The GQ Clips of the Sydney Sweeney Struggle Session Were Misleading.
The Full Interview is Worse.

So says Pirate Wires, who watched the whole thing.

Inside The Sydney Sweeney GQ Interview From Hell

wherein sydney, who evidently has a voluptuous iq, stares into the depths of a gotcha reporter's soul instead of apologizing for being hot
Blake Dodge

...

Assuming the clips were less forgiving than the full-length interview because of the laws of the internet, I listened to the whole thing. Come to find out: it's actually worse than the clips. It's really bad. I honestly can't deal with it.

The reporter's whole vibe was kind of: BuzzFeed nark in little white sneakers crossed with your best friend's mom who's not really authorized to discipline you but is mad at you for something that you did?

She front-loaded just about every question with an accusation ("context") and raised eyebrows that betrayed the feelings she wouldn't say out loud....

Katherine replied: given stuff like Euphoria (which doesn't take a moral stance on the different problems it explores, like teen drug use), Sydney's career doesn't look very political. And yet: "you have become very swept up in politics. And so I wondered if that has surprised you, as you put your ideas and yourself into art, not commentary."

*this was the first among many times in the interview that Sydney had to process the different levels of fuckery in the question with her face muscles*

"I've always believed that I'm not here to tell people what to think," she said. "I'm just here to kind of open their eyes to different ideas. And so I think that's why I gravitate towards characters and stories that are complicated and are maybe morally questionable and characters that are, on the page, hard to like, but then you find the humanity underneath them."

After sort of affirming (?) the idea of artists keeping themselves "a little bit" separate from politics, Katherine moved on to the cultural obsession with Sydney reaching a kind of climax: "Did your sense of your own fame change this year?"

(First of all, what?)

Cue Sydney's extremely sane answer:

"No. I surround myself with a really, really strong group of people who have been in my life since I was little. And they take me out of Hollywood, take me out of this bubble, and remind me what the real world is. And that that's where I exist. The idea of fame -- it doesn't apply to my personal life. I'm just Syd."

"You can't feel the difference in the volume at times?"

"If I turn on my phone, yes. If I have my phone off, and I'm home, no."

"So what is it like now being single?"

Lol. You may not see how that is a natural follow-up question, but Katherine sure did. After Sydney produced and starred in the rom-com Anyone But You, she played a "game" of letting rumors fly about a romance with Glen Powell, her co-star, Katherine asserted.

"We all now know that that was a projection, let's say, on our parts -- that wasn't real. But it occurred to me that maybe that story doesn't go so viral if you're not a very private person," Katherine said. "I imagine there are personal benefits to being private about your personal life, but are there also professional benefits to being private about your personal life?"

Wow, so, the question was roughly: is Sydney really private, or is she just pretending to be, such that the secrecy makes her even more rich and powerful?

*facial processing*

"The professional benefits for me and being private -- is for my own just health and sanity. If I let everybody in all the time, I have nothing for myself." She's just 28 years old, Sydney said; she's still going to make mistakes and grow. "And I think that it's important to be able to do that without having to say every single thing all the time."

"Right. Okay."

Lol.

"I don't really let other people define who I am," Sydney said.

"I'm happy to hear that. I have a lot of secondhand concern for you lately," Katherine said while fake laughing. "We're sort of talking around this American Eagle ad right now."

Aha.

The whole piece is good. I don't want to excerpt more.

Sydney Sweeney's small movie, Christy, about a female boxer with an abusive husband/coach, did poorly at the box office, but...

1, it's a small-budget movie about a niche figure. Who expected it to break records?

2, almost every movie is bombing now, including the much bigger box office and much-promoted love letter to Antifa bombers starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

3, this was plainly a passion project for Sydney Sweeney, one she probably only got made by agreeing to do some more commercial fare. Again, how much do we expect passion -- or vanity -- projects to make?

Christian Toto says we should support it, as she's a culture war icon.

I don't even know if she's "on the right." I watched her movie Immaculate, about a virgin nun becoming pregnant and being celebrated by creepy members of a Catholic church as the New Madonna. It's a halfway competently made movie, with a semi-"clever" gimmick to set it apart from Rosemary's Baby, but... did you see it?

It's the most egregiously anti-Christian and stridently pro-abortion commercial movie I've ever seen. I mean, I'm not much of a Christian and I'm an abortion moderate and even I was like, "What the hell is this nasty propaganda?"

I don't even want to tell you the ending. It's... it goes as far as you could possibly go in a pro-abortion, anti-Christ direction.

Remember Mac's joke headline in the Always Sunny abortion episode? "What if they aborted Jesus?" It's along those lines.

And she's in charge of her career. She picked this film to make.

I don't want to jump on her because I kind of like her but this is not a right-wing culture warrior. I'll praise her for not wading into political issues outside of her actual art, and I will definitely give her props for mogging a femcel CHUD, but I'm not going to hail her as a MAGA spokesmodel.

Eh. If she refunds the $7 I spent to buy the movie, maybe I'll buy a matinee ticket to Cristy.

I'm not going to see a feminist empowerment lady-boxer movie -- a sort of movie I have no interest in -- just to put money in the pockets of someone who made more money by age 20 than I've made in 20 years.

Eh. I already supported Matt Walsh, despite finding him to be tedious and annoying. I don't know how much money I have to spend on Culture War Bonds, as the now-insane Ya Boy Zack says.

Isn't "supporting" movies for identity-politics and political reasons a left-wing thing?

Gay entertainment zine The Hollywood Reporter:

In the new film Predator: Badlands, a young Predator monster, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), is bullied by his domineering father for being too small and weak, learns important lessons about the value of sensitivity, and meets two feisty women (one a robot, the other an alien) who will become his besties for life. He might as well audition for the school musical. Or move to New York City at the end.

That's the joke a friend and I made as we walked out of Dan Trachtenberg's surprisingly soft-hearted addition to the Predator canon, a movie that pushes its franchise mythology in a decidedly sweet direction. Some viewers might miss the macho brutality of Predators past, but Dek's adventures in self-confidence and chosen family may well satisfy plenty of others. This Predator is queer and we should say it.

Meanwhile: Billy Bob Thornton says he's tired of know-nothing celebrities pontificating about every political and cultural issue.

Obligatory: I don't want to post this. I have to post this.

posted by Ace at 04:42 PM

| Access Comments