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.

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.

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.”

The late Barney Frank in a 5.12 N.Y. Times interview: “The main problem Democrats face is the perception that the party is beholden to a left-wing agenda involving drastic social changes and litmus tests that alienate moderate voters. The left’s demand for immediate, sweeping policies makes the entire party unpalatable to Middle America.”

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.

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.”

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.

I’m not necessarily in Spencer Pratt‘s corner, but I know a smart political ad when I see one. Pratt, a non-MAGA rightie, seems to me like a temperamental prankster and showboater.

These Spencer Pratt videos by @dsonoiki are better than 99.9% of political consultant ads. He does it again. pic.twitter.com/hemFACa8xZ

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 29, 2026

Posted on olympics.com on 5.26.26…biofemales only:

California Gov. candidate Tom Steyer just posted this video with trans athlete AB Hernandez, who will compete for a girls' state track & field title this weekend.

"I'm so proud of you for what you're doing," Steyer said. pic.twitter.com/iIq5VqX14J

— Jackson Thompson (@JackThompsonFOX) May 29, 2026

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.

Right now there’s a Criterion 4K Bluray of Bob Fosse‘s Lenny (’74) out there, and I have to be honest — I’m not sure I want a copy of this thing to have and to hold.

Thirteen years ago (3.18.13) I posted the following:

Three excerpts from a criterion.com Lenny piece that Mark Harris posted on 5.26.26:

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I’m telling you that this latest John Carney film — easily his best since Once — indisputably works, and I mean in a naturally behaved, wholly believable, occasionally subtle, well-written and finely-calibrated way. It never feels slick or “theatrical” or tonally off-balance or over-cranked.

I went into yesterday afternoon’s AMC Lincoln Square screening with a “show me” attitude, and I was won over less than 20 minutes into Act One. Hell, earlier than that.

Carney is generally loved for his spirit-vibey, music-themed dramas (Once, Begin Again, Sing Street, Flora and Son); his films always leave audiences soothed or at least sated. But Carney is primarily a hard-working, highly skilled filmmaker par excellence — skilled at pacing, at getting his actors to deliver in a fashion that feels honest and true, at natural-sounding dialogue, at plot construction, at peeling off this and that layer of a story in just the right way.

Boiled down I believed each and every aspect of Power Ballad…every character shading, every modest revelation, every line and performance.

When a confection-type drama advances and unfurls in just the right way, as Power Ballad does, it settles you down while flipping on a relax-and-enjoy switch. I was waiting for something to go wrong or for a bit or a scene to feel somehow mishandled, but disappointment never arrived. And it ends not just happily, but in an emotionally satisfying, un-forced, non-sappy way.

Power Ballad is basically a two-hander — a story about the elusive butterfly of song-writing inspiration**, the every-present seductions of big-time money and fame, and what feelings of disappointment and desperation can do to frustrated or insecure musicians.

Plot-wise Power Ballad is about a kind of rivalry between performers who are 20 years apart but engulfed in a vaguely similar career dynamic — Paul Rudd‘s Rick Power, a 50ish American wedding-band performer, happily married and Emerald Isle-residing, whose rock-star career kinda started to happen in the ’90s but then ran out of gas, and Nick Jonas‘s Danny Wilson, a former boy-band star (as in the real-world Jonas Brothers of the aughts) who, though wealthy and hanging in there, is worried about his ability to succeed as a solo act in the big-time realm.

You’ve no doubt read that Power Ballad is about Danny and Rick jamming together after a lavish Irish wedding, and then Danny stealing Rick’s unproduced love song, “How To Write A Song (Without You)” — a tune that Rick wrote 13 or 14 years earlier but never recorded or even has a digital demo of.

Days later Danny adds a bridge and records the tune in exactly the right Richard Perry way, and a few months later it’s become a number one hit. Danny is suddenly recharged and back in the groove, but Rick, after randomly hearing the track in a shopping mall, is enraged and wants some kind of revenge or payback.

Danny’s conveyance of guilt and inner conflict is fascinating. He never quite lets it out in so many words, but when Rick finally confronts him in the third act — at a lavish, Los Angeles birthday party at his own hillside home — he defensively, half-assedly admits that he plagiarized the song, but at the same time emphasizes that it never would have become a hit unless he’d given it a power-pop makeover with a well-crafted bridge. Which he’s probably right about. (Jonathan Shields made a similar point about Fred Amiel‘s script of The Far-Away Mountain.)

I’d just re-watched Rudd’s performance in Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40, which was shot 14 years ago, and here he is again in more or less the same same spiritual and physical shape.

I hadn’t been paying close attention to the career of Jack Reynor, who played Florence Pugh‘s absentee boyfriend in Ari Aster‘s Midsommar but here he’s Danny’s L.A. manager…a manager who gradually comes to sense that his client is an ethically dicey fellow.

And what a coincidence that Marcia, Danny’s L.A. girlfriend, is played by Havana Rose Liu, who plays the female lead in Tuner, which I saw three or four hours before Power Ballad at the same Manhattan plex.

I really do believe that the critics who’ve pissed on this film have exposed themselves as…I don’t know, pinched or screwed up or emotionally malignant on some level. N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. Los Angeles Times staffer Amy Nicholson, UPI’s Fred Topel, Fresh Fiction’s Courtney Howard.. These people have urine in their veins.

My approving view of Power Ballad is not, like, “an opinion, man”. I know when I’ve seen a film that’s been assembled with the right kind of charm, humanity, skill, confidence and assurance. This is not something to be debated. I know this.

** how a good song doesn’t necessarily become a hit unless it’s been recorded and produced in just the right way, and with just the right mood and dynamic.