In an 8.1.22 HE story called “Au Hasard, Cocaine Bear,” I conveyed a certain degree of loathing for what Elizabeth Banks‘ Cocaine Bear (Universal, 2.24 23) appeared to be about. Here’s what I said:

A while back Banks sat for a Variety cover story, written by Adam B. Vary. A passage reads as follows: “Most crucially, when Banks looked into the real story, she came away with what she describes as ‘a deep sympathy for the bear.'”

Banks: “I really felt like this is so fucked up that this bear got dragged into this drug run gone bad and ends up dead. I felt like this movie could be that bear’s revenge story.”

The below image was stolen from a “New Rules” segment on Real Time with Bill Maher.

God help the forces of cinematic aspiration, wish fulfillment and basic decency if Everything Everywhere All At Once…if the fucking Daniels, I mean, wind up winning the top award at this evening’s 75th annual DGA Awards.

Dear God…please, please don’t let this infuriating headspinner…this mongrel of an IRS Marvel multiverse yarn…please don’t let it win tonight. I’m on my knees, Lord…begging, pleading. Dread isn’t the name of the stuff that’s pulsing through my system. Don’t let the Eric Kohn contingent win…please.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert aside, the four competitors for the top prize are Todd Field, Tár; Joseph Kosinski, Top Gun: Maverick; Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin; and Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans.

What the hell, give it to Spielberg…that won’t hurt so badly.

The DGA ceremonies will begin…I don’t know when they’ll begin but things should be well underway by 9 pm Pacific. The venue is the Beverly Hilton hotel ballroom, the same place where the Golden Globes happened a while back.

I was all cranked up and ready to cheer Ben Affleck and Matt Damon‘s Air (Amazon, 4.5), and then I saw the one-sheet…yikes!

My first honest thought was “this looks like an ’80s Cannon poster for one of their programmers.” (I used to work at Cannon in the late ’80s so don’t tell me.) It also looks like the poster for Airport (’70) or The Towering Inferno (’74).

My second thought was “where’s Michael Jordan, who, along with Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro, a hot-shot Nike Salesman, is right at the heart of the story?” The answer, of course, is that Jordan isn’t portrayed in the film, although his parents, James R. and Deloris Jordan, are front and center, portrayed by Julius Tennon and Viola Davis.

My third thought: “Wait…who’s Chris Tucker playing? Obviously not Jordan (too old) but who?”

It sends out the wrong vibes. Seriously.

From yesterday’s (2.17) rave Deadline review of Matt Johnson‘s BlackBerry. It was written by Pete Hammond, who in all fairness and full disclosure should have perhaps disclosed that he was a devotional BlackBerry guy for many years:

“Who knew a Canadian biopic of an infamous smartphone could be this entertaining, even poignant and moving? I am here to tell you today’s world premiere Berlin Film Festival competition entry BlackBerry is all that and more.

“In the hands of co-writer, director and co-star Matt Johnson (The Dirties), this long and winding tale of the rise and fall of the BlackBerry, the revolutionary device that first combined a computer with a phone all in one, is at once wonderfully funny, suspenseful and ultimately tragic. Here is a business story that has it all, and has much in common with other movies that focus on iconic tales of new-age businesses like The Social Network, Moneyball and The Big Short. Those movies had the likes of Aaron Sorkin and Adam McKay behind them, and this one ought to really put its chief architect Johnson on the cinematic map.

“Centering on nerdy and inventive Mike Lazaridis (a terrific and never better Jay Baruchel) and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton — sensational), Johnson’s film starts in 1996 with the emergence of this unheard of idea of a phone that can also send and receive emails with its keyboard built into a magical device no one in the tech world had achieved before these Canadian dreamers actually found a way to make it work.

From a review of same by Screen Daily‘s Lee Marshall:

“Johnson and co-writer Matthew Miller turn the story of [the BlackBerry’s] brisk rise and meteoric fall into a kind of breathless tech fever dream, a relentless but addictive downbeat human comedy about the struggle to stay on top in a fast-moving industry.

“Previously something of an indie slacker-comedy and mockumentary specialist, Canadian director Johnson (Operation Avalanche) should achieve international visibility with a film that was picked up by Paramount for the bulk of worldwide rights just prior to its Berlin competition debut (North America, the Middle East, Scandinavia and airline rights were previously sold by co-financier XYZ Films).”

Hammond again: “Audiences in the film’s core 30-60 age bracket will likely have David Fincher’s 2010 drama about the rise of Facebook — and perhaps also Danny Boyle’s 2015 Apple drama Steve Jobs — in mind, and BlackBerry doesn’t suffer by comparison.

“The big difference is that BlackBerry filters out the white noise to focus entirely on the workplace. We have no idea if the film’s two central characters, tech genius and RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and the company’s hard-nosed, borderline psychotic business head, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), are in relationships with anyone. We see Balsillie at home alone for a few brief seconds; the rest of the action takes place in the workshop and boardrooms.

“But first it is Lazaridis and his freewheeling, loopy but tech-smart buddy Douglas Fregin (played endearingly by Johnson himself), along with their unsophisticated tech-y friends, who are out to convince the world they can deliver on the promise of their then unnamed invention. Once they bring a sharp and uber-aggressive businessman, Balsillie, into their company Research In Motion, an idea from nerd-land turns into a reality — especially when Balsillie manages to convince Bell Atlantic, particularly chief skeptic John Woodman (Saul Rubinek), of its value for their servers.

“On its way to market the BlackBerry must overcome all sorts of obstacles and impossible business deals, but by the early aughts it is a superstar, beloved by everyone from U.S. presidents to celebrities to average joes — a life-changing communication device. It is a dream come true until shady business deals, infighting and most damaging Steve Jobs and the iPhone combine to bring it crashing down.

What’s the difference between book–burning and word–burning, which is what “sensitivity readers” (currently working for all major publishers) are basically about? It’s a matter of scale as the basic impulse is the same.

8:01 pm: I walked out of Ant–Man and the Wasp: Quantumania with approximately 30 minutes left to go. My soul was screaming with boredom. Make that boredom-fueled rage. I felt sick, poisoned.

It’s one of the most corrupt and sickening wastes of time I’ve ever submitted to, and that’s saying something.

I can’t believe that Peyton Reed, the guy behind the original glorious Ant–Man (‘15), has so completely sold his soul to the devil. For it was Reed, a twisted, perverse, black-hearted jackal if there ever was one, who decided to set the whole damn thing in the micro-sized Quantum realm, an “exotic” green-screen George Lucas visual disease land by way of Fantastic Voyage and the Star Wars prequels, complete with dopey exotic monsters amid super-lavish sets and bullshit CG backdrops that obviously cost a shitload.

Reed “did” this movie to me…he created it and suffocated and killed me tonight…his doing, his fault…and he should be hung upside down and dipped in a vat of boiling oil.

I nonetheless feel obliged to praise Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang Bang, the Sam-The-Sham Conqueror of the Kingdom of Self-Loathing. It was good enough to prompt me to imagine him one day playing Macbeth or Othello at the Old Vic.

Today (2.17.23) is the fourth anniversary of Hollywood Elsewhere’s worst physical injury episode…actually the worst of my entire life. I slipped and fell and bruised the shit out of my rib cage. It happened on Sunday, 2.17.19 in the Sierra Nevada foothills, a 20-minute drive out of Lone Pine. It was my fault for wearing Italian suede lace-ups as I walked down a gentle slope covered by icy, fresh-fallen snow.

When I was nine or ten years old a friend and I had lugged a large boulder to the top of my parents’ backyard garage. (I think we wanted to drop it off and maybe crush something below.) The garage roof was shingled and slightly peaked. I can’t explain what happened precisely, but I somehow managed to fall off the roof and the boulder, insanely, rolled off a few seconds later and landed on my upper thigh. I howled and cried; it hurt like a sonavubitch and left an awful purple bruise. But later that day I was kind of hobbling around; I’d almost forgotten about it by the end of the week.

But the Sierra foothills tragedy dropped me into a pit of hurt and grief for a good four or five weeks. Oxycodone, walking with a cane, wearing a chest-wrap device. Just getting out of bed in the morning was awful.

If some kind of soothsayer or fortune-teller had declared 50 years ago that Stella Stevens and Raquel Welch would die within two days of each other in February 2023, somebody would have said “well, that would be coincidental,” given that both actresses were more or less at their marquee-brand, sex-symbol peak in early ’72. But Welch was a bigger name then, and her legend looms larger now.

I was always respectful of Stevens’ fame, atractiveness and sense of humor, but I never thought she was especially good in anything except Sam Peckinpah‘s The Ballad of Cable Hogue (’70). Film-lore-wise Stevens got lucky three times — Jerry Lewis‘s The Nutty Professor (’63), Cable Hogue and Irwin Allen‘s dreadful The Poseidon Adventure (’72). Otherwise, not so much but then again each and every day she was “Stella Stevens”…a pretty good deal for a few decades.

Roughly seven years ago Stevens moved to a long-term Alzheimer’s care facility in Los Angeles. I didn’t know that and I’m sorry. She passed from Alzheimer’s earlier today at age 84. Hugs and condolences.