“It’s all over,” “It’s all over,” “It’s all over,” is boring at first, then irritating, then infuriating, going over what I saw at the movies this year. An era has passed, a certain format has gone, the medium remains. 2020 convinced me that without movie theaters, movies cannot exist. There’s no “cinema” if the “cinema” isn’t also a place. A healthy cinema needs stars as much as it needs audience members, and heading into the first full year of no-corona-paranoia, moviegoers were underserved. Besides the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that shut promotion down and delayed dozens of films set to be released between July and December, there were more fake movies: the trailer for Ticket to Paradise, with George Clooney and Julia Roberts, felt like a slap in the face, an easy joke you might’ve seen on 30 Rock back when Hollywood filmmaking wasn’t flailing.
There are no movie stars, the mantra of the last seven years. There are a number of actresses who’ve distinguished themselves in the last decade: Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Margot Robbie—none of them American. Talia Ryder could surpass them in a few years, but no one’s complaining about lack of young actresses, American or not. It’s leading men, more elusive than ever, how Basil Exposition described Austin Powers: “Women want him, and men want to be him.” Flip that and reverse it however you want; Paul Schrader’s right when he says that moviegoing is a bisexual experience. It’s important to everyone when Brad Pitt takes his shirt off in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In 2019, that shot was bittersweet, because it was always brought up in this context: Why are there no more movie stars?
Jacob Elordi is the only leading man to emerge in the last decade that has any staying power. He’s a serious actor and a serious star, the opposite of the pox Timothée Chalamet, one of the most grotesque and unattractive stars ever pushed by Hollywood. He’s here to stay, too, apparently—Wonka over-performed, and even if that means fewer Marvel movies, it just means more crap with that asshole in it. He doesn’t look right, he doesn’t sound right, and he’s going to be fucking terrible as Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown.
Elordi has appeared in three movies this fall in quick succession: Priscilla, Saltburn, and The Sweet East. The latter may be the best by a mile but it’s on the fewest screens; Elordi does what he can with Emerald Fennell’s lousy material, but it’s a movie that worships him and worships him as the star he is. Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla has him playing a real megastar, but his Elvis Presley doesn’t make an impression in Coppola’s dramatically under-lit film—that’s Cailee Spaeny’s movie. He doesn’t look much like Elvis, but he sounds like him, and his strategy for getting into character with so little preparation time—covering his Saltburn hotel room with pictures of Elvis so he could “absorb it”—makes more sense and is more real than anything that’s ever come out of that oversized ant Chalamet’s mouth.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith