Roughly ten days ago I presented a case for Barbie and Poor Things being more or less the same film, the difference being that Poor Things is sexier, crazier, loopier, trippier…more Alice in Wonderland meets Terry Gilliam‘s Frankenstein in a hard-R kinda way.
Poor Things, in short, is a much hipper film…more apple-cart-upsetting, more subterranean, more wild-ass unhinged…almost in a Radley Metzger sense.
And yet if the Best Picture race comes down to these two being the finalists, the proverbial mob (i.e., those who are far less hip than they think they are) wants the Oscar to go to Barbie. Why? Because it became a huge cultural event and made tons and tons of money, and they loved that glorious affirmation of urban girlitude and pinkitude. It was quite the national moment.
Filed on 7.20.23 — one of the first things I wrote after my late afternoon show of Barbie ended:
Key 7.20.23 passage: “I have to give Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach credit for having created a fleet, zippy, self-acknowledging, hall-of-mirrors Barbie universe that mostly works.
“If you don’t mind the relentless humiliation that is heaped upon the stupid, self-deluding Ken men, the film holds together. It’s fully realized and precisely thought through and is quite the pink creation, quite the work of imagination…
“Even though it regards men as pathetic and immature and basically seven- and eight-year-olds…the Barbie women are the wise and the strong and way, WAY more commanding and visionary and competent….the Ken men are foolish, emotionally stunted infants, and women know SO much more and are SO much wiser and more mature and they, henceforth, will lead the way. And are destined, it is fully implied, to run the real world once the men are fully deballed and schooled and feminized…”
“No Clint Eastwood or Lee Marvin types allowed! And no Cary Grants or Jack Lemmons either! Only buff-bod gay guys who are pretending to be straight, or at least aren’t identified as queer.”
But honestly? The more I think about Barbie, the less interested I am in seeing it again. If it has to be one of these, I’m definitely more in the Poor Things camp.
Lawmen: Bass Reeves is a new western series (Paramount +, 11.5) about a tough, well-respected lawman in the Arkansas and Oklahoma Indian territories during the post-Civil War Years.
The series was created by showrunner Chad Feehan, executive produced by Taylor Sheridan, and stars David Oyelowo (who also produced). Costarring Dennis Quaid, Forrest Goodluck, Lauren E. Banks, Barry Pepper, Grantham Coleman, Demi Singleton.
I don’t know how many episodes are in store but the writers won’t need to invent much as Reeves lived quite a life. The trailer makes it feel Deadwood-y.
What I haven’t figured is why the first word in the title is Lawmen.
Wiki excerpt: “Reeves worked for 32 years as a federal peace officer in the Indian Territory, brought in some of the most dangerous fugitives of the time, and was never wounded despite having his hat and belt shot off on separate occasions.
“In addition to being a marksman with a rifle and revolver, Reeves developed superior detective skills during his long career. When he retired in 1907, Reeves had on his record thousands of arrests of felons, some accounts claiming over 3000. According to his obituary, he killed 14 outlaws to defend his life.”
Reeves was portrayed by Delroy Lindo in The Harder They Fall (’21).
Please go to 2:25 in the below video report from England’s Channel 4 — “Inside the Gaza siege – an eyewitness report.”
Kamala Harris! What a wounded showhorse of a vice-president, not to mention the target of a devastating profile that will almost certainly make things worse all around. The N.Y. Times reporter, Astead W. Herndon, is a sharp-minded dude of color who doesn’t miss a trick, and he clearly has issues with her.
Five words: Herndon’s portrait is not flattering.
Kamala is basically seen as mostly a recipient of good luck and fortunate timing — a beneficiary of racial-political largesse, a diversity hire with nothing especially dynamic under the hood, a blah and brittle vp with no defining visionary issue apart from the usual incremental wonky talking points, and no personal charisma or rhetorical pizazz. A soporific, eyes-glazed-over spouter of “word salads.” A testy, defensive tactician whom no one outside of one key demographic and identity group — black females — really likes.
Plus she’s an absolutely dreadful public speaker with a weak, whiny voice and no sense of musical rhythm in her phrasings. Plus she’s quite short (5’2”) — the word is actually elfin. Plus there’s no ignoring the fact that aside from that one moment when she attacked Joe Biden over busing, Kamala never began to connect as a presidential candidate in ‘19 and early ‘20. Plus she sheds senior staffers left and right. Plus there’s that cackle. Plus she reportedly devotes huge blocks of time to her hair. (Okay, that’s a cheap shot.)
She’s basically a drip-drip, slow-motion, can’t-sell-it implosion who terrifies many democrats and is obviously an easy target for righties.
I know nothing, of course, but dead babies on gurneys? Some of them beheaded? This happened? How could anyone do this to children en masse?
'About 40 babies were taken out on gurneys… Cribs overturned, strollers left behind, doors left wide open'
Our correspondent @Nicole_Zedek continues to survey the horror scenes left behind in Kibbutz Kfar Aza where Hamas invaded and murdered dozens of Israelis in their homes pic.twitter.com/ZZCwDGkV8z
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) October 10, 2023
“When I think about what makes a good story — a tale that traces out a plot and a path from A to B — the answers don’t always square with the parts of movies I love best.
“I’m not super hot on Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, but the scenes in which Lenny conducts are magnificent and powerful, like being thrown into the middle of a sonic storm. The rest — the tortured-genius, bad-wife-guy intrigue — sometimes felt like homework. I often found myself thinking, ‘Let’s get back to the music.'” — from “When Did the Plot Become the Only Way to Judge a Movie?,” 10.8 N.Y. Times piece by Beatrice Loayza.
A recent Maestro conversation:
HE: “Emma Kiely’s Collider review of Maestro is totally in the tank for Carey Mulligan and that’s fine, but Kiely doesn’t even flirt with the possibility that Maestro might feel like weak tea to some. What is this review side-stepping? What about Cooper’s film that Kiely is being less than fully truthful about?”
Brooklyn Guy: “It’s the story of a marriage and a life between two people, one of whom just happens to be, in the view of many, one of the best composers and conductors of all time. [But the film suggests that] what Bernstein was doing with his life is just a coincidence. And yet without that, why should we even care about the marriage?
“In Michael Mann‘s Ferrari, the central couple (heterosexual) are business partners and that’s a crucial difference. There’s an actual conflict there. In Maestro the argument is over infidelity and drug use…nothing else. Bernstein’s politics? Nonexistent. Hers too. So it’s two-dimensional and complaint-driven, and yet it still manages to subscribe to a ‘great man’ theory of history.
HE: “Since Telluride I’ve been hearing that Mulligan’s big explosion-of-rage scene (while the Thanksgiving Day floats are moving past the apartment windows) is the keeper.”
Brooklyn Guy: “That’s about right.’
HE: “‘Non-existent’ politics alludes to the absence of the Tom Wolfe-chronicled Black Panther party (“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s“).
Brooklyn Guy: “A filmmaker could go either way with that, either try to make an ass of Bernstein and yuck it up at Black people eating canapés that Tom Wolfe thought they were better suited to serve (do you think it’s a coincidence that Wolfe dressed like a plantation owner?) or they could give the Bernstein’s credit for making an effort but they go neither way.”
HE: “Wolfe’s Gatsby-esque garb was a throwback to the 1920s…he presented himself as half of a wisacre and half of a genteel Southern lad from Richmond.”
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