Day: May 28, 2025

I’m just sharing my sorrow over the death of Presley Chweneyagae, star of Gavin Hood‘s Oscar-winning drama Tsotsi (’05). The poor guy was only 40 years old.

I met and chatted with Presley and Hood nearly 20 years ago in Toronto.

“Spark of Goodness”, posted on 2.27.06:

A little over six months ago I wrote that Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi had become “the big stand-out at the end of the Toronto Film Festival.”

A few weeks later Tsotsi was picked up by Miramax and is playing in theatres starting today (2.24). And it seems safe to say now that it’s the most likely winner of the Best Foreign Language Oscar on March 5th…unless a sufficient number of Academy members take leave of their senses and vote for Joyeux Noel.

Based on a book by South African playwright Athol Fugard and set in a funky Johannesburg shantytown, Tsotsi (pronounced “Sawt-see”) is about a merciless teenage thug (Presley Chweneyagae) who discovers a small spring of compassion in himself when he starts to care for an infant boy he discovers in the back seat of a car he’s stolen.

Tsotsi‘s basic achievement is that it sells the notion in a believably non-sappy way that sparks of kindness exist in even the worst of us.

I knew Tsotsi would probably connect with general audiences when it won the Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice award, which followed a similar win at the Edinburgh Film Festival a month or two earlier.

But I wasn’t certain until my good Toronto friend Leora Conway saw Tsotsi at a Toronto Film Festival screening and was beaming when she told me about it afterwards, and said it made her cry at the end.

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I never posted about the extreme trauma that I went through during the Cannes Film Festival, but each and every day I was grappling with daily, crippling attacks from malicious IPs, apparently of a Chinese or Indian origin. I think it was sparked by fanatical woke haters, but I can’t prove it.

Liquid Web techies blocked and firewalled as best they could, but the attacks were unrelenting and the site was unloadable for periods of one to two hours minimum, almost every damn day.

In the midst of this horror the LW tech consultants suggested that I incorporate Cloudflare but that I needed to load new Cloudserver-friendly nameservers. Alas, I couldn’t do this during the festival as a name-server change always shuts a site down for roughly eight to twelve hours, to allow the new name-servers to propagate worldwide. (The Web.com/Network Solution tecchies insisted that full propagation could take 24 to 48….bullshit.)

So yesterday afternoon I followed the advice of my Liquid Web tech advisors and switched out the name-servers. The site went down, of course, but I figured I’d be good by the time I woke up this morning.

But at 6 am, it wasn’t good. Two respected tracker sites (www.dnschecker.org and https://www.whatsmydns.net/#NS/www.hollywood-elsewhere.com) said it hadn’t really propagated at all. The Cloudflare-friendly nameservers weren’t kicking in….disaster. A bullshit suggestion as it turned out.

It took a couple of hours to try to revert back to a generic Liquid Web name-server, and it finally fell into place. But it was awful. Cloudflare is now operational. Who knows what’ll happen when the baddies strike again?

Fake wangs have been peeking through over the last several months, and they’ve all been on the hefty side.

Walton Goggins wore a large dangling sausage in a water-skiing scene in HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones. Jason Isaacs briefly flashed about halfway through Season 3 of The White Lotus. And Joaquin Pheonix is clearly wearing one during a brief disrobing sequence in Ari Aster‘s Eddington, which I just saw in Cannes.

You know right away because Joaquin’s appendage is bigger, longer and thigh-slappier than expected.

Which is why actors are down with realistic bendy-wendies. We’re all in on the game of pretending to have large schlongs, but they enhance an actor’s masculinity all the same.

One thing you don’t want to do is wear an appendage that makes your package look smaller than expected.

Adam Scott did this in Patrick Brice‘s The Overnight (’15). His character was deeply bothered about having a small junk, and so Scott’s character was wearing a small-dick prosthetic. I don’t think it mattered if audiences knew that or not. The fakey-wakey looked like a #2 pencil.

I’d be lying if I said this bizarre scene (Scott and costar Jason Schwartzman dancing nude in front of their wives) didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. Truth be told, it’s one reason why I’ve never wanted to watch Severance. I can’t get rid of the association.

There’s no question that growers who do nude scenes risk — risk, not ensure — career damage. The nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Ken Russell‘s Women in Love didn’t exactly suggest associations with horses or elephants, but the editing saved them. Cillian Murphy did himself no favors when he allowed Danny Boyle and Anthony Dod Mantle to briefly glimpse his package in 28 Days Later.

Guys performing nude should always work up a little heft before the director says “action!” A former girlfriend who used to work for Viva, the women’s magazine that ran nude male centerfolds, once told me that photographers always wanted their male subjects to be in a state of “maximum tumescence in repose.” One way not to look like you’re “hung like a cashew” (a devastating phrase coined by James Ellroy) is to pop Viagra or Cialis. In the military drill sergeants refer to low-level soldiers as “swinging dicks” — said medications actually allow that condition to manifest.

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As good great as he is Sentimental Value, I was trying not to feel distracted (if not distressed) by how frail and withered Stellan Skarsgard looks in Joachim Trier’s sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated family drama.

He’s not that old (born in ’51, turns 74 on 6.13.25) but with his sagging features and most of his hair fallen out, Stellan looks as far along as Michael Caine, who was born in ’33.

At the very least he looks like a gent in his early to mid ’80s, and certainly past his sexual activity sell-by date.

Something’s going on. 73 year-olds are young enough to be fucking the prom queen. They’re not supposed to look like they’re preparing for an assisted living facility. Even Walter Brennan looked younger in The Real McCoys.

We all appear older as the wheels turn, of course, but actors aren’t supposed to look strikingly older than their years. It’s not too late for Stellan to resort to the usual remedies, including HE’s Prague hair guy.

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