The Method to Our Madness
PLUS: a rant about orcas!
For Your Re-Consideration: In Which, With The Benefit of Hindsight & Accrued Wisdom, Dames Karen & Sophie Right Grievous Cultural Wrongs
We’re in the thick of awards season for movies, and since awards and canonicity are things we’re pretty much always thinking about, we wanted to turn our minds to correcting awards that went to the wrong nominee, or bestowing an award on a deserving artist who might not even have been on the nominee list in a particular year.
We open For Your Re-Consideration’s debut with a musician and actor who’s enjoyed a decades-long career: Clifford Smith, Jr., known to most of us as Method Man. We hasten to mention that Your Dames had already decided a couple of weeks ago that he would be our first subject, and seeing that he’s the cover star of this month’s Essence only ratifies what an excellent and deserving candidate he is For Your Re-Consideration.
Luke Cage is right, it IS him!
In brief: an EGOT for Method Man when??? Meth is already 25% of the way to this top-line cultural honor. He is already a Grammy winner, thanks to his “I’ll Be There/You’re All I Need To Get By” duet with Mary J. Blige. We would like to add to his awards shelf an Emmy for his peerlessly delightful supporting performance in the late, lamented one-season wonder Teenage Bounty Hunters. (Dame Sophie holds an undying grudge against Netflix for this appallingly bad decision.) His character Terrance is a professional and romantic rival to the titular characters’ mentor Bowser, played by the equally deserving Kadeem Hardison. Terrance is smart and wily, and an astute self-marketer with a popular YouTube channel. He is also an excellent amateur chef, and, it must be respectfully said, so. very. fine. Method Man brings to this role his personal charm and swag, expert comic timing, and a glint in his eye that says “yes, I am a little shit, and that’s why you love me!” He’s 100% correct.
Thanks to his magnetic screen presence and range – in addition to being very funny in Keanu and How High with his bestie Redman, he’s a strong dramatic actor, as seen in his roles in The Wire and the currently-airing Starz series Power Book II: Ghost, for which he’s already won an NAACP Image Award – we move to honor him with a Supporting Actor Oscar in 2017, and to shore up everyone’s appreciation of his chops and launch a new phase of his career by casting him as the lead in a reboot of the mid-80s classic Baby Boom.
Yes, we are talking about a gender-flipped reboot of the Diane Keaton romantic comedy that explores the question of whether career women can really have it all (per the original, they can, provided they leave the rat race to run a wildly successful baby food company in Vermont). What would the plot and locations of this film even be? We’re just spitballing here, but we think a general sense of “tightly-wound careerist faces the challenges of wholly unanticipated fatherhood and finds within himself the kinds and abundances of love he’d given up on ever experiencing” would do nicely.
All options are on the table, but the overall concept would ensure that Method Man would have lots of opportunities to be ultra-competent, vulnerable, heartfelt, flustered, dreamy, and fatherly. We propose for this movie to be written and directed by Keegan-Michael Key (himself an excellent romantic lead, please see his performances in Playing House and Schmigadoon! for all the proof you’ll ever need). Method Man and Key already worked together well on Keanu, and we’d like to see Key get more opportunities to establish himself as a filmmaker, so this is a very efficient two birds, one stone situation.
His success as an on-screen romantic lead with both comedy and dramatic chops and his proven abilities as a musician and rapper should lead very naturally to stage work. We don’t yet have a theatrical vehicle in mind for him, but we’re confident he’ll have a host of good options to choose from, and we look forward to being surprised. Will Method Man go for an August Wilson revival? Will he challenge himself by getting cast in a musical? Perhaps he’ll work on something really experimental and avant-garde off-Broadway to start? Whatever path Meth chooses, a Tony will surely follow in due course, rounding out the famous quartet of awards he so richly deserves.
Facts are facts!
Sophie’s Link of The Week: A Few Thoughts on Orcas
Full points for these elegant synchronized dives, gold medals all around for Team Cetacean
By now, we all know better than to mess around with orcas, right? It’s cruel and dangerous to keep them in captivity. I’m a very indoorsy and physical risk-averse person and even I know this. Their ability to communicate and hunt is disrupted when humans subject them to the noise of sonar and underwater explosions. They have complex and deep emotional bonds with other orcas in their pods. They are brilliantly creative hunters. Neko Case wrote a very bleak, very catchy song about them. They’re beautiful wild creatures, and we should have a very healthy, respectful fear of them and stay out of their way, because they are metal as hell. They are apex predators who we now know for a fact hunt, kill, and eat blue whales. These comparatively little scrappy kings of the sea are out there taking down the largest creature that has ever existed on this planet. This report in the NYTimes – which is so breathlessly impressed with orcas that my friend Craig suggested perhaps it was in fact written by a particularly PR-focused orca – informs us that:
The water ran red with the blood of the massive creature, and chunks of its flesh were floating all around. The scientists observed one orca force its way into the blue whale’s mouth and feast on its tongue.
I’m trying not to anthropomorphize here, but this is baroque violence. John Woo at his peak could never. I should probably limit myself to saying it’s logical and efficient. The tongue of a blue whale probably has high nutrient value for the orca, and swimming right into the whale’s mouth to get at it is just good common sense. Regardless, I’m going to continue to give these dapper-looking oceanic murderers as wide a berth as possible.
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
Quinta Brunson reuniting with her sixth grade teacher Ms. Abbott, the inspiration for her hilarious and beautiful show Abbott Elementary, and making everyone happy cry
This handy Curling explainer, full of useful & interesting facts about the sport from its sincere & open-hearted fans
Hilarious, absurd AI-generated Valentines that deserve to take the world by storm this February. Dame Sophie will henceforth sign all correspondence “with all my sparklepants”!
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