much of Avatar 2 is padded all to hell & is too fucking long, man…it could’ve easily, EASILY been 45 minutes shorter. The narrative pretty much stops in the middle section and becomes a bloated, ultra-costly real-estate video + a tricks-of-under-the-sea survival instructional + Club Med acqua-blue travelogue for glorious Pandora Shores.
The tech is marvelous and bracingly real & every last dollar seems to be on the screen. But there’s something oddly oppressive and even un-entertaining at times about being vigorously assaulted & smothered by so much CG dough…truckloads & truckloads of cash spent by the ultimate wizardly maestro of wildly expensive holy shit superfuck blockbusters. The film is a titanic grand-slam CG toy factory spendathon…whew!
I like the “family is a fortress” theme but my God, I was exhausted when it ended. I’m not altogether sure I want to see it a second time. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman was right when he called it thin. Pic seems to take as much as it gives.
Right after the first media screening of Avatar 2 I said for the 157th time that you can’t trust fanboys. The only reactions you can trust are those from “grumpy” critics, which is to say discerning types who don’t immediately drop to their knees when confronted with next-level CG.
I wouldn’t call Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman a grump or a grinch, but he’s no easy lay**. His assessment of Avatar 2, therefore, has value.
Key Gleiberman passage: “At its height, it feels exhilarating. But not all the way through. Cameron, in The Way of Water, remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that.
“The story, in fact, could hardly be more basic. The Sky People, led again by the treacherous Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), have now become Avatars themselves, with Quaritch recast as a scowling Na’vi redneck in combat boots and a black crewcut. They’ve arrived in this guise to hunt Jake down. But Jake escapes with his family and hides out with the Metkayina. Quaritch and his goon squad commandeer a hunting ship and eventually track them down. There is a massive confrontation. The end.
“This tale, with its bare-bones dialogue, could easily have served an ambitious Netflix thriller, and could have been told in two hours rather than three. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The Way of Water is braided with sequences that exist almost solely for their sculptured imagistic magic. It’s truly a movie crossed with a virtual-reality theme-park ride. Another way to put it is that it’s a live-action film that casts the spell of an animated fantasy. But though the faces of the Na’vi and the MetKayina are expressive, and the actors make their presence felt, there is almost zero dimensionality to the characters. The dimensionality is all in the images.”
