In all my decades of movie-obsessing, only one film has given me pause in the matter of male anatomy. Pause and a slight feeling of discomfort.
I must have been 14 or 15 years old as I watched this scene from Mr. Roberts in our family TV room, and I distinctly remember saying to myself, “Jesus, you can see Jack Lemmon‘s twin gonads right through his Navy khaki pants.” I found it distracting and distasteful.
If I’d been directing (not sure if it was John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy or Joshua Logan shouting “action” and “cut” when this scene was shot), I would have pulled Lemmon aside and told him to duck into wardrobe and put on one of those metal jockstraps that baseball catchers wear. That or stuff his underwear with a big wad of toilet paper, Mick Jagger-style.
HE’s all-time favorite Lemmon performances: Operation Mad Ball, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Days of Wine and Roses, The Fortune Cookie, Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome, Missing, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, JFK, Glengarry Glen Ross, Short Cuts, Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s (13).
I don’t know what to say about the just-announced DGA nominees for Best Direction of a Feature. I know what I can say…congratulations to the nominees! And special golden congrats to Nomadland‘s Chloe Zhao — obviously the designated winner barring a devastating meteor bombardment or a 8.0 earthquake on the day of the DGA ceremony — Saturday, April 10. Congrats also to The Trial of the Chicago 7‘s Aaron Sorkin (deserves the honor, probably won’t prevail), Mank‘s David Fincher (ditto), Minari‘s Lee Isaac Chung (not a chance) and Promising Young Woman‘s Emerald Fennell.
Why wasn’t Fennell nominated for Best First Feature? She would have been a likely winner if she had been, no? As it stands, the BFF nominees are One Night in Miami‘s Regina King, The Father‘s Florian Zeller, The 40-Year Old Version‘s Radha Blank, Sound of Metal‘s Darius Marder and — whut? — I’m No Longer Here‘s Fernando Frías de la Parra.
Hollywood Elsewhere agrees with the DGA’s decision not to nominate Max Barbakow, director of the deeply loathed Palm Springs — not for Best First Feature or Best Best Direction of a Feature. Movies like Palm Springs make he want to jump off tall buildings.
Good Morning Britain‘s Piers Morgan went off yesterday morning on Megan Markle, whom he apparently regards as something of a shifty personality who manipulates and cuts people off at random. (Morgan is one of those she’s cut off, he admitted.) He ranted too strongly as thousands of Twitter complaints were posted in response. Two days ago Harry told Oprah Winfrey that someone in the royal family had voiced a concern about the potential skin shade of their unborn Archie. This struck Morgan as incomplete and incendiary.
This morning Morgan and GMB weatherman Alex Beresford got into a long argument about the merits, and you can just feel the vibe — Beresford believes Morgan is some kind of unconscious toxic racist and Morgan feels this right back, and their argument was as fascinating as the one between Lester Maddox, Jim Brown and Dick Cavett on on 12.18.70.
Beresford: “I understand that you don’t like Meghan Markle. You’ve made it so clear a number of times on this program, and I understand that you had a personal relationship with Meghan Markle and she cut you off,” Beresford said. “Has she said anything about you after she cut you off? She’s entitled to cut you off if she wants to. And yet you continue to trash her.” In response Morgan lost his temper and walked off the set.
Hollywood Elsewhere apologizes for posting about the 2021 BAFTA noms three hours later than I should have:
All hail Sarah Gavron‘s Rocks, which has matched Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland with seven (7) BAFTA noms — the top two nom-getters. For a reason.
If nothing else, the 2021 Woke BAFTA noms have inspired me to finally see Gavron’s well-reviewed film, which premiered at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival, and received some sort of theatrical and/or streaming play in England last year.
Congrats also to BAFTA Best Actress nominees Bukky Bakray, the star of Rocks, and Wunmi Mosaku, the Nigerian-born star of a 2020 British horror film, His House, which is playing on Netflix. Other Best Actress BAFTA nominees are Radha Blank (The Forty-Year-Old Version) and Alfre Woodard (Clemency) plus Pieces of a Woman‘s Vanessa Kirby and Nomadland‘s Frances McDormand.
Does this roster strike anyone as a little…uhm, wokester-mandated? Maybe a little bit? As pointed out in the People’s Central Committee “conscious voter training” manual?
I’ll tell you what’s happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly unclear. Following last September’s BAFTA diversity review, which was prompted by the BAFTAS-so-white hashtag, the BAFTAs have become a People’s Central Diversity Committee thing, and if you don’t go along with it or think it’s a bit skewed….well, you need to get with the program.
The Lead Actor nominees are HE’s own Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal), the late Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Adarsh Gourav (The White Tiger), Anthony Hopkins (The Father), Mads Mikkelsen (Another Round) and Tahar Rahim (The Mauritanian).
I wasn’t exactly riveted by Gourav’s performance (too many blank smiles, didn’t care for the outdoor-pooping scene) and I thought Rahim’s performance was….well, okay but oddly passive. No issues with these guys being nominated, of course, but we all know what’s going on here. As HE’s friendo #1 says, “It’s the mandated woke thing, the obsessive ritual embrace of POCs, the shunning of white male actors. Ordinary people can spot this from a mile away.”
In fact let’s turn the show over entirely to friendo #1 and friendo #2…..take it away!
Friendo #2: “The BAFTAs went full equity. They did not trust their own members to choose the nominees for Best Director or the acting categories, which were selected by a jury, and the jury wasn’t even entirely composed of BAFTA members. They did this because they were called racists last year. It is just so self-serving. The idea is it’s supposed to be a competition where voters pick what they like best. But they removed that part of it and simply inserted the most diverse nominees in those categories. That is a perfect description of equity. It is simply not right to pretend to have a competition where you micro-manage or ‘cheat’ your way into good headlines. Why would anyone want that to be their achievement? Selected to make BAFTA look good? They want a pat on the back, fine, give it to them. But let’s not pretend these are competitive in any way. Why would anyone want that?”
Friendo #1: “They are trivializing the awards season right out of existence.”
Friendo #2: “And if you look at Film Twitter right now you will see the typical virtue signalers are out in force. I’m sure Mark Harris is going to pretend these are legit, white saviors on the loose.”
Friendo #1: “[They seem to be saying] it was only ‘racial bias’ that was preventing a micro-movie that no one cares about and that would never in a million years have been an awards contender like The Forty-Year-Old Version from getting the recognition it deserved!! Mark Harris is all in on this stuff. He’s become a black-armband-wearing cultural Gestapo agent, who mocked the canceling of those Dr. Seuss books by saying they were books ‘no one wanted any more.’ No one! Absolutely no one! And he gets to decide!”
Friendo #2: “Seriously this assumes that everyone is wrong about worth and that notions of ‘quality’ themselves are driven by white supremacy. That changes the whole definition of what is ‘good’ because white people can’t be trusted to judge quality. It’s completely insane. The BAFTAs should say ‘because we’re racists we’re going to stop having film awards and now we’re going to select by a woke jury the right contenders.’”
Friendo #1: “That’s exactly what they’re saying. With one rather luscious irony built in. The people who are making this judgement (about the cosmic racial historical fallacy of the judgment of white people)…are white people! What’s going on now with the BAFTAS, the Oscars and even the Globes…what’s going on is that the film world has stopped having film awards. They’ve swapped in something else…the Woke Feel Good If You’re a Person of Color Awards!
For the last five or six years Norwegians have been cutting their teeth on the disaster genre. First came Roar Uthaug‘s The Wave (’15), which I enjoyed and admired. Then John Andreas Andersen‘s The Quake (’18), which I didn’t see. And now Pål Øie‘s The Tunnel (aka Tunnelen), which opened in Norway in December 2019. It naturally reminded me of Rob Cohen and Sylvester Stallone‘s Daylight (’96).
The Tunnel (Samuel Goldwyn) begins streaming on 4.9.21.
IMDB user review: “To be honest, it’s not that great. No big-star cast, no fancy special effects but somehow i enjoyed it.” — Fella_shibby.
“Obviously built on dismissive racial stereotypes, this Mel Blanc-Jack Benny routine was regarded as hilarious back in the day. If I were to really let my guard down I’d admit that it’s still half-funny now, albeit in a lame, stupid-ass way. Four years ago a YouTube commenter named Armando Verttisaid “I’m Mexican, and I find this SO FUCKING FUNNY!” It shows how different American attitudes were back in the Eisenhower-Kennedy days. (The sombrero-wearing guy was Mel Blanc, who voiced all the big WB cartoon characters — Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, etc.) Will I get into trouble for posting this? I’m just saying ‘this is how it was.'”
The tide began to turn in the mid to late ’60s. Bill Dana dropped his Jose Jimenez routine in 1970.
The ten nominees for the Producers Guild of America’s Darryl F. Zanuck Award (equivalent to the Best Picture Oscar) are Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Judas and the Black Messiah, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Mank, Minari, Nomadland, One Night In Miami, Promising Young Woman, Sound Of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7. The shafted include The Father (easily one of the most carefully crafted alternate-reality films I’ve seen this century, one that doesn’t so much flip between reality and fantasy as one that deals old-man fantasy cards off the top and bottom of the deck) and News of the World. The champ will almost certainly be Nomadland. I’d be down with Chicago 7 becoming a surprise winner. The fact that Sound of Metal is the most spiritual film of the bunch…unfortunately that’s neither here nor there. I wish it were otherwise.
Everyone knows what it means to “do a Norbit” — it means possibly ruining your chances of winning an Oscar (as Eddie Murphy arguably did in 2006 and early ‘07) because you’ve given a downmarket, verging-on-hard-to-take performance in a coarse popcorn film released during award season and more precisely in the dumping ground of January and February.
Richard Brody Bulletin: Murphy’s Norbit performance is the 17th finest of the 21st Century.
Brody: “DiCaprio is the most paradoxical of actors. A star since he was a teenager, he built his career around his charisma and his gift for mimicry; in most of his early performances, he seemed to be impersonating a movie star, and slipped frictionlessly into his roles as if they were costumes, regardless of the physical difficulty they involved. With The Wolf of Wall Street, he finally achieved his cinematic apotheosis. In the role of Jordan Belfort, a super-salesman and super-con-man whose hedonistic will to power is one with his consuming fury, DiCaprio seemed to tap deep into himself, even if in the way of mere fantasy and exuberant disinhibition. He so heatedly embraced the role’s excesses that they stuck to him; he flung himself so hard at its artifices that he shattered them and came through as more himself than he had ever been onscreen; he and his art finally met.”
Jordan Ruimy: “Richard Brody is the Armond White of ultra-progressive cinematic Bernie Bros.”
I saw Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount, 12.25) for the second time last night, and it felt just as wild and manic as it did the first time. (And without an ounce of fat — it’s very tightly constructed.) And yet it’s a highly moral film…mostly. Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and all the rest are never really “in the room” with these depraved Stratton Oakmont brokers. They’re obviously juiced with the spirit of play-acting and pumping the film up and revving their engines, but each and every scene has an invisible subtitle that says “do you see get what kind of sick diseased fucks these guys were?…do you understand that Jordan Belfort‘s exploits redefined the term ‘asshole’ for all time?”
Why, then, did I say that Wolf is “mostly” moral? Because there’s a subcurrent that revels in the bacchanalian exploits of Belfort and his homies. It broadly satirizes Roman-orgy behavior while winking at it. (Or half-winking.) Unlike the Queens-residing goombahs in Goodfellas, whom he obviously feels a mixed affection for, Scorsese clearly doesn’t like or relate to the Stratton Oakmont guys. But the 71 year-old director also knows first-hand how enjoyable drug-abuse can be for cocky Type-A personalities in groups, and he conveys this in spades. Wolf is clearly “personal” for Scorsese. Like everyone else who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, he is believed to have “indulged” to some extent. (Whatever the truth of it, 1977’s New York, New York has long been regarded as a huge cocaine movie.) One presumes that Scorsese is living a sensible and relatively healthy life these days, but boy, does he remember!
From an English perspective, the Harry and Meghan story was always a primal one. We’ve all been educated to ignore and/or disdain issues concerning blood, tradition, ethnic heritage and tribal identity, but deep down many focus on these regardless. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex knew they were rattling that cage, and certain odious reactions from Harry’s family and the British tabloid press were enough to persuade the 30something couple to pull up stakes, leave England and set up a new base of operations in Montecito.
If Jackie Gleason‘s Minnesota Fats was watching last night’s Oprah, Meghan and Harry interview from the TV lounge at Ames Billiards, he’d probably say, “Big John? You think these kids are hustlers?” And then he’d smile and chuckle. And Big John would answer, “Yeah, hustlers but the snowflake kind.”
This morning (3.7) producer Robert Weide, Woody Allen‘s most exacting and persuasive defender, posted a fresh essay about Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick‘s strongly condemning, flagrantly unbalanced Allen v. Farrow.
Titled “The Interview That Never Happened“, the article was initially composed for “a major online publication” that wanted some balancing (i.e., mitigating) information and viewpoints as part of a piece on the HBO Max series. But then the publication changed course, Weide reports, and didn’t want to use his balancing info after all.
Weide knows all the ins and outs of the Woody, Mia, Dylan and Soon-Yi history, and the essay provides several sharp retorts to Dick and Zeiring’s assertions about Allen’s behavior and whatnot during the early 1990s.
Weide regards the filmmaking partners as “the winners of the Leni Riefenstahl Lifetime Achievement Award,” and the doc itself as “a one-sided hatchet job.” He’s not wrong about the latter.
However, at the beginning of paragraph #2 Weide states that he told the editor of the “major online publication” that he “wasn’t watching the series, but had heard reports from others who had seen all four episodes via press links.”
Nope — not good enough. The first three episodes of Allen v. Farrow are accessible now. All he has to do is turn on HBO or download the HBO Max app and watch them. As much as Weide knows the case from every conceivable angle, he can’t continue to dispute the content of Allen v. Farrow (which he has an absolute responsibility to do) without watching it.
HE congratulates Max Barbakow‘s Palm Springs, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and opened commercially last July, for winning the Critics Choice award for Best Comedy.
I don’t understand how anyone could’ve voted for this Sundance glee club film over Judd Apatow‘s The King of Staten Island, far and away a much better effort in terms of character, ground-level realism, dramatic construction and ace-level writing, is beyond me. Or Borat 2, for that matter.
It’s an indisputable fact that Palm Springs isn’t particularly good — a labored, haphazardly written, unfunny and occasionally callous thing. Here’s to a truly great time-loop comedy that was released 28 years ago, and to the judgment of today’s Critics Choice members. Here’s HE’s 7.10.20 review.
