Last night’s Suddenly, Last Summer Facebook commentary (Dale Launer, Rick Segreda, Meredith Brody, myself):

I’ve tried watching Suddenly, Last Summer twice, and have failed — given up — both times. I couldn’t handle the bulk of it, I mean. The interminable middle section. Yes, I’ve seen the powerful finale (an anguished Elizabeth Taylor recalling her memory of cousin Sebastian’s grotesque death), but I could never shake the feeling that this Joseph L. Mankiewicz film was psychologically diseased, and that the disease was somehow catching.

Before my second viewing (streaming) I told myself “shake off your negative attitudes and show respect for these people…Mank, Tennessee Williams, Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, Gore Vidal.” But it once again made me feel oppressed and infected.

Oh, and the predatory “street urchins” were straight out of William S. Burroughs’ “The Wild Boys.” Dirt-poor, dark-complexioned street cannibals with boners. And they don’t really “eat” Sebastian whole. They eat portions, cutlets.

Posted on 2.14.18: Joseph Mankiewicz‘s Suddenly Last Summer is good for one thing — the stills of 27 year-old Elizabeth Taylor that were taken during filming.

She was still slender back then, or a couple of years away from that Cleopatra-era plumpness (heavy drinking + pasta) that began to overtake her features in ’61. Taylor was always a well-respected actress (Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Butterfield 8), but she always seemed to be conspicuously “acting.” I always found her voice shrill and grating on some level, especially when called upon to show anger or outrage and emotional distress. But from the early to late ’50s she was quite the visual package.

Suddenly Last Summer ends with a shocking revelation about Taylor’s mentally unstable character having witnessed her gay cousin, Sebastian Venable, being eaten alive — cannibalized — by a pack of feral young boys.

The bizarre finale was obviously intended as some kind of metaphorical condemnation of gay sexuality. Sebastian’s rich mother (Katharine Hepburn) is so appalled and disgusted by suspicions of Sebastian’s lifestyle that she wants Taylor lobotomized in order to suppress any notion that the cannibal incident happened. It’s quite ugly and joyless, this film. Rage, repression, self-loathing.

From Wikipage: “Following A Streetcar Named Desire (’51) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (’58), Suddenly, Last Summer was the third Williams film that dealt with the subject of homosexuality, although it was far more explicit in its treatment than either of the previous films were allowed to be under the Motion Picture Production Code.

“Working in conjunction with the National Legion of Decency, the Production Code Administration gave the filmmakers special dispensation to depict Sebastian Venable, declaring, ‘Since the film illustrates the horrors of such a lifestyle, it can be considered moral in theme even though it deals with sexual perversion.”

“The horrors of such a lifestyle”! No wonder Tennessee Williams disavowed any direct participation, even though it was based on a 1958 one-act play he’d written for an off-Broadway venue. The play was adapted for the screen by Gore Vidal.

If Trump wanted to convey fierce disrespect or acidic disdain, the more appropriate “bastards”’ adjectives would have been “despicable” “godless”, “reptilian”, “seething”, “self-destructive”, etc.

“Crazy bastards” means “eccentric nutters with a genius scheme, or at least one I didn’t see coming”. Crazy as in wily, foxy, deceptive.

We all know what aggressive, spirit-throttling film scores sound like, and there are certainly many great ones in this vein. I could go ond on.

But what exactly constitutes a quiet film score? David Shire‘s score for All The President’s Man is an exquisite example. It’s all about antsy moods, suspicions, anxiety, uncertainties, undercurrents. I think it’s masterful — perhaps the best of its kind.

Which scores are Shire’s keenest competitors? The ones for Moneyball, Drive and Twelve Angry Men, certainly. Which others?

Confession: I intend to see The Drama but I’m not sure I want to catch it theatrically. Okay, I may catch it this evening but while deliberating this I decided to ask Grok to write an HE parody review:

I saw A24’s The Drama last night at one of those smug little screenings where everyone’s pretending they’re not there to gawk at Zendaya and RTPatz pretending to be normal people having a meltdown. And this thing is a sleek, serpentine little viper of a movie, lemme tell ya. It’s cringe, all right, and it won’t let go until the credits roll and you’re left wondering why the hell you’re suddenly questioning every relationship you’ve ever had.

Kristoffer Borgli (the sick fuck who gave us Sick of Myself) has made what feels like an anti-romcom for people who’ve actually been in a real relationship.

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play Emma and Charlie, this impossibly photogenic couple about to get married, and they’re happy…too happy. The kind of happy that makes you lean over to your plus-one and whisper, “Something awful is about to happen.”

And brother, does it ever! Without spoiling the precise nature of the “one damn confession” (though the trailer sorta kinda ruins it like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving), the film detonates their perfect little world in ways that are by turns hilarious, excruciating, and weirdly erotic in that uncomfortable “am I supposed to be turned on by emotional carnage?” kind of way.

Pattinson is doing that patented Pattinson thing where he looks like a Victorian ghost who wandered into a SoulCycle class and decided to commit to the bit. He’s twitchy, haunted, funny as hell, and somehow still hot in the way only beautiful disasters can be. Zendaya, meanwhile, is operating on another plane. She weaponizes stillness like a sniper. One slow blink from her and you feel like you’ve been emotionally waterboarded.

The script is vicious in its precision. Borgli has an almost sadistic ear for the way people who love each other can still eviscerate one another with a perfectly timed sigh or a loaded “it’s fine.”

The supporting cast (including a couple of scene-stealing weirdos I won’t name because spoilers) are all operating at peak “A24 character actor who’s been waiting their whole life for this exact monologue”.

The Drama isn’t for the Marvel crowd. If you need your hand held and your catharsis spoon-fed with a nice little dessert served at the end, stay home and rewatch Anyone But You. The Drama leaves you raw. It’s messy. It’s mean. It’s funny in the way that real pain sometimes is when you’re watching it from a safe distance.

Zendaya and Pattinson have more chemistry arguing about whether a certain revelation counts as “technically cheating” than most couples have during actual sex scenes in other movies. I laughed. I squirmed. At one point I audibly groaned in the theater and the guy next to me (some hipster in a backwards baseball cap) shot me a dirty look like I’d violated sacred cinema space. Sorry, pal — this movie earns the groans.

Bottom line: The Drama is one of the most uncomfortably entertaining films I’ve seen in a while. It’s not perfect — there’s a third-act swerve that feels a little too pleased with itself — but it’s alive in a way most 2026 releases aren’t. Zendaya and Pattinson are giving career-high work, Borgli is a twisted little genius, and A24 continues its reign as the studio that understands that adults still exist and sometimes want to watch beautiful people destroy each other for two hours.Go see it. Then go home and stare at your partner a little too long. See what happens.

The Artemis II app is appreciated, but the poetic aura or undercurrent of past lunar voyages feels somehow less filling this time.

I can’t stop thinking about the reported spent–gunpowder smell (or the scent in the air after a firecracker explosion) on the lunar surface; ditto the 96 bags of human waste that were dumped by various astronauts between ‘69 and ‘72, and which are still effing lying there as we speak.**

** Would it have been so difficult to dig a hole with a plastic hand spade and bury the poop bags? I’m talking about showing respect and reverence for the purity of the lunar environment.

HR respects Wall Street Journal contributor Ben Appel, whose contentious article posted on 4.2.26.

It was announced yesterday 4.2.26) that David Kelley is writing a miniseries version of Tom Wolfe‘s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” with Matt (Let Me In, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Batman) Reeves inked to direct and executive produce.

This is a chance to properly resurrect Tom Wolfe’s great Balzac-ian novel of mid ‘80s Manhattan…sharp district attorneys, hungry journos, Harlem hustlers large and small, and the Wall Street culture of “Masters of the Universe.”

Brian DePalma’s 1990 film adaptation was a total catastrophe, of course, which is why it’s an inspired idea to remake the Wolfe book as a ten-parter. If you listen to the “Vanities” audio book it lasts for 20something hours. This is one of those rare instances in which a miniseries is the smarter way to go.

I’m confident that Reeves won’t screw this up. He’s too good of a director to follow in DePalma’s clumsy footsteps. This is a golden opportunity to translate Wolfe’s labrynthian book accurately. The Kelly-Reeves miniseries will presumably be shot in period (mid ’80s).

Reeves has always been a fan of Wolfe’s book and has long believed he could make a filmed version turn out right some day.

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A week or so ago Ryan Gosling was anounced as the star of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s next dazzling film. A week later Gosling bailed due to an alleged “scheduling conflict”…bullshit.

Variety‘s Clayton Davis: “Kwan and Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, aimed to start filming in Los Angeles later this summer, but the production was unable to shift to accomodate Gosling’s schedule, which has been packed as of late following a lengthy global press tour for Amazon MGM’s sci-fi epic Project Hail Mary”…bullshit.

Gosling may have just saved himself from the Daniels’ “sophomore slump” effort. Okay, I don’t know if it’s a slumper or not, but I do know that an army of EEAAO haters is out there in force, and that they’re determined to get these guys one way or another, and that their luck can’t hold out forever.