Kohn’s Last IndieWire Podcast

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I forgot to mention a few days ago that IndieWire‘s influential film critic and editor Eric Kohn has flown the coop. He’s now working as a film strategy and development exec for Harmony Korine‘s EDGLRD, and HE wishes him all the best. A job with serious creative potential, a better salary, slicker threads, more security for his family, etc. Good for him.

That said, EDGLRD is a completely nonsensical compression of EDGELORD that no one will ever be able to spell without double-checking, or perhaps even remember. You look at it and nothing kicks in. You can hear Korine saying “I need a company name that sounds extra cool or at least can be spelled in a cooler way than EDGELORD but at the same time can’t be cooler because it’s pronounced edd-glurrd.”

That’s Korine for you — in the name of edgeness and hipster chops he simultaneously attracts and repels.

In the context of journalism, it’s now necessary to speak of Kohn in the past tense.

Eric was always a nice guy (as in congenial, nebbishy, mild-mannered, smoothly spoken). He was always a reliably smart critic and an engaging writer who (a semblance of honesty is allowable) frequently soft-pedalled his opinions or praised films so obliquely or described them so blandly that sometimes a reader couldn’t be entirely sure if he liked a film or not.

But I was always grateful to Eric for his all-around warmth and graciousness, and for having gotten me into the Key West Film Festival for three or four years. A fine fellow in many respects.

Eric’s nice-guy credentials aside, I have to add that I found his refusal to admit to even the existence of wokesterism since the woke plague kicked in five or six years ago….that was infuriating.

And in his capacity as an influential New York Film Critics Circle member and chairman of that group during 2018 and ’19, it has to be acknowledged that Kohn and fellow IndieWire critic David Ehrlich (whom Kohn hired) did a lot to change the image of the NYFCC from that of a gold-standard critics org to one strongly associated with woke eccentricity.

From “Not Necessarily The Bad Guys,” posted on 1.9.23:

“In addition to their sometimes well-grounded, highly perceptive praising of stellar filmmaking and performances, the New York Film Critics Circle has (be honest) been in the grip of woke theology over the last four or five years. Most of us understand this, and the NYFCC honchos and spokespersons will deny it to their dying day.

“For decades a NYFCC award was a gold-standard honor — a classy, triple-A stamp of irrefutable big-city approval. But since ’18 or thereabouts the NYFCC members have sought to integrate notions of quality with “the sacralization of racial, gender and sexual [identity],” as Matthew Goodwin put it in February 2021.

“In short, they’ve become known as a contender for the most reliably eccentric, woke-flakey critics group, neck and neck with the occasionally wokejobby Los Angeles Film Critics Association. (Note: HE has agreed on certain occasions with LAFCA award calls, hence the term “occasionally woke-jobby.”)

“For me the syndrome seemed to begin in 2018 when the NYFCC handed their Best Actress award to Support The Girls‘ Regina Hall. For me there was no contest among the Best Actress contenders that year — Melissa McCarthy‘s performance in Can you Ever Forgive Me? was heads and shoulders above Hall’s, and yet the NYFCC allowed themselves to be guided by identity politics. They disputed this, of course.

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“Obsession With Technique”

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“The driving idea of The Killer is that Michael Fassbender’s hit man, with his cool finesse, his six storage spaces filled with things like weapons and license plates, his professional punctiliousness combined with a serial killer’s attitude (the opening-credits montage of the various methods of killing he employs almost feels like it could be the creepy fanfare to Se7en 2), has tried to make himself into a human murder machine, someone who turns homicide into a system, who has squashed any tremor of feeling in himself.

“Yet the reason he has to work so hard to do this is that, beneath it all, he does have feelings. That’s what lends his actions their moody existential thrust. At least that’s the idea.

“But watching the heroes of thrillers act with brutal efficiency (and a total lack of empathy for their victims) is not exactly novel. It’s there in every Jason Statham movie, in the Bond films, you name it.

“The Killer is trying to be something different, something more ‘real,’ as if Fassbender were playing not just another genre character but an actual hitman. That’s why he has to use a pulse monitor to make sure his heartbeat is down to 72 before he pulls the trigger. It’s why he’s hooked on the Smiths, with their languid romantic anti-romanticism. As catchy a motif as that is, you may start to think: If he’s such a real person, doesn’t he ever listen to music that’s not the Smiths?

“In The Killer, [director] David Fincher is hooked on his own obsession with technique, his mystique of filmmaking-as-virtuoso-procedure. It’s not that he’s anything less than great at it, but he may think there’s more shading, more revelation in how he has staged The Killer than there actually is.” — from Owen Gleiberman’s 9.3 review.

What If “Barbie” Had Been Directed by the Marquis de Sade?

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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.”

Buried Alive

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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.

Why “EEAAO” Oscar Sweep Was So Depressing

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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.

Surprising Sellers Consensus

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The long-established consensus is that Rex’s Harrison Best Actor Oscar for his My Fair Lady performance was, at the very least, unfortunate, particularly given the calibre of the competition — Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton in Becket, Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek, and Peter Sellers‘ trio of performances in Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Since Becket hit Bluray in ’08 pretty much everyone began to realize that King Henry II was O’Toole’s peak role and performance, and that he was robbed. Or so it seemed. But according to a Twitter poll I saw this morning, the majority feels it was actually Sellers who was robbed.

My presumption is that everyone has seen Strangelove and relatively few have seen Becket, and there’s not much more to it than that.

Sellers is magnificent in Strangelove, of course, but playing three characters in a single film (if not for an injury he would’ve played four) is essentially a stunt, plus none of his characters really touch bottom, especially given the film’s darkly satiric tone. They were three sketch bits, not full-bodied performances.

And of course, strategy-wise Paramount publicists pushing O’Toole and Burton equally was all but guaranteed to result in a loss for both.

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A Fine, Lanthimosian Madness

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I can’t pound out a ten-paragraph review of Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things as it’s nearly 11 pm and I’m really whipped (I only slept about four hours last night) but it’s totally fucking wild, this thing — it’s too sprawling to describe in a single sentence but I could start by calling it an imaginatively nutso, no-holds-barred sexual Frankenstein saga.

The production design and visual style are basically pervy Lathimos meets Terry Gilliam meets Jean Pierre Juenet…really crazy and wackazoid and fairly perfect in that regard.

Set in a make-believe 19th Century realm that includes fanciful versions of London, Paris and Lisbon, Poor Things is at least partly The Bride of Frankenstein by way of a long-haul feminist parable about a underdog woman eventually finding strength and wisdom and coming into her own.

It swan-dives into all kinds of surreal humor with boundless nudity and I-forget-how-many sex scenes in which Emma Stone, giving her bravest and craziest-ever performance, totally goes to town in this regard save for the last, oh, 20 or 25. The film runs 141 minutes.

Poor Things is easily Lanthimos’ finest film, and all hail Stone For having gone totally over the waterfall without a flotation device…giving her boldest, most totally-out-there performance as she rides the mighty steed, so to speak, while repeatedly behaving in a “big”, herky-jerky fashion as Tony McNamara’s screenplay, based on Alasdair Gray‘s same-titled novel, whips up the perversity and tests the boundaries of what used to be known as softcore sex scenes.

The costars include Mark Ruffalo (giving a totally enraged, broadly comic performance as a middle-aged libertine), Willem “Scarface” Dafoe as Dr. Godwin Baxter, Ramy Youssef as Dafoe’s assistant and Christopher Abbott as as an upper-class London slimeball, plus four stand-out cameos by Margaret Qualley, Kathryn Hunter, Suzy Bemba and 79-year-old Hanna Schygulla.

I’ll add to this tomorrow morning but this is one serious boundary-pusher…wow.

No Hard-Humping Today

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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.

Buffet Lived Well…Right?

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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.

“Fall”, Fast Footwork, “Poor Things”

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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).