Month: June 2025

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.

When it came to brass tacks at the end of The Godfather‘s first act, Michael Corleone didn’t mince words: “We can’t wait. We can’t wait. I don’t care what Sollozzo says about a deal, he’s gonna kill Pop…that’s it. That’s the key for him. Gotta get Sollozzo.”

Similarly, Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu has said in no uncertain terms that Israel (and by extension the U.S,) has to “get” Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Netanyahu has stated that he believes Khamenei’s death could potentially “end the conflict” between Israel and Iran.

So that’s it — kill the Ayatollah. A bullet through the forehead inside Louis’s restaurant in the Bronx.

At the end of yesterday’s riff about Team IndieWire’s rundown of the finest films from the first half of the 2020s, I said I’d slap together HE’s own roster from the same period. My tally comes to 38, but maybe I’ve overlooked a few.

HE’s top ten films of the 2020-2025 period thus far: (1) Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse (which premiered in Europe in late ’19 but wasn’t pirated for U.S. consumption until early ’20), (2) Sean Baker‘s Anora, (3) Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, (4) Steven Zallian‘s Ripley, (5) Edward Berger‘s Conclave, (6) Steve McQueen‘s Mangrove, (7) David Fincher‘s The Killer, (8) Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers, (9) Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard, (10) Tran Anh Hung‘s The Taste of Things (The Pot au Feu).

Second Grouping of Ten: (11) Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant, (12) Joseph Kosinski‘s Top Gun: Maverick, (13) Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake, (14) Janicza Bravo’s Zola, (15) Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, (16) Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, (17) Eva Victor’s Sorry Baby, (18) Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, (19) Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro, (20) Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.

Third Grouping of Ten: (21) Audrey Diwan‘s Happening, (22) Jasmila Žbanić‘s Quo Vadis, Aida?, (23) Errol Morris‘s The Pigeon Tunnel, (24) Ali Abbasi‘s The Apprentice, (25) Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera, (26) Anders Thomas Jensen‘s Riders of Justice, (27) Jon Watts‘ Spider-Man: No Way Home, (28) Peter Jackson‘s The Beatles: Get Back, (29) Cristian Mungiu‘s R.M.N., (30) Todd Field‘s TAR.

Last Licks: (31) Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths; (32) Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7, (33) Judd Apatow‘s The King of Staten Island, (34) Michael Winterbottom‘s The Trip to Greece, (35) Diao Yinan‘s The Wild Goose Lake, (36) Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland, (37) Jon M. Chu‘s In The Heights, (38) Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story.

Obviously grade-A direction, writing, acting (not just Jeremy Allen White as Bruce but the great Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau, his manager) and everything else.

Please, please debut this biopic at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.

Why isn’t it just called Deliver Me From Nowhere? Why did they have to fecking call it Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere? You know the answer. You know why they added his last name to the title. Because a significant portion of American moviegoers are too ignorant, and because they’d be alienated by a title that sounds a bi despairing and melancholy.

Deliver Me From Nowhere is the coolest sounding movie title since Zero Dark Thirty. But the 20th Century marketers have killed it…they’ve killed the poetic vibe.

Long is the way and hard that, out of darkness, leads up to Oscar light.

Cary Grant famously labored as a (mostly leading) Hollywood actor for 35 years before retiring. He began at Paramount in 1931 and retired after Walk Don’t Run in 1966. He had been Best Actor-nominated for Penny Serenade (’41) and None But the Lonely Heart (’44), but Grant never had his golden-statue moment until landing a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1970. 39 years in the making**.

On 11.16.25, Cruise, one of the most popular, hard-working and quality-aspiring stars in Hollywood history, will receive the same kind of award given to Grant — an Honorary Oscar — at a Governors Awards ceremony inside the Ray Dolby ballroom.

He’s been Best Actor-nominated three times — Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia — but, like Grant, has never won, and he damn well should have been nominated for playing Vincent-the-hit-man in Collateral. And now after 44 years of acting in major-league films (1981’s Taps was his first standout role) and serving as a major theatrical magnet since Risky Business, Cruise’s moment in the sun as at hand.

Grant was 66 when he finally took the Oscar stage; Cruise will be 63 when his big moment occurs five months hence.

** In my book Grant should have been nominated for his lead performances in Only Angels Have Wings, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, To Catch a Thief and absolutely North by Northwest.

Only in the N.Y. Times could you find a nod to the trans community in a sentence about the growing presence of women within the F1 fanbase.

In an F1: The Movie fan–review piece by Luke Smith and Madeline Coleman (“Fast, Loud, Very Hollywood — But Will Race Fans Love It or Hate It?”), a parenthetical appearing inside the second sentence in paragraph #36 reads as follows: “Around 40 percent of the F1 fanbase identify as women”.

In other words, Smith and Coleman are allowing for the possibility that this particular fanbase is composed of biological women (almost certainly the majority congregation) as well as an unspecified percentage of biomales presenting themselves as women…right?

Paragraph #14, by the way, contains a major spoiler about Damson Idris’s Pearce character.