The wokesters have found a new way to torpedo Green Book. Much better than “magic negro” or “white savior.” This afternoon The Cut‘s Anna Silman posted a hit piece about Green Book director Peter Farrelly having comically weenie-wagged in front of two prominent persons 20 years ago. How Brett Kavanaugh was Farrelly’s behavior? Sometime in … Read more
I experienced a drop-out moment yesterday while watching Mary, Queen of Scots. It was when I realized that Josie Rourke‘s 16th Century epic would be adopting an historically woke, Hamilton-like approach to casting. I never knew, for example, that black dudes had networked their way into the upper chambers of English and Scottish government in … Read more
Now that Telluride screenings are flying fast and furious I’m going through the usual homina-homina-homina. No time to write anything, squeezed from both ends, Macbook Pro batteries dying too soon, Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless. It’s 6 am as we speak. I crashed just after 1 am and awoke four hours later to get a jump on … Read more
The Cannes Film Festival jury — “madame president” Cate Blanchett, Kristen Stewart, Ava DuVernay, Lea Seydoux, director Denis Villenueve, Taiwanese martial-arts actor Chang Chen, Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev, Burundian singer Khadja Nin and French social-realism director-writer Robert Guediguian — gathered for a press conference today. The questions were “diplomatic”, which is a diplomatic term for … Read more
The 2016/2017 Oscar race taught us about a major seismic shift in the way younger Oscar voters (i.e., the Academy cool kidz) are seeing things now, as opposed to just five years ago when the old boomer-farty Oscar-worthy standards still applied. Traditional Oscar-bait movies are now regarded askance, and identity politics are almost everything. Oscar-bait … Read more
Yesterday on Facebook HE’s own Jordan Ruimy again predicted that Jordan Peele‘s Get Out will win the Best Picture Oscar. Then he doubled-down on Twitter this morning. What he means is that Get Out, a half creepy, half satiric, racially-stamped Stepford Wives, will slipslide into a win because a huge number of Academy members have … Read more
After four days of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, I’m tempted to call it weak tea. So far there’s been no Call Me By Your Name, no Mudbound, no Big Sick. By my sights the only moderately pleasing narrative films have been Tamara Jenkins‘ lightly comedic Private Life and Jessie Peretz‘s Juliet, Naked. And that’s … Read more
A couple of hours ago Glamour‘s Abby Gardner, speaking on behalf of the “woke” Twitter comintern, lambasted the editors of a just-published L.A. Times‘ Envelope issue (dated 12.21) for excluding actresses of color from the cover and the conversation. The issue celebrates six top contenders for the Best Actress Oscar — Lady Bird‘s Saoirse Ronan, … Read more
It’s 9:41 am and I’ve nothing to say here. West Coast twitter coverage of last night’s SNL Trump-Clinton debate spoof surged around 10 or 10:30 pm, and was all but spent when I awoke this morning at 7 am. Okay, Kate McKinnon‘s cough, cane + somersault introduction was special. She was the life of the … Read more
An observation in a 4.21 Ross Douthat column (“The Democrats After Sanders”) woke me up this morning. Bernie Sanders, he says, “was in many ways a non-ideal standard-bearer for a left-wing youth movement…he struggled to win over African-American and Hispanic voters, he seemed like too much of a long shot to win endorsements from the … Read more
I’m so late to the discussion about the moderately miraculous Jenny Slate in Gillian Robespierre‘s Obvious Child that I feel a little foolish bringing it up. It took me two weeks to write this piece because I felt so conflicted about this. But Slate is so alive and extra-dimensional and spunky with the right blend … Read more
A Bluray of Joe Dante‘s The Howling (’81) streets on 6.18. I’ve always had a soft spot for this film, probably because it doesn’t embrace werewolf tropes as much as satirically comment on them while slipping in social satire. On top of of which it’s tartly written (by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless), performed … Read more