“A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.” — Francis Coppola by way of George C. Scott by way of George S. Patton.

Of all the high achievers who passed in 2025, the ones I felt closest to or saddest about were Robert Redford, Frank Gehry, Tom Stoppard, Terence Stamp, Diane Keaton, Marianne Faithfull, David Johansen, Giorgio Armani, Brian Wilson, Michael Madsen and Sly Stone.

I was shocked and startled by the mad-dog cruelty that removed Rob Reiner and wife, Michele Singer Reiner, from our sphere.

For whatever reason I didn’t feel all that much about poor Gene Hackman. I certainly felt sorry about the undignified manner in which he left the planet, but that was something else.

“Stoplight With Hackman,” posted on 1.28.21: Sometime in the summer or early fall of ’94 (can’t remember which) I visited the Culver Studios set of Crimson Tide.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer had invited me. I hung around in a low-key way for two or three hours. No chit-chats with “talent” or anyone except Jerry — basically an opportunity to see the nuclear submarine set, which was built to tilt and lean and shake around. I watched Tony Scott guide Gene Hackman through a confrontation scene over and over. I was maybe 100 feet away.

When you first arrive on a big movie set there’s nothing more exciting. And then you hang around for a while, doing nothing but watching and maybe shooting the shit with whomever and taking notes and sipping soft drinks and nibbling bagels, and you’re eventually bored stiff.

Eventually it was time to leave. I took a last look at the set, thanked Jerry, shook hands and briskly walked off the sound stage and back to my black 240SX Nissan. I eased out of the parking lot and drove north on Ince Blvd. I stopped at a red light at the corner of Ince and Culver Blvd.

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“No one could stand between my men and home. Not even me.”

To this I call bullshit. Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men were away for 20 effing years — the 10-year Trojan War plus another ten years of roaming around and getting into this and that adventure (cyclops, sirens, et. al.). I’d say that after a decade of fighting the Trojan War, Odysseus did stand between his men and home, and for a helluva long time at that.

You heard it here first — there’s a distinct possibility that The Odysssey is going to turn out to be a turgid, self-important whiff.

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While Meg Ryan is moaning and shrieking in her seat, Billy Crystal reacts in a low-key fashion. A subdued grimace, sharing polite looks with fellow diners, etc. But if director Rob Reiner had told Crystal to glance at the camera with an Oliver Hardy-like expression of pique, it would have been a tiny bit funnier.

Personal HE thanksgiving: I’m so grateful that I was lucky and fortunate enough to have lived through a mythic era of cinema and moviegoing. Basically my whole life until the near-death blow of the pandemic, and then the final blows that were recently delivered by Ted “Godzilla” Sarandos and the YouTube Oscars deal.

My decades of theatrical movie-watching were a true blessing, and yet are gone forever, never to return. Nothing lasts, everything fades.

Plus I feel so privileged that I still have access to the elite and magical vibes of viewing films at top-tier film festivals. Full houses, superb projection standards, seriously focused industry audiences, great post-screening discussions.

Why does my thankfulness feel so gloomy and resigned? Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman summed it up earlier today

“Consider the icing that last week was poured on top of the doomsday-of-cinema cake,” he began.

“In a bombshell development, it was announced that the Academy Awards, starting in 2029, will no longer be broadcast on ABC, or on any television network. A deal was struck so that you will watch them exclusively on YouTube.

“A friend says this sounds like some horrifically just-plausible-enough satirical premise out of Seth Rogen’s The Studio, and he’s right: In what world are the Oscars going to be an event on YouTube?

“I get it: The monoculture is fading. Broadcast television is no longer the centralized force it once was. And a YouTubed Oscars could have an impressive international reach.

“Yet forget all that for a moment and listen to your gut. It’s beyond obvious that the Oscars on YouTube would be radically diminished — that they would go from being must-see TV to maybe-see semi-background noise.

“And the timing is nearly karmic. The YouTube Oscars that a fading number of viewers will care about is set to come along just as a newly baptized Netflix Warner Bros. is diluting the appeal of theatrical enough so that only a fading number of viewers will care about them.
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“An extinction-level event? Yes, it could be.

“Unless forces within the industry see what’s at stake, and rise up to fight it.”

HE to Gleiberman: Fight it how? By kidnapping Ted Sarandos like Robert DeNiro and Sandra Bernhard kidnap Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy?

Owen hasn’t mentioned the other big reason why Joe and Jane Popcorn have quit theatrical movies, and that’s the instructional woke shit (racial identity, sexuality, gender plus “all whites are mostly bad”) that movies began peddling sometime in the mid to late teens.

Wokey currents began diminishing in mid ’24, true, but malignant habits die hard.

Robert Mitchum‘s Jeff Bailey: “There may not be a way to win [in a casino], but there’s a way to lose more slowly.”

“Let Me Go“, a Mick Jagger-Keith Richards track on Emotional Rescue (6.20.80), is a second-tier thing, but it’s always been one of my all-time pleasurables. The breakup lyrics are blunt and dismissive. Jagger’s vocals are fine, but Richards’ guitar work is the hook. A blissful mood every time.

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Last night’s highly unusual thing was that I actually laughed out loud at a couple of SNL skits. The bloody Home Alone riff is truly wonderful until it cops out at the 2:48 mark. And the first two written-by-Michael Che, read-by-Colin Jost jokes are hilarious. Okay, the third one is pretty good also.

Received this morning:

HE reply: I fear that a significant portion of the Joe and Jane Popcorn community is too timid-hearted, too robotic of attitude, too dull-witted and far too closed- and conventional-minded to really get the wild-ass, New York Jewish hustler, pogo-stick elation of Marty Supreme.

I wish it were otherwise. It’s easily the best smarthouse–meets–megaplex movie of 2025. I can’t wait to see it another two or three times, minimally. It really is a Raging Bull-level thing.

That said, it’s time for all the Marty Supreme devotionals to link arms, begin chanting in unison and put an end to One Battle After Another’s Erwin Rommel German tank award-season blitzkrieg.

OBAA is very well crafted and acted, but the main plot driver — Sean Penn’s rightwing, starched-fatigue asshat colonel needing to kill his biological light-skinned African American daughter to gain membership into a secret white racist club — is around-the-bend stupid and hugely irritating.

It’s basically propelled by an insane lefty-fantasy theology that, if rewarded with a Best Picture Oscar, will further characterize (i.e., tarnish the image of) the Hollywood community as kneejerk lefty wackos living on their own secular planet.

Marty Supreme is on a whole ‘nother cinematic spiritual level.

“Timothee Chalamet A Smash In Spectacular Screwball Ping-Pong Hellzapoppin'” — from Peter Bradshaw‘s 12.1.25 Guardian review:

“Marty Supreme’s Megawatt Personality,” Richard Brody, The New Yorker — 12.19:

“In Josh Safdie’s hectic new film, Timothée Chalamet plays a gifted ping-pong player who’s also a born performer.

“Though Marty Supreme is based (albeit loosely) on the true story of someone else’s life, it’s Safdie’s most personal film to date. It’s one of the very few movies that dramatize — hyperbolically, comedically, even mockingly, yet optimistically — the boldness unto folly of a young fanatic turning ambition into reality.

“I’m not, of course, suggesting that Safdie or Bronstein has ever done anything Marty-like—lied, cheated, threatened, insulted, seduced, betrayed, stolen, clobbered, been clobbered, or endangered others in pursuit of their art—but that, in imagining Marty, they’ve successfully extrapolated from the mind–bending extremes of energy and will that themovie life demands.

“Safdie, like Marty, bet on himself, starting with D.I.Y. filmmaking, and advancing through a decade-plus of critically acclaimed movies on the industry’s periphery. Now, with Marty Supreme, he’s in reach of the brass ring, even as he self-deprecatingly admits what it feels like to have fought his way there.”

A day ago Drew McWeeny said in an HE comment thread that the notion about Bill Hader having probably ignited Nick Reiner’s rage is “fucking deranged”.

“It’s not deranged,” I replied. “Hader’s response to Nick’s ‘are you famous?’ taunt was one of curt dismissal. He basically meant ‘you’re obviously being hostile and I absolutely don’t want to talk to you, chubbypants, not to mention to anyone wearing a ridiculous hoodie outfit…piss off.’

“Hader, in short, gave Nick a brief reality bullet. The alleged fact that Nick took this badly — he reportedly responded with a silent Manson lamps glare that lasted several seconds — tells us that Hader had given him a taste of blunt real-world disdain, which is something that he almost certainly never got from his soft-touch parents. Hader’s dismissal was almost certainly triggering. A few hours later Nick exploded with homicidal rage.

“’Hader did it’ is too simplistic, of course, but he almost certainly agitated or ignited the demons in Nick’s head.

“For what it’s worth, if I had been at Conan’s and if Nick had asked me if I was famous, I would have said “that’s not a sincere question…it’s a provocation. And I’m not going to be provoked. Bother someone else.”

The basic message of Jacob Savage’s The Lost Generation is that DEI didn’t hurt while-male boomers or GenXers, but it really messed with the careers of white-male Millennial screenwriters, journalists and academics, to name but three professional categories.

Great quote: “It’s a lot better to actually know you’re about to get hit by car than to not know.”

We’re allowed to say that guys like Jeremy Allen White or Benedict Cumberbatch lack conventional attractiveness, but if you say this about any actress you need to be seized, thrown into a hungry wolf pit and torn into shreds.