Month: February 2024

Imagine you’re speaking to Ryan Gosling in a dark cellar room with a single chair, a table and a light bulb hanging from a cord, and he’s somehow slipped into a very candid mood…cough it up, no holds barred. And you ask him “of the 26 or 27 films you’ve made since Remember The Titans, how many are you seriously proud of? How many hold up honorably and beautifully?”

If i were in Gosling’s shoes, I would name the following 7 films: The Believer, Blue Valentine, The Driver, The Big Short, The Nice Guys, La La Land, Barbie.

The other 19 or 20 Gosling films are decent, not bad, passable, problematic, disappointing, underwhelming, painful: Remember the Titans, Murder by Numbers, The Slaughter Rule, The United States of Leland, The Notebook, Stay, Half Nelson, Fracture, Lars and the Real Girl, All Good Things, Crazy, Stupid, Lovem, The Ides of March, The Place Beyond the Pines, Gangster Squad, Only God Forgives, Lost River, Song to Song, Blade Runner, First Man, The Gray Man.

So 7 out of 27 or roughly 25% good and 75% problematic in one way or another. That’s not a terrible average. It’s probably an inevitable one.

There is no more terrible sound in our Godless universe than the shrieking of a “friendly” celebrity, laughing with forced, exuberant, high-pitched glee.

Charles Melton‘s moussed hair looks really great…seriously.

Lily Gladstone‘s slicked-back hair looks good, but what’s with the pinkish ghost face? Remember that scene in Mike Nichols‘ Silkwood when Diana Scarwid, as Cher’s girlfriend who works in a funeral parlor, was powder-puffing Cher’s face and maing it look all white and chalky, and then Kurt Russell saunters into the kitchen and says “you look like a fucking corpse”?

Why is Tinkerbell-sized Jenny Ortega hanging with this group? The only semi-noteworthy film she did in ’23 was Scream VI.

I get it, I get it…Barry Keoghan and the W magazine guys want to alarm and offend middle-class schmucks like myself. Mission accomplished, so to speak.

Comment #1: Thank God in heaven that they chose not show Keoghan’s “blood”-stained feet. Comment #2: The grand guignol effect is compromised if not ruined by Keohgan’s grotesque bee-stung nose. Comment #3: No offense but if Bloody Barry was the size of an insect and I happened to notice him crawling along my kitchen floor, I would gently pick him up and take him outside and place him in the grass…I wouldn’t stomp him to death…I would give him the gift of freedom.

Here’s a reposting of a Stanley Kubrick-Kirk Douglas story, passed along 13 years ago by director-screenwriter James Toback during a Savannah Film Festival q & a:

During last Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, guests Van Jones and Ann Coulter were asked about the Kansas City shooting that had happened during last Wednesday’s (2.14) Super Bowl celebration parade.

After it was mentioned that the identity of the shooter was being kept under wraps by Kansas City authorities, Coulter said this almost certainly indicates that the shooter is black, as district attorneys and news media types always suppress issues of non-white identity whenever a violent or criminal incident has occurred.

Daily Mail summary:

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It was announced yesterday (2.20) that the accused bad guys are Dominic Miller and Lyndell Mays. Radio personality Lisa Lopez-Gavin was killed by a random bullet during the shoot-em-up.

HE admires Netflix’s Best Actress campaign on behalf of Nyad ‘s Annette Bening. Netflix strategists know it’s an impossible dream (the top contenders are Emma Stone’s clearly superior performance in Poor Things vs. Lily Gladstone’s identity-driven campaign for her KOTFM turn) but they’re doing it anyway in never-say-die fashion, and HE respects the spirit behind this.

And congrats, by the way, to Awards Daily Sasha Stone for having authored the top quote.

Imagine all the Times Square passersby who looked up at this huge, block-long billboard in December of 1958 and said, “Wow…that looks like something I should definitely see.” Right now it’s a struggle to find anyone who recalls even seeing this film, or who remembers it with any particular fondness if they have. If you ask me this billboard photo (posted by flashbak.com) is cooler than the film, which I was somehow motivated to write about on 2.23.18.

Why in the world would Martin Scorsese want to make another Jesus film? 35 years ago he delivered his magnum opus with The Last Temptation of Christ…he did it, nailed it, nothing left to prove. Especially with Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind, a parable-driven Jesus flick he’s been editing for somewhere between four and five years, possibly debuting later this year. On top of which belief in Christian dogma has been plummeting for decades, and especially this century.

At a Berlinale press conference earlier today Scorsese said he’s still “contemplating” the approach to his Jesus film.

“What kind of film I’m not quite sure, but I want to make something unique and different that could be thought-provoking and I hope also entertaining. I’m not quite sure yet how to go about it. But once we finish our rounds here of promoting [Killers of the Flower Moon], maybe I’ll get some sleep and then wake up and I’ll have this fresh idea on how to do it.”

HE suggestion: Forget the Nazarene and do another gangster flick, only faster-moving this time. Faster and less contemplative and no old guys. As John Ford was to the western, Martin Scorsese is to northeastern-region goombah crime flicks.

The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, released a couple of days ago, has decided that the lowest-ranked U.S. presidents, ranking #40 to #45, are Warren G. Harding (Teapot Dome, tempestuous sexual appetite), William Henry Harrison (died 31 days after inauguration), Franklin Pierce (racially antagonistic, divisive), Andrew Johnson (Lincoln’s successor), James Buchanan and, at the very bottom of the list, Donald Trump.

The good guys (#1 through #10) are Lincoln, FDR, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman, Barack Obama, Dwight D. Eisenhower, LBJ and JFK.

Bill Clinton ranks 12th, Joe Biden is two notches below at 14th, Ronald Reagan is 16th, Dubya is 19th, Jimmy Carter is 22nd and Gerald Ford ranks 27th.

I don’t understand Eisenhower being in eighth place. He was a steady, unexciting, moderate-minded fellow who presided over a country absorbed in anxiety, paranoia, invaders, commie conspiracies…Elvis Presley, Debbie Reynolds, No Down Payment….a relatively timid chapter in our country’s history…”the bland leading the bland.”

All hail Jeffrey Wright! Good man, zen cat, excellent actor. His American Fiction performance was first-rate. Cord Jefferson’s drama received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Wright. But we all understand that Wright was never in serious contention for that award (not really) and that Jefferson failed to land a Best Director nom. Obviously the film is admired but it hasn’t connected. If you ask me it’s because the excellence of the first 45 minutes isn’t sustained, and because it ends a bit weakly. I’m asking for assessments from the HE community.

Yesterday Sasha and I gave the weekly podcast a shot, and it didn’t work out. Sometimes the spirit is with you, and sometimes it isn’t. I’ll record something tonight on my own and post it tomorrow. Sasha and I will give it another try next weekend.

The issue, to be honest, was that some HE commenters said that Sasha was berating me. So we tried different ways to fix the problem (including adopting a nicey-nice “turn the other cheek” approach) but it wasn’t working. She’s frustrated with me and hates being the subject of the HE commentariat, and I feel inhibited talking to her. So we’re at an impasse.

Sasha thinks I should get a new partner but I think we have a good rapport at times. Does anyone want to volunteer to step into her place? Sasha would be overjoyed by this.

That wasn’t a serious question, of course. The vast majority of HE regulars are too chicken to do a podcast. I know this, they know this. Let’s cut the shit.