Give Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up a chance. I wasn’t Scott Mantz-ing when I called it “a crazy-ass Covid and climate-change comic allegory…a ballsy Strangelove-like satire that feels like an extended, gargantuan, improv-y, effects-laden SNL super-skit about massive self-delusion & self-destruction…really out there, righteously wackazoid, hits the mark a few times. As broad apocalyptic satires go, you certainly can’t say it doesn’t swing for the fences.”
Sunset at Calamigos Ranch — Latigo Canyon Road (near Kanan Dume Rd.) in deep Malibu — snapped a couple of hours ago by Tatiana.
A handicapper friend assures me that Penelope Cruz, star of Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers — a film that is 15 times better than House of Gucci, 10 times better than Spencer and far more emotionally rewarding than Being The Ricardos — is almost certainly good for a Best Actress nomination.
I hope so. I would certainly think so. I realize Cruz might not win for reasons having nothing to do with quality of delivery. But she needs to be nominated, at least.
I’ve seen the Almodovar twice and I know Cruz’s performance is the shit this year. She’s the absolute queen of her category. No other lead female performance comes close to plucking the emotional chords that she owns the patent on. She’s given the best female performance of the year. Don’t debate it, no question, put it to bed.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has Penelope in 2nd place as we speak. Feinberg Frontrunners: Kristen Stewart (Spencer); Penélope Cruz (Parallel Mothers); Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos); Lady Gaga (House of Gucci) and Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter).
I realize that in the myopic and strangely calculating award-season culture that we live in that some people are insisting otherwise…that Penelope is in the rear somewhere. They’re saying that Nicole Kidman (Ricardos) or Kristen Stewart (Spencer) or Lady Gaga (Gucci) are somehow better or at least more likely to win, partly because they’re backed by some heavy-hitter agencies and expensive campaigns.
Which is why I suspect that the best Cruz can expect is a Best Actress nomination. Because Oscar races are not so much about merit as muscle and power and primal audience longings and identifications. If it were my call I would give Cruz the Oscar now but she at least needs to become one of the five…c’mon.
I know that Pedro’s film doesn’t open until 12.24 but the big critics groups will begin voting soon. Somehow or some way the award-season heat has to start building in Cruz’s favor. I hope she gets there — her performances ‘is obviously much better than Kidman’s, Gaga’s and KStew’s — but she might not make it. I can feel it — she’s just not in the conversation the way the others are.
Repeating: Cruz’s Parallel performance is somewhere between 5 and 10 and 15 times better than all the other performances put together. It’s one of the finest efforts of her career, and yet if you talk to certain people her name is barely in the conversation. (David Poland actually believes that Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim is one of the top three contenders.) As we speak Cruz is regarded as a peripheral player, and she’s not — she’s the top.
This kind of humility from a big-name actor is relatively rare, at least as far as quoted interviews go. But of course, all successful movie stars know what their wheelhouse is about and that they need to stay within it. That's how their fans like it also.
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Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (UA Releasing, 11.24) is a cool, muted, decently made docudrama about how the Gucci family business gradually went downhill in the ’80s and ’90s, and how the 1995 murder of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) by killers hired by Maurizo’s ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), seemed to signify this decline.
The problem for me was one of expectation. Goaded by the trailers and that Patrizia Reggiani-slash-Lady Gaga money quote — “I don’t consider myself to be a particularly ethical person, but I am fair” — I was expecting Gaga to deliver a ruthless, high-camp, carniverous dragonlady — a new version of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest.
Alas, despite what Team Variety and the fawning Twitter whores are saying, that’s not what this movie is. It’s not out to make Reggiani some kind of fang-toothed pit viper. It’s actually about trying to portray her in a half-sympathetic light. And so House of Gucci is basically about how an admittedly ambitious woman reacts when she’s scorned and bruised and cast aside.
I was not a huge fan of most of the big grossers of 1976 — Rocky, A Star Is Born, King Kong, Silver Streak, The Omen, The Bad News Bears. I wasn’t even that much of a big believer in Hal Ashby‘s Bound for Glory (although I respected it). For me there were only five films that mattered that year — Network, All The President’s Men, Taxi Driver, Assault on Precinct 13 and Marathon Man. I still feel that way.
This photo ran in the Wilton Bulletin in early August ’76. It accompanied a story about a then-upcoming Save The Whales concert, which then-girlfriend Sophie Black (on my left) and I co-produced, and which was held on a hilly 52-acre farm owned by Sophie’s parents, David and Linda Cabot Black. The focus of the story was that a portion of the proceeds would be donated by Camp PIP, a non-profit that offered recreational facilities help to lower-income kids.
I must say that I was looking pretty good for a three-year-old. I turned four on 11.12.76.
For as long as he lives, Kyle Rittenhouse will be thought of as a kind of rightwing militia girlyman. If only he’d studied Point Blank and learned how to do the Lee Marvin thing…
Then again what happened doesn’t appear to have been motivated by anything more than raw, idiot-level nihilism. Brooks is reportedly a common criminal. True, Waukesha is an overwhelminglywhitebedroomcommunity, but there doesn’t seem to be any linkage between that fact and the recent Kyle Rittenhouse trial, which happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
In Robert Wise’s 1961 West Side Story as well as innumerable stage versions performed over the decades, the dance scenes are never acknowledged by passersby, much less performed for them. In fact, passersby barely exist.
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A Dallas Morning News spitball poll about the forthcoming Texas gubernatorial race (posted on Real Clear on Sunday, Nov. 11) indicates that the unaffiliated, un-woke Matthew McConaughey has an eight-point lead over Gov. Gregg Abbott (R.) — MM 43, Abbott 35. By contrast, Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke is currently six points behind Abbott — 45 to 39.
This is a totally wrong year for any progressive-left wokester candidate to run for anything. Except in the really blue areas.
Earlier today Sutton Frances Wells, born on 11.17.21, had her very first experience with the great outdoors.
Her parents, Jett and Cait, drove her to Verona Park in Verona, New Jersey, which is just north of West Orange. Dressed in a pink winter coat, knit gloves and winter hat and lying under a blanket in a BMW-grade stroller, Sutton was rolled around and given her very first opportunity to breathe in those vibrant New Jersey aromas.
HE to Jett: “Hey, she’s sleeping! Her first time breathing that nippy New Jersey air and she’s catching 40 winks.”
HE to Sutton: “C’mon, man. Breathe in a few lungfuls of outdoor air, marvel at the big blue sky, smell the grass and trees and savor the sounds of other people talking and barking dogs and whatnot. Once you’ve done that, then you can take a nap.”
Sutton to HE: “Hey, give me a break. I’m only four days old. I sleep a lot. Deal with it. Verona Park will presumably still be there when I’m older and a bit more rambunctious.”
There were two slightly awkward things about Jonathan Larson‘s romantic life in the years before his untimely death in January 1996.
One was that he was straight, and nobody likes the sound of that. The second was the apparent fact that Larson’s two most conspicuous girlfriends, cinematographer Victoria Leacock and a woman named Susan (nobody seems to know her last name), were descended from …uhm, European tribes. This doesn’t square with 2021 sensibilities, of course. But Tick, Tick…Boom director Lin Manuel Miranda remedied the situation by casting Alexandra Ship as “woke” Susan, and now everything’s cool.
In sum, it wasn’t Larson’s “fault” for failing to become emotionally entwined with a woman of color back in the ’80s and early ’90s. He simply didn’t know any better at the time. No need to beat a dead horse, water under the bridge, etc.
I gradually came to respect Lin Manuel Miranda‘s Tick Tick…Boom (Netflix, now streaming). I was even emotionally affected by it in the second half, but man, what a struggle. Mine, I mean.
Based on Larson’s 1990 stage musical of the same name, it’s about Larson himself (Andrew Garfield) struggling and feeling desperate and anxious and needing so hard to get his material produced and seen…to get up and over…he constantly sweats and strains and feels awful about not being a success at age 30, and the movie puts you right into the misery pit with the poor guy, and it’s no picnic, let me tell you.
Tick, Tick…Boom is a “musical based on a musical about writing a musical”, and I’m telling you that the first 20 or 25 minutes of this film, directed by Lin Manuel Miranda, will make you go “oh, no…please, no.” I was in agony. Garfield is pushing so hard, turning on the “charm” and emphatic personality, singing with a not-great singing voice, so much “sell” in his performance…buh-bo-buh-bo-bo!
Art isn’t easy, but watching a poor, exhausted, stressed-out guy trying to make good art isn’t easy either.
But after 30 or 40 minutes of torture I began to settle into the story and I began to feel and even identify with Larson’s pain. I’ve been there. In ’78 and ’79 I was poor as a churchmouse and living in a Soho cockroach flat and trying to get rolling as a movie critic and interviewer, and my theme song was Gerry Rafferty‘s “Baker Street.” (“And you’re cryin’, you’re cryin’ now”) I know all about that agony and fear and desperation so don’t tell me.
Incidentally “Baker Street” is a much catchier and more arresting tune than anything in Larson’s Tick Tick score. Sorry.
Friendo to HE: “I hate all of the people in this thing. People don’t talk like this in real life. It’s very 2021. They’re all talking in woke-speak. It’s the modern left’s idea of the perfect sensitive person movie, Except nobody will give a single shit about it.”
HE to Friendo: “I groaned when Susan, his LatinX-woman of color girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp), left him because he’s too consumed in his work. Earth to Susan: All creatively-driven types are consumed by their work. It goes with the territory. The real loves of Larson’s life were, of course, his music and Stephen Sondheim.
Friendo to HE: “I felt badly for his plight but this script is just terrible.”
HE to Friendo: “And for all of it, we don’t get the grand payoff that is Larson’s Rent….Rent is years away when the film ends. I took Jett with me to see Rent at the Nederlander when he was eight or thereabouts, and he wasn’t a fan.”
