“All great black leaders get killed.” — quote from Warren Beatty‘s Bulworth (’98).
As it turns out Beatty’s Senator Jay Bulworth, one of the blackest white politicians who ever served in a fictional feature, gets killed also — shot by an insurance industry villain played by Paul Sorvino.
Bulworth is a Democrat from California and a total liberal establishment guy with all the usual noble sentiments and allegiances (photos of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King on his office wall) that have never amounted to much.
The film begins with Bulworth in deep despair and sick of all the bullshit. The film is basically about Bulworth saying “fuck it” and and just stating plain and straight how things really are, and hang the freakin’ consequences.
Friendo: “Last night I rewatched Bulworth for the first time since it came out in 1998 — a quarter-century ago. Very funny, totally outrageous, sometimes cringe-worthy and…oh, yeah, Halle Berry was totally hot.
“I got to thinking how this film would be received today. I know you’re gonna say the wokesters would go off on it, but maybe, just maybe, they’d see it for the satire it is. And maybe they’d understand that it asks the question ‘What would happen if a politician finally told the honest truth about our political system?’
“On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a 76% approval rating, but not one of the critics listed is black. So how did black critics (outside of Elvis Mitchell) view it? How many influential black critics were even around back then?
“I know that black audiences didn’t attend screenings of Bulworth in droves, despite its focus upon black culture and featuring quite a few black characters. Maybe they felt vaguely alienated by Bulworth’s remarks about black behaviors (‘If you don’t put down the malt liquor and chicken wings and get behind someone other than a running back who stabs his wife, you’re never gonna get rid of someone like me!’). Or maybe not.
“Either way Bulworth, which cost round $30 million to produce, ended up with a relative slender gross of $29 million. It obviously didn’t connect with certain segments of the public for certain reasons. The only segment that seemed to support it were white, well-educated urban liberals.
“Bulworth has to be one of the most audacious mainstream films ever made. I think it deserves a reassessment.”
HE: "I haven't seen Barbie, of course, but I can sense where it's coming from and what it is. It's very much a feminist film, obviously. That said I should just keep my mouth shut until the moment of truth. All I know for sure is that the Barbie toy line is first and foremost a metaphor about a kind of idealized (or suppressed) way of living and thinking for pretty little girly girls of a bygone era."
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Here I am on a Sunday morning, sipping coffee and feeling glum as hell about the films of Joel and Ethan Coen no longer being part of our world. They haven't been, really, since Inside Llewyn Davis, the last bona fide Coen Bros. flick (low key, early '60s folkie vibes, slurping cereal milk, Schrodinger's cat). It opened almost exactly a decade ago (May '13) in Cannes.
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Casting-wise, blackwashing has been a thing since the woke dambreak of ’16 or ’17. For decades Hollywood adhered to whitewash casting, and now that European paleface culture has been identified and discredited as the root of all social evils, the tables have turned — simple enough.
It’s a deal, okay, but a relatively small one. Not worth anyone getting into a twist.
True, Cressida Crowell‘s original children’s books were set in a Scandinavian Viking world, which for centuries has been a white-ass culture. (Just ask Kirk Douglas.) Ditto the 2010 Dreamworks animated version — white-ass Viking men and women from top to bottom. But the new social rules (including the doctrine of presentism) require that white-culture-based stories be reassessed and updated.
Casting directors understand that it’s politically safer to roll with diverse or multicultural mindsets, even if casting an actress of color as the heroine of a centuries-old Scandinavian saga defies any common understanding of Viking history.
Diminishing the visual presence of whiteness by going multicultural has been happening for six or seven years now (ratification of the Academy’s inclusion standards made it official in 2020). Politically speaking it boils down to this: if you don’t want industry people to give the side-eye, you need to play along.
Plus one other thing: Nico Parker was very good as the daughter of Pedro Pascal‘s Joel in HBO’s The Last Of Us.
As far as I’m able to figure, Jessica Hausner’s ClubZero is a satire of the academic woke insanity virus, which has been spreading among teachers and college professors throughout the progressive community for the last 20-plus years…a virus that has led to mental derangement and domestic terror and has triggered the culture wars .
Or at least, that’s how I read it.
Club Zero is about Ms. Novak (Mia Wasikowska). a chillingly self-possessed teacher at an elite private school, passing along a wacko food concept called “conscious eating,” which basically states that all foods from any source are kinda bad for you and should therefore be pretty much avoided. Eat less and thereby transcend.
Novak’s teachings require the slapping of foreheads, sure, but aren’t hugely different from insisting that (a) all descendants of European tribes (and white males in particular) are corroded and evil or (b) there are no clearly defined women or men any more (gender is a spectrum), or that (c) guys should get pregnant and deliver more babies and (d) the theology of trans people should be canonical and exalted above all other considerations and that (e) the jokes of Dave Chappelle are repugnant, etc.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis would never watch ClubZero (and certainly wouldn’t have the patience for it if he did) but if he somehow got through it he’d undoubtedly say “I endorse this film…two thumbs up!”
Style-wise Club Zero is quite dry and excessively poised and very soft-spoken in an Orwellian sense (which is the point, of course) and at the same time passionately out-to-lunch as far as recognizable human behavior is concerned. I didn’t really “like” it but any film that condemns wokery gets a pass from this corner.
On or about 11.5.19 I chatted with Leonardo Dicaprio at a San Vicente Bungalows party. He was particularly excited about Killers of The Flower Moon, describing it as a kind of “birth of the modern FBI” story. The basic line, he said, focused on former Texas Ranger Tom White (whom Leo was intending to play at the time) being ordered by top G-man J. Edgar Hoover to take over the Osage murders case and make sure the bad guys pay the price.
Eventually DiCaprio decided to play one of the killers, Ernest Burkhart, with Jesse Plemons stepping into the White role.
Given Leo’s summary, one could have been forgiven for presuming that Martin Scorsese‘s film, which didn’t begin shooting until April ’21, would be a “white FBI guys bring justice to Oklahoma” movie, or something in that general vein. Certainly not as fictitious or fantastical as Alan Parker‘s Mississippi Burning, as Eric Roth‘s screenplay has always been closely based upon David Grann’s scrupulously researched 2017 book. But perhaps with a certain good guys-vs-bad-guys attitude.
But between Scorsese, Grann and Roth, how could Flower Moon possibly have been made with the idea of delivering an Oklahoma version of Parker’s 1988 thriller, which ignored many facts about the 1964 murder of three Civil Rights workers and reduced the African-American characters to people who grieved, cowered and sung hymns?
But then, three months ago, along came Flower Moon costar Lily Gladstone, who, in a Variety interview with Zack Sharf, seemed to suggest that Scorsese had, up to a point, made a film that hadn’t, in fact, sufficiently considered the Osage native point of view of the killings and the investigation of same.
Gladstone said that Scorsese “worked closely with the real-life Osage Nation to ensure his movie would properly represent the community. The result was that “the Osage Nation ended up positively changingFlower Moon from what Scorsese [had] originally planned.”
“The work is better when you let the world inform the work,” Gladstone explained to Sharf. “That was very refreshing how involved the production got with the [Osage Nation] community. As the community warmed up to our presence, the more the community got involved with the film.
“It’s a different movie than the one [Scorsese] walked in to make, almost entirely because of what the community had to say about how it was being made and what was being portrayed.”
Glenn Kenny: “That’s Gladstone’s perspective, shaped through that of Sharf, and in any event has nothing to do with reshoots. Scorsese and company were getting Osage input from well before the cameras started rolling.
“Look, man, I know how precious the ‘Native Americans strong-armed Scorsese into going woke’ narrative is to you, and I know you’re gonna stick with it through thick and thin, but just don’t pretend too much insider knowledge here.”
HE response: “So Gladstone misstated Scorsese’s creative strategy (i.e., before the alleged Osage Nation re-think) in order to celebrate the Osage Nation’s strength as a culture and to emphasize that their perspective on the 1920s murders was, thank God, crucially included at the 11th hour.
“You’re saying, in other words, that Scorsese had understood the entire Killers equation from the get-go, as had original author David Grann, and that neither of them needed woke tutoring as far as the Osage perspective was concerned.
“Gladstone, in short, was spinning her own impressions last January, and Sharf, a go-along wokester parrot, played along?
“Maybe so.”
Here, by the way, is a snap of the actual Ernest Burkhart and Mollie Burkhart (played by DiCaprio and Gladstone in the film)
Co-authored by the highly esteemed Jon Frosch, David Rooney, Sheri Linden, Lovia Gyarkye, Leslie Felperin and Jordan Mintzer, the piece highlights several brilliant, important, well-chosen films, but for the most part it’s a DEI checklist roster…the same kind of diverse balancing act assessment that N.Y. Times critics A.O. Scott and and Manohla Dargis began to be associated with starting about five years ago….gay, Black, women, Asian + steer clear of any white male influence whenever possible…gay, Black, women, Asian + steer clear of any white male influence whenever possible…wash, rinse, repeat.
The key question must always be, “If you discount the DEI aspect, how good are these films on their own bare-bones merit?”
Most of these critics understand this is a fair way to winnow and select, but they’re fearful of not doing the DEI dance because doing so could be interpreted as exclusionary, elitist, racist or old-schoolish. In the old days (i.e., before 2017) such lists were sometimes driven by attempts to reckon with the best-of-the-best based on purely cinematic, dramatic, daring or transcendent, soul-drilling terms. Now it’s all about identity politics and Twitter and terror…about being afraid to say what they really think because this might get them into trouble or cause some kind of ruckus. They know this deep down but will never admit it.
Here’s what they chose (HE agreement in boldface)…HE enthusiastically approves of 12THR picks:
Bottom 25: Weekend (fine), Black Panther (gimme a break!), Time (difficult incarceration story), Bright Star (Jane Campion, John Keats, Fanny Brawne), Pariah (Dee Rees, Brooklyn lesbian saga), Bridesmaids (culturally important but not really good enough to make a serious “creme de la creme” list), Things to Come (Mia Hansen Love, Isabelle Huppert), Grizzly Man (great Herzog), Never Rarely Sometimes Always (weak tea abortion saga), Pan’s Labyrinth (top-tier GDT), Summer of Soul (found-footage POC concert doc…stirring as far as it goes), I Am Not Your Negro (gripping James Baldwin doc), Children of Men (brilliant, classic), Wendy and Lucy (good but basically a sop to the Reichart cult), Lover’s Rock (not the best of the five Small Axe films — the best is Mangrove), The Favourite (good Yorgos Lanthimos costumer but calm down), The Social Network (brilliant), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (blistering lesbian romance, emotional wipe-out), The Return (I’m more enamored of Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan), Manchester by the Sea (grand slam), Marie Antoinette (please!), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Romanian classic), A Serious Man (magnificent defeatism, peak Coen Bros.), At Berkeley (Wiseman tribute doc), Y Tu Mamá También (classic Cuaron but “unbearably poignant”?). HE approval tally: 6.
Top 25: Call Me By Your Name (Guadagnino’s landmark romance), Timbuktu (Islamic nutters), 35 Shots of Rum (calm down), Before Sunset (not the best of Linklater’s relationship trilogy — that would be Before Midnight), Parasite (good but overrated — collapses when drunk con artists let the maid in and thereby ruin their whole con), Far From Heaven (commendable but overpraised Sirk tribute), Drive My Car (too long, too many cigarettes, exhausting, runs out of gas), Shoplifters (under-energized, over-praised), Talk to Her (magnificent Almodovar), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (fine), The Power of the Dog (no way in hell does this punishing slog of a film belong on this list), Wall-E (okay), Burning (corrosive and hard-hitting, but overlong and sluggish), Moonlight (way overpraised due to weak third act + too-muscular Trevante Rhodes, but Barry Jenkins‘ depiction of a world-class handjob on a beach will be long remembered), Boyhood (exceptional stunt film), Get Out (racially stamped Ira Levin zombie spooker…possibly the most overpraised film of the 21st Century), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (brilliant), In the Mood for Love (understated, appropriately respected romance, considerably aided by Chris Doyle‘s cinematography), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee‘s timeless classic about letting love slip away), Spirited Away (fine), Mulholland Drive (take away the spookiness and perversity and what’s left?), Zodiac (drop-dead brilliant investigation of an endlessly fascinating cold case), The Gleaners and I (never saw it), Inside Llewyn Davis (another serving of world-class downerism from the Coens) and Yi Yi (ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen it). HE approval tally: 6.
It’s great that Mitchell is singing and playing guitar and sounding pretty good, particularly in the wake of having suffered a brain aneurysm in late March of 2015. She was in fairly bad shape after that tragedy, but she’s recovered (or at least is recovering) to a significant degree, and praise be to God for this.
The key question to me is “is Joni still smoking?” Because that’s almost certainly what helped to bring about her aneurysm. She initially lost her ability to speak and walk, and still needs a little help getting around as we speak.
I was so concerned about Mitchell’s well-being in the wake of the aneurysm that I once hand-delivered an admonishing fan letter to her Spanish home in Bel Air. I insisted I was one of her biggest fans and begged her to think about vaping instead of sticking with tobacco.
Mitchell may have decided that life isn’t worth living without the pleasure of unfiltered cigarettes, but maybe not. She once said in an interview that she began smoking at age 9 or 10 or something. At a certain point the body just can’t take the nicotine and the toxins and complications will manifest.
It’s wonderful, in any event, that Mitchell has regained (or is in the process of regaining) her singing and guitar-playing abilities. She’ll turn 80 on 11.7.23.
Posted on 3.31.15: I attended a short, smallish concert that Mitchell gave at Studio 54 in October ’82 to promote “Wild Things Run Fast.” The crowd was not huge, maybe 150 or so, and I was standing fairly close and pretty much dead center. No female artist has ever touched me like Mitchell**, and I was quite excited about being this close to her.
I was beaming, starry-eyed and staring at her like the most self-abasing suck-up fan you could imagine, and during the first song her eyes locked onto mine and I swear to God we began to kind of half-stare at each other. (Some performers do this, deciding to sing for this or that special person in the crowd.) Her eyes danced around from time to time but she kept coming back to me, and I remember thinking, “Okay, she senses that I love her and she probably likes my looks so I guess I’m her special fanboy or something for the next few minutes.”
Mitchell was dressed in a white pants suit and some kind of colorful scarf, and she sang and played really well, and I remember she had a little bit of a sexy tummy thing going on. Sorry but that had a portion of my attention along with the songs and “being there” and a feeling that I’d remember this moment for decades to come.
A.O. Scott, the long-serving N.Y. Times critic (1999-2023) who’s shifting into book-reviewing, has tapped out a kind of farewell essay. Here are my reactions, including one unanswered question.
1. Why doesn’t Scott explain why he’s bailing? Does he feel like a burnt-out case? Okay, then say that and relate how he got to this point. What led to this presumed lethargy? What turned him off? Scott isn’t that old (56) but has reviewed films for the Times for roughly the same number of years that Vincent Canby did (23 or 24, give or take). So what’s the lowdown?
2. An unfortunate fact (and I take no pleasure in bringing it up) is that Scott, an excellent, highly perceptive critic for the better part of two decades, began to drink wokester Kool-Aid about three or four years ago, and in my humble view dented his rep to a proportionate degree. (Ditto Manohla Dargis.) On 1.17.22, I wrote about “a category of film lovers who have lifted off the planet so often and gone so far around the bend and outside of our solar system, caused for the most part by extra-passionate wokeness (which includes a rapt belief in the wondrous and transcendent benefit of abosrbing any and all films about POC characters, POC history and starring POCs), and who seem oddly committed to contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake (i.e., the Armond White syndrome). Due respect but after pondering A.O. Scott‘s recently posted list of the most award-deserving films of 2021, I have to acknowledge the possibility that even within his bizarre arena of N.Y. Times woke-itude, Scott may be even more of an eccentric than White, and that’s saying something.”
3. “Let’s not even mention Woody Allen,” Scott writes. No, let’s mention Allen and particularly Scott’s decision to wash his hands of this great Brooklyn-born artist, which for me was entirely foul and cruel and horrid. Allen is incontestably a great filmmaker — a man of considerable genius and relentless innovative creativity, a guy whose output has enhanced the quality and worldliness of American cinema over the last 55 years, and whose sterling reputation as a filmmaker will be remembered and cherished long after Scott and the other Allen denigrators have died and been forgotten.
4. Scott on Allen’s Match Point (’05): “It is the film’s brisk, chilly precision that makes it so bracingly pleasurable. The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen’s bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter.”
5. One of the finest opening paragraphs in the history of movie reviewing was contained in Scott’s 5.25.01 review of Michael Bay‘s Pearl Harbor: “The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II has inspired a splendid movie, full of vivid performances and unforgettable scenes, a movie that uses the coming of war as a backdrop for individual stories of love, ambition, heroism and betrayal. The name of that movie is From Here to Eternity.”
6. From Scott’s farewell essay: “I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, groupidentity and mobbehavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.”
“From a sensible center perspective, woke is a divisive and destructiveideology that aggressively pushes hardcore leftwing agendas into all aspects of entertainment while demonizing anyone who happens to be straight, white and male…undermining western cultural values, hijacking and destroying long-established characters and franchises and generally chipping away at everything that our culture is built on
“Raising awareness of social, cultural and environmental issues [obviously] isn’t a bad thing. Neither is encouraging people to look at the world for various perspectives. Or giving historically underrepresented groups a bit more visibility and attention. But pushing all of this stuff too hard, too aggressively or with ill intentions is having a damaging effect on modern entertainment…instead of encouraging people to broaden their minds and consider new perspectives, woke is basically about lecturing and browbeating them into making them think the way their creators want them to think…replacing one form of arrogant narrow-mindedness with a different one…instead of elevating marginalized groups, it’s insulting and demonizing everyone else….socio–politicalindoctrination with a thin veneer of entertainment wrapped around it.”
Until this morning I had somehow never heard, and had certainly never used, the slang term "bougie." Short for bourgeois, it means people with elite or pretentious airs who haven't earned the cred. The Urban Dictionary examples suggests it's primarily a Black culture term, but it's okay for guys like me to use it. A white female friend used it this morning.
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