Day: July 19, 2025

Penned 21 and 1/2 years ago by an Austin-based film lover named “Cue–ball”:

As long as we’re on a Hustler jag, please reconsider an HE piece titled “Sara and ‘The Hustler’“, posted on 9.27.21.

If you’re a hotshot CEO and you’re “ doing” a woman who works for you — a married, silver-haired HR exec — rule #1 is that you don’t engage in PDA inside a crowded sports arena during a rock concert. You confine your get-togethers to hotels, motels and dark, smokey places…duhhhhh!

Presumably a fair percentage of the HE chorus saw Ari Aster‘s Eddington yesterday. I’m presuming that many are agreeing with my judgment from last May’s Cannes Film Festival, which is that it’s a strange, mildly interesting civil war drama that, boiled down, is a dull horror sinkhole laced with political satire…a pandemic atmosphere downer dive.

I should probably bend over backwards by re-watching it this weekend, but I really, really didn’t derive much enjoyment, much less any sense of cinematic satori, two months ago.

I’ve jumbled up some previous comments and thrown them out on the floor like Mia Farrow playing scrabble in Rosemary’s Baby…

Bingo #1: I’ll admit to feeling aroused or at least awoken during the last 45 when Eddington abandons all sense of restraint and it becomes The Wild Bunch on steroids.

Bingo #2: Yes, this is a smart and aggressive political satire of sorts, but it’s basically just a narrative version of the same X-treme left vs. X-treme right insanity that we’ve all been living with since the start of the pandemic, if not 2018 or ’19…

Bingo #3: I’m not calling it a “bad” or ineffective film or anything, but it’s basically unexciting and kind of drab and sloppy and not much fun, really. And the chaos is…well, certainly predictable. It has some bizarre surreal humor at times, but mostly it’s a fastball thrown wide of the batter’s box.

Bingo #4: Joaquin Phoenix‘s performance as Joe Cross, the rightwing-ish, initally not-too-crazy, anti-mask sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico…Joaquin’s performance is fairly weak…it’s almost like he’s playing Napoleon again, and that’s not even taking his thigh-slapping schlong prosthetic into account. I simply didn’t like hanging with the guy. There’s something flaccid and fumbling about him. He’s not “entertaining”.

Bingo #5: A smart, increasingly intense, ultimately surreal reflection of the stark raving madness of the COVID years. If you remove the over-the-top violence, it’s basically a movie about the same polarizing rhetorical shit we’ve all been living with since 2020 (or, in my head at least, since 2018). JUST YOUR BASIC AMERICAN POLARIZED MADNESS. Take away the bullets and the brain matter and it reminded me of the comment threads from Hollywood Elsewhere over the last five or six years.

Bingo #6: Pedro Pascal‘s performance as Ted Garcia, the sensibly-liberal mayor of Eddington, is much more grounded and appealing than Joaquin’s.

Bingo #7: The thing Eddington was selling never plugged in, never spoke to me beyond the obvious. It’s all about X-treme left bonker types vs. gun-toting, righty-right over-reactions.

Bingo #8: Emma Stone is pretty much wasted.

An annual $100M production tab (according to Deadline’s Matthew Belloni) means The Late Show with Stephen Colbert costs $8.3M ($8,333,333) each month, resulting in an annual loss of $40M or $3.3M ($3.333,333) per month.

I’m not suggesting that CBS’s decision to pull the plug wasn’t primarily political, but these numbers obviously make no sense.

Colbert’s annual haul is said to be $15M with an alleged per-episode rate of $89K. He can’t host that show for, say, $40K or $50K per episode? That’s not exactly chump change.

If I was running that show my basic message to Colbert and everyone else would be “at the very least this show breaks even…take it or leave it.”