A few days ago Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling posted a chat with Parallel Mothers star and Best Actress contender Penelope Cruz. I meant to post it right away, but I let other stuff overwhelm and I failed to muster the discipline…my deepest apologies.
But this really has to be said and withoutequivocation to all Academy members: Penelope Cruz gave the deepest, richest, most emotionally fulfilling lead female performance of 2021…by far. Way, way above the realm of her illustrious competitors (Kidman, Gaga, Stewart, Chastain, Colman). You simply can’t watch Parallel Mothers and not come to this very conclusion. It’s not possible — not if you’re honest with yourself.
Remember that Penelope has already won 2021 Best Actress awards from the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the San Diego Film Critics Society as well as the Venice Film Festival’s Best Actress award last September.
I’m going to stick this post to the top of Hollywood Elsewhere this weekend, and there’s nothing in it for me ad-wise. The Sony Classics team has been minimally responsive to my words of praise over the last two or three months. This is just me, my action…Penelope Cruz is the absolute soul mama of 2021 Best Actress contenders.
Durling: “This is the greatest performance by an actress of 2021 and that she needs to be nominated! Nomination voting is happening as we speak and we need to get Penelope among the five! Listen to her answer the last question (23:25) about working with Pedro Almodovar, on the last day of shooting…so heartfelt.”
“Possibly The Worst Film of All Time,” posted on 1.24.19: “Heavy-handed camp about Hollywood — an attempt to fuse Sunset Boulevard, Vertigo, The Barefoot Contessa and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Peter Finch plays a Svengali-like movie director. His great star, the glamorous foreigner Lylah Clare, died mysteriously a few hours after marrying him, and now he is turning a young American actress (Kim Novak) into Lylah. The stale, gaudy script (from a teleplay by Robert Thom and Edward De Blasio) provides roles for Coral Browne as a bitch columnist, Rossella Falk as a predatory European lesbian, and Valentina Cortese as a designer.
“Maybe an amusing macabre pastiche could have been made of it if the director, Robert Aldrich, hadn’t been so clumsy; it’s a static piece of filmmaking. With Michael Murphy, George Kennedy and Ernest Borgnine, who has rarely been worse — he demonstrates his shouting range.” — Pauline Kael on Robert Aldrich‘s The Legend of Lylah Clare (’68).
Roger Ebert wrote the film was “awful…but fairly enjoyable“, while Life‘s Richard Schickel felt that the film would catch on as a cult classic because it was “not merely awful…it is grandly, toweringly, amazingly so…I laughed myself silly at Lylah Clare, and if you’re in just the right mood, you may too.”
At various times, director Robert Aldrich blamed Novak’s performance and bad editing for the film’s failure. But in 1972, Aldrich said “I think there are a number of faults with” the film. “I was about to bum rap Kim Novak, when we were talking about this the other day, and then I realized that would be pretty unfair. Because people forget that Novak can act. I really didn’t do her justice. But there are some stars whose motion picture image is so firmly and deeply rooted in the public’s mind that an audience comes to a movie with a pre-conception about that person. And that pre-conception makes ‘reality” or any kind of myth that’s contrary to their pre-conceived reality impossible.
Daniel Roher’s Navalny (CNN Films) is an utterly fascinating study of Vladimir Putin’s nearly lethal persecution of chief opposition leader Alexei Navalny over the last two or three years. At Putin’s direction, Navalny (whose English is as good as Tatiana’s) is currently doing time in a correctivecolony in Vladimir Oblast.
In 2020 Navalny was poisoned in Tomsk, Siberia with an agent called Novichok. He recovered in Berlin and returned to Russia in early ‘21. Russian government goons forcibly and brutally led away Navalny supporters at Moscow’s Sheremetyevoairport; security guys arrested Navalny when he landed.
The doc appears to reliably identify three thugs involved with the poisoning incident, names and all, in apparent cahoots with a Russian security cabal of some kind. The thugs infected Navalny by dosing his underwear. In a bizarre, breathtaking sequence, Navalny even impersonates one of the would-be assassin’s collaborators during a phone call (actually a series of calls) and extracts incriminating information.
Navalny is currently looking at a couple of decades in prison. The conspiracy is proven, it’s all out in the open, Russia is a sham democracy, Putin is a killer and none of it matters — Putin runs the country like a mafia boss, and Navalny is in a political concentration camp. So it goes.
The east-coast news outlets always over-sell coming snowstorms. Before it arrives it’s always a blizzardapocalypse and historic hardship on the way, and then the snowflakes begin and nine times out of ten it’s not so bad.
“Just an average snowfall,” says Jett (below and giving Sutton her very first snowstorm exposure).
Any way you slice it snowstorms are perfect before the snow trucks start scraping the roads, before the snow shovels and foot-prints disturb the purity and mess it all up.
Rod is either describing the seething Montana closet-case cowboy drama with the cut-hand anthrax climax or the red Saab, cigarette-smoking, Justin Chang-worshipped Japanese grief monkey movie.
“…and a large left contingent that refuses to call them out for this. [We’re] in this ridiculous new era of mind-numbing partisanship where if I keep it real about the nonsense in the Democratic party, it makes me an instant hero to Republicans.
“The same thing happened in reverse to Darth Vader‘s daughter, Liz Cheney, who is now a hero to liberals simply because she recognizes that Biden did not steal the last election….simply acknowledging reality is now seen as a profile in courage.
“When normal people read that San Francisco has basically legalized shoplifting, they think Democrats have gone nuts. It’s not my fault that that the party of FDR and JFK is turning into the party of LOL and WTF….making Mr. Potato Head gender-neutral and now an [Apple] emoji for pregnant men.”
Wanna be starting’ somethin’? We need a third major singer-songwriter to dump Spotify. That’ll make it easier for the fourth snd fifth to join the cause.
This evening I caught a 35mm projection of Frank Perry’s PlayItAsItLays at the Los Feliz branch of the American Cinematheque. Four days ago I said I was very worried that they might show a pink print or one full of scratches. To my great surprise and delight tonight’s print was damnnearperfect — clean and smooth, only a few barely noticeable scratches at the end of the reels. Amazing! It was like time-travelling back to ‘72 and watching it a week or two after opening day. Plus good sound. Apologies to A.C. management for my previous lack of faith.
The basic idea here (and it’s not mine!) is that Shelley Winters‘ more-or-less innocent victim character in A PlaceInTheSun (’51) is irksome if not profoundly irritating, and that…well, read Mr. Ormsby‘s reaction.
QuestiontoHEcommunity: What other significant characters whose death or removal have you found yourself wishing for?
Official Showtime copy: “Super-Pumped is about “the roller-coaster ride of Uber, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful and most destructive companies, told from the perspective of the company’s CEO Travis Kalanick, who is ultimately ousted in a boardroom coup after tense internal and external battles that ripple with unpredictable consequences.”
If this was a one-off, Super-Pumped might be analogous to The Social Network — another story of a smart but obnoxious mover-and-shaker who launches an enormously successful company with a new idea. But no — it’s an anthology series from Brian Koppelman and David Levien, based on the same-titled 2019 book by Mike Isaac.
The strong cast includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kyle Chandler, Kerry Bishé, Babak Tafti, Mousa Hussein Kraish, Hank Azaria, Elisabeth Shue and Uma Thurman.
During her ascendant, hot-rocket period (’85 to ’92), Sinead O’Connor was one of the greatest rockers ever — a ballsy poet, provocateur, wailer, screecher, torch carrier…a woman with a voice that mixed exquisite style and control with primal pain. She was / is magnificent. I still listen to The Lion and the Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, and I still love “Madinka”, “Jerusalem”, “Troy” and “Nothing Compares 2 U”…all of it, the primal energy, the shifting pitch of her voice, the Irish punk banshee thing…wow.
It doesn’t matter that this happened 30 to 35 years ago, and that O’Connor has lived a convulsive, ebb-and-flow life ever since…one torrential spew or tussle or throw-down after another…or that she now performs in Muslim robes (having converted two or three years ago)…what matters is that from age 19 through 26, or for roughly eight years, O’Connor was a blazing art-rocker of the first order and an unstoppable historic force…like Bob Dylan was between ’61 and the motorcycle accident + Blonde on Blonde crescendo of ’66.
Kathryn Ferguson’s Nothing Compares, a 96-minute doc that I saw late yesterday afternoon, is mainly about O’Connor’s rise, peak and fall over that eight-year period. (The last 30 years are acknowledged but mainly in the credit crawl.) Sinead’s climactic crisis, of course, was that infamous mass rejection that followed her defiant “tearing up the Pope photo” performance on a 10.3.92 airing of Saturday Night Live, which then was followed by the booing she received at a Dylan 30th Anniversary tribute concert in Madison Square Garden about two weeks later.
She never recovered the magic mojo.
Ferguson’s doc says three important things. One, Sinead’s fiery temperament came from a horribly abusive childhood, principally due to her monstrous mother (who died in a car crash in ’86), and as a musician she radiated such a bruised, scarred and beat-to-hell psychology that…well, blame her awful mom and her shitty dad also. Two, her peak period was magnificent, and if nothing else the doc will remind you of this. Three, Sinead was right about the Pope, or rather the institutional abuse of children at the hands of pedophile priests, and so she was way ahead of her time. (The Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team made a huge splash with their ’02 report about the Catholic church hiding the criminal misdeeds of priests abusing Boston-area children, and of course Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight came along in ’15.)
O’Connor has soldiered on and kept plugging for the last 30 years, and obviously there’s an intrepid aspect and bravery in that, and yet Ferguson ignores the blow-by-blow — the lurching, shifting, sporadic turbulence that has marked O’Connor’s life ever since (not including the devastating suicide of her son Shane earlier this month, which happened well after the film had wrapped).
Side observation #1: The 55-year-old O’Connor doesn’t appear in the doc as an on-camera talking head, although she narrates a good portion of it. I have to say that the deep, guttural sound of her present-day voice — honestly? — sounds like a dude’s. Booze, cigarettes, whatever…the speaking voice she had in interviews from the late ’80s and early ’90s is gone.
Side observation #2: The Prince estate refused to allow Ferguson to use “Nothing Compares 2 U”, as the song was authored by Prince and owned by the estate. What a dick move! A low-budget doc that pays devotional tribute to O’Connor and the Prince estate refuses to allow her most famous recording to be heard? Jesus…this has to be one of the lowest scumbag moves in rock-music history.
Side observation #3: Who were those assholes who booed O’Connor at a Dylan concert, of all things? Her manner of conveyance was overly blunt, agreed, and she probably should have toned it down, but c’mon, her Pope protest was about protecting children from abuse and pain and thousands of Dylan fans fucking booed her?
