After God knows how many years in the far reaches of space, Michael Clayton‘s Tony Gilroy is back from Andor and the equally faraway realm of Rogue One…thank God almighty!

The newbie is Behemoth!, an intelligent, earthbound film about musically-driven adults.

Plus I’ve got an early draft of Gilroy’s script (reading it tonight). It obviously gives off Tar vibes although the jeopardy facing Pedro Pascal‘s Alex Serian, “a renowned, prolific cellist returning to Los Angeles to compose film scores”, is almost certainly different than what Cate Blanchett dealt with.

An obviously top-tier cast — Pascal plus Will Arnett as Alex’s brother; Eva Victor as Nadia, “Alex’s colleague and love interest”; Olivia Wilde as Alex’s ex-girlfriend; Hank Azaria as Alex’s father plus Alexa Swinton, Kaya Ralls, Erik Griffin, JoBeth Williams and Matthew Lillard.

The last major film with the word “behemoth” in the title was released 67 years ago:

The 8.28 release date of Ridley Scott‘s The Dog Stars (20th Century) tells you that 20th Century isn’t strongly invested. Not with the Venice and Telluride film festivals kicking off in late August and early September. Plus the Scott film seems nearly identical to Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann‘s The Last Of Us, the highly-praised 2023 miniseries about an apocalypse is triggered by a mysterious, highly lethal virus. Dog Stars is about a flu pandemic that has almost destroyed humanity, etc. But no zombies — just hungry survivors struggling to survive with limited food and fuel.

The only way that a metaphor behind The Odyssey…the only way it works for me is that it’s not about a weary Ithacan warrior trying to return home but being delayed, distracted and detoured by the gods for ten long years…

For a wandering decade-long journey can only me processed as a story about a warrior who doesn’t really want to return home. This, at least, makes sense. Who wants to return to the chains of matrimony? Mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage, cleaning the gutters.

Odysseus is nominally trying to return to wife Penelope and son Telemachus, but he’s too curious, too much in love with brawny adventure, and too attracted to grappling with all the godly manipulations and exotic strange-itude.

Odysseus is ostensibly trying to return home, but not really. Deep down he isn’t fully into it. This is the only interpretation that seems understandable.

HE to those who’ve seen The Odyssey: Does Chris Nolan‘s film suggest that this is what’s really going on with Matt Damon‘s Odysseus, deep down? Does Nolan acknowledge that this is the core motivation at work here?

Scholars have argued that Odysseus subconsciously sabotages his own journey. His insatiable wanderer’s instinct and burning curiosity constantly pull him into danger rather than leading him toward Ithaca.

I’m told there’s a line in the film about Odysseus’s ambivalence blah blah. But this is not really a core issue.

Why do I like this interpretation? Because if applied and developed, it could make Homer’s “The Odyssey” seem grounded by something real…something psychologically understandable.

Ten years of grappling with the Gods and chasing exotic thrills around the Aegean sea makes no sense, of course. Zero story tension.

I’ve been asked to review the newish, 4K-upgraded, slightly altered version of Michael Mann‘s Manhunter (’86), which will open commercially on 7.24.

It’s a 4K scan of the original 35mm negative with a few shots from an interpositive. Digitally restored at L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna. Both the theatrical version and the UHD HDR & SDR video color gradings were performed by Mann and Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3 in Los Angeles. Sound restoration was done at Audio Mechanics from an original 35mm magnetic 6-track printmaster to release a new 5.1 mix by Luke Schwartzweller at Fox. Technical coordination and deliveries were managed by L’Immagine Ritrovata.

Mann: “If the picture was left the way it was, it would be interesting, but you’d feel some distance…you’d be observing it somewhat. I’m more interested in its original intent impacting you the same way it may have in 1986…that is, to bring you into it again in the original way.”

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“Not a disaster” is not a recommendation.

Chris Gore and Alan Ng‘s reactions to The Odyssey left me feeling overjoyed….ecstatic!

Over the last few weeks HE’s Nolan whore brigade has all but called me deranged and unstable for harboring feelings of pre-viewing, anticipatory hate, and now, here and at long last, are two gentleman whom I know are sane and sensible saying it’s somewhere between a half-and-halfer and a bust. Glory be to God! Angel choirs!

Gore: “The thing that didn’t work for me is the accents….the way they spoke diminished the film. It felt too modern. In a way it felt a bit like El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowski‘s cult film which felt like a modern western. In this same sense The Odyssey felt to me like a modern epic. There are parts that drag, especially during the first half. There are other moments, in particular [the encounter] with the Cyclops, that I thought were great. The fall of Troy. The witch [Samantha Morton]. The way the solders transform is, I thought, very clever. The controversial castings aren’t that big of a deal because of screen time. Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page might as well be [playing] cameos.”

Alan Ng: “I can’t wait to not see this movie again. You can’t hear the dialogue, for one thing. And, like, there was Matt Damon on-screen. There was Anne Hathaway on-screen. There was Tom Holland on-screen. But there was no characterization, no effort to say ‘I’m playing this character.’ It just doesn’t feel part of the period.”

Gore: “I didn’t like that the colors were muted…very muted. It could have been grand and colorful, but it wasn’t. This movie will probably win a lot of technical Oscars. It’s not a disaster, but mixed.”

Alan Ng: “It’s a disaster. Not mixed.”

Trailers are often unreliable indicators, but the new Digger trailer seems to suggest one thing fairly clearly: It’s way too emphatic, shouty and table-pounding to warrant a comparison to Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove.

The trailer also persuades that the heavily made-up Tom Cruise now looks like Bob Odenkirk im Better Call Saul.

It also suggests that John Goodman‘s performance as the U.S. Presaident may emerge as an award-season standout.

Back to Strangelove: While the characters in Kubrick’s 1964 doomsday classic have their moments of eccentricity and even edgy derangement, the tone of the film is mostly one of sincere, no-bullshit, matter-of-fact realism.

Starting a nuclear war over the Russians having allegedly poisoned our bodily fluids is ridiculous, but the rationales, responses to and collateral discussions about an impending nuclear disaster are spoken straight from the shoulder.

Strangelove is mostly a low-key, plain-spoken thing. Shouting happens but sparely — only during moments of peak anxiety.

Whatever Digger turns out to be, there’s certainly a lot of shouting in the trailer. The tone is quite broad.

AI sez: “Costar Jesse Plemons sparked the Strangelove comparison in a January 2026 chat with Variety‘s Clayton Davis. He characterized the Digger script as as ‘one of the strangest, funniest, and most tragic’ he’s ever read.

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[Initially posted five and a half years ago — 2.3.26]

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“My husband’s back and there’s gonna be trouble…hey, lahhh-de-lah, my husband’s back!”

Consider this paragraph from a days-old Observer article by a scholastic fellow who recently saw The Odyssey in London:

If asked, most anyone would call Sam Neill’s peak period an especially rich, varied and long-lasting one — 37 years by my count.

I’m very sorry that he’s permanently hung up his hat and left the earth for cosmic parts unknown.

Neill’s career, fortified by a reliably witty, urbane, thoughtful and generally cultured attitude, was launched with Sleeping Dogs (‘77) and soldiered on with My Brilliant Career, the deeply repellent Omen III: The Final Conflict, Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, Reilly: Ace of Spies, A Cry in the Dark, Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October (‘90), Jane Campion’s The Piano, John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness, the disastrous Event Horizon, and the first two chapters of Peaky Blinders (2013 and ‘14).

But in terms of international popcorn megaplex fame and sexy, magnetic, cover-of-People-magazine smoothitude, Neill ascended to the peak of the heap with his performance as Dr. Alan Grant in Steven “beardo” Spielberg ‘s Jurassic Park (‘93), as well as the low-rent paycheck sequels (2001’s Jurassic Park III, 2022’s Jurassic World) that slightly tarnished Sam’s legacy.

The white cisgender male gaze…only Orson Welles** and Chris Nolan stood tall and proud on behalf of HOCs (Helens of color).

** Eartha Kitt, 1950, Helen of Troy in Paris stage performance.

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Over the last two nights I’ve watched all of season #1 and #2 of Mr. Inbetween, and I’m now three episodes into season #3.

This utterly brilliant Scott Ryan-Nash Edgerton series is as much of a thoughtful, sobering meditation about the corrosive effects of violence (spiritual, familial) as David Cronenberg‘s A History of Violence, which was actually more of a dark “comedy” (thanks to William Hurt‘s performance) than Mr. Inbetween is being described as.

The patiently-paced dialogue scenes between the simultaneously amiable and worldly but curiously icy-mannered Ray Shoesmith (Ryan) and his highly intelligent daughter Brittany (Chika Yasumura) are phenomenally good.

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