I saw Jay Roach and Charles Randolph‘s Bombshell (Lionsgate, 12.20) at a 2 pm screening at Westwood’s Bruin theatre. I had to wait until 9 pm to tweet my reactions.

(l. to r.) Bombshell costars Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie during or following Sunday night’s Bombshell screening at the Pacific Design Center. (Photo totally stolen from Variety website.)

Vaclav Marhoul‘s The Painted Bird (IFC Films, sometime in early 2020) probably won’t win the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar, but, as the official Czech Republic submission, it totally deserves to be nominated. Because within its own ravishing and diseased realm, it’s a great film. It just happens to be tough to sit through.

I saw it last night and holy moley holy fucktard. It’s about a little Jewish kid (Petr Kotlár) trying to survive all on his own in eastern Europe during World War II, and man, does he suffer the drawn-out pains of hell. So did I in a manner of speaking. But not altogether.

I’m calling The Painted Bird a “beautiful” highbrow art film for elite critics and cineastes who have the fence-straddling ability to enjoy magnificent b&w cinematography (all hail dp Vladimir Smutny) and austere visual compositions while savoring the utmost in human cruelty and heartless perversion.

The vile, animal-like behavior is unrelenting; ditto the highly sophisticated monochrome arthouse chops. Marhoul is quite gifted, quite determined and uncompromised, and quite the bold cinematic artist. He is also, as Kosinski was, one sick fuck.

I mean that in a good way as Marhoul is a Bergman-like in an unrelenting clinical way; he never panders or tries to soften things up for the mom-and-pop schmuckos — he’s totally playing to Guy Lodge and his ilk. This is a movie about some awful, horrific, beastly people (Harvey Keitel‘s priest and the kid’s father excepted), and what agony it can be to suffer under them on a prolonged basis.

I read Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird” when I was 22 or 23, and I somehow absorbed all the horrific sadism and cruelty and lonely agony without incident because of the dry, matter-of-fact Kosinski prose. It’s quite another thing to hang with that feral, dark-eyed little kid who doesn’t talk for the entire film.

What is the perverse obsession with people and animals being hung upside down by ropes? What was so terrible about servicing that hot-to-trot farmer’s daughter (Jitka Cadek Cvancarova)?

The instant you see white-haired, beard-stubbled Udo Kier, you go “oh God, here comes another cold, maniacal, salivating monster performance.” Harvey Keitel is totally subservient to the mise en scene — just playing an old, white-haired priest who coughs a lot and then dies. Julian Sands plays a total salivating beast. Barry Pepper (who was young 20 years ago but no longer) is interesting as a Russian soldier with no love for Communism or Josef Stalin.

Exquisitely made, and utterly hellish to the core in terms of its depiction of the human condition. I happen to be on friendly terms with one of the producers, Tatiana Detlofson, who used to be married to Variety‘s Steven Gaydos. Does it deserve to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film? Yes — it’s too well made not to be so honored. Every frame screams “soul-cancer arthouse perversion“.

Originally posted on 7.25.11: The gist of Scott Feinberg‘s 7.25 piece (“The Art of Dying Young‘) about the death of Amy Winehouse is that it’s not such a terrible thing to check out early if your legend is going downhill anyway. Biological shutdowns will always be traumatic to friends, fans and loved ones, but it’s arguably worse, Feinberg is saying, to hang on past your peak point.

But how do you know when you’ve peaked? Answer: Nobody ever does. Everyone goes through life saying, “I’ll find a way to turn things around…after all, tomorrow is another day.”

“Most [performing survivors] overstay their welcome,” says Feinberg, “and simply begin to evaporate from the public’s consciousness, either because they find themselves (a) unable to maintain the performance-level that first garnered them fame, (b) creatively limited by the public’s limited perception of them, (c) distracted and/or deterred by fame and its trappings, (d) no longer able or willing to compete with ‘fresher’ faces.”

Truman Capote certainly fell prey to (c). I remember to this day what Gore Vidal said when Capote more or less committed suicide: “A very wise career move.”

If I could re-orchestrate my life from a free-for-all cosmic perspective, I’d like to live about 250 years but get no older than, say, 42 years. I’d arrange to be born in 1800 with my current consciousness intact, and then explore the unsullied American frontier and become an inventor and buy up all the patents for everything and become stinking rich.

And then tour the world and become friends with everyone worth knowing — young Abe Lincoln, Leo Tolstoy, Chief Sitting Bull, Herman Melville, young Katherine Hepburn, Frederick C. Douglas, Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Isadora Duncan, D.W. Griffith, Theodore Roosevelt, John Reed, Jack London, young Cary Grant, young JFK, young John Lennon, etc. And then wind things down around 2050, give or take. Or maybe keep going.

All though the decades I’ve had a problem with the spelling of this famous character’s name — it should obviously have two “o”s (as in the spelling of Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the 1942 air raid upon Japan) and not just one. You can’t have that “ooooh” sound without two “o”s. One “o” produces an “oh” sound, as in dough.

Dolittle, God help us, will open on 1.17.20. Costarring Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent; Malek aside, the voice cast includes John Cena, Marion Cotillard, Carmen Ejogo, Ralph Fiennes, Selena Gomez, Tom Holland, Kumail Nanjiani, Craig Robinson, Octavia Spencer, Emma Thompson and Frances de la Tour.

David “Jim Hopper” Harbour as Oscar, a pissed-off, glum-faced sanitation engineer who decides to own it lock, stock and barrel: “If everyone calls you trash and everyone treats you like trash, why don’t you just become trash?”