I've chatted with Leonardo DiCaprio a few times, and can confirm he's around six feet tall. At 5'7" Jeff Bezos is five inches shorter than Leo, and shorter still if Leo is standing on an elevated platform of some kind. Bezos' girlfriend Lauren Sanchez is 5'3", and therefore four inches shorter than Bezos and nine inches shorter than Leo. Sanchez is reacting to Leo as if he's the coolest, most glorious, super-sexy alpha male she's ever encountered in her life, but I've seen women behave this way with celebrities a thousand times in a thousand different places. If she was unattached could Leo have her without breaking a sweat? Apparently, but remember his alleged rule about a certain age limit.
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21 Gold Derby forecasters have stated preferences in the race for Best Actress Oscar. The overwhelming favorite is Kristen Stewart‘s performance as Diana, Princess of Wales in Spencer, and so she’s sitting atop 13 lists.
Except the most deserving recipient for the ’21 and ’22 Best Actress Oscar is Penelope Cruz in Pedro’s Parallel Mothers — theres no question about this, none whatsoever.
How many GD smarties have Cruz at the top of their lists? Two — Variety‘s Tim Gray and Queerty’s Michael Musto. There should be more. Cruz’s performance is incontestably fuller, richer, tethered to common experience than Stewart’s. Comparing the two isn’t allowed — entirely different leagues.
Stewart’s submission to Spencer‘s concept — Diana was half-mad, besieged by visions and nightmares, lost in her own head — is total and therefore admirable; you could even call what she does mesmerizing. (being a stickler, I can’t apply that term.) But she’s mainly being favored because critics and public alike are still Diana-struck (they all want to curtsy and bow) and because Spencer declares that the royal family members were bloodless ghouls, and this synchs with current wokester views.
Plus there’s Stewart’s LGBTQ profile and her two-decade career besides (plugging away since 2002’s Panic Room, only 31 years old).
Nagging problem: A few brave critics who’ve seen Pablo Larrain’s film have honestly shared what they feel about it. The fact is that Spencer is an oppressive and smothering thing to sit through. It literally gives you a kind of headache. This doesn’t seem to bother Stewart’s supporters, but in the old days (i.e., before 2015) if a movie really stunk then the Oscar chances of this or that performer in said film would be negatively affected. Not so much any more, or so it would seem.
Stewart is a respected actor. She’s been in a few half-decent films (Welcome to the Rileys, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Runaways, Cafe Society) and also made a lot of stinkers. Spencer is one of them. How many truly awesome, artistically approved knockout films has Stewart made in her life? Exactly one — Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper.
13 for Kristen Stewart. 3 for Lady Gaga. 2 for Olivia Colman, 2 for Penelope Cruz, 1 for Jessica Chastain.
I’m reading about “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy” (Encounter, 10.26), a just-published book by Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon.
It got my attention because roughly the same thing has been happening in the film industry for the last five or six years. I summarized the situation twice this year — on 9.9.21, and on 3.22.21.
Amazon synopsis: “Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before ‘fake news’ became the calling card of the right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore.
“That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including ‘antiracism,’ intersectionality, open borders and critical race theory. How did this come to be?
“The moral panic around race, encouraged by today’s elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. ‘Bad News’ explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.”
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But there’s no way in hell that Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (which is being aggressivejy junketed right now at the Four Seasons) can even fantasize about winning the Best Picture Oscar.
Those insisting that it’s time for Campion to snag an Academy trophy might be able to push this notion through, but the film itself is a rancid bowl of grim about a mean and smelly closet case (i.e., Benedict Cumberbatch). The Gold Derby kiss-asses who are projecting a Dog Best Picture win are completely out of their fucking minds.
And Anne Thompson, by the way, rating Dune higher than King Richard? That’s crazy stuff!
But she doesn’t. She wimps out. Probably because she knew N.Y. Times wokester thinking would just lead to a watering-down process so why bother?
The closest Dowd comes to just saying it is to quote James Carville kvetching about “stupid wokeness”.
Here’s what she could have said: Goaded and justifiably alarmed by Donald Trump’s racist, dog-whistled taunts during the ‘15 and ‘16 campaign, doubly freaked by his defeat of Hillary Clinton, jarred by “The 1619 Project” (launched in August’19) and then carried along by the agonized George Floyd protests of May ‘20, Democrats embraced the woke progressive agenda lock, stock and barrel.
The time had come to not only push back against 300 years of systemic racism but to embrace anti–white racism as a counterweight. The tables had to be turned, and whites had to not only be confronted but condemned for a bedrock biological poison in their bones a la Robin DiAngelo. Which required stringent anti-racist education in not just colleges but public schools, and in some cases with young kids being taught this doctrine.
This led to suburban parental perceptions that wokesters had overplayed their hand — that the basic educational thrust in schools was that people of color are sainted figures and hothouse flowers and needed to be treated with scholastic kid gloves (equity vs. “racist” meritocracy) and that European-descended Anglo culture is rooted in cruel, dismissive, anti-persons-of-color attitudes.
Nobody has any arguments with frank teachings about the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and systemic governmental prejudice and neglect, but instructing kids that whites are infected with a fundamental evil gene was a bridge too far, and telling parents not to try and mess with school curriculums (as Terry McAuliffe did) was rubbing salt in the wound. Hence the decisive victory of Glenn Youngkin last Tuesday.
That’s what Dowd could have said.
No adminstrative body in this city would be so titanically stupid as to even discuss tearing down the Chinese…get outta town.
King Richard has an 89% Rotten Tomatoes score but a 71 Metacritic score?? Any critic who dismisses or puts this film down, trust me, is basically saying “I’m a pisshead with my head up my ass.”
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy: “In September, I spitballed the Best Picture race that was starting to take shape post-Venice and Telluride. My conclusion was that Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast was the current de facto frontrunner. Five weeks later, I’m starting to doubt that assessment.
“Having seen Marcus Reinaldo Green’s King Richard, I can safely say it is the better and more effective crowd pleaser. It has the goods to go all the way. Rags-to-riches tale? Check. True story? Check. Inclusivity? Check. High-entertainment? Check.
“The film itself could get up to 4 acting nods, it’ll also be triumphant at SAG. Maybe the directors branch will be a little tougher on it since this isn’t really an auteur film, but it’s my current Best Picture winner. The film has already won five audience awards at film festivals. Astounding.”
#KingRichard is a knockout. One of the strongest and most soul-stirring sports dramas in years, with a brilliant balance of heart and humor. Will Smith is the best he’s ever been, Aunjanue Ellis is equally as electrifying, and Jon Bernthal is just a *blast*. Absolutely adored it. pic.twitter.com/B0tfg6kCHE
— Zach Gilbert (@zachbgilbert) November 5, 2021
A month ago a trade reporter allegedly tweeted that “a major Oscar late-release” will run three hours. (I wrote the reporter in question to confirm yay or nay, but he didn’t reply.) I subtracted Licorice Pizza (133 minutes), Don’t Look Up (145 minutes) and Nightmare Alley (139 minutes). If the trade reporter was correct, that left Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story as the only possible elephant in the room.
But it’s not. The Wikipedia page links to New Zealand’s United Cinemas chain, and a West Side Story page says it runs 156 minutes.
I noted a while back Robert Wise’s Oscar-winning West Side Story (’61) ran 152 minutes. I said that “if Spielberg’s version runs shorter than Wise’s, I’ll be fucking flabbergasted.” Well, there we go.
A couple of hours ago I tweeted Malcolm Hollis about Laurent Bouzereau‘s “West Side Story: The Making of the Steven Spielberg Film” (due on 11.16) and asked if it mentions the running time. “I’m hearing it’s 180 minutes,” I wrote.
A half-hour later West Side Story star Rachel Zegler (occupying Natalie Wood‘s Maria role) replied “our movie is not 3 hours long.” Thanks, Rachel!
Tatiana has just told me she doesn’t want to attend this evening’s Licorice Pizza screening because the romantic couple in question, played by 29 year-old Alana Haim and 18 year-old Cooper Hoffman, isn’t attractive enough. They don’t have that swoony sexy-romantic charisma thing going on, she said.
“At least one of them should be attractive,” she emphasized, “but both of them unattractive? Oh no…”
Los Angeles Friendo: “This is like the reverse of Frankie and Johnny, that 1991 relationship drama with Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. Everyone said it was totally unbelievable that drop-dead beautiful Pfeiffer would be cast as a plain-Jane waitress…it didn’t wash.”
Back-east Friendo said a similar thing earlier today. Licorice Pizza, he said, “sounds like Paul Thomas Anderson‘s version of Moonrise Kingdom.” HE to Back-east Friendo: “Yeah. With two zero-charisma leads. One pushing 30, the other in his late teens.”
Back-east Friendo: “That’s the Moonrise formula! Two young lead characters that no one in his right mind could give less of a fuck about.”
Does anyone remember a 1945 film called The Enchanted Cottage? Robert Young played a disfigured war veteran and Dorothy Maguire was a very plain and (it is suggested) homely woman. They fall in love with each other, and gradually they become more and more attractive because we’re seeing their features through their eyes.
Another unlikely pair came along in Robert Altman‘s A Perfect Couple (’79). Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin as a vaguely dorky-looking couple, age-separated by 20 years.
Can anyone recall other funny-looking twosomes in noteworthy films?
“Land of plenty. They were always so confident that God was on their side. Now I think they are not so sure.”
It’s not just that Chloe Zhao‘s Eternals has shitty aggregate ratings (49% Rotten Tomatoes, 53% Metacritic) as well as the lowest-ever score for a Marvel film; it’s also being trashed because presumably toxic males don’t like it when a woman directs an action film. I haven’t hate-watched it yet — does Davis have a point?
#Eternals has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of any MCU film. “I think this speaks to a larger problem…any time a woman takes on the action genre, people come harder at that filmmaker,” says @ByClaytonDavis. | Variety The Take presented by @AppleTV https://t.co/XFigklsxMg pic.twitter.com/X0J0Nrn8Fj
— Variety (@Variety) November 5, 2021
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