It’s just been announced that the “next wave” of presenters at the 94th Oscars will include actress Stephanie Beatriz (who?), DJ & record executive DJ Khaled, singer-songwriter H.E.R., skateboarder Tony Hawk and Olympic gold-medal snowboarder Shaun White.
Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “Who are those guys?”
HE to Oscar producers Will Packer and Shayla Cowan: “Whadjoo guys do, invite some of your friends? I’m sorry but people who present Oscars have always been famous or at least accomplished within the motion picture industry. Is this is a mistake, these names? Is it a put-on?”
It’s been six months since the almost comically myopic Academy Museum (i.e., “Woke House“) opened. We all remember that the main priority of the curators out of the gate was to apologize for the industry’s many decades of pernicious racism and to celebrate women and POCs as well as current efforts in the service of equity and inclusion.
But it wasn’t long before people started saying “yes, yes…we all acknowledge that Hollywood has always been an evil racist cauldron that needs to be corrected and cleansed by visionary wokesters, and that the worst perpetrators of this fundamental evil (not to mention innumerable forms of sexism) were the white men who founded and built the film industry back in the early to mid 20th Century. But what about the fact that these guys — all of the big-studio owners were Jews — actually created this industry? Shouldn’t the fact that they built this industry from the ground up…shouldn’t that warrant some acknowledgement?”
As far as I could discern the response from Woke House curators was something along the lines of “yes, of course…the men who created this business deserve some credit and I’m sure we’ll get around to paying tribute to their pioneering spirit and industriousness, but the main thing to keep in mind is that they perpetrated a system of fiendish exploitation, making life miserable for people of color and God knows how many struggling actresses and would-be female filmmakers, and that generations of successive white men came along and strengthened this evil system, and it’s now up to us and other forward-thinking progressives to finally put a stop to this and lead the industry out of the darkness.”
This morning Woke House finally relented and announced that a year from now they’ll be debuting a section of the the Museum that pays tribute to the founding Jews. It’ll be called HOLLYWOODLAND. Here’s the official announcement:
“Opening in late Spring 2023, HOLLYWOODLAND will trace the history of filmmaking in Los Angeles back to its roots at the beginning of the 20th century, illustrating how and why the city became the world capital of cinema that it still is today. This immersive gallery will convey the evolving topography of Los Angeles along the timeline of the developing movie industry, allowing visitors to feel a tangible proximity to this rich history and encouraging further exploration of the city’s landmarks upon departing the Academy Museum.
“The exhibition will focus on the predominantly Jewish founders of the early Hollywood studio system, delving into how their personal narratives shaped the distinct characteristics of the movies their respective studios produced. It will foreground the ways in which the birth of the American film industry — and therefore the projected depiction of the American Dream — is truly an immigrant story.
“The exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Dara Jaffe in collaboration with Associate Curator of Digital Presentations Gary Dauphin.”
After living in this town since ’83, I decided yesterday that I would finally visit Julie Christie‘s Shampoo bungalow — the one owned or rented by Jack Warden‘s “Lester” for his mistress “Jackie” (Christie) to live in. I don’t need to familiarize anyone with the Act II scene that happens indoors (more specifically in the bathroom) or how the film ends on a since-built-upon plateau above it. The home is located at 2700 Bowmont Drive — up Coldwater, take a right on Cherokee. Shampoo was shot 47 years ago but the place looks more or less the same. Well, pretty much.
Is there anyone reading this who concurs? Anyone at all? I sure as hell don’t. CODA just won the WGA’s Best Adapted Screenplay — couple that with the PGA and SAG wins, and Davis surely understands that CODA has the Best Picture Oscar more or less in the bag, and yet he’s trying to sell the idea of a horse race. Odd.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is obviously brilliant, principled, impeccablycredentialed and abundantlyqualified to sit on the Supreme Court.
Today was just about opening statements. The rough stuff happens tomorrow and Wednesday. She should be queried about the ethnic hot-button issues. One of these is the fairness of implemented equity policies in education institutions, which many parents are outraged about. It’s fair to get into all this.
Certain Republican awful-awfuls will try to rough her up as best they can within the bounds of propriety, and she’ll get through it, and then she’ll be confirmed.
I didn’t mention the other night that The Beatles: Get Back (Disney +), Peter Jackson‘s three-part, 468-minute “documentary about a documentary”, won the PGA Award for Outstanding Producer of Non-Fiction Television. I know I did the right thing in slogging through this nearly eight-hour epic, and I’m glad it’s there for re-sampling any time I want. How about a 90-minute or two-hour summary reel with all the best stuff? Has anyone taken a crack at that?
A friend who never “does” Twitter decided last night to put on waders and step waist-deep into the cesspool.
Observation #1: “It’s like trying to have a conversation in The Land Of The Brain-Dead…but somehow these idiots all think like lawyers, so they’re nitpicking every point. It’s an impossible landscape. The very form of it is anti-truth. You can feel your soul being leached away.
Observation #2: “[Twitter is] poisoning our species, and yet everyone’s addicted to it! No wonder what’s happening is happening. Because it’s like trying to talk about something through a string and two paper cups, and the people who are disagreeing with you are, to a large extent, cultists.”
I myself have denied or dismissed the reality of what led to the bizarre Best Picture win of AroundThe Worldin80Days (‘56). And I think it’s time to come clean.
It wasn’t the meager cinematic merits of that Mike Toddfilm — a ten-ton, elephantine, all-star travelogue spectacle with Shirley MacLaine as an Indian princess — as much as the impact it had & the money it made — its success as an enormous, eye-filling, big-scale, reserved-seat Todd-AO event film that TV couldn’t hope to compete with — that’s what Academy members voted for.
The realization that TV had to be fought tooth and nail had only sunk in five or six years earlier — ThisIsCinerama (‘52) was the first costly attempt to win back audiences along these lines, followed by the CinemaScope (‘53) and VistaVision (‘54) processes, not to mention the flim-flam attempt to impose fake widescreen images with 1.85 aperture plates (April ‘53).
The massive competition of TV, and the possibly permanent diminishment of Hollywood’s share of the entertainment dollar —that’s what the industry had been facing since TV began to catch on in ‘48 or ‘49 and what it was still was facing in ‘56.
Having dealt with an alcoholic dad and coped with my own boozing issues until I embraced sobriety on 3.20.12, I’m not especially interested in films about alcoholics. Even without that history movies about drunks have always seemed more or less the same to me.
In Michael Morris‘s To Leslie, which recently screened at South by Southwest, Andrea Riseborough plays the 40ish Leslie, an all-but-hopeless drunk who’s nothing but rat poison to everyone she’s ever known or been close to, including her son.
The first 50 minutes or so are pure hell to get through, and then Leslie finally falls in with a couple of low-rent guys who run a 2nd-class motel. One of them, an amiable, low-key dude named Sweeney, is played by Marc Maron, and right away you’re asking yourself “is Sweeney a fucking idiot? Why has he offered Leslie a job as the motel’s maid? Why did he give her a chance? She’s obviously a lost cause and nothing but trouble.”
But he gives her a chance anyway, and after another relapse or two Leslie finally pulls out of the long downward spiral. But there’s so much ugliness in this film. I mean it’s really and truly awful.
Remember the opening scene in Bruce Beresford‘s Tender Mercies (’83), when Robert Duvall‘s Mac Sledge, a semi-retired country singer, is shouting and slugging someone and generally behaving like an abusive drunk? The ugly happens in one brief scene, and then Mac is on the mend for the rest of the film. But in To Leslie, Riseborough does the ugly for a whole damn hour before she starts to self-reflect and turn a corner. It struck me as too much to bear.
Riseborough’s performance is raw and scalding and frankly dispiriting. I believed her in every scene, but I also wanted to see her get hit by a truck. I didn’t believe Maron — I thought he was just laying on the charm with a shitkicker accent. But high marks for the other costars — Allison Janney, Andre Royo, Stephen Root, Owen Teague, etc.
The Lost City (Paramount, 3.25) is a lightweight, 100% synthetic “adventure” comedy in the vein of Romancing The Stone (’84). I didn’t hate it but there was no way to engage with or get lost in it. Not a chance. It’s pure jizz-whizz, and I just sat there in the fourth row like an overripe canteloupe or, you know, a half-eaten watermelon.
It did strike me as being primarily aimed at women and gay guys. No straight male could possibly give this film a thumbs-up or even a “whatev”. Because it’s emptiness incarnate. Harmless vapor.
When the show broke at the Century City AMC plex I was walking behind a youngish hetero couple, and as we hit the lobby the woman waved at a friend and gave her a thumbs-down gesture.
Right now the Rotten Tomatoes rating is 95%; Team Metacritic has given it a 67%. Most critics are shameless whores.
Based on the trailers I expected Brad Pitt to be some kind of supporting player. The promos made it clear that the leads are Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, but the expectation was that within the film’s helium-balloon, wank-off scheme Pitt would be a steady secondary principal. Early in the Dominican Republic section (i.e., 85% to 90% of the film) Pitt and Tatum make a good team. I was saying to myself “this is good…I like Pitt’s energy and scruffy dominance…if he hangs in there I might be okay with this.”
And then he’s suddenly gone. Right away I muttered to myself “to hell with this…no Pitt, no fun…eff this movie.”
None of the action scenes pass muster; none of the running-around-and-climbing-mountains stuff is even faintly credible. Half of the insert shots look like sound-stage sets, and a lot of the images look CG-enhanced. Most of the jungle photography was shot with a drone.
Daniel Radcliffe plays the yuppie bad guy — no killer lines, no funny scenes, doesn’t hold his own, boring to hang with.
One earmark of a sucky movie is that the bad guys have no personalities — no wit or flavor or stand-out attitude of any kind. The Lost City bad guys are the same exact stooges you’ve seen in a hundred other action films. Remember Richard Masur, Ray Sharkey and Anthony Zerbe‘s bad guys in Who’ll Stop The Rain (’78)? It never got any better than that. They were darkly funny, eccentric, deranged, vulnerable, and they never once winked.
All through the film Tatum is wearing a standard flat-top haircut (i.e., a little length on top). Near the end he suddenly adopts a butch cut (i.e., just this side of a shaved-head thing). It makes no sense that he would change his hair at the very end — he just does.
Poor Da’Vine Joy Randolph, whose affecting performance as Lady Reed in Dolomite Is My Name put her on the map, plays a spunky book publicist. She’s amusing from time to time, but I couldn’t get past one of the apparent ideas behind her casting in this film — i.e., to normalize her appearance.
Repeating: I didn’t hate this film. If some ticket-buyers have a good time with it, fine. I just kept saying to myself “who could give a shit about this?”
West Side Story star Rachel Zegler has been denied a seat at the Oscars. She spilledthebeansearliertoday on Instagram. It was Team Disney’s call, of course — God, do they look like assholes or what? If the Oscar producers were smart, they would turn this situation into a running gag. Arrange for Zegler to watch the show from a seat placed at extreme stage left, say, and then invite her to participate in a few random jokes as the show progresses.
