The late, great Robert Duvall soft-peaked for 41 years, from his Boo Radley in Kill A Mockingbird (’62) to Boss Spearman in Kevin Costner‘s Open Range (’03). He hard-peaked for roughly a dozen years, between George Lucas‘s THX-1138 (’71) and Bruce Beresford‘s Tender Mercies (’83). But he was always first-rate in everything…absolutely everything he did.

Posted on 8.22.18:

Robert Duvall is good every time at bat. Open Range, Lonesome Dove, Frank Hackett, Boo Radley, the taxi driver in Bullitt, The Apostle…always right on the mark. When luck and the angels are with him, he’s great.

But the marriage of Duvall and Mac Sledge was perfect. I despise country-style Christians for the most part, but I sure related to them here. Tender Mercies is probably the greatest getting-sober-and-turning-your-life-around movie of all time.

And yet when it opened in ’83, audiences mostly blew it off. It cost over $4 million to make, and only made $8 million and change.

Wiki excerpt: “The post-screening feedback was, in the words of director Bruce Beresford, ‘absolutely disastrous.’ As a result, Universal executives lost faith in the film and made little effort to promote it.

Screenwriter Horton Foote said of the studio, ‘I don’t know that they disliked the film. I just think they thought it was inconsequential. I guess they thought it would just get lost in the shuffle.’ Others in the film industry were equally dismissive; one Paramount Pictures representative described the picture as ‘like watching paint dry‘.”

Here’s a reptilian, depths-of-hell, bad-breath Beelzebub scenario that some might find triggering.

The deep-state bad guys, the super-rich gargoyles who really control things, are actively prolonging the Nancy Guthrie investigation and would be totally okay with the whereabouts of Savannah’s mom continuing to be a mystery for several more weeks, if not months.

Why? Because the Guthrie case distracts from the attention that might otherwise be focused on the Epstein files. The still unreleased stuff that Attorney General Pam Bondi is sitting on, I mean. The roughly three million files that allegedly contain deeply ugly videos, images and whatnot showing minors and perhaps even children being subjected to God knows what.

Prediction: The Guthrie case will continue to drag on and on, and the Bondi suppression will also continue until the rancid stuff will somehow leak out, possibly from European sources.

HE–posted last night (Sunday, 2.15):.

“The Silence of the Lambs, by the way, is not a horror film —- it’s a chilling, character driven, high-octane investigative thriller.”

Allegedly written by Reginald Hall, who was Fats Domino‘s brother-in-law, “You Talk Too Much” was a 1960 single by r&b singer Joe Jones (1926-2005). The song reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Later that year the song was adapted into French by Georges Aber as “Tu parles trop” and was a hit for Johnny Hallyday in early 1961.

Little was known about transgenderism when Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs was released 35 years ago. “Trans” may or may not have been a term back then, but it certainly wasn’t commonly used.

Ted Levine, who played Lambs’ sexually perverse, cross-dressing serial killer Jame Gumb a.k.a.”Buffalo Bill”, has told THR’s Ryan Gajewski that he feels unsettled about Lambs having instilled a negative image of gender nonconforming trans folk.

Was Jame Gumb a transgender whatever? Not as I recall. He wore lipstick and eyeliner at home, but he sure as hell looked and talked like a regular dude when Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling paid him a visit in Act Three.

Then again it’s not as if the real-life record of trans loners and depressives is completely unblemished.

While rightwing social media types have been pushing claims that trans persons are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings, snopes.com says this is false — it reports that the vast majority of mass shooting wackos have been straight or “cis” males.

Then again trans or trans-allied shooters have been associated with at least five horrific mass shootings (the recent Canadian school slaughter and the 2023 Memphis school shooting among them).

The Silence of the Lambs, by the way, is not a horror film — it’s a chilling, character driven, high-octane investigative thriller.

Woked and nutbagged themselves into a corner.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, monkey laughter is easily the least in this regard.

Monkey laughter is basically forced reactive giggling — a suck-up tactic used by vaguely fearful employees or kiss-assers of any stripe…a way of flattering bosses or admired colleagues or anyone they’re looking to get in good with.

It could be argued that almost all social laughter is untrustworthy, to this or that degree. Which is why I always slightly flinch or recoil when I hear or see it. I usually mutter to myself, “There goes another phony…performance giggling…another attempt at some form of social advancement.”

Movie-theatre laughter is 100% honest. Ditto the “watching TV in the living room” kind. Ditto reading something or other.

This is not a big deal, but HE is once again mildly irked by another obviously ill-fitting POC inserted into an early 19th Century British film, an Oscar-nominated comedy short called Jane Austen’s Period Drama.

The hunky Hawaiian actor who stands out like a sore thumb (although his narrow eyes, smallish cranium and aggressively bulging cheekbones will presumably meet with Justin Chang‘s approval) is listed in the credits as Ta’imua, but whose full name is Lachlan Taimua Hannemann.

Ta’imua plays Mr. James Dickley, a pretentious, posturing fellow with an appalling ignorance of female biology. Co-director and co-writer Julia Asks plays Miss Estrogenia Talbot. Her directing-writing collaborator is Steve Pinder The producer is Elli Legerski.

Why did Asks, Pinder and Legerski hire a young, resplendently brawny Pacific islander to play an eligible bachelor in a Jane Austen satire set in the early 1800s? Gee, who knows?

Will Jane Austen’s Period Drama win the Oscar for best non-doc short?

Wiki excerpt: “Three months ago Emma Thompson joined the project under the title of ‘Executive Menstrual Advisor.'”

HE is becoming angrier and angrier with all the empty noise and nocturnal flashing-cop-light spectacle (Tuscon fuzz, FBI raiding homes with zero payoffs) and the endless, infuriating brain-tease speculation from Ashleigh Banfield, Megyn Kelly, Brian Entin, Fox News and all the others (investigators, security experts, former lawmen, MSM anchors and reporters across the universe) who have NEXT TO NOTHING on their plates.

They’re all just sitting or standing there or poking around the cactus fields with their fingers up their butts, and with ALMOST NOTHING TO SAY except “maybe maybe, could be, who knows?, DNA blah blah blah one or two gloves found and sent to Florida or Quantico blah blah blah blah”…sounds like, could be, no arrests”…it’s mostly bullshit, I tell you!…mostly empty noise, and I’m asking myself “how are the authorities managing to be so bad, so inept, so Mack Sennett or Keystone cops in their search for poor abducted Nancy Guthrie?”

The Guthrie case is two weeks old — the third week has begun — and it really, REALLY is time, fellas, for a good old-fashioned “enough!!…we’ve all had enough of this crap so put up or shut up and stop pissing around because the general man-on-the-street impression is that the authorities are farting, farting, farting in the wind.”

Why doesn’t the FBI take a chance and pay $100K to that sketchy, scurvy-sounding TMZ gremlin who claims he knows what’s up? C’mon, what can they lose? They can afford to drop the dough with Trump involved in the case. Even if the gremlin turns out to be a fraud, that’ll at least distract from the empty Tuscon void.

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Eight and a half years ago I became the first and (as far as I know) only movie columnist to publicly observe that Callum Turner has menacing, feral, wolf-like eyes.

I wrote this in a 7.21.17 review of Marc Webb‘s Only Living Boy in New York (Roadside/Amazon).

Key passage: “I like the idea of a young New York guy (Callum Turner) discovering that his married dad (Pierce Brosnan) is having it off with a significantly younger hottie (Kate Beckinsale), and then slipping into the situation and boning the girlfriend himself.”

Here’s how I put it: “The only thing that gives me slight pause is the fact that Turner has eyes like Johnny Hallyday‘s, which is to say eyes like a timber wolf — a timber wolf in stylish, round-rim glasses.

“Some guys have warlock eyes (Stephen Frears), some have big cow eyes (Cary Grant), some have Chris Walken eyes (me), some look like otters (Benedict Cumberbatch) and others have eyes like Turner…just saying.”

We’ve all read that Turner may be cast as the next James Bond, and in so doing might nudge Jacob Elordi aside.

Turner’s cold eyes would be a perfect fit for this legendary British agent. A believable Bond actor has to be able to “bring the cruel”. Sean Connery had this in spades; ditto Daniel Craig.

When asked about the Bond buzz during a Berlin Film Festival press conference for Rosebush Pruning, Turner said it was “too early” and that he wouldn’t be commenting.

Callum Turner is immediately asked about playing the next James Bond at the Berlin Film Festival.

“I’m not going to comment.” His ‘Rosebush Pruning’ co-star Tracy Letts then interjects: “… I’m the next James Bond!” pic.twitter.com/LIUS73TEEh

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 14, 2026

HE to Schrader: This was presumably triggered by that empty, dimension-less, Ruairí Robinson-produced duke-out video between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise…right?

AI robotic-digital diversion is a wide-open, free-flowing cesspool**, and so the Colisseum cheap-seat serfs will always have chuckles galore on their phone screens.

As long as there are well-educated, enterprising filmmakers with hungry hearts, aggressively curious minds and resonating, real-deal perceptions (capable of recognizing the eternal cosmic goods, panoramic window-pane soul vistas, the loneliness of the long-distance runner…all that good stuff) there will be stories and journeys that will intrigue and nourish the usual 5% to 10% of the viewing public…the percentage that has always found the common gruel of mass entertainment boring, narcotizing, soul-numbing.

I for one live for the kinds of “books, films, movies and plays” that guys like Robinson will never be able to create. First and foremost because they don’t care to. They’re interested in (shocker!) delighting the Shallow Hal majority, just like the Roman Colisseum managers were a couple of thousand years ago.

All hail the proscenium-arch realms of Paul Schrader, Chloe Zhao, Sean Baker, Jonah Hill, Pawel Pawlikowski, pre-Barbie and definitely pre-Narnia Greta Gerwig, Luca Guadagnino, pre-Foxcatcher Bennett Miller, Josh Safdie, Timothee Chalamet, Alejandro G. Inarritu, pre-Detroit Kathryn Bigelow, pre-Odyssey Chris Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Celine Sciamma, Joachim Trier …hell, an entire parade of forthcoming filmmakers who will not only be capable of pissing off people like me but are probably, impishly eager to do so.

Life is full of pain, irritation, and hair-trigger emotions that we need to quickly suppress.