Democratic Presidential hopeful Dean Phillips spoke earlier today with All-In’s Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg.
HE commenters can crack wise and be shitheads and piss all over everyone and everything as usual, but Phillips is a steady, all-right guy. He’s just trying to wake everyone up to (God help us) the potential tragedy of the ‘24 Biden candidacy, the expanding candidate field and (God help us) the potential Trump ascendancy.
Kim Jorgensen on Facebook: “Saltburn (Searchlight, 11.17) is my film of the year. We’re talking cinema, baby — attitude, style, irreverence, confidence, rebellion. It’s out there.
“I didn’t care for Emerald Fennell’s previous effort, Promising Young Woman, but this one makes up for it. She’s the most accomplished new European voice since Ruben Östlund.
“I really hate to harp upon our wonderful critics, but they gave it only a 58 Metacritic score. Most of them saw it at Telluride, where it screened AFTER the rhapsodically received All of Us Strangers (91 score), and they seem to have expected the same boring, method-acting, nuanced, character-driven piece of politically correct gay banality.
“[But with Saltburn] they got an expressionist opera: Brideshead Revisited meets Idol/Euphoria and Tom Ripley (with a dollop of Barry Lyndon). Giving away the plot would rob you of the constant unexpected twists, including the truly inspired last shot.
“Unlike Searchlight’s Strangers and its low-to-nonexistent theatrical potential, Saltburn at least has the feel of a possible commercial arthouse hit (to the extent that such creatures are not extinct). Here’s hoping.”
HE to Jorgensen: As you know, the Telluride reactions to Saltburn were sharply divided. I hated it so much that I had to take a brief lobby break. You can actually call it an extended bathroom break mixed with buying popcorn. I
I liked hanging with good-looking Jacob Elordi but that’s where it stopped. I spent most of the time staring at Barry Keoghan’s bee-stung nose. And the bulbous nose isn’t his only sizable characteristic, by the way, as the final naked Greek satyr scene makes clear.
Fennel can tell us that England’s wealthy and corroded elite are sick in the head…jaded, poisoned, appalling…until she’s blue in the face, but the conceit is standard woke positioning and the design is…okay, it’s inventive but also shallow and gaudy. I hated everyone except Elordi, and the film basically feels arch and perverse and eventually dull. Did I mention suffocating and oppressive? Well, I have now.
When Saltburn finally ended I let out a HUGE sigh of relief.
That said I agree with your remarks about All of Us Strangers.
Several days ago The Marvels director Nia La Costa shared some disapproving sentiments about Marvel fanboys with Variety‘s Angelique Jackson.
Now, wrote Jackson, The Marvels is “flooded with comments criticizing Disney for ‘going woke’ and rooting for the film to flop.”
Some of what La Costa said seemed to echo the complaints of last February’s sore-loser quartet — Till director Chinonye Chukwu and lead actress Danielle Deadwyler, along with Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood and its star, Viola Davis — all of whom claimed that their films got blanked by embedded white elitism or misogynoir or some other racist variant.
“Andrea Riseborough + Duelling Concepts of Meritocracy vs. Equity,” posed on 2.15.23 or nine months ago:
We’re all familiar with the recent complaints about the Oscar nominations by the sore-loser quartet — Till director Chinonye Chukwu and lead actress Danielle Deadwyler, along with Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood and its star, Viola Davis.
In their minds they all got blanked by embedded white elitism or misogynoir or some other racist variant.
In response Everything Everywhere All At Once‘s Michelle Yeoh, a Best Actress nominee, suggested that they should cool their jets and wait their turn.
Prince-Blythewood: “There is no groundswell from privileged people with enormous social capital to get behind Black women. There never has been.”
Deadwyler: “We’re talking about misogynoir. It comes in all kinds of ways. Whether it’s direct or indirect, it impacts who we are.”
The essence of the lament seemed to be “we’re looking for some equity here and we haven’t received it…progressive Academy members know that the BIPOC narrative is about giving us the respect and adulation that is our due for the work but also in a payback sense, considering the decades upon decades of racist exclusion in this industry…we know we delivered first-rate work and yet we got shut out…some of you won’t say what happened but we can smell it in the wind…Andrea Riseborough‘s white supporters pushed her though but perhaps at our expense, or so it seems.”
In short, the sore losers were saying that in this time of revolutionary overhaul and the diminishing of Hollywood’s white-male heirarchy, equity needs to count as much as meritocracy (and perhaps even a bit more) in terms of handing out Oscar nominations.
On top of which it’s more than a couple of days old…a mind-blowing Zoomer blow-up.
…the whore-ish, kiss-ass reactions of the early-bird crowd. I haven’t seen The Color Purple (Warner Bros., 12.25) but if you read between the lines…well, try doing that.
Purple’s Danielle Brooks is a likely Oscar contender and an apparently serious threat to The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
But overall the only reactions you can probably trust are from the hard-nosed veterans, two of whom — Dave Karger and Greg Ellwood — are hilarious in their descriptions.
Ellwood flat-out faults the “script, direction, editing.” When Karger praises the “costumes and the choreography,” you know what he means.
On Sunday, 11.19 HE will attend a special screening of Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Man Who Knew Too Much — a 4K UHD restoration supervised by restoration guru Robert Harris.
It’s happening at the Bedford Playhouse at 1 pm.
Aside from the enhanced clarity and color, the presentation will also contain the original Perspecta stereo sound mix, which hasn’t been heard since the original 1956 release in first-run theatres. TMWKTM will be projected in 4K Super VistaVision. Bring the kids!
A q & a with Harris and Janet Maslin will follow the screening.
Prediction: Travis Kelce, 34, will either get dumped or leave on his own accord six to nine months hence, mostly, I’m guessing, because Taylor Swift will be increasingly unable to tolerate his less-than-progressive views about women. He’s a Cro-Magnon man.
You have to admire Martin Scorsese‘s “killer’ footwear combo….those shiny brown Italian loafers accented by violet socks…perfect. Especially compared to Steven Spielberg‘s whiteside lace-ups and maroon socks…atrocious. Older guys are allowed to wear comfort shoes, agreed, but whitesides are completely verboten.
Marty looks like an elegant resident of Bologna or Milan…Spielberg looks like Joe Schlubbo at the hardware store.
Brooklyn friendo to HE: “Now that Napoleon is out of the running, it’s Killers of the Flower Moon vs. Oppie….neck and neck until March. Maestro may have given you multiple orgasms but that’s not gonna be universal. Bitch and moan all you want but you’re not changing this narrative.”
HE to Brooklyn friendo: “Honest people are admitting all over town that Oppenheimer is a brilliant film but a long, punishing sit. And nobody really likes Killers of the Flower Moon, and the Ernest and Molly Burkhart relationship, though based on fact, seems nonsensical. Neither film is really daring or delicious or devastating…neither delivers the kind of emotional highs that win Oscars. Oppenheimer tires, exhausts, depletes, gives you a headache, makes your legs ache.
In the minds of average non-obsessives the top two contenders are The Holdovers and Maestro…hands down.”
The night before last a friend who had seen Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon and scratched his heasd over Joaquin Phoenix‘s lead performance, said “what is driving Napoleon?…what is he out to accomplish?” Scott’s film never lays the French general’s cards on the table, but another film did….
Napoleon: “I judge my conduct by my conscience, and my conscience is not troubled. Day by day I too gave my life for my country. I made war in order to secure peace. Not for a year but for a dozen centuries. I dreamed of the United States of Europe. Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Poles, Russians and all the others. One law, one coin and one people. Was that so rash a dream?”
The screenwriter was Daniel Taradash (winner of Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for From Here to Eternity), the actor was Marlon Brando, and the film was Henry Koster‘s Desiree (’54). Could the dialogue have been more complex, or less staid and simplistic? Sure but at least it gives you an idea of where Taradash’s Napoleon was coming from.
The scene in question begins at the one hour and 45 minute mark…close to the end.
…but she sorta kinda wishes that David Grann‘s saga had been directed by, say, a full-blood Osage helmer instead…no offense. Martin Scorsese did the best that he could, she’s saying, given his white-guy limitations and the curious focus on Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Ernest Burkhart.
The director of Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Casino, The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street warrants respect, she’s saying — an A for effort.
“Marty is a titan, but he’s not bigger than history,” Gladstone has told Variety‘s Selome Hailu.
“He’s a major shaper of it though. It’s the tricky nature of a story like this. You have more representation [in Killers], but coming from somebody who’s not from the community. So you always have to look at it with a different angle. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You just have to be very aware of the film that you’re watching and what lens it was made through.”
Do you want to look at those black, soul-dead eyes for four or eight years? Eyes that would fit right into a Blumhouse horror film? Forget it, man. Manchin doesn’t have it.
