Month: September 2025

“Vaguely fearful of ‘The Housemaid’“, posted on 3.22.25:

Indications are that Paul Feig‘s The Housemaid (Lionsgate, 12.19), based on Freida McFadden‘s three-year-old novel, a feminist potboiler that has since grown into a multi-book franchise, is going to be a bit of a groaner…perhaps even a forehead-slapper.

All feminist airport fiction is based upon a single premise, which is that the principal male character is a toxic piece of shit who has made his own bed and deserves all the bad karma that’s sure to come his way.

It certainly seems unlikely that Feig’s film will deliver the intrigue and complexity of Im Sang-soo‘s The Housemaid (’10), which I recall as being half-decent.

Both versions have vaguely similar plots with the husband banging (or at least looking to bang) the housemaid, and the wife freaking out and the usual blowback kicking in.

The Housemaid costars Sydney Sweeney as the titular character; Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar (the bearded, nice-guy suitor in It Ends With Us) are her wealthy employers.

I feel like a total effing fool for having paid $180 bills to see a NYFF closing-night screening of Bradley Cooper‘s Is This Thing On? (Searchlight, 12.19). Two $90 tickets, I mean. 180 smackers! Charging this much for a movie seat is exploitive, disreputable, ugly. I wish I had summoned the character to say “uhhm, wait, no…I can’t pay this much” to the Avery Fisher Hall ticket-seller. But I didn’t. I failed.

The bottom line is that I wanted to catch this presumably award-worthy film because I respected and admired Cooper’s filmmaking chops in Maestro. Anyway, it’s done. I feel angry and nearly humiliated, but the tickets are in my possession and that’s that.

Hollywood Elsewhere has been an ongoing thing since August 2004, and posting on a daily bloggy-blog basis since April ’06, and it’s always looked the same…same front, same dark-blue headlines, same light gray background, same Hollywood hills logo. I feel really terrible that this ongoing visual signature has collapsed over the past two days…it’s all been shattered.

I know the HE presentation will soon be replaced by something better, and that upgrading to the the 2025 realm is obviously a good thing. There’s no percentage in hanging on to the past. I just want to say that I’m very, very sorry for this trauma, which of course is entirely my fault. I feel so fucked up about this…I feel lost, adrift, cut loose.

Hollywood Elsewhere has been my security blanket for so many years…my little blue blankie, and now it’s gone.

N.Y. Times, February 4, 1939, Page 1….

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ABC is deep-sixing Jimmy Kimmel Live! “indefinitely”, which sounds like “adios”, fare-thee-well and that’s all she wrote. The yanking was ostensibly about Kimmel saying something erroneous or insensitive about Charlie Kirk‘s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson. Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr wants Kimmel gone, having suggested that ABC’s broadcast license “is at risk from Kimmel’s statements about Robinson.” Nexstar Media Group, which is seeking FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna, was ebviously eager to dump Kimmel. The Trumpies, in short, are doing everything they can to eliminate late-night Trump antagonists.

For the last several months I’ve been skeptical about the notion of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (Warner Bros., 9.26), which I caught yesterday morning inside the AMC 34th Street, being any kind of artistic comeback flick, much less an Oscar contender. In my mind PTA has been vaguely downswirling or certainly treading water since There Will Be Blood (’07), his last really good film.

Well, it’s now Wednesday afternoon and I am no longer skeptical about the potential award-season fortunes of this film. It’s a serious winner — thrilling, complex, darkly humorous, poignantly emotional from a father-daughter perspective, dramatically scored, beautifully shot…it really connects. Battle might run into some trouble commercially as it’s strictly a blue-cities flick from a political-ideological standpoint, but in all other respects I am now a believer.

Battle is certainly a Best Picture contender, and it could even potentially win (although I doubt this given that it’s too emphatically woked-up and white-male-hating or white-male-pitying for general comfort). But it’s going to be nominated in almost every category. Anderson has bounced back big-time, and is certainly no longer slumping…he’s riding the award-season whirlwind. Who remembers the paranoid imaginings of Alan Pakula‘s The Parallax View (’74), and particularly the vibe of the Parallax Corporation? I’m not saying that Battle is even vaguely analogous to Parallax, but they do line up in one respect.

Pakula’s Parallax Corporation was run by shadowy, cold-blooded, conservatively-attired serpents who were in the business of murdering high-profile liberal politicians. I’m just saying that in PTA’s newbie, which actually has a happy ending, the Parallax Corporation is, at the very least, symbolically back in action, only this time the group is called the Christmas Adventurers, an elite cabal of white nationalists who aren’t plotting political killings but are certainly “think white”-ish and pulling racist strings when strategy requires it. I went into yesterday morning’s 9:30 am screening with an attitude of guarded optimism.

I was mainly hoping that it would be as good as what the earlybird whores have been crowing about for the last few days. I knew it wouldn’t be as good as what IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich has been saying (“…might be the best movie released by a major American studio since I started working as a critic in 2010”) because Ehrlich is, in my humble view, a foam-at-the-mouth woke fanatic, but I really wanted at least a ground-rule-double or a triple. I didn’t trust the idea of a home run as PTA has been off his game since Blood and probably, I’ve been calculating, sinking into soft mud, but I really wanted to hear the loud crack of the bat and the subsequent roar of the crowd. Battle, to put it mildly, has exceeded my expectations.

Form-wise it’s a total homer — a knockout masterwork from a gifted director who knows exactly what he’s doing and how to deliver the right stuff — while the content is so absurdly woked-up in a POC-favoring, over-the-waterfall-in-a-barrel way that it’s sure to be hated or certainly hooted at outside the big cities, especially in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Average Joes and Janes will say “yeah, a really good movie but what’s with the leftist guerilla-revolution jazz?

In the wake of the Charley Kirk tragedy they’re releasing a hooray-for-the-left, defy-the-malevolent-whiteys film? A movie that says all white people and especially guys in starched military fatigues with close-cropped hair are bad…we get that, this is what Hollywood always does…whitey bad, POCs good…whitey baddie-waddie, POCs are spirit angels and God’s chosen..but the Kirk tragedy has changed the political landscape.”

I for one didn’t mind the woke current because OBAA is so damnably well directed. I think it’s PTA’s best film ever, and if you ask me and Warner Bros. marketing’s decision not to premiere it in Venice or Telluride was nonsensical. The present-tense section (the first 40 minutes are set in ’09 or thereabouts while the remaining two hours are set in the present) happens in a Trumpian police-state world that feels fairly current (ICE-like military invasions, rounded-up immigrants held inside chain-link-fence compounds, white shitheads in military fatigues and business suits bringing racist rain down upon the heads of change-seeking POC lefties) and is basically….well, not about an ongoing battle between the POC wokies and the big bad whiteys, although it’s the only seriously action-driven, car-chasey PTA film ever.

Battle is primarily about a father’s attempt to rescue his daughter from rightwing kidnappers (i.e., the present-tense material), but it’s based on an oddly sexual romantic triangle between Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson (grizzled ex-revolutionary), Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (broomstick up his ass, hot for black chicks) and Teyana Taylor‘s Perfidia Beverly Hills, which is dramatized during the first 40. A triangle, incidentally, that doesn’t even spark conflict or recriminations Battle is so well done, so gripping, so well acted, shot and cut, so dynamically captured….the 160 minutes fly by like they’re 95 or 100. But it’s so fucking woke and so virulently against heavily-fortified white authority figures, it’s not going to fly in red states…not in the wake of the Kirk murder.

Owen Gleiberman: “The film spooks us with the question: Is this where America is now heading? Anderson completed the movie before Donald Trump took office in January 2025, but it’s presented as a knowing projection of what autocracy under the current administration could lead to. The film isn’t just some abstract metaphoric cinematic speculation; it’s designed to look and feel just ahead of the curve of where we’re at now. And since Once Battle After Another is trying to be ruthlessly authentic about how an authoritarian state works, the revolutionaries, it turns out, don’t have much of a chance. “The film suggests that the current white-nationalist movement is, in heart, an attempt to separate white and Black people as a primal way of pretending that black-white sexual relationships of the past never happened. And that this denial is nothing less than the key fantasy driving the new alt-right America.

Bob leaves revolution in the dust to rescue his mixed-race daughter, but the movie says that what he’s doing is the real revolution: finding a family that you fight to hold together; keeping Black and white together, as they long have been; keeping hope alive, in the face of a regime that employs the stifling of hope as a ruling tactic. The movie says that out of this revolt of the everyday a greater revolution will rise.” All hail the performances by DiCaprio, Taylor, Penn plus Chase Infiniti (excellent actress!), Regina Hall, Shayna McHayle, Alana Haim, Starlette DuPois, D.W. Moffett, Paul Grimstead, James Raterman, Tony Goldwyn, Jim Downey.

My WordPress theme design (Armory) has stopped updating and hasn’t for years. My fault entirely. The Revolution slider has also stopped functioning. It’s now obsolete, and almost the whole thematic structure and operation of Hollywood Elsewhere has collapsed into a heap of soggy dysfunctional pretzels. We’ve lost the style sheet.

My designer and I are now searching for a new theme (possibly Flexblog) and a new provider of a slider mechanism. The process will take a few hours but it’ll be a good thing to finally update the PHP and streamline the whole shebang according to 2025 standards.

Meanwhile I’m expanding upon my initial comment-thread post about PTA’s One Battle After Another (WB, 9.26). which I saw and quite liked (the absurd woke mindset aside) yesterday morning. The embargo lifts at noon eastern, 9 am Pacific.

I saw four films yesterday — One Battle After Another, plus (2) Darren Aronofsky‘s Caught Stealing (which I hated with a passion — I couldn’t stop muttering “go fuck yourself, go fuck yourself, go fuck yourself” to Austin Butler‘s lead character…I wanted him to take a bullet to the head so I wouldn’t have to hang with his sorry, beer-slurping ass), (3) Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin‘s Splitsville, a marital infidelity freestyle-farce sitcom which I didn’t exactly “like” but found unusual and occasionally funny and semi-diverting and therefore tolerable (although Covino and Marvin, who play the two male leads, aren’t nearly attractive enough to enlist audience empathy and identification — if I was gay or a woman I definitely wouldn’t want to fuck these guys…no way), and (4) Dag Johan Haugerud‘s Dreams (Sex Love), a quietly first-rate Norwegian drama that played in competition in Berlin last February and is now screening at the Film Forum.