We have a lot to discuss, so BUCKLE UP. The Creative Arts Emmys will have to wait, because today we need to focus on what we missed from Venice: Jodie Turner-Smith, Tessa Thompson, and Timothee Chalamet in a halter top “as Lord Licorice from Greta Gerwig’s Candy Land,” brilliant quip there from Louis Virtel, A+, no notes… It’s all coming.
But first, it’s the Don’t Worry Darling premiere, a.k.a. the one everyone has been waiting for even if they want to pretend they aren’t that interested in the mess. There is just… so much. Like:
- La Pugh missed the press conference, citing her Dune II shooting schedule, and left right after the premiere for the same reason. This is both completely legitimate, and also a brilliant way to avoid going to a junket where everyone is going to ask questions that involve the word “feud” and you’re not interested in answering them. Some have pointed out that Timothee is also shooting Dune II but got more time off for Venice, but it’s definitely possible Timmy might actually have been off the shooting schedule for more days and Florence happened not to be. We will never know — Denis Villenueve is not going to post his production schedule on Instagram with a skull emoji — so again, either it’s true, or it’s the perfect excuse, or both.
- Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde did not stand next to each other once, thereby ensuring that no one has a photo of them together and/or any photograph they could crop other people out of so that it looks like they were standing alone together. That was clearly choreographed.
- Florence Pugh did not take photos with Olivia or Harry, unless it was a large group shot, and each had a human shield between them and the others. She did, however, get snapped with some of her other co-stars.
- Her stylist captioned photos of the event with only the words “Miss Flo” — backstory here — and that is… savage and brilliant, frankly.
- Reviews have been middling. Everyone says it’s visually gorgeous. Everyone likes Florence. Deadline seemed to think the whole thing was just fine; EW was like, “Ehhhh, okay, B-minus,” The Hollywood Reporter wasn’t particularly impressed, and Rolling Stone and Indiewire absolutely panned it, with RS using words like “revolting” and saying, “Don’t Worry Darling plays like a bad Op-Ed piece that wants you to believe its good intentions are more significant and righteous than they actually are. It’s nowhere near The Feminine Mystique on acid, though judges might accept “Lean In after a few too many Lime-a-Ritas” as a less aspirational, more accurate description. Rarely has high-concept genre commentary been so gorgeous yet so barely coherent.” WOW.
- Chris Pine had to sit between Olivia and Harry at the premiere itself, and Twitter lost its mind because one clip makes it seem like… Harry SPIT on him?!? SURELY not?? Someone else said this was just the moment Chris realized where he’d put his sunglasses, but that can’t be true because in this clip you can see he had only put them down milliseconds before…?!?!? It is insane to me that people would think Harry spat on Chris Pine INTENTIONALLY. There’s no way, unless it’s a running joke with them. Chris Pine is not involved. Chris Pine is hurting no one. Chris Pine just wants to go meditate naked on his hotel balcony with some edibles. But I can see why everyone went nuts over the various clips — they are wild(e) — and also, frankly, I think we all probably need to power down and go touch some grass, myself included.
- Chris later put on the sunnies as the lights went down, which is such an Anna Wintour move. Dude wants his reactions hidden and maybe, as the Tweeter suggested, a catnap. And his facial expressions during the press conference say, to me, “I was not in the shit! I was untouched by the shit! And now the shit has come to me.”
- You know who really IS untouched by the shit? KiKi Layne. Did you know she’s in this? Exactly. It barely comes up. KiKi has steered clear of ALL of this. I’m sure she’s also filming Dune II. Winky face emoji.
You know who else is untouched by the shit? Queen Pugh:
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Please, please, scroll to the third slide and watch the video walk. This woman is NOT BOTHERED. The outfit is sort of goofy — I call it Coastal Cool Stepmom, in that I feel like if Meredith Blake had married the twins’ father in Parent Trap, they’d eventually have bought a place in the Hamptons and she’d be making the girls’ friends low-cal spritzers on the sly and generally trying to buy them off with permissiveness. But it is a deliciously breezy way to enter this situation. Those are not the shoes of a woman who expects to step in muck. She knows she will leave as clean as when she arrived, smelling like a rose.
I will say this, though: I’m going to watch the movie, because I’m so curious. And surely I’m not the only one. That small fact alone can turn all the potential losers here into winners. So if it turns out this whole thing was a masterplan to make sure an unremarkable movie made a mark — I don’t think that’s the case, but you know — then bravo.
