If you say that young white males — the lonely, undervalued, borderline incel, spending-too-much-time-at-home types — are having a rough time these days, fine. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and it’s a known thing among many of us. But if you say that young white males are having a particularly difficult time because they’re regarded by liberal elites as bad eggs and would-be oppressors because they’re white and therefore a potential Kyle Rittenhouse, you’ve got a problem. Because in progressive circles “white male” has become an epithet. Not without cause, I realize, but if you express the slightest sympathy for young, depressed white dudes (under-educated, working at home, limited prospects), elites automatically presume that you’re aligning yourself with some kind of toxic male syndrome.
Letter to friend, sent this morning: Jeff Sneider, Brian Truitt and Ed Douglas have supported your skepticism about Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. And thank God for you four and others who haven’t been intimidated by the #MeToo rank-and-file & have summoned the courage to calmly and sensibly call a spade a spade.
Your reservations have been respectful and all you were doing in re-tweeting Sneider, Truitt & Douglas was showing there are other dissenting voices out there.
You know what things were like in Telluride with the Justin Chang, Eric Anderson & Greg Ellwood kowtow crowd praising it to the heavens. And then finally the clouds parted in Toronto…breaths of fresh air!
Aside from my own less-than-delighted reaction I was told twice in Telluride, unprompted, by an elderly rich guy & a 40ish married woman that they “hated” Polley’s film. When the rank-and-file Academy & guild members get a look at this thing you KNOW what many of them will think.
Neither you nor I hated it, but you know in your heart that it’s basically a dimly-lighted #MeToo “Waiting for Godot” in a barn, and that aside from the morally urgent narrative (of COURSE they should leave but (a) where are they going and (b) with what funds and (c) do they have tents and blankets and toilet paper?) & high-quality performances (principally from Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara and Claire Foy) that it’s WELL below the compelling, confined-set standards of Lumet’s 12 Angry Men or Rope or Rear Window, and that it’s fairly agonizing to sit through and that the Women Talking experience is basically about waiting for it to end.
The basic idea, of course, isn’t that a few sex-starved, cold-blooded Mennonite men are brute beasts, but that the overall patriarchy (straight white men) is to be regarded with extreme suspicion as too many white males seem amoral, heartless and exploitive & probably need to be fought tooth & nail and perhaps even overthrown.
A friend feels Polley’s film is “almost comically male-hating.” When the wimpy and wimpering Ben Whishaw is the only male they can trust, you know what Polley is saying……”tearful, guilt-stricken-on-behalf-of-their-gender gay men are cool but forget straight guys!!”
Really? There isn’t one decent straight guy in the community who can be trusted? Not one regular dude who’s disgusted by the rapes and pledges to support the women? Imagine how the film could be spiritually and emotionally opened up, so to speak, if there was such a character. Or if a second straight male were to intrude only to speak skeptically about the assaults & argue against leaving.
Women Talking is oppressive because (a) it’s oxygen-starved and visually claustrophobic, (b) there’s no dramatic tension to speak of because from the perspective of the horribly brutalized victims it’s ludicrous to argue for staying, (c) the characters don’t sound like isolated Mennonites but smart, educated, worldly women playing their idea of isolated Mennonites.
In short, your skepticism about Women Talking is sensible and mature and certainly not extreme.
It’s not a rumor — some tiddly-wink at HBO Max has removed Warren Beatty‘s cigar from the McCabe and Mrs. Miller promotional art on the HBO Max menu. Ditto Paul Newman‘s cigar from HBO Max’s promotional art for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.
I’m presuming that someone figured that it’s wrong to promote smoking of any kind so the cigar was zotzed. HE is calling this an advertising form of woke “presentism.” What’s next? Digitally erasing Robert Mitchum‘s cigarettes in Out of the Past?
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Filed by THR‘s Aaron Couch, Sydney Odman and Borys Kit: “The footage shown included a big sequence during a New York ticker tape parade, a horseback chase in a subway tunnel, a train sequence and Indy using his iconic whip to take on a dozen guns.”
How do you “take on a dozen [presumably loaded] guns” with a bullwhip? Remember that scary bedouin villain threatening Indy with a huge sword in the 1981 original, and Indy pulling out his pistol and shooting the guy? I could see Indy using his whip to disarm a swordsman but a dozen guns?
Small HE quibble: Indy’s pants are too baggy.
This has already been kicked around, but Owen Glieberman’s Lost King review got me going again.
HE to Gleiberman: “Very keen on seeing this, and your TIFF review excited me. But why oh why does the film insist that Richard III wasn’t a vaguely grotesque figure, or the glint-eyed. hunchbacked fellow played by Laurence Olivier in the mid ‘50s? Why does the film insist on depriving us of that perversely pleasurable characterization?
“Even if you claim that Richard III was contorted into a deformed or misshaped figure whom dogs barked at…even if you assert that Shakespeare mangled him into a creep in order to please the Tudors, Richard was still a scheming bastard who murdered his way to the throne. And Harry Lloyd’s beatific expression is infuriating in this light. One glance at Lloyd and I felt a surge of instant loathing. How dare you, Stephen Frears and Steve Coogan? The ghost of Lord Olivier is puzzled; ditto the alive-and-well Ian McKellan, Ralph Fiennes and Al Pacino. Unwelcome revisionism, to put it mildly.”
From Owen Gleiberman’s The Lost King review (9.9.22): “As Philippa Langley, a middle-class British divorcée who, with no special knowledge or skill, goes on a quest to find the remains of King Richard III, Sally Hawkins, who has given so many extraordinary performances, may, in this movie, have given her greatest one yet.”
We all understand that Michelle Yeoh has been grandfathered in by the powers-that-be. And there’s absolutely no question about Cate Blanchett and Olivia Colman…don’t even question it. Whatever the general response to Blonde, Ana de Armas will probably qualify because of the Cuban-actress-plays-Marilyn factor (reassuring to non-white actors who may one day aspire to play this or that famous white character) plus the touching metaphor of MM, bruised and maimed by pig males all her life, dying from a combination of their sins and her own calamitious childhood.
San Francisco has always had skid-row types but this is different. The barking dog completes the feral atmosphere. Whipped cream with a cherry on top.
San Francisco right now pic.twitter.com/FmGdX6B9gK
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) September 9, 2022
When @ShellenbergerMD and @lwoodhouse documentary comes out, it's going to shock a lot of people as to how bad things are in San Francisco. This clip alone tells a lot.pic.twitter.com/tcIRHmSBAA
— Adam B. Coleman, President of Aintblackistan (@wrong_speak) September 9, 2022
British royalty is mostly about the notion of high-born continuity, which most of us find vaguely comforting on some level. (My heritage and bloodline come from England, a fact that automatically makes me a racist cad, so I can feel it to some extent.) Nostalgic, misty-eyed history, pomp and circumstance, and tourism. When did the British monarchy become ceremonial rather than authoritative? During the mid to later stages of Queen Victoria’s reign (1860s-1901), most would say. 130 or 140 years ago. Exalted in a sense but mainly about soft, symbolic power throughout the entire 20th Century and into today. And yet…
We’re all familiar with those unfortunate biological quirks of nature in which people of quality and achievement are occasionally stuck with lesser, weaker family members or in-laws, otherwise known as the black-sheep or bad-seed syndrome.
There’s the bad-son syndrome (i.e., Hunter Biden, Cameron Douglas), as well as the bad-brother syndrome (Billy Carter) or the bad half-brother syndrome (Roger Clinton). My younger brother Tony, who passed in 2009, was closer to an under-achiever than a bad seed, but everyone is familiar with this. Remember George Clooney‘s no-account brother in Michael Clayton, the guy with the substance issues who stole steel-belted radial tires from his sister’s garage?
It follows that many fathers or older brothers or wealthy benefactors from within the family, motivated by love or misplaced loyalty or a simple urge to protect and defend, sometimes do what they can to clean up the messes caused by bad-seed types.
No reasonable person will dispute that Hunter Biden behaved like a fairly bad seed during his crack-and-cocaine-and-hookers addiction period. We all understand that during the Obama administration Hunter profited in various ways from being Joe Biden‘s son. (Are you telling me that Donald Trump‘s sons are any better from an ethical perspective?) At the same time no reasonable person would argue that Hunter’s behavior casts any kind of substantial reflection upon President Joe Biden‘s character or moral behavior. Fathers will always try to help their bad-seed sons. For much of his life Hunter was a wrong one — weak, derelict, craven, maybe even depraved. And so what? American families are full of Hunter Biden types.
Which is why bullshit rightwing movies like My Son Hunter are disreputable distractions. Distributed by Breitbart News, directed by Robert Davi and costarring Gina Carano as a secret service agent…hah! Laurence Fox plays Hunter Biden, and John James plays his dad. Production began in October 2021 in Serbia and lasted for four weeks (!).
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