Another Woke Grenade Tossed at Mungiu’s “Fjord”

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In the immediate wake of Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord winning the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or on 5.23.26, woke-mob pushback was voiced by respected film critic B. Ruby Rich in a 5.24 Facebook post.

Rich passed along a second-hand observation (originally shared, she said, by “an esteemed U.S. curator”) that called Fjord “the MAGA film.”

Three days later came another shot across the Fjord bow, this time from identity-driven New Yorker critic Justin Chang.

In a 5.27 piece titled “All the Films in Competition at Cannes 2026, Ranked from Best to Worst“, Chang dismissively ranked Fjord, the festival’s only home-run knockout in my view, as the 11th best film he saw in Cannes, while snooting the following sentence: “More than a few wondered if Mungiu, whose Romanian-set films have forcefully criticized religious fundamentalism, had suddenly moved rightward as his camera drifted west [to Norway].”

HE interjection: “More than a few” alludes to the same people B. Ruby Rich and her “esteemed U.S. curator” had been chatting with in Cannes. The notion that Mungiu’s social-political perceptions may have “suddenly moved rightward” is an oblique, carefully phrased, typically Chang-ian way of saying Mungiu’s thinking (on this film at least) may have gone MAGA.

Two excerpts from Scott Roxborough’s THR interview with Mungiu, posted on 5.22.26:

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Son of Apartment Hallway Agony

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It was impossible not to respect Leonardo DiCaprio‘s intense, go-for-broke performances as loose-cannon types in This Boy’s Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, which he performed at age 16 and 17 or something like that. But they were “kid” performances.

Next came a pulp western, The Quick and the Dead (’95), which, performed at age 19, showcased his first teenager performance. Alas, the movie wasn’t all that good.

Next came Scott Kalvert‘s The Basketball Diaries, which I saw at Sundance ’95. This, for me, was Leo’s breakthrough — the film that really made me sit up and take notice. Street guy, edge guy, junkie,…wham. This scene in particular is what cinched the deal.

Posted in late 2020: “When I think of vintage DiCaprio I rewind back to that dynamic six-year period in the ’90s (’93 to ’98) when he was all about becoming and jumping off higher and higher cliffs — aflame, intense and panther-like in every performance he gave.

I respected Leo’s performance in This Boy’s Life but I didn’t love it, and I felt the same kind of admiring distance with Arnie, his mentally handicpped younger brother role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, partly because he was kind of a whiny, nasally-voiced kid in both and…you know, good work but later. Excellent actor, didn’t care for the feisty-kid vibes.

But a few months before Gilbert Grape opened I met DiCaprio for a Movieline interview at The Grill in Beverly Hills, and by that time he was taller and rail-thin and just shy of 20. I was sitting in that booth and listening to him free-associate with that irreverent, lightning-quick mind, and saying to myself, “This guy’s got it…I can feel the current.”

Then came a torrent: a crazy gunslinger in Sam Raimi‘s The Quick and the Dead (’95), as the delicate Paul Verlaine in Total Eclipse (’95), as himself in the semi-improvised, black-and-white homey film that only me and a few others saw called Don’s Plum (’95), as the druggy Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries (’95), as a wild, angry kid in Jerry Zak‘s Marvin’s Room, opposite Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann‘s Romeo + Juliet, as Jack Dawson in Titanic and finally as a parody of himself in Woody’s Celebrity. Eight performances, and every one a kind of sparkler-firecracker thing.

Then Leo took what felt like a year and half to drink and party (two-thirds of ’98, a good portion of ’99), and during that phase he was in a Randall Wallace clunker called The Man in the Iron Mask, giving the first “what the fuck is this?” performance of his career. And when he returned in Danny Boyle‘s The Beach (which opened in February of ’00) he’d gone doughy or something. That snap-crackle thing felt watered down or less focused or whatever. I only know that when he came on-screen in The Beach I said to myself “wait…what’s going on?” His face looked a bit puffy, his longish hair had been shorn off and his manner seemed dodgy and oblique.

Nightmare on Holloway Drive

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This photo put a big chill in my bones. Instant transportation back to the gloomiest chapter of my adult life. (Life was gloomier during my tween and mid-teen years, agreed, but I was too young to deliver any kind of skillful pushback .) HE’s WeHo pad wasn’t far from the original Barney’s Beanery, but that awful suffocating nightmare vibe had sunk in all over… everywhere. Masks, mass resignation and smoggy overcast skies. Life felt like Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile, but on a suspended-in-time basis.

Haven’t Thought About Little River Band For Decades…

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Written by David Briggs,”Lonesome Loser” is a 1979 cut by Australia’s Little River Band. Released as the lead single from First Under The Wire, their fifth studio album, “Loser” peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the band’s third top 10 hit and sixth overall top 40 hit in the United States.”

YouTube guy (a year ago): “If you experienced the 70s (and it doesn’t matter how many years have passed), this is one of those songs you remember the words to and can’t help but sing along.”

Dad Did This To Us

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Adapted by Aleshea Harris from her award-winning 2018 play, Is God Is (Amazon MGM, 5.15) is a stylized grindhouse revenge thriller about scarred twin sisters (Kara Young, Mallori Johnson) tracking down their abusive father (Sterling K. Brown). Greek tragedy meets a return to 1970s Blaxploitation. An unapologetic exploration of Black female rage and generational trauma. Did someone say “dark, stylish humor”? Okay, fine.

Whack-Ass Crazy Girlfriend

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General HE rule: “If it’s Blumhouse, it blows.” But Blumhouse films do, I’m very sorry to say, tend to be profitable.

Michael Johnston‘s “Bear”: “I was…uhm, calling to see if I can cancel the wish.”

Voice of Obsession director/writer Curry Baker: “I’m sorry, but we don’t really do that.”

Read Owen Gleiberman’s 5.30 Variety essay — “The Shocking Success of Backrooms and Obsession Should Be a Memo to Hollywood: You Need What’s Outside the Box.”

Fat, Blurpy-Voiced Eisenhower

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If I’ve ever seen a feature-film trailer that screams “streaming, no theatrical!”, it’s Anthony Maras‘s Pressure (Studio Canal, 5.29), which is clearly a “dad recreates D-Day” movie. Kyle’s Smith Wall Street Journal review says it best, at least as far as I’m concerned since the mere idea of Dwight D. Eisenhower being played by a larducket strikes me as…uhm, offensive:

Smith: “In this clunky D-Day drama, the overly emotive Brendan Fraser isn’t like Ike.”

Smith’s last three words refer to a song in Irving Berlin‘s “Call Me Madam“, which opened on Broadway on 10.12.50.

Good For The Soul, and…Oh, God, Steyer Is Living in 2022, Against Recent Olympic Committee Decision

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Posted on olympics.com on 5.26.26…biofemales only:

Disgusting AI History Porn

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John Wilkes Booth is eight feet tall here, and therefore weighs over 300 pounds. Two guys in Lincoln’s Ford Theatre booth (which is way too large) are wearing 20th Century ties. Booth wasn’t a rootin’, tootin’ buckaroo armed with a pair of six-shooters — he shot Lincoln with a Derringer, which Slim Pickens described in One–Eyed Jacks as a “little popper.” Foam-at-the-mouth AI vandals are truly the new pornographers.