Amiable Guy to Madonna: “Do you want to talk at all off-camera?”

Warren Beatty to Amiable Guy: “She doesn’t want to live off-camera, much less talk. There’s nothing to say off-camera, Why would you say something at all if it’s off-camera?”

Alek Keshishian‘s Madonna: Truth or Dare (’91) is a seemingly intimate, fairly interesting chronicle of Madonna’s backstage life during her 1990 Blonde Ambition tour. She was pretty much Taylor Swift back then.

Beatty and Madonna were quite the attractive couple. They had begun their relationship during the making of Dick Tracy in ’89, when he was 52 and she was 31. Their union lasted for roughly 15 months, which is a decent run in that realm. Madonna and Beatty probably had more to say to each other 34 years ago than Swift and Travis Kelce do now.

The second best scene in Truth or Dare was when Madonna simulated giving a blowjob with a water bottle. Swift would never do that, or certainly not for posterity. Plus the fan base wouldn’t approve.

After months and months of floundering around in distribution purgatory, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies has finally landed a theatrical release date — Friday, 3.29.

Except it’s now being called Asphalt City.

John Huston‘s The Asphalt Jungle (’50) was a cooler title.

Exhaustion, screeching brakes, sudden jolts and grubby walk-up apartments, sirens, raw aromas and in-your-face whatevers.

I saw Black Flies in Cannes last May (nine months ago), and have written about it three or four times since.

“Black Flies Punches Through,” posted on 5.23.23:

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies (Open Road), a pounding, brutally realistic New York City action drama about living-on-the-ragged-edge paramedics.

It beats the shit out of you, this film, but in a way that you can’t help but admire. It’s a tough sit but a very high-quality one. The traumatized soul of lower-depths Brooklyn and the sad, ferociously angry residents who’ve been badly damaged in ways I’d rather not describe has never felt more in-your-face.

In terms of assaultive realism and gritty authenticity Black Flies matches any classic ’70s or ’80s New York City film you could mention…The French Connection, Serpico, Prince of the City, Q & A, Good Time, Across 110th Street.

And what an acting triumph for Sean Penn, who plays the caring but worn-down and throughly haunted Gene Rutkovsky, a veteran paramedic who bonds with and brings along Tye Sheridan‘s Ollie Cross, a shaken-up Colorado native who lives in a shitty Chinatown studio and is trying to get into medical school.

Rutkovsky is a great hardboiled character, and Penn has certainly taken the bull by the horns and delivered his finest performance since his Oscar-winning turns in Mystic River (’03) and Milk (’08).

And Sheridan is also damn good in this, his best film ever. His character eats more trauma and anxiety and suffers more spiritual discomfort than any rookie paramedic deserves, and you can absolutely feel everything that’s churning around inside the poor guy.

At first I thought this 120-minute film would be Bringing Out The Dead, Part 2, but Black Flies, which moves like an express A train and feels more like 90 minutes, struck me as harder and punchier than that 1999 Martin Scorsese film, which I didn’t like all that much after catching it 23 and 1/2 years ago and which I’ve never rewatched.

It’s definitely not welcome news that departing Los Angeles Times film critic Justin Chang is joining The New Yorker as its senior film critic, or at least as a co-senior bigmouth with Richard Brody (i.e., “the Armond White of the far left”).

Chang is a brilliant, first-rate critic who has passed along many valuable judgments and perceptions over the years. But over the past six or seven annums he’s become a bit of a social justice warrior (at least in my eyes) and something of an identity ideologue. Example: Last October Chang panned The Holdovers over a single depiction of racist cruelty between two minor characters.

The Chang hire means two things, and both are breaking my heart.

One, The New Yorker film desk is now doubly woked-up and, in my opinion, half-fanatical. I’ve been an occasional fan of Brody’s essays, but there’s no forgetting that in his 10.13.22 Tar review he actually doubted the existence of wokeism and cancel culture. That, good sir, is fanaticism.

And two, New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, hired by Tina Brown 31 years ago and one of my absolute favorite wordsmith smart-asses ever since, has been kicked upstairs by editor David Remnick.

Lane will be “expanding to writing [on] a wider range of topics,” Remnick has announced — a polite way of saying that Lane’s senior stripes have been torn off.

This is not the end of my online New Yorker subscription, but Remnick is downgrading and more or less humiliating one of the very few non-woke (or mostly non-woke) critics of a senior status. Not cool and rather shitty in fact.