Fin: Bradley Cooper's Sophie’s choice, remaking ‘Juwanna Mann,’ and is ‘Wish’ woke?
This week’s Friday notes column
For months and months, due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, actors not only couldn’t work, but they couldn’t promote their movies either. That meant talk show appearances were verboten, as were media interviews, and stars couldn’t even show at their movie premieres.
Since the strike was settled, actors have been making up for lost time. Bradley Cooper, director and star of Maestro, did a bunch of press the last couple of weeks, including an interview this week with The Howard Stern Show:
Stern, as an interviewer, likes to ask tough and uncomfortable questions. In his younger years, they were often sexual, but this week, he asked an even more personal question, which he termed a “Sophie’s Choice”: If Cooper could choose, would he rather himself win Best Actor and Best Director for Maestro, including a Best Actress Oscar for Carey Mulligan, or see the Eagles win the Super Bowl?
Cooper’s answer? The Eagles.
I feel like Cooper gave the diplomatic answer and the crowd-pleasing answer. I don’t think for a second that he gave his true answer.
Of course, Cooper would rather win the Oscar! For one thing, it would be his achievement, and a Super Bowl win would be his favorite team’s. For another, Cooper, who has been nominated nine times, has never won an Oscar. He has also made two movies in a row that – while I liked both a lot — seem meticulously constructed to finally win him that Oscar, whether for acting, writing, directing, producing, or (in A Star is Born’s case) songwriting. A Star Is Born’s Oscar case inexplicably collapsed throughout that season, and the song that won the award was not one Cooper had credit on.
The Eagles, on the other hand, won the Super Bowl five years ago. Bradley was there, in the owner’s box. The Eagles, for a long time, were in a similar predicament as the man who wore their jersey in Silver Linings Playbook, often coming close but never quite getting over the finish line, but then they did.
Cooper often gets accused of “Oscar thirst,” and I’m on the record as stating that Oscar thirst is completely fine and nothing to be ashamed of. There’s an entire industry dedicated to persuading voters and winning Oscars, and it all but takes over film culture for about 5 months out of every year. There’s nothing wrong with the performers themselves wanting to win one.
That said, an Eagles championship this year is more likely than a Maestro Oscars sweep.
Ben Shapiro’s ‘Juwanna Mann’
The right-wing website The Daily Wire has well-established aspirations to also be a movie studio, and this week they released the trailer for their new comedy, Lady Ballers, which is exactly what it sounds like:
They do know they don’t always have to make “triggering” jokes, don’t they?
There are quite a few things to say about this. For one, it shows once again that for all the right’s contempt of Hollywood and popular culture, they really at heart, want to be actors, comedians, and filmmakers, and have their own, heretofore thwarted, showbiz aspirations.
Lady Ballers, it would appear, is based on cultural right’s mean-spirited obsession with trans people, as well as their fear that male athletes, in some large number, will undergo gender transitions in bad faith, to compete in and “ruin” women’s sports, something that, inconveniently, has never happened. And as evidenced by the “it’s ladies basketball… nobody watches” joke, these guys are trying to defend the honor of women’s sports while also showing disdain for them.
Keep me in mind: The premise of this “comedy” is not that the men are trans; it’s that they’re pretending to be trans, to obtain athletic opportunities.
It’s also, judging by the trailer, extremely hacky and unfunny. And it comes with the idea that this premise is one that Hollywood is just too squeamish to tackle. However, there was a time when Hollywood made movies all the time about someone cross-dressing and using it to their advantage. There was the sitcom Bosom Buddies and the movies Tootsie, Yentl, Just One of the Guys, Mrs. Doubtfire, and later, the sports comedy Juwanna Mann.
The thing is, those shows and movies came out, respectively, in 1980, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1993 and 2002. And the pedigrees go back centuries earlier- Just One of the Guys was loosely based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Yentl was adapted from an Isaac Bashevis Singer story from the 19th century.
Sure, those stories weren’t about transgenderism, per se, but Hollywood has been there, done that. Cross-dressing comedies (and the occasional drama) had a heyday, which was 40 years ago. The Daily Wire is just way behind. By the time of Juwanna Mann, whose plot about a suspended NBA player disguising himself as a WNBA player was closer to that of Lady Ballers than the others, the genre had petered out. That was 21 years ago. (It did get a resurgence, a while later, with the Big Momma’s House franchise.)
Plus, it’s got what every other comedy this year has been missing: A funny cameo by Ted Cruz.
And finally, no, I will not be watching or reviewing this. I’m normally willing to give a chance to just about any movie, and I wrote earlier this week about the pro-Derek Chauvin documentary because I thought it had ideas worth engaging with. But no, this is hacky nonsense that I’m going to skip, especially since it’s awards voting deadline time and I currently have about 75 films, that I do want to see, in my queue.
To their credit, The Daily Wire did email me offering a screener, although I suspect their critic reachout was aimed at getting a couple of dozen critics to reply with a well-placed “go fuck yourself,” allowing The Daily Wire to turn it into content, which is exactly what they did with their previous anti-trans film.
Kissinger at the movies
Henry Kissinger finally died Wednesday, at the age of 100. The social media reaction, as you may have noticed, has been bifurcated: Politicians, institutions, and even the New York Yankees have issued reverent remembrances, while just about everyone else has called him a loathsome war criminal, responsible for the prolonging of the Vietnam War and millions of deaths. I lean towards the latter, but I’m still gobsmacked by that Yankees message- was Henry so appreciative of George Steinbrenner’s illegal campaign contributions to Nixon that he remained friends for life with the Steinbrenner family?
Because this is a movie newsletter, allow me to rank the best-ever portrayals of Henry Kissinger in the movies:
5. Ron Silver in Kissinger and Nixon (Daniel Petrie, 1995)
4. Saul Rubinek in Dick (Andrew Fleming, 1999)
3. Liev Schrieber in Golda (Guy Nattiv, 2023)
2. Paul Sorvino in Nixon (Oliver Stone, 1995)
Kissinger himself, in The Trials of Henry Kissinger (Eugene Jarecki, 2002).
The last one was the documentary fronted by the late journalist and longtime Kissinger bete noire Christopher Hitchens, based on his book. Given his faculty with mean obituaries, the worst part of Kissinger living this long is that Hitch wasn’t around to react to his death.
It’s all on YouTube:
There’s also Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go, a short film Joel and Ethan Coen made when they were kids, shooting at the Minneapolis airport. But I don’t believe that has ever publicly surfaced.
Is ‘Wish’ woke?
Disney’s movie Wish appears to have flopped, with audiences not connecting with it. As always, the explanation for why is ready: Because it’s “woke”!”
Is it, though? It has a pretty typical Disney plot and the whole idea of the movie is that it’s built up out of the parts and tropes of other Disney movies from the last 100 years. Is there an evil despotic king? Sure, but that’s nothing new. Is it a “Trump allegory”? That never occurred to me at any point while watching it, and the guy looks or sounds in no way whatsoever like Trump. But hey, if you see an odious, dictatorial ruler and “Trump” is the first thing to come to mind, that’s on you, not me.
There is one notable thing that likely got the anti-wokesters going: The main girl in it is Black. And if that’s what you think “woke” is, and “woke” is bad…
Similarly, I’m being told that Mystery Science Theater 3000 is “woke” now because… there’s a woman in it. That’s it, that’s the whole argument:
Philly, Loki, and Enshittification
There’s some weird stuff going on with the Internet these days. Sports Illustrated, formerly the most respected name in sports journalism, recently got caught running AI-generated articles. Some clown recently wrote a tweetstorm showing how he pulled off an “SEO heist” in which he “stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor.” That’s the sort of thing that should be punishable with arrest, or at the very least Google knocking everything that schmuck owns straight to the bottom.
It’s what Cory Doctorow called “Enshittification” the way all sorts of incentives are in place to make the Internet worse and worse over time- whether it’s Elon Musk on X prioritizing scams, misinformation, and Nazis, or this bot-written SEO garbage that’s showing up more and more in Google results.
This has happened quite a few times with things I’ve written. Last week, my Philadelphia Inquirer editor Bedatri wrote a piece for the paper about the announcement of Creed IV, and in it, she included something I had written at the time of the Creed III trailer release a year ago, where I said “especially here in Philadelphia, Rocky will never die.”
Some clickbait site that somehow got itself indexed on Google News rewrote her story but, for some reason, subbed in several references to Loki. So my quote reads “But the truth is,” Stephen Silver wrote in the Inquirer… ‘Especially in Philadelphia, where Loki will never die.’”
Stop the Internet, I want to get off.
This week’s writings
Here at the site, I wrote about The Fall of Minneapolis, looked back on ten years of Frozen, defended Saltburn and director Emerald Fennell from those who hate her for no apparent reason, and reviewed John Woo’s comeback film, Silent Night. The Fall of Minneapolis piece, by the way, is the most-read in the history of this newsletter, so thank you for reading, and welcome new readers.
For Splice Today, I reviewed What Happens Later.
For Broad Street Review, I previewed Philadelphia-area repertory offerings in December, including the wrap-up of the Film Society’s Sight and Sound 100 presentation, a Schindler’s List 30th anniversary showing at the Weitzman Museum, and several shows of It’s a Wonderful Life.
For the Jewish Exponent, I looked at the many Jewish (and Philadelphia ties) of Maestro, from screenwriter Josh Singer singing Leonard Bernstein songs in his synagogue choir, to a Hebrew shirt Bernstein wears in the movie. I also interviewed Kristen Arter, head of Philadelphia Jewish Film and Media, following the recent completion of their annual fall film festival.
Coming up next week: A review of my favorite movie of the year, a tenth-anniversary look back at my favorite of the last decade, and a documentary that hits close to home. As always, thank you for your support.