Because I’m sick to death of current April weather in the NYC area…overly cool bordering on cold, damp…fecking 34 degrees now with light rain expected…warm up, will ya?…Jesus.
I’m trying to imagine myself all stubbly-faced, overweight and tattoed, and wearing an oversized and half-unbuttoned shirt, blousy shorts and a backwards baseball cap.
Why was the location kept under wraps? The Bahamas, Key West, Turks and Caicos?
A person who doesn’t love dogs or cats has, I’m certain, something missing inside. An absence of compassion, warmth, empathy. And that’s an Orange Plague thing.
During last night’s “book report” about his 150-minute dinner and White House tour with Donald Trump on Monday, 3.31, Bill Maher quoted the 47th president as saying that “a lot of the presidents had dogs for political purposes.” Maher said, a tiny bit testily, “No, people love dogs…that’s what that is.” And Donald Trump replied, “Yeah, okay, that’s true.”
The real Donald Trump, who is undoubtedly a sociopath and a morbid narcissist, is the guy who’s never had a dog (or, as far as I know, a cat) and suspects that certain dog-owning presidents were putting on a show.
The sociopathic Trump, the one who performs at the drop of a hat and plays people for his own gain (a trait shared by 97% of film industry types and even, truth be told, myself from time to time) was the “yeah, okay, that’s true” guy.
Maher’s book report was plain and straight as far as it went, but deep down this half-Irish, half-Jewish dude from a middle-class upbringing in northern New Jersey had to feel flattered and turned on by being respectfully received and treated obligingly by a White House occupant.
And yet he surely understands that Trump was playing him that night (just as Maher himself, a pothead charmer and a sharp, moderate-mannered politician in his own way, was surely playing Trump for his own gain), and that Trump wanted Maher to pass along the “hey, he plays a MAGA tyrant on camera and during contentious press interviews, but he was a decent, occasionally chuckling guy and a gracious host with me” thing. And he got that last night.
We’re all adults on this forum, and are generally well educated so I don’t need to post boilerplate definitions of sociopathic behavior, especially as it concerns high achieving types.
I think we can all agree that callous or physically abusive behavior on a movie set is a bad thing, no matter who’s dishing it out or taking it. Simply acting like a dick….that doesn’t fly either.
Earlier today Bella Thorne accused Mickey Rourke of giving her a hard time during the making of Girl. If her accusations are valid Rourke owes her an apology and a general pledge not to behave this way again with anyone.
Thorne’s apparent goal in making a stink about this is presumably to obtain said apology…right? She hasn’t filed a lawsuit so the idea is apparently to make him sweat or pay on some social or professional level.
Why didn’t she forcefully confront him after the film wrapped in late 2019 or or during the pre-release promotion in the late summer or 2020? Why did she wait almost five years to lower the boom?
I’m sorry about the passing of director Ted Kotcheff, whom I first met in the early fall of ’82 when he was promoting First Blood. I liked Ted — my idea of an excellent fellow — smart, friendly, engaging in a laid-back way. And he knew how to direct efficiently, and by my sights he wasn’t just a rote get-it-done guy. He had balls, character. His better films had a certain gravitas.
Kotcheff was fortunate enough to enjoy a 15-year peak period from the mid ’70s to late ’80s — The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (’74), Fun with Dick and Jane (’77), Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (’78), North Dallas Forty (’79), Split Image (’82), First Blood (’82), Uncommon Valor (’83), Joshua Then and Now (’85), Switching Channels (1988) and Weekend at Bernie’s (’89).
Of these ten films, the best were North Dallas Forty (Nick Nolte as an aging football player, dependant on painkillers), First Blood (still the best Rambo film ever, and a huge financial success) and Uncommon Valor (former Marine Gene Hackman leading a crack team of commandos to rescue his son from a Vietnamese P.O.W. camp).
Weekend at Bernies was also a sizable hit, of course (it gradually became a cult film), but I personally hated it — coarse and crude, made for the animals.
During the First Blood promotion Kotcheff was kind enough to feed me a lot of good info on the troubled making of Tootsie. I wrote a big labored piece about this for The Film Journal, which I was managing editor of. I met Kotcheff and screenwriter Robert Kaufman at Joe Allen one night in early October, and I was given me a big rundown on the convoluted pre-production and production experience…excellent stuff.
The gist was the then-astounding notion that a present-day New York comedy about an actor who can’t get a job could cost $21 million, which at the time was way above the norm.
Kaufman was one of the uncredited Tootsie writers (along with Don McGuire, Murray Schisgal, Elaine May, director Dick Richards) and the stories were fairly wild, or certainly seemed that way at the time.
Kotcheff had 94 mostly good years — we should all be so fortunate.
In Richard Lawson‘s 4.10 Vanity Fair review, he calls Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners “a vampire movie, one that has tense fun with all the old rules — garlic, wooden stakes, needing an invitation to enter a building — but uses them in service of a sad, harrowing evocation of history.”
A second Lawson quote reads, “One could look at the two sides of Sinners — Black entrepreneurs, artists, and revelers versus predacious white fiends — and see an obvious intent. That is certainly a foundational tenet of the film’s thinking.”
Lawson is describing some kind of wicked, anguished social situation in the Mississippi Delta of the early 1930s, but seems reluctant to just spit it out. I guess “the film’s thinking” will be clear enough when I catch Sinners next week.
Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Vampire metaphors are almost always erotic, but despite the rather steamy atmosphere of Sinners (at the juke joint, there’s a whole lotta hookin’ up goin’ on), that’s not what it means here. The vampires are presented as extensions of the racist white culture that wants to stop the party.”
From Peter Bradshaw‘s 4.10 Guardian review:
And “in its forthright way, Sinners is a riff on the idea of blues as a kind of music that is avidly consumed by its producers’ enemies. As Delroy Lindo’s character says: ‘White folks like the blues just fine…just not the people who make it.'”
There’s no discernible difference between digital and celluloid these days. Not to my eyes, at least. But Coogler sure knows his varying film formats and aspect ratios! And he’s a big believer in 2.76:1.
Ryan Coogler, the director of Black Panther and Creed, breaks down each film format and the many ways you can see Sinners on the big screen. Sinners, shot on KODAK 65mm film is only in theaters April 18. #SinnersMovie pic.twitter.com/5t4ld8wjyt
— Kodak (@Kodak) April 10, 2025
Over the last few days I’ve been on a Brooke Hayward jag. Okay, a Brooke Hayward-and-Dennis Hopper thing…quite a pairing + the lore of ‘60s Hollywood and Joan Didion-ville…the counter-cultural turnovers, upheavals and whatnot.
This led yesterday to Mike Rozzo’s “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy”, a 2022 book about the fraught but exciting eight-year marriage (‘61 to ‘69) between Hayward, author of 1977’s “Haywire”, one of the better torn-and-frayed Hollywood memoirs, and the eccentric Hopper.
I initially wrote “nutso” to describe the late Easy Rider director and Blue Velvet costar. This might sound unkind but it takes one to know one. Not the druggy stuff, mind, as I never went down that hole. I meant it as a like-minded compliment, actually, because a paragraph in Rozzo’s book about a seminal moment in Hopper’s Kansas childhood reminded me of my own.
I didn’t feel that my childhood was less “real” than the realms I sank into when I began to catch films as a kid, but it was far less attractive. If anything it was too real.
All I wanted in my tweens and teens was to obtain parole from the repressive suburban gulag I’d been raised under and thereafter blend into (taste, know more intimately, in some way contribute to, anything) the extra-level pizazz of movies.
My Hayward dive began with an opening lecture scene in Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin (‘73), in which the mid-30ish Hayward, whose ‘60s acting career never took off, asks George C. Scott about governmental dolphin research.
Hayward is one of three female questioners in this scene, but she seems like the most knowledgable and grounded on some level…there’s a whiff of character and conviction in her WASPy features and confident tone of voice…you can feel it. On top of which she’s quite beautiful.
I’ve also been flipping through the almost half-century-old “Haywire”, which digs into Brooke’s Hollywood vs. northeast corridor upbringing and her turbulent young adulthood.
The late Buck Henry, an old friend who wrote the screenplay for The Day of the Dolphin and was probably instrumental in getting Brooke that cameo, wrote a forward intro for a 2010 re-issue of “Haywire”. It ends with this line:
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided to award a new Oscar for Achievement in Stunt Design, starting with the 100th Academy Awards in 2028 (i.e., recognizing achievements in films released in 2027). The corpses of Daryl F. Zanuck, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Robert Towne, David O. Selznick, Irving Thalberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Edith Head, Ben Hecht, William Wyler and Gregg Toland have just turned in their graves…trust me.
This will be the first grunt-level or “meathead” Oscar category in the Academy’s history. For almost a full century every other category — directing, acting, screenwriting, cinematography, makeup, set design, costumes — has represented some kind of truly creative, fine-art aspiration. Even the forthcoming casting Oscar category, which will produce a winner at the 2026 Oscars, represents the kind of achievement that, if done right, truly enhances the art of cinema.
Stunts, difficult as they can be to perform well, are essentially low-rent. The only artful stunts I could point to were performed by Buster Keaton a century ago.
Today’s stunts, of course, are a different deal. They certainly don’t occupy the same station as modern dance or ballet, which have long been practiced by performers who care about creative visions and possibilities. Even trapeze artistry can be regarded as an art form. But not movie stunts. Stunt performers are fine as long as they say on their side of the fence. But they don’t deserve to stand alongside the film industry’s actual artists.
The bad guys in his instance are director David Leitch and stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara of Stunts Unlimited. They’ve been aggressively advocating for a stunt Oscar category, and now the Academy, grappling with the fact that the Oscars are a failing brand, has imperceptibly shrugged and given in.
Owen Gleiberman‘s 3.28.25 review of Warfare, co-directed by Alex Garland and former SEAL Ray Mendoza, explained the basic deal — no movie stuff — just raw, assaultive, in-your-face realism within a short time frame.
By “stuff” he meant “no story, no dramatic hooks, no scripted banter, no musical score, no establishment of plot points, no character development, no giving those of us in the audience our bearings”…just a real-time incident that happened to Mendoza and several other SEALS 19 years ago during the Battle of Ramadi. A mere 95 minutes, and all of it inside and just outside a two-story home without plants or shade.
And I knew all that going into last night’s 7 pm IMAX screening. No surprises, locked and loaded…ready.
So here’s what happened…not in the film as I knew that Garland-Mendoza would put me through the ringer and leave me with a temporary case of PTSD. And they do exactly that, in spades. What I mean is, here’s what happened to me:
The screen was fake IMAX (half as large as the one at the AMC Lincoln Square) but the projection quality was aces — immaculate clarity, razor-sharp focus — and the loud battle sounds (dunf-dunf-dunf-DOOF!) were, in a sense, life-giving. They got my pulse going…woke me the fuck UP….I almost forgot about the popcorn.
Nothing happens during the first 25 or 30 minutes, but it holds you tight and firm because you know bad shit is right around the corner. Everything we hear and see is at the very least riveting because you KNOW. And then it starts…okay, I won’t describe it. But it has to be experienced on a big screen with loud, crisp, pumped-out sound. No streaming, no couches, no smart phone distraction…full attention.
A few guys get shot up and shredded, but then you knew that. That’s not to say what happens isn’t horrific. I was flinching and gasping all through it, but as I know a few of the actors I was able to occasonally pull back and disassociate and think about stuff of my own.
One of the SEALS is Joseph Quinn‘s “Sam”, and while I felt terribly for the poor guy (in actuality, back in ’06) and his ghastly leg wounds (he moans and wails a lot and who could blame him?) but to be perfectly honest I was also whispering to Quinn, “I’m sorry for your character’s terrible pain but on another level you, Joseph Quinn, almost deserve it because you’ll be playing George Harrison for Sam Mendes, and you don’t even faintly resemble Harrison…alabaster skin, auburn hair, eyes that couldn’t be more different than Harrison’s deep browns.”
Mendoza is played by the 25 year-old D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, whom I liked right away. He’s good-looking and slender and watchful like a tiger and super-attuned….a guy you feel good about right away. I had looked at current photos of Mendoza, and, as you might expect, he’s put on a fair amount of weight over the last 20 years. You can laugh but the fact that Woon-A-Tai’s Mendoza is a young and lean workout Nazi…you can laugh but I gave thanks to God for this.
On the other hand Michael (son of James) Gandolfini is a bit on the bulky side, and as he’s only 26 he’d better watch himself…if you’re not in reasonably trim physical shape in your mid 20s you’ll be a mess when you hit 40 or even 35.
And yet Charles Melton, who only appears during the last half-hour as Jake, an officer of some kind, delivers great authority and pretty much restores his acting career.
I didn’t mind Melton’s passable performance as Julianne Moore‘s much younger husband in Todd Haynes‘ May December (’23), but I was really turned off when he started winning Best Supporting Actor awards in late ’23. The wokesters shrieked their usual denials, but it was obvious this was happening because of Melton’s ethnicity (his mother is Korean). But when he took charge and starting barking orders last night, I almost said out loud,”All is forgiven, dude…your mushy husband portrayal from two years ago is gone from my head, and all I can see and feel is Jake’s hardcore commitment…you’ve saved yourself.”
There’s a recurring image — a prop, I should say — in Warfare that I will never forget. Not a dead American body but a portion of one. That’s all I’m going to say.
10:30 am update: Lynne Ramsay‘s Die My Love, a post-partum depression “comedy” that costars Jennifer “JLaw” Lawrence and Robert “RPatz” Pattinson, will be announced as an additional Cannes title. World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is hearing “as many as SEVEN late additions, including two in competition, will be announced.” Die My Love costars LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek and the profoundly grizzled Nick Nolte.
Earlier this morning: Many potentially exciting Cannes ’25 films are missing from the just-announced lineup, and despite a general understanding that more titles will be added over the next two or three weeks, I for one am moderately bummed.
After five years of editing The Way of the Wind, the seemingly wispy, undeniably fickle-minded Terrence Malick has once again chickened out.
Amazon has also wimped out, I gather, on approving the showing of Luca Guadagnino‘s reportedly forceful After The Hunt. In the realm of potential award-season contenders, distributors are generally scared shitless of Cannes.
Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex has apparently been given the go-by. Jim Jarmusch‘s Father, Mother, Sister, Brother has been rejected. Kristen Stewart‘s The Chronology of Water either isn’t ready or hasn’t made the cut. And for whatever reasons[s] Laszlo Nemes’ Orphan is, for now, out.
It would’ve been surprising if Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another had been selected (it’s almost certainly going to Venice) but it would’ve been so much fun to catch it early. Warner Bros. is understandably concerned over advance reactions — I would be too.
But hey, at least attendees will have an opportunity to savor Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, “an intimate and moving exploration of family, memories, and the reconciliatory power of art.” HE is earnestly looking forward to this, especially with Renate Reinsve starring.
Not to mention the somber spectacle of Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor doing each other in early 20th Century New England in Oliver Hermanus‘s The History of Sound…spiritual longings, hard-ons, primitive recording equipment, etc.
And Ari Aster‘s Eddington…I guess. And Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise‘s Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. And, for a change of pace, Andrew Dominik‘s Bono: Stories of Surrender
And Richard Linklater‘s Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless.
Oh, and Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest, a remake of Akira kurosawa‘s High and Low (’63), will screen non-competitively.
In Competition:
“Sentimental Value” (dir. Joachim Trier)
“Sound of Falling” (dir. Mascha Schilinski)
“Romeria” (dir. Carla Simon)
“The Mastermind” (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
“Nouvelle Vague” (dir. Richard Linklater)
“The Eagles of the Republic” (dir. Tarik Saleh)
“Dossier 137” (dir. Dominik Moll)
“The Secret Agent” (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)
“Fuori” (dir. Mario Martone)
“Two Prosecutors” (dir. Sergei Loznitsa)
“La Petite Dernière” (dir. Hafsia Herzi)
“A Simple Accident” (dir. Jafar Panahi)
“The History of Sound” (dir. Oliver Hermanus)
“Renoir” (dir. Chie Hayakawa)
“Alpha” (dir. Julia Ducournau)
“Sirat” (dir. Oliver Laxe)
“Young Mothers” (dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne)
“Eddington” (dir. Ari Aster)
“The Phoenician Scheme” (dir. Wes Anderson)
Cannes Premiere:
“Amrum” (dir. Fatih Akin)
“Splitsville” (dir. Michael Angelo Covino)
“Connemara” (dir. Alex Lutz)
“The Disappearance of Josef Mengele” (dir. Kirill Serebrennikov)
“Orwell” (dir. Raoul Peck)
“The Wave” (dir. Sebastián Lelio)
Un Certain Regard:
“The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” (dir. Diego Céspedes)
“My Father’s Shadow” (dir. Akinola Davies)
“Urchin” (dir. Harris Dickinson)
“Meteors” (dir. Hubert Charuel)
“A Pale View of Hills” (dir. Kei Ishikawa)
“Eleanor the Great” (dir. Scarlett Johansson)
“Pillion” (dir. Harry Lighton)
“L’inconnue de la Grande Arche” (dir. Stephane Demoustier)
“Aisha Can’t Fly Away” (dir. Morad Mostafa)
“Once Upon a Time in Gaza” (dir. Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser)
“The Plague” (dir. Charlie Polinger)
“Heads or Tails?” (dir. Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis)
“Homebound” (dir. Neeraj Ghaywan)
“The Last One for the Road” (dir. Francesco Sossai)
Special Screenings:
“Bono: Stories of Surrender” (dir. Andrew Dominik)
“Tell Her That I Love Her” (dir. Claude Miller)
“The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol” (dir. Sylvain Chomet)
“Dalloway” (dir. Yann Gozlan)
Out of Competition:
“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” (dir. Christopher McQuarrie)
“The Coming of the Future” (dir. Cedric Klapisch)
“Vie Privée” (dir. Rebecca Zlotowski)
“The Richest Woman in the World” (dir. Thierry Klifa)
In the early to mid ’50s Dewey Martin was quite the appealing young actor — handsome, well-spoken, disciplined, no-nonsense vibes. He landed strong supporting roles in a quartet of respected and successful films — Howard Hawks‘ The Thing (’51), The Big Sky (’52) and Land of the Pharoahs (’55), and William Wyler‘s The Desperate Hours (’55).
But after costarring with Dean Martin in Ten Thousand Bedrooms (’57), Dewey’s feature career began to go south.
He turned up in several more films, but no good ones. He was in Meet Me in Las Vegas (’56) and The Proud and Profane (’56), but without credit. His supporting role in The Longest Day (1962) was deleted. He became a semi-prominent TV actor (the lead role in a well-remembered Twilight Zone episode that aired in ’60 (“I Shot An Arrow into The Air“) and plugged along throughout the ’60s, but the gas was pretty much gone from the tank by the early to mid ’70s.
Martin married Peggy Lee in ’58, but they divorced in June ’59.
I don’t know what Martin did for a living during his last few decades, but he had a strong constitution and wound up living until age 94. Martin passed seven years ago in San Pedro.
Where would Martin have been without Hawks’ admiration and professional support? The Thing, The Big Sky and Land of the Pharoahs were fairly big deals in their day.
What was the essence of the Hawks-Martin bond? Presumably Hawks saw Martin as the son he never had, but I’ve searched and asked around and know nothing.
The bottom line is that things began to dry up for Martin after Hawks took a hiatus from directing after Land of the Pharoahs and didn’t return until Rio Bravo, which was shot in 58 or thereabouts.
I hate to say this but I suspect the name “Dewey” didn’t work for certain folks — it sounded unmanly or adolescent. It may have reminded some in the audience of Huey, Dewey and Louie.
A semblance of class and restraint on the left…not so much on the right.
JFK’s subued Oval Office scheme, circa 1961.
Richard Nixon’s Oval office.The following has happened many, many times in my moviegoing life, and especially before I got into this racket: I’d read a bunch of shitty reviews of a given film, but I saw it anyway and…surprise!…it turned out to be not only half-decent but surprisingly good here and there.
This led me to wonder what kind of stick had been shoved up the asses of the critics who panned it. What was their basic malfunction? It gradually hit me when I became friendly with several critics in the late ’70s and beyond that some are “friendly” or appealing enough on a colorful personality basis (in terms of exuding actual human qualities one of my favorite critics was Andrew Sarris, with whom I spent three or four hours on a road trip in ’77) but some of them are just snippy, snarly pricks. If not overtly then on some kind of buried, deep-down basis. (This is not a psychological examination piece.)
The critical shitstorm that clobbered (but failed to seriously injure) Green Book is one example of this.
My first viewing of Peter Farrelly‘s Oscar-winning film happened at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival, and the crowd didn’t just approve and applaud — they adored it. But along came the prick critics (many of them wokeys) and before you knew it Green Book was a movie that not only needed to be disparaged but killed. I didn’t “think” Green Book was a nice, agreeable, feel-good thing — I knew it was that. I’d felt a rousing connection in the presence of hundreds of Toronto filmgoers.
Nobody ever claimed that Green Book was some kind of historic masterpiece, but it was fine as far as it went, not to mention charming and likable and undeniably well-crafted. But the pterodactyls in the critical community used every weapon in their reptile arsenal to draw blood, which led me to recall a line that I once heard William S. Burroughs say before a microphone: “Some people are shits.”
I came to a similar conclusion two years ago while reviewing Stephen Frears‘ The Lost King. “The people who’ve trashed this film are really and truly rancid,” I wrote, as The Lost King “is a good, personable, middle-class British film…not a comedy but amusing here and there…I completely enjoyed its company.” I didn’t care for a couple of aspects (the ghost of Richard appearing to Sally Hawkins) but to use a misstep or two as a reason to completely dismiss it is just vile.
