No Half Measures

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From Glenn Erickson’s longish review of the new 4K Bluray of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon, which streets today: “Babylon lives up to the crazy reports that accompanied its theatrical release last December — it’s a spectacular Hollywood history movie that ignores Hollywood history in favor of exaggerated orgies and drug use, as if Kenneth Anger’s bad gossip were just the tip of the scandal iceberg.

“In entertainment terms it’s a 188-minute gross-out that wants to be shocking but is mainly unpleasant. Anachronistic profanity is non-stop, but the dealbreaker comes in the very first scene with an enormous, diarrhetic elephant whose bodily eliminations rival Noah’s Flood. Margot Robbie is a dynamo and Brad Pitt as charming as ever, but the movie overall is ideal only for the curious and the masochistic.

“Babylon, in short, is oppressively off-putting, and no deep thought is required to explain why it wasn’t a hit. Word of mouth likely did the job, as most audiences would find it unpleasant at best and at worst intolerable. Personal tastes vary, but I know nobody who would think the movie’s excesses are entertaining. If I were to take a date to this picture, within three minutes I’d be telling the person, ‘it’s perfectly okay if you want to walk out right now.’ Babylon may do much better on disc and streaming than it did in theaters — a lot of moviegoers out there are curious.”

The HE community is encouraged to read Erickson’s entire essay.

Posted by yours truly on 11.17.22:

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Why Would Anyone Want To Hang With a Diseased Fan?

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Ingrid Goes West, The Fan, Misery, Big Fan, Swimfan, The Seduction…I’ve never had the slightest, faintest interest in spending two hours with an obsessive nutter. And yet decade after decade films of this sort keep getting made, obviously because a significant portion of the viewing public relates to the nutter, or at least feels a certain sympatico on some level.

A Little Less Honesty

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If your wife/partner/lover is a writer and you’re in the difficult if not impossible position of (a) not admiring her writing all that much but (b) unable to share your honest opinion for obvious reasons…what the hell do you do? I’ll tell you what you do. Never share your honest opinion with her or anyone else…ever. Never write it down, never record it…observe Moscow rules.

That doesn’t just mean “keep it hidden until you die”; it means “keep it hidden eternally.” It’s the only way to go. Life with a wife/partner/lover is hard enough; naked honesty will just send the relationship into a ditch.

From Owen Gleiberman’s 1.22.23 Sundance review of Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings: “For close to half an hour, we have no idea where You Hurt My Feelings is going, and we don’t care. We’re happy just to spend time watching Nicole Holofcener’s people reveal themselves with an alternating current of savagery and vulnerability. But then, out of the blue, the film coalesces into a situation.

“At the Paragon Sports store near Union Square, Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her sister (Michaela Watkins) happen to walk in and see that Beth’s husband Don (Tobias Menzies) is there buying socks with Mark (Arian Moayed), his brother-in-law. They approach but stop short when they overhear what the two men are talking about. It’s Beth’s new novel. Don confesses that he didn’t actually like it. But he read so many drafts, and felt so committed to being encouraging, that he couldn’t bring himself to tell Beth what he really thought. Now he’s stuck in a lie he can’t get out of.

“This is not a matter of overpraising someone’s pot roast. Beth’s writing is part of her identity, her core. That Don didn’t like her book — and deceived her about it — cuts her to the quick. It’s almost as if he was being unfaithful, a point the film underscores by having Beth rush out of the store and come close to throwing up in the middle of a New York street, deliberately evoking Jill Clayburgh’s meltdown in An Unmarried Woman.

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Not Looking Forward to “Oppenheimer” In One Respect

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You know that the sound mix on Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer (Universal. 7.21) is probably going to be hellish, certainly to some extent. It’s going to be a bear, you know this, and yet you’ve been avoiding the act of thinking about it, or more honestly dreading it. You know what’s coming.

There’s only one fulfilling way to watch a Nolan film these days, and that’s at home with subtitles. I truly wish this were otherwise.

If Egerton Is Starring…

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Kingsman: The Secret Service, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Billionaire Boys Club, the absolutely vile Robin Hood and the slow-paced (except for the opening 40 minutes) Rocketman…I’ve never liked and have mostly hated films starring Taron Egerton. I’m therefore reluctant to see anything he’s starring in.

From Brian Tallerico’s 3.16 review of Jon S. Baird and Noah Pink‘s Tetris (Apple, 3.31):

“Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, the founder of a company called Bullet-Proof Software, and a man who basically stumbled into the legacy of Tetris at a gaming convention in his new home country of Japan. He instantly realizes the potential of a game that had yet to make its way around the Iron Curtain to any part of the world other than Tokyo. And he wants a piece of it.

“Rogers narrates Tetris, a complicated film about a simple game. It’s just a rolling array of dropping blocks, but the details about market shares, legal rights, and Cold War politics drive this plot, not the game itself. Rogers is a low-level player in the gaming world, and getting the rights to something as Tetris will require navigating around power figures in both business and politics.

“It sounds like a lot, and yet it’s also not enough. All of this intrigue and negotiation gets Tetris to a remarkably repetitive and monotonous place that’s not helped by director Jon S. Baird’s glib tone, one that looks back on the ‘80s with a sort of goofy bemusement that feels disingenuous. The movie bounces back and forth between conference rooms and scary Russian alleys, but it never finds the right depth of character or deviation in either, choosing to enliven the dry material with an odd amount of condescension instead of actual tension. “Can you believe these crazy Russians?” is an odd tone to strike, especially with the current state of the world in 2023.

“The saddest thing about Tetris is that it’s easy to see why someone wanted to tell this story. The little guy never wins in Russia, and he usually goes to jail for even thinking he could play, but American business is built on narratives of Davids beating business Goliaths. Merging the two for a story in which an ambitious American had to use the tools of Capitalism to topple Communism sounds like an easy sell, and there’s probably a great documentary to be made on this subject. But breaking it out into a drama or thriller requires a different set of rules, and, despite Egerton’s best efforts, the team behind “Tetris” never figured out how to tell this story.”

Tom Jones’ Barber Went His Own Way

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Because of the always-urgent need for presentism by way of diverse casting, the forthcoming Tom Jones miniseries (PBS, 4.30) is going with a beautiful woman of color as Sophia, the main romantic interest of Solly McLeod‘s titular lead character. And that’s fine because Sophie Wilde is drop-dead dishy + well spoken.

In Tony Richardson’s same-titled 1963 farce, which closely followed Henry Fielding‘s 1749 novel, Wilde’s character was called Sophie Western and played by Susannah York. The blonde and beautiful Sophie was the daughter of Squire Western (Hugh Griffith) and the niece of the elderly Miss Western (Edith Evans).

In the new miniseries Alun Armstrong plays Squire Western, and Shirley Henderson plays Aunt Western.

Dont ask me to explain anything — I just work here.

The other “off” aspect is McLeod’s way-too-short hair. Men of the mid 18th Century wore their hair long or certainly longish as a rule.

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Eye of the Beholder

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Some folks appear to be having trouble with how things work. When Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams said that white people “need to get the hell away from Black people,” it was entirely hateful and racist. (And it was, not to mention stupid of Adams to blurt this out.) But when White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo said “I think people of color need to get away from white people,” it was cool or, you know, not a problem.

And if you, the reader, don’t understand this system, you’ve got a problem. Not DiAngelo or Adams…you.

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Let Me Hate This Movie In My Own Way

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“We can’t help but marvel that it took Hollywood this long to see what kind of Hangover-styled mischief an all-Asian American crew might come up with.

“Like Girls Trip with an all-Asian-American cast (and one nonbinary lead), the Seth Rogen-produced, hard-R road movie follows small-town besties Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) to Beijing, where they tackle everything from taboo tattoos to a devil’s threesome with all the gusto you’d hope or expect from Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim’s directorial debut.

“The movie may not be Bridesmaids-level brilliant, [but] it’s showing that another underrepresented demographic can be just as extreme as your average Seth Rogen movie. With that goal in mind, Joy Ride features more irreverent vagina monologues than Sausage Party did dick jokes, which is a surely an accomplishment of some kind.” — from Peter Debruge’s 3.18 SXSW Variety review.

“Joy Ride is a prime example of how important representation is on screen and proves that Asian American comedians can be just as funny, raunchy, and successful as their white male counterparts.” — from Marisa Mirabal’s 3.18 IndieWire review.

As someone who loathes and despises coarse humor, who was moderately amused by portions of Bridesmaids but that’s all, who was irritated by Girls Trip and found Sausage Party tedious, who was okay with the first Hangover but hated the rest of them, I can’t wait to not laugh at Joy Ride and to subsequently pour my heart into trashing it.