Month: May 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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

…but Netflix is probably a fitting home for Richard Liinklater’s Nouvelle Vague, which the streamer has reportedly acquired for $4 million.

It was one thing for Cannes cinephiles who saw this reverent, affectionate tribute to the French New Wave and the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in particular…it was one thing for that crowd to go “whoopee!” But what the odds that Joe and Jane Popcorn would care, much less pay to see it theatrically?

Here’s what I wrote hours after seeing Nouvelle Vague in Cannes:

The toughest, cruelest, most unsentimental comment was posted yesterday in response to Jordan Ruimy’s story about the Netflix deal:

Nouvelle Vague is not “embarrassing fan fiction”. It’s a clever, spirited time trip…a mild-mannered, light-hearted, generally effervescent revisiting of the Breathless legend. This aside, what Doeberman wrote is reasonably accurate.

The seething and loathing in Charles Grodin‘s eyes…the “being pushed to the limit by this godawful kid”…..this is actually funny stuff. And I never even saw Clifford (’94, which was actually shot in ’90 and then sat on the shelf for four years.

In honor of Tuesday night’s Bedford Playhouse screening of Bad Day at Black Rock, HE is re-posting (second time within the last 12 months!) a riff about Anne Francis‘s Liz Wirth character not (heh-heh) getting any, or at least being indifferent to the concept, due to where she lives.

The original HE posting appeared on 11.15.24:

Bad Day at Black Rock (‘55) is a good, strong John Sturges film except for one thing. Nobody in that tiny little desert backwater is doing Anne Francis.

It makes no sense that Francis would even be there, as a woman this fetching would never settle for a grim existence in a dinky little ghost town like this. Life is short — you have to go for the gusto and the goodies.

But even if you accept that Francis’s “Liz Wirth” would be content to live in this dusty hell hole, human nature dictates that someone in that miserable hamlet would’ve stepped up to the plate and said to her, “I’m your man…really. We can make beautiful music together and have all kinds of nice plants on the patio.”

Someone always steps up and seals the deal in these situations. It happened in each and every cave settlement in prehistoric times, in every village in ancient Judea, in every clay-hut, grass-roof settlement in medieval Europe. Not that a knockout like Francis would’ve rubbed shoulders with everyday European villagers or Judeans or cave-dwellers.

The fact that director John Sturges never addressed this reality — Francis not only being unattached but none of the dudes even applying for the position — tells you something about the funny-looking Sturges, who might’ve been an egghead brother of Richard Kiel except shorter, and with a high forehead. It suggests he wasn’t much of a hound in his youth or that he tried his luck with women but wasn’t very successful.

If I was Spencer Tracy, I would’ve sized things up and sauntered over to Robert Ryan or Lee Marvin or Walter Brennan or Wirth’s brother Pete, who works at the hotel, and said, “Are you telling me that no one’s giving Anne the high, hard one, or at least trying to? Because that really goes against basic human nature.“

Anne Francis passed in 2011 at age 80.

Altogether I saw 21 or 22 films** during my 11 days at the Cannes Film Festival, although I tried like hell to see a few more. Within the limits imposed by stress, fatigue and the necessity of eating cheese sandwiches and getting five-hour sleeps, I did my best to cover the whole magilla.

The Venice Film Festival, three months hence, is the next big event. Thanks again to those who contributed to HE’s GoFundMe Cannes/Venice travel fund.

For me and in this order, there were five gold-star standouts in Cannes:

1. Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, which I’ve written plenty about. (HE review)

2. Richard Linklater‘s Nouvelle Vague. (HE review.)

3. Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake. Pic wound up winning the Director’s Fortnight Audience Award as well the Camera d’Or. (HE review)

4. Thomas Ngojil‘s Untamable. (HE review).

5. Eva Victor‘s Sorry, Baby. (HE review)

For credentialed, non-elite press people like myself, Cannes is quite the aggressive, move-it-or-lose-it ticket competition.

I was basically shut down in trying to reserve tickets for Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest (which I actually Ubered to see in nearby Cannes la Bocca only to get shut out a second time), Scarlett Johansson‘s Eleanor the Great (waited in last-minute line outside Salle Debussy…ixnay) and Kristen Stewart‘s The Chronology of Water. For what it’s worth none of these films were described in radiant, top-of-the-line terms by critics.

If Lee’s producers and the festival organizers had wanted more people to see Highest 2 Lowest, they would have scheduled a Salle Debussy screening that was concurrent with the black-tie Grand Lumiere screening, or at the very least a next-morning screening at the Salle Agnes Varda. But they didn’t.

HE definitely saw (and in some cases suffered through) the following Competition films:

1. Case 137, d: Dominik Moll.
2. Die, My Love, d: Lynne Ramsay
3. Eddington, d: Ari Aster
4. Fuori, d: Mario Martone
5. The History of Sound, d: Oliver Hermanus
6. It Was Just an Accident, d: Jafar Panahi
7. The Mastermind, d: Kelly Reichardt
8. Nouvelle Vague, d: Richard Linklater
9. The Phoenician Scheme, d: Wes Anderson
10. Romería, d: Carla Simón
11. The Secret Agent, d: Kleber Mendonça Filho
12. Sentimental Value, d: Joachim Trier
13. Sirat, d: Óliver Laxe
14. Sound of Falling, d: Mascha Schilinski.
15. Two Prosecutors, d: Sergei Loznitsa
15. Woman and Child, d: Saeed Roustayi
16. Young Mothers, d: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
17. Urchin, d: Harris Dickinson.

Plus four Directors’ Fortnight films:

18. The President’s Cake, d: Hasan Hadi.
19. Wild Foxes, d: Valéry Carnoy.
20. Untamable, d: Thomas Ngojil.
21. Sorry, Baby, d: Eva Victor.

I really wish I could have seen the Lee, the Johansson and the Stewart. I was really kind of pissed off that I was more or less blocked from seeing them. Didn’t seem fair on the part of the organizers.

I was either forced to blow off (scheduling conflicts) or simply chose not to see the following Competition films:

The Little Sister, d: Hafsia Herzi
Renoir, d: Chie Hayakawa.
The three-hour Resurrection, d: Bi Gan.
The almost universally loathed Alpha, d: Julia Ducournau.
Eagles of the Republic, d: Tarik Saleh .

** 22 films if you count Friday afternoon’s (5.23) empty-Coke-bottle screening of Barry Lyndon.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoningopewned three days ago (5.12). So what’s the HE community verdict? C’mon, cough it up.

The Metacritic score (only two-thirds of critics approve, roughly the same in the case of Joe and Jane Popcorn) tells you there’s trouble in River City. (The Rotten Tomatoes 80% score is meaningless — that site is crawling with whores).

Having seen it 11 or 12 days ago and soon after posted my somewhat bewildered review, I’ve been feeling more and more anoyance with Tom Cruise‘s Ethan Hunt having been pretty much deified. Hunt is spoken of and deferred to with the same respect and reverence offered to Angela Bassett‘s U.S. President (former CIA honcho Erika Sloane). He might as well as be Superman in a Warner Bros. D.C. film.

What happened to the idea of major government authorities pledging to disavow any knowledge of Hunt and/or the M:I force if things theoretically go south? Final Reckoning‘s Hunt is completely out of the shadows. He could host his own CNN show, or even run for President himself.