Day: May 4, 2025

What forms of prospective hell might be wrought by this threat of protectionist economic brutality? This declaration of retribution? This is rash, mad–king stuff. What are the likely consequences? I’m asking.

An echo of Network s Arthur Jensen, thundering from the heavens: “You are threatening to meddle with the primal forces of nature, President Trump, and I won’t have it! Is that clear?

“An abrupt imposition of a 100% tariff on foreign-produced films and streaming content would not incentivize but brutalize…it would be punitive and authoritarian and therefore impose a radical disturbance of natural ebb and flow, of tidal gravity…of economic and ecological balance.”

THR’s Patrick Brzeski and Scott Roxborough are reporting that Trump’s threatened 100% tariff on foreign-produced features and streaming content is more or less the fault of Jon Voight, one of Trump’s Hollywood emissaries (along with Mel Gibson and Sly Stallone).

Voight has taken several meetings, Brzeski and Roxborough have written, and has passed along a portrait of a besieged industry. Voight apparently hasn’t been urging tariffs, but with Bully Boy at the helm this is how it’s nonetheless shaking out.

I’ll never forget the delicious, almost adrenalized thrill I got out of reading “David McLintick‘s “Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street“, which was published 43 years ago…talk about a wayback machine.

I’d love to re-read “Indecent Exposure” on Kindle, but it doesn’t appear to be on Kindle…odd.

I did a phoner with David Begelman once, although I can’t recall what the topic was. It was sometime in the early ’90s, I think. I’ll never forget the theatrical charisma, the calculated smoothitude in his voice. That patented Begelman vibe, which arose out of many years of being an agent, was immediately soothing or at least placating…you felt you were talking to a very skilled salesman as well as a bon vivant.

The following excerpt is from Frank Langella‘s “Dropped Names” (2012). Quite the smoothie himself in his 20th Century heyday, Langella, a fellow Wiltonian, was represented by Begelman for a short period.

I needn’t remind that Langella got into trouble a while back for getting a tiny bit handsy with a female Millennial or Zoomer costar…”you touched my leg in a familiar fashion!!…eeeeeeee!”

Langella, now 87, is a skilled writer. “Dropped Names” is an easy and pleasurable read.

(a) “Tiffany hardware…a symbol of love’s transformative strength” or (b) “That’s becawwz yuh son’s a fuckin’ pussy”?

Straight from the director of Another Simple Favor (which I’m reluctant to watch because of the high-attitude vibes of Blake Lively) and The Housemaid (another “rich white males are inherently evil” flick, opening on 12.25)…”ya gotta make your film accessible to the none-too-brights.”

When Paul Feig, Annie Mumulo and Kristen Wiig’s Bridesmaids opened almost exactly 14 years ago, it was widely believed that Feig was gifted with some kind of magical comedic touch. Then along came the calamity that was Ghostbusters (‘16).

Paycheck-wise the Feig brand is doing fine today, but he’ll never again be that Bridesmaids guy.

HE reply: If one could capture the subjective experience of Joe Biden over the last couple of years of his term…

Andy Griffith’s initially joyful or even imbued portrayal of Lonesome Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (‘57).

In a certain light, Richard Burton’s performance as Thomas Becket in 1964’s Becket is an admiring portrait of a noble form of dementia.

The gradual falling away of practical, strategic, warts-and-all rationality on one hand, and on the other hand a gradual submission to a form of inner, self-deluding grandeur…the “holy” kind that we were all once taught to admire.

“Are you demented? You’re chancellor of England! You’re mine!” — Peter O’Toole’s Henry II to Burton’s Becket.

Otherwise Michael Haneke’s Amour, which I’ve always regarded as a kind of horror film, the kind that only a wife or a husband or a devoted caregiver can know on a daily, drip-drip basis.