Month: December 2025

Last night I indulged a kind of snide-attitude curiosity impulse by renting Walt Disney and Robert Stevenson’s Johnny Tremain (‘57), which I had presumed would be a simplistic, teen-friendly saga about Boston patriots in the 1770s (the Sons of Liberty, Paul Revere, John Adams, the Boston Tea Party, “the redcoats are coming!”, the first shot fired in Lexington) with the usual edges sanded off (i.e., standard Disney treatment) and a bit dumbed-down.

Well, it is all those things to a certain degree, but it’s not offensively dumbed down and actually applies a certain Encyclopedia Brittanica intelligence and offers basic respect for standardized historical “facts”.

Plus I instantly warmed to Hal Stalmaster’s performance as Tremain, a silversmith’s apprentice with a planted, straight-talking manner — a young, sensible-minded dude you feel you can trust. Only 16 during filming, the handsome Hal is certainly not playing some twerpy, emotionally effusive, pogo-stick kid. He’s a 30 year-old in temperament, but obliged to sound half that age by the Johnny Tremain requirement.

The 13-years-younger brother of legendary casting director Lyn Stalmaster (1927-2021), Hal never managed (or apparently sought) another lead role in anything. After playing a supporting role in Disney’s The Swamp Fox miniseries (Leslie Neilsen!) and handling some guest roles in TV series, Hal left acting in ‘66. He worked as a booking agent, and is still with us at age 85.

HE has a theory about why Hal Stalmaster never became Richard Beymer, the 6’2” hunk who played Tremain’s best bro and went on to significant fame in a few early to mid ‘60s films (including West Side Story and The Longest Day). I think it was at least partly because Hal was too short. He appears in Tremain to be Dustin Hoffman-sized.

…I would have been down for a third installment. I would have welcomed such a chapter, in fact. But as things now stand, I’m truly sick to death of this franchise. May God hear me…I want the Navi to go away and STAY AWAY…eternally.

To me it’s a serious human tragedy that James Cameron, a guy I so deeply respected in the ’80s and ’90s and all the way up to the first Avatar flick in ’09 and his historic Phillipine submersible dive in 2012…it’s emotionally painful that now he’s just grinding these films out like sausage. Not for the vision but for the money.

#AvatarFireAndAsh is a visual masterpiece. If you love these movies, it’s more of the same, but story-wise, it’s the same “capture/rescue” plot over and over again with some laughable dialogue thrown in the middle. The runtime is criminal, and if you have eye issues, avoid the 3D pic.twitter.com/p8ou1mI25c

— Kaitlyn Booth (@katiesmovies) December 2, 2025

“But the script becomes lazy, repetitive & exhausting with excruciatingly bad dialogue,” etc.

I think this is AI bullshit, although Sen. Chuck Schumer almost certainly said these words recently. I realize that throwing in an occasional “eff” bomb is a mark of authenticity these days, but I still think it’s fake.

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And the one trophy Sinners did win was for Autumn Durald Arkapaw‘s cinematography, which to my eyes was muddy and dreary and indistinct during some of the nocturnal scenes. I literally couldn’t see all that was happening when the Irish vampires were out and about.

Arkapaw did, however, shoot Sinners on 65mm film, using a combination of IMAX 15-perf and Ultra Panavision 70 cameras, which made her the first female dp to shoot IMAX.

Otherwise the New York film Critics Circle gave their trophies to…

Best Film: Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another. HE comment: Fine, whatever…basically a political “yay team!” call. Fuck Joe Popcorn and all the money PTA’s film lost…we know better!

Best Director: It Was Just an Accident‘s Jafar Panahi. HE comment: This is all about the one-year jail term that Panahi was just sentenced to in absentia. Basically a mew-mew, milkbowl-licking political decision.

Best Actor: The Secret Agent‘s Wagner Moura, HE comment: WHAT? Moura is fine in this film, but Leonardo DiCaprio is far more “alive” and striking and penetrating in OBAA.

Best Actress: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You‘s Rose Byrne. HE comment: It was truly punishing to sit through Byrne’s performance, and for that matter the film itself. Kinda ridiculous. Hamnet‘s Jessie Buckley and Sentimental Value‘s Renate Reinsve are far more relatable and affecting.

Best Supporting Actor: One Battle After Another‘s Benicio del Toro. HE comment: Benicio is great as “Sensei”, but you can’t tell me he exudes anything close to the anguished penetration that Stellan Skarsgård delivers in Sentimental Value. And what about poor Adam Sandler in Jay Kelly?

Best Supporting Actress: Weapons‘ Amy Madigan. HE comment: Agreed — a totally warranted win.

Best International Film: Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s The Secret Agent. HE comment: It’s completely ridiculous to assert that The Secret Agent, a good-but-vaguely-problematic period drama, is more deserving of this NYFCC trophy than Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value. Patently absurd!

Thank God Sinners was trounced in the major categories!

To me, John Malkovich, who will turn 72 a week from now, has long seemed like a fascinating, super-knowledgable, deep-drill fellow, and I’m sure he always will be. Nobody plays droll intelligent madmen better than he.

I was part of a small, very relaxed Malkovich press schmooze at the 2010 Marrakech Film Festival, and I remember gently asking him about cynical paycheck roles vs. the real stuff, and how he was simultaneously a wee bit taken aback and yet cool with the question after two or three seconds. Cool and settled.

Malkovich will always be mythic, but his peak era lasted 14 or 15 years — his Biff in the 1984 B’way stage production of Death of a Salesman (“a 31 year-old, totally-on-fire John Malkovich,” I wrote after seeing the play), Places in the Heart (’84), The Killing Fields (’85), Burn This on Broadway (’87), Dangerous Liaisons (Vicomte de Valmont) and his marriage-shattering affair with Michelle Pfeiffer, The Sheltering Sky (’90), In the Line of Fire (’93), Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom in Con Air (’87), and finally his multitudinous self in Being John Malkovich (’99).

And that, ladies and gems, was one hell of a 15-year peak.

Then Malkovich rebounded in Burn After Reading (’08) — I’ve long felt that his alcoholic, self-deluding, furiously frustrated Osborne Cox, a CIA guy, is not only his greatest-ever film performance, but one of the greatest film performances ever.

The sharpest, coolest, zippiest AI maestro could never, ever create a film like Sentimental Value, as Sasha Stone pointed out a few weeks ago.

@jakevsthestate Everything changes in the next 12 months #movies #film #hollywood ♬ original sound – Jake State

There’s no reaching the God-knows-how-many-millions-of-woke-kneejerk-simpletons out there who agree with @alibrooke4ever.

Woody Allen haters are beyond the realm of reason and rationality. They are cultists living in a cave.

There’s a Grand Canyon’s worth of difference, for example, between Soon–Yi Previn having been his “stepdaughter” (imagined) and “adopted daughter of girlfriend.” Not to mention the 28 years of marriage that have transpired since Woody and Soon–Yi tied the knot in ‘97.

Ali Brooke could be ordered to read and re-read Woody Allen‘s 2.7.14 op–ed response in the N.Y. Times ten or twenty or a hundred times, and she would still say “no!”

The haters could be forced to read and re-read Moses Farrow’s “A Son Speaks Out” (5.23.18) and they would say “okay, Moses was right there in the house and all, but we’re not buying it!”

All hail persons of moral integrity and backbone like Scarlett Johansson.

Incidentally: Not that it matters all that much, but Woody’s Isaac character in Manhattan is 42, not 40.

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To the best of my recollection Walt Disney and Robert Stevenson‘s Johnny Tremain (6.19.57) is the only mainstream film that ever depicted the Boston Tea Party. Am I wrong? Oh, and the Sons of Liberty were violent rowdies.

Despite the purported semblance of historical realism, Tremain fulfilled a paramount Disney law of the 1950s…the one about always featuring a happy sing-along scene.

Titular player Hal Stalmaster is now 85 years old. Luana Patten was definitely a looker, but she sadly passed at age 58. 19 year-old Richard Beymer (West Side Story) played Johnny’s best friend, Rab Silsbee.

When this happens inside Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre on Sunday, 3.15.26, it will be the second time that a political/cultural sympathy vote has bestowed a major honor upon Jafar Panahi’s latest film, the first time occuring at the close of last May’s Cannes Film Festival when it won the Palme d’Or.

Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, obviously the best film of the 2025 festival, therefore lost to It Was Just An Accident and had to settle for a Grand Prix award (i.e., second prize). If I know anything about the Academy, Value will once again get elbowed aside because of Panahi’s just-announced one-year jail sentence.