Day: May 7, 2025

Sasha Stone and I fed a premise about a pair of weathered Oscar bloggers to Gemini 2.5 Flash (released on 5.7.25), and here’s what it yielded…

Most of Chaz Palmintieri‘s A Bronx Tale (’93) is set in 1968. Back then the “door test” was a legitimate and reliable way to figure out if a prospective girlfriend was selfish or not. Remote door locks, which became common in US-made vehicles starting around ’90 or thereabouts, gradually put the door test out of commission.

I was driving a 1990 Nissan 240Z when I saw A Bronx Tale, and I distinctly recall it had no remote door lock. With some relish I subjected a couple of women I was seeing to the door test. They both passed with flying colors, or so I recall.

A new 4K restoration of Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon will screen at the grand and immaculate Debussy theatre on Friday, 5.23 — my final night at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

There’s no way this Criterion-supervised version (due to “street” via 4K Bluray on 7.8.25) will deliver any kind of noticable bump over the current Criterion manifestation. It’ll look magnificent of course, but the viewing experience, boiled down, will be the same one I saw projected at the Ziegfeld in late December of ’75.

I’ve seen Lyndon at least 10 or 12 times since, and I know every line and frame by heart. And Marisa Berenson‘s empty, blank-faced performance has sapped my spirit on each and every occasion. She was such a drag to hang with.

However, the 5.23 Cannes screening will probably be my last opportunity to see the handsome, downbeat, darkly humorous Barry in a truly first-rate venue — really big screen, perfectly projected light levels, state-of-the-art sound. So I’ll probably have a seat.

“Speaking of Flatline Elements“, posted on 5.14.23:

Stanley Kubrick was famous for encouraging lively, eccentric and even over-the-top performances. Steven Spielberg’s 1999 recollection abut a 1980 dinner with Kubrick at Childwickbury Manor, during which Kubrick explained that Jack Nicholson‘s over-the-top performance in The Shining was a kind of tribute to the acting style of James Cagney, is a case in point.

It is therefore strange if not bizarre that during the making of Barry Lyndon, Kubrick directed Marisa Berenson to give such an opaque non-performance. In each and every scene, her Lady Lyndon conveys utter vacuity…absolutely nothing behind the eyes.

Did Kubrick realize too late in the process that he’d made a mistake, that Berenson was profoundly ungifted and had next to nothing inside, and that the best course would be to emphasize (rather than try to obscure) this fact?

Berenson is the primary cause, in fact, of Barry Lyndon‘s “dead zone” problem.

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Obviously another shallow social satire by way of a gumshoe investigation…another Drive-Away Dolls, except set somewhere in Bakersfield or in the upper desert. The style feels Raising Arizona-ish. Poor Ethan Coen needs to disengage from this odd lesbian bag, and keep it that way. And a trilogy? One was enough, two is too much and three…please.

If a Cannes screening fits into my schedule, fine. Out of respect for Ethan’s history, but only that. In the old days the creative hand of Ethan Coen (along with Joel) meant something…mostly. Then again I never liked the overly broad Raising Arizona or, truth be told, The Hudsucker Proxy.

Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day, Billy Eichner, Gabby Beans (great name!), Talia Ryder.

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This is not about celebrity parents loving and supporting their queer, trans or nonbinary kids. Any parent with a heart and a soul would and should do the same.

Nor is this about the appearance of Los Angeles-based celebrities apparently rearing a much higher percentage of queer, trans or nonbinary children than typical parents statistically appear to do in Tampa, Mobile, Tenafly, Peoria or Sandusky, Ohio (the girlhood home of Sugar Kowalczyk!)

This is about the mathematical likelihood of a parent, be they a resident of Pacific Palisades or Duluth or Burlington, raising and supporting three queer, trans or nonbinary kids. A trifecta….three out of three!

Marcia Gay Harden has a trio of such kids — one non-binary, one gay, and one identifying as “fluid”. Megan Fox also has three — Noah, 12, Bodhi, 11 and Journey, 8.

Can we please cut the shit? Just for a few short seconds, and then everyone can crawl back into their little gopher holes of denial.

Many if not most of these kids are almost certainly trendsexuals…proclaiming their queerness or gender fluidity or transiness because they’ve been instructed by the entertainment industry’s woke-progressive culture that there isn’t anything less cool or more embarassing, even, than to be straight and white, or, worst of all, to be a straight white male. Because they can’t bear the stain or the congregational verdict of being terminally clueless or out-to-lunch or socially hopeless by way of gender identity (I was terrified of being labelled as schlumpy or twerpy or dweeby by my tweener or high-school peers), they opt for gayness or gender fluidity and — presto! — they’re no longer a pariah, no longer looked down upon, part of the avant garde.

This would be a fascinating topic of a 100-minute Alex Gibney documentary, or for a PBS Frontline examination or for an in-depth NPR series. But of course, Gibney, Frontline or NPR would never, ever go there. Ditto Anderson Cooper or Ross Douthat or Chris Cuomo or any other MSM journalist. If they did they would be shunned and shredded and carpet-bombed on social media. They would be putting themselves in not just social but professional jeopardy. Among the timid their names would be mud.

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