Day: July 13, 2025

The instant I saw the white, woolly-haired Zlatko Buric in Superman, portraying Boravian president Vasil Ghurkos with broad gestures and some kind of thick Slavic accent, I immediately thought “okay, a Vladmir Putin-like despot as well as an ally of Lex Luthor, and clearly up to no good.”

And when Boravian troops are shown invading or otherwise hassling their neighboring country of Jarhanpur, I naturally saw this as a reenactment of Russia invading Ukraine.

But a whole lot of TikTok wokeys are seeing a different analogy. Vasil Ghurkos is not Putin but Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu, they’re saying, and Jarhanpur is not Ukraine but Gaza.

Could I get a show of hands from the HE community about which real-world analogy seems the more plausible?

Ghurkos is obviously too much of a vulgar, intemperate, arm-waving blowhard to serve as a convincing stand-in for Bibi, who is well-known for his non-accented English, trimly cut white hair and conservative, well-tailored business suits. But tell this to the TikTokers.

I’ve been sensing uh-oh vibes from Paul Thomas Anderson One Battle After Another since 3.29.25, which is when I talked to a fellow who’d recently seen a preview screening and called it “a satire of radical left revolutionaries”…”it’s played for comedy but the wokeys won’t like it”.

Who the hell cares enough about rural looney-tune radical lefties to see, much less enjoy, a satire of their behaviors? I hated PTA’s last Thomas Pynchon adaptation so what are the odds I’ll be receptive to this one?

Preview guy also called it “a guy movie like Uncut Gems but aimed more at black women and [even] white conservative women than liberal white women on anti–depressants…I wouldn’t take my girlfriend to it…it’s not a 2025 movie…it would’ve gone down well during Obama’s second term, but movies like this are not made today.”

It is therefore not surprising to read a Jordan Ruimy report that the Warner Bros. distribution team may have decided not to premiere the PTA at the 2025 Venice Film Festival (8.27 to 9.6):

I’ve been sniffing weirdo gas fumes (i.e. the eccentric “I love black women!” kind) from this pricey PTA flick all along. If the Italian Cinematore guy is correct, it would appear that WB p.r. execs are persuaded that the film will draw a “mixed” or half-negative critical reaction in Venice and have decided it’s better to cut bait rather than fish.

The Venice lineup will be announced on Tuesday, 7.22.

My system wasn’t just wilting from a massive injection of James Gunn geek arsenic, but from a feeling of terrible spiritual exhaustion…a feeling of defeat and hopelessness that had nowhere to go but down.

From Owen Gleiberman’s 7.13 essay about the movie-critic war over the horror of Superman:

Jackie Gleason’s 39th birthday party was held on 2.26.55 at Toot’s Shor’s (51 W. 51st Street). He was rolling in clover and adulation back then, and on this particular night (i.e., Saturday) he was being toasted and celebrated by every showbiz hotshot in town (including Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio).

Plus ratings for The Jackie Gleason Show had been surging since ‘53 or thereabouts, and Gleason had recently decided to gamble big on a full season (39 episodes) of The Honeymooners, a hugely successful half-hour series which ran from 10.1.55 to 9.22.56 and is still being re-watched as we speak.

Gleason was a genius madman back then — big drinker, smoker and spender, living for the highs, burning the candle at both ends — and he enjoyed a long and successful career, of course, but I hated his constantly seething Buford T. Justice in the Smokey movies, and I never cared much for his old-school, tweedle-dee mustache.

Gleason was beautiful when youngish and livin’ large and full of beans, but the old pizazz ebbed away as he got older. His heyday had happened in the ‘50s, and everyone knew that.

When you’ve got it, flaunt it. Life is short. Go for the gusto while it’s still gusting, etc.

Gleason’s final peak momrnt — at least in my estimation — was his performance as Minnesota Fats in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (‘61). for which he was Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category. Gleason should have damn well won the Oscar, but West Side Story’s George Chakiris unjustly edged him out.

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