I’d like to say that that Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and challenger Spencer Pratt will end up competing in a November runoff election. But recent polling says that Nithya Raman is polling second, right after Bass and just ahead of Pratt. This strikes me as odd as Raman seems bland.
The election is happening today. How will it all shake out? Pratt is a franker, more colorful candidate, but there’s something a bit downmarket about the guy.
I saw Curry Barker’s Obsession (Focus, 5.15) last night. Over the last two weekends it’s become a massive, phenomenal hit, as we’ve all read. Except it’s not really good enough (it’s certainly not Weapons-level) to warrant this kind of social-earthquake response. Yes, it’s well acted and has an imaginatively out-there downscale vibe and it’s certainly bloody and gorey here and there…aahh, let me start over.
I didn’t hate Obsession. It’s Walmart-level, but tolerably so. I felt hugely repulsed by Michael Johnston’s male lead (a music store employee called “Bear” who behaves more like a greasy little cub), but I was down with (i.e., felt erotically stirred by) 25 year-old Inde Nazarette, who plays Bear’s whackjob girlfriend, Nikki, with serious manic spunk. I felt aroused by her hair-trigger lunacy.
I’m not saying Obsession is crap. I didn’t feel at the end that two hours had been stolen from me. I felt a bit soiled but not burned. Call it marginally effective low-rent horror gruel with at least one excellent whambam jump scare.
My 9:25 pm screening was 90% to 95% filled, which is highly unusual for a Monday night…packed with moderately mulchy, none-too-sophisticated 20somethings who were behaving in an “animated” way…commenting or groaning (“Nice rack!” when Nazarette pulled off her normcore sweatshirt…a general “yo!…we crave your bod” atmosphere) or otherwise talking back to the screen like black audiences used to do in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s.
Me and maybe three other guys were the only over-45 types. I was the only older dude with slightly longish hair and certainly the only viewer wearing pricey, Italian-made, black leather loafers, I can tell you that much.
What is Obsession, boiled down? It’s basically a serving of moody, splotchy, button-pushing, crazy-girlfriend garbage by way of anything-goes horror exploitation, but augmented with above-average, babygirl-Zoomer acting and Zoomer dialogue that felt reasonably honest or real-world as far as it went.
It’s a rehashing of “The Monkey’s Paw”, a 1902 horror short story by W.W. Jacobs, with a little spritz on the side of “Nick of Time”, that 1960 William Shatner Twilight Zone episode in which Shatner’s young newlywed becomes entranced by a wicked fortune-telling device.
Thematically or metaphorically, it’s about…uhm, be emotionally real and genuine with women, and don’t hide behind put-on games or pretentious posing or wimpy dodging…just be straight and sincere. But at the same time don’t be cringe-sensitive. Don’t secrete your icky hetero longings. Try to behave like a semi-normal, straight-from-the-shoulder type.
And that goes double if you’re Johnston’s “Bear”, a wimpy-voiced, babygirl-ish, kitten-mewing, totally candy-assed (read: anguished sensitivity) guy with greasy hair and standard five-day facial stubble…a guy who wears shitty normcore threads (as well as the butt-ugliest, light-gray, lace-up Foot Locker sneakers…don’t get me started).
Obsession starts with Bear in the throes of erotic whatever…emotionally enthralled by a pretty, dark-haired, agreeably bosom-y coworker (i.e., Nazarette) who maybe stands 5’1” in heels. I was saying to myself “just let it go, bruh…you’re too mushy, too girlyman…she’s out of your league.”
Find the courage, the film is saying, to behave like a man of at least some substance and not like an emotionally intimidated three-year-old.
Like so many other lower-budgeted gloomy-spooky films, Obsession has that under-lighted, processed-in-lentil-soup palette (subdued amber-grayish colors, no real daylight to speak of, a Gordon Willis scheme but without the panache of Gordo’s super-rich blacks and occasional shafts of punctuating sunlight).
You can’t tell me “Curry” isn’t a funny-sounding first name. A spicy Indian sauce that rhymes with “furry” or more particularly Coury-brand cat food, which Elliot Gould’s Phillip Marlowe tried to buy at 3 am in a Hollywood market back in ‘73.
The overweight, Jim Belushi-ish Cooper Tomlinson, who plays Ian, another music-store employee who’s friendly with Bear and Nikki, holds up his end and then some. He’s the only normal-ish character in the whole film, and certainly the only relatable male. God, I so despised Johnston’s mealy -mouthed, chickenshit, greasy-faced performance!
As I was leaving I spotted a 20something Latin-x woman (gold-painted toenails) who seemed to be recovering from the trauma of watching the film. She was standing next to the exit door with an anguished expression. As I moved past her I almost ran into an equally traumatized, slightly younger girl who went “oh!!” as we suddenly faced each other. I tried for a little calm-down action by shrugging and saying “I’m just walking out…no worries…cool.”
The same kind of cheap tattle-tale reporting could have theoretically torpedoed JFK’s presidential campaign in 1960. Some men are led around by their dicks; I’m sorry that Platner appears to be among this fraternity, but it doesn’t matter anyway. We all need to give woke pearl-clutching femmebot sensibilities a rest.
I can’t wait to hate, but if it’s good then it’s good. Fair is fair.
For my money the most perceptive analysis of the anti-Fjord wokester cabal, not to mention the most stinging, was posted Sunday night by “Aka Ming We.” I’ve never spoken to this person, but hats off, full respect & thank you.
The post is initially driven by a dispute with HE commenter “Christophe”, who accused yours truly of sounding contradictory or inconsistent.
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:
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.
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.”
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.”
