“With the exception of Kristen Stewart‘s alert, quietly arresting performance as a personal assistant to Juliette Binoche‘s famous, middle-aged actress undergoing an emotional-psychological downshift, Olivier Assayas‘s Clouds of Sils Maria (IFC Films, 12.1) is a talky, rather flat experience. It isn’t Persona or Three Women or All About Eve, although it seems to occasionally flirt with the material that these three films explored and dug into. MCN’s David Poland has written that it sometimes feels like “a female version of My Dinner With Andre” — generous! But on that note I’ll give Poland credit for thinking about this rather airless and meandering chit-chat film more than I did. It just didn’t light my torch. I agree with Poland on one point — it would have been a more interesting film if Assayas has focused more on Stewart and costar Chloe Moretz, who’s more or less playing a version of herself.” — posted on 5.23.14 from the Cannes Film Festival.
“It’s tempting to blame the peculiar leadenness of Snow White and The Huntsman on its casting,” writes Slate‘s Dana Stevens. “Charlize Theron isn’t a terrible choice to play the evil queen, though the poignancy of the queen’s obsession with youth might register more deeply if she were played by an actress who showed any visible signs of aging. But Twilight‘s Kristen Stewart as Snow White — especially this particular version of Snow White, a Joan of Arc-like medieval action heroine? Not gonna happen.
“Stewart’s whole manner, her slouchy bearing and general aura of sulky passivity, make her ill-suited to play a deposed princess whose irresistible charisma enables her to lead a peasant revolt. Stewart may have a limited range, but I don’t mind her in contemporary roles — she’s just right as the moony Bella in the Twilight movies or Jesse Eisenberg‘s object of desire in Adventureland, and she even made a passable Joan Jett. Still, the image of her leading a castle siege in full battle armor is so incongruous it might come from one of those parody trailers that opened Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder.”
In a 12.5.11 piece called “Stewart Needs To Dump CG Flicks,” I wrote that “I’ve admired Stewart’s work in The Runaways, Welcome to the Rileys and Adventureland. And I’m looking forward to her reportedly upfront Marylou performance in Walter Salles‘ On the Road. I used to think KStew might be evolving into Sean Penn. Now I’m not so sure.”
If LexG wasn’t banned I’m not sure he’d have a whole lot to say beyond the usual erotic fixation stuff. It’s probably just as well.
Gena Rowlands‘ performance in A Woman Under The Influence was an early influence upon Kristen Stewart. So when exactly is she going to deliver a tour de force like that? Because she really needs to do something difficult and noteworthy to counterbalance the Twilight onslaught of the last three years plus her Snow White and the Huntsman role….a medieval CG paycheck role with a sword, a shield and a chestplate.
I used to think KStew might be evolving into Sean Penn. Now I’m not so sure.
That said I’ve admired her work in The Runaways, Welcome to the Rileys and Adventureland. And I’m looking forward to her reportedly upfront Marylou performance in Walter Salles‘ On the Road.
Mainstream media and online jackals reacted adversely yesterday to Kristen Stewart‘s comment, included in an interview with British Elle‘s Claire Matthiae, that being hunted down, surrounded and flash-bulbed by paparazzi is a little like being raped.
Kristen Strewart in a British Elle snap used to accompany the interview.
In the print version of his story, N.Y. Daily News writer Anthony Benigno quoted an online ranter who called Stewart’s remarks “ignorant and insensitive,” and added that she should “apologize to rape victims.”
Why should Stewart apologize? Paparazzi are hit-and-run rapists of a sort, and being obliged to surrender little slivers of your soul as your picture is taken hundreds or thousands of times by a pack of shouting wolves is a kind of personal mauling that isn’t far from my understanding of “rape” — to be invaded and occupied and suffer a kind of brutal violation or wounding or theft, be it physical or emotional.
The people dissing Stewart are insisting, idiotically, that “rape” be defined as only a sexual violation. I’ll bet twenty bucks that most of these complainers aren’t very well educated.
I felt raped once when I came home to a Paris apartment I’d been staying in and realized it had been broken into and everything taken, including a new can of American-brand shaving cream that heated up when it came out of the can. I really loved that stuff, and those frog mo’fos stole it! I was enraged, and realized in an instant that this is probably a taste of what being physically raped feels like. Sexual violation is obviously many times more bruising and traumatic, but I know what I felt when I saw that apartment door ajar and my bathroom cabinet ransacked.
“The photos are so…I feel like I’m looking at someone being raped,” Stewart tells Matthiae. “A lot of the time I can’t handle it. What you don’t see are the cameras shoved in my face and the bizarre intrusive questions being asked, or the people falling over themselves, screaming and taunting to get a reaction. All you see is an actor or a celebrity lit up by a flash..it’s fucked. I never expected that this would be my life.’
“Welcome to the Rileys follows a familiar trope with James Gandolfini as an Indiana plumbing-parts entrepreneur taking a fatherly interest in a young stripper (Kristen Stewart) he meets while at a convention in New Orleans. To the credit of writer-director Jake Scott, it’s a chaste relationship that builds in affection and mutual trust, although Gandolfini and Melissa Leo, as a married couple, have a history we’ve seen before — i.e., going through the motions since their teen daughter was killed several years earlier.
James Gandolfini, Kristen Stewart
“Rileys doesn’t make any Hollywood plot turns, preferring to focus on the realistic prospects of a Midwestern couple suddenly trying to assume a parental role in the life of this young runaway.
“It’s also smart enough not to make a big deal out of the emotional estrangement between Gandolfini and Leo: no simmering recriminations, or angry venting of years-old anger. They instead offer beautifully modulated performances as a couple that has lost its way, although would like to find it back.
“Stewart attacks her role with a clarity and ferocity that is compelling. Stewart brings an emotional nakedness and spirit to the role that is reminiscent of certain male actors when they were young: Sean Penn for one, Leonardo DiCaprio for another.” — from Marshall Fine‘s recently-posted review.
33 year-old Kristen Stewart has been out for quite a few years now. She officially announced on SNL in September ’17, but I recall getting slapped around by the HE commentariat a year or two earlier for saying that I found one of her girlfriends too butch and that if I were Stewart (rich, famous, pick of the litter) I would go for someone foxier.
Anyway, Variety‘s Adam B. Vary has posted a 1.11.24 piece called “How Kristen Stewart Became A Queer Trailblazer“, and I’m like “we’re doing this again?” How many times can Stewart be celebrated for being out and proud? Are we going to be reading a similar cover story in 2030, when Stewart is 39?
As you read the article you can feel Vary’s emotional investment in Stewart’s bold-as-brass queerness. It turns him on, lights him up, gets him off.
Vary adopted this “yay, team!” approach because Stewart is promoting Love Lies Bleeding, a Sundance ’24 attraction about a hot lesbian love affair.
About 20 days ago I wrote that I don’t find Love Lies Bleeding especially appealing as neither Stewart (whose character looks plain and butchy and wears bad mullet hair) nor costar Katy O’Brian seem especially attractive, at least in this instance. The commentariat bitches beat me up for saying that also.
My first thought as I watched the trailer for Rose Glass‘s Love Lies Bleeding (A24, 3.8), a blue-collar lesbian melodrama, was “nope, not for me.”
The second thought was “they’re taunting me…they want me to mansplain how the two leads are too butchy and therefore unappealing to Joe and Jane Popcorn.” Which they are.
Plus the fact that Kristen Stewart has clearly tried to butch herself down — not a hint of makeup, shaggy mullet — and Katy O’Brian is too stocky and buffed up, and frankly not all that classically fetching. I’m sorry but we can’t all be beautiful or button-cute.
A queer cinema landmark? Perhaps among a certain independent film sorority or within Venice Beach body-building circles, but you can’t seriously expect guys like myself to say “hmmm, looks interesting…I’ll definitely give it a shot.” C’mon, man…they’re not that attractive! Sorry but I’m more of a lipstick lesbian kinda guy
Bleeding will debut at Sundance ’24, and that’s where it belongs. Costarring Ed Harris, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov and Dave Franco.
4:15 pm eastern: All hail the Gods of Rome! Not only did Killers of the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone fail to win the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Leading Performance Award, but she didn’t even place in runner-up status (although she did so qualify in the supporting category). For now at least, her identity campaign has been stopped in its tracks…screech! The award has been split between Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Hüller, and Poor Things‘ Emma Stone.
The runner-ups are All of Us Strangers‘ Andrew Scott and American Fiction’s Jeffrey Wright,
LAFCA’s Best Supporting Performance awards have gone to Rachel McAdams, (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) and The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Runners-up: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Ryan Gosling, Barbie.
Earlier today: The Los Angeles Film Critics Association is widely regarded as perhaps the most fickle and eccentric awards-bestowing org on the planet. We all know this. Don’t argue.
Not only have they chopped the roster of eligible acting winners in half by dispensing with gender, but they’re known worldwide as the only major critics group that routinely takes a brunch break during voting….bagels and soft-spread cream cheese, lox and onions, potato salad, pickles, Ruffles chips, half-consumed jars of mayonnaise, etc. They’re dedicated to their eccentricity, and when they vote each year everyone says “okay, here come the virtue-signalling fruit loops.” Not that bagels, cream cheese, onions and wokeness necessarily go hand in hand.
Seven years ago (i.e., late ’16) LAFCA gave Lily Gladstone their Best Supporting Actress award for having stared longingly at Kristen Stewart while saying almost nothing in Kelly Reichardt‘s Certain Women — basically an attagirl identity award for Gladstone playing her own rural Native American self while conveying lesbian currents.
You just know they’re going to come roaring back and give her their Best Actress trophy for doing roughly the same thing in Killers of the Flower Moon, or for playing a hetero Native American woman staring daggers at Robert DeNiro and the other bad guys while saying almost nothing.
So far…
Best Screenplay: All of Us Strangers. Andrew Haigh.
Runner-up: May December, Samy Burch.
Best Cinematography: Poor Things (Searchlight) — Robbie Ryan
Runner-up: Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Original Films/Paramount Pictures) — Rodrigo Prieto
Best Production Design: Barbie (Warner Bros.) — Sarah Greenwood
Runner-up: Poor Things (Searchlight Pictures) — Shona Heath, James Price
Best Music Score: The Zone of Interest (A24) — Mica Levi, sound designer Johnnie Burn.
Runner-up: Barbie (Warner Bros.) — Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt.
Diana, the former Princess of Wales, died on 8.31.97 — exactly a quarter-century ago today.
When I noted the 20th anniversary of her car-crash demise five years ago, the over-saturation of her legend (largely by way of Emma Corrin’s Diana in The Crown and Kristen Stewart’s in Spencer) hadn’t yet happened. And it still ain’t over — the final two seasons of The Crown (focusing on Elizabeth Debicki’s version) will begin their extended journey in November.
Anyone who says at this point “no, I’m not Diana’ed out…I want to re-immerse over and over and will probably never be satisfied”…anyone who says this with a straight face is someone most of us would probably want to avoid, no offense.
Posted on 8.4.17: I was attending the Montreal Film Festival when the news broke. I remember talking it through with colleagues and then retreating to my hotel room and tapping out a reaction piece for my L.A. Times Syndicate column. Given my haste and the late-hour fatigue, the piece was too long.
The next day Rod Steiger, a guest of the festival, delivered a rant about how the papparazzi had killed her. Which they did in a way. But the primary villain was Dodi Fayed, the millionaire asshat whom Diana had been intimate with for a few weeks.
I was working at People when Diana began seeing Fayed in July 1997. Two or three of us were asked to make some calls and prepare a file on the guy. Within three or four hours I’d learned that Fayed was an irresponsible playboy, didn’t pay his bills on occasion, lacked vision and maturity and basically wasn’t a man.
And yet Diana overlooked this or didn’t want to know. And that’s why she died. She orchestrated her demise by choosing Fayed for a boyfriend.
Fayed was just foolish and insecure enough, jet-setting around with his father’s millions and looking to play the protective stud by saving Diana from the paparazzi, to put her in harm’s way. It all came to a head on that fateful night in Paris. Fayed told his drunken chauffeur to try and outrun a bunch of easily finessable scumbag photographers on motorcycles, and we all know the rest.
David Cronenberg‘s Crimes of the Future opened three days ago (6.3). I’m presuming that the reviews scared a lot of would-be viewers off — not the negative judgments, of which there are very few, but the descriptions of the surgical slicings and glurpy body parts, not to mention “ear man.” But some HE followers are bolder and more inquisitive, or so I tell myself. Please share if you went there.
Just to get things started, here are some excerpts from my 5.24 Cannes review:
1. As far as it goes, Crimes is a respectable, dialogue-driven, high-concept chamber piece. Baroque, perverse, concentrated.
2. Where does it stand on my Cronenberg preference list? Somewhere in the middle, just above Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch. My all-time favorite Cronenberg film is still The Dead Zone, followed by A History of Violence, Crash, The Fly and Scanners.
3. Crimes of the Future is basically a play . There’s never any doubt that you’re watching a thoughtful, rigorously sculpted effort by a grade-A auteur. It’s not elevated horror but a kind of perversely erotic body-probe mood piece.
4. Remove the physical-effects stuff — bizarre surgical slicings, erotic body penetration, superfluous internal organ removal — and the seaside, small-hamlet, sound-stage setting (it was shot in Athens), and you’re left with a presentation that could have been staged at Manhattan’s Cherry Lane theatre or…whatever, on Philco Playhouse back in the early to mid ’50s.
David Cronenberg‘s Crimes of the Future, which I caught last night, is basically a play — a dialogue-driven, restricted-locale chamber piece. I felt respect and fascination — the scheme is nothing if not disciplined — and there’s never any doubt that you’re watching a thoughtful, rigorously sculpted effort by a grade-A auteur.
But (and I liked this aspect) it’s quite removed from the kind of gross-out horror film aesthetic that your midnight-movie crowd might enjoy. It’s not elevated horror but a kind of perversely erotic body-probe mood piece, and if you’re the kind of viewer who’s into mad energy and geysers of cinematic pizazz and gooey gore for its own sake, the likely reaction is going to be less along the lines of “holy shit!” and more in the vein of “uhm…what?”
Remove the physical-effects stuff — bizarre surgical slicings, erotic body penetration, superfluous internal organ removal — and the seaside, small-hamlet, sound-stage setting (it was shot in Athens), and you’re left with a presentation that could have been staged at Manhattan’s Cherry Lane theatre or…whatever, on Philco Playhouse back in the early to mid ’50s.
Set in a bizarre future in which pain has been eliminated (hence the various surgeries and excavations without anesthetics) and people are growing strange organs in their chest and stomach cavities, Crimes focuses on a performance-artist couple (Viggo Mortensen‘s “Saul Tenser”‘s and Léa Seydoux‘s “Caprice”) whose show involves the removal of said organs before paying audiences.
Did I mention that Caprice is into tattoo-ing Saul’s organs? (She is, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out why or to what end.) And the hanging, tentacled, oyster-like bed devices that Saul sleeps or meditates in, and a scene in which he and Caprice (naked as jaybirds) share some kind of sexual communion? And that you need to chew on the concept of “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome”?
The main thing is that these flesh slicings and subsequent icky probes are a turn-on for all concerned. You’ve read this before, but the film’s most quoted line is “surgery is the new sex.”
A secondary couple (Don McKellar‘s “Wippet” and Kristen Stewart‘s “Timlin”) are investigators at the National Organ Registry. Admirers of Saul and Caprice, they’re both tingling with anticipation about watching their act.
The key plot element is about Saul deciding whether to include in the show an autopsy of a recently murdered young boy — a kid who had become some kind of plastic-eating mutant. I’ll leave out mentioning his killer, but the boy’s father (Yorgos Karamihos), a guy who eats purple chocolate bars with curious chemical components, is the one pimping the autopsy to Saul.
Cronenberg wrote Crimes of the Future almost a quarter-century ago — in 1998 — and in a 5.23 interview with IndieWire’s Eric Kohn insisted “that he hadn’t changed a word of his original draft when production resources finally came together last year,” Kohn writes.
Cronenberg: “The human condition is the subject of my filmmaking and all art. Right now, these are things that are intriguing in terms of where people are and how they’re living.”
The subhead of Kohn’s article states that Cronenberg “elaborate[s] on the [film’s] complex themes,” and yet at no point in the piece do Kohn or Cronenberg even mention, much less discuss, a somewhat related present-day parallel — the fact that over the last few years gender ideology has brought about surgical alterations in young bodies — puberty blockers, breast removals, genital surgery, other transitional procedures.
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