Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer, which will soon debut at the Venice Film Festival, bears significant similarities to Larrain’s Jackie, which premiered at the same venue five years ago.

Both focus on privileged young women — Diana, Princess of Wales and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy — who, in their early 20s, married wealthy, world-famous men, and in so doing became figures of obsessive fascination and even worship among the media and the public, only to experience rupture in their early 30s, in Jackie’s case by murder and in Diana’s by divorce.

Why, I’m wondering, did Larrain decide to make a pair of films about tragic femmes whose stories are this similar (if regarded from this particular angle)?

HE: I realize that Spencer has its own turf and that Steven Knight wrote the screenplay and all, but I’m half-dreading it.

Jordan Ruimy: It can’t be that bad.

HE: I had great admiration for and felt great allegiance with Larrain after No (’12), but then came Jackie. I’d read Noah Oppenheim‘s Jackie script (it was about what what actually occurred as opposed to where Jackie was at in her head). Larrain changed it into a meditative interior art film…a dialogue thing, on the mopey, meandering side.

Ruimy: I don’t think Larrain is working from the same blueprint as Jackie here. Different screenwriter. It sounds more like a chamber piece.

HE: That’s what I’m afraid of — a woke emancipation chamber piece. Diana decides to file for divorce from Charles because she feels unhappy and unloved and alone. It sounds awful.

Ruimy: Too bad. Larrain showed great promise with his No trilogy. I don’t really think Jackie was anything woke or woke-ish.

HE: I didn’t say that, but it was a chore to sit through. Read the script I sent you — it’s from 2010, by Oppenheim. It worked better than the film.

Ruimy: Spencer has more potential for wokeness and relevance due to the British royalty being in the news [Harry, Meghan, Oprah] and Diana’s feminist journey inside Buckingham Palace.

HE: She freed herself from a powerful man — that was her big shedding, her big accomplishment. But of course, she became Princess Diana because she married Prince Charles. Unhappy as that marriage was for both of them, it transformed her life and cemented her status and reputation.

Ruimy: I know. It was her decision. Her claim that she didn’t know what was in store for her is preposterous.

HE: So Diana’s story is (a) she became hugely famous, wealthy and super-privileged by marrying Prince Charles, (b) she soon realized they were hugely incompatible and that he didn’t love her, and so (c) she embarked on a series of affairs. Big deal. What’s that got to do with the price of rice?

Following a recent blowoff by the Venice Film Festival and in the wake of generally negative feedback by others in the elite film festival community, Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, a long-gestating adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ take on the life of Marilyn Monroe, has been drop-kicked by Netflix into a 2022 release date.

Recent scuttlebutt is that Dominik and Netflix have been fighting over final cut, but who cares at this stage? We’re talking Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A. here.

It wasn’t that long ago that Blonde looked like a major career booster for Ana de Armas, who plays Monroe. Now she’s a sparrow with a bruise and a broken wing. Tough luck. She’s also in the completed but not yet released No Time to Die, the endlessly Covid-delayed Bond film, and Adrien Lyne‘s Deep Water.

She’s also costarring in Anthony and Joe Russo‘s forthcoming The Gray Man> (Netflix).

Earlier today I posted a paywalled report about the compassionate West Hollywood pet clinics who are over-charging pet owners for…well, everything. Fees for a simple neutering procedure for Anya, our three-year-old female Siamese, will run between $700 and $800 and as high as $1000, depending on how greedy and opportunistic the clinics are.

I’ve just booked Anya for a spaying operation on Thursday, 8.12, at the highly regarded Clinica Veterinaria Albeitar in Rosaraito Beach — in by 10 am, out by 3 or 4 pm. I’m told that the tab will be around $100, give or take. No, that’s not a typo.

There are many Los Angeles pet lovers who will read this and instantly conclude that the Rosarito clinic is some kind of substandard operation and that we’re probably taking a risk by bringing Anya down there, etc. You know what that is? Racism, pure and simple. Just like those HE commenters who posted side-eye responses when I mentioned having dental work at the Baja Oral Center in Tijuana.

Update: A spokesperson for Better Call Saul‘s Bob Odenkirk has confirmed that the 58 year-old actor is “in stable condition after experiencing a “heart-related incident” last night. Good to hear, but what’s the difference between a heart attack and a “heart-related incident”?

Earlier: Hollywood Elsewhere wants Bob Odenkirk to recover from whatever it was that floored him last night. Everyone wants him well. The 58 year-old actor “collapsed” (as in “fell to the ground”) while shooting a Better Call Saul episode in Alberquerque, New Mexico.

Bryan Cranston posted on Instagram that everyone should send “positive thoughts and prayers,” etc.

May I ask something? Odenkirk is a major public figure, well known and well loved, so why isn’t someone close to him putting out a statement about his condition? That would be the considerate thing as far as his fans are concerned, no?

Speculation is that this was either a stroke or a heart attack, and it could may been caused by…oh, who knows? Odenkirk put himself through a rigorous fitness regime a couple of years ago for Nobody, but that was then.

People suffering a heart attack don’t generally “collapse”. They usually complain of chest pains and shortness of breath and an aching left arm as they sit down and get out their cell phone to call a doctor.

Great achievement in almost any field is always about the forsaking of easy, casual pleasures, and is always the result of fire in the belly, serious devotion, relentless discipline, hardcore thinking, early to bed and early to rise, etc. And if you don’t have those rigors in your own mind and system, you damn well need someone who (a) cares, (b) believes in you and (c) will crack the whip.

King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19) is the fact-based story of how Richard Williams pushed and shaped his daughters, Venus and Serena Williams, into becoming tennis superstars. The trailer for suggests straight, focused naturalism, which is what everyone wants anyway.

You know Smith will be Best Actor nominated — locked.

The director is Reinaldo Marcus Green (Monsters and Men, Joe Bell). The script is by Zach Baylin.

Yes, Adam Driver‘s Burberry Hero ad (runs on beach, swims with a horse, becomes centaur) is “out there”, but it somehow works. Partly because it’s beautifully shot, cut and scored, but also because Driver’s features were described in certain corners (not in this space!) as horse-like before this ad came to be. It makes you wonder if the ad happened because of this association. In which case it’s a fairly bold statement.

Driver could be saying that “some people (mean people) have said I have a face like a horse. Well, here I am selling Burberry cologne in an ad in which I become a human steed.”

Driver and the people who threw this ad together have my respect.

Again: I’ve never slagged Driver or even mentioned the term “horseface” in the same breath. All I’m doing here is reacting to what “they” have said.

Adam Driver for Burberry Hero, featuring “Two Weeks” by FKA twigs. pic.twitter.com/j938KYEtMF

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) July 27, 2021

…was really bothering me. But no longer. Thank God it’s settled once and for all.

From a 7.14.21 heyuguys review of Valdimar Jóhannsson‘s supernatural Lamb, by Joan Titmarsh:

“A childless couple living on a sheep farm, Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Himir Snær Guðnason), deliver a lamb that they decide to take into their home and raise as their own child.

“When Maria performs a terrible act in order to protect her ersatz motherhood, it is clear that she has stirred up the wrath of something ancient, and in her taking the lamb from its mother there is something from the natural == or supernatural — world that will come to seek retribution. Rather than the humans signalling this, it is the animals, most notably the trusty sheepdog, who pick up on the looming danger.

“This is an intelligent and hugely entertaining film that quietly creates a bucolic horror and has much of the ancient fairy tale about it. It deals with important questions such as motherhood, family and happiness, as well as the lengths people will go to when they see any of those things slipping from their grasp. It is a film about grief, but it is full of fun. It joins Rams in that hallowed pantheon of Icelandic films about sheep, a genre that is rapidly turning out to be one of my favorites.”

HE confession: I didn’t care for Rams at all. I felt stuck on that damp farm with those bearded brothers and all that wool, and the smell of it.