HE believes that Kerry Condon, who plays the sensible but distraught Siobhan (the sister of Colin Farrell‘s Paddy) in The Banshees of Inisherin, has given the most grounded and formidable supporting actress performance so far this year.
For what it;s worth Condon is on the Best Supporting Actress lists of almost all of the finger-to-the-wind Gold Derby prognosticators, and clearly has plenty of wind in her sails as we speak.
If not Condon I would vote for Carey Mulligan‘s Megan Twohey in She Said.
Due respect but I find it almost satirical that Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis‘s broad, comic-book-level performances in Everything Everywhere All at Once are even being discussed in this context. Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley‘s taut, enraged performances in Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking are entirely respectable, but they’re arguably playing feminist constructs as opposed to rounded, relatable human beings.
Meanwhile the competition for the appealing alternate titles of of Martin McDoangh’s new film continues apace. My favorites are (a) Fingers (hat tip to James Toback’s 1978 film), (b) Five Finger Exercise or…what others?
Serial killer sagas have always been hot tickets. I’ve liked exactly five — Manhunter, Mindhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en and Zodiac — but then I’m an outlier.
Jett and Cait are big fans of serial killer “product.” Netflix’s idiotically titled Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is “the ninth most popular English-language TV show of all time, with 56 million households having viewed all 10 episodes.” Against my better judgment I watched three or four episodes…later.
A friend had told me that The Good Nurse, a stand-alone, fact-based drama about the hospital serial killer Charles Cullen, was quite good so I caught it the other night in Manhattan. I was underwhelmed. Mystified even. It’s one of those films that you manage to endure. It’s certainly nothing to write home about. I began losing patience around the 40-minute mark, and then I was stuck for another 80.
It’s one of the darkest and dreariest looking films I’ve seen in ages (obviously intentional and quite the contrast as the dp, Jody Lee Lipes, shot Trainwreck and Manchester By The Sea).
All through it I was asking myself “who could possibly care about this glum, plodding little film?” The answer, of course, is that tens of millions will become instant fans, no matter how flat or slow it is. Simply because Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) murdered at least 40 hospital patients and perhaps hundreds of others with injections of insulin and dejoxin, etc. That’s all they care about.
Redmayne’s Cullen is a kind of soft-voiced, good-natured dolt…dullness incarnate until the very end. Jessica Chastain is Amy Loughren, a nurse who’d been fairly friendly with Cullen but later helped detectives get the goods on him.
A friend called The Good Nurse “Fincheresque” but David Fincher would never direct a film this dull.
By the way, what other film set in a hospital focused on an unstable man who surreptitiously kills patients with overdoses of insulin and dijoxin? Paddy Chayefsky’s The Hospital (‘71).
Friendo #2: “Although it might have been taking artistic license, if I had been brought in to punch up The Good Nurse I would have suggested the following: Chastain’s character agrees to help the police only because she’s convinced Redmayne is innocent and wants to prove it to them. She’s then doubly horrified to learn the truth.”
On 10.11 I passed along some positivereactions to Martin McDonagh’s TheBansheesofInisherin (Searchlight, 10.21), and quoted a critic friendo who’d been told by a couple of eccentric colleagues that Banshees might win the Best Picture Oscar…”peopleadorethisfilm.”
This prompted another critic friendo to pass along the following:
Last night I saw McDonagh’s film. Five minutes after emerging from the 1350 Sixth Avenue screening room I wrote the Los Angeles guy as follows:
“In some respects a lovely metaphorical lament about Irish anguish and turbulence and the general impermanence of things, and fortified by excellent dialogue, fine acting (especially by Colin Farrell and Kerry Condon), handsome cinematography and so on, but in other respects a bizarre, brutal thing that struck me as borderlinediseased.
“You were right — the New York people who said that TheBansheesofInisherin might win the Best Picture Oscar are out of their fecking minds….INSANE.
“There were three or four sane characters in that film, Farrell’s Paddy Súilleabháin (at least initially) and Condon’s Siobhan (i.e., Farrell’s sister) being the sanest. Certain measures of rational behavior are also noticable from, I suppose, Sheila Flitton’s old crone, Pat Shortt’s bartender and one or two others.
“But Brendan Gleeson’s Colm Doherty and the mad priest and the belligerent cop and Barry Keohgan’s local loon (a counterpart to John Mills’ village idiot in Ryan’sDaughter, which also occurs in a rural Irish seaside village roughly a century ago), are all lunatics of one kind or another.
“It’s a film about rage and nihilism and futility and banality and bloody finger stumps.
The “rage against the Supremes killing Roe” bump is apparently subsiding. Biden’s bad numbers are returning; ditto projections about likely Republican gains. I modestly, half-heartedly approve of Joe’s job performance save for his kowtowing to the wokester wing. But the fact is that somethingawful might happen if he runs again. A younger, credible and compelling left-centrist Democrat has to primary him.
— from Common Sense / TGIF columnist Nellie Bowles, postedon10.21.
PattiLupone recently said that B’way ticket prices are “insane.” I knew they were painful but it’s been a few years since I actually pondered (i.e., fantasized about) a purchase. I also presumed Lupone had turned on the hyperbole spigot. Then I looked at prices for Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. Okay, Telecharge isn’t as punishing.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t see this coming. I doubt if anyone did. Then again…
If I had been on the jury, I would have felt piqued by the time factor. The alleged incident happened in ‘86 when Kevin Spacey, now 63, was 26, and his accuser Anthony Rapp, now 50, was 14. I would have said “why are we dealing with this so many years after the fact? It happened 36 years ago.”
I experienced a few awful, hurtful things in my teens. Do I still feel angry or wounded about some of them? Yeah, but they happened a long-ass time ago. Move on, be here now.
Based on a Wikipedia link to figures from the CaliforniaFilmDivision, I recently reported that Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (Paramount, 12.23) cost $110 million. That’s wrong, I was told today by a Paramount spokesperson. The tab was actually $78 million. Okay then.
Despite my admiration for all things Tony Gilroy, I still have yet to watch the seven-episode Andor. It is my solemn belief that doing so would be bad for my soul. Plus I don’t care for brown-and-beige color palettes.
Prince Charles and Lady Diana were the same height — 5′ 10″ — but not so much in Season 5 in The Crown (Netflix, 11.9).
Dominic West, who plays Charles, stands six feet even while the stork-like Elizabeth Debickitops him by three inches. The obvious solution would have been for West to wear elevator shoes. Apparently that option was discarded.
The previous four Crown episodes have always been strong, classy and well-sculpted, but after Spencer who among us doesn’t feel Diana’ed out?
“Like 1917 before it, and like the better films that continue to inspire a concentratedly grisly mode of war picture (the epochal Russian film Come and See is explicitly referenced at least once, as is the more recent, and more problematic, The Painted Bird), All Quiet on the Western Front is state-of-the-art in shoving your nose in realistic-seeming carnage and possibly inducing hearing damage in laying on the ear-splitting aural experience of a firefight.
“The in-the-trenches tracking shots that Stanley Kubrick crafted for Paths of Glory (a movie that culminated in a point that actually made sense, unlike this muddle) are now steady hand-held digital panoramas of exposed viscera and agonized writhing. Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning ‘war is hell’ into a ‘can you top this?’ competition.” — from Glenn Kenny’s 10.14 review.
But without street gangs or guns, and probably without a violent ending. Hanks’ Otto to new neighbor: “Ever notice how every once in a while you come across someone you shouldn’t be fucking with? That’s me”….not.
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Sony will release A Man Called Otto on 12.25. Produced by Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Rita Wilson, and directed by Marc Forster. Based on a 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove, directed by Hannes Holm. Shot earlier this year in Pittsburgh.
I for one really admired Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington‘s The Equalizer 2 (’16), and I have no problem with them making another one. We’re all cool, I’m presuming, with The Equalizer 3 currently filming on the Amalfi Coast — Atrani, Ravello, Minori. Bring it on, bruh.
There’s nothing wrong with being a respected, Sam Fuller-ish or Robert Aldrich-y hack who does genre films and efficiently at that**.
But it’s fair, surely, to ask if this might reflect upon the presumed prestige factor that some are attaching to Fuqua’s allegedly Oscar-calibre Emancipation (possibly “Fuqua’s best” according to Variety‘s Clayton Davis)? Runaway slave saga on one hand, whupass on the other…what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
