Good-Hearted “Gaming” or “Patronizing”?

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A couple of weeks ago Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and Eric Kohn revealed something interesting about voting for contenders in this or that category on year-end ballots. They both spoke of “gaming” the system in order to favor artists of color. They discussed this during a “Screen Talk” podcast (#176) that posted on 12.8.17.

Thompson (starting around the 8:28 mark): “This is a horrible way to put this, but I know when I was filling out my Critics Choice ballot, there were a couple of categories where I did lean into a couple of movies including Get Out and Mudbound and Shape of Water…where I wanted to make sure there were some people of color on my ballot…I did! And you probably did too.”

Kohn: “Of course. I will cop to that, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think this would be a problematic tendency if the quality wasn’t there. But [it is], and so this is a year in which you can lean into those options without feeling guilty.”

Thompson: “What I noticed I did…what I did was that I made them higher. On my ballot. In each case. I moved them up to make sure that it was recognized. As opposed to putting them as #4 or #5 or something like that. Academy members are going to do the same thing.”

I’m mentioning this because of a comment posted yesterday by Australian HE reader Jeffrey Edwards, to wit:

“As a result of the #Oscarssowhite hysteria, regressive leftists are seemingly expecting Oscar voters to consider a potential nominee’s skin color as a primary factor when deciding who to vote for,” he wrote.

Edwards then imagined their thought processes being something akin to “Well, I would like to vote for Michael Stuhlbarg for Best Supporting Actor because I think his performance truly merits a nomination. However, all the actors I nominate for that category will be white so instead to avoid outrage I’d better vote for Jason Mitchell in Mudbound because even though I thought he was just solid and would prefer to vote for Stuhlbarg, I’d rather avoid incurring the wrath of hysterical people on [Twitter].

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Death of Downsizing

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Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing, an intelligent, well-made film with a fascinating hook, is a dead puppy. It earned $768 per screen after opening yesterday in 2668 situations. This on top of the 52% and 63% respective scores from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic plus a Cinemascore C grade. Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro reports that under-25 viewers “hated it.”

I’m still advising HE readers to catch it this weekend. It’s not a typical “burn” but a sometimes brilliant disappointment. It delivers, in fact, a very good-to-excellent first act and a reasonably decent second act. But it commits hari-kiri in the third act, and in so doing destroys the initial good will that it had during the first…oh, 35 or 40 minutes. I’m truly sorry. My respect to Mr. Payne and his collaborators. Everybody drops the ball once in a while.

Here’s how I put it four and two thirds months ago (“Downsizing Deflates, Treads Water in Telluride”):

“Everyone knows the boilerplate. A futuristic setting and a dazzling, astonishing scientific discovery from Norwegian scientists that allows humans to reduce themselves to five inches tall. In so doing small volunteers live much more luxuriously and lavishly (their financial holdings are worth much more) while hundreds of thousands if not millions of carbon footprints are sharply reduced, and a far healthier environment results. Or so it seems at first.

“The story is about shlumpy physical therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his shallow wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) deciding to get small and live lavishly inside a downsized tiny town. A controlled environment inside a plastic dome, safe from birds and cats and other predators.

“The truth is that Downsizing starts off like a house on fire (loving it! yes! so great! Christoph Waltz is a hoot!) and then it starts to droop around the 40-minute mark, and then it really droops and sags when the movie moves to Norway. (No, I’m not going to explain what means, just that the film goes there during the final act.)

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Stuhlbarg’s Soliloquy

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The brilliant aspects of this justly praised scene from Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, apart from the dialogue and Michael Stuhlbarg‘s exquisite delivery, are (a) the very slow zoom-in as Stuhlbarg begins speaking, (b) the subtle rumble of thunder at the :22 mark, (c) the gentle addition of Sufjan Stevens‘ piano at the 1:56 mark, and (d) the way Timothee Chalamet refrains from melting until the very end. Clip editor’s note: Things should’ve faded to black before Chalamet asks “does mom know?”

Now That You’ve Seen The Post…

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Yesterday on Facebook Paul Schrader threw some left-handed shade upon Steven Spielberg‘s The Post, which opened yesterday in New York and Los Angeles. And then Bret Easton Ellis followed suit.

The Post, said Schrader, “feeds the myth that the system actually works. That the events of 1971 could be repeated today. I can hear Trump/Fox chuckling: yeah, let Hollywood and the media believe that myth if it keeps them pacified. We fixed that. It will never happen again.”

Ellis: The Hillary Clinton of prestige movies: lost in a bubble, smug, completely clueless, made by the establishment. [And conveying] a refusal to understand Trump’s appeal. This is the kind of lost and naive movie that unknowingly explains exactly why the mainstream media are where they are now — this story from 1971 has absolutely nothing to do with what is going on in 2017 (we are in a much more complicated moment) and yet it pushes a theory that is so flattering to journalists that despite the glaring weaknesses of the movie (and its thesis) they are going crazy over it. The Post is a myth only left-wing millionaires could buy.”

Village Voice critic Bilge Ebiri: “I disagree that The Post is all that convinced it can happen again. The hazy nostalgia with which it depicts bustling newsrooms is very pointed — it’s making a case that the kind of journalistic institutions that allowed for this kind of reporting are dinosaurs. It’s a very sad movie, in that sense.”

Excerpt from HE review, posted on 12.6: “A smartly written, well-performed tale of how and why Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) decided to man up and a grow a pair in the thick of the Pentagon Papers episode of June 1971, The Post is far and away my favorite Spielberg film since Saving Private Ryan. Call it Spielberg’s best, certainly his least problematic, in two decades.

“The critical verdict hasn’t been unanimous but I fell for it, and I mean all the way through and not just during the manipulative third act, which, if you have any stored-up sentiment about the glory days of 20th century dead-tree journalism, will definitely melt you down. I knew I was being sold a Spielbergian bill of goods but I bought it anyway.  I gushed out some thoughts the day after, and a New York friend replied, ‘Calm down, Tonto…it’s very good but not great.'”

Another critic friend: “It never made me tingle the way Spotlight or All the President’s Men did. Plus it has too many Spielberg-y touches: the little girl selling lemonade (Jesus!), that [redacted] ending. It all felt forced rather than organic, despite strong performances from Streep and Hanks.”

“It was also two hours of people going ‘We can’t do that!’ and others saying ‘We have to do that!’

Oswald Clan Thanksgiving

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This Oswald family footage, taken on 11.22.62 or Thanksgiving Day, is indistinguishable from tens of thousands of home movies taken that very same afternoon. Family celebrations are pretty much all the same, and are always about facades. The insisted-upon emotions of these gatherings (happiness, contentment, alpha vibes) always mask the undercurrents. The likelihood on this pre-Christmas weekend is that everyone in your clan is doing reasonably well or at least trying to do better, and planning for the best. But you never know. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Note: I’d never seen this 8mm footage before this morning.)

Won’t Kill You

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Because I didn’t review Michael Gracey, Hugh Jackman and James Mangold‘s The Greatest Showman when everyone else did, I conveyed an impression that I haven’t seen it. Except I have. I caught it on the Fox lot on 12.13, and then…well, I kind of put it aside. It’s not that I hated the damn thing or even disliked it. It’s not so much painful to sit through as draining. It’s a big, fat, empty-headed, old-school musical with an exclamation point, and by that I mean a musical with nothing going on inside. All The Greatest Showman wants to do is shovel the exuberance as it over-produces and over-sells.

Using a simplistic pruning of the life of P.T. Barnum as a narrative thread, it’s basically a series of splashy music videos strung end to end. It’s not bad, I didn’t hate it, you could do worse, etc. Jackman and his costars — Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Keala Settle — perform well under the circumstances. It’s just that Gracey tries so hard and the film feels so synthetic.

Last night I felt a bit nauseous after visiting a Michael Kors store in the Beverly Center. All that glitter garb, all those gold chains and sparkly shoe buckles and gaudy cluelessness, and with Michael Kors branding on just about every item. Kors seems to be selling uptown threads to people without much taste, to people who wouldn’t know stylistic understatement if it bit them in the ass. People of limited education who don’t get it, who feel they need to make some kind of vaguely vulgar, attention-getting statement in order to matter.

These are the people, I told myself, who will love The Greatest Showman. I’m not putting the movie down per se. It is what it is, and some will have a fairly good time with it. But Jesus, it feels so vapid, so lacking in edge and so consumed by a desire to entertain the most impressionable Vegas-visiting schmucks in the room.

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Damon Is New Spacey? Really?

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20,971 petitioners apparently want George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh to “do a Ridley Scott” with Matt Damon‘s cameo in Gary Ross‘s Ocean’s 8 (Warner Bros., 6.8.18), an all-female soft reboot of the Ocean’s trilogy. That or cut Damon’s cameo altogether. I knew that Damon has been under fire for, in the opinion of some, not condemning sexual misbehavior with sufficient severity, but I hadn’t realized until today that he’s almost regarded as a Kevin Spacey-type ogre. Almost.

Damon hasn’t been accused of sexual harassment or assault by anyone, but he is regarded as some kind of apologist or look-the-other-way type when it comes to the behavior of male abusers like Harvey Weinstein. Damon sounded relatively sane and reasonable to me when he spoke a week ago to Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers about the current #MeToo climate, but the Robespierre contingent disagrees.

“Matt Damon should not be in this movie,” a Petitionsite essay declares. “[His] inclusion would trivialize the serious nature of the charges against sexual abusers like Weinstein and show massive disrespect for the brave women speaking out. It would also send a terrible message about the inevitability of — and lack of accountability for — sexual harassment in the workplace that four in ten American women experience. I’m calling on Oceans 8 producers George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh to toss Damon’s Oceans 8 cameo where it belongs: on the cutting room floor.”

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Six Actresses Caught in Crossfire

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A couple of hours ago Glamour‘s Abby Gardner, speaking on behalf of the “woke” Twitter comintern, lambasted the editors of a just-published L.A. Times‘ Envelope issue (dated 12.21) for excluding actresses of color from the cover and the conversation.

The issue celebrates six top contenders for the Best Actress Oscar — Lady Bird‘s Saoirse Ronan, I, Tonya‘s Margot Robbie, In The Fade‘s Diane Kruger, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool‘s Annette Bening, Wonder Wheel‘s Kate Winslet and Molly Game‘s Jessica Chastain. All of them fair-skinned with blonde or ginger-colored hair…shame!

Gardner’s complaint is, of course, complete bullshit for two reasons: (a) the idea was apparently to highlight leading Best Actress contenders, and (b) this year there are, lamentably, no non-white actresses in serious contention for that trophy. (Best Supporting Actress is a different story — Mudbound‘s Mary J. Blige, Girls Trip‘s Tiffany Haddish, Downsizing‘s Hong Chau, Shape of Water‘s Octavia Spencer.)

The only woman of color who might have made it into the 2017 Best Actress circle is Natalie Paul, who was excellent in Matt Ruskin‘s Crown Heights but who never really campaigned or found traction of any kind.

If there’s a “problem” with the Envelope cover it’s because three leading contenders — The Post‘s Meryl Streep, The Shape of Water‘s Sally Hawkins and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri‘s Frances McDormand are missing. And honestly? The only actresses on the current cover who really count and deserve the highest consideration for the Best Actress Oscar are Ronan and Kruger.

Okay, you could maybe add Robbie to the hottie list, but Bening, Chastain and Winslet aren’t happening.

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Absence of Strategic Thinking

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Nikki Haley‘s statement yesterday about a then-forthcoming U.N. vote about the Trump administration’s decision to support relocating the Israeli capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, was, in the words of Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough, “somewhere between a schoolyard taunt and a mafia boss’s threat.” In the words of former CIA director John Brennan, “Trump administration’s threat to retaliate against nations [that] oppose U.S.position on Jerusalem is beyond outrageous…[it] shows that @realDonaldTrump expects blind loyalty and subservience from everyone — qualities usually found in narcissistic, vengeful autocrats.”

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Graduate Takedown Has Begun

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Mike Nichols and Buck Henry‘s The Graduate, perhaps the most culturally on-target, stylistically audacious and emotionally affecting relationship comedy in Hollywood history, opened exactly a half-century ago — on 12.22.67. But guess what? It’s time for a significant portion of that respect and glorification to go away, and for two reasons. I’m presuming that HE readers can guess the first without reading any further.

Just as former New York Post critic Lou Lumenick proclaimed a couple of years ago that Gone With The Wind has become a disreputable and even odious film because it reflects unfortunate racial attitudes of the late 1930s, Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson announced yesterday that it’s time to take The Graduate down a peg or two, partly because of recent allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Dustin Hoffman, and partly because Benjamin Braddock is a dullard — a far less interesting character than Anne Bancroft‘s Mrs. Robinson or even Katherine Ross‘s Elaine Robinson.

HE response #1: Deplorable as Hoffman’s behavior is alleged to have been during certain encounters in the ’80s, when The Graduate was shot he was a 29 year-old actor doing his damnedest to make the Braddock character sympathetic and engaging, and for the last half-century just about the entire civilized world has agreed that he achieved that goal. You can’t come along 50 years later and say “But Hoffman acted like a sexist asshole in the ’80s!” and so everything he did creatively before, during and after the Reagan era has to be darkly re-assessed.

HE response #2: On top of which Nichols and Henry, The Graduate‘s director and screenwriter, deliberately portrayed Braddock as confused, unfocused, de-politicized and largely inarticulate for the first 65 minutes. That was all a set-up for the big pivot point when Benjamin realizes he loves Elaine and is determined to end his affair with her mother. The first hour and change is about a bumbling guy in a passive-reactive state of mind, and the last 35 or 40 minutes is about this guy struggling to achieve a goal and attain a kind of emotional fulfillment.

HE response #3: Wilkinson doesn’t take credit for her “Mrs. Robinson is a more layered and intriguing character than Braddock” opinion, which I happen to agree with as far as the first 65 minutes is concerned. She acknowledges, in fact, that Roger Ebert offered this opinion at the time of the film’s 30th anniversary. She could have added that Sam Kashner said the same thing in a 2008 Vanity Fair piece about the making of The Graduate.

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