Who’s the actor who played the bald moustache Globe Motors salesman in “Everybody Hurts“, the 45th episode of The Sopranos?
The salesman who tries to interest James Gandolfini‘s Tony Soprano in a Mercedes, I mean, but who quickly jettisons this idea when Tony inquires about Annabella Sciorra‘s Gloria Trillo. The salesman gives Tony the lowdown — i.e., that Trillo, a former Globe salesperson, is not only deceased but by her own hand.
I’m asking because he’s terrific, this guy. A gravelly New Jersey voice, plain-spoken but a bit sleazy, and yet nakedly honest as far as it goes. And you can tell at the end of the scene that he knows Tony was somehow involved with Gloria.
Directed by Steve Buscemi and written by Michael Imperioli, “Hurts” aired on 10.20.02.
I haven’t yet seen Joe Carnahan, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon‘s The Rip (Netflix, 1.16), but some snarky comment-threader who’s apparently seen it…he/she wrote this morning that it’s okaybutnogreatshakes…a morally conflicted, slightly-better-than-generic programmer.
I’m tapping this out from memory as I can’t find the URL, but the guy basically said that The Rip is “intriguing at first but soon devolves into a generic Netflix thriller, somewhat in the vein of the last Artists Equity boilerplate crime flick, The Instigators.”
The problem with that dismissive remark was that the latter film, produced by Damon and Affleck’s Artists Equity and streamed by Apple, was and is a totallyfirst–ratestand–alonefeature.
The comment-threader was wrong, make no mistake, because TheInstigators, a downbeat Boston noir comedy, is noboilerplateho–hummer! On 8.18.24 I called it “a true American original —- TheFriendsofEddie Coyle meets deadpan screwball fatalism.”
The only thing that doesn’t work about The Instigators, I said, is the humdrum title. If it was my show I’d have called it I’ve Been Waiting All My Life To Fuck Up Like This — yes, a line stolen from Karel Reisz and Robert Stone‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain? (’78).
Essence of my review: “Despite the downish tone of this heist-gone-wrong ensemble chase thriller, it’s fundamentally a low-key noir comedy…sardonic sarcasm meets ‘fuck our lousy luck and Jesus, have we fucked things up or what?’ meets a kind of loserKeystoneCopsmentality.
“It’s basically about the oafish shenanigans of a squad of half-assed, not-smart-enough but not altogether disreputable guys, principally played by Damon (who produced through Artists Equity) and Casey Affleck (who co-wrote the script with Chuck Maclean). Their performances are sweet, sublime, spot-on.
“I was truly delighted by this existential crime sitcom, which is darklyhilariouswithouteverquiteannouncingthatit’sahah–hah ‘comedy‘. It’s certainly too smart and cool for the idiots out there who hate the idea of mixing humor and loser-stamped noir. It almost delivers the same kind of tonal balancing act that Pulp Fiction was about.
“And the supporting cast is aces — Hong Chau, Paul Walter Hauser, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina, Toby Jones, Jack Harlow, etc.”
Last night and for the third or fourth time I re-watched Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Teorema, and I swear to God it’s an even bigger wallop now. Expanded, deepened…a flotation experience.
HE hereby pledges to visit the white Teorema mansion (Via Palatino, 16, 20148 Milano) when I return to Italy seven months hence.
Pasolini and the entire cast (Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Anne Wiazemsky, Laura Betti) have passed. Only the red-haired son, played by Andrés José Cruz Soublette, is still with us.
Tuesday, 1.13, 2:15 pm: Between public GoFundMe and private Venmo, the Cannes/Venice campaign has raised $3000 after four days…certainly a good start. That’s only about 40% of the target goal ($8K), and yet the pace of accumulation feels…well, a wee bit sluggish.
True, there’s plenty of time to get there — 2026 has barely begun — but I’d ideally like to see this campaign come to a happy conclusion by, say, this time next month, or certainly by March 1st. (Wouldn’t you if you were in my position?)
I’m looking to raise $4K per festival or $8K total. Rent, air fare, train fare, low-rent meals, cappucinos, baguettes, etc.
Please remember that I’m not “begging” for dough, as a few haters have claimed. I’m simply attempting to attract donations in a different, far less draining manner than the monthly method used by other webzines and columnists. I’m just asking for a one-off gimmee of $25 or $50 and whatever feels right. HE stopped paywalling this site a couple of years ago, and so the regularly refreshed content is entirely free and wide open, and this — this! — is the only pitch I’m making.
I’ve shed buckets of spiritual blood for this site over the last 21 and 1/2 years. Buckets.
Again, $25 or $50…. whatever’s affordable. Oh, and if you’d rather keep your donation anonymous, please send it to my Venmo account — @gruver56.
Special offer to haters: No name-brand Hollywood columnist has had more darts, steak knives and horse manure flung in his/her direction over the last eight years or so. (Except for poor Sasha Stone — she’s been taking it in the neck since the summer of ’24.) I’ve been routinely shot with thousands upon thousands of sharp arrows by woke fanatics, and boy, do they lay it on! If there are such places as heaven and hell, the HE haters, trust me, will be roasting on a spit in the immediate wake of their demise. This, therefore, is their chance to free their souls. One decent donation and I, for what it’s worth, will offer a measure of charitable forgiveness in the usual…uhm, saintly, turn-the-other-cheek way. The haters may roast anyway because of other (many?) transgressions, but HE-wise their consciences will be clean.
In my Venice Film Festival review of Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee, I noted that Shaker founder Ann Lee, who lived until age 48, “was flat-faced and rather ugly, and that Seyfried (who turned 40 in December) is, of course, beautiful, so the film’s realism is lacking in this regard.
“And as long as hotness is on the table, 35-year-old Stacy Martin, who plays Jane Wardley, a British born co-founder of the Shakers, is way too attractive to play a woman who’s into a no-sex, God-and-only-God lifestyle…one look at Martin and you’re thinking “what is she doing with this bunch?”
Kristi Coulter has tried to ridicule me for sharing this observation, but hot women rarely renounce the perks that are naturally and plentifully given to them. Guys too. The truth is that abundantly dishy persons never join secular oddball religious cults because…like, why? The world is at their feet so why turn inward?
John Huston got away with casting the prim and prudish Deborah Kerr as a nun in Heaven Knows, Mr, Allison (’57), but would any sensible director have cast Marilyn Monroe in a similar role? Attractiveness is as attractiveness does.
I’ve always had trouble believing the central premise of Alfred Hitchcock‘s I Confess, which was that a young guy who looks like Montgomery Clift would become a humble, soft-spoken priest in Quebec. He’s simply too pretty for that.
The fetching Jean Simmons played a version of 1920s evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in Elmer Gantry (’60), but at the end of Act Two she began fucking Burt Lancaster. (Gantry was directed by Simmons’ husband, Richard Brooks.)
I’ve always respected Jeffrey Hunter‘s performance as the Nazarene in King of Kings (’61), but nobody accepted his being cast in the role. He was way too beautiful..those radiant blue eyes, that golden-brown hair, those perfectly pedicured toes.
Why would actor-director-producer Timothy Busfield, a 68 year-old, well-established, name-brand player, behave in a way that might blow up his career and possibly envelop him in ruin?
Busfield hasn’t been accused by a couple of young actors (twins) of blatant sexual molestation — they’ve basically said he just touched them or, in Busfield’s version, possibly “tickled”** them inappropriately — but we can all sense recklessness and some kind of absurd urge to self-destruct.
The alleged behavior happened between 2022 and ’24, during the filming of The Cleaning Lady, a TV series on which Busfield was an exec producer (i.e., one of many).
Is the prospect of gently touching a young guy’s schlong with the tips of your fingers that transporting?…so theoretically transporting that it’s worth risking your stability, employability and industry-wide reputation…hell, everything that means anything?
3:45 pm update: “Actor and director Timothy Busfield surrendered to New Mexico authorities Tuesday after a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with child sex abuse charges. He insisted he was innocent before being taken into custody.”
** Tickling young guys sounds suspiciously similar to Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky having claimed he was just “horsing around” with young football players.
The ICE agent who slipped and fell on his ass the other day? Big deal. It happens to intemperate guys in a big hurry. But the bros who laughed and whooped like hyenas and called the ICE agent a pussy for falling and so on? Those guys were behaving like cheap little weenies. Sadistic bullies. I’m not in any way empathizing with Minnesota ICE thugs, but I hate those giggling streetside twats.
During his eight-year administration Obama ejected 3,066,457, averaging 383,307 per year, which is significantly higher than Trump’s tally so far. Obama’s nickname in this regard — “deporter in chief” — speaks for itself.
It follows that illegal immigration is not an imagined blight, and that giving the heave-ho to offenders is not an inherently evil thing.
But the Immigration Customs Enforcement storm troopers have persuaded millions otherwise, at least as far as their reported (i.e., video-captured) activities are concerned. Widely loathed and deeply despised isn’t the half of it.
This recent gas-station confrontation (i.e., the usual aggressive chaos) in St. Paul was posted this morning by the N.Y. Post. What an effusion of misery on both sides.
According to recent stats, starting pay for ICE agents is around $48K to $50K. “Experienced” agents pull down between $71,674 and $93,175. Annual pay for “senior” agents ranges between $99,628 and $129,517. Jonathan Ross, the killer of Renee Good, is reportedly a senior-level agent. He lives in a Minneapolis suburb, and is reportedly married with kids.
Videos show that Ross, positioned in front of Good’s car, shot her without urgent cause…intemperately, angrily (“fucking bitch”). But Good and her wife were reportedly agitating, and we all understand Good would be alive today if she’d just chilled and submitted when told to “get out of the fucking car.” Instead she panicked and peeled out.
Two days ago (1.10.26), Iran International reported that at least 2,000 protesters — a conservative estimate — had been killed nationwide over the previous 48 hours. Amidst an internet and power blackout, Iranian security forces have been blowing away demonstrators en masse with no-holds-barred brutality.
Yesterday afternoon (1.11) the Guardian ran a story that was headlined “the streets are full of blood“…”Iranian protests gather momentum as regime cracks down.”
Trump has said U.S. forces might strategically hit Iran if the government continues to murder protestors. Obviously that’s what they’re doing. So…?
PBS.org: “‘We’re looking at some very strong options,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday night. Asked about Iran’s threats of retaliation, he said: “If they do that, we will hit them at levels that they’ve never been hit before.”
‘Trump said that his administration was in talks to set up a meeting with Tehran, but cautioned that he may have to act first as reports of the death toll in Iran mount and the government continues to arrest protesters.
“‘I think they’re tired of being beat up by the United States,’ Trump said. ‘Iran wants to negotiate.'”
@cbsnews International journalists such as CBS News’ Holly Williams and others can’t get into Iran amid protests throughout the country against the regime. Williams reports from Erbil, Iraq, close to the Iraq-Iran border, where despite a media and internet blackout, Iranians are telling their story of resistance. #Iran#protests♬ original sound – cbsnews
I’m a person who walks around with a generally dispassionate view of the cosmic scheme of things (intelligent design over moralistic whatever), and yet my GoldenGlobereactions last night were punctuated with several emotional “thank God!” exclamations.
Largely, I admit, in response to this or that Golden Globe nominee losing or being ignored. Otherwise I nodded, grunted, chortled and groaned.
Congrats to Team Hamnet for taking the Best Motion Picture — Drama trophy. This happened, of course, because of the emotional power punch of the final 15 minutes. I accept this cause-and-effect.
I would have voted for the far-more-elegant, way-more-penetrating SentimentalValue, but that’s me.
My final client of the night, a very bright and emotionally upbeat Stratford resident, said he didn’t actually know what Hamnet is. (Until I gave him the rundown.) I’m sorry but award-season hoopla just doesn’t matter much to even well-educated Average Joes. Now more than ever, I mean.
Congrats to Timothee Chalamet and Jessie Buckley for winning in their respective categories.
The GG loonies actually placed IfIHadLegsI’dKickYou, arguably themostexasperatingandemotionallysuffocatingmisery–virusfilmof2025, in the Musical + Comedy realm. Rose Byrne brought the mute nostril agony like no other actress last year, and she took the M + C Best Actress award…gaaahh!
I was able to accept Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Director win for OneBattleAfterAnother (which won the top prize in the musical + comedy category) as a kind of career achievement, gold-watch thing, He’s 55, has been on the phenomenal auteur path since the mid ‘90s, has a snow-white beard, etc.
There’snopointinmy mentioningthat OBAA is a financial failure and a lefty-bubble phenomenon. It’s basically Crash, and I don’t mean Cronenberg.
But PTA snatching the Best Screenplay trophy away from both SentimentalValue’s Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier and Marty Supreme’s Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie struck me as nutso, given the ludicrous construction and arc of Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw character.
Yesterday afternoon I was openly praying for the absurdly over-praised Sinners to be blanked in the merit realm, and it was! No Best Screenplay award!
Ludwig Goransson’s Best Original Score trophy aside, Sinners’ only other win was basically a Joe and Jane Popcorn attaboy back-pat thing — i.e., a GG Cinematic and Box-Office Achievement award.
Thank God SentimentalValue’s Stellan Skarsgard won for Best Supporting Actor. I was afraid that Value might be shut out entirely due to the dull-witted slow boaters…the none-too-brights who lack the sensitivity to comprehend and appreciate what Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix winner gently probes and reveals.
GG voters declared last night that OBAA’s Teyana Taylor (whose “Perfidia Beverly Hills” performance is okay but no great shakes) is more deserving of their Best Supporting Actress trophy than Weapons’ Amy Madigan or Sentimental Value’s Inga IbsdotterLilleaas? Yeah, but for bullshit reasons.
They went for Taylor because (a) they needed a significant non-white winner and (b) because they couldn’t pronounce, much less spell, Inga’s middle and last names.
