Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025)
Zoe Saldana spake in a BAFTA acceptance speech: films are supposed to change hearts and minds. ? Great films indeed suggest alternate thinking. Change another dimension entirely.
Karla Sofía Gascón. She is not a canniba;!:)(
You’d think there’d be an English translation of her response! -always Google if you have no Spanish! You’ve heard this Selina Gomez. <eow
Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance…I know what it is to exist between the world’s certainties.
Emilia Pérez more seams owing Jacques Demy and Agnes Varda than Lin Miranda and Damian Chazelle. Strange, fascinating: not sure all quite works yet so exquisite and so such a brave road for Audiard for travel. Intricately woven cinema, no thread forfeited.
Not such a fan of La La Land but Emma Stone’s audition swept my all hearts away….So, now, TV drama..or as Steven Spielberg once denounced now forgiven STREAMING. All moi can say: glad I knew the cinema when the Cat Never W’Oz. As did she.
After dissing writer Jez Butterworth for The Agency, finally,finally, finally, caught up with Mammals. James Corden such a great actor! Cats miss yu spoilt late night. Felines/ felons inherently mischievous. You and Seth. Toss up? Four paws! The dogs understandably, Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert. There’s no accounting’ for taste our new world arena. Unless your an …..
Still tryin’ figuring out what went wrong for me and The Agency after watching a still gripping Season 2 of The Diplomat and finally The Night Agent, one of Netflix most watched original series. Not to be confused with equally gripping The Night Manager [John Le Carré based]. Saving The White Lotus [Season 3] to binge some eps when Spring inevitably disappoints and “hang you up the most”. One’s investigation would make a great high school exam paper for those ever bored. I remember opening my exam and gleefully answering something film related. Or maybe it was morality. Anyhow, words flowed for Lina Wertmüller and Fassbinder.
What The Night Agent and The Diplomat share is time out from plot for character. Something Jez Butterworth does in spades for Mammals. There’s the bad ‘Russian’ guy in The Agency but all remembered is his boots and vaguely his secretary, recruited and set up. Even the ‘chipper’ ‘daffodil’ demeanor events manager in The Diplomat with her flowery dresses hard to forget. Or Peter Sutherland’s trooper ‘bestie’ Cisco in The Night Agent.
Back to Karla Sofía Gascón. What would you have done as a Netflix exec when a journalist finds anti Islamic ’tweets’? Why? People say/do crazy things sometimes. Always. And the world turns. There is no escape for someone in the public eye. I’d be more worried about post 9/11 Muslim racial profiling that continued for over a decade in NY State. Few seemed too upset by that!
USAID at least Americans still live where debate is permissible. Relatively.
Context is everything. Who has’t expressed Karla’s views? Bill Maher Religulous. Conclave dares beyond belief! Many many people find solace from woe in religion whatever their faith. Cruel to take that away. Dear Karla: you screwed up. Once. Doesn’t make you a bad person. You must attend the Oscars. Well, Mel Gibson. Vodka does what it states on the tin/bottle! Law enforcement obviously not on that same planet that night for you. Doesn’t make you bad guy either!
Mike Leigh [BAFTA red carpet interview] “trying to raise the money to make another film but it’s very difficult. -Even for someone like you with your reputation? -“Yeah, absolutely.”
Grew up with Family Life (Ken Loach) and Meantime (Mike Leigh). Interviewed Jan Chapman [The Piano producer] some decades back. Mike:! she said exactly the same! Lordy, lordy! Forever films need faith!
Such funny coincience. Schwarzenegger atop an island flooding global warming. FLOW. Great inquisitive minds think alike. Talk about oportunist rabbit.! The world turns.
SAG AWARDS: Hate you Shōgun! All these decades my support of Japanese cinema! And now…more work..OK already…Jane Fonda’s fitness exercises saved me. Just that Lifetime acceptance speech may save many others. Takes work. Commitment. Tina Fey quipping on late night after morning coffee, looking forward to bed again. How dare we! How pathetic. Ironically bathrobe comedy may also just save our world. Out of the head and into the heart.
So how’s about Anora and Peter von Kant as a double bill? Natasha Lyonne and moi in parallel universes!:) Who’d a thought. Only water for me back then. Making up for lost time nowadays:) It is a joke people particularly for those seeming hellbent on bringing me down to their tiny pharisaic plateau. What’s so intriguing about Sean Baker’s films? They aren’t particularly different to many other indies in subject, arguably, or approach. Maybe it’s that his camera cares as if a social worker crossing the line to help. Most films even great ones observe letting all play out. Is it projection to say Sean’s camera allows characters beauty, intelligence and a shot in this judgmental world? Red Rocket as if Danny Lyon in semi-Saturated colors or William Eggleston.
Ozon’s films, of course, are more Douglas Sirk in their ‘heightened’ style and with Peter von Kant willfully Fassbinder. His not so well received Angel is heartbreaking. No shortage of ideas in this world for Sean Baker and François Ozon.
Looks like there’s room to snuggle on Arianna’s spell-binding dress [Daniel Roseberry/ Schiaparelli] for a cat to nap before presenting:)
So the 2025 Oscars ceremony: remembering a London colleague as we departed a very mediocre screening said: that’s 2 hours of your life you’ll never get back! Well, the Oscars is 4hours of one’s life plus red carpet! Plus Adrien Brody’s 4h acceptance speech;) The crab’s no good now…Shouldn’t we be watching those foreign films we never ever got around to or those Fred Wiseman docs we never ever saw. Award ceremonies don’t change our hearts and minds but making some people happy is such a bad thing? Wasn’t Quentin Tarantino at Cannes who said ‘there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure’. Certainly not for creatives who win. More than 10,500 “global film industry artists and leaders” are members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. So the obvious question after last night, what impressed everyone in the Academy to award Sean Baker’s ANORA four Oscars? The most won by anyone in history for a single film. Were they simply absolutely desperate for something real? Maybe. Not sure that cathartic is even accurate. Is Sean’s secret shooting reality with a dash of magic so longing in people’s lives? Anyone who watches Anora will in some way be scarred yet emboldened for life.
This is why I asked before all the Oscar hoopla: what’s so SEAN intriguing? Someone should ask all the greats their opinions like editor Thelma Schoonmaker. My take is that Mr Sean Baker is a pianistic Arthur Rubinstein or Sviatoslav Richter and his wrong notes. Listen to them when they were young! OMG. And somehow it would be so wrong yet right for even Martin Scorsese to weigh in. Sean Baker clearly loves making films about the marginalized. NO noblesse oblige. Judged for no other reason than simply being who they really are. In a very unusual way even Truman Capote’s SWANS marginalized.
A final thought on casting particularly with Mikey Madison’s Best Actress win. Could another actress have taken Anora to the finishing line? Hollywood is littered with those conjectures. What about Gene Hackman iconic in The Conversation? So much else going on there but he carries the flag through battle. Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate when originally the producers wanted a young blonde male Pamela Anderson;)! Audrey Hepburn not Marilyn Monroe in Breakfast at Tiffanys. Public knowledge that Demi Moore wasn’t first choice for The Substance. And of course the now iconic Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain. If he’d said no, nearly happened, as great certainly is Jesse Eisenberg’s script: would everyone be talking?
And Timothée Chalamet, another American fiction;) such an attractive force for good, even when it isn’t, even on the Red Carpet. Yet, let’s be honest friends, given Denis Villeneuve’s genius, a feline could have played your part Chalamet. Just throwing into the mix. DUNE’s are AMAZING, guess real life isn’t worth all that effort. Total sympathy on my planet! That Sandworm will never be unemployed as a harpist in mine. Sense trepidation from well re-knowned orchestras, Daniel Barenboim’s totally COOL. Schoenberg’s SANDWORM concerto, now lost in the LA fires(: What’s wrong with escaping the sand ghetto? YO-go CRAB concertina! A new life, a new dawn…!
2025 Oscar winning short: The Only Girl in the Orchestra. Can’t believe Zubin Mehta said that! Watch the short, it’s short. So much to say and so little time.
and The Eternal Daughter asks us what is real our past present existence. Our heart culpable of everything?
Actors should never accept roles where souls have nothing to say. That said there’s always something to learn from making even a shitty movie. Jack Palance did 120 odd and surely amazing in all. Yet casting directors, directors and producers often see what the actor can’t. Shit hidden away inside never having seen the light. Mikey Madison’s ‘Ani’ oozes love from every pore of her being. A tough cookie yet inside so vulnerable. Her resplendent wings never used now broken beyond repair? Sean Baker writes himself such difficult material seeming easy. As in Red Rocket it could all end up a mess without his vision. The audience can never go back to before.
Need to meditate on an ending? Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just American Fiction.
And our hearts go out to Dolly Parton who’s just lost her husband of WOW 60 years.
