The forced-deck plotting in which all kinds of seemingly impossible problems have to be resolved before the debut episode goes on the air feels…forced.

Gabriel LaBelle‘s performance as SNL producer Lorne Michaels has no snap, no bite, no eye-gleam, no inner furnace…LaBelle’s performance as young Steven Spielberg in The Fablemans was reasonably decent, but his Michaels is about as bland as it gets.

Overhead lighting crashing to the floor is an overly emphatic metaphor for on-set chaos…too heavy-handed.

The most engaging performance or presence comes from curly-haired Rachel Sennot, who plays Michaels’ former wife and creative partner, Rosie Shuster. They were married between 1967 and 1980, and you can feel odd flirtatious vibes between them….vibes that go nowhere. On the downslope of their marriage Shuster began fucking Dan Aykroyd in 1979. If I was Reitman I would have cheated the timeline and used Shuster’s infidelity as a plot point.

Matt Wood plays John Belushi as some kind of submental, subverbal psychopath…why?

The Richard Kiel-sized Nicholas Braun is way, way too tall to play Andy Kaufman.

Saturday Night opens on 9.27=.24,

One way or another, tonight’s Harris-Trump debate is going to be a humdinger.

Because Harris really and truly needs to put her cards face-up on the kitchen table…frankly, honestly, no word-salad answers…and if she equivocates or tap-dances she’ll be in trouble.

And there can be no mincing words about the obvious fact that Donald J. Trump is a totalitarian, foam-at-the-mouth animal.

N.Y. Times reporters Reid J. Epstein and Jonathan Swan: “With no other debates scheduled between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump, the face-off figures to be one of the highest-stakes 90 minutes in American politics in generations.”

Hollywood Elsewhere will begin the bingle-bangle sometime around 9 pm eastern.

Here’s the thing: There’s a lesson in the fact that Hubert Humphrey‘s 1968 candidacy never caught on until he separated himself from LBJ’s Vietnam War policies. The lesson is this: A vice-president looking to succeed a sitting president has no choice but to man up and say “I am my own person with my own vision, and not a carbon copy or a ‘me too” version of the president.”

In order to persuade heavy-lidded, low-information, couch-slumping, fence-sitting voters to trust or at least take a chance on a Kamala Harris presidency, the sitting vice-president needs to at least partially throw droolin’ Joe Biden under the bus. She needs to admit what everyone knows, which is that a vice-president is primarily obliged to back up the president, but her own Presidency, moving forward, will be first and foremost about fufilling her own goals and policies.

“Did Harry Truman model his presidency on the legislative goals and governmental philosophy of Franklin Roosevelt?,” Harris could rhetorically ask. “Yes and no, but within a very short period he set his own course. Did Lyndon Johnson model his presidency on what John F. Kennedy attempted to do? Intially, yes, but Johnson very quickly and aggressively formulated his own domestic agenda — civil rights legislation, war on poverty, Medicare — as well as his own self-destructive instincts about the Vietnam War.

“For better or ill, every vice-president-turned-president has gone his own way and charted his own path.”

N.Y. Times columnist Thomas L. Freidman has said it best — “23 Words Harris Needs to Say to Win“:

“’Joe and I got a lot of things right, but we got some things wrong, too — and here is what I have learned.’

“For my money, uttering those 23 words, or something like them, is the key for Kamala Harris to win Tuesday’s debate against Donald Trump, and the election.

Part One of Alex Gibney‘s Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos is pretty much what I expected — a smooth, hugely enjoyable, inside-baseball chronicle of the life of David Chase (from his New Jersey childhood beginnings and an acrimonious relatonship with a difficult mom, all the way to the debut of The Sopranos in early ’99) and the corresponding creative genesis (writing, casting, uncertainties, early political struggles) of that landmark HBO series.

A delicious ride and a rich nostalgic recap…bull’s eye, made me happy, etc.

But Part Two really reached inside and got the old leaky spigots going…it took me back to the whole emotional extended-family meltdown thing…the whole James Gandolfini-Nancy Marchand-Drea de Matteo-Tony Sirico…all of it…it sent me right back to the early aughts…I could watch it all over again right now.

One relatively small thing threw me, and that’s the fact that Lorraine Bracco (Dr. Melfi, Goodfellas) doesn’t look like herself any more. Heavier face, gray hair…there’s almost literally no resemblance. The voice is familiar but the face is from some other realm…sorry.

I was also reminded how Gandolfini pretty much doubled in size between the season opener (shot in ’98, aired in ’99) and the last two seasons. Drinking, possibly drugs, no apparent restraint. He more or less killed himself. When Gibney asks Chase if he was surprised by Gandolfini’s death in Rome in June ’13, Chase says “no.”

I did a phoner with Chase in late ’98, the main topic being the odd resemblance between the psychiatric angle in The Sopranos and the psychiatric hook in Harold Ramis and Kenneth Lonergan‘s Analyze This, which opened on 3.5.99 or roughly two months after the 1.10.99 Sopranos debut.

I also spoke to Ramis for this story, and he told me upfront that he’d heard The Sopranoe was “really good.”

‘

Emilia Perez costar Karla Sofia Gascon (whose height is apparently 72 or 73 inches), director Jacques “little head” Audiard (5’9”), Zoe Saldana (5’7”), Selena Gomez…basking in Cannes sunlight.

I’m posting this because when you search for Gascon’s height, Google won’t say boo.

For the fifth or sixth time, if Netflix runs Gascon as a Best Supporting Actress contender, she’ll almost certainly win and in so doing make Oscar history — the first and only winner of a Best Supporting Actress Oscar who lived as a dude until middle age.

Will Netflix play it smart and take the easy win?

Gascon can’t beat Anora ‘s Mikey Madison…not a snowball’s chance in hell.

11 years ago I attended the funeral of the great James Gandolfini. My report about this sad but moving event triggered one of the ugliest comment-thread pile-ons in the history of this column. It followed a plainly-written “this is how it happened” piece about my having “crashed” (in a vague manner of speaking) Gandolfini’s funeral service at Manhattan’s St. John The Divine on 6.27.13.

For two days I was seething with rage while coping with a broken heart. The ugliness amazed me although a few commenters, at least, understood and respected the fact that I attended out of love and respect. Variety‘s Stephen Gaydos said it best in 6.28.13 post: “Wells is a huge [Gandolfini] fan and so he paid his respects to a guy who was talented and died too young. Those are the facts. The rest is cockatoo chatter.”

At the end of a local ABC News report about the funeral, an anchor guy stated that “the funeral was closed to the press.” The beat-down I received that day was partly about my having claimed that press wasn’t invited (or at least that I wasn’t) and that I had to circumvent stern-looking women with clipboards who were checking names, etc.

Here it is again: “I got hated on big-time for tweeting about having crashed James Gandolfini‘s funeral this morning at Manhattan’s St. John The Divine. Yes, I flippantly used the term “funeral crasher!” because that’s what I was. But it’s the singer, not the song. The haters ignored the fact that I (a) asked for God’s forgiveness in having crashed, (b) ascribed my crashing success to the intervention of angels, and (c) said that I crashed with reverence and respect for James, David Chase and all the “made” Sopranos guys. The rush-to-judgment pissheads simply weren’t listening. They never do. They’re scolds…shrill finger-wagging scolds going “tut-tut!” and “no, no, no!”

“I didn’t crash Gandolfini’s funeral like some giggling monkey, and I didn’t take the subway up there this morning with the intention of crashing. I crashed it solemnly like some devoted choirboy or Sopranos family soldier. I just grimmed up and shuffled up the cathedral steps and…well, go ahead and laugh but I honestly believe that I got past security because some angel from heaven who lived in my area of New Jersey when he or she was mortal happened to look down from heaven at that moment and said ‘whoa, wait up…he’s okay…fuck it, let him through.’

The great James Earl Jones — Lt. Lothar Zogg in Dr. Strangelove, Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope, the voice and soul of Darth Vader in the first three Star Wars films, Tony Award winner for his portrayal of Troy Maxson in August Wilson‘s Fences, Vice Admiral James Greer in Clear and Present Danger (“Watch your back, Jack”), Terence Mann in Field of Dreams — has left the earth at age 93.

I’ve never heard the original, un-synthesized tapes of Jones speaking Darth Vader’s dialogue, but “no, I am your father” is not only the most famous single line he ever performed, but one of the famous lines in movie history.

Jones’ deep baritone voice was a thing of absolute beauty. I never knew he was plagued by stuttering, at least as a young man.

I have this half-century-old memory of Jones explaining to Dick Cavett that the then-current colloquial term for a dude of color was “spade cat.” That was once a term of respect and awe…really. When’s the last time anyone said “spade cat” in mixed company? Has Robin D’Angelo ever used it?

HE can’t wait to see Ron Howard’s Eden. Seriously.

Don’t kid yourself: The Galapagos island of Floreana, where the turbulent real-life story unfolded 95 years ago, is no tropical paradise. And it’s widely presumed that Dr. Friedrich Ritter, the brusque German misanthrope (Jude Law), was so incensed by the flamboyant vulgarity of Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas) that somehow expelling or otherwise getting rid of her became an obsession.

From Owen Gleiberman ‘s 9.8.24 review:

“This Is Bad“, posted on 9.28.05:

I can’t overstate what a besotted, drugged-out feeling it is to be back in Los Angeles…to once again stand on the roof of a certain West Hollywood high-rise and smell the faintly noxious air and gaze out at the milky haze and tell myself, “It’s okay…despair not.”

There is only one way to live in this town and that’s to crawl into the cave of your own head and your work, and to feed off screenings and DVDs and the haunting emotions of pretty women, and to savor those special times in which you happen to be in the company of similarly diseased and/or disgruntled persons like myself.

Like, for instance, the amazing Joss Whedon.

I would find it astonishing to find myself in the pasta-and-sauces department of Pavilions and all of a sudden…Whedon! Just standing there in boring clothes like a regular mortal and telling himself, “I can’t eat pasta any more, certainly not in the evening. Face it — those days are over.”

A portion of my L.A. lethargy is indicated by the fact that I’m back to reading Defamer and going “hyeh-hyeh” like Beevis and Butthead. I didn’t go to Defamer once during the Toronto Film Festival, and not all that much when I was living in Brooklyn. I like Defamer — it’s a very well-written thing and a necessary component — but you have to be a little sick in your soul to be into it in the first place.

I could feel the old vibe swirling around me like that banshee from Darby O’Gill and the Little People, so I did the sensible thing and evacuated myself off the roof of the high-rise and made my way over to Tower Records and bought the DVD of No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

I tried to wangle a freebie from the Paramount Home Video publicist who took Martin Blythe‘s place, but she didn’t call back until today. I tried to buy it yesterday at Laser Blazer in the early afternoon, only to be told it had sold out. The Tower Video guys, who had plenty of copies, said it was moving moderately well but nothing to write home about.

I nodded off for about 20 minutes when I saw David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in Cannes and I didn’t get around to it in Toronto, so tonight I get to absorb the whole thing at the American Cinematheque, more or less alert…down for it.

I’m a little surprised to be riffing rather indulgently about the stink of Los Angeles seeping back into my bones (that’s a Charles Bukowksi line), and I promise to get back into matters of substance fairly soon.

Except melancholia is a matter of substance if you live here.

I’ve got a screening conflict next Tuesday evening — Tony Scott’s Domino vs. Joss Whedon’s Serenity. Well, not really. I would be squirming a bit if Whedon and I were talking in the pasta-and-sauces aisle right now and he was asking me, “So, are you going?”…but we’re not so I’m cool.

The only thing that gives me concern about Domino is an observation in David Katz‘s profile of Keira Knightley in the current issue of Esquire. He says that Domino is “a messy movie, often intentionally, often not.”

Roughly a year ago…

Anora’s Mikey Madison is a slam-dunk to win the Best Actress Oscar on Sunday, 3.2.25 (six months hence!) because of a few combining factors but mainly two.

One, her performance is one of those guns-blazing, force-of-nature, hurricane-strength grand slams that can’t be brushed aside…a bloom-of-youth, prime-of-life fastball that streaks across the plate at 105 mph.

Not so much during the first third of the film, mind, but starting a bit shy of the one-hour mark after her sex-worker character’s fairytale fantasy (immense wealth through marriage! endless partying! security for life!) comes to an abrupt, screeching halt.

And two, despite the rage and chaos that pours into her life like a flash flood after the parents of her immature, waste-of-skin Russian husband get involved, Anora (she prefers to be called “Anni”) is essentially a Cinderella figure —- a young, struggling, hard-knocks scrapper who is scooped up and saved and then knocked down and brutally pushed around only to be re-saved (or at least blessed by a life-changing emotional breakthrough) at the very end.

Everyone loves a Cinderella story, especially if, as in Anora’s case, it avoids the sentimental, sappy stuff and goes for broke with relentless hellzapoppin’ and a “don’t fuck with me” spitfire attitude.

There are no other 2024 Best Actress contenders or performances (young, older, anyone) who come close to delivering this kind of current.

Madison will win for the same reason Jennifer Lawrence won for her eccentric, emotionally unbalanced but open-hearted protagonist in Silver Linings Playbook. You just knew Lawrence had it in the bag.

What other Cinderella-type roles have resulted in Oscar jackpots, or at least heavily favored Best Actress nominations?

Audrey Hepburn won for playing a spiritually confined princess who is released after falling in love with Gregory Peck in in Roman Holiday (‘53). She was Best Actress nominated the following year for playing another Cinderella character —- a chauffeur’s daughter —- in Sabrina (‘54).

Julia Roberts’ performance as Vivian in Pretty Woman (‘90) was also nominated for Best Actress, although she lost to Misery’s Kathy Bates. Roberts did, however, win the Golden Globe trophy for Best Actress a few weeks prior.

Who else?