Fin: Festival FOMO, Taylor at the movies, Rotten Tomatoes bribery, and woke James Bond

The inaugural edition of this newsletter's weekly news-and-notes column

First of all, a big thank you to everyone for reading and subscribing in the first week of the newsletter. I feel like I'm getting the hang of this Substack thing, and I appreciate the early reactions. And the early subscriptions have been beyond my most optimistic expectations. 

Hang on, because there's a lot of exciting stuff I've got planned in the next couple of weeks. 

This is the first edition of my weekly Friday notes column, which I've named "Fin" in honor of my daily end-of-day column at the old TechnologyTell Entertainment site. Other inspirations include Matthew Levine's Money Stuff newsletter and the Sunday sports notes columns Peter Gammons pioneered in the 1980s at the Boston Globe. Here we go: 

Missing TIFF 

The Toronto International Film Festival got underway in Canada on Thursday. I went in person last year for the first time and had a fantastic experience. I decided to drive to Canada, crossed the bridge from Buffalo into the Commonwealth at the very moment I got word of the queen's death, and saw about 25 movies in five days. I'm not usually one to get starstruck, but it was pretty cool to be in the same room with both Steven Spielberg and "Weird Al" Yankovic within the span of a few days. 

Despite getting credentials, I opted to skip this year's event. The strikes mean no actors or writers in attendance, and I figured that would mean not enough assignments to make it worth my while. However, I'm prepared for a heavy dose of TIFF FOMO for the next week and a half, whether it's a long list of films I wish I could have seen or a photo of someone walking down King Street. 

What I and other critics often tell ourselves is, that we're going to see all of these movies eventually, probably before the end of the year. It's just a question of seeing some of them in September instead of October, November, or December. 

I did just get approved for the New York Film Festival later this month and am planning to head up there for 2 or 3 days of press screenings, and the Philadelphia Film Festival comes around in late October. Look for plenty of reviews from both in this space. 

Taylor's Movie Era 

Last year at TIFF, there was a huge crowd of people camping out outside the Bell Lightbox venue in order to see Taylor Swift. No, she wasn't doing a concert or even singing at all, but rather giving a talk, which included a showing of her extended "All Too Well" video. At the time, there was even buzz that "All Too Well" might get some Oscar attention in the Live Action Short category (it did not.)

I remember a TIFF volunteer standing in front of the front door and shouting, at the 500 or so people gathered, that Tay had already left the building and they could disperse now (they did, eventually.)

It was announced late last month that Taylor is coming back to the movies in a serious way, with a concert film edition of her Eras Tour, which was just about the biggest concert tour in human history. I fully expect the film, which comes out October 13, to end up the highest-grossing movie of the fall, and probably second of the year behind Barbie. Not bad, for a movie that no one even knew was happening until about two weeks ago.

Strike Zone 

I haven't written much about the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and I don't anticipate them being that major a topic in this newsletter. I've never reported on Hollywood labor issues, I don't claim any special expertise when it comes to them, so I don't feel I have a great deal to add. For that, I highly recommend The Ankler newsletter, and especially Elaine Low's Strikegeist newsletter (which is free.)

That said, I'm firmly on the side of the unions and hope that when this strike ends — hopefully sooner rather than later — it will be with a fair deal for the actors and writers. 

Something Rotten 

Vulture ran a big expose this week about Rotten Tomatoes showing that, among other embarrassing things, one publicity firm offered $50 bribes to critics to positively review their movies. 

This is pretty horrible, of course. I'm on the record as stating that we all pay way too much attention to Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores and that they tell us very little (and the audience scores, it should go without saying, tell us even less.) 

Then there's this: I've been on Rotten Tomatoes for 15 years- should I feel insulted that no one has ever tried to bribe me? The film publicists I deal with regularly are good people and not so mercenary and unscrupulous, I guess; they don’t even give us popcorn, much less straight cash. I have gotten a few out-of-left-field requests from publicists to add a positive review of their movie – in one case, for a movie several years old — but I've always said no, and no one has ever offered me money. 

It should go without saying that there's no way I would ever put something on RT, or in a review for that matter, that wasn't what I really believed, cash bribe or no cash bribe. 

Double-O-Woke 

From what I've seen in the last few years, about 90 percent of conservative cultural commentary amounts to little more than pointing at a movie, show, or person, declaring it "woke," predicting its imminent failure, and leaving it at that. This is tiresome for a couple of reasons: It doesn't require the commentator to actually see the movie or show, but rather react to, say, casting news or a poster. Also, when someone does this, it's pretty much a tossup whether the tweet is coming from a Daily Wire editor or a Republican United States senator. Doesn't Ted Cruz have better things to do? 

I've always appreciated the work of the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat because, even though I usually disagree with him, he's willing to actually engage with culture on its own merits. I used to read his old blog, long before he worked at the Times, and I specifically remember him noticing that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., appeared to be the inspiration for Sack Lodge, Bradley Cooper's villainous bro character in Wedding Crashers. 

So I was disappointed to see a column this week under Douthat's byline with the headline "How America Made James Bond Woke." 

He's talking not about the latest Bond movie — at this point, we don't when they're making it or even who might play him — but rather the latest novel, in which the villain is "a Little Englander, a Brexiteer, a right-wing populist, apparently the true and natural heir to Goldfinger and Blofeld." 

I wasn't aware that the post-Ian Fleming Bond novels mattered all that much, but in Britain, I guess they do. Douthat does have interesting points to make about how populism is working in Canada but not in Britain, but I don't see how that sort of villain is out of step with the series. Plus, a Bond movie villain based on Nigel Farage would sort of rule. 

I think often of the scene in Goldeneye, the first movie in which Judi Dench played M, when M denounces 007 as "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur [and] a relic of the Cold War," and then talks about having "the balls to send a man out to die." 

If that scene – both the casting of a woman in a traditionally male role and the sexism talk — was in a Bond movie today, the anti-wokesters would lose their damn minds. I don't even want to imagine the YouTube rants about how “wokeness is ruining James Bond.”

But that was in 1995! And in the 007 movie after that, Tomorrow Never Dies, the bad guy (Jonathan Pryce) was basically Rupert Murdoch. 

Return of the Nooch

Deadline reported this week that Steven Mnuchin, who served as Secretary of the Treasury for the entirety of the Trump presidency, is getting back into the movie business. Liberty Strategic Capital, a private equity firm controlled by Mnuchin, has purchased a 5.5 percent stake in Lionsgate. 

There was a period of a couple of years in the mid-2010s when Warner Bros' entire slate was funded by a consortium led by Mnuchin (and his then-business partner, Brett Ratner, but we don't talk about him.) This led to Mnuchin having an executive producer credit on dozens of movies, which caused lots of unintentional comedy. The name of this ex-Goldman Sachs stalwart was on the remake of Going in Style, a movie whose plot was driven by evil bankers. In the 2017 comedy Fist Fight, a horse appeared on screen and defecated, at the very moment Mnuchin's name appeared on screen. 

While I wouldn't call myself a fan or anything, Mnuchin was far from the most evil member of the Trump Administration; he was instrumental in the passage of the CARES Act, and he hasn't been named in any of the indictments. He's also, as we've seen of late, not the worst person ever in a decision-making capacity at Warner Brothers (Hey, they've all been bad- even going back to the original Warner Brothers!) Plus, his wife was hilarious. Remember this? 

That said, I'd much rather Mnuchin be in the movie business as opposed to the government. As long as he doesn't let Louise make a sequel to Me You Madness. 

A selection of this week's writings 

Here at the SS Ben Hecht, I introduced the newsletter on Tuesday, I looked back on Eight Men Out on Wednesday and I reviewed Hello Dankness and We Kill For Love on Thursday. Coming next week: A manifesto on what I believe about movies, a documentary about a lovable NFL star, and a look back at a classic movie that means a great deal to me. 

For Splice Today, I reviewed My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, which was a bit of a mess but I found it kind of charming regardless.

Over at Living Life Fearless, I reviewed two very different movies about the car company Nissan: Gran Turismo, which shows how a video gamer, as part of a Nissan program, became a real race car driver, and Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn, the four-part Apple TV+ doc about how the celebrity CEO of the same company snuck out of Japan in an instrument case to avoid indictment. 

For Dealerscope, I wrote about the Metaverse, interviewing Wagner James Au, the journalist who has writing about the topic since before most of us had ever heard of it. The conclusion: No, the Metaverse is not dead, even though Facebook's version of it is a disaster. 

And for 19FortyFive, I wrote about the hilarious, narcissism-of-small-differences war between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kari Lake.

Have a nice weekend, everyone!