Gossip Central

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman: Awarding a Revenge Fantasy

As awards season ratchets up, Carey Mulligan’s performance in Promising Young Woman is the one to beat for over-the-top best actress accolades. She plays a sharp-witted young woman who has had enough! The National Board of Review named Mulligan Best Actress, and screenwriter/ director Emerald Fennell is slated for the Independent Spirit Award’s Best Director. Capturing the Zeitgeist, Promising Young Woman promises recognition for this film, lingering way past its final moments: even as it becomes most outlandish, it rings most true.

The specter of Brett Kavanagh’s unmanly past at a frat party hangs over Emerald Fennell’s feature debut, Promising Young Woman, as do the million microaggressions endured by girls/women finding their place in the world. Carey Mulligan portrays Cassie, a medical school dropout, aprowl in bars at night, picking up men who see her, drunk, out of it equating with easy prey, easy lay. Legs astride, makeup dripping, her look signals anything but control, but she’s got a trick waiting. As they undress her, she bolts up, confronts their predations and takes off, a quiet act of revolt.

Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI: Reflections on a Complicated Legacy

 “I love America,” filmmaker Sam Pollard asserts, interviewed by The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, “but it’s a complicated, fucked up place.” The occasion was the opening of his latest documentary, MLK/FBI, released in time for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day; the interview from the fall, predated the events of January 6 that more than anything proves the statement true. As is the case with other films he’s worked on, Eyes on the Prize II and 4 Little Girls among them, Pollard revels in complicated, teaching “Anything in America is layered in complexity.”

Rebranding the The Gotham Awards

Breaking news: the IFP Gotham Awards will now be called The Gothams. Kicking off the awards season, this week’s celebration of “indie” or lower budget films managed to recreate the Gotham experience, seating guests at their packed tables in the cavernous Cipriani Wall Street, virtually, of course. Sipping my wine, I could kibbitz with fellow journalists. Let us say, no one was commenting on the celebrities’ gowns, glitz, or hairdos. For the occasion, I did wear makeup—and a sweater over yoga pants (not pajamas) instead of my usual cocktail dress. I did not work the room, but I enjoyed the experience of seeing Cadillac Escalades occupy the space, along with a few lone well-distanced high-rise tables near a stage with red velvet curtains. Elegance was maintained. I could see that I was not alone feeling out the possibilities. Early on, when the Best Documentary award went to two films, A Thousand Cuts and Time, onlookers heard the winners mutter, “I don’t see anyone. This is weird.” Alone in a room, we were not alone.

Hilary Swank in Fatale: Bridging Two Hollywoods

Two-time Academy Award winning Hilary Swank may be the most famous name attached to the new noir feature, Fatale, but, said director Deon Taylor in a Q&A after a virtual special screening, for black audiences Michael Ealy is a bigger star. Debate this point all you want. These actors are sublime in Fatale, acting out a pas de deux between a police detective and a crime suspect, so nuanced and sexy—Taylor conceived the idea—where race is key to the convolutions of the plot. “There are two Hollywoods,” said Taylor, “white Hollywood and black Hollywood. Hilary Swank did not know who Michael Ealy was.”