I was and am as appalled, horrified and heartbroken about Rob and Michele Reiner’s murder as the next guy, but I really don’t care for adoration tributes. Reiner has been quickly deified over the last week or so, but I prefer to remember people as they actually were deep down, warts and all. Just share gently and honestly, and don’t be afraid to discuss this or that shortcoming. (Example: Albert Brooks talking about how young Rob was naive and clumsy with women.) Rob was a spiritually buoyant fellow and emotionally generous in so many respects, everyone says, but no jumping up and down about this. Keep it real.

If you’ve been following the recent high-school squabble between prominent rightie columnists and podcasters, you know that last Thursday Ben Shapiro delivered a speech at AmFest in which he trashed the extreme conspiracy-minded fringe nutters (Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson) and one of their apologists (Megan Kelly).

Those who’ve been instinctively or habitually trashing Shapiro over the last four or five years need to give him a re-think. Shapiro is now a principled conservative who’s said “no” to the wackazoids. He’s now a man with a formidable backbone.

“Dial M Mauled By Fascists,” posted on 4.28.12:

The 1.78 or 1.85 a.r. on the Dial M For Murder Bluray was favored because of one reason only — because this a.r. conforms to the 16 x 9 aspect ratio of high-def flat panels. The people who made this call were and are nothing but FASCIST REVISIONIST BRUTES.

“We have a vision,” their manifesto reads. ‘A vision of all films shot from the early ’50s to mid ’60s with their tops and bottoms CHOPPED OFF, and we will stop at nothing to achieve that goal. Because of 16 x 9 high-def screens, we are committed to killing visual information. And we will succeed because we have the factual data and research to back up the assertion that these films were shot to be shown at 1.85, but could also be shown at 1.33 or 1.37 for purist film buff screenings and for television airings and VHS and DVD versions.

“Repeat after us: WE HAVE A VISION, and it is about KILLING VISUAL INFORMATION by slicing off the tops and bottoms of films.”

I’ve said this before, hut if WHE were to stream the boxy version of Dial M For Murder, I would buy it in a split second.

All through the 20th Century and into the 21st I watched Dial M at 1.33 or 1.37. I also saw it in 1.33 or 1.37 3D at the Eighth Street Playhouse in ’80. The compositions and framings were and are entirely satisfactory and didn’t need to have their tops and buttons CHOPPED OFF WITH A MEAT CLEAVER.

Read more

Watching Broken English, the 2025 doc about Marianne Faithfull that I saw in Venice three and a half months ago, would be a perfect thing to stream on this cold and snowy Connecicut day. Is it streamable as a stand-alone rental? Apparently not. Okay, maybe it is but I’m just too fucking dumb to figure it out.

Posted on 9.7.25: Just because I failed to post a review of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard‘s Broken English doesn’t mean I wasn’t won over and in fact melted down. I caught a late-night screening at the Venice Film Festival, and have been thinking about it — warmly — ever since.

It’s not a typical shake-and-bake summary of a pop star, but a free-form docu-portrait of a quirky, cultured individualist who, for a short period, seemed to live by the light of camera flashbulbs as she wrote and performed a few songs (she penned the lyrics to “Sister Morphine“), and was, for a certain period, a junkie, and was later a radiant, raspy-voiced pop poet and vocal stylist.

I’m not allowed to say that I still prefer the thin and willowy Faithfull of the ’60s and ’70s to the wise, seasoned, heavy-set Faithfull of the aughts and 20teens. Anyone who says this deserves to be scorned, kicked, spat upon and thrown into a wolf pit.

I can’t wait to see Forsyth and Pollard’s doc again.

Early this morning Slate ‘s Dana Stevens urged readers to consider Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme and Mary Bronte’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in the same light — as two peas in a pod, in fact — linked as they are by the same producer, Ronald Bronstein, who is also Mary’s husband**.

But of course! Except for the fact that Marty Supreme is a hyper, adrenalized, globe-hopping, pogo-stick contact high and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a miserable, claustrophobic, feminist-minded, self-loathing agony slog that only XX-chromosome celebrationists like Kristi Coulter could possibly “enjoy”, they’re almost exactly the same film. Certainly!

Supreme–ala made me want to bop-the-rock with a hubba-hubba Chalamet while going down on Gwyneth Paltrow in Central Park and throb-dancing to Tears for Fears and going “hoo-hoo!” like Daffy Duck. If I Had Legs ignited thoughts of overdosing on Oxy while stabbing myself in the throat with a steak knife. Yeaaahhh!

=

** Ronald and Mary have a daughter, live in fucking White Plains.

Read more

“A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.” — Francis Coppola by way of George C. Scott by way of George S. Patton.

Of all the high achievers who passed in 2025, the ones I felt closest to or saddest about were Robert Redford, Frank Gehry, Tom Stoppard, Terence Stamp, Diane Keaton, Marianne Faithfull, David Johansen, Giorgio Armani, Brian Wilson, Michael Madsen and Sly Stone.

I was shocked and startled by the mad-dog cruelty that removed Rob Reiner and wife, Michele Singer Reiner, from our sphere.

For whatever reason I didn’t feel all that much about poor Gene Hackman. I certainly felt sorry about the undignified manner in which he left the planet, but that was something else.

“Stoplight With Hackman,” posted on 1.28.21: Sometime in the summer or early fall of ’94 (can’t remember which) I visited the Culver Studios set of Crimson Tide.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer had invited me. I hung around in a low-key way for two or three hours. No chit-chats with “talent” or anyone except Jerry — basically an opportunity to see the nuclear submarine set, which was built to tilt and lean and shake around. I watched Tony Scott guide Gene Hackman through a confrontation scene over and over. I was maybe 100 feet away.

When you first arrive on a big movie set there’s nothing more exciting. And then you hang around for a while, doing nothing but watching and maybe shooting the shit with whomever and taking notes and sipping soft drinks and nibbling bagels, and you’re eventually bored stiff.

Eventually it was time to leave. I took a last look at the set, thanked Jerry, shook hands and briskly walked off the sound stage and back to my black 240SX Nissan. I eased out of the parking lot and drove north on Ince Blvd. I stopped at a red light at the corner of Ince and Culver Blvd.

Read more

“No one could stand between my men and home. Not even me.”

To this I call bullshit. Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men were away for 20 effing years — the 10-year Trojan War plus another ten years of roaming around and getting into this and that adventure (cyclops, sirens, et. al.). I’d say that after a decade of fighting the Trojan War, Odysseus did stand between his men and home, and for a helluva long time at that.

You heard it here first — there’s a distinct possibility that The Odysssey is going to turn out to be a turgid, self-important whiff.

Read more

While Meg Ryan is moaning and shrieking in her seat, Billy Crystal reacts in a low-key fashion. A subdued grimace, sharing polite looks with fellow diners, etc. But if director Rob Reiner had told Crystal to glance at the camera with an Oliver Hardy-like expression of pique, it would have been a tiny bit funnier.

Personal HE thanksgiving: I’m so grateful that I was lucky and fortunate enough to have lived through a mythic era of cinema and moviegoing. Basically my whole life until the near-death blow of the pandemic, and then the final blows that were recently delivered by Ted “Godzilla” Sarandos and the YouTube Oscars deal.

My decades of theatrical movie-watching were a true blessing, and yet are gone forever, never to return. Nothing lasts, everything fades.

Plus I feel so privileged that I still have access to the elite and magical vibes of viewing films at top-tier film festivals. Full houses, superb projection standards, seriously focused industry audiences, great post-screening discussions.

Why does my thankfulness feel so gloomy and resigned? Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman summed it up earlier today

“Consider the icing that last week was poured on top of the doomsday-of-cinema cake,” he began.

“In a bombshell development, it was announced that the Academy Awards, starting in 2029, will no longer be broadcast on ABC, or on any television network. A deal was struck so that you will watch them exclusively on YouTube.

“A friend says this sounds like some horrifically just-plausible-enough satirical premise out of Seth Rogen’s The Studio, and he’s right: In what world are the Oscars going to be an event on YouTube?

“I get it: The monoculture is fading. Broadcast television is no longer the centralized force it once was. And a YouTubed Oscars could have an impressive international reach.

“Yet forget all that for a moment and listen to your gut. It’s beyond obvious that the Oscars on YouTube would be radically diminished — that they would go from being must-see TV to maybe-see semi-background noise.

“And the timing is nearly karmic. The YouTube Oscars that a fading number of viewers will care about is set to come along just as a newly baptized Netflix Warner Bros. is diluting the appeal of theatrical enough so that only a fading number of viewers will care about them.
‘
“An extinction-level event? Yes, it could be.

“Unless forces within the industry see what’s at stake, and rise up to fight it.”

HE to Gleiberman: Fight it how? By kidnapping Ted Sarandos like Robert DeNiro and Sandra Bernhard kidnap Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy?

Owen hasn’t mentioned the other big reason why Joe and Jane Popcorn have quit theatrical movies, and that’s the instructional woke shit (racial identity, sexuality, gender plus “all whites are mostly bad”) that movies began peddling sometime in the mid to late teens.

Wokey currents began diminishing in mid ’24, true, but malignant habits die hard.

Robert Mitchum‘s Jeff Bailey: “There may not be a way to win [in a casino], but there’s a way to lose more slowly.”

“Let Me Go“, a Mick Jagger-Keith Richards track on Emotional Rescue (6.20.80), is a second-tier thing, but it’s always been one of my all-time pleasurables. The breakup lyrics are blunt and dismissive. Jagger’s vocals are fine, but Richards’ guitar work is the hook. A blissful mood every time.

</p>

Last night’s highly unusual thing was that I actually laughed out loud at a couple of SNL skits. The bloody Home Alone riff is truly wonderful until it cops out at the 2:48 mark. And the first two written-by-Michael Che, read-by-Colin Jost jokes are hilarious. Okay, the third one is pretty good also.