NYFCC Hands Best Film Trophy to Brady Corbet’s “Brutalist”…Get Outta Here!

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And Adrien Brody‘s performance as Lászlo Tóth, the period film’s profusely weeping, cigarette-smoking, heroin-shooting protagonist, has won the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Actor prize.

I’ve only seen the first half of The Brutalist (really couldn’t stand it) but I know what this performance primarily is, and this is an outrageous decision.

Virtuoso Nickel Boys auteurist RaMell Ross won for Best Director. If Ross had been handed some kind of Best Audacious First Film trophy, fine. But Nickel Boys doesn’t work and actually becomes quite tiresome. This was a broad consensus view at Telluride so don’t tell me.

I haven’t seen Mike Leigh‘s Hard Truths so no opinion about Marianne Jean-Baptiste winning for Best Actress…congrats.

A Real Pain‘s Kieran Culkin won the Best Supporting Actor trophy — the only NYFCC decision I wholly agree with.

Carol Kane was named Best Supporting Actress for playing music teacher Carla Kessler in Nathan Silver‘s Between the Temples. Call me superficial, but I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to invest in the once-svelte Jason Schwartzman playing a chunky-bod. (He’s even fatter in Queer.)

Sean Baker won a Best Screenplay awards for Anora….he should have won for Best Director, and Anora should have won Best Film….the NYFCC are really a bunch of eccentric assholes this year!

Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba Is Filing A Lawsuit

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…against the descendants of all the senior producers and creatives on the original The Wizard of Os (’39). Elphaba is suing for damages in the hundreds of millions because the Margaret Hamilton version of the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West is defamatory, plain and simple. Everyone understands this, but Louis B. Mayer sure didn’t. He didn’t understand that young Elphaba was a wonderful person at heart…a school-age girl who was unfortunately treated with cruelty during her time at Shiz University.

Snow White, Insurrectionist & Revolutionary!

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And following in the path of Glenn Powell‘s character in Twister, relegated to the sidelines during the action-packed climax, there ain’t no savior prince in the new Snow White (Disney, 3.21) — this is apparently a militant, storm-the-barricades show aimed at progressive women of all ages. (The script is by Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson.) Okay, there’s the kind-hearted, mild-mannered Jonathan character (Andrew Burnap) as well as the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia)), but, like Powell, these are second-banana characters.

Last Night Gotham Awards Satirized Themselves

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The Gotham Awards abandoned quality for its own sake some years ago. They’re basically become the gender-neutral, identity-celebrating, social virtue-signalling Wokey Awards…like their West Coast Spirit Award brethren they’ve become cultists in a kind of Branch Davidian way.

I haven’t seen Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man so who am I to talk, right? My avoidance impulse admittedly stems from weakness…from a sense of prospective anxiety and discomfort about hanging with an actual neurofibromatosis sufferer (in this case Adam Pearson). Which makes me a terrible person, of course.

I don’t want to avoid the disfigured…well, okay, I guess I do but I certainly don’t want to darken their lives in any way, shape or form. I merely choose to avert my gaze. If you ask me these feelings are benign and hands-off. And you know what? 98% of humanity feels the same way. Just ask Victor Hugo, Tod Browning (director of Freaks, which Andrew Sarris called “one of the most compassionate movies ever made”), Charles Laughton, Rod Serling.

I suggested in a piece last July that in response to my alleged or seeming cowardice and narrow-mindedness a certain kind of virtue–signalling hate snobbery (I called the proponents of this faith “neurofibromatosis wokeys”) would praise and embrace A Different Man as a way of trumpeting their open-hearted virtue and emotional support for not only the sufferers of this disease but anyone suffering from any oppressive handicap, biological or social.

They’re also determined to condemn anyone like me…anyone from the benign avoidance community, I mean…to eternal agonizing damnation. They are committed, trust me, to applying the bullwhip and sending we narrow-minded uglies straight to hell.

Last night the Gothams re-affirmed their social justice warrior belief system by giving their top prize to A Different Man — bingo! Like wind-up tin soldiers they walked right into their own self-lampooning satire…right into the mindset behind my snide little perception. In so doing they more or less said “we’re 100% sincere and real about this….neurofibromatosis sufferers have to be loved and supported and hugged, and we’re just the kind of enlightened organization to spearhead this social movement.”

Let me explain as carefully as I can that while neurofibromatosis wokeys are primarily guided by kind and gentle social impulses (as I am or at least try to be — I simply don’t want direct visual access to a manifestation of nature’s random cruelty) but they are also SJW snobs and haters. Remember Charles Bukowski’s “The Genius of the Crowd”? He nailed these detestable little scolds like few had ever managed. I’ve endured their slings and arrows in HE comment threads so I should know.

Word Around The Campfire

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..sez that Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (Focus, 12.25) sorta kinda blows a bit, and especially that Lily Rose Depp’s lead performance doesn’t cut the mustard.

I’ve spoken to a friend who feels this way, and at least one just-posted trade review agrees; another doesn’t argue all that strenuously. Any Eggers film is a must-see, of course, but this one sounds dicey.

Wait…IndieWire’s David Ehrlich thinks Depp is just swell!

Adventures With Finchy

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Blurry but funny. Peter O’Toole was 74 at the time. This was taped sometime in early December of ’06, the subject being Roger Michell‘s Venus. O’Toole passed in 2013 at age 81. The great Peter Finch (aka “Finchy“) died in ’77 at age 60….heart attack.

I don’t think often about the fun I occasionally had during my drinking days, but every now and then I do.

Pound for Pound

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“If you’re going to look like this, you’ll have to settle for the fat-girl parts.” — a drama teacher to Kate Winslet when she was in her mid teens, according to Winslet’s account during a 60 Minutes essay that aired yesterday (12.1).

By “like this,” the drama teacher meant not slender or rail-thin, a physical state that all competitive actresses aspire to whether they want to admit it or not.

What the drama teacher also meant, I suspect, was that Winslet wasn’t so much “fat” as zaftig (curvy, fleshy, wide-hipped). During the filming of Titanic James Cameron allegedly referred to Winset as “Kate weighs-a-lot.” I’ve personally never said an unkind word to any woman’s face for the misdemeanor of being a bit hefty or bulky, but I’ve held critical thoughts about such qualities for nearly my whole life. Everyone has.

Catherine Breillat made a film about a French obese teen and called it Fat Girl. Was that a size-ist slur or a statement of fact?

Things have changed over the last 30-plus years, but women of size and bulk are still not generally regarded as being in the 8, 9 or 10 categories…be honest. Nobody wants to be so impolite or coarse to put such women down for this, and it’s certainly permissible if this or that guy finds “big girls” attractive…knock yourselves out.

It’s noteworthy that the 60 Minutes interviewer (Cecilia Vega, who blends ardent feminism with standard obsequiousness) didn’t ask Winslet to explain or reiterate her own statement of self-condemnation for the crime of having worked with Woody Allen (Wonder Wheel) and Roman Polanski (Carnage).

Winslet: “It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful.”

I’ll tell you what was disgraceful back in ’21 — knee-jerk #MeToo Stalinist sentiments from Johnny-come-lately, trying-to-curry-favor activist actresses.

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