I saw it again tonight, and holy moley…it was shot in 1.66:1. A result of the European sensibility of dp Lucasz Zal (Ida, Cold War, The Zone of Interest). Chloe Zhao agreed, I’m guessing, because 1.66 is an older a.r. (European “flat”, common in France and England in the mid 20th Century) and this seemed to vaguely augment the Elizabethan vibe.

I’ll be very surprised if a single film critic or puff-piece profiler has mentioned this. One reason is that 98% of your mainstream media kiss-assers don’t even know what a 1.66 aspect ratio is.

I was more or less okay with Albert Brooks‘ Defending Your Life (’91) and I’ll always adore the last 25 minutes of Warren Beatty and Buck Henry‘s Heaven Can Wait (’78). Because, deep down, I’m susceptible to this brand of romantic fantasy…fate, happenstance, eternal connections, etc.

But I would never so much as flirt with the idea of submitting myself to an afterlife romcom as obviously puerile and vomitous as Eternity (A24, 11.26).

Which youngish afterlife dead guy (Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller or Callum Turner) should the also-dead-but-reborn Elizabeth Olsen choose for her eternal afterlife partner? Jesus, man…who the hell cares?

Imagine if 2001‘s Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) had realized at the very end of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1968 classic, just he was about to transform into a cosmic star-child, that the only thing that really matters is somehow finding and hooking up with Pamela Byrge, a girl he was head-over-heels in love with in high school, etc.

It obviously required an extraordinary degree of shallowness and not even a glimmering of cosmic consciousness for cowriters Pat Cunnane and David Freyne (Freyne also directed) to dream up this crap.

I noted eight years ago that Turner has eyes like a northwestern timberwolf. This is still the case.

In Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat (’44), a German submarine survivor, Willie (Walter Slezak), admits that his crew shelled the lifeboats of a sunken British ship. He explains through Tallulah Bankhead‘s Connie, who translates his German, that they were “just following orders” to fire on the lifeboats, even though they posed no military threat.

“This admission sparks a hushed debate among the survivors about how to treat an enemy who participated in such a deplorable act.

“Ultimately, the survivors, driven by a combination of anger, suspicion (Willie is later found to have a hidden flask of water and food tablets that the others lacked) and a struggle for survival, savagely beat Willie and throw him overboard to his death.”

Political cartoon by Nick Anderson:

Make that two figures of speech, and both involving H20. I encountered them earlier today while reading a four-day-old Hamnet review, written by the Daily Beast‘s Chris Feil.

The deplorable terms are (a) “pool of tears” and (b) “puddle of tears.” I’m not saying that Hamnet‘s Globe Theatre finale doesn’t deliver a meltdown. It surely does. I’m saying that any and all allusions to pools or puddles of tears are verboten.

In traffic violation terms, writing “puddle of tears” or “pool of tears” is equal to drunk driving, or perhaps even hitting a pedestrian and leaving the scene with squealing tires and burnt-rubber smoke in the air.

Feil: “The first thing you’ve likely heard about Oscar-winner director Chloé Zhao’s latest film, Hamnet — before even predictions about its Oscar chances — is the degree to which it is leaving crowds in a pool of tears.”

Less than two seconds after reading this sentence, I was telepathically muttering epithets….”You shameless motherfucker…pool of tears?…you craven shoveller… you should be bitchslapped for that”, etc.

Her choice is included in “The 10 Best Movies of 2025“, posted on 12.3.25 at 2:54 pm:

HE disagrees with 16 of Quentin Tarantino’s choices for the 20 best films of the 21st Century — the ixnays are in boldface, the agreements are underlined:

Agreements:

David Fincher’s “Zodiac” (No. 6)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” (No. 5)
Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball” (No. 18)
Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” (No. 10)

Nay-nays:

Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” (No. 20)
Eli Roth’s “Cabin Fever” (No. 19)
Prachya Pinkaew’s “Chocolate” (No. 17)
Rob Zombie’s “The Devil’s Rejects” (No. 16)
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” (No. 15)
Richard Linklater’s “School of Rock” (No. 14)
Jeff Tremaine’s “Jackass: The Movie” (No. 13)
Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s “Big Bad Wolves” (No. 12)
Kinji Fukasaku’s “Battle Royale” (No. 11)
Edgar Wright’s “Shaun of the Dead” (No. 9)
George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” (No. 8)
Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable” (No. 7)
Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” (No. 4)
Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” (No. 3)
Lee Unkrich’s “Toy Story 3” (No. 2)
Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” (No. 1)

HE’s Top 25 Films of the 21st Century:

1. Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse, 2. David Fincher‘s Zodiac, 3a. Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic; 3b. Paul Greengrass‘s United 93, 4. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men, 5. Spike Jonze‘s Adaptation; 6. Polanski’s The Pianist, 7. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others, 8. Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton, 9. Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 10. Todd Fields‘ In the Bedroom, 11. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country For Old Men, 12. Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker, 13. David Fincher‘s The Social Network, 15. Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation, 16. Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball, 17. Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, 18. David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook, 19. Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, 20. Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, 21. Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea, 22. Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, 23.Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, 24. Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed; and 25. Kent Jones‘ Diane.

Last night I indulged a kind of snide-attitude curiosity impulse by renting Walt Disney and Robert Stevenson’s Johnny Tremain (‘57), which I had presumed would be a simplistic, teen-friendly saga about Boston patriots in the 1770s (the Sons of Liberty, Paul Revere, John Adams, the Boston Tea Party, “the redcoats are coming!”, the first shot fired in Lexington) with the usual edges sanded off (i.e., standard Disney treatment) and a bit dumbed-down.

Well, it is all those things to a certain degree, but it’s not offensively dumbed down and actually applies a certain Encyclopedia Brittanica intelligence and offers basic respect for standardized historical “facts”.

Plus I instantly warmed to Hal Stalmaster’s performance as Tremain, a silversmith’s apprentice with a planted, straight-talking manner — a young, sensible-minded dude you feel you can trust. Only 16 during filming, the handsome Hal is certainly not playing some twerpy, emotionally effusive, pogo-stick kid. He’s a 30 year-old in temperament, but obliged to sound half that age by the Johnny Tremain requirement.

The 13-years-younger brother of legendary casting director Lyn Stalmaster (1927-2021), Hal never managed (or apparently sought) another lead role in anything. After playing a supporting role in Disney’s The Swamp Fox miniseries (Leslie Neilsen!) and handling some guest roles in TV series, Hal left acting in ‘66. He worked as a booking agent, and is still with us at age 85.

HE has a theory about why Hal Stalmaster never became Richard Beymer, the 6’2” hunk who played Tremain’s best bro and went on to significant fame in a few early to mid ‘60s films (including West Side Story and The Longest Day). I think it was at least partly because Hal was too short. He appears in Tremain to be Dustin Hoffman-sized.

…I would have been down for a third installment. I would have welcomed such a chapter, in fact. But as things now stand, I’m truly sick to death of this franchise. May God hear me…I want the Navi to go away and STAY AWAY…eternally.

To me it’s a serious human tragedy that James Cameron, a guy I so deeply respected in the ’80s and ’90s and all the way up to the first Avatar flick in ’09 and his historic Phillipine submersible dive in 2012…it’s emotionally painful that now he’s just grinding these films out like sausage. Not for the vision but for the money.

#AvatarFireAndAsh is a visual masterpiece. If you love these movies, it’s more of the same, but story-wise, it’s the same “capture/rescue” plot over and over again with some laughable dialogue thrown in the middle. The runtime is criminal, and if you have eye issues, avoid the 3D pic.twitter.com/p8ou1mI25c

— Kaitlyn Booth (@katiesmovies) December 2, 2025

“But the script becomes lazy, repetitive & exhausting with excruciatingly bad dialogue,” etc.

I think this is AI bullshit, although Sen. Chuck Schumer almost certainly said these words recently. I realize that throwing in an occasional “eff” bomb is a mark of authenticity these days, but I still think it’s fake.