WARNING: CONTAINS A POOR THINGS SPOILER OR TWO:

Telluride friendo (after reading my brief Poor Things review): “You seriously thought this movie was better than Lanthimos’s The Favourite? Yeah, I guess Poor Things is ‘wild’ but in its undeniably interesting and audacious way I found it to be an ungainly, overlong didactic art thing.

“It’s like Barbie directed by the Marquis de Sade.

“Emma Stone is excellent, but she’s playing the only interesting character (apart from Dafoe’s scarred freak). Mark Ruffalo seems interesting at first, but grows duller as the movie goes on. He becomes one more oppressive male in a movie that’s programmatically full of them.

“How can you object to Barbie being an anti-male jeremiad and not object to this one?”

HE to friendo: “Every festival film, it seems, is misandrist except for Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. Filmmakers are generally not allowed to not hate white guys. Then again Scarface Dafoe and his loyal assistant weren’t depicted as ugly diseased males. In any event I felt that the mad nutso Terry Gilliam paintbrush aspect overwhelmed my reservations about anti-male portraiture. Oh, and I wasn’t knocked out by The Favorite.”

Telluride friendo: “Poor Things is visually entrancing, no doubt, but once Stone’s character gets out into the world (and becomes a less and less interesting character as she grows more intelligent and just becomes…a normal Englishwoman!), the storytelling becomes very basic and kind of stilted. It’a a drag that Ruffalo’s character turns out to be such a run-of-the-mill asshole. How much better it would have been had there really been something to their relationship, or to Stone’s relationship to anyone else in the film.

“I had no moral objection to Stone’s descent into prostitution, but what’s the point? You’re right that Dafoe and his assistant weren’t depicted as ugly diseased males, but by the end of the movie, every other male in the film is. That’s the whole point. That’s why that shot of her husband [redacted] is such a money shot. It’s sealing the deal on the movie’s misandry.

“My real objection isn’t that I found it so offensive — it’s that it’s so thin. The movie is the fairy tale as (woke) allegory, and I really wish that it could’ve been more of a greater fairy tale and less allegory. After a while, I was almost bored by it. Seemed like it would never end. This is not a movie that needed to be 140 fucking minutes.

“But I guess the machine has already decided that it’s this year’s woke/eccentric/Off-Hollywood Best Picture winner…”

HE to friendo: “It did become less interesting when Stone became a professional woman of diminished virtue. And yes, it does feel increasingly thin. And yes, it’s lamentable that Ruffalo’s louche wastrel character is written as such a vain and pathetic figure.

“My absolute favorite sequence was the dance number that Stone and Ruffalo perform.”

Telluride friendo: “That was a great scene, but not as great as Jenny Ortega‘s dance sequence in the streaming series Wednesday.

“What I don’t get is how this film — thinner as it goes along, Barbie by a Greek postmodern Tim Burton, a perverse Terry Gilliam-esque takedown of the patriarchy — is being hailed as the new Citizen Kane. I guess we’ve living in a post-Jeanne Dielman-as-greatest-film-of-all-time universe.”

I’ve suddenly decided to re-watch Roger Corman‘s Premature Burial (’62), in which a mid-50ish Ray Milland played Guy Carrell, a cataleptic, death-obsessed British aristocrat. (Milland was at least 15 years too old for the part.) My chief recollection is a dream sequence in which Carrell, having seemingly but not actually died, awakes inside his burial vault and finds that none of the escape mechanisms work.

Poor Milland — in ’54 he had played the elegant ex-tennis star Tony Wendice in Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder, but eight years later under Corman he was staring into a silver chalice filled with maggots.

From “‘The House Is the Monster’: Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle,” posted on 8.25.23.

Bill Maher: “When you get a little older and you’ve mutilated your body…you- maybe that’ll be a decision your happy with or maybe it won’t but there’s no going back.” pic.twitter.com/9sJuMTBVxB

— 〽️ARS (@UpperhandMars) September 3, 2023

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In the immediate wake of Everything Everywhere All At Once winning seven Oscars out of eleven nominations, I was consumed by the deepest and darkest depression of my Hollywood journalism career.

I knew this had happened because of the New Academy Kidz — recently consecrated Academy members who are resolute about making identity and wokesterism the defining criteria — as well as the degraded intellectual property values among the SAG/AFTRA membership. I kept telling myself that the NAK were serious — they really think that EEAAO had expressed something about the times in which we’re all living…good fucking God almighty.

A plurality had actually decided that Jamie Lee Curtis‘s louche and clownish performance as an IRS investigator was more deserving of a Best Supporting Actress Oscar than, say, Kerry Condon‘s turn in The Banshees of Inisherin or Hong Chau‘s “Liz” in The Whale. It was culturally embarassing — a confirmation that a large percentage of voting Academy members were in fact little piglets, which is to say completely unburdened by (i.e., unconcerned with) issues of taste, perspective and film knowledge.

Several weeks ago a dismissive Cannes review of Aki Kaurismaki ‘s Fallen Leaves lowered my want-to-see. But at the urging of SBIFF kingpin Roger Durling I caught it yesterday afternoon, and was glad that I did. It’s a simple but pleasing romantic fable — bare bones, wholly believable, well acted and genuinely touching.

Nobody’s urging me to see Rustin, which screens at the Palm at 4:15. The reviews have been tepid. Trusted critic friend: “It does exactly what you expect it to do,” I’ll be attending but I won’t use one of my early-entry passes. It’s not worth it. If I don’t get in, fine. Pretty Things is at 7:30 pm.

Serious respect for the late Jimmy Buffet, who lived large and luxuriously off an enduring music career that stretches back to the ‘70s. Laid-back beach vibes, Caribbean atmospheres + rum and crushed ice in the blender, shots of tequila and “that frozen concoction that helps me hang on.”

I never related all that strongly to the Buffet legend or sensibility or whatever, which was basically about cynicism and resignation. But he did come to represent a “fuck it”, sandal-wearing, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing attitude toward the tensions and stresses of modern life, and you can’t say it didn’t resonate.

Smarthouse audiences will derive satisfaction from Justine Triet‘s Anatomy of a Fall, which is a longish investigative procedural-slash-courtoom “thriller”. Not to say it’s especially thrilling — it isn’t — but you can’t say it’s not thorough.

It’s about a renowned, middle-aged writer named Sandra (Sandra Huller) facing official suspicion over the possibly accidental (or not) death of her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), also a writer but a less successful, more financially struggling one.

Theirs has been a turbulent relationship involving casual infidelities on her part, and the authorities suspect that Sandra may have pushed Samuel from the third floor of their A-framed Grenoble chalet.

The main takeaway is that Huller, best known for Toni Erdmann and currently also costarring in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, is a major Best Actress contender.

Huller and Triet spoke prior to yesterday’s 1 pm screening at the Pierre.

I found Anatomy of a Fall fairly gripping (i.e., not spellbinding but fully deserving of my attention) but my knees were absolutely killing me in the tiny Pierre theatre, which affords no leg room.

I’m not so sure that Joe and Jane Popcorn will like it as much. It’s almost entirely set in the A-frame and in a courtoom, and it goes on for two and half hours.

It’s now 8:05 am with my first screening happening 55 minutes hence, and I have to be there no later than 8:30 am.

Two festival days gone, three more to go. Today’s lineup is The Taste of Things at 9 (and those who frown on my re-seeing a sublime Cannes film can go fuck themselves), possibly Janet Planet at 1 pm, Rustin (groan) at 4:15 pm and then Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things at 7 pm (Herzog).

A screening of Andrew Haigh‘s much-celebrated All Of Us Strangers just ended an hour ago, and I’m…well, I’m a dissenter to some extent.

I’m sorry but as rooted, refined, well-written and emotionally palatable as this film is, being about a present-tense gay relationship in London, it’s slow as molasses (as in largely or at least somewhat boring) and the often whispered and mumbled dialogue is hard to make out, and when you boil it all down Strangers is basically 135 minutes of beard stubble rendered in widescreen close-up.

And yet it’s primarily about three or four conversations with ghosts.

Story-wise it’s kind of a gay Midnight in Paris, except instead of hanging with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway the time traveller in question (a screenwriter named Adam, played by the mid-40ish Andrew Scott) spends a lot of time with his late parents, who are miraculously alive and their old glorious selves, and played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy.

Their get-togethers allow Adam, of course, a chance to explain to them both (well, his mom) that he’s been gay (he doesn’t relate to queer) for decades but that being so inclined is no longer the socially uncertain, vaguely uncomfortable thing it was when mum and dad died in a car crash, back in the ’80s.

Strangers is certainly a classy, ultra-swoony, top-tier capturing of an intimate gay relationship. Then again I’m trying to imagine a hetero love affair portrayed or paced in this fashion (i.e., not much of a narrative, mostly about the past by way of dead-parent conversations) and I can’t.

Scott is a subdued, gentle-mannered, first-rate actor with classically handsome features and dark watery eyes (he once played Paul McCartney), and Harry, his lover, is played by the 27-year-old Paul Mescal, an HE non-favorite who wears a moustache and Van Dyke goatee in this thing and has generally horrible taste in clothing. Their performances are flawless; ditto the acting by Bell and Foy.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that watching Mescal and Scott get down with this and that intimate activity…beard-stubble eroticism with drooling kisses and leg rubbings and tender hair-stroking is…there’s no way to honestly react to the physical intimacy stuff without sounding like a conservative rube, and so, yes, I’m fully aware that I’m “not allowed” to say that such scenes are not my cup of tea.

Plus I’m used to gay sex scenes a la Brokeback Mountain or Call Me By Your Name…you know, the old-fashioned, straight-friendly kind.

But there’s no questioning the quality of it all. This is an honest, mature, sophisticated film about serious intimacy and the unpeeling of the usual layers.

Bottom line: If you’re going to make a film that vaguely borrows from Midnight in Paris, you should probably try to make it as diverting as that 2011 Woody Allen film.

I don’t care what the orientation of a pair of given lovers might be, but it’s generally not a good idea to make a boring love story… a love story in which nothing really happens between the here-and-now lovers (except for some fucking early on). All that happens is “gee, my dead parents are back in the old house and so I can talk to them about everything, and maybe introduce them to my boyfriend,” etc.

It goes without saying that All Of Us Strangers will play best in blue coastal cities, and that the kind of rapturous reception it’s gotten from major-outlet critics thus far reflects a certain form of self-protective political posturing (i.e., show approval or be branded a homophobe) that no one will admit to. But then most of us knew that going in.

Posted in response to HE’s Saltburn review: