Day: June 19, 2025

…but all I experienced were the dry heaves.

Bill McCuddy to HE after seeing Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and Anthony Dod Mantle’s 28 Years Later:

“Terence Malick has made a zombie movie under the name Danny Boyle. This is a thinking man’s running dead movie. When I say Malick I mean it’s beautifully shot and deals with family, survival and death by way of a poignant, non-zombie subplot. It has a little Children of Men vibe going on to but you may not want to reveal that.

“Ralph Fiennes arrives at the three-quarter mark…a nice bump.

“And Aaron Taylor Johnson fans eager to see the ‘maybe James Bond’ may be disappointed to learn he’s not really in the film all that much.

“The story is mainly about ATJ’s son (Alfie Williams) and wife (a sickly Jodie Comer) departing a semi-safe island compound in search of Ralph Fiennes, playing a doctor of sorts. It’s never really clear why anyone would risk leaving said compound but you kinda have to go with that.

“I liked it and am recommending, but I don’t know how commercial it will be. It’s smaller than even the first film — a walking road picture with mother and son. Plenty of blood and manic action. In some ways this is the best of the franchise. But it’s not a blockbuster. It’s just good. Will that be enough?”

HE to McCuddy after catching this well-made if godforsaken film early Thursday evening:

“What’s wrong with you? What do you mean you ‘liked it’? I wasn’t expecting all that much, but I was somewhere between appalled and truly, deeply repelled. I remember being positive on 28 Days Later way back in ‘02, although my all-time favorite zombie flick is still Dawn of the Dead. But this…! The instant judgment is ‘artistically honorable but mostly indigestible.’”

McCuddy to HE: “I should have known when Perri Nemiroff liked it you’d hate it.”

HE to McCuddy: “I HATED, HATED, HATED this film.  I hated the futility and hopelessness, the blood and gore and goo-glop-slime, the sickening grunge, the stench, the puddles, the cheap shock cuts, the yelling, the all-but-impenetrable accents, the obese corpses, the vomiting, the cancer, the rage, the fury, and the worms, flies, rats and insects…the brutal slam cuts, the incessant howling, the tower of skulls, the endless supply of arrows…the sudden, left-field use of subtitles when a small crew of soldiers appears when subtitles were clearly required throughout most of the film…the relentless, all-but-vomitous spewing and spraying of blood, blood, blood and slithery, odious, Chicago stockyard pig organs…arrows, chest shots, head shots….guts, guts, guts.

“28 Years Later is probably the most skin-crawling, the least engaging…let me start over…the filthiest, emptiest, most repellent and nihilistic film of this sort and…oh, hell and damnation and repulsion…almost certainly the most physically disgusting film of any kind that I’ve ever seen in my life.

”Yes, it is partially redeemed toward the end by Fiennes, whose dialogue is actually understandable (as always, his elocutionary skills are admirable) and who has a delightful moment when he recalls a famous Hamlet line…but let’s not get too carried away.”

I first heard this crack in Billy Wilder‘s One, Two, Three (’61), and for a throw-away line I’ve always found it hilarious. How so? Jimmy Cagney feels so pressured and anxiety-plagued that he prefers the broken-back-coupled-with-hellfire scenario to the one he’s currently experiencing. Any comedy that conveys this kind of over-the-top, kill-me-now despair gets my vote.

If I’d written the line, it would’ve been “I wish I was in hell with my back broken.”

What are the odds of Kathryn Bigelow‘s A House of Dynamite (Netflix, streaming on 10.24) playing the Venice Film Festival? Fairly high, I would guess. Perhaps Telluride also.

Noah Oppenheim‘s script is set inside the White House. It’s a high-tension political/military situation drama about a rogue missile heading for the United States. Presumably targeting some location in Washington, D.C. or maybe New York….some place symbolically significant.

Who’s behind it?, how much time before it hits?, how to respond?, etc.

The U.S. president, I’m guessing, is being played by Idris Elba. The costars are Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Jonah Hauer-King, Moses Ingram, Greta Lee and Jason Clarke.

Sasha Stone: “I know two things about this movie without seeing it. The first is that the politics will lean left. Which means there are only two people who can be responsible for the missile — a Trump-like MAGA figure or a Putin-like dictator. And, because it’s Netflix, it can’t be anyone who is non-white doing the damage.

“Only one kind of villain is allowed in Hollywood in 2025 — a heterosexual white man. Occasionally a heterosexual white woman. This isn’t just a Netflix thing — it’s a Hollywood mandate.”

The trailer will probably pop sometime in July.

Day after day and screening after screening I’ve noticed that when the lights go down but before the movie sound kicks in, dozens of people start coughing with a minor subgroup clearing their throats.

They’re doing this deliberately, of course. We’re about to remain silent for two hours, they seem to be saying, so we’re going to loudly cough before the film starts as a way of…you tell us. Are we expelling demons, kicking out the jams, ridding ourselves of hesitations, all of the above?

I for one find it irritating. On top of which I’ve never coughed before a film begins, or during one even. Okay, I’ve cleared my throat once or twice.

The general assumption is that people are coughing for natural reasons and that the theatre just happens to be filled with people who have colds and coughs…right? Wrong. The coughing is performed. Which means, to recap, that there are two kinds of coughing in theatres — one, waiting-for-the-show-to-start coughing and two, middle-of-the-movie coughing which indicates that some are bored and restless.

Listen to this and share your intuition or estimation about Jessica Lange‘s granddaughters. They don’t honestly sound to me like the sharpest tools in the shed. Unless they’re five years old or younger, in which case nor harm or foul.

@jessicalangearchive Jessica talking about her granddaughters watching her in Tootsie. ❤️ #jessicalange #actress #tootsie #film #1982 #80s #jessicalangeedit ♬ It Might Be You (Theme from Tootsie) – Stephen Bishop

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling a surge of quiet comfort about yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling (United States v. Skrmetti) that upholds Tennessee’s ban on transgender surgery and puberty blockers for minors.

I’m not a rightie but a sensible centrist with a colorful, even strident left-liberal history, and yet in my mind the “bad guys” have lost. You can howl all you want, but Matt Walsh is on the right side of this issue.

All I want is for kids to be left alone….unencouraged and un-prodded. When they attain legal maturity at age 18 or 21 or whenever they’re obviously free to choose their own mode of gender expression, and nobody will say squat. Not in my corner, they won’t.

Last week I had a nice 10-minute consultation with a dress-wearing trans person (in her early 30s) who works for the Wilton Library, and I would never, ever want to inject the slightest amount of grief or judgment into this person’s life, but “hey, teacher, leave the kids alone!”

The trans community and its wokey supporters would be relatively uncriticized and un-messed with if they had just left kids out of the equation. But they had to push it.

N.Y. Times‘ Nicholas Confessore: “On Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered a new, crushing blow, upholding in 6-to-3 decision a Tennessee law that bars doctors from providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery to young people who feel that their bodies are the wrong sex.

“In allowing Tennessee to outlaw blockers and hormones, the court not only shielded similar laws on the books in some two dozen states. It effectively closed the door on extending new constitutional protections to trans people.

“Some advocates fear that Skrmetti could open the door to banning medical transition for adults” — HE would be strongly opposed to this — “and perhaps other health care that some conservatives oppose, like birth control or in vitro fertilization — even vaccines. The fate of a once-obscure medical treatment could have profound consequences for American law.”

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I could’ve seen 28 Years Later this afternoon, but I don’t care that much about undead plagues and all that icky jizz-whizz stuff. I’m seeing it this evening out of respect for director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Alex Garland, dp Anthony Dod Mantle and the esteemed cast (Jack O’Connell, Aaron-Taylor Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes). I’m waving away Alfie Williams — I don’t like kid actors as a general rule.

Donald Trump talks a tough game, but deep down he’s a fat pussy…a twitching, fluttering. sabre-rattling, falsetto-voiced twinkle toes…and the Iranians know this.

Posted an hour ago (1:45 pm) by N.Y. Times staffers:

Sweltering temps begin today. I love 92 in the shade in the dry lower desert, but not so much in muggy-ass Connecticut or Manhattan.

As a veteran of countless back-and-forths between Fairfield and Westchester counties and NYC-area airports (JFK, LGA, Newark), I’m acutely aware of how agonizing and soul-draining congested highway travel can be (particularly on the 678 through the Bronx and Queens).

Don’t buy any bureaucratic b.s. about the massive JFK reconstruction project proceeding at a reasonable pace — month after month the seeming absence of churning machinery and busy-bee workers by the roadside has been obvious — it’s mostly a slow-motion exercise in urban hellscape obstruction.

Take a train to Manhattan and then grab a Howard Beach-bound A train plus the JFK Air Train (the fare will be cut this summer by 50%!)…only way to travel.