…in which I casually, briefly engaged with dozens upon dozens of Average Joes and Janes about this and that chit-chat topic, and when the subject of the year’s best films briefly surfaced, Joe and Jane had never heard of the tip-tops….Sentimental Value, Marty Supreme, Hamnet, et. al. It would have been one thing if they’d at least heard of these and were half-interested in streaming them down the road, but these and other titles drew a total effing blank. They’d never even heard of them. Morever, no one had even heard of last year’s Best Picture winner — Anora. Moviegoing used to be an accessible, mass-interest thing, at least as far as the end-of-the-year Oscar chasers were concerned. Movies have devolved into an elite cottage industry. I know, I know…this has been apparent for many years, but 2025 was the year in which this realization became inescapable. Joe and Jane have mostly checked out, given up, lost that lovin’ feelin’.

And in this order. Yes, that’s correct — The President’s Cake is judged to be a better, more nourishing film that One Battle After Another

1. Josh Safdie‘s Marty Supreme (the finest, most adrenalized, most type-A-meets-grade-A film of the year….no politics, just pogo sticks)
2. Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value (generates honest current, nails it, gets nothing wrong)
3. Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet (except it was overpraised in Telluride, and I know at least one critic who’s sorta kinda frowning)
4. Zach Cregger‘s Weapons
5. Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake (brilliant, transporting)
6. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (te second most overpraised film of the year, the first being Sinners)
7. Kent Jones‘ Late Fame
8. Kaouther Ben Hania‘s The Voice of Hind Rajib
9. Noah Baumbach‘s Jay Kelly.
10. (Special Feature Documentary Stand-Out) David Kittredge‘s Boorman and the Devil.

In the context of this highly divisive, incorrectly color-graded Bluray, the names Larry Smith and Criterion’s Lee Kline will live in infamy…talk about burnt bridges!

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Las night I re-watched Matt Tyrnauer‘s seven-year-old Studio 54, and it still delivers a great high for those who were young or youngish and occasionally clubbing and quaaluding back in the late Jimmy Carter era. It feels really soothing and heartwarming to revisit that bacchanalian atmosphere of yore, and it’s also a great Christmas movie in a certain sense.

The first half (i.e., before the downfall) delivers a robust high….the feeling is just as rich and levitational as the one you get from watching Alistair Sim‘s Scrooge (a.k.a. A Christmas Carol).

Studio 54 wasn’t just an immersive alternate-reality trip on West 54th near 8th Avenue — it was Shangrila. Swirling sounds, dancing until 2 or 3 am, possible sex, cocaine, nocturnal delights, quaaludes, drinks and that pounding thump-thump-BUHMP-BUHMP.

Oh, to have been a young buck in ’77 and ’78 and get waved through by Steve Rubell himself and then run into the levitational coolios (rock stars, journalists, models, authors, actors, producers, politicians) in that cellar-level salon…sniff, snort, stop it, you’re dreaming.

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I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Tyrnauer’s film is a fascinating, well-told tale — exciting, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad — that invites you to really sink into a mad Manhattan era (mid ’77 to early ’80) that was a real bacchanalian sweet spot — post-pill, pre-AIDS, sexual liberation and an abundance of cocaine and quaaludes (and the operational assistance of the beloved Edlich Pharmacy).

A few weeks ago it hit me why I’m so affected by Studio 54, above and beyond the nostalgia. It’s because it uses a brilliant up-and-down narrative strategy that works as a metaphor for how briefly youth lasts and how suddenly the best of times can end, and how two crafty fellows — Rubell and Ian Schrager — foresaw and caught hold of a special hedonism in the air, a certain what-the-fuckness that happened at just the right time and in just the right way, and all under the cultural auspices of a somewhat prudish and puritanical peanut-farmer president.

And for the first time ever, Schrager actually pokes his head out, sits down and talks to Tyrnauer about the whole saga, start to finish, no holds barred.

Tyrnauer’s strategy for the first hour is to give you a great contact high with the saga of Studio 54’s success — the cinematic equivalent of dropping a Lemmon 714 on an empty stomach.

Then it shifts into wistful melancholy as he relates how Rubell and Schrager struck it enormously rich only to see the whole thing collapse less than three years later. Their version of Studio 54 (it re-opened in 1981 under Mark Fleischman and continued for five years) launched in April of ’77 and closed in February ’80, right after which Schrader and Rubell went to jail for tax evasion.

Schrager recovered and went on to great success as a boutique hotelier; Rubell died of AIDS in 1989 at age 45.

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For the 47th or 48th time, The Shining gives good eerie here and there, but it’s never been scary. Creepy or ominously unnerving is fine, but “scary” is a very precise and deeply unsettling thing…an ansty-cold feeling in your blood and bones. On top of which Jack Nicholson‘s kabuki-like performance as Jack Torrance is a helluva lot “funnier” than Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson, lemme tell ya.

Roughly 45 and 2/3 years ago, I took cartoonist Chris Browne to an early press screening of The Shining. The old Warner screening room at 75 Rockefeller Plaza, I mean, on the eighth floor. Plush, nicely carpeted, 103 seats.

Browne, who passed on 2.7.23, began drawing his dad’s “Hagar the Horrible” strip in ’88, and was quite the guy in cartoonist circles.

It was a long-lead screening (sometime in late March of ’80) and we were lucky to see the slightly longer version of The Shining, the one that ended with Overlook manager Barry Nelson visiting Shelley Duvall in a hospital room after Nicholson’s frozen-icicle death.

Like Steven Spielberg after his initial viewing, I wasn’t all that knocked out. It was only years later, having watched The Shining for the eighth or twelfth time (who remembers?), that I realized it had seeped into my system and taken hold in some curious way.

A few critics were there at the March ’80 screening along with Buck Henry (glasses, tan baseball cap), Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen.

As soon as the lights came up Browne whipped out his sketch pad and, in the space of two or three minutes, drew a cartoon of Henry and his friends in their seats, their eyes wide with terror and with little piss puddles on the floor below. Browne went up to Henry in the downstairs lobby and showed him the drawing. I can recall Henry’s dryly bemused expression with absolute clarity.

Yesterday I wrote Chris on Messenger and asked if he still had that drawing. If so I asked if there was a chance he could scan it and send it my way. Or, failing that, if could he re-draw it and send it along. (As noted, the original only took him three minutes to draw it inside the screening room.) Chris graciously agreed to re-draw it but (a) without McDowell or Steenburgen, and (b) without the pee puddles. So here’s Buck again, and here’s to the lightning-fast creative derring-do of Chris Browne.

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Warped notions of what constitutes comedic are over-the-top these days. Leonardo DiCaprio‘s decision to look and sound like a stoner wreck (unshaven, bathrobe, “Viva La Revolucion!”) and behaving in a generally anxious and excitable manner is commendable as far as it goes, but it’s certainly not hah-hah funny or even heh-heh chuckly.

Behaving like the careless twat that I am, I dropped an unopened, totally sealed can of Diet Coke into my computer bag the other night. It had to stay sealed, I figured. Coke cans don’t open themselves, right? Well, this one fucking did and soon after my two-year-old 16-inch Macbook Pro — the newest one I own, the one with no problems to speak of — was toast. Totally ruined. Yesterday I was forced to buy a newbie on Back Market — Macbook Pro 2021 — Apple M1 Pro 10-core and 16-core GPU — 32GB RAM — SSD 512 GB. Less than $700. A good deal but fuck me all the same.

Season’s thanks & greetings to “HK Phooey” and “Glen Runciter Plays The Hits”…seriously.

Fair question: How does being beaten and bruised by an African Silverback woke gorilla goon squad translate into the “burning of bridges” (or vice versa)? Would it be fair to characterize a victim of China’s Great Cultural Revolution in the ‘60s and early ‘70s in such a way? Sui generis, pure as the driven snow.

Here‘s the 60 Minutes “Inside CECOT” report that Bari Weiss yanked a couple of days ago.

Sharyn Alfonsi‘s piece was essentially the same story that was reported by the N.Y. Times several weeks ago. “To run a story on this subject two months later, we need to do more,” Weiss has said. “And this is 60 Minutes. We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera.”

“Government silence is a statement, not a VETO,” Alfonsi stated. “Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”

Again, here’s the spiked segment.

I was and am as appalled, horrified and heartbroken about Rob and Michele Reiner’s murder as the next guy, but I really don’t care for adoration tributes. Reiner has been quickly deified over the last week or so, but I prefer to remember people as they actually were deep down, warts and all. Just share gently and honestly, and don’t be afraid to discuss this or that shortcoming. (Example: Albert Brooks talking about how young Rob was naive and clumsy with women.) Rob was a spiritually buoyant fellow and emotionally generous in so many respects, everyone says, but no jumping up and down about this. Keep it real.

Wolf of Wall Street Max Bellfort tribute message.

If you’ve been following the recent high-school squabble between prominent rightie columnists and podcasters, you know that last Thursday Ben Shapiro delivered a speech at AmFest in which he trashed the extreme conspiracy-minded fringe nutters (Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson) and one of their apologists (Megan Kelly).

Those who’ve been instinctively or habitually trashing Shapiro over the last four or five years need to give him a re-think. Shapiro is now a principled conservative who’s said “no” to the wackazoids. He’s now a man with a formidable backbone.

“Dial M Mauled By Fascists,” posted on 4.28.12:

The 1.78 or 1.85 a.r. on the Dial M For Murder Bluray was favored because of one reason only — because this a.r. conforms to the 16 x 9 aspect ratio of high-def flat panels. The people who made this call were and are nothing but FASCIST REVISIONIST BRUTES.

“We have a vision,” their manifesto reads. ‘A vision of all films shot from the early ’50s to mid ’60s with their tops and bottoms CHOPPED OFF, and we will stop at nothing to achieve that goal. Because of 16 x 9 high-def screens, we are committed to killing visual information. And we will succeed because we have the factual data and research to back up the assertion that these films were shot to be shown at 1.85, but could also be shown at 1.33 or 1.37 for purist film buff screenings and for television airings and VHS and DVD versions.

“Repeat after us: WE HAVE A VISION, and it is about KILLING VISUAL INFORMATION by slicing off the tops and bottoms of films.”

I’ve said this before, hut if WHE were to stream the boxy version of Dial M For Murder, I would buy it in a split second.

All through the 20th Century and into the 21st I watched Dial M at 1.33 or 1.37. I also saw it in 1.33 or 1.37 3D at the Eighth Street Playhouse in ’80. The compositions and framings were and are entirely satisfactory and didn’t need to have their tops and buttons CHOPPED OFF WITH A MEAT CLEAVER.

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