There’s a major disconnect in the trailer for Love and Death (HBO Max, 4.27), a true-crime drama written by David E. Kelley and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter. Boiled down, the disconnect is Elizabeth Olsen saying to Jesse Plemons, “Are you interested in having an affair?”
I’m not having trouble digesting the facts of the case, which happened in 1980 in the small town of Wylie, Texas. Candy Montgomery (Olsen) was a terminally bored mother and housewife whose husband, Pat Montgomery (Patrick Fugit), was an electrical engineer. Montgomery’s close friend Betty Gore (Lily Rabe) was married to Allan Gore (Plemons). Candy and Allan wound up having an affair, and Betty freaked when she found out, which led to Candy doing some freaking of her own — she savagely murdered Betty with an axe, striking her dozens of times.
All of this is fine, but biological reality is strongly arguing.
It would be one thing if the actress playing Candy was shlumpy or overweight or less than dynamically attractive. But Olsen, 34, is a double-A hottie and has been so for many years, so why in the real world would she want to have sex with a C-minus guy (at best) who looks like Jesse Plemons? Fleshy and ginger-haired, pale and puffy-faced, tiny pig eyes.
This isn’t how life works. Birds of a general feather tend to flock together, and saucy hotties don’t sleep with plump ginger dudes as a rule. I don’t care how bored they are.
Trains don't derail or plow through a station barrier in real life -- only in movies. It's possible, I suppose, if the chief engineer has suffered a heart attack or something. Like that elderly subway engineer in The French Connection. In Silver StreakGene Wilder's heroic George Caldwell, knowing that the throttling engine car is unstoppable, disconnects it from the rest of the train. All to say that the Metro North engineer who allowed a train to smash into the New Canaan end-of-the-line barrier was either unconscious or suffering some kind of seizure or whatever.
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Since 1929, the Academy Award of Merit (aka Oscar) has been awarded to artists by artists. Less than a decade after the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created the categories of Best Actor and Best Actress, not as artifacts of a patriarchal, oppressive past but harbingers of a more progressive future in which the inseparability of sex and performance was acknowledged — and celebrated at parity.
This model has held for nearly a century because it is understood that actors bring more than simply talent to their craft — they bring the intractible experience of life as either male or female.
It is no surprise that recent calls to abolish these categories, including gender-neutral moves by the Spirit Awards, the Gotham Awards and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, originate outside the profession and community of actors most impacted by them. These are efforts to change longstanding practice not at the behest of performers or for the betterment of the art, but to serve a broader, relatively recent agenda that presumes to achieve “equality” through the erasure of any recognized distinctions between the sexes. We reject these efforts as regressive and misogynist and call on the Academy and other organizations to do likewise.
It is especially disconcerting that this pressure campaign comes during a year with no fewer than three major awards contenders — The Woman King, Women Talking and She Said — singularly centered on the unique experiences of women. That all three films were also written and directed by women is a laudable step in the right direction — but could they have been just as easily written and directed by men? Absolutely. Could their predominantly female casts have been replaced by men? Categorically not. This is the distinction that advocates of genderless categories ignore.
Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh are already heavy awards season Best Actress favorites for their respective performances in Tàr and Everything Everywhere All at Once. But their achievements are more than great acting — the characters depicted are wives and mothers, women struggling to meet unequal expectations in a male-dominated world. These are parts defined by their explorations of womanhood, elevated by great actresses with the irreplaceable experience of being women.
The same may be said on the other side of the equation — Colin Farrell and Bill Nighy‘s respective performances in The Banshees of Inisherin and Living are likewise rooted in their irreplaceable experiences as men. Living, adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, is a noteworthy case in point. Though separated by seventy years and two continents, Bill Nighy and Takashi Shimura face precisely the same realities — experiences which transcend culture while being bound by sex.
Actors and actresses all understand that their career paths diverge based on sex and that this constitutes an opportunity, not a handicap. We should not expect or want Frances McDormand to play Macbeth any more than we should want Denzel Washington to play Lady Macbeth as the resulting performances would ring false, lacking the emotional resonance with which cinema connects the lived experiences of performers and audiences.
I realize that Congressperson Val Demings has been behind Sen. Marco Rubio all along in the polls. A new pool from Florida Atlantic University shows Rubio leading Demings by 6 points, 48 percent to 42 percent.
That said, Demings came off as a better debater, and I believe she’s a better human being. Nobody laughed at her during the debate, but they laughed their ass off at Rubio when he lied about his former position on the 2020 election.
“Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and his Democratic challenger, Representative Val Demings, met for the only debate of the Florida Senate race on Tuesday, a fast-paced, fiery face-off that cruised through a series of the top issues affecting the country and the state.
“Mr. Rubio, who participated in around a dozen debates as a Republican presidential candidate in 2016, was polished and quick. Taking a more evocative approach, Ms. Demings sought to cast him as heartless, disconnected from the human impact of his policies on issues like abortion and guns.
“Still, she may not have gotten the kind of viral moment necessary to shift the trajectory of the race in her favor. For months, polls have shown Mr. Rubio with a lead in Florida, a perennial battleground state but one that has shifted to the right.”
Jordan Peele‘s Nope (Universal, 7.22) is a fairly empty diversion — a wacko visual-effects thrill ride and a Signs-like alien visitation thing.
The alien stuff aside, it has three cool elements — (a) a 1998 flashback scene involving a chimpanzee named Gordy, (b) the re-birth of Fry’s Electronics, the defunct chain store that died from Covid in early ’21, and (c) incessant third-act appearances by an army of “tall boys” or “air dancers” — those shimmering tube-like balloons that used-car lots use to attract attention.
It’s about the owners of a remote horse ranch somewhere in the Southwest, a brother and sister named OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer) who inherit the ranch when their horse-loving dad (Keith David) is killed by falling objects, apparently dropped by mean-as-fuck aliens.
Bit by bit and more and more, the aliens (whose presence is chiefly signified by saucer-like spaceships and a massive, floating, cloud-like bedsheet thing) begin to intimidate and then terrify OJ and Emerald.
And then OJ and Emerald hire a Fry’s guy (Brandon Perea) to capture video images of the visitors, and then they bring in a documentarian (Michael Wincott‘s “Antlers Holst”, a character cut from the Robert Shaw/”Quint” mold) to capture the alien spacecraft on celluloid. And then the threat element increases. And then it ends.
I saw Nope last night. I developed a thesis this morning that the aliens are a metaphor for white people’s oppression of BIPOCs. This is what Peele does, of course — racial re-fittings of genre tropes. Get Out was a racial spin on The Stepford Wives, and Us was a horror film about doppelgangers but finally about the absolute terror of Ken Kragen‘s “Hands Across America.”
Friendo: “Naah, you’re reading too much into it…Nope is just a UFO thriller.” HE: “But it’s not SAYING anything except ‘boo!’ It has no content…UNLESS you, the viewer, interpret the aliens as metaphors for white oppression. THEN it’s saying something.”
Nope has no structure, no real story, nothing that digs in and pays off. It’s an alien horror film equivalent of a Jasper Johns painting — paint flung and dripped and splattered upon the canvas.
Basic Nope strategy: Start with basic spooky UFO premise and then (a) throw out the rule book, (b) disconnect the logic terminals, (c) throw everything you can think of at the canvas, and (d) see what sticks.
Oh, and by the way? It’s really hard to understand Palmer and especially Kaluuya. As Eddie Murphy might say if he catches Nope, “I don’t what the fuck these guys are sayin’.” Remember Barbara Billingsley’s imitation of black “jive” in 1980’s Airplane? That’s how Palmer talks — half Billingsley, half vocal fry. Remember Murphy’s imitation of James Brown with those guttural scat riffs? That’s how Kaluuya sounds. I was able to understand him maybe 20% of the time, if that.
And they don’t look like brother and sister. Palmer could be Keith David’s daughter, no prob, but no way is Kaluuya his son. Kaluuya’s parents are from Uganda, Palmer’s are from Chicago, David’s are from Harlem/Queens.
No discipline, this fucking film. It’s “imaginative,” if you want to call it that. As slow and talky and stodgy as Cleopatra was, it at least made sense. Which is more than you can say for Nope. So Cleopatra is better.
Say it again — when Gordy appears, the film comes alive. What Gordy has to do with the dumbshit rascal white-oppressor aliens is anyone’s guess.
Steven Yeun costars in Nope, and I couldn’t understand why he was in it. Yes, he has something to do with Gordy (I won’t say) and he wears a red suit and a big white cowboy hat in one scene, but he has NOTHING to do with anything.
I need to re-watch this movie with subtitles some day.
Why the hell is Kaluuya’s character named “OJ,” of all things? That’s a statement of some kind, but what?
If Dore Schary had somehow returned from the dead and become the producer on this film, before filming began he would have invited Peele to lunch and said, “Look, I’m just a Jewish white-guy producer and I don’t know much about African Americans or horse ranches or Fry’s Electronics, but WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MOVIE ABOUT?? You don’t know, do you? You’re just farting around with spooky alien visitors and trying to cook up something different and trippy, but THIS MOVIE IS BULLSHIT, JORDAN…you know it and I know it.”
And Peele would reply, “It’s a metaphor about white people’s oppression of BIPOCs.” And Schary would reply, “What are BIPOCs?” And Peele would say, “Don’t worry about it, bruh…I got this.”
No white-ass producer would dare say “bullshit” to Peele, of course, lest he/she be accused of harboring racist attitudes. Which is why Nope turned out this way…a crazy, impressionistic, Jasper Johns-like mess. Peele was apparently given carte blanche control, and this is what happens.
I do approve, however, of Peele bringing Fry’s back to life after it shut down all 31 locations in early ‘21. And I’l always approve of tube men and chimpanzees and stuff like that.
I was studying Palmer closely throughout the film, by the way. I don’t know if it was Palmer who didn’t get along with Bill Murray on the set of Being Mortal, but if it was I can see why. Palmer is buried inside herself and cranked up about everything, and Murray, I’m guessing, thought she was “wrapped too tight for New Orleans” and tried some kind of stilly, loosening-up prank, and she reacted badly, I’m guessing. She not only told him to back off but brought the temple down. Again — I don’t know what happened. I just want to make that clear. But Palmer excited my imagination.
This is big news, a huge development…seriously. Down the road it will help invalids enormously. It could eventually lead to writers composing articles and novels without using keyboards or fingers.
Posted on 4.8 by CNET’s Jackson Ryan: “Neuralink, the brain implant start-up founded by SpaceX head honcho and self-appointed ‘technoking’ Elon Musk, has unveiled a new video of a nine-year-old monkey named ‘Pager’ playing Pong…with its brain.
“The three-minute video shows Pager learning to control a computer with his brain activity. At first, the monkey uses a joystick to interact with the computer for a ‘tasty banana smoothie, delivered through a straw.’
“The narrator states Pager has two Neuralink devices implanted in his brain. The devices, which Musk calls a ‘Fitbit for your skull,’ were revealed at a press briefing in August 2020.
“As Pager plays through the games, the narrator explains the Neuralink devices in his brain are reading his brain activity and that activity is being decoded by a computer. When the team disconnect the joystick, Pager keeps playing the game — and the brain-implant allows him to play MindPong, as Neuralink has dubbed it.”
Does anyone know anything about David O. Russell’s untitled 1930s flick, which has been shooting for several weeks and may have wrapped? I know someone who worked as background actor a few weeks ago, but they didn’t know much. Wiki logline: “A doctor and a lawyer form an unlikely partnership.”
The 20th Century release (slated for ’22) boasts a big-name cast — Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek, Zoe Saldana, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Timothy Olyphant, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alessandro Nivola.
I haven’t re-watched Russell’s I Heart Huckabees since it opened 15 and 1/2 years ago (10.1.04). Now that it’s in my head, I might just do that.
Review excerpt: “Huckabees shot right through my skull on Wednesday night and came out like some cosmic effusion and just sort of hung there above my head like a low-altitude cloud and sprinkling light rain.
“That sounds too tranquil. A movie this funny and frantic and this totally off-the-planet (and yet strangely inside the whole universal anxiety syndrome that we all live with day to day) can’t be that cosmically soothing. That’s not the idea.
“But it is soothing…that’s the weird thing. Huckabees makes you laugh fairly uproariously, but it leaves you in a spiritual place that feels settled and well-nourished. Variety‘s David Rooney said it was ‘largely an intellectual pleasure with a hollow core.’ Rooney has probably never been wronger in his life. Not because he isn’t smart or perceptive, but because he failed to do a very important thing.
He didn’t see Huckabees twice.
“This is one of those rare movies in which you have to double-dip it. You obviously don’t have to take my advice. Go ahead and just see it once and then say to yourself, “Well, that happened!” Just understand that Huckabees is, I feel, too dense and arch with too much going on to fully get it in one sitting.
“On one level it’s a kind of psychobabble satire; on another it’s the most profoundly spiritual Hollywood film since Groundhog Day. And the amazing-ness of it may not come together in your head…if at all.
“That’s how the first viewing happened, at least. I was initially into it on a ‘whoa…what was that?’ level and for the antsy, pedal-to-the-metal pacing…but it goes beyond that. The first time is the eye-opener, the water-in-the-face, the violent lapel-grabbing; the second time is da bomb.
Over the last two nights I’ve slogged through seven episodes of The Serpent, a limited BBC One / Netflix series about notorious serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who murdered between 20 and 24 young tourists during 1975–1976.
Directed by Tom Shankland and Hans Herbots and co-written by Richard Warlow and Toby Finlay, it’s an annoying, patience-testing, spirit-draining ordeal… it plods along and never ends. It’s an uphill hike.
Tahar Rahim plays Sobhraj, an ice-cold sociopath whose opaque company I immediately didn’t care for. (He lacks that mesmerizing Hannibal Lecter magnetism.) A friend had recommended that I watch this thing, and within the first 20 minutes I was texting him with remarks like “I have to hang out with this asshole for seven more episodes? I’m really not digging this.”
I instantly disliked the whole damn package, although I did find the Asian settings alluring. The show was mostly filmed in Bangkok and Hua Hin, a resort town in Thailand’s Prachuap Khiri Khan Province. At the very least I came away with a fuller appreciation for the look, sounds, aromas and textures of Thailand. That was nice.
Otherwise I felt bruised by the flat, clunky dialogue and particularly by the endless flashbacks and the way it just goes on and on and on. (It should have been a four- or six-hour series.)
The fact that nearly every character was constantly smoking cigarettes drove me nuts.
I was driven up the wall by Jenna Coleman‘s glassy-eyed, impossible-to-read performance as Marie-Andrée Leclerc, who was Sobhraj’s partner and accomplice. (Her final scenes in episode #8 are her best.). Dutch diplomatic staffer Herman Knippenberg, the guy who investigated and hunted down Sobhraj, is played by Billy Howle with the fakest-sounding Dutch accent in the history of filmed drama. I despised Amesh Edireweera‘s performance as Ajay Chowdhury, who was Sobhraj’s sleazy, bushy-haired errand boy.
The only costars I could stand were Ellie Bamber as Knippenberg’s wife Angela, and Tim McInnerny as a Graham Greene-ish Bangkok character named Paul Siemons.
HE to Friendo after seeing Promising Young Woman (Focus Features, 12.25): “This is a really well-made film…carefully honed, brittle attitude, super-dry dialogue, well shot…Carey Mulligan’s Cassie is shut down and seemingly ‘over’ from the get-go…burning rage, nihilism, chilly and icy but highly controlled. The film itself is that way…ice cubes, deliberate glacier-hood, calculating.
“It’s been described as a kind of #MeToo Death Wish thing, but it’s a much finer creation than Michael Winner’s 1974 film. And yet God, the ice water in its veins! So angry at chauvinist prick fuckheads that it can’t…well, it can see straight but it can’t cut anyone a break. The evil parties must pay and die, and the feeling of vengeance and wrath is such that it just HAS to splash over and soak Carey’s character…I’ll leave it at that.
“Director-writer Emerald Fennell’s decision to make Ryan, the ostensible nice guy pediatrician boyfriend (Bo Burnham, the director-writer of Eighth Grade)…the guy is suddenly presented as…uhm, flawed. And this character decision is REALLY ICE COLD. Bold and brave on Fennell’s part but colder than shit. For we’ve been led to believe that Ryan is the one nice guy — the totem that says ‘there are some decent guys out there…they’re not all pigs and fiends.’
“And yet one mark of exceptional artistic achievement is not being afraid to go all the way. PYW definitely goes for broke and then some. It doesn’t just despise the young male tribe of insensitive assholes out there — it wants them exterminated like insects.
“In a sense, PYW is lucky it’s coming out during the pandemic because it would die a VERY quick death in theatres.
“THAT SAID, it certainly has the unflinching courage of its convictions. It does not lose its nerve. And so it stays with you. But aside from #MeToo hardcores and critics with the ability or willingness to step back and respect it for refusing to back off, who is going to recommend or earnestly praise this thing?
“For me, the last film that had this much of an icy attitude was Neil Labute’s In The Company of Men. Another in this vein is Michel Franco’s New Order. A similar feeling of ruthless payback and punishment. PYW isn’t the least bit political while New Order is very much that, but they share a certain hard clarity or severity of mind.”
If there’s been one steady-drumbeat message that has thundered across the Twitterverse for several weeks now, it’s that Pete Docter‘s Soul (Disney, 12.25) is a truly exceptional animated feature…a half-emotional, half-philosophical, jazz-embroidered film so rich and resonant and full-hearted that it deserves to be in Best Picture contention. (Which of course will never happen as far as the Academy is concerned because, being animated, it belongs in Best Animated Feature contention.)
And then along comes Variety‘s award-season handicapper, a guy more or less required to not dwell on negative currents (that’s Owen Gleiberman or Peter Debruge‘s job, if and when the situation warrants) and to celebrate the celebrational and be as turn-the-other-cheeky as possible…along comes Clayton Davis with the first significant anti-Soul opinion to come down the pike.
Davis tweeted this morning that as much as he “wanted to love it”, he was unable to. Because “there’s a disconnect between story and character“, and because it feels like an Inside Out ripoff that doesn’t quite land where it’s supposed to.”
By the way: A few minutes ago I was quizzing myself on the states in the above CNN map. Unlike Al Franken, I can’t draw the U.S. map on a state-by-state basis but since grade school I’ve been fairly solid on which state is where, etc.
So I felt…well, slightly thrown when I couldn’t remember which state is north of Iowa and east of the two Dakotas. I also drew a blank on the state below South Dakota; ditto the one below Iowa. The respective answers are (a) Minnesota, (b) Nebraska and (c) Missouri. Franken and the Coen Bros are from Minnesota so that should be easy to remember; ditto Nebraska and the legend of Alexander Payne. No solid connection with Missouri other than Harry Truman and staunch skepticism, even though I once visited “KayCeeMoe.”
I know my maps a lot better than any of those geographical doofuses Jimmy Kimmel or Jay Leno have talked to on the street, but otherwise I’ve no excuse. I only know that I eyeballed the above three and racked my brain, and the names just wouldn’t come. Truth be told I’ve always had a certain feeling of distance and disconnection when it comes to the Midwestern breadbasket region. New England, Mid-Atlantic, Deep South, Rocky Mountain states, Southeast, Southwest, Northwest rainforests and California…no problem. But the breadbasket is hazy.
I guess I’m basically saying that it’s the breadbasket states’ fault, not mine. Too flat, not distinctive enough, lacking in personality. Plus the ones I couldn’t remember all end in vowels.
In my heart of hearts I’d like to impose a Mississippi Burning payback fantasy upon Orange Plague, Mitch McConnell, Stephen Mnuchin and Senate Republicans who won’t budge on restoring the $600-per-week pandemic benefits. An angry crowd breaking through locked doors and beating these loathsome pricks…not killing them**, but delivering severe pain, boot-kicks, gashes, bruises, swellings, black eyes, blood trickling, etc.
Just a fantasy but if it actually happened? I wouldn’t condemn it. No one would. Some of us would cheer.
“Around 1000 Americans are dying from COVID-19 each day…ten times the rate in the European Union. Thanks to our failure to control the pandemic, we’re still suffering from Great Depression levels of unemployment. [And] yet enhanced unemployment benefits, a crucial lifeline for tens of millions of Americans, have expired. And negotiations over how — or even whether — to restore aid appear to be stalled.”
“House Democrats passed a bill specifically designed to deal with this mess two and a half months ago. The Trump Administration and Senate Republicans had plenty of time to propose an alternative. Instead, they didn’t even focus on the issue until days before the benefits ended. And even now, they’re refusing to offer anything that might significantly alleviate workers’ plight. This is an astonishing failure of governance — right up there with the mishandling of the pandemic itself.”
“The policy proposals being floated by White House aides and advisers are almost surreal in their disconnect from reality. Cutting payroll taxes on workers who can’t work? Letting businesspeople deduct the full cost of three-martini lunches they can’t eat? Above all, Republicans seem obsessed with the idea that unemployment benefits are making workers lazy and unwilling to accept jobs.”
** “After all we’re not murderers, despite what this undertaker thinks.” — Vito Corleone, The Godfather.