#seriocomic

[auditionsuggestions]

hi! i’m looking for a slightly comedic dramatic monologue from a published play or musical to audition for sophie in mamma mia! any suggestions? tysm!! 💗

Hi! A seriocomic is definitely an interesting take. Those are definitely good for showing your range.

I think you can pull a good punch with Georgie's monologue from Spike Heels (obv you can cut the f-bombs if you need/want). It lives kind of in the middle.

This one from Hearts Like Fists is a little more dramatic, but definitely has some beats in there that you can play more comedic.

This one is more straight up comedy, but if you play that apology in the beginning then you can get a little more out of it.

Break a leg!

[mumblelard]

{the shadow} (raft-hourglass-3) (i-k-was) or this may sound like gibberish but i think i'm in a seriocomic slipstream space opera without the space

in hundreds of throws, i've never drawn the shadow. i don't think i want to put words to this one. i am just going to let it stew

this week, i bagged my first dead metaphor, cliffhanger. i'm having it mounted at the local taxitropist for eventual display above my mantel

i keep thinking about the seventy-nine cent black pepper noodles i got at dekalb farmers market

i wish i could get video of boba when she decides it is too cold to inspect the porch on any given morning. it's a sniff-squint-headshake gesture that makes me resent all of the words that mug and bog and slurry my thoughts

she is not alone, to be sure, but the exuberant blossoming of my christmas cactus, clarice, does make me feel like i might be an okay person after all

i bought myself early solstice presents last week: a new pink k-42 paint marker, new earbuds, and a grippy new pair of trail shoes to attack the winter

[cantsayidont]

(Edited to reflect the remainder of the season, but still more more haterating than hollerating, TBF.)

SUNNY (2024): Weird, exceptionally abrasive A24/Apple TV+ sci-fi black comedy about an entitled and resentful white American expat in Kyoto, Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones), whose Japanese husband (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and young son have apparently died in a plane crash, leaving Suzie with one of his company's domestic robots (the titular Sunny, voiced by Joanna Sotomura), an irritatingly chipper, reflexively manipulative, passive-aggressive, possibly dangerous device whose cutesy CGI design suffers very serious uncanny valley problems throughout. In between clashes with her disapproving mother-in-law Noriko (Judy Ongg), Suzie stumbles into a mysterious conspiracy involving the Yakuza, accompanied by a blue-haired bartender named Mixxy (singer-songwriter annie the clumsy), who's the closest thing she has to a friend.

Adapted by Katie Robbins from a novel by Colin O'Sullivan, the show does a poor job of establishing its sci-fi conceits (homebots like Sunny are apparently fairly common, but we don't ever see any others for long enough to put Sunny's odd behavior in any perspective); Jones is unbearable in an incredibly unsympathetic lead role; and the convoluted plot (which ends on a very weak cliffhanger) can never make up its mind whether it wants to be taken seriously or not. Even after 10 episodes, it's still unclear what the show is trying to be, except that its determination to sideline its Japanese characters in favor of its grating American protagonist is very off-putting. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Mixxy is gay, although her obvious desire to get in Suzie's pants suggests that she has absolutely terrible taste in women. VERDICT: I was mildly intrigued by the odd seriocomic tone, but the muddled, frequently irritating story goes nowhere, and the focus on Suzie makes it an ordeal.

[sydmarch]

there's been too many times i've clicked an old link & it no longer goes anywhere so i'm gonna begin the tedious yet satisfying process of archiving some interviews that i reference frequently starting with this one

Like the offspring of any revered icon, Brandon Cronenberg’s last name grabs hold of your attention. Indeed, the 33-year-old Canadian filmmaker is the son of David Cronenberg, genre cinema’s great auteur of psychodrama and body horror. And like his father, Brandon expresses a strong interest in the inextricable brain-body link, not to mention the dark crevices of society’s underbelly. Antiviral, Brandon’s feature debut as writer and director, is a sci-fi satire with a sharp conceit worthy of that unmistakable surname, and a stylistic strength that promises more compelling work from its maker. Uniquely skewering our ever-evolving (or devolving) obsessions with celebrity, the movie, now playing in limited release, tells of a world intended to appear not very far from our own, wherein a facility known as the Lucas Clinic perpetuates the ultimate form of star worship, infecting rabid fans with diseases harvested from the cells of the über-famous (what’s more, delis on corners sell “steaks” grown from celebrity muscle cells, so die-hards can literally consume their favorite A-Listers). At the center of this seriocomic nightmare is Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), a Lucas employee who also moonlights as part of the superstar-sickness black market. Things turn especially ugly when Syd comes down with the same bug afflicting America’s most-wanted sweetheart.

In person, Brandon is deeply humble and unassuming, a boyish-looking guy with his father’s grey-blue eyes, and a few piercings that project just the right amount of edge. He’s remarkably articulate about the themes his film explores, and he proves just how fully he mulled over the movie’s ideas, which, according to him, aren’t that far-fetched at all. In a high-rise in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, in a small office whose unremarkable sterility calls to mind Antiviral‘s stark aesthetic, Brandon chats at length about the psychology of fandom, the time he cozied up with a primate on one of his dad’s sets, and his thoughts on the trajectory of celebrity culture, which, if not literally, has surely already gone viral.

Filmmaker: There’s a lot of pointed dialogue in Antiviral in regard to celebrity, such as, “What does it mean to deserve to be famous?” and, “Celebrities are not people, they’re group hallucinations.” How much of this is your own perspective? Do you believe that certain celebrities don’t deserve to be famous? Do you see them as being real people?

Brandon Cronenberg: A lot of that is me, but it’s also filtered through the character, so not everything said in the film is just directly my own opinion. “Celebrities are not real, they’re group hallucinations”—I do believe that. I think that the majority of people have this idea about a celebrity, but that idea is sort of a culturally constructed thing and kind of a fiction. Because a lot of what’s reported about celebrities is made up, and a lot of our sense of them comes from the media and is sort of unrelated to the human being who is living their own life, and living and dying in this way that’s sort of disconnected from their media double. But I think anyone who’s famous deserves to be famous, only in the sense that this whole criterion for fame is that people recognize you enough to be famous. A lot of people say, “Oh, this person doesn’t deserve to be famous.” What is it really to deserve to be famous? It isn’t an accomplishment. I think fame has always been something other than an accomplishment. It’s sometimes tied to an accomplishment—sometimes people become famous because they accomplish something. But I think it has more to do with the repetition of an image, or of a person, or a name, rather than fulfilling a certain obligation.

Filmmaker: The whole thing must be a more interesting concept for you now, since you’re essentially becoming a celebrity yourself, being a filmmaker in the public eye.

Brandon Cronenberg: That aspect of it is really weird, because going around promoting a film that’s about something like this is kind of strange. But, two things: First of all, as a director, and especially as a Canadian director, I can only become so famous, so I don’t imagine myself getting stalked by paparazzi anytime soon. Also, I think that the film is about the industry of celebrity, which isn’t the same as just celebrity in general, in a sense. I think, for instance, to recognize someone and have respect for them because you like their work, and to take an interest in what they’re doing because of that isn’t unhealthy—I think that’s fine. It’s more that certain level of fanaticism that represents a kind of mania and a kind of delusion that is unhealthy. And tied to that is this increasingly insular industry of celebrity that sort of mass produces fame through reality television, and tries to elevate people to this point where they’re famous and their job is just being famous for a year, or two years. I think that is different from just talking about your film, in that all art, to a certain extent, is a cultural dialogue that you need to engage in as an artist.

Filmmaker: What specific thing in our celebrity-obsessed culture do you see as being most closely linked to the satirical extreme that you go to in Antiviral?

Brandon Cronenberg: I don’t think there is one! [Laughs.] Someone bought John Lennon’s teeth, you know? But that isn’t even just the one thing. Covers of magazines comparing people’s cellulite…[the film is] only a very slight exaggeration. That industry’s pretty insane.

Filmmaker: I read that this idea germinated when you were in film school at 24, and came down with a bad case of the flu. Did a fear of illness or mortality factor heavily into the concept?

Brandon Cronenberg: It wasn’t really a fear of illness, it was more just a moment of seeing disease as something intimate. Because a virus is manufactured, literally, in someone else’s body, by their infected cells, and then gets into your body and penetrates your own cells, and that’s hugely intimate if you think about it on that level. So it was that moment of seeing disease as intimate and trying to think of a character who would see disease as something intimate. We tend to be repulsed by disease, but you could imagine an obsessed fan who would want a celebrity’s virus, or something, as a way of feeling physically connected to them if it were described in those terms—something from their body into your body. Don’t you want that? Someone’s gotta want that.

Filmmaker: You’re 32 now?

Brandon Cronenberg: 33.

Filmmaker: In the the eight or nine years since you first toyed with this idea, the world of celebrity and fan relationships has changed quite a bit, with social media somewhat leveling the field of interaction and things like that. Was there ever a worry that the concept would lose some of its relevance because of that evolution?

Brandon Cronenberg: During editing, a friend of mine sent me this Sarah Michelle Gellar clip where she was on Jimmy Kimmel Live and she was saying that she was worried about singing because she had this cold—she was worried she would infect the entire audience. And then everyone started applauding madly and cheering. So I thought, “Okay, we’re pretty much making a documentary now!” So it’s changed and it hasn’t changed. I’ve been talking about Paris Hilton lately. She’s out of style now, and maybe seems like the obvious, passé celebrity to go to to discuss this sort of thing, but I think, early on, when I was first writing, she was just really becoming very public, and there’s something about that moment, when a lot of people were using the phrase “famous for being famous.” Again, I don’t think fame has ever been inherently bound to accomplishment, but I think she was so just famous for being famous, in a way that everyone recognized, that I think that really fed into the celebrity industry. It was a certain moment in the history of celebrity. Now, to say that she’s famous for being famous is not even interesting anymore, but at the time, people were like, “Haven’t you noticed that Paris Hilton is famous for being famous and isn’t that kind of weird?”

Filmmaker: As the central character, Syd March, Caleb Landry Jones gives a really impressive breakthrough performance, and he looks like a runway model, which amplifies your visual juxtaposition of fashion-magazine chic and body horror. Can you describe how you came to work with him and how he complimented your aesthetic?

Brandon Cronenberg: Sure. His agent had worked with my producer, and when we were looking around for actors, he sent Caleb’s stuff over—some clips from films he’d been in and an audition he’d done for another film. And we all got immediately, really excited because he has that very striking look, and he’s very intense, and a great actor, He really has that thing that some actors have where they’re immediately interesting to watch. Even when they’re doing very mundane things, they’re somehow able to be captivating performers. So we wanted to get him and he wanted to do it, so it worked out nicely. I had actually written the character for a much older actor, and the character was a bit different in my mind, but when I saw Caleb, I wanted to plug into the excitement and roll with it. Now I can’t see that character any other way. He brought a huge amount to it and that was part of developing that character—discovering all of this stuff with him.

Filmmaker: And then, of course, there’s Sarah Gadon, who starred in your father’s Cosmopolis last year, and A Dangerous Method the year before that. Did your father recommend her to you?

Brandon Cronenberg: Well I saw her in A Dangerous Method, and I thought she was great, but I hadn’t met her until we sent her the script. I liked what I saw from her in my dad’s work, and then I asked him, and he said he had a great experience with her. So, whether you’re related to them or not, being able to talk to directors who have worked with actors, it’s a good thing.

Filmmaker: Gadon’s character, Hannah Geist, is the ultimate desirable object in Antiviral, and then there’s also Aria Noble, played by Nenna Abuwa. I was wondering why you didn’t opt to focus on any obsessed-over male celebrities in the film.

Brandon Cronenberg: There are a couple of references, and on the walls there were some male celerities in the office. I guess I was focusing on female celebrities just because of the degree of the fetishy body stuff you get in celebrity news. I mean, you get that with male celebrities, too, but the “who has the worse cellulite?” stuff is always female. The covers of those magazines, the surgical precision with which people fetishize and criticize—it’s particularly extreme for females. But there are both in the film.

Filmmaker: I also read that you had initial interest in writing, painting, and music, and then turned to film because it merges all of those things. How influential was your father, or his work, in that decision?

Brandon Cronenberg: I was less inclined to get into film because of people’s preconceptions about me based on my father and the fact that they assumed I should want to be in film. Like, “Oh, you must love film and want to be in your father’s footsteps!” It was always kind of obnoxious and kind of off-putting. So, I would say it probably took me longer to develop an interest in film because of that, if anything.

Filmmaker: Yeah, the connection must be a bit of a double-edged sword. There’s a clear cache to it, but also this pressure to assert your own voice, and to live up to expectations.

Brandon Cronenberg: I’ve felt that pressure, but only because everyone keeps telling me I should! I didn’t feel any special pressure, but especially now that the film’s done, everyone’s asking me if I feel some special pressure to live up to something, so I’m starting to wonder if I should.

Filmmaker: Well there’s obviously some thematic kinship going on. Did that develop on more of an unconscious level?

Brandon Cronenberg: Yeah, it’s more…I decided when I got into film that I needed to not worry about his career and just do whatever was interesting to me. To actively avoid it would be defining myself in opposition to him and in that way defining myself in terms of his career still. So I just did what I thought was interesting. I mean, he’s my father and we have a close relationship, so the fact that some of our interests overlap is pretty reasonable.

Filmmaker: Growing up, were you on set for a lot of your dad’s projects? Any experiences tied to specific films that stand out as remarkable?

Brandon Cronenberg: I was present to varying degrees. I mean, obviously, a lot of it happened when I was very young, or before I was born, depending on the film. I worked on eXistenZ in the special effects department, so I was very around for that one. Some of the other ones, not so much. I tried to be on set a fair bit for Eastern Promises just because I was already in film school at that point, and wanted to absorb what I could. When I was a kid, the baboon from The Fly sat on my lap. That was a pretty memorable experience! But I don’t think it had an influence on me as a filmmaker. [Laughs.]

Filmmaker: Good stuff. In Anitviral, I noticed you also make passing mention of Henrietta Lacks, who’s made a lot of headlines thanks to Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller, and even recent updates about the continued usage of her cells. Did Lacks’s story strongly influence the film’s concept, or was it just woven into the fabric of it?

Brandon Cronenberg: It didn’t strongly influence it, but it’s just a really interesting idea, I think. Because that relationship between identity and the body is really interesting. I think they’re two very different things, and I think identity is this very theoretical, weird thing that no one has a full grasp on. I don’t think we can perceive ourselves perfectly clearly, but obviously, from the outside, people can’t know us perfectly either, and we’re always in flux. And then you have this body that people associate that identity with, but again, the body is constantly changing, and I find all of that stuff really interesting. And in the film, obviously, there’s the celebrity cell steaks, and the idea that they’re grown from the celebrities. It’s sort of cannibalism, but it’s not quite cannibalism. Are they that meat, or is that another thing? The human being, the body—is that the celebrity, or is the celebrity this cultural idea, this abstract thing? So that was just a really great, real-world example of that sort of thing, but it wasn’t at the core of the film.

Filmmaker: You mention in press notes that you’re naturally reclusive, much like Syd March. How much do you identify with the character? Beyond, you know, his activities…

Brandon Cronenberg: Well, I definitely put some of myself in there. But in weird ways. I was going to college in this horrible city in Ontario, called London, Ontario, and it was hard to get good food there. So, for a while, I was eating a lot of egg salad sandwiches and orange juice. And when I was thinking about the character, I thought that for a character whose main interest in his body is this disease, I could see how food could become just a purely functional thing—just a necessity that he takes no pleasure in. So he has these units of food—orange juice paired with egg salad sandwiches. Interestingly, Caleb—because he likes to live the character as much as he can—was eating all egg salad sandwiches and orange juice when he initially got to Canada, and then he got really sick of them. So he was worried that when it came to doing those scenes, he wouldn’t be able to eat the egg salad because he was so grossed out by it at that point. But apparently the props department makes solid egg salad, so… [Laughs.]

Filmmaker: There’s a lot of talk in the film about the human face. Can you discuss your fascination with it?

Brandon Cronenberg: Yeah. There’s a line in the film that says “[the face] has a high information resolution.” I think it’s true. There’s such a huge amount of information that we communicate consciously and unconsciously through our facial expressions. And apparently that’s why we so commonly see faces in clouds and in rock formations—because our brains are tuned to look for faces, and look toward that information. Apparently with zebras, it’s the stripes. We see zebras as just striped animals, but they really identify each other through the stripes and they can really recognize quickly individual markings, and that’s a huge identifying factor for them. So I think the way we see things depends greatly on our biology.

Filmmaker: Antiviral speaks for itself, but how would you sum up your current view of our celebrity culture? Where do you see it going? Is it on a hopeless downward spiral? Is all this transparency just becoming more and more unhealthy? Is it getting worse? Better?

Brandon Cronenberg: I don’t know! I think it’s a version of something, a kind of broader, older human tendency that we have to deify each other. One example I tend to fall back on is sainthood. The saints were sort of celebrities. They were people elevated to the status of gods, almost, and there’s the iconography—the recognizable repetition of images—and the same physical fetishism. There are the old Italian churches that claim to have the finger bone of such-and-such saint, and it’s imbued with this great power, these relics. So I think we do that, for some reason. I’m not exactly sure why. I think it’s hard to predict where celebrity culture is going, just because I don’t think it’s unique to our time and place. Again, I think the industrial aspect of that is something that’s fairly unique, or that’s at least becoming more prominent—the manufacturing of celebrity to make money. And I assume that will, just by the nature of industry, go as far as it possibly can, but it’s hard to predict. I don’t know if it will implode eventually. I think we’ll always have some version of celebrity.

[allmusic]

AllMusic Staff Pick: Blur Parklife

Modern Life Is Rubbish established Blur as the heir to the archly British pop of the Kinks, the Small Faces, and the Jam, but its follow-up, Parklife, revealed the depth of that transformation. Relying more heavily on Ray Davies' seriocomic social commentary, as well as new wave, Parklife runs through the entire history of post-British Invasion Britpop in the course of 16 songs, touching on psychedelia, synth pop, disco, punk, and music hall along the way.

- Stephen Thomas Erlewine

[thishadoscarbuzz]

276 - Spanglish

This week, we are talking about one of the biggest THOB titles that we haven't yet discussed: 2004's Spanglish. James L. Brooks returned nearly a decade after his Oscar success with As Good As It Gets with this story of two disparate families thrust together: an immigrant single mother and the rich Los Angeles family she works for. With Adam Sandler headlining one year after earning his first bout of buzz for Punch-Drunk Love, this looked to be a chance for the Academy to honor him as a serious performer within the Academy-beloved Brooksian seriocomic glow. But the movie... has some issues!

This episode, we talk about Cloris Leachman's stellar boozy performance and Téa Leoni's work tried to wrangle an impossible character. We also discuss Paz Vega as the film's attempted breakthrough performance to American audiences, Brooks' Oscar history, and the many mystery middle names in Hollywood.

Topics also include Mitski fans, the film's cringe-inducing sex scene, and the history of the Tristar logo.

The 2004 Academy Awards

Vulture Movies Fantasy League

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[abriefingwithmichael]

“It's a Living” s1e9 (1981)

Terry Kiser.

Another seriocomic episode. Jan's teacher threatens to fail her if she doesn't sleep with him. It's resolves easily in the end, and chuckles are thin on the ground. Most come from Cassie's one-liners, as usual. It's entertaining, however. And the dilemma highlights the differences in the five main characters reasonably well.

January 1981: ABC aired It's a Living on Thursdays in the second hour of prime time after Barney Miller and before 20/20. Against it, CBS had Magnum, P.I. and NBC aired Thursday Night at the Movies.

6/10

[recentlyheardcom]

2024 Zurich Film Festival Awards Winners List

Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl has won top honors at the 20th Zurich Film Festival, winning the Golden Eye for best film. Zurich’s competition jury, led by Lee Daniels, praised the film for its spectacular cinematography, exquisite sound design and breathtaking performances. Nyoni’s follow-up to her breakout debut I Am Not A Witch is a surreal and seriocomic family drama about sexual…

[back-and-totheleft]

The old college triad

Call them city boys. Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Spike Lee are not only NYU film school’s most prominent graduates, they’re provocateurs in the most colorful Gotham sense.

Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of NYU’s Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & Television (part of the Tisch School of the Arts), asserts the filmmakers reflect the curriculum’s “strong auteur philosophy.”

Stone likes to think they share “a New York state of mind,” or, as he elaborates for Variety, “an irascibility … something energetic, and off-putting sometimes, and it comes out in Spike’s work and in Marty’s, and I think it comes out in mine — but each in different ways.”

All three are experiencing a banner year with big-studio productions featuring strong scripts written by relative novices. And for Stone and Lee, who are coming off what might be termed a baroque period of overly mannered movies that served as fresh meat for their detractors, vindication is sweet.

Newsweek’s David Ansen called Lee’s “The Inside Man” a film that “crackles with the seriocomic tension of thin-skinned New Yorkers thrown together in a crisis,” while the New Yorker’s David Denby says with “World Trade Center,” “Stone bulls his way into our emotions with his usual force but with greater clarity, sanity and measure than in the past, and he is better at violent spectacle and at capturing the stages of dying than any other director.”

Scorsese, whose classes Stone and Lee attended at NYU, has received the most uniform praise with “The Departed,” a crime drama in which his chosen milieu — the mean streets of New York — have been replaced by those of Boston’s South Side. “This is the movie that Scorsese fans have been yearning to see for a very long time,” wrote Joe Morgenstern in his Wall Street Journal review, “and it’s a crowd-pleaser in the bargain.”

In a way, working within the confines of genre — albeit with strong narratives and punchy dialogue — has benefited both Scorsese and Lee. For his part, Stone was dealing with a subject — the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — that required the kind of sensitivity with which he’d appear to be at odds.

“The grandiosity (of recent Stone projects) looked like his self-indulgence knew no bounds,” says author, film scholar and critic Molly Haskell. “With (‘World Trade Center’), he couldn’t dominate the story, so he chose instead just to serve it.”

If Scorsese, Lee and Stone have been shaped by their experience at NYU — which Stone calls “a home of ideas” — they hailed from different backgrounds.

Scorsese, a native of Manhattan’s Little Italy, seriously considered joining the Catholic priesthood before attending film school in the early ’60s.

Stone, the son of a successful Wall Street stockbroker, dropped out of Yale and did a tour of duty in Vietnam (for which he was awarded the Bronze Star for valor and the Purple Heart) before he enrolled at NYU.

And Lee, who spent his formative years in Brooklyn, attended Morehouse College before earning a graduate degree from Tisch.

The three directors have not only given back as instructors (Lee has been teaching at NYU for the past 10 years) and with financial support, the subjects and themes they explored as students remain very much with them today.

Scorsese’s senior class short, “It’s Not Just You, Murray” (1964), centers on an aging mobster who reflects on his life of crime; Stone’s 11-minute student film from 1971 is titled “Last Year in Viet Nam”; and Lee’s controversial NYU short “The Answer” (1980) reimagines a remake of D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” from the perspective of a black screenwriter.

“When you start out young, you’ve got to believe you’re going to change the world,” Haskell says. “They certainly did. And they wanted to change the way movies were made. They all had more of an agenda than most people who come out of film schools, especially West Coast film schools. They weren’t looking to get into the industry to do smooth, polished work. There was something more gritty, more urban, more violent, edgier.”

School for scrappers

Or, as Morgenstern puts it, “They’ve all been infected by the idea of film as more than something that opens on a Friday night, makes a killing over the weekend and disappears.”

That ethos is reflected in NYU’s fostering of individual voices.

Campbell says: “One of the things our faculty says about teaching is, ‘I’m not interested in the film that I want to make, I’m interested in who you are and the film you want to make.’ And everything we do is about finding out what your story is, and then giving you the tools to make that story.”

Stone recalls NYU as offering “a certain degree of independence. We were all on our own, there was no money, it was like a rat’s nest of competing ideologies. We’d have to fight for our budgets, our scripts. I remember every film was a struggle. So it was a scrappy way of learning.”

This struggle has remained with Scorsese, Stone and Lee throughout their careers. Even in the wake of such career high points as “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas,” Scorsese has always harbored the fear that every film could be his last, that whatever suit was signing his checks could pull the plug at any moment.

“At least until recently, (Scorsese, Stone and Lee) have represented a sort of urban New York counterpart to the industry,” Haskell explains. “They’re sort of anti-industry, and maybe that’s one of the reasons they’ve had such a hard time in terms of Academy Awards.”

Between the three of them, they have earned 20 Oscar nominations, but only Stone has won, thrice: for directing “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July” and for writing “Midnight Express.”

The year Lee received a screenplay nom for “Do the Right Thing” — his incendiary drama about racial tension in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood — presenter Kim Basinger famously departed from the script on Oscar night when she said: “We have five great films here and they are great for one reason — they tell the truth. But there is one film missing from the list that deserves to be honored because, ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all. And that’s ‘Do the Right Thing.’ ”

“I think there was always that (sentiment),” recalls Haskell of Basinger’s extemporaneous remarks, “especially with (Lee), because there was this sort of desperate desire for some black filmmakers to make good. I think he’s very talented, but I think people put up with a lot from him, too, just because they wanted him to succeed, and they wanted that voice in movies, that vision.”

That vision still abounds in “The Inside Man.”

In the guise of a bank-heist movie, Lee injects the narrative — from a script by Russell Gewirtz — with a melting pot of ethnic flavors and post-9/11 paranoia that’s at once tense and funny.

Veneration gap

“He brought all that New York energy to the film,” Morgenstern says. “The movie is really densely populated, and it’s fascinating to me that after all these worthy attempts at small, personal films that haven’t really connected with an audience — black or white — here Spike Lee was brought in as a director for hire, and he’s obviously had his way with the script, and his imprint is on the material.”

If Lee has felt shortchanged by the Academy, he’s not saying. Multiple calls and emails to his handlers went unanswered. But, like Scorsese, who also is not talking to the press, he seems to have made peace with an industry that has given him multiple platforms and opportunities as a filmmaker.

“I think they sort of exorcized some of their personal demons,” says Haskell of NYU’s power trio. “And once you become accepted, or even venerated, you don’t make the same films anymore. And there would be something faux about it if they did. They have grown, they’ve matured.”

Stone, who now makes his home in Los Angeles, puts it another way. “Hollywood — it’s a muse, and also a bitch goddess, but it’s made a good life for me. In the end, I can’t complain, because I do think she gave me some good breaks. And I couldn’t get those in New York, which is why I had to leave.”

-Steve Chagollan, "The old college triad," Variety, Oct 25 2006

[havewereadthis]

"Set in a time-bending, seriocomically imagined world between Heaven and Hell, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is a philosophical meditation on the conflict between divine mercy and human free will that takes a close look at the eternal damnation of the Bible's most notorious sinner. This latest work from the author of Our Lady of 121st Street "shares many of the traits that have made Mr. Guirgis a playwright to reckon with in recent years: a fierce and questing mind that refuses to settle for glib answers, a gift for identifying with life's losers and an unforced eloquence that finds the poetry in lowdown street talk."

[cantsayidont]

MONA LISA AND THE BLOOD MOON (2021): This heady, disjointed supernatural drama-thriller is I guess Ana Lily Amirpour's take on the YA modern fantasy genre: A previously near-catatonic young woman called Mona Lisa Lee (Jun Jong-Seo), imprisoned for 12 years in a New Orleans asylum, escapes after discovering that she has the power to psychically control the minds of others. Lost in a world she barely understands, Mona falls in with a hard-bitten stripper named Bonnie (Kate Hudson), who immediately realizes she can use Mona's power for scamming and petty crime, and befriends Bonnie's 10-year-old metalhead son Charlie (Evan Whitten) while being pursued by a cop named Harold (Craig Robinson), who knows what Mona can do because she previously forced him to shoot himself in the leg.

Less deliberately sketchy than Amirpour's previous features (characters even have names most of the time!), MONA LISA is still awfully thin on plot, relying more on mood, atmosphere, and the protagonist's longing to be somewhere other than she's been; its vivid strangeness is kind of compelling, although at points the lack of direction leaves it feeling threadbare.

Of the central characters, Charlie is well-drawn, a latchkey kid who's had to develop his own strategies for giving himself the emotional regulation his mother doesn't provide, but Mona's idiot savant blankness is sometimes uncomfortable (although Jun does as well as she can with a difficult part), and the story is meaner about Bonnie than I think was really called for. Even more than in the 2016 THE BAD BATCH, I was uneasy with the film's treatment of its Black characters — none of them are killed this time, but most get battered and humiliated for comic relief — which is starting to seem like a problem for Amirpour. CONTAINS LESBIANS? After seeing Bonnie dance, Mona says she's pretty, but it's otherwise pretty hetero. VERDICT: If you catch it in the right mood, you may dig its seriocomic fever-dream vibe, but its scattershot story and uncomfortable character choices sometimes frustrate.

[qudachuk]

There is something of In Bruges about this Belgium-set tale of whistleblowers in hiding, with a little bit of David BrentNeil Maskell is the charismatic British actor known for his complex, seriocomic tough-guy performances in the movies of Ben...

[movienation]

Netflixable? SerioComic Hijinx among three Mexico City Makeup Artists -- "Making it Up?

Well-cast and acted with sympathic warmth and wit, “Making it Up” is an object lesson in the shortcomings of relying on voice-over narration to tell your story on screen. It’s a dark, maddeningly-manic and almost cute dip into loving someone whose mental illness renders them toxic to be around. And writer-director Guillermo Calderón (“Neurda”) makes the infuriating decision to talk the damned…

[byneddiedingo]

.Mathilde Nielsen, Johannes Meyer, and Karin Nellemose in Master of the House (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1925)

Cast: Johannes Meyer, Astrid Holm, Karin Nellemose, Mathilde Nielsen, Petrine Sonne, Clara Schønfeld, Johannes Nielsen, Aage Hoffman. Screenplay: Carl Theodor Dreyer, based on a play by Svend Rindom. Cinematography: George Schnéevoigt. Art direction: Carl Theodor Dreyer. Film editing: Carl Theodor Dreyer.

iMaster of the House, Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent comedy-drama, is an ironic title, one attached to the film for its release in English-speaking countries. The original Danish title translates as Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife, and the play by Sven Rindom on which it was based was called Tyrannens fald -- The Tyrant's Fall. It's also misleading to call it a comedy-drama, although it has moments of mild humor and a happy ending. The tone is seriocomic, or as the original title -- which is echoed in the film's concluding intertitle -- suggests, it's a moral fable. Viktor Frandsen (Johannes Meyer), the master of the house, is an ill-tempered bully, constantly berating his wife, Ida (Astrid Holm), who does everything she can to placate him. For example, she asks him whether he wants the meat she will serve him for lunch to be cold or warm. He answers, as usual irritably, as if he can't be bothered with such mundane matters, that he wants it cold. And then, later, when it's served, he snaps, "Couldn't you have found time to warm it up?" Life for Ida is constant drudgery, taking care of routine household chores, as well as looking after three children, the oldest of which is the pre-teen Karen (Karin Nellemose), whom Ida tries to spare from any of the harder chores that might roughen her hands. What little help Ida gets comes from Viktor's old nanny, known to the family as Mads (Mathilde Nielsen), who drops in to help Ida with the mending -- and to cast a disapproving eye on Viktor's bullying. Eventually, Mads arranges with Ida's mother (Clara Schønfeld) for Ida to escape from the household and rest. More worn out than she knew, Ida has a breakdown, and during her prolonged absence Mads takes over the household and whips Viktor into shape. The story arc is a familiar one -- we've seen it done on TV sitcoms and in Hollywood family comedies -- but it gains strength from the performances and from Dreyer's masterly control of the story and use of the camera. Although Viktor looks like a sheer monster at first, we gain understanding of him when we learn, well into the film, that he is out of work: His business has failed. His absence from the house during the day goes unexplained to his family, although we see him walking the streets and dropping into a neighborhood bar. Nielsen, who had also played the role of Mads on stage, is a marvelous presence in the film, although Dreyer never questions whether, as a nanny who used to administer whippings to Viktor, she might not bear some responsibility for the way he turned out as a man. Best of all, the film gives us a semi-documentary glimpse of what daily life was like for a lower-middle-class family in 1920s Denmark (and presumably elsewhere that modern home appliances hadn't yet taken up some of the burden of housework). Dreyer's meticulous attention to detail -- he served as his own art director and set decorator -- extended to the construction of a four-walled set (walls could be removed to provide camera angles) with working plumbing and electricity and a functioning stove, and he makes the most of it. Master of the House is not quite the pioneering feminist film some would have it be: Ida is a little too sweetly passive even after Viktor reforms. But it's an important step in the growth of Dreyer's moral aesthetic and of his artistry as a filmmaker.