My first reaction to this trailer for John Lennon: Murder Without A Trial (12.6) was "okay, the 40th anniversary of Lennon's murder was three years ago so what's the compelling reason for revisiting this?" Other than acknowledging the 43rd anniversary, I mean.
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I re-watched Poor Things a couple of nights ago (my second viewing), and reacted in a way I hadn’t expected. I felt a bit more dazzled or certainly more appreciative of the multitudinous elements that go into each shot. I was knocked out when I saw it in Telluride in early September, but I expected to have more or less the same reaction. Maybe a slight enthusiasm drop but that’s par for the course and nothing to sweat.
But to my surprise it gained. I was saying “wow” over and over, as much as I did three months ago. Over and over I was shaking my head in admiration for the visual energy…the exacting care and immaculate invention that went into every aspect — the exciting abnormality of it all, the skewed Victorian-era dialogue, Emma Stone‘s robotically out-there manner and behavior, the imaginative artificiality and bizarre production design, the weird performances from pretty much everyone, the perverse humor…all of it. It looks and feels like a weird dream, but one you can easily settle into.
I gradually realized that Poor Things is one of those films that you need to see twice because there’s so much going on that a single viewing won’t suffice.
I was wondering for a while what Poor Things would be like if I saw it on peyote or mescaline. I would never consider such a thing (in my youth I tripped my way through at least three or four films) but it’s a film that would really be enhanced by the right kind of hallucinogen. A gentle one, I mean.
Make no mistake — Poor Things delivers a woke narrative. An attractive and spirited artificial young woman in her 20s encounters the big, bad, male-corrupted world for the very first time with naive, childlike eyes and somehow finds her way through the thicket, and emerges at the end of the tale with an emboldened, seen-it-all feminist attitude. But Bella Baxter’s tale is so inventively told I not only didn’t mind the preach but was taken by it. I didn’t feel the least bit dismayed or disengaged.
I noticed something else that I probably shouldn’t mention but will anyway. I’m talking about the simple biological fact that Emma Stone has large, slender, shovel-like feet. I’m sorry but she’s barefoot in at least half of her scenes, and I was saying “well, there it is…her feet don’t have that petite Japanese geisha thing going on.” No problems or judgments; her anatomy is her anatomy. But I did notice this.
But I was also thinking, “God, what a brave and striking performance…Bella is so eccentric, so stiff-necked (a little like Elsa Lanchester‘s Bride of Frankenstein) and yet so carefully and correctly phrased,m and so willful…such an original concept.
And before Poor Things I was never a huge Yorgos Lanthimos fan, mind. I respected and appreciated his brand and sensibility, but this was the first time I felt really enthused about what he was showing me.
HE: “When I think of Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (Searchlight, 12.8), I think of a one-two effect. First I think of Frankenstein’s sexually vigorous daughter, and then a back-from-the-grave woman whose worldview evolves from wide-eyed wonderment into critical male-shirking wokeness. I also believe that Emma Stone has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag.”
Friendo: “When I think of Poor Things, I first think of a lurching, amusing and sometimes audacious [effort] that feels second-rate-ish at the end of the day. Then I think of the in-your-face woke design (Ms. Barbie Frankenstein in a world of angry, damaged, predatory men!), then I think of all that sex and how it’s really kind of gratuitous (unless this were 1972) but wow, it sure is going to help sell the movie!”
From Brent Lang and Matt Donnelly’s Variety story (filed on 11.28 at 10:18 am) about the attempted censoring of Robert DeNiro‘s speech at last night’s Gotham Awards:
“A source close to the film denied that there was any censorship involved and said that the incident was a miscommunication. There had been multiple versions of De Niro’s speech and there was a desire to focus solely on the moviemakers and their artistry, according to the source. Apple and the filmmakers were unaware that De Niro hadn’t signed off on the final draft, the insider added.”
Translation: “We [Apple] tried to politically sanitize DeNiro’s speech. In hindsight we realize we shouldn’t have done this, But to protect ourselves now, we’re going to deny everything and call it a miscommunication.”
May December‘s Charles Melton has won the Gotham Award for Best Supporting Performance. Good, fine and congrats, but may I ask where this Melton energy came from? Why did this happen? What voting bloc rammed this through? What is this?
It is Hollywood Elsewhere’s opinion, due respect, that no less than eight Gotham nominees in this category delivered far more arresting performances than Melton.
HE’s best-of-the-best is The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph, closely followed by BlackBerry‘s Glenn Howerton. HE’s #3, #4 and #5 picks are Ferrari‘s Penélope Cruz, The Taste of Things‘ Juliette Binoche and All Of Us Strangers‘ Claire Foy.
Then comes Jamie Foxx in The Burial (#6), Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (#7) and Ryan Gosling in Barbie (#8).
Then and only then comes the ninth–place Melton.
This is so sweet… charles melton you are so loved pic.twitter.com/SJCJfyPWaf
— e (@mellarkanti) November 28, 2023
The Outstanding Lead Performance award went to Lily Gladstone in The Unknown Country, a film that no one relatively few have seen or reviewed, to go by general impressions. The urge to socially and culturally celebrate Gladstone’s Killers of the Flower Moon Oscar campaign was the motivating factor here. Congrats to her handlers.
The Best Feature award went to Past Lives…yeesh. The Gotham voters really and truly live on their own tight little island.
Daniel Richtman is reporting that Jharrel Jerome is "in talks" to play the lead role of Mike in an untitled, racially-themed comedy from director Trey Parker and screenwriter Vernon Chatman.
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Just allow me to believe what I'm seeing. Just make a credible effort and I'll buy into it. This scene from Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (now 32 years old) made belief impossible. I felt insulted.
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Last night “Bob Hightower” posted an anecdote about director Mike Nichols. Residing in the comment thread for an HE article titled “Son of New York Theatre Stories,” it concerns the summer movie-house run of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff? and particularly the behavior of a certain New York projectionist.
“When Nichols’s first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opened in late June of ’66, he went to a theater in New York one afternoon to watch it with a paying audience.
“The film was out of focus. It kept being out of focus. And of course, no one in the audience complained.
“Nichols frantically ran out and up the stairs to the projection booth. He banged on the door. No one answered. He banged again. Nothing. So he pushed open the door and found the projectionist on the floor banging an usherette. Nichols crept out and left the theater. As Gregg Toland once said, ‘The projectionist is the ultimate censor.'”
HE correction: Toland probably meant to say “the projectionist is the ultimate arbiter.” Showing a film out of focus obviously doesn’t constitute censorship, but vandalism.
Mark Harris informs that the anecdote isn’t from his 2022 Nichols biography, but says “it certainly sounds credible.”
Well, I don’t find the story credible.
HE to Hightower #1: With the urgent knocking why wouldn’t the randy projectionist have gotten up and seen who it was, especially if the door was unlocked? He surely understood that women hate it when strangers burst into a room with intimate activity going on. If the projectionist wanted to keep things going with the usherette he would taken proper privacy precautions. It would have been one thing if the projection booth door was locked, but it obviously wasn’t. You can’t tell me he didn’t hear Nichols knocking.
HE to Hightower #2: Projection booth floors are made of hard plastic tiles or plain cement. Who would attempt to make love to an usherette on one of those awful uncarpeted floors? What kind of usherette would submit to this? Women like their romantic encounters to be nice and soft and candle-lit. I would expect that most projectionists and usherettes would avoid the floor and attempt the deed standing up. Or perhaps with the usherette bent over the reel-spicing table, say.
One thing that’s always bothered me about Virginia Wolff is that George and Martha’s young guests — George Segal‘s Nick and Sandy Dennis‘s Honey — arrive around 2:30 am. The four of them have already been to a previous faculty party which presumably started at 8 or 9 pm, and now it’s five or six hours later and they’re about to start drinking and chit-chatting again? Even at the height of my most rambunctious youth I never showed up anywhere — a friend’s home or a bar or anything — at 2:30 am. During my drinking days I might’ve crashed at 2:30 or 3 am, but I never partied until dawn killed the moon…never. And I was a wild man, relatively speaking.
As much as I respect Milos Forman‘s Amadeus (’84), I haven’t had the slightest desire to rewatch it over the last 39 years. This is due to my profound, never-forgotten loathing for Tom Hulce‘s performance as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Not to mention that awful white lion’s-mane wig that he wore. Perhaps others feel this way also.
But if I could somehow re-experience my viewing of the B’way stage version with Ian McKellen and Peter Firth, I would do so repeatedly.
From “Respect for Milos Forman,” posted on 4.4.18: “Sometime in ’81 I saw Peter Shaffer‘s Amadeus at the Broadhurst, and revelled in Ian McKellen and Peter Firth‘s performance as Salieri and Mozart. It was such a huge, radiant high that I had difficulty adjusting to Milos Forman’s film version, which opened in September ’84.
“It was a handsome, well-crafted thing and a Best Picture Oscar champ, of course, and like everyone else I…well, appreciated F. Murray Abraham‘s Salieri. But Forman’s film just didn’t have that same snap and pizazz, and I hated Thomas Hulce‘s giggly-geek performance as Mozart and flat-out despised Elizabeth Berridge‘s bridge-and-tunnel performance as Constanze Mozart (i.e., she called her husband “Wolfie”).
“Amadeus is a good film but the play was much better.”
The VyceVictus praise is yet another measure of proof that Alexander Payne's The Holdovers (which begins streaming tomorrow) is happening with slightly older Average Joes. That doesn't mean the assisted living crowd but anyone who thinks and feels outside the realm of Millennials and Zoomers...people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. Or X-factor under-40s, who exist in certain pockets. All hail '70s filmmaking chops, which are just as great now as they ever were.
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Sasha Stone and I recorded the latest Oscar Poker on Sunday, 11.26, around 1:30 pm. Here’s a link.
Incidentally: Hollywood Elsewhere continues to take exception to the strange absence of Black Flies, which Open Road has obviously yanked from its previously-slated late November release date.
An assaultive, high-velocity, rough and tumble capturing of the lives of Emergency Medical Technicians in Brooklyn, Black Flies may not be a great, earth-changing film but it’s certainly a respectable one while being a close relation of Martin Scorsese‘s Bringing Out The Dead (’99). We discussed this situation towards the end of the podcast.
Again, the link to the latest.
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