Costarring Russell Crowe, Shailene Woodley and Room‘s Jacob Tremblay as Ted Kaczynski, Unabomber (Netflix, 9.25.26) was actually directed by Janus Metz Pedersen and written by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves.
Pic alternates between two timelines — Kaczynski’s time attending Harvard University as an undergrad (’59 through ’62) and his prolonged manhunt decades later.
There’s a new zero-content Netflix teaser for the forthcoming David Fincher film that everyone (and I mean people of all ages, races and creeds and from all corners of the world) has known for many months as The Adventures of Cliff Booth, and I don’t want to hear any nyah-nyah bullshit about this. This title has been commonly embraced and kicked-around for well over a year.
In any event the new teaser raises three issues of concern. For me anyway.
Netflix reported earlier today that The Adventures of Cliff Booth has now officially been titled (it’s really been re-branded) with an almost nonsensical six-word whateverism — The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth.
First, the hyphen between “Mis” and “Adventures” is arch and stupid. The word is spelled “misadventures.” If you’ve misread a sentence or mispronounced someone’s name or mislabeled a retail product or been misinformed (as Humphrey Bogart was about the Casablanca waters) or have been misinterpreted in some way, nobody uses a hyphen.
Second, “further misadventures” alludes, obviously, to previous misadventures. A misadventure means “an unlucky accident, a piece of bad luck, or a mishap that leads to a bad result.”
So what misadventures did Cliff Booth get into in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood?
Okay, that fight with Bruce Lee on a movie lot. In a stretch. Or, if we’re talking flashbacks, that “accidental” spear-gunning of Cliff’s late wife. But otherwise not much. That visit to the Spahn Ranch was a colorful, character-defining episode, not a misadventure. Was Cliff’s pit bull biting into the balls of Tex Watson or Cliff punching out one of those manic Manson girls inside Rick Dalton‘s home…was that a misadventure?
Third, the visual content of the new teaser is so rote and lazy that it makes you wonder “who in their right mind decided that a brief clip of a cigarette-smoking Brad Pitt driving his car from a reclining position (which is dangerous by the way) was an acceptable tease when the film in question is due to open in three months?”
This is the kind of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tease that you might see when a film has just begun to film or is otherwise several months away from opening. Basic marketing tradition requires something that advances the basic Cliff Booth-in-1977 narrative. The newbie, in short, is lazy dogshit.
This tells me that Fincher is not really in gear on this film, editing-wise.
Jeff Sneider reported a few weeks back that Fincher was “unhappy with the movie as it was currently constituted — something that is apparently par for the course on every one of his movies.” Sneider has also “heard” that screenwriter Quentin Tarantino [has] also expressed “disappointment with the current cut, which makes sense, given that he’s an extremely particular filmmaker.”
Yes, TFMOCB is still expected to debut on 11.25 upon IMAX screens. I can definitely smell trouble on this one. I wish it were otherwise.
I would have never said the word “hillbilly” in the presence of Dolly Parton…never! At the very least because it would have been cruel and insulting.
And yet the “h” word would have also conveyed a certain geographical truth as Parton came from the east Tennessee hills, a.k.a. the smokeys. Resting on the banks of the Little Pigeon River, her home town is called Pittman Center, which was a kind of Dogpatch-like community. Yes, the term implies that rural Deliverance people (yokels, hayseeds, rednecks, bumblefucks) are hopelessly backward and perhaps deserving of mild scorn. But leaving aside the cliches (the Griner brothers or that backwoods ruffian who raped Ned Beatty), are they? The answer is a firm “no or hardly ever.”
The fact is that a lack of education (a hillbilly hallmark outside of your self-educated Abe Lincoln types) does not imply a lack of intelligence or talent in a given field. Parton, a gifted songbird, tough nut and a wise philosopher (“if you want the rainbow you gotta put up with the rain”) was a sterling example of this. “Undereducated” is merely an offshoot of random bad luck and unfortunate circumstance — it reveals nothing about character or aptitude.
But…but!…living an undereducated life during one’s formative, growing-up years tends to indicate if not foreshadow a kind of Dogpatch approach or attitude about things. It tends to foster a basic lack of curiosity, and a half-instinctual inclination to stay close to home and keep it local. Undereducated youths usually grow into undereducated adults, and this does tend to result in taking vacations to tightly controlled, sun-and-fun, Club Med-type places or family havens like Disneyland, Dollywood or Knott’s Berry Farm rather than, say, roaming around Europe on a rail pass or rumblehogging through the Middle East or Asia. It’s just how rural-stamped people tend to roll.
In a recent riff about Karen Black‘s Rayette Dipesto, a devoted follower of Tammy Wynette-type country values, I described her as “an obviously decent person…perhaps not the brightest bulb and perhaps cinema’s least worldly character this side of Robert Duvall‘s Boo Radley, but a genuine, open-hearted, emotionally vulnerable human being. And yet, to Jack Nicholson‘s Bobby Dupea or to any prospective husband or partner, Rayette also reps a guarantee of a certain kind of cultural isolation on earth…Bobby Dupea knows that he’s looking at a kind of Bakersfield penal colony existence if he marries her and the kid comes along. She bores him to death.”
“You’re like a crossing guard standing in front of a school but you’re not doing anything with your arms, so the cars are just plowing down the children” — Bill Burr‘s Charlie to Jeremy Strong‘s Mark Zuckerberg in Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning (Sony, 10.9).
Everyone was presuming Reckoning would have a big Venice Film Festival debut, but then shootings of supplemental scenes were scheduled and Venice went south. Very disappointing.
Why can’t I remember the title of this thing? I try and try, and every time I half to rely on the phone. Social Network, Social Contract, Social Projection…can’t lock it down.
HE to brusquely dismissive HE commentariat (update): “Wow…you guys are saying this new trailer has basically shot the film in the leg and all but foretold general critical diminishment. I didn’t receive that impression but have at it. I mainly feel great about Burr being in this.”
The late Tim Curry was gifted and dynamic enough to capture performative lightning in a bottle and thereby enjoy a splendid peak moment with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, both on-stage and in the 1975 midnight-movie version.
Curry was subsequently nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his roles as The Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance (1982 — I only saw Kevin Kline’s version of this role, performed at the Delacorte in Central Park — and King Arthur in Spamalot (2006–2007).
Curry also earned three Tony Award noms — (a) Best Actor in a Play for his role as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Amadeus (1981), (b) Best Actor in a Musical for My Favorite Year (’92) and Spamalot (2005).
Last night and for the first time in my life I finally watched Anthony Mann‘s The Fall of the Roman Empire (’64), a super-pricey, grand-scaled, cast-of-thousands 70mm spectacle of ancient Rome.
It’s generally known that Ben Barzman, Basilio Franchina and Philip Yordan‘s script of TFOTRE more or less served as the basic template of Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator (’00), which was co-written by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson.
Mann’s film is essentially Gladiator minus the revenge plot (Russell Crowe‘s Maximus, a Roman military commander, determined to take down Joaquin Phoenix‘s Commodus for ordering the murder of his wife and son) and the gladiator arena. No thumbs up or thumbs down — no “are you not entertained?”…none of that.
The Fall of the Roman Empire‘s Maximus-like character, a mirror of the main protagonist played by Crowe, is called Livius (Stephen Boyd). Commodus, the deranged and wicked son of Marcus Aurelius (Alec Guinness under Mann, Richard Harris under Scott), is played by Christopher Plummer. Lucilla, the sister of Commodus, is played by Connie Neilsen in Gladiator and Sophia Loren in the Mann.
And the big violent climaxes of TFOTRE and Gladiator are nearly the same (Maximus vs. Commodus in the Colisseum; Livius vs. Commodus in the Mann).
Mann’s version runs 185 minutes plus overture and intermission; Scott’s clocks in at 155 minutes. Mann’s was critically panned for the most part, and a total financial bust ($16 million to produce, $4.8 million in earnings). Plus it was all but ignored at the Oscars.
Scott’s collected two significant Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actor for Crowe) while reaping massive financial success ($103 million budget, $466 million gross).
But there’s no question that The Fall of the Roman Empire, a stiffer, talkier and generally less bloody and combative film than Gladiator, is much more of a visual knockout than Scott’s version. It’s a simple, obvious fact that TFOTRE is completely CG-free and 100% real–world — every last Roman and Barbarian soldier and all the chariots, swords, shields, helmets and tunics…every eye-filling shot, every last element.
There’s a grim, stately and haunting snowfall scene depicting the funeral of Aurelius [above], adorned with dozens if not hundreds of torches and aurally flooded with the strange, mournful humming of Roman soldiers. [It’s unfortunate that there’s no decent YouTube clip of this scene — it looked wonderful last night via 1080p streaming.]
And the sets (particularly a massive, bigger-than-a-football-field reconstruction of the Roman forum) are 100% genuine and non-illusional while Scott’s film was heavily CG’ed. And the Ultra Panavision 70 cinematography by Robert Krasker (The Third Man, Alexander the Great, El Cid) along with Veniero Colasanti and John Moore‘s production design…the real-world, hand-crafted look of this film is magnificent while much of Scott’s film was software .
And Dimitri Tiomkin‘s Roman Empire score is far more rousing (albeit in an old-school, “listen to this and feel the brassy vibes of ancient Rome!” sort of way) than Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard‘s Gladiator heart music.
And there’s absolutely no question that Plummer’s demonic Commodus performance comes from a much higher realm — more emotionally varied, far more specific and skillful and close to dazzling in a formalist, RADA-like fashion…a far better thing than what Phoenix delivered. Pheonix’s Commodus is a crude, sickfuck psycho; Plummer’s is richer, quirkier, more delicate.
James Mason, playing an Aurelius confidante named Timonides, also stands out with a magnificent, impassioned speech (human values vs. brute military strategy) that he delivers to the Roman Senate.
Mann’s film was shot in Ultra Panavision 70 with a 2.76:1 aspect ratio, but it was reportedly never screened in that format. (Not once!) Instead, it was apparently screened with a 2.20:1 aspect ratio for 70mm roadshow presentations, and in 35mm at 2.35:1 during the film’s general release.
The current, streaming version (2.35:1) looks fine, but it’s a crying shame that Krasker’s extra-wide-angle framings (the same aspect ratio used for Raintree County, Ben-Hur, Mutiny on the Bounty and The Hateful Eight) have apparently been lost forever.
…except for the fact that Donald Trump is a fundamentally criminal, foam-at-the-mouth authoritarian sociopath. His largely justified loathing of fanatical woketards doesn’t excuse who and what he is, and his continuing attempts to methodically dismantle and destroy our democracy are unforgivable. (Not to mention that forthcoming vulgar ballroom.)
And the 2020 election was honestly won by Joe Biden…period.
Otherwise Sasha is telling it straight and plain here. What she says happened to her over the last decade, and what was triggered by the metamorphosis that she experienced and what she wrote as a result…it all really happened this way.
All she had to do was call out Trump for being the beast that he is. If she’d simply done this while sticking to her anti-woke cultural-political perceptions….who knows ?
Again, the Green Book saga.
Summer of the Shark is really good.
I posted “my story” on TikTok and got a lot of views for it. FYI. I love the TikTok filters, lol. pic.twitter.com/hchXBToSnO
— Sasha Stone (@realsashastone) August 25, 2026
…that just as female disdain for straight white males is becoming more and more of a thing, is it any surprise that in the midst of this toxic climate that wealthy white guys are apparently developing more and more of a yen for synthie girlfriends? One begets the other. Peace in the valley. Let the biological harridans stew in their own juices.
I’ve been posting impressions of Boorman and the Devil for nearly a year now, but here are a few fresh paragraphs from my just-up N.Y. Sun review. (Tapped out yesterday.) The review will also be included in the Sun‘s printed edition on Thursday, 8.27. The film opens at Manhattan’s Quad the following day.
The sad passing of Dolly Parton, 80, is hereby acknowledged and mourned. She was iconic in the country music realm, of course, and cinematically hit it big…well, fairly big in four ’80s films, principally the feminist-minded 9 to 5 (1980), a workplace comedy that costarred Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (’82) opposite Burt Reynolds and the great Charles Durning.
These were the two most respected Parton films, for sure. The most finely crafted, most critically approved. (Right?)
It would be dishonest not to call the light-hearted Rhinestone (’84), in which she costarred with Sylvester Stallone, an embarassment. Parton was fine in Steel Magnolias (’89), which did reasonably well with critics and ticket-buyers.
Parton also starred in A Smoky Mountain Christmas (’86), Wild Texas Wind (1991), Unlikely Angel (’96) and Blue Valley Songbird (’99). She also costarred with James Woods in Straight Talk (’92).
Due respect but, to many of us, the country-music world is a whole ‘nother planet. Until today I hadn’t given Parton or her career a single thought since the late ’80s. She was best known for her down-home effervescence I suppose…her “aw shucks”, self-effacing sense of humor + plus her songwriting skills. These and her Double Dees, of course. Where would she have been without them?
In a 1967 interview with Kenneth Tynan, Richard Burton famously stated [25:20] that “the only interesting parts to play are defeated men.”
The basic idea was that successful heroes are “always faintly boring” — true. But there’s a significant difference, I feel, between struggling, wounded, conflicted, insecure, hubris-afflicted, blindly boastful, fatally flawed or anxiety-plagued men, and those I would call defeated, which is to say pathetic — a man who’s fallen to his knees and is more or less reduced to lamenting his failures and life’s random tendency to be cruel. A broken, tragic figure.
In all my decades of moviegoing there has been no more pathetic character…more self-loathing, servile, groveling…than Burton’s Marc Antony in Cleopatra, especially in the film’s second half. Tynan made a point of mentioning Burton’s Antony — “a passive antihero” — as a preface to his question: “Do you think that kind of role suits you?”
Most certainly, Burton answered. “This is why the great tragedies are so attractive to actors,” he explained. “One must always play a defeated man. Hamlet is a defeated man. Macbeth is a defeated man. Lear is a defeated man, They’re all defeated men. Othello, Iago. Antony fascinated me for this particular reason.”
The psychiatrist Martin Dysart in Equus…half-defeated in a sense but not altogether. In Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (’65), Burton’s Alec Leamas isn’t defeated but he’s certainly a melancholy type, and in the final seconds of Spy he totally surrenders, allowing himself to be shot by East German border guards.
Upon his initial viewing of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s rough cut of Cleopatra, 20th Century Fox honcho Daryl F. Zanuck was all but consumed with loathing for Burton’s Antony. He reportedly complained to colleagues that Elizabeth Taylor‘s titular character was too dominant over Antony. “If any woman behaved towards me like Cleopatra treated Antony,” Zanuck reportedly said, “I would cut her balls off.”
Antony and John Turturro‘s Bernie Bernbaum -in-Miller’s Crossing aside, which performances rank as the most pathetic male characters in motion picture history?
But why? Is it because Sutton Foster‘s stage manner (her voice or coy expressions?) rubs me the wrong way? Is it because I hate tap-dancing musicals as a rule and this number especially because, unlike the balletic street dancing in West Side Story or the dream ballet sequenbces in Oklahoma and Carousel, it offers zero undercurrent or context of any kind? Because it’s all “look how hard we’re trying and how much we’ve rehearsed and how lithe and limber we are and how we just luhhhhv smiling those beaming, gleaming smiles”?