Month: February 2025

Neil Rosen, Bill McCuddy and Billy Boy Bregoli cover the major Oscar awards within 13 minutes.

Apologies to Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman in advance for inserting the HE term “Mondo Bondo” and well as the word “prepare”…

“Now owned by a company, Amazon MGM, whose essential mission is to convert movies into streaming content, the Bond series will likely be “expanded,” spun off into sideline franchises (‘The Reign of M‘, ‘The Blofeld Chronicles‘, ‘Young Bond: License to Drive‘), maybe serialized, and generally milked.

“The exact same thing will happen to Mondo Bondo, in other words, that happened to the Star Wars franchise after George Lucas relinquished control of that to Disney: It will be expanded so much that it will, in an essential way, be watered down, and the more that that happens, the more the producers will scramble to make up for the mistakes they’ve made, which can only mean one thing: Even more content!

“Prepare for the strip-mining of the mystique…killing the golden goose by exploiting it into oblivion.”

It’s not just that Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are the height of eight or nine year-olds (at most), but their heads are 50% smaller than those of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. Experiments created by Dr. Septimus Pretorius, tall girls of Munchkinland, etc.

When the first shot rang out in Dealey Plaza, JFK immediately reacted. Both arms went up, hands near his throat. Did secret service agent Clint Hill immediately spring into action by leaping upon the presidential limo and using his body to shield JFK? No — he cooled his jets, waited until the third shot had blown half ot Kennedy’s head into shards. THEN he sprang into action.

That’s why Hill (RIP at age 93) was so guilt-ridden all his life.

Basic Instinct,” posted on 4.17.23:

The 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination will be upon us before we know it (concurrent, by the way, with the 11.22.23 opening of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon) and I’m asking myself something.

Why after all this time has no one ever suggested that Lenny Bruce may have been on to something when he suggested that Jackie Kennedy was simply, immediately terrified about being shot herself (as anyone would be) and was following a blind instinct to avoid a similar death by getting the hell away from the line of fire by climbing out of the back seat and onto the limousine trunk?

That has always seemed to me like a very natural and default kneejerk response — haul ass in order to save your own terrified, freaked-out ass.

And yet every last person who’s ever analyzed what happened during those fateful seconds in Dealey Plaza…they ALL say she was trying to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown onto the trunk. And maybe she was, but why has no one ever suggested that Bruce’s interpretation was at the very least a reasonable possibility?

If so, Jackie wasn’t behaving in some cowardly or ignoble fashion. She’d just seen half of JFK’s head — very close, only inches away — explode into blood and skull and brain matter and vapor — soaking her gloves bright red and all that cranial flotsam spraying upon her own face. Naturally she came to a split-second realization that she might be next and immediately thought about saving herself from a similar fate and, not incidentally, staying alive in order to care for her two children.

Would that have been such a terrible instantaneous reaction?

More than Mickey 17, I mean, and right now I am physically twitching and flinching at the mere mention of the title of Bong Joon-ho‘s upcoming film. Blake and Ryan are the bad guys.

As I scan the early ‘25 cinema horizon, there is nothing that even comes close to depressing me as much as my inevitable submission to Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 (Warner Bros., 3.7). I hate this sight-unseen film so much that dark green ooze is seeping out of my ears.

On the plus side, there’s no film I’m more excited about seeing right now than Michel Franco’s Dreams, which recently premiered at the Berlinale. I knew it would be a must-see when the woked-up Jessica Chastain said she was uncomfortable about playing the wealthy but conflicted lead character.

No distributor has been announced, and I’ve been unable to find a press-screening link.

Anora doesn’t have to win everything. It’s okay — it’s still the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar.

Brutalist topliner Adrien Brody losing the SAG trophy for Best Actor and A Complete Unknown Timothee Chalamet taking it instead truly warms the cockles of my heart…thank God! I would have been crestfallen if Brody had triumphed. Brutalist haters, unite!

And hooray for Team Conclave taking SAG’s Best Ensemble. Does this mean there’s a chance that Conclave might win the top Oscar prize? Yes, there’s a decent chance of that happening. But it’s not all that likely.

Am I slightly bummed by Demi Moore snagging SAG’s Best Actress award? Yes, that bums me out a bit. Will I get over it? Yes, I will.

“I’ve worked with a lot of actresses who could be cancelled for inappropriate behaviour. It’s not just boys [who] behave that way. It happens on both sides of the street. But men don’t talk about it because they would fear [other men] would say, ‘why are you complaining?’”

— Zero Day‘s Matthew Modine speaking to the Telegraph‘s Helen Brown (2.20.25).

Pete in ’28! Please! Obviously the best and the brightest…the smartest lefty guy out there.

A few fellows have famously died during (or as a result of) coitus, but to the best of my knowledge this fate was suffered by only one woman in the showbiz realm.

One female movie character, I should say — Jane Fonda‘s Christine Bonner, a free-spirited but unhealthy young woman who dies after going to bed with Peter Finch‘s Murray Logan in Robert Stevens‘ In The Cool of the Day (’63). The film stinks.

The most famous American real-life victim of the sex-death syndrome was Nelson Rockefeller, who served as New York State governor for 14 years (1959-1973), ran for president a couple of times and then served as Gerald Ford‘s vice-president (1974-1977). On 1.26.79 Rockefeller suffered a fatal heart attack while boning 25-year-old Megan Marshack, a personal aide or mistress or both, inside a Manhattan townhouse at 13 West 54th Street.

Roughly two weeks before Rockefeller’s demise Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, a classic capturing of a Pryor stage performance, was released. During the show, which was filmed in Long Beach on 12.10.78, Pryor revealed that his father, LeRoy “Buck Carter” Pryor, had died during sex at age 53. Pryor: “He came and went at the same time.”

Felix Faure, president of France between 1895 and 1899, allegedly died while his girlfriend, actress Marguerite Steinheil, was…uhm, blowing him. Steinheil was thereafter nicknamed “kiss of death”. I’m mentioning Faure because of I’ve walked along rue Felix Faure in Cannes for many years.

I’m not including guys who died from auto-erotic asphyxiation (i.e., Michael Hutchence and David Carradine). They obviously bought it — were actively involved — tempting death. HE’s list is solely about people who didn’t see it coming and then whoosh….expiration.

Who am I missing? Movie characters, real-life victims…anyone who just keeled over at the moment or orgasm, or soon after.