Month: September 2026

Lido-Bound Backwash

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Each morning around 6:45 am this correspondent settles into a churning, rumbling vaporetto cruise across the Venice lagoon. Talk about joie de vivre…a daily reminder of how life can massage or excite or enthrall those who are lucky or fortunate enough to experience such a journey. I won’t let myself feel blase about this.

Easily Among Malkovich’s Greatest Film Roles, If Not His All-Time Best

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Eight months ago I tapped out “Peak Malkovich“, a hurried career assessment of a widely-acknowledged mythical actor whose actual age (73) is exactly the same as his Wild Horse Nine character, a grizzled, bewhiskered, cancer-afflicted CIA guy named Chris.

In fact Malkovich looks more like 83 than 73 in this Martin McDonagh film (he looked spiffier during today’s Venice Film Festival press conference), but that’s how genetic inheritances tend to work from time to time.

I wrote last December that Malkovich’s 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 (’97), and finally his multitudinous self in Being John Malkovich (’99).

We all know that Malkovich rebounded in Burn After Reading (’08). I for one went apeshit. Excerpt: “I’ve long felt that his alcoholic, self-deluding, furiously frustrated Osborne Cox, another CIA guy, is not only his greatest-ever film performance, but one of the greatest comedic film performances ever…because Cox is grounded in actual, real-deal rage.” That’s what I said eight months ago, yes, and now that statement is invalid.

Because JM has rebounded yet again with what may be his greatest, certainly his most touching film role ever — a guy who feels badly about all the death and convulsion that he’s activated over the decades, and who is looking to “shed his corroded skin”, so to speak, while thinking about the right or fitting way to end it all.

Chris is an increasingly feeble but uninhibited fellow who seems mostly out to lunch in the film’s early portions but gradually gathers more and more pizazz and lucidity and fuck-all conviction. This is the glory of his sly performance…the way it almost imperceptibly gains, gains and gains.

Malkovich will be aggressively campaigned for Best Actor over the final four months of ’26 and then the first two months of ’27 (the special Telluride tribute happening this weekend is the official kick-off). This is a go-for-broke moment for Malkovich-Malkovich-Malkovich. I can easily see him taking the gold statuette on 3.14.27. The only thing that could keep this from happening will be Malkovich’s aloof manner and stubborn integrity…his general loathing of sell-sell-sell.

Variety‘s Guy Lodge has summarized Wild Horse Nine as “two CIA agents go on holiday to Easter Island” just prior to the Chilean military coup of 1973, “and then [the story] ending with a small lump in the throat”.

I disagree with “small” — the lump in the throat is fortified by Chris’s resignation and melancholy self-acknowledgment. It therefore leaves a lingering residue. We’re not contemplating Malkovich himself hanging up his spurs or six-shooter, but we’re certainly pondering the last 40 or 45 years of his storied life and career, and this kind of bittersweet reflection tends to stick to the ribs or at least moisten the cheeks.

What are the odds that Malkovich will land another role as good as Chris between now and whenever things finally come to an end? We know they’re fairly slight. HE says “go for the gusto while the going is good.”

Steinem Was Smart, Sensible, Brave, Perceptive

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Gloria Steinem was major. From her berth in Manhattan and beginning early in the Nixon administration, she sparked a change in social consciousness while introducing “Ms.” as a substitute for “Miss” or “Mrs.” as she advanced the new cause of women’s liberation in the late ’60s and for many decades beyond.

For 55 years she was the face of the movement — iconic, sensible, articulate and dignified — and she had great-looking gray-streaked hair and wore fetching tinted glasses.

And she wasn’t a bot. An ideologue, yes, but a politically sklillful, practical-minded one. And quite attractive or, if you will, bonerish in her heyday. And contentedly sexual with a string of distinguished boyfriends including Mort Sahl, Mike Nichols, Jim Brown, Robert Benton, Rafer Johnson, Mort Zuckerman, etc. Steinem earned everyone‘s respect and allegiance. Steinem was 92 when she passed. Tip of hat, hand on heart.

Delusional Risk Junkies on Slopes of Everest

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Don’t kid yourself — Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin‘s Everest:The Other Side is perhaps (and I take no comfort in reporting this) the most appalling, deeply repulsive, crazy-town mountain-climbing doc ever made.

It’s about the perils and pitfalls of being a do-or-die Mount Everest risk junkie, and about a blissfully lunatic rationale that seeks to enoble reckless mountain-climbing behavior of the most irrational kind.

The invisible subtitle of Everest: The Other Side is “we have a rendezvous with death, and we’re going to get there sooner or later.”

The doc’s basic sell is that attaining your mountain-climbing (or more precisely mountain-skiing) dream is such an ecstatic thing that common sense is something to be rigorously avoided at all costs. The doc literally celebrates this attitude.

On top of which the film struck me as evasive if not dishonest in terms of conveying the basic facts about two horrible tragedies that befell mountaineering athlete Jim Morrison — (a) the September 2022 avalanche-related death of Morrison’s wife Hilaree Nelson, and (b) the 2011 plane crash death of Morrison’s first wife, private pilot Katie Morrison, near Barstow — a tragedy that also killed Jim and Katie’s two small children, Wyatt and Hannah.

The astounding feat of not just scaling the north face of Mount Everest in the face of horrific winds and sudden avalanches but compounding the risk by attempting to ski down the Everest slope…c’mon!

Everest-skiing strikes me as the height of privileged, Telluride-dwelling rich-person arrogance, and not too far in my mind from Alan B. Shepard‘s hitting a couple of golf balls on the moon.

I respect Mr. Morrison’s determination to push on despite nature and life itself repeatedly urging him to reconsider, but I despise his attempt to glorify this denial with optimistic, fairy-tale bromides about believing in your dreams, etc.

Official Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi statement: “Everest: The Other Side examines the trade-offs required to pursue extraordinary goals. We set out to make this film not only because Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson’s story grips you, but because Hilaree was a singular human being.

“After tragedy strikes, Jim makes a deliberate choice to fulfill their shared dream, offering a parable of how to endure grief. Seven years in the making, the film required documenting a near-impossible expedition to one of the most remote places on earth.”

All this aside, the doc’s cinematography is entirely breathtaking…congrats to Chin and Vasarhelyi on this score alone.

A Certain Shunning?

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Casey Affleck‘s Company, an allegedly unsettling mystery told within three time frames, will screen next Tuesday for Venice Film Festival press. I know nothing, but the advance word sounds pretty good. If the buzz proves valid, some will wonder why no other film festivals have extended a welcome — no Telluride, no Toronto, no New York, no London.

There’s a reason why this has gotten the cold shoulder from every festival except Venice, I gather, and it has nothing to do with the alleged quality of Company. Do the math.

Boilerplate: “Company is an upcoming mystery film, co-written and directed by Casey Affleck, starring Nick Nolte, Adelaide Clemens, Ben Mendelsohn, Scoot McNairy, Emily Alyn Lind and Caylee Cowan.”