Month: February 2025

Sorry But This Is Great Filmmaking

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And none of the finest films of 2024 can begin to compete with it, quality-wise. The wild and woolly outdoors, and shot on a Warner Bros. soundstage yet! The dp was Ted McCord (Young Man with a Horn, East of Eden, The Sound of Music). Razor-sharp focus. The lighting was/is as good as it gets.

In Hell Again

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…due to a re-watch of The Brutalist. If I were to run into Brady Corbet on the streets of Ojai I wouldn’t take a poke at him — I’m a civilized human being — but I would probably give him a dirty look. Okay, I wouldn’t do that either — I would smile and go “hey!” and schmooze and whatnot. But I would hate myself for doing so.

Ojai Walk-Round

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Go to any wealthy or plain old middle-class bedroom community and you’ll never, ever see junker cars from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s parked on residential streets. But there are all kinds of decades-old beaters in laid-back, nestled-away Ojai, which is a hugely expensive place to live and quiet as fuck — you can hear a pin drop on Main Street.

If the “Emilia Perez” Meltdown Followed The “Network” Script

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…Netflix execs would have Karla Sofia Gascon meet with an “accident” of some kind…just like Peter Finch‘s Howard Beale goes down in a hail of bullets after Robert Duvall‘s Frank Hackett and Faye Dunaway‘s Diana Christianson decide they have no other choice.

Paddy Chayefsky cooked it up, and then Sidney Lumet shot and cut it with all the necessary skills.

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Because They’re Young

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Is it fair to say that mainstream media types are being a bit ageist in their reportings and commentaries about Elon Musk‘s young guns, otherwise known as the six DOGE hotshots?

Mainstream mantra: “What the fuck is this?…they’re too young, too brash…what do they know?…this is crazy!”

The subhead of this article is “All The Young Dudes.”

Posted three days ago (2.2.25) by Wired‘s Vittoria Elliot, Dhruv Mehrotra, Zoë Schiffer and Tim Marchman:

Six young dudes, all in or certainly adjacent to their early 20s, are key players in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, “tasked by executive order” with “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

These brazen engineers, every one a gunslinger and all of them absolute government virgins, have basically been given the keys to the inner workings and wirings of the federal kingdom.

The hotshots are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger and Ethan Shaotran.

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Alienation Over “Freaky Friday”

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Even before my movie journalism career launched in the late ‘70s, I always considered it vital to see films that had seriously impacted the culture, even if the general consensus was that they were shit.

So it means something, I think, that I never had the slightest interest in catching Disney’s Freaky Friday, a popular but allegedly pedestrian mother-daughter body-swap comedy, when it opened 22 years ago.

I regard women-friendly films of this type as cotton candy at best, and the costarring of Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis seemed, in this context, like a formidable warning if not a flat-out repellent.

I therefore regard a 2.3.25 report that Cpt. Rebecca Lobach, who was killed on 1.29.25 when the Blackhawk helicopter she was co-piloting collided with an American Eagle commercial jet and caused the deaths of 64 passengers…reading that Lobach was a fanatical, repeat-watch fan of Freaky Friday is vaguely disappointing at the least, and kind of alienating, truth be told.

The 28-year-old Lobach was six or seven when Freaky Friday opened on 8.4.03. But her family kept re-watching it over and over and over, she later wrote. There’s no accounting for taste in films, needless to add.

If Flat Palm Rests Upon a Tender Flank

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…it means the guy in question is almost certainly putting it to the woman in question. He’s at least giving it serious thought.

This Jon Voight-Raquel Welch pic was, I believe, snapped just before the 1975 Oscar ceremony. (Or just after.) Voight’s daughter, Angelina Jolie, who lives to hate and hold grudges, was born three months later (6.4.75).

“Whadaya think of this boner I’ve got here?” — Voight in Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis (‘24).

“Am I a drug-dealer of color? Are we in Inglewood?” — Eric Stoltz to John Travolta in Pulp Fiction (‘94).

The Big Takeover

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Call it vague or paranoid or alarmingly perceptive, but last night I listened to a futuristic nightmare AI scenario. I texted the doomsayer this morning, shared a few thoughts:

“I can’t stop thinking about your gloomy robot forecast.

“Not just AI’s current, ongoing mimicry of most forms of Hollywood ‘creativity’, but its eventual, inevitable conquering…the swallowing of organic Hollywood culture as many of us know it or certainly have known it over the last half-century, and within 20 or 25 years.

“Sutton will turn 29 in 2050, and she’ll be right in the thick of it.

“Right now AI is merely working its way into things by mimicry and flattery, but give it time.

“When did this scenario occur to you? When you first contemplated the implications of HAL nine-triple-zero in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or did the light switch on more recently?

“If it’s a natural conclusion based on experience, have you written any of it down? Even fragments would be great. Last night you seemed to have the diagnosis down cold. You’ve been thinking and refining.

“From Aeschylus and Euripides in 450 to 500 B.C. to as recently as 2015 or 2020, there was only one kind of dramatic writing and crafting — a natural, organic, brain-to-hands-and-fingers process drawn from the rigors of daily life, refined through compression and struggle.

“2500 years of dramatic process and storytelling, and now, human-fallibility-wise, that’s coming to an end.

“I also liked your take on the next seismic shift in filmmaking coming from TikTokers. They’ll be working ‘with’ AI, of course, but indifferently or obliviously or what?

“Do you know any slightly younger creatives who have shared observations along these lines?”