“Everything now is so politically correct. So boring. So expected. And everyone is so scared of what will happen if they go too far. A few tweets and it’s done…their career is over.” — Charlotte Gainsbourg speaking to the Guardian‘s Arwa Mahdawi, in a piece posted last weekend.
In a 10.16 “On Second Thought” essay N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott regards Taika Watiti‘s JoJo Rabbit in the same authoritarian-mocking tradition as Charlie Chaplin‘s The Great Dictator (’40), Ernst Lubitsch‘s To Be Or Not To Be (’42) along with the less respected 1983 Mel Brooks remake, not to mention Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler”, an inadvertently successful Broadway musical within the fictitious context of The Producers (’67), and the WWII German-spoofing in Hogan’s Heroes.
“But what if we don’t live in that world?,” Scott asks. “For a long time, laughing at historical Nazis has seemed like a painless moral booster shot, a way of keeping the really bad stuff they represent safely contained in the past. Maybe that was always wishful thinking.
“Recent history shows that the medicine of laughter can have scary side effects. Fascism has crawled out of the dust pile of history, striking familiar poses, sometimes with tongue in cheek. It has been amply documented that ‘ironic’ expressions of bigotry and anti-Semitism — jokes and memes on social media; facetious trolling of the politically correct; slurs as exercises in free speech — can evolve over time into the real thing. A dress-up costume can be mistaken for a uniform, including by its wearer.”
So Scott is saying that anti-Nazi humor doesn’t have the bite or relevance that it once had, and that on a cultural-processing level Jojo Rabbit may not be the anti-hate satire that its admirers believe it to be? Something like that. My first reaction to Jojo was why reach all the way back to 75-year-old Nazi culture to deliver an anti-racist message? Why not fiddle around with anti-immigrant Trumpster sentiments or focus on the go-along child of an ICE officer…something in that vein? Why use the filter of WWII history when it probably doesn’t register all that strongly with a good portion of the audience?
Side issue: David Poland has become an unofficial award-season Twitter lobbyist for Jojo Rabbit. As the Poland ardor ebbs or surges, so goes the campaign itself. Keep close tabs.
HE is looking to read News of the World, a script by Paul Greengrass and Luke Davies, based on the book by Paulette Jiles. Greengrass will soon direct the historical drama with Tom Hanks in the lead, and Universal will release the film on 12.25.20.
From Deadline: Set in 1870, the story’s about Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks), a war veteran who roams from town to town as a non-fiction storyteller, sharing the news of presidents and queens, glorious feuds, devastating catastrophes, and gripping adventures from the far reaches of the globe. In Texas Kidd crosses paths with Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old taken in by the Kiowa tribe six years earlier and raised as one of their own. (Natalie Wood in The Searchers.) Johanna is being returned to her biological aunt and uncle against her will. Kidd agrees to deliver the child where the law says she belongs.
$100 bucks says News of the World will end like a blend of Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals and current politically correct thinking— that Hanks will realize at the end of Act Three that he’s doing a bad thing by forcing poor Johanna to live with her perverse, pinched-sphincter-muscle aunt and uncle, and so he allows her to return to her Kiowa family. Because Native Americans are more spiritual than white people, etc. And because almost all white people are bad, Hanks’ character being an exception. Because he comes to recognize the evil of whiteness, and in so doing transcends himself.
Update: Incorrect assumption, I’m told. But “white people are inherently evil” is nonetheless a legitimate talking point in progressive circles.
“Hurt people hurt people….the whole world is a strip club…sleep is where and when it happens.”
I knew that Lorene Scafaria‘s Hustlers (STX, 9.13) was a cut above immediately. I mean within five or ten seconds. I could tell that the focus was honest, intimate, up close, and that Scafaria and the actresses were keeping it real as the material allowed. And so I relaxed and settled in.
The first act of Hustlers isn’t so much about the bods and the flash and the cash (although it is) as what the dancer characters — played by Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez, Keke Palmer, Lili Reinhart, Lizzo and Cardi B — are feeling and grappling with, about the move-it-or-lose-it grind of working at a top-tier Manhattan strip club and how the dancers are all coping with insufficient pay and the constant company of Wall Street “assholes.”
I’ve put quotes around that word because it’s an oft-supplied description from the dancers who were interviewed by Jessica Pressler for her 2015 article (“The Hustlers at Scores“), which inspired Scafaria’s script.
Julia Stiles plays the Pressler character (“Elizabeth”).
I read Pressler’s 2015 article when I got home, and so I know the ins and outs and most of the particulars. Some sharp women decided to turn the tables on the stock traders and Wall Street patrons by getting them drunk and taking them for as much dough as they could, running their credit cards behind their inebriated backs while doing lap dances and flashing their boobs and (I gather) offering private-room blowjobs. Until the scam reached the ears and eyes of the fuzz, and then it all fell apart, charges were filed and the girls had to pay the price.
The fact that this is Scafaria’s most likable and engaging film thus far may be interpreted in some corners as damnation with faint praise. I don’t mean it that way. I simply didn’t care for the premise or the vibe of Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, which Scafaria directed and wrote. I half-liked her follow-up effort, The Meddler, a mother-daughter drama with Susan Sarandon and Rose Byrne, but not enough to write anything about it. But for what it is, Hustlers hits the spot.
Hustlers enjoyed a wowser reception a few days ago at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was applauded for its humanity, spirit, efficiency and general enjoyment factor. Tribune News Service’s Katie Walsh called it “girlie Goodfellas“. On top of which Lopez was talked up as a possible Best Actress contender. In my opinion Constance Wu gives the best performance but the hype machine wants what it wants.
This morning a colleague said that he respected Hustlers “but the film is half music video.” Yeah, I said, but it’s nonetheless focused on the interior lives of the principal dancer characters. And the embezzlement stuff was offered as just and fair could because the marks were assholes — wealthy Wall Street greedheads (indistinguishable from the Wolf of Wall Street guys). Oh, and by the way I blinked and missed poor Frank Whaley.”
The heat that Hustlers got out of Toronto was, I believe, partly if not significantly driven by p.c. factors. It’s a kind of “you go, girl” revenge flick…get those assholes, take their fucking money, fuck those guys, they hurt others to we’re going to hurt them (“Hurt people hurt people”)…yes, yes, yes! Mainly because there’s no cultural group more loathed and despised in this Trumpian age than greedy, swaggering, entitled white guys in pricey suits…three of them are murdered in a subway in Joker and here they’re being fleeced and scamboozled and that’s fine because they FUCKING DESERVE IT!
Bernie Sanders needs to man up and drop out. I know he won’t do this until after Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, but with Droolin’ Joe and Elizabeth Warren tied at 26% each in a new Economist/YouGuv poll (1500 respondents) and Sanders only polling a lousy 16%, it’s the only thing to do.
Sanders and Warren stand for essentially the same progressive principles, and if Bernie disappears a good chunk of his support (at least 10% or 12%) will probably go straight to Warren, which would put her 10% to 12% ahead of Biden. Down with the gaffemaster!
And then Warren could choose Mayor Pete for her vp. Homophobic black voters (of which there are quite a few) might not like this, but what are they gonna do? Vote for Trump?
Bill Maher: “The Trump voter? I don’t think they’re blind to Trump’s myriad flaws. If you talk to them, what they like about him is ‘he’s not politically correct.’ Especially that. I think we underestimate how much America has been choking on political correctness for the last 25 years.”
Except the wokesters, who only manifested a couple of years ago, and cancel culture are a much more malignant manifestation.
You want it short and straight? Okay, here goes, and this is about as plain and blunt-spoken as any assessment you’re likely to read anywhere:
White guys still dominate the movie-reviewing field. A January 2018 USC study found that 77.8% of reviews of a recent sample had been written by males, and 22.2% percent by females, and of these 82% were white and 18% were from underrepresented racial/ethnic backgrounds.
It follows that in today’s atmosphere of politically correct terror and intimidation, “white” and “male” are negative definers, and so fair-skinned guy critics (especially older ones) are white-knuckle terrified of the wokester mob. Plus their ranks are thinning anyway because of the weakening of traditional print outlets.
Which is why white male critics are generally trying to reflexively kowtow and kiss the feet of any film that champions or embodies progressive values. (Like Jojo Rabbit, for example….down with hate!) Because they don’t want to be targeted or ostracized or regarded as out of the swing of things by “them” (women, Millennial progressives, POCs, Twitter fanatics, New Academy Kidz). Which is why you can’t trust many critics these days. Because many (if not most) of them are “playing it safe” in order to protect themselves.
Are they all cowards? Baahing sheep on the hillside, nudged along by p.c. shepherds? No. There are some who tell the truth as best they can and let the chips fall, and for this they deserve everyone’s respect and allegiance. But these fellows are not in the majority.
“This is the new trick in Democratic politics. Dig up something your opponent said decades ago that looks bad by today’s standards, and pretend that [this is] mike-drop evidence of your awesome moral superiority. [But] humans evolve, and people need to stop pretending that if they were alive back then, they wouldn’t have been the same asshole as everyone else. Yes, you would. You would’ve driven without seat belts and drank when you were pregnant and hit your kids and hit your neighbor’s kids….they did that shit!
“Because woke-sight is not 20/20, and you don’t have ESPCP — Extra Sensory Politically Correct Perception. And if you were around in the 1780s and were rich and white, you likely would have had slaves. The first abolitionist society in American was founded in 1775, and it had 24 members. 24 people in the whole country thought slavery was wrong in the year before we declared independence. Stop being surprised [that] we used to be dumber than we are now. The humans of tomorrow will be horrified by us. You’re not morally better than your grandparents — you just came later. You’re just the next upgrade. You’re the iPhone 11.”
On a personal evolutionary note: People who’ve at least tried to bring clarity and moderation into their lives (i.e., those not enslaved by drugs, booze, cigarettes or some other malicious addiction) tend to evolve in itty-bitty increments. Gentler or more tolerant attitudes tend to prevail as we get older, rough edges tend to get sanded off, wisdom accrues drop by drop. And if you become sober **, it’s fair and reasonable to infer that inch by inch things will slowly evolve in a slightly better direction.
When we think about the current climate of political terror (left-radical finger-pointing, shrieking condemnations on Twitter, threats of Danton-like beheadings and social shunnings), we tend to associate this with the politically correct intensity of the last two or three years, or since Donald Trump became President. But I was reminded this morning that the first stirrings began in the late aughts.
10 1/2 years ago and one month before the ’08 election of Barack Obama, I was severely beaten, gouged, kicked and bloodied by p.c. goon-squad types for mentioning a friend’s against-the-grain opinion about Jonathan Demme‘s Rachel Getting Married.
Demme’s film is not really about the marriage of the alabaster Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Sidney, a handsome Afrique-ebony guy (Tunde Adebimpe) as much as the travails of Rachel’s older sister Kim (Anne Hathaway), and especially her drug and alcohol problems and general inability to restrain her attention-whore tendencies during the wedding festivities.
The paragraph that landed me in hot water: “A friend has observed that the way Demme portrays the [film’s] African-American and Jamaican characters — Sidney, his Army-serving younger brother, his parents and the various musicians and guests who float in and out — reps a form of benevolent reverse racism. He does this, my friend argued, by making certain that only the white characters — Rachel and Kym and their parents, played by Debra Winger and Bill Irwin — are the screwed-up ones. Antsy, haunted, angry, nervous, gloomy. But the darker-skinned characters are all cool, kindly, radiant, gentle, serene.”
This is actually a dead-on observation, but the goon squad wasn’t having it. Here was my response:
“You guys sound like a typical personification of the morally and ethically superior media p.c. elite. Admonishing from a hanging-judge perspective or vantage point, but also speaking from an ivory tower.
“All I said is that Rachel Getting Married felt annoyingly fake — unnatural, restrictive — for two reasons in this context. One, only the white characters have any hangups or interesting character wrinkles of any kind, and two, the fact that nobody in the entire wedding ensemble over the weekend makes any kind of observational innocuous remark about the Sidney-Rachel dichotomy.
“Every good movie is a product of the mind and sensibilities of the director (or the director-writer) but if the auteurist card is overplayed a movie can end up feeling like the movie is taking place on another planet, or at least in another hemisphere.
“You’re telling me that in real life (and not in the rarified world of Demme Land) that nobody would say anything about Rachel-Sidney? Nothing? With the dialogue that we’ve all been hearing all across the country for the last year or so about the ‘elephant in the room’ in the current presidential election?
“With this country being a little more than 235 years old, and a once-significant (if extremely dated) Stanley Kramer social issues movie about the difficulty of accepting an interracial marriage on the part of the bride’s parents having been released only 40 years ago? You’re saying the country has become so transformed over the last 40 years that nobody invited to the Rachel-Sidney wedding would say anything at all? Nothing?
“During the LA Film Festival I asked a question of the director of Boogie Man, the doc about Lee Atwater. I said that I don’t believe that a strong>Willie Horton-type smear campaign would be as effective today as it was 20 years ago, and I was laughed at by some in the audience — they thought my statement was close to ridiculous.
“They didn’t think, in other words, that this country has moved a single inch from where it was values-wise in 1988. And you’re telling me there are no remnants whatsoever of the 1968 mentality, attitudes and social currents that resulted in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? You’re living on your own planet, gentlemen.”
[Around 7:10 mark] “Far-left political correctness is a cancer on progressivism. When you talk to Trump supporters, they are not blind to his myriad flaws, but one thing they always say is ‘[at least] he’s not politically correct.’ I don’t think you can overestimate how much people have been choking on political correctness and hating it. There were two recent studies about this recently, in a N.Y. Times front-page story and in The Atlantic about a year ago. The vast majority of liberals in this country hate it…they think political correctness has gone way too far…no one likes to be living on eggshells.”
What…this again? Liam Neeson apologizing again for that late ’70s racial-rage episode that he confessed to and apologized for after his remarks blew up on social media around seven weeks ago?
He’s probably been running into some serious casting shunnings over the last few weeks, hence his new re-apology.
On 2.5 I wrote that “public candor about private failings is not a wise policy in our current situation. You can’t say ‘I once succumbed to an urge to practice witchcraft back in the ’70s.’ To the Cotton Mather crowd that’s like saying you might put a hex on someone tomorrow.”
Neeson’s unfortunate recollection was part of an Independent interview that posted on 2.4.19.
Neeson said that he’d briefly succumbed to a surge of racially-focused rage after learning that a friend has been raped by a black dude. Neeson was in his mid to late 20s at the time. He maintained that his furious reaction was more generically tribal than anti-black — that he would have felt the same gut-level animosity “if she had said an Irish or a Scot or a Brit or a Lithuanian [had raped her]…[it] would have had the same effect.”
That explanation apparently didn’t cut it with the International League of Retroactive Racial-Attitude Correction, Fault-Finding and Stern Admonishment. And so Neeson is back on the p.c. carpet, kneeling and begging and weeping….”please, please, please.”
“Over the last several weeks, I have reflected on and spoken to a variety of people who were hurt by my impulsive recounting of a brutal rape of a dear female friend nearly 40 years ago and my unacceptable thoughts and actions at that time in response to this crime,” he said in a statement.
“The horror of what happened to my friend ignited irrational thoughts that do not represent the person I am. In trying to explain those feelings today, I missed the point and hurt many people at a time when language is so often weaponized and an entire community of innocent people are targeted in acts of rage.
“What I failed to realize is that this is not about justifying my anger all those years ago, it is also about the impact my words have today. I was wrong to do what I did. I recognize that, although the comments I made do not reflect, in any way, my true feelings nor me, they were hurtful and divisive. I profoundly apologize.”
I am so sick to death of hearing mature people of consequence apologize to the Cotton Mathers and Robespierre Committees for having done something wrong (i.e., behaved in a cruel manner or wrote something appalling or hair-trigger that doesn’t pass muster by current p.c. standards) when they were in their teens or 20s.
Almost everyone has one or two things in their immature past that they wish they hadn’t done. So here’s a one-size-fits-all apology that the next celebrity or politician can repeat when they get into trouble.
“Dear P.C. Commissars: I am truly sorry for having retroactively transgressed against or otherwise offended current p.c. values when I was in my teens or 20s. If I could return to that offense-giving moment via time machine, I would certainly not make the same error. I wish that my teenaged or 20something self could have summoned the wisdom and maturity that I now possess, but unfortunately it rarely works that way. Young hormonal types often do, say or write stupid things. I wish it were otherwise.
“But I also wish to say that as embarassed and mortified as I am by this decades-old error or shortcoming, the sum total of my regret and shame can’t begin to compare to the loathing and contempt that I hold for you and yours — the admonishing, politically correct, shrieking banshees of our time.
“In my humble judgment the group-think, finger-wagging, potentially-career-ruining admonishments and oppressions that you and and your fellow accusers occasionally issue about decades-old missteps are just as regrettable and perhaps even worse than the bad things that I was guilty of when young.
“I’m truly sorry for and ashamed of my youthful failings, but you guys, no offense, are hooded ogres, and if I could tie your hands and dunk you in a lake I would. Peace.”
Beto O’Rourke is hereby strongly advised to never again apologize for something bad he did in his youth. Explanations and regrets are obviously necessary and appropriate, but begging on your knees really doesn’t make it…”oh, please forgive me, I’m so very sorry, I was such a terrible flawed person before,” etc. Because people like me are SICK OF HEARING THIS SHIT.
Yesterday Variety‘s Matt Donnelly reported some particulars about what a lousy year 2018 was for Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna. Three wipeouts and a total loss of around $37 million, give or take.
Why? Because Ellison is famously into quality for its own sake, and doesn’t (or didn’t, at least) believe in greenlighting possible commercial successes as much as smart, sensitive, upmarket films that will delight film festival crowds along with her enlightened, SJW, politically correct hipster colleagues and feminist friendos.
Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk earned $14 million and change, but lost between $8 million and $10 million, Donnelly reports. Karyn Kusama‘s Destroyer didn’t earn squat domestically ($1,527,853) and lost around $7 million.
The biggest calamity was Adam McKay‘s Vice, which cost $65 million to make but lost between $15 and $20 million.
Be honest — you’re the final “yes or no” person at Annapurna, and certain voices want you to greenlight an adaptation of a 1974 James Baldwin novel that, despite Jenkins’ intention to bathe it in Wong Kar Wai-styled lighting, others regard as a serious downer. It’s basically about a young black couple in Harlem who are totally in love with each other, but then the young husband gets jailed for a rape he didn’t commit and he winds up staying in the clink for the rest of the film, in part because his wife’s mother is unable to persuade a Puerto Rican woman who misidentified the husband as the culprit to recant her testimony.
In all honesty, would you greenlight Beale Street?
And would you greenlight a hardboiled police thriller with Nicole Kidman as a gray-faced zombie cop who goes from one encounter to another speaking in an affected, raspy-voiced, all-but-unintelligible Clint Eastwood whisper? A movie that was shot in order to prove that a crusty, hard-boiled undercover woman detective can be just as existentially blighted and inwardly destroyed as any male badass cop — would you say “yeah, sounds like a winner”?
On one hand, the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidate can’t just be championed by the politically correct SJW militants — he / she also has to command a certain allegiance among your Midwestern pudgebods. (Which is where Kamala Harris will run into trouble.) On the other hand, facts argue against anyone getting too romantic about who and what the Trump proletariat is deep down. Never forget that all along Trump voters have been lazily under-informed, defiantly low-information, fact-challenged, deluded. They’re guided by rash, nihilistic, moronic instincts (i.e., keep the predatory “other” from coming into this country). They’re really bad people, in short — the kind of proletariat cattle who championed Hitler and Mussolini in their day. The best approach is to welcome their support in a manner of speaking, but mainly to wait for them to die off.
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