Month: July 2025

Don’t Listen to Professional Whores

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“Everything was too fast…it was like the actors were trying to force me to believe this movie….I’m sorry, I’m sorry…I never cringed so hard…not the movie that everyone said it was.”

This guy (supasilenz) knows.

@supasilenz_ Honest Superman Movie review …and yeah guys idk bout that. I was waiting for this movie to be at least decent and im jus not a fan . Tiktok over hyped this way too much #fyp #foryoupage #foryou #superman #movie #honest #supermanmovie #moviereview ♬ Classic classical gymnopedie solo piano(1034554) – Lyrebirds music

Feelings Matter, But So Does Girth

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How do you write about Lena Dunham’s semi-autobiographical Too Much, a 10-part Netflix series that popped on 7.10, without stepping on a land mine or stepping over the woke-terror line by addressing the elephant in the room?

You start by praising Dunham’s writing, I suppose. (Right?) The dialogue is well honed and just right — wise and zeitgeisty and agreeably settled-in and never less than perceptive. I immediately felt at ease because of this talent, this signature, this attitudinal stamp.

And because of Megan Stalter’s believably dug-in and disarming lead performance.

But we can’t just sail along and pretend that Too Much, despite its emotional precision and candor and generally elevated vibe, isn’t a chubbo sell-job.

The truth is that I briefly gasped when a shot captured a partially disrobed Stalter in profile. I didn’t gasp because I wanted to earn or ratify my ayehole credentials. I gasped because a voice deep inside went “holy shit!”

Remember when the great Shelley Winters (who once told me I reminded her of an old boyfriend) ballooned up in the mid ‘60s? In Jack Smight and Paul Newman’s Harper (‘66) she was candidly and unapologetically described with the “f” word. Imagine!

Remember James Mangold ‘s Heavy (‘96)? And Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (‘01)? Remember that moment in Sideways when Thomas Haden Church described Missy Doty as “the grateful type”? The Stalinists would never tolerate this terminology now..

Too Much is an engaging, faintly downish but agreeably hip and certainly chuckle-worthy feminist romcom that is also (I’m repeating myself but an emphasis is warranted) an attempt to normalize.

Normalize what? Well, what has always seemed to me and tens of millions of others like an exotic concept, which is that obese, whipsmart, Type-A women and lean, open-hearted, chubby-chasing dudes often hook up and wind up happily entwined or even married. Not to be spoil-sportish but this kind of thing is not by any stretch a common relationship occurence, not even among size-affirming Millennials and Zoomers.

We all understand the basic appeal of curvy, zaftig and even a little Rubenesque action. As far back as the ‘70s a friend used the term “tons of fun”, and I knew exactly that he was joking about, conceptually speaking.

Speaking as a trim guy from way back, how many overweight women have I “been” with? One. Okay, maybe two. (And I don’t mean obese.) Did I mostly steer clear of calorically challenged lassies because I’m a bigot? It sure didn’t seem that way back then (i.e., the 20th Century). Nobody “slept” with fatties.

Backstory–wise, Too Much is about a moderately fetching Dunham-esque producer-writer-whatever (Stalter) who moves to London in the wake of a traumatic breakup with a longtime Brooklyn boyfriend (the trimly proportioned Michael Zegen) who’s dumped her for a model-esque hottie (Emily Ratajkowski).

The main order of business is about Stalter falling for a poor, well-sculpted musician and kindred spirit (The White Lotus’s Will Sharpe) who, in a non-wokey, normal-seeming world, would almost certainly be seeing a girl more his own size and shape. Or at least a zaftig rather than a tubby tuba.

What happens between Stalter and Sharpe is the meat and essence of the show, of course. Most of it romantically resonates and touches bottom and all that good stuff. (Including, I’ve read**, one or two harsh stand-offs.) Dunham is grade-A all the way. But how do you get around those gasp moments?

** I’ve only seen the first three episodes

’79 Was A Very Good Year

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I wish I could find my 46-year-old review of Francois Truffaut‘s Love on the Run. I seem to recall not being much of a fan, largely because I thought the film depended on too many Antoine Doinel flashbacks, reaching all the way back to The 400 Blows (’59).

Jean Pierre Leaud, still with us at age 80, was 34 during filming.

The director of a private school that Leaud attended in the eighth grade wrote the following to Truffaut: “I regret to inform you that Jean-Pierre is more and more unmanageable. Indifference, arrogance, permanent defiance, lack of discipline in all its forms. He has twice been caught leafing through pornographic pictures in the dorm. He is developing more and more into an emotionally disturbed case.”

That was me! At age 12 or 13 I was also rebellious, “emotionally disturbed” and leafing through nudie magazines.

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How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count The Ways.

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James Gunn‘s Superman is about so much stuff — big jolts, goofing off, silliness, monsters, emptiness, jerking off, twists and turns, urban destruction, social media trashings, the basically rancid nature of Average Joes and Janes — that it’s not really about anything except sadism…sadism directed at David Corenswet‘s Man of Vulnerability, and sadism directed at the audience.

The damn thing runs 129 minutes, and at least 80% or 85% — call it 110 minutes — of this crazy-ass, scatterbrained, no-holds-barred exercise in aggressive, over-visualized and sound-slammed fuckyou-ism (comic-book geeks will be delighted but people with taste will be rolling in nausea)…this effing film is largely about Superman getting his ass whupped, and that makes it not just repetitive and tiresome but infuriating after the first 45 or so.

Note to a friend: “I realize that no major critic wants to shit on comic-book movies — light scolding is permitted, but no dumping on them — because hard pans of such films tend to make critics sound mean-spirited, old-fogeyish and out of touch. And I’m not saying Superman doesn’t have a diseased scheme of its own, a kind or cancer-ridden, audience-despising worldview, but how in the world could anyone give this thing a pass?”

While watching I was muttering to myself “this film is fucking evil” but if I actually write this — if I literally call it a Superman flick with a 666 tattoed on its neck — the HE commentariat will say I’m mean-spirited, old-fogeyish and out of touch.

As noted, it’s mostly about Corenswet getting the shit beat out of him….pounded, bloodied, gut-slammed, bone-crunched, Kryptonited, cancelled, jailed, all but killed, goaded, derided, doubted, made to scream and howl ad nauseum. It’s Gunn’s intention, obviously, to make Superman into a whiny little bitch…to show him suffering, wincing, screaming, weeping, moaning, wailing.

HE to Gunn in my fifth row seat: “Will you fucking ease up on this shit? There’s more to life than just suffering.”

Corenswet is beaten more savagely, continuously and relentlessly in this thing than Jim Caviezel was beaten and bloodied in Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ. And that’s saying something.

Who wants to watch a once-heroic, true-blue figure (i.e., heroic back in the old Chris Reeve era) get bashed and bruised and pounded over and over and over and over and over and over?

And how, in the opening scene, does Corenswet manage to get bruised and bloodied in the first place? How does that work exactly? Yeah, he’s “human” in a certain emotionally vulnerable sense, but he’s also Superman.

And what’s with Krypto the attack dog? Why is he even in this thing? Krypto the white poodle presumably arrived from Krypton along with the infant Superman, so that would make him 30 years old or a really old fart in dog years…roughly 136.

I would really hate to jump into the churning sizzling brainpan of James Gunn and splash around. The man has no discipline, no soul, no shrewdness, no sense of restraint……he’s so geeked up and CG-pretzel twisted that he’s become a kind of mad fiend or gila monster.

If by clapping my hands three times I could eradicate James Gunn-ism from the face of the earth and hurl it into an eternal flaming hellscape, I would clap my hands three times.

Superman deals so much story at such a whooshing, whizbang pace that I was choking on it. I was swatting at the plot turns like flies.

“I don’t give a shit about any of this,” I was muttering. “Fuck all these people, all these meta-folks with their bullshit costumes and whatnot. I don’t want or need this shit in my life. And I pretty much hated the main characters. If Rachel Brosnahan‘s Lois Lane had been killed, I wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow….fine! The only character I really didn’t want to see killed, Corenswet aside, was Edi Gathegi‘s Mister Terrific. I would haver been totally fine if Skyler Gisondo‘s Jimmy Olden has been killed…no sweat at all.”

The fact that Gisondo looks like a young Bruno Kirby (he has a cucumber-sized nose) makes the idea of Sara Sampaio‘s Eve Teschmacher having a crush on him seem ridiculous. Women who look like Sampaio never give guys with big honkers the time of day.

I would have been totally at peace if every last person in Metropolis had been drowned or burned or squashed to death. Okay, except for a pretty woman who is saved by Superman from being crushed by a falling building. I don’t know her name but she’s attractive.

Nathan Fillon‘s Green Lantern wears the worst, dumbest-looking blonde wig every worn by any actor in the history of motion pictures.

I recognized the played-Leonard-Bernstein guy in a cameo, of course; ditto Angela Sarafyan from Westworld.

Grim Slide

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I felt so drained Wednesday night and Thursday by my recent diagnosis that I figured I couldn’t stand the combination of atherosclerosis plus watching James Gunn’s Superman. But now that I’ve settled into (i.e., accepted) the glumness of things, I guess I can handle a Superman viewing. That’s what I’m doing now. Suffering through the godawful trailers, I mean.

Healthwise I’ve Been Carefree Or Certainly Cavalier For Ages

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And now it’s time to face the consequences of too much sugar, generally not-great food choices, way too little exercise as all my free time goes into the column, and — I know this is borderline suicidal — occasionally chugging energy drinks because I’ve always loved the bolt and the buzz and the sheer fuck-off-edness…the old Don Logan thing.

All my life I’ve had an exceptionally strong and resilient constitution. I don’t smoke or drink and have kept my weight more or less in check, and so I’ve lived my life like a relatively unencumbered 37 year-old for the most part. Because I’m a lucky inheritor of strong genes. I’ve felt like an exception to the rule for decades. I don’t get sick or certainly not for extended periods — that happens to others and not me.

But over the last four days I’ve been grappling with news that I have…uhm, a heart issue…screeech! All of a damn sudden I have to hit the brakes on my 37-year-old lifestyle and divorce myself from a general presumption about being more or less bulletproof. I suddenly need to radically healthify the diet and perhaps even have a procedure or two — a plaque-arresting stent and a balloon angioplasty.

All I know is that I feel as healthy as always (okay, not like a 37-year-old but generally like an anything-but-frail, go-for-the-gusto type) but a recent diagnosis begs to differ. I’m not certain that my Medicare + United Health insurance package will cover the stent and the angioplasty but here’s hoping. My dad submitted to the latter in his late 60s; ditto a pair of boomer film journo friendos in the recent past.

Frank Ripploh’s Famous Anus

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“A tragicomic story about the impossibility of a couple’s life….neither a pornographic film, nor a sociological exposé, nor a moral lesson.” — Frank Ripploh on Taxi Zum Klo.

HE to Ripploh: Okay, yeah but not really. It’s really about dickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdick…about a gay school teacher who loves cruising around West Berlin during that brief window of limitless sexual opportunity that gay men enjoyed in the mid to late ’70s before AIDS came along and brought all kinds of devastation.

The fact that Manhatan’s only theatrical boooking of the 4K restoration or Taxi Zum Klo is at the Metrograph…that should tell you something. If you’re not familiar with hardcore gay cinema, perhaps you should think twice.

I saw Taxi Zum Kmlo 44 years ago at the N.Y. Film Festival, and all I could say back then was “well, it’s certainly amiable and good humored, and it’s definitely a groundbreaker in terms of watching guys do each other…later.”

Apparently there actually is an outfit called Anus Films (the logo is obviously a riff on the one for Janus Films), and apparently it really does have something to do with Taxi Zum Klo, though I know not what. Okay, maybe it’s a put-on but it had me fooled.

Posted on 8.31.09: “As long as we’re talking no-nos and ‘thanks but no thanks’, I don’t really want to see guys in whatever kind of shape doing each other. I know that all modern cineastes are obliged to politely sit through gay sex scenes, but doing so requires a certain amount of grimming up. Sorry, but this stuff (Salo, Taxi Zum Klo) makes me squirm in my seat. And I’m allowed to feel and say this without anyone calling me this, that or the other thing. I know the p.c. things I’m supposed to say. I know how to play the game and blah-blah my way through a discussion of films of this type. But if you can’t man up and say, ‘Well, this is how I really feel about this,’ then what good are you, Jimmy Dick?”

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All Hail Hall & Oates

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This is actually the only scene in No Hard Feelings that really, really touches bottom….that really works.

[Posted two years ago — 6.18.23] “It’s very difficult to do comedy because if they don’t laugh when they should laugh, you are there with egg on your face, and that’s sad. In a serious picture you don’t hear them being bored, but in a comedy you can hear them not laughing. You tried so hard and the guy did the pratfall, but nothing — and you wish you were dead.” — Billy Wilder.

I really wanted to have a great bawdy old time with No Hard Feelings (Sony, 6.23), a casually coarse sex comedy about an “inappropriate age gap” relationship between Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a 32 year-old Montauk bartender in a financial hole, and Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), an introverted 19-year-old who’s about to become a Princeton freshman.

Percy’s helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti) are concerned about his lack of outgoingness plus the fact that he’s still a virgin, so they place an ad in Craigslist that says “looking for a 20something woman who can pull our son out of his shell” — the implication being that they want this woman to sexually initiate the lad and generally prepare him for the social pressures of college.

They’re slightly concerned about Maddie being (a) 13 years older than Percy and (b) something of a low-rent townie, but they figure a woman who’s been around and has some mileage will handle him with care, etc.

So the premise isn’t bad and right off the top you can see that the laughs will come out of the somewhat impatient, blunt-spoken Maddie feeling increasingly frustrated and even irate as her attempts to seduce the reticent, romantic-minded Percy lead nowhere. You can also see from the get-go that Maddie and Percy will soon get past the sexual initiation and performance stuff and start relating to each other as vulnerable humans, etc.

To his credit, director and co-screenwriter Gene Stupnitsky balances the lewd and rude material with moments of introspection and truth-telling.

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