Kamala Harris‘s chances of scoring the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination are zero. Nobody wants her around. She’s done.
During the ’24 race she didn’t have the elemental political smarts to recognize that the only way to win was to (a) clearly distance herself from Joe Biden, to (b) explain that Vice Presidents are ceremonial figureheads with no agency of their own, and (c) state that if elected she would going her own way. The fact that she flubbed this by saying she would continue Biden-ism in a rote, rubber-stamped way…that in itself showed she wasn’t smart or tough enough for the Presidency. She’s toast.
Scott Galloway: “I actually think Mayor Pete would do pretty well on the national stage [in ’28] — he just has to get through the Democratic primary, in which the Black caucus carries a lot of weight.” Translation: “Intransigent black homophobia is still Pete’s primary impediment to a fair shot at the nomination.”
I’ve always thought of this 1957 lifeboat drama, directed and adapted by Richard Sale, as Abandon Ship!, but the British title is Seven Waves Away. Without going into a big song-and-dance about it, it’s a better-than-decent serving of a high-stakes moral tale –a story that teeters on the question of “who lives and who dies, and is there any fair way for a captain to choose?”
David Kittredge‘s Boorman and the Devil was honored earlier this month with a debut screening at the Venice Film Festival. A followup booking should have happened at the Toronto Film Festival, and it damn well ought to be booked for the about-to-begin New York Film Festival. And perhaps at AFI Fest.
I’m basically saying that it’s way too good — too rich, too fully considered, too thoughtfiul and high-end — to be screening at the upcoming Brooklyn Horror Film Festival on 10.22. It’s much, much better than what this booking implies.
All hail the late, great Claudia Cardinale, who flourished in the late ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s….Big Deal on Madonna Street, Il bell’Antonio, Rocco and His Brothers, Girl with a Suitcase, 8 1/2,, The Leopard, The Professionals, Once Upon a Time in the West, Blood Brothers, A Common Sense of Modesty, Escape to Athena, The Salamander, The Skin, Fitzcarraldo.
What do we think of first when thoughts of Cardinale come to mind? Be honest. But even in her youth she had a lot more going on than just a great rack.
I finally saw Ron Howard‘s Eden last night, and yeah, I get it — it’s not much fun to watch. This doesn’t make it a “bad” film — just an unpleasant one. It’s basically a grubby, sandy, hand-to-mouth survival story, set in the early 1930s, about a few German settlers of Floreana, one of the Gallapagos Islands…a gnarly, rocky, non-tropical, water-poor place roughly 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador…dogs, cows, lizards, steep paths, scrub brush, etc.
I like Owen Gleiberman’s capsule description — “a misanthropic survivalist Robinson Crusoe meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with deranged footnotes by Friedrich Nietzsche.”
It’s not Howard’s fault that all but two of the characters are generally foul, perverse types. Well, okay…Howard chose to re-tell this calamitious true story but he’s just passing along what happened…just sticking to the facts.
All I knew last night was that it felt like a real drag to hang with three of the characters — Jude Law‘s Dr. Friedrich Ritter, a chilly, judgmental misanthrope…Vanessa Kirby‘s Dore Strauch, Ritter’s significant other and a chilly, malevolent blonde in her own right…and Ana de Armas‘s haughty Austrian bitch, Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn, who has an entitled attitude from hell.
There’s also a half-grown son (Jonathan Tittel), a pair of boy-toy types (Toby Wallace, Felix Kammerer) and a well-educated fellow with a movie camera who briefly visits the island (Richard Roxburgh).
The two decent settlers are Sydney Sweeney‘s Margret Wittmer, who lived on Floreana from 1932 until her death at age 95 in 2000, and Margret’s husband Heinz (Daniel Brühl).
Sweeney’s performance has nothing to do with her big boobs, and everything to do with real-deal, dug-in acting that feels genuine and un-“performed”. Zero makeup, her convincing German accent, Margret’s no-nonsense dialogue…Sweeney is the clear standout. Yes, viewers will talk about her baby-birthing scene while dogs are growling and snapping at her, but I believed each and every line and gesture. In every one of her scenes Margret touches the bottom of the pool.
For the last seven years or so Sweeney has struck me as a somewhat breezy lightweight with bodacious ta-tas…Under the Silver Lake, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Reality, Americana, Anyone but You, Madame Web, Christy, the sure-to-be-trashy The Housemaid. Now I respect her. Now I’ve seen through the facade.
Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s Bride of Frankenstein is angry, seething, appalled…naturally. But like every assertive, defiant, hoping-to-be-liberated woman made from odd body parts, she wants to be known, heard and recognized for who she is deep down, and not for being…you know, the bride of this or that dude or hulking creature or whatever.
And so she asks at one point, “What’s my name?” And then chuckles cynically at the silence that greets her. Men…men! Beasts! Egoistic assholes!
Who thought up that splattered inkwell tattoo that extends out of the right corner of Jessie Buckley‘s mouth and onto her right cheek?
Makeup guy to Maggie Gyllenhaal: “Whaddaya think? Maybe…?” Gyllenhaal to Makeup Guy: “I like it. I like it a lot.”
Imagine a momemt as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is just starting to be filmed. Imagine director George Roy Hill taking the moustachioed Robert Redford aside and showing him a pencil sketch that closely resembles the below photo of Buckley’s hissing, screaming bride, and saying “look at this, Bob…are you digging that scowling, tumultuous rage? That angry-rattlesnake expression on her face? That’s what I want from you, Bob…I want the Sundance Kid to be fucking feral. Forget that internal, implacable, cool-cat gunslinger thing that you do so well. I want snarling reptilian rage in almost every scene…can you give me that?”
Kimmel was suspended last week after making an odd, bordering-on-clueless remark during a monologue…a remark that seemed to question the conventional narrative about accused Charlie Kirk murderer Tyler Robinson may have been motivated by his feelings for a live-in transgender biomale furry “girlfriend” named Lance Twiggs…let me start again.
For some reason Kimmel’s monologue remark avoided or sidestepped a prevailing (if unproven) view that Robinson pulled the trigger because he was enraged by what he and others believed were hateful, dismissive attitudes toward the LGBTQ and/or transgender communities from Kirk.
One presumes that Donald Trump, his kneejerk-acolyte brute squad and FCC chairman Brendan Carr are seething and punching the refrigerator as we speak.
How will the Nexstar-owned affiliates react to this?
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country.
“It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
I’m presuming that the financial situation is still not good for Kimmel’s show (ditto the situation regarding CBS’s Late Night with Stephen Colbert) as far as a cost-vs.-earnings comparison is concerned. But against all odds and despite the repressive, sabre-rattling, authoritarian bully-boy maneuvers of the Trumpies, Disney clearly wasn’t comfortable with the free-speech-blowback reaction that was activated by the Kimmel suspension.
Question for Kimmel: Did you honestly think that if it turns out that Robinson is in fact guilty…did you honestly suspect or believe that he wasn’t motivated by rage over Kirk’s statements about the LGBTQ and trans communities in particular?
Bari Weiss‘s five-day-old FP interview with Woody Allen delivered, for me, a wonderful current of calm…a soothing and settled feeling of luscious well-being. It made me feel as if I understand everything…all of it. I felt like I was cruising on a Lemmon 714. I could have listened to a three- or four-hour version.
The only thing I didn’t care for was Allen’s refusal to condemn the woke insanity wave of 2019 to 2024…five or six fucking years of red-book-waving, career-destroying terror, and to this day 90% of the perpetrators STILL don’t even acknowledge that it happened. Of all the cancelled people in the world, Allen shrugs it off and says that “doesn’t affect me” or words to that effect. It does, of course — Allen mined his anger and outrage over the Mia-and-Dylan accusation quite throughly in “Apropos of Nothing“. But he doesn’t want “that” conversation to color his mind, mood or basic attitude, so it gets tossed.
Earlier this morning I watched two Charlie Rose Show interviews with the late, great Lou Reed — a 2003 interview that included his wife Laurie Anderson, and a 1998 solo interview. More bliss.
If I was still living in West Hollywood I would have definitely have driven to Las Vegas by now to see the Las Vegas Sphere presentation of The Wizard Of Oz. It began showing about a month ago. Ticket prices are punishing ($140 or $150 for one decent seat — close to $300 for two people without popcorn, and closer to $400 if you’re buying through a greedy broker).
Sphere Oz began showing on 8.28.25, and has earned $55 million so far…in one theatre. The cost of transforming the original 35mm Oz into Sphere’s stunning 16K dimensions took about $100 million. Although the arena seats over 17000 when full, Oz showings only offer the middle section, or roughly a third of its capacity. Two to three shows a day (why not four or five?), nearly every day, through the end of March 2026, with a ticket price that starts at $114 for shitty seats.
Sphere theatres should obviously be built all over the country, but which films should be Sphere-icized? Please, please don’t suggest the fucking Harry Potter films…no!
In HE’s realm the obvious calls would be the classic big-screen spectacles — Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (but not the prequels!), Apocalypse Now, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, Titanic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the original 1933 King Kong…which others?
I would particularly love to see North by Northwest in this format. Image the crop-dusting sequence with all the directional sound and dust and the aroma of dirt and corn crops and a slight whiff of pesticides, and that magnificent blue sky above.
How can any sensible, Democracy-respecting person be against Gavin Newsom‘s Prop. 50, which will try to counterbalance the perversely pro-right gerrymandering of Texas by Donald Trump and Texas governor Greg Abbott? Who could actually support the rogue tilting the electoral map in favor of MAGA brutalism? Note: I’m saying this despite being in limited league with Trump’s anti-woke leanings — the anti-woke stuff is fine, but the repressive authoritarian stuff obviously isn’t.
