“Everything” Will Be Nominated, Yes

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…but there’s no way in hell or on God’s good green earth that it comes even close to winning unless…unless!…a subtle intimidation campaign takes hold.

If you weren’t dazzled by Everything Everywhere All At Once, if you don’t worship it with all your heart and soul, and if you don’t understand the cultural importance of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s mostly infuriating film achieving the honors that its fans believe it absolutely deserves…if you’re anywhere close to the negative side of the ledger, as I am, you might be a closet racist.

Do you want to absolve yourself of any such notions, even while staring at yourself in the bathroom mirror? You know what to do.

From “Frequent Agonies of ‘Everything Everywhere’” (8.2.22):

“Most good scenes are rarely about what the subject matter is,” screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown, Shampoo, The Last Detail) once said. “You soon see the power of dealing obliquely or elliptically with situations, because most people [in real life] rarely confront things head-on.”

The finest, most realistic and effective screenplays, in other words, are mostly about the things that are not said. And when all the things that are not said and that finally need to be said are finally said…that’s the great catharsis of the movie.

The absence of this, to me, is what’s terribly, agonizingly wrong with Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s Everything Everywhere All At Once, which I’ve been avoiding for months but which I finally sat through last night.

It took me three and a half hours to get through this curiously successful A24 release. Because I needed breathers and time-outs. I needed air. I needed to talk things out with a friend who also had difficulty sitting through it but finally got there after three attempts. But I finally made it to the end, and I have to say that despite my anguish I absolutely loved the ending, or more precisely the last two lines. (I’ll explain in a minute.)

But my head had been aching from all that hammering, on-the-nose exposition, and enduring this gave me great pain. I don’t want to imagine Robert Towne’s response.

All those parallel universes and all that verse-jumping. The constant milking of the Matrix-like idea that there are multi-dimensional hallucinatory realms above, beyond and within our day-to-day regimens and banalities, and how the multiverse is being annoyingly threatened (here we go) by Stephanie Hsu‘s Jobu Tupaki, who “experiences all universes at once and can verse-jump and manipulate matter at will”, etc. And whose “godlike power has created a black hole-like ‘everything bagel’ that can potentially destroy the multiverse”…my head was splitting.

The pornographic overuse of martial-arts battles. Jamie Lee Curtis‘s over-acting as the IRS agent, and the more-more-more of it all, which made it feel all the more synthetic and gimmicky.

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Trump Aside, People Need A New Villain

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And nature abhors a vacuum.

One Choice

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One film to never, ever see again — a decision to be completely at peace with forever. And that film would be the bottom middle, man.

Did HE Community Just Blow This Off?

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The whirling dervishy George Miller, the Spock-eared Idris Elba, the British given-to-shuddering-orgasm Tilda Swinton…shut down like that. Not even given half a chance…bye! That’s harsh, man. Harsh and unfair. Because the adult relationship aspects really reach in and touch bottom.

Variety Casually Slanders Brad Pitt

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As a director, Angelina Jolie has been repeatedly drawn to stories about savage brutality visited upon innocent protagonists. Over the last 11 years she’s made four films in this vein.

They are In The Land of Blood & Honey (’11) — Serbs brutalizing Bosnian Muslims. Unbroken (’14) — Japanese soldiers brutalizing American POWs. First They Killed My Father (’17) — the fanatical Khmer Rouge brutalizing and murdering two million Cambodians in agrarian work camps.

And now her latest, an adaptation of Alessandro Baricco’s short novel “Without Blood”, about a young girl who witnesses the savage murder of her father and brother by his enemies, only to confront one of the killers as a middle-aged adult.

The film, due for release in late ’23, is set in a Mexico-like country during the early to mid 20th Century.

Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli has posted an interview with Jolie (8.26). They met while she was directing Without Blood at Rome’s Cinecitta Studios. Vivarelli doesn’t note the streak of fierce brutality that runs through all four of her films. He manages, however, to fling mud at Jolie’s ex-husband, Brad Pitt, with a slimey insinuation.

“Told in a series of flashbacks, Without Blood is a…complex work about violence, war and choices,” Vivrelli explains. Jolie: “This film raises different questions. There is no clear good and bad in this film, even though there is clearly bad, horrible, horrific and criminal behavior.”

Vivarelli’s next paragraph — a parenthetical — follows a train of thought: “This interview was conducted before an FBI report from 2016 leaked last week where Jolie alleged that Pitt assaulted her on a plane ride, leading to their divorce,” he writes.

In other words, with Jolie currently focusing on a film about “bad, horrible, horrific and criminal behavior,” she’s also grappling with memories of possibly similar behavior from her ex-husband aboard a private plane back in 2016.

This is called yellow journalism.

Not Prosecuting Trump Would Be A Form of Suicide

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From an 8.26 N.Y. Times editorial, “Donald Trump Is Not Above the Law“:

“Donald Trump’s unprecedented assault on the integrity of American democracy requires a criminal investigation.

“The disturbing details of his post-election misfeasance, meticulously assembled by the Jan. 6 committee, leave little doubt that Mr. Trump sought to subvert the Constitution and overturn the will of the American people. The president, defeated at the polls in 2020, tried to enlist federal law enforcement authorities, state officials and administrators of the nation’s electoral system in a furious effort to remain in power. When all else failed, he roused an armed mob that stormed the Capitol and threatened lawmakers.

“Mr. Trump’s actions as a public official, like no others since the Civil War, attacked the heart of our system of government. He used the power of his office to subvert the rule of law. If we hesitate to call those actions and their perpetrator criminal, then we are saying he is above the law and giving license to future presidents to do whatever they want.

“Aside from letting Mr. Trump escape punishment, doing nothing to hold him accountable for his actions in the months leading up to Jan. 6 could set an irresistible precedent for future presidents. Why not attempt to stay in power by any means necessary or use the power of the office to enrich oneself or punish one’s enemies, knowing that the law does not apply to presidents in or out of office?

“More important, democratic government is an ideal that must constantly be made real. America is not sustained by a set of principles; it is sustained by resolute action to defend those principles.”

Pugh’s Ace In The Hole?

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The word around the campfire is that Florence Pugh, currently grappling with a reputation as an arch-backed sorehead and something of an Attitude Mama because of her allegedly chilly and contentious relationship with Don’t Worry Darling director Olivia Wilde, is quite good in a non-showy way in Sebastián Lelio‘s The Wonder (Netflix), which will have its first domestic peek-out at Telluride.

Described last year as a “psychological thriller,” The Wonder is an adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s same-titled 2016 novel.

Synopsis: “Set in southern Ireland in 1859 over a period of two weeks, Lib Wright (Pugh) is a widow and a nurse — trained by Florence Nightingale, a veteran of the Crimean War. Wright travels to Ireland to observe 11 year old Anna O’Donnell, who has not eaten in four months. A local committee wants to know if this is a hoax or divine intervention, as Anna’s family claims. The child reports that she receives manna from heaven. Wright is out of place in Catholic Ireland and is convinced that the whole thing is a trick.”

To put it in the most banal terms imaginable, Pugh’s Wonder performance may “save” her from the Don’t Worry Darling debacle.

Don’t Crap A Crapper

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Asked about the Academy’s “inclusion standards,” which basically say that a given film will not be eligible for Oscars unless the cast and crew are seriously and specifically diverse (i.e., no films like Ordinary People ever again), Academy CEO Bill Kramer has been quoted by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg as follows:

“We don’t want to legislate art” — HE says bullshit. “That’s not what this is about” — ditto. “We want filmmakers to continue to make the films they want to make” — bullshit. “I’m very happy to announce that the best picture nominees from this past year all would have qualified under our inclusion standards” — terrific! “At the all-member meeting we’ll be talking more about that because that’s a big point of discussion for our members, and we want to be very clear that we don’t want this to be onerous or punitive — we want this to be collaborative” — bullshit.

The Academy’s inclusion standards are a form of institutional terror or, if you will, paranoid, watch-your-back virtue signalling. Because if you don’t support the inclusion standards 100% and with all your heart and soul, you’re either an out-and-out racist or a closeted one.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, posted this morning (8.26): “A friend of mine called the way the Oscars featured almost all Black performers and presenters as a ‘new kind of blackface.’

“The Academy is 80% white. America is just under 60% white. America is also 95% heterosexual. Americans believe in God by about 80%. These stats are starting to shift, no doubt. GenZ tends to be the generation that is more LGBTQIA, less religious, and more ‘woke’ for sure. But we’re still talking about the minority pop, not the majority.

“The Oscars can’t draw the majority because they are singularly obsessed with their outward image, as with most of the top 1% that runs Hollywood. They have almost ceased being able to tell good stories and now much find ways to tell good stories under the thumb of fundamentalism. It is wrong to police art in this way, and I don’t care what Twitter thinks about that. It is simply the truth, proven century after century. Dogmatic art is not art — it’s propaganda.

“Executives are deathly afraid of being called out for racism. It is bad press they don’t believe they can afford with an army of Orwellian Children Spies breathing down their necks. The Oscars, and much of the films that will pass their required standards, reflect the paranoia in the white community, not the actual power in that community. In other words, how much of it is simply ‘virtue signaling,’ and how much of it is actual change? And if it is change, what is it changing exactly?

“Yes, they are trying to legislate art. All the executives at all studios who make content are legislating art. They’re forcing artists to reflect a specific ideology that serves their newfound religion and gets them off the hook. Remember, the people at the top who hold power are still the same — across all institutions of power in this country. They are, therefore, allowing marginalized groups to be presented as proof that they are prioritizing activism.”