The Good, The Bad, and The Santos

I used to be a movie critic so I don’t take much of what they say to heart.

Nor do I care that much about what the now ex-public servant George Santos, the self-proclaimed Mary Magdalene of Congress, has to say about anything.

But first, let’s talk about the critics. We’ll get to Mary, I mean, George, in a few moments.

My former colleague and fellow critic at Daily Variety, Jim Harwood, summed it up best years ago when some outraged stranger asked him pointedly what qualified HIM to be a movie critic.

Harwood tartly replied:

Because I have an opinion and a place to print it.

That’s about all there is to it.

In fact, it’s so perfectly succinct, I’ve told that anecdote many times before and written it about it several times here.

Then why was I so outraged with the New York Film Critics Association this week when they announced their awards for 2023?

Even more outraged than I was about Santos, the 35 year-old (maybe?), Botox using at the expense of his campaign contributors (Note: Seriously, how many lines could she possibly have?), the entire time he was in Congress.

Well, I’ll tell you.

I’ve seen thousands of movies over the years and can count on less than ten fingers the number of times I’ve walked out of a theatre before a film is over. As bad as something might be, it just doesn’t seem right to not give the filmmakers their due and view what they’ve turned out to the bitter end.

This is unlike watching a Congressional hearing on cable news where the very nature of the questions and comments simply beg you to turn t h em off.

His first name is Markwayne, so my brain already turned off

It’s difficult to make a movie, even one that doesn’t work for you. But it’s pretty simple to stage a House or Senate committee hearing where you can manage to bore and/or offend just about anyone in record time and get them to leave.

Nevertheless, I made an exception to my longstanding rule of not walking out on a movie if I could help it this summer at Outfest, the LGBTQ film festival, because the lead performance in one film was so simultaneously grating, flat, whiny and, well, amateurish, that it took me out of the story, not to mention the performances of all the other capable actors, and literally made me cringe.

Repeatedly.

Even more than Santos calling himself Mary Magdalene, which is really saying something significant, a practice George seldom indulges in.

Anyway, I whispered half-an-hour in to the friend who took me to this film if he thought this lead actor wasn’t just god-awful. To which he whispered back, yeah, he’s not very good. And we kept watching the movie.

But with each line of dialogue and every outrageous scene after another he appeared in, this actor made me want to climb the walls. It was like the worst line readings of every bit of dialogue I and every writer friend of mine had ever written were all strung together and projected in 35mm in one endless loop for eternity.

Not as blithely silly as George nor as starkly offensive and obnoxious as George’s choice for president, Donald Trump, but equally as nails on a blackboard bad.

Finally, with less than twenty minutes to go in the film, I blurted out to my friend that I was leaving.

Really? It’s almost over.

I can’t do it, I replied. I can’t stay here one minute longer. Not one second longer.

At which point, I got up and walked as unobtrusively as I could up the aisle and out the door, praying I wouldn’t run into the filmmaker or, even worse, that actor.

Unlike George and his MAGA clan, I had no interest in making this a thing, a media worthy meme or even a slightly hurtful, tone deaf personal encounter.

As you might have googled by now, the actor is Franz Rogowski, and for his work in Ira Sachs’ Passages he was this week named best actor of the year by the New York Film Critics Association.

Better than Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.

Better than Bradley Cooper in Maestro.

Better than Colman Domingo in Rustin.

Even better than Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers, Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction, Barry Keoghan in Saltburn, Andrew Scott in All Of Us Strangers, Teo Yoo in Past Lives or Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon, the latter NYFCA’s choice for best film of the year.

Having already seen many of the above films and read glowing notices on the remaining handful, I can’t fathom in a thousand George Santos-es how the New York critics made their choice in that category this year.

Perhaps it has to do with attention-getting or simply standing out from the crowd, never good reasoning for a critical determination but certainly the point at which the Carousel of American Regression that is Santos comes in.

It seems these days being outrageously untruthful and different from everyone else is enough to make you a popular winner. At least temporarily.

The sweater under the jacket still confounds me

I mean, Santos defrauded his voters by lying about where he went to school and his business experience all the while spending their hard-earned money on designer clothes and paying off his credits card debts as he passed himself off as Jewish (Note: Later stating he really only meant he was Jew-ish, aka like being a little bit pregnant-ish) and claimed that his mother had died on 9/11 at the World Trade Center’s South Tower when all the while she was living in her native Brazil, alone and very far away from her soon to be quite infamous son.

Though I might argue vociferously with Mr. Rogowski being the recipient of his award, at the end of the day we all know this is just merely a matter of opinion.

But George “Mary Magdalene” Santos, Donald “Orange Jesus” Trump and everyone else in the entire MAGA brood, should be made to face all of the legal and moral consequences their performative behaviors have wrought in these last several years, entertaining as they might seem to some audiences.

Most certainly, they should not be awarded anything for them. Or rewarded in any way, shape or form.

Saturday Night Live — George Santos Cold Open (12/2/23)

11.26.23

by notesfromachair

More Than Friends

This holiday season has just begun and it already has me teary-eyed at the thought of a friend and how much friendships mean to me.

This is partly due to the deaths of several precious friends whom I miss terribly right about now, and not only because they are no longer around to complain to about the holidays this year.

I promise the whole post will not be like this! I swear!

It is also due to a pair of screen stories I’ve seen in the last week where the friend in the story touched me deeply and, well, meant everything.

The first is the uncluttered, focused honesty of Jodie Foster as Bonnie Stoll, “best friend” to iconic marathon swimming champion Diana Nyad in the just released Netflix biopic, Nyad.

Annette Bening is more than convincing in the title role (Note: She brutally trained a full year as a swimmer and it shows) but it is Foster’s performance that gives the film its true heart and meaning.

Nyad is the star (Note: In this case, athlete), a difficult, unsentimental and tunnel-visioned success story that makes the headlines and gets the lion share of the credit. Yet what we get to see in this movie is just how much her best friend and briefly former “girlfriend” enabled the impossibly obstinate Nyad to live the kind of life she longed for both professionally and personally.

As her coach and closest confidante for decades, it is Bonnie’s loving, no-fuss determined dedication that allows Nyad, then in her early sixties, to actually fulfill her lifelong dream to become the first person in the world to swim from Cuba to Florida.

This, of course, makes it sound like a typical inspiration sports film and, in some ways, it is. Except, by the end, when it isn’t that at all.

See, at most Nyad is a well-structured, competent sports drama that hits the requisite beats one would expect.

But what makes it truly worth watching is the often-unexplored relationship between two people, in this case two gay women, who briefly dated years ago and have now become family.

They introduce themselves to others as mere best friends, a phrase that means quite a bit on its own but is woefully lacking when it comes to these two. And yet this is true and has also been said for many close friendships we have all seen over the years and/or perhaps have experienced for ourselves.

Still, without Bonnie there would be no Nyad and without Diana Nyad there would be no way Bonnie would likely have ever experienced the adventurous highs and intense emotional peaks and even valleys that gave her life meaning and made her feel most alive.

It’s not the typical paradigm of athlete-trainer, mentor-star. It is the unnaturally natural connection of two people that society still doesn’t have the proper term for that is the real story, the one that provides this film its principle drive and certainly that which gives it its primary power.

Not surprisingly, it is the relationship between two gay men over thirty plus years in the Showtime limited series, Fellow Travelers, that also touches me so deep to my core that at times I need to either look away, put it on pause to do some laundry or simply stick it out and let the feelings unshake memories I’ve chosen to keep pretty deeply buried for fear of the pain they would unleash (Note: Except, of course, with a therapist present).

Based on the best-selling novel, the eight, hour-long episodes of Fellow Travelers (Note: At this writing just the first five have aired) expands the scope of the fictional Hawk and Tim (aka Skippy) “love” story beyond the lavender scare of the 1950s, when gay people in Washington, D.C. were hunted down, outed and, in turn, had their lives destroyed, through the gay liberation of the late 1960s and 1970s and well into the AIDS-era death march radicalism of the mid-1980s.

In so many ways the slightly older, certainly more experienced and handsomely sophisticated Hawk is the love of his younger, at one time lover Tim’s life. Nevertheless, what they have is not so much a messy, decades-long, on and off again affair, but an epic, non-traditional, boundary-crossing friendship that explodes far beyond the limitations of romance.

Again, it seems to sell their relationship short to call it a mere friendship but it also sells it even shorter to classify it as a long-term functionally dysfunctional tragic love story. Instead, what they have is a messy, magnetic, invisible to the naked eye connection that seems to have no restrictions and yet far too many limits.

In that way, Fellow Travelers succeeds not so much as a historical chronicle of gay history and the gay people that lived it (Note: Though it has its moments) but as the uncomfortable, deeply human representation of how much and how little two people can bring to each other despite, or because, of how much they feel.

This is in no small part due to the on-screen chemistry between out actors Matt Bomer (Hawk) and Jonathan Bailey (Tim). No, you don’t have to be gay in real life to play gay men over these four key decades but, my gosh, it helps. This is especially the case when it comes to the frankly provocative and always quite truthful sex scenes. Not to mention what is not said in the moments right before and right after.

Full confession: I saw so much of my younger self in the naïve, trusting Tim and too much of the impossibly charismatic, seductive Hawk in any number of dear, long gone lovers, crushes and closely observed acquaintances. This has made me mostly adore the characters, frequently hate their actions and yet allowed me to always deeply understand how they do so much that is right and just as much that is always and utterly just so hopelessly wrong.

It’s a relationship that creates its own rules and then defies them. So much more than friends, and yet, they sometimes don’t even seem to be that. Certainly, they are not the equivalent of any long-term married or unmarried couple we’ve ever seen.

But what they are to me, and I suspect many others, is a touchstone to every wrong move we’ve ever made, every right move that didn’t work out and every random act any of us ever took that provided an unexpected, perfect outcome we could never have anticipated.

In short, a couple that you can’t help but feel, in more ways than you can count.

Friends – Bette Midler