Somehow, out of all of the controversy and debate following Stone winning over Gladstone (easily the more contented Stone), I have to say that I was even more shocked to see that Cillian Murphy is the first Irish actor to win Best Actor.  It's one of those things where you have to stop in your tracks and think about for a second.  "That can't be right".  Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris?  Right, neither ever won.  Gabriel Byrne?  Certainly has the talent but never the right role.  Liam Neeson?  Beat by Tom Hanks in '94.  Colin Farrell?  Lost to Brendan Frasier somehow.  (Has anyone actually seen The Whale?)

I suppose there's always the disconnect between actual Irish actors and those Americans of Irish descent (Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, Jack Lemmon).  Still, a strange precedent for 2024.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

Has anyone actually seen The Whale?
 

I have, and I think I feel pretty comfortable calling it terrible. Like shockingly, obnoxiously bad.

And I don't think Fraser should have won over Farrell, but he definitely wasn't the problem with the movie. He is actually fairly decent, especially when you consider how bad a lot of the dialogue and direction is in the film.

Rock wrote:

I saw a clip of The Whale that I understand was pretty representative. Not gonna lie, it made me really uncomfortable. Probably unfair to write off a movie based on a few minutes out of context, but I can’t imagine sitting through the whole thing.

I bet it isn't remotely unfair for you to judge it on those minutes. In fact, watching a fragment of it might get you to believe that it isn't as grotesque and pandering as it is. Or how it wants us to spend our time with this caricature of a fat person who rolls over to the fridge and stuffs five cakes into his face with his bare hands every time he gets sad. And then demand the audience feel sad for this annoying tit while he's doing it. And this isn''t even getting into how this serious drama is structured like a sit com where people keep popping in like Kramer to continue the stupid charade going a little longer. Or the bad dialogue. Or the highschool level symbolism it employs as a crutch in every scene. Or, or, or, or to inifity.

I was almost astonished how bad it was. I hadn't read anything of it beyond an interview with Fraser a few months before it was released where they were treating the film like it was going to be a revolutionary Citizen Kane like accomplishment, so I was just shocked with what I was watching. Truly one of the worst things I've seen since I moved to Hamilton.

Somehow, I can see I didn't give it one star, which I probably should have. And I think that is because of Fraser alone, even if his performance has a lot of problems with it too. Yes, he definitely sculpts a character you want to slap in the face at all the wrong moments, especially when he giggles like the Pillsbury doughboy everytime he gets poked in the stomach. But somehow, right at the end, he does knocks it out of the park with the big Oscar bait scene that still manages to be effective, regardless of the fact that it is also pretty obnoxious in how desperately it tries to get the audience to cry. It worked on me, and I resent that it worked on me, but that is an accomplishment in itself to create any genuine emotion in a movie as artificially and as contrived and misguided as this one is.


 

In regards to the Kenneth Anger snubbing, a great article on his contribution to film history, by a movie reviewer I generally ignore.

https://variety.com/2023/film/columns/kenneth-anger-tribute-influence-scorpio-rising-hollywood-babylon-1235626052/

Jinnistan wrote:

Yeah, I didn't know Gleiberman was such a kink.

It almost makes you wonder how maybe some of these people might be more interesting critics if they were willing to make themselves vulnerable with the things they say. To actually reveal something about why movies matter to them. To say more than nothing.

 

Cannes is officially underway, and not a moment too soon we also got another anonymously-sourced hit piece on Megalopolis just prior to its world premiere.  Turns out that Coppola is a bit of a hugger and cheek pecker.  He's Italian!  He also smokes weed!  And several people on the film crew seemed to have a problem with Coppola's "old school" ways of not using CGI, preferring instead to do more work-intensive in-camera effects.  Film crews don't like to work!  They also get miffed when Coppola occasionally has them re-do their shoddy work.  And they had to come out with all of this anonymously because Coppola would get mad and blackball them all from future employment because Coppola totally has that kind of power in modern Hollywood which is why he just made a self-financed film outside of the studio system that no studio wants to distribute.

....

In what is becoming an annual tradition, Iran is persecuting another one of its directors who have a film in the festival, this time Mohammad Rasoulof, director of The Seed of the Sacred Fog, who last week had to go into exile in Europe to escape an 8 year prison sentence after the Iranian government demanded that he withdraw the film from the festival.  Rasoulof will attend the festival, so let's hope security will be scanning for knives.

.....

Among the classics and restorations, the festival will open with the brand new print of Gance's Napoleon.  A number of other legacy screenings will be Chantal Ackerman's documentary American Stories: Food Family and Philosophy and Ousmane Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye.  Also Melville's Army of Shadows, Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer (have not seen), Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Wenders' Paris Texas, Scorsese's After Hours, De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, Miyazaki's Porco Rosso, Demy's Umbrellas of Cherbourg, as well as Gilda, Johnny Got His Gun, Sugarland Express, Armour of God II, Trainspotting and bunches of other stuff.
 

Am I a bad person for not thinking anyone felt seriously threatened or traumatized by an 85-year-old man well known for unusual working methods, or that having a possibly disorganized set isn’t a cancellable offense?

Have I ever mentioned what happened to the bass player of hardcore punk band Soul Glo here before?

He was ejected from the band after allegations he sexually assaulted and (in some media reports) raped another man.

Well that sounds fair. At least until you realize the supposed rape was one of 'uninformed consent'. Basically, he didn't tell the person who slept with him (with consent) that he had a boyfriend. This person doesn't like to be the 'other man', so he felt he wouldn't have said yes if he knew. So he publically called him out for sexual assault (and some newspapers ran with the word 'rape')

Is this a dick move? Sure. Do both parties, both the boyfriend and the one night stand have a right to be mad or even hate him? Sure. But should we be reporting this as a rape in headlines, and should he lose his job just as his band broke, because he is a bad boyfriend? Get out of fucking town.

It all gets back to exactly what I said to pluckylump ten years ago. Nothing good comes from diluting what the word rape means. I remember him laughing at me when I made the obviously ridiculous claim that if someone felt sexually violated by an extremely vulgar obscene phone call, if they could call that a rape as well (he claimed how the victims feels is all that mattered in defining what rape was). He said I was being absurd and making light of the situation we were discussing. But now here we are, with people claiming that a guy who cheats is now equal to a rapist. They both get branded with the same terminology, so how can we differentiate. And frankly, as far as I'm concerned, an obscene phone call is considerably worse than this.

But what do I know. I'm just a rape apologist, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
 

What I want to know is if there is a space in between  people honestly trying to not say or do the wrong things, and every one else understanding sometimes this won't happen (because it's impossible), and not crumbling into dust the first moment something happens they don't like or that makes them feel uncomfortable or that forces them to actually work hard at work that probably should be hard in the first place?

Or should society and everything that comes with it just decay because existing with other people, all of them with different ideas and feelings and work ethics, is just too difficult?

Also, is this all just empty and fairly normal employee griping being elevated to something more for the exact reasons Jinnistan has already pointed out. That this is simply a film somebody, somewhere, wants to kill for both its existence and its message.

I'll sign up for the newsletter on that conspiracy theory.

 

I'm going to have to start restricting these mod privileges....

crumbsroom wrote:

Rock wrote:

Am I a bad person for not thinking anyone felt seriously threatened or traumatized by an 85-year-old man well known for unusual working methods, or that having a possibly disorganized set isn’t a cancellable offense?

I think it's more than fair for people to say this shouldn't be at a workplace, and I think it's also fair to understand that this was upsetting to some people.

But also, at the same time, not all offences are created equally, and the notion that we have to treat people who deal with this fairly minor kind of behavior as victims that we need to step gently around, otherwise they'd be retraumatized all over again is....honestly....fuck off.

Some of these complaints are particularly egregious, like those about Coppola's insistence on using practical effects rather than CG.  "So he [Coppola] spends literally half of a day on what could have been done in 10 minutes."  What the fuck do you care?  You're getting paid either way!!!  It makes me wonder how many of these grips even worked longer than 10-15 years ago and are incapable of comprehending non-digital filmmaking.

Something like the more touchy-feely accusations also feel off to me.  Why the anonymity?  I don't buy the 'fear of reprisal' argument.  Recently, a bunch of extras from that Sly Stallone TV show filed a SAG complaint, and I think Sly was just calling them fat or something.  If the situation on set was that uncomfortable, I don't see why they would wait and only anonymously make the charge.  And on the eve of the film's premiere no less.  It just stinks.

What is clear is that there are some people who do not want other people to see this movie.  I can't conceive the motive of the average comment troll out there, but maybe the financiers and studio execs who caught the initial screening may have gotten their nerves touched a bit by whatever the film has to say about elite wealth and the devaluing of art in late-capitalism.  Given the amount of anti-(capital A)-Art and anti-intellectualism in much of the pushback of this film, I think that's a safe assumption.  Value is only in consumption, not inspiration.  I don't want to spoil myself on the deets, but I did take a cursury scan through the post-Cannes reviews, and the positive ones seem agog and the negative ones don't make it seem any less fascinating.  It'll be polarizing, like all of the best and ballsiest films.