Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Warner Bros., 9.6) not only screens tomorrow in Venice but opens domestically a bit more than a week hence. Where’s the buzz? I’m not feeling it. Nobody wants to sit through a cash-grab experience. I adore the 1988 original. Please don’t mess this up.

…but reviews of Todd Phillips‘ Joker: Folie a Deux won’t surface until Wednesday, September 4th.

Variety‘s Alex Hitman is reporting that Cooper Hoffman (Saturday Night, Licorice Pizza) will play a would-be “sexual muse” to an artist played by Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex.

Written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, pic is described as a “provocative thriller” that “blithely explores desire, domination and fantasy.”

I’m sorry but nobody wants to see a film in which Cooper (son of “Philly” Hoffman**) performs sexually in any way, shape or form. Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off. He’s just not sexy or good-looking enough….sorry.

There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.

In fact Paddy Chayefsky wrote a teleplay (and then a movie version of the same script) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that we was on the verge of giving up. It was sad but 1955 audiences understood his predicament because the actor who played the butcher was Ernest Borgnine.

** I’ll allow that the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman was briefly shown slamming ham with Marisa Tomei in Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, but that was a very fast and quick one-off.

After watching Lee last night, I can at least say that I’m much more familiar with the life and times of Lee Miller, and for that I’m grateful. I apologize for my previous ignorance.

For Lee — shot in late ’22, premiered in Toronto 12 months ago, opening on 9.13.24 — is a reasonably sturdy, realistic and believable portrait of a gutsy feminist firebrand who went for the gusto, and under fire at that.

Born in ’07, Miller died 37 years at age 70.

The Lee screenplay was written by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume, and is adapted from Antony Penrose‘s “The Lives of Lee Miller” (’85).

Winslet produced and even personally coughed up for two weeks of expenses during filming.

A 1920s fashion model turned Parisian expat, Man Ray-influenced photographer and renowned WWII Vogue photojournalist (London Blitz, 1944 Paris liberation, horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau), Miller was in her late 30s when her war experiences began. Winslet was in her late 40s when filming started, but she and the 1940s-era Miller clearly resemble each other. Past their foxy prime (weathered, not slender) but with good bones and take-no-shit demeanors.

The film tells us that in real life Miller never rolled over for anyone — bristling with moxie, defiance, bravery. Sipped from a metal flask, smoked like a chimney.

Winslet and Alexander Sjarsgard, who plays her lover Roland Penrose, are only a year apart in age, although he’s in better shape.

Winslet has told journalists that she’s accepting of the fact that she’s become something of a big girl (not fat but fleshy, ample), but she’s also made sure that Lee viewers will understand that her bodacious ta-tas are just as big and bountiful as ever. Lee features three boob-flashing scenes, and one in particular definitely struck me as erotic — a moment when Penrose smears green body paint all over her upper torso.

Lee Miller was tough and gutsy and liked to fuck and smoke and hang out with the swells, and she took no shit or derision from sexist males. She was tough, scrappy, blunt.

Her experiences in war-torn France are tonally grim and draining but enveloping all the same. Kuras makes certain that we understand that war is hell, horror, slaughter. Stinking dead bodies on freight cars…good God. There’s no mistaking that Lee, in a very primal way, was affected by all this carnage. You can feel it in her sad, shaken, traumatized eyes.

I’m not a fan of Winslet’s crude, twangy American accent, but it doesn’t get in the way. Lee is a militantly feminist film. It’s basically saying that many (most?) men back then were smug, overbearing, entitled dicks. Hell, they still are! Men of the world, let’s all get together on a worldwide Zoom call and slit our throats!

Lee boasts a first-rate supporting cast — Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Skarsgard, Andy Samberg, Noémie Merlant, Josh O’Connor.

“Not everyone can believe this. Surely they can see what he is.” — from a Lee scene in which Winslet is watching newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler but is also, obviously, referring to Donald Trump.

Please check out the Lee Miller archives.

…of a Beatles documentary ever written can be found on the 2024 Venice Film festival website. A boilerplate description of Andre Ujica‘s TWST: Things We Said Today calls it “a time capsule of New York City between August 13-15, 1965, framed by the Beatles’ arrival in the city and their first concert at Shea Stadium.” But read this…it’s really good:

[Posted on 9.19.11] Last night Jett, his roommate Sonya and I caught a 7:50 pm screening of Drive at Brooklyn’s UA Court Street Stadium plex. My second viewing. Great film.

I hit the smallish bathroom after it ended. Two urinals and a toilet stall with six or seven guys lined up. I should have bailed right then and there, but I was looking for a little sit-down action and wasn’t sure of my alternate options.

A guy left the stall and a 30something black dude took ownership and, like, didn’t come out. Three, four minutes. Five minutes. Six. Could he be undergoing self-administered surgery? Filling out a mortgage application?

Then, still on the pot, he began talking to his girlfriend on his cell, flirting with her, settling in. “How ya doin’? Movie’s over…yeah. You wanna eat somethin’?,” etc.

If I had any balls I would have knocked on the stall door and, just like Tom Cruise in Collateral, said, “Yo, homey!” I didn’t, of course. I just stood and waited like a sap, listening to this jerkoff go on and on. The idea of showing consideration to others simply hadn’t occurred to him.

Around the seven- or eight-minute mark I gave up and went outside and used the facilities at a nearby Barnes and Noble.

It’s simply a matter of culture and manners. Let’s face it — some people are low-lifes.

I’ll be attending an invitational screening of George Clooney‘s The Ides of March at the Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday. If I happen to hit the bathroom after it ends I can absolutely guarantee that nobody will sit in a toilet stall for several minutes, ignoring the fact that several others are waiting, while chit-chatting with a girl. I’ll put $100 on this right now. I’ll bet anything.

And yet Vanessa Redgrave didn’t play the lead role or main protagonist — Jane Fonda (as playwright Lillian Hellman) fulfilled that task, and was Oscar-nominated for Best Actress. Fonda wound up winning a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, but not an Oscar.

For her titular performance as Julia, an anti-Nazi activist (and later martyr) who was Hellman’s close friend and who experiences traumatic surgery at the hands of the Nazis, Vanessa Redgrave was campaigned by 20th Century Fox for Best Supporting Actress, and she won.

By the same token, Zoe Saldana plays the lead role in Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez — a frustrated Mexico City attorney, Rita Moro Castro, who’s persuaded to assist a Mexican cartel leader, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, as he undergoes sex reassignment surgery, partly to evade the authorities and partly to become “Emilia Perez”.

Real-life trans person Karla Sofia Gascon plays the cartel leader and Perez, but it’s not a lead role — it’s a strong supporting thing as she’s clearly not the main protagonist plus Gascon doesn’t have a huge amount of face time in Audiard’s film, certainly not compared to Saldana.

The identity fanatics (i.e., the same folks who insisted that Killers or the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone was a deserving recipient of a Best Actress Oscar) will be playing the same tune on behalf of Gascon.

She won’t win, of course, but Netflix will get to run a big identity campaign on behalf of Gascon ane the trans community, and that’s what they mostly care about.

Which of HE’s top 21 films released in 1999 have I re-watched more than a couple of times? Just four — Election, The Limey, The Insider and Malkovich. I re-watched Lola in an AMC plex a couple of months ago…loved it. I’ve actually re-watched American Beauty three times, come to think. I’ve re-watched Al Pacino’s “ inches” speech from Any Given Sunday 17 or 18 times.

Quentin Tarantino smoking a Sherlock Holmes pipe…actually a Hans Landa pipe…either way.

QT: “It’s a situation, I think…I’m being fair enough to say that the armorer, the guy who handles the gun, an armorer is 90% responsible for everything that happens when it comes to that gun. But, but, but, but, but, but…the actor is 10% responsible. The actor is 10% responsible.”

Near the end of their chat, Tarantino and Maher are clearly drunk and high. Words and phrases slurred here and there. That’s the fun of it.

Non-truths flood our communal atmosphere, not because we’re compulsive liars but because of our disrespect for various parties.

Nobody’s 100% honest with their bosses or supervisors; ditto their wives or girlfriends. Familiarity breeds contempt, and with that a willingness to dispense occasional evasions and half-truths.

Very few parents are 100% honest with their tweener and teenaged kids. Almost no drivers are honest with traffic cops. If I truly respect and fully trust you, I’ll be as honest as the day is long. But we live in a universe full of short days.

This goes double or triple from a celebrity’s perspective. Pretty much every famous person lies through his or her teeth when it comes to public statements. Not blatantly but in a mild, sideways fashion.

But that’s okay because they’re well motivated. They’re lying because they despise the gossip-driven media and feel that dealing with a corrupt and disreputable entity means all bets are off.

I think I understand the ethical system they’re embracing because it was explained in a couple of respected ’60s westerns.

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is one of them. I’m thinking of a scene in which William Holden’s Pike Bishop expresses moral support for Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton because he gave his “word” to a bunch of “damned railroad men,” and Ernest Borgnine’s Dutch Engstrom defiantly argues, “That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to.”

Burt Lancaster says the same thing in The Professionals when he discusses flexible ethics with Lee Marvin. When Marvin reminds Lancaster that he’s given his ‘word’ to Ralph Bellamy’s J.W. Grant, a millionaire railroad tycoon, Lancaster replies, “My word to Grant ain’t worth a plug nickel.”

Tom Cruise was J.W. Grant-ing, in effect, when he told Oprah Winfrey he was in love with Katie Holmes and wanted to marry her and so on. He was saying, “This is what you’re going to get from me, and if you don’t think I’m being honest then too bad because my life is my own and you guys don’t rate the real truth because you’re scumbags who pass along tabloid fairy tales.”

I can’t recall if my pitch was emailed or typed-out and sent via snail-mail, but Esquire bit right away…assignment! Those were the days when it could take as long as two or three months between suggesting an article and seeing it in print. The other freelance piece [after the jump] was about private Hollywood poker games. It was either for GQ or Outside magazine; I honestly don’t remember.

Best idea I pitched that nobody wanted to run: A Playboy parody article called “The Girls of Bumblefuck.” The premise was that (a) the myth of the devastatingly attractive farmer’s daughter bailing hay in Podunk, Arkansas, was bullshit and (b) that beauty always follows wealth and power, hence the dishiest women are almost always found in big cities while women from one-horse, out-of the way trailer-park towns tend to be…well, not in the Ava Gardner or Angelina Jolie realm.