Jeffrey Wells

They come out of nowhere…films you never felt much enthusiasm for, but then one day you suddenly want to give them another shot. And then you do, and you discover that (a) they’re just as dispiriting as you remember or (b) they play somewhat better than you expected.

For me, Anthony Minghella‘s Breaking and Entering (’06) is one of those films. Or it became one, I should say, two or three hours ago.

If Minghella were with us today, would he be a wokester? Or a contrarian like myself — an “East Berliner”?

One reason I’d like to re-watch this film is because there are no decent HD clips or trailers — everything looks soft and fuzzy.

Posted on 12.14.06: “Minghella’s screenplay was inspired by his London studio flat having been repeatedly burgled three or four years ago when he was off making Cold Mountain in Romania. Similarly, an office managed by a married architect (Jude Law) and his partner in London’s half-seedy, half-emerging King’s Cross district is repeatedly broken into and ripped off.

“Law eventually spots the teenaged thief (Rafi Gavron), follows him home, and develops an immediate attraction for his Bosnian-refugee mom (Juliette Binoche). Curiously, despite Law’s well-known tabloid history and the fact that he may have portrayed one too many hounds over the past three or four years (Closer, Alfie), he and Binoche quickly sink into a steamy affair. As soon as it begins you can’t help but think, ‘Here we go again.’

“Minghella is a major believer in volcanic currents between lovers, and it’s clear he feels more of an allegiance to Law’s affair with Binoche than Law’s marriage to a chilly Nordic blonde (Robin Wright Penn) who always seems vaguely pissed about something or other. There are no sex scenes between Law and Penn (naturally, given the nature of most marriages) but the action he shares with Binoche is intense and quite splendid.

“The fact that Law gives her great oral sex seems to underline Minghella’s basic attitude, which is that he’s much more into exotic and uncertain alliances than steady and familiar ones.

“In a 12.14.06 article, N.Y. Times profiler Sarah Lyall says noted that Breaking and Entering is about a “clash of cultures between the rich and the poor, the privileged and the disaffected, that churns beneath the surface of contemporary London.” This is certainly a part of it, but the movie eventually settles into a kind of guilty meditation piece that’s half about Law’s wandering penis and half about class disparity and liberal guilt.

“Some people have been muttering that the film is inconclusive, half-there and indifferently off on its own beam. The biggest complaint is that it has a lousy ending, which it does. But it’s not a ‘bad’ film, by which I mean it’s not, you know, boring.

“The performances by Law, Binoche, Rafi Gavron and Ray Winstone (as a detective) are more than absorbing for the most part, and the atmosphere seems recognizably “real.” But there’s not a lot of residue when you leave the theatre. The film does a fast fade in your head.

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Just as there are some actors with faces you can’t help liking or easing into without effort, there are faces on the other side of the canyon that you don’t like very much. As in instantly, no thinking about it. Faces you’d like to punch once or twice, or at the very least avoid.

I laughed when I read about Carlo Simone‘s wife instantly disliking the face of Cooper Raiff, the director-producer-writer of Cha Cha Real Smooth (Apple+, 6.17). I don’t happen to like his face all that much either, but I can roll with it. The topic, however, is certainly discussable across the board. Which actors have faces that the HE community just can’t stand? It’s rash and cruel to indulge such reactions, but we all feel them (at least briefly) from time to time.

HE’s pet animal-dislike peeves: (1) Matt Smith, the guy who played the sleazeball pimp in Last Night in Soho and the title role in Ondi Timoner‘s Mapplethorpe, (2) Michael Fassbender, (3) Ben Mendelsohn, the Australian actor who build his career out of performances in which he smoked cigarettes and sweated buckets, (4) Michael Cera, (5) Aaron Paul. And this is not a complete list. I’m just trying to get the ball rolling.

Note: Jon Bernthal used to be on HE’s animal-dislike list, but I took him off after his performances in Ford vs. Ferrari and Those Who Wish Me Dead.

If you run into Bradley Cooper after Maestro, his forthcoming Leonard Bernstein biopic, has been nominated for this and that Oscar (which will probably happen), don’t say “way to go, bruh…Maestro totally deserved those noms!” Because that will just piss Cooper off.

The socially safe thing, apparently, will be to avoid the topic of nominations for the most part and focus only on the likelihood of Cooper’s Oscar wins. As in “bruh, you’re totally going to win this time…everyone is voting for you…Maestro is a work of genius,” etc. If you offer nommy congrats, Cooper may take that as a slur.

This, in any event, was indicated when Cooper paid a recent visit to Smartless, the podcast co-hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes. Here’s the key quote, transcribed by Variety’s Zack Sharf:

A couple or a small group of friends, staying in a remote, bare-bones, cut-off-from-civilization abode of some kind, try to cope with an increasingly terrifying situation due to unforeseen predators and whatnot.

What was the very first successful film of this sort? George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead(’68), I suppose, followed by Sam Peckinpah‘s Straw Dogs (’71)…right? Am I forgetting something? The first generic, popcorn-level exploitation slasher flick set in a cabin in the woods was…?

“Childhood has no forebodings…no memories of outlived sorrow.” — George Eliot.

IndieWire‘s Eric Kohn has posted an exclusive peek at an unfortunately discarded sequence in Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

We all know that Nicolas Cage plays a meta-fictionalized version of himself…a guy who feels tormented or at least needled by a feeling that he hasn’t constructively built on the success of his ’80s and ’90s films. Here, in a sequence that didn’t make Gormican’s final cut, Cage confronts his inner doppelganger amid the darkly impressionist environment of Robert Wiene‘s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (’20).

A UHD version of Gormican’s film is rent-streaming for $5.99.

Why doesn’t David Poland, always projecting the vibe of a lordly, knowledgable, yappity-yap-yap industry analyst who supposedly knows the real inside skinny…why doesn’t Poland just say it concisely like the following excerpt from The Ankler‘s Sean McNulty?:

So basically things are changing but Netflix is doing reasonably well — better than that when you consider that they’re safely in the black with over a billion in profits. And yet another round of layoffs will happen tomorrow or Thursday.

I’m guessing this Mad Men scene happened some time during season #1, or in 2007 or thereabouts — 15 damn years ago. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) looks so young; Peggy Olson (played by the then-25-year-old Elizabeth Moss) looks even younger. And my God, what a flaming, irredeemable, culturally stunted asshole Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) was. Matthew Weiner was really on his game back then. Has the spirit left him? The Romanoffs didn’t work for me.

“And yet, of course, the age that I am makes [such a scene] extremely challenging because we aren’t used to seeing untreated bodies on the screen. To be truly honest, I will never ever be happy with my body. It will never happen. I was brainwashed too early on. I cannot undo those neural pathways.” — Good Luck To You, Leo Grande star Emma Thompson discussing her full-frontal nude scene with Cinema Cafe during Sundance 2022.

A few days later (1.26.22) I reviewed Sophie Hyde’s “sex positive” two-hander. I basically agreed with everyone else’s favorable opinions while — concurrently! — agreeing with Thompson’s above statement, but phrased in my own way.

I was all but tarred and feathered for the latter…for mentioning the unmentionable by stating that (a) while the body positivity movement was well and good in terms of discouraging self-loathing tendencies among older or overweight women, at the same time it was (b) kind of off on its own lunar trajectory because most people don’t exactly relish the idea of watching nude scenes with fleshy women who are over, say, 40 or 45. (Or men for that matter.)

Several HE comment-thread scolds came after me with spears, swords, slander, slaps, handguns and grenades. I was all but vivisected. Such is the nature of your delightful spray-pissers on this site.

I described Leo Grande — three sexual and very personal encounters in an English hotel room over 97 minutes, plus one in a hotel bar — as an intimate, occasionally amusing, open-hearted exploration of an older woman’s sexuality, and that it makes it very clear what a transformational thing good sex can be (nothing wrong with that!).

I also said that most of us have problems with older or overweight people performing nude scenes or sex scenes, and that I wouldn’t want to see a nude scene with anyone who’s too old or saggy or out of shape. And yet the idea of older women enjoying sex as much as any 17 or 22 or 38 or 46 year-old is lovely and delightful, and that conceptually speaking if an actress of Thompson’s age wants to do a full-frontal nude scene, fine.

And then came a statement that only a truly evil person would vocalize. I said that if a 45-plus actress wants to do a nude scene, she should do what she can to leapfrog or transcend the concerns that Thompson herself has admitted having about her own body, and to bite the bullet by paying for a nice, mild tummy tuck and a subtle but artful boob lift. (And maybe an ass lift.) You think Paulina Porizkova would argue against this?

I’ve had work done on my eye bags, eyelids, neck wattle and thinning hair, and believe me I look much, much better because of these modest measures. There’s nothing wrong with resorting to touch-ups when age, biology and gravity start to work against you.

Again — last January Thompson said that she “will never ever be happy” with her body, and a few days after that I said two things — (1) no moviegoer will ever he delighted about ogling a body that’s seen better days, and (2) Thompson has nothing to worry about if she just pays a visit to my Prague friendos — they’ll fix her right up and with no one the wiser. What is so fucking awful about that? We’re all going to wrinkle and wither and die anyway so you might as well face old age with a little Prague fortification.

Parental rights activist Will Estrada to N.Y. Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who’s a total trans-advocating wokester, posted on 6.16.22:

Estrada: “I’ve been amazed, Lulu, that Terry McAuliffe could have absolutely said in that debate with Glenn Youngkin, ‘I absolutely agree with you, Glenn. Parental rights are important. Every teacher will tell you they want the parents to be engaged, but we have to be careful that parents don’t make the wild west in public schools.’ And when we look at what’s happening with parental rights, it’s flooring me.

“My mind is blown that you just don’t have politicians from both sides saying we’re going to respect this and then maybe nuance it in different ways instead of doubling down on this insane concept that parents shouldn’t be involved in the education of their children.

“It would be so easy for people to just do the Bill Clinton, I feel your pain, I understand it, I’m engaged in my children’s education. And then kind of nuance different things. But instead we’re seeing the opposite. And it boggles my mind. It’s political malpractice.”

Garcia-Navarro: “I think what I hear you saying is that you think Democrats are missing the opportunity to also embrace the parents’ rights movement, which you think is available to anyone.”

“Estrada: “Exactly. You look at some of the surveys and Americans, even those who identify as liberal-leaning and identify as Democrat, and certainly moderates, and completely certainly Republicans they view this as (a) one party supports parental rights, the Republican Party, and (b) one party opposes parental rights, the Democrat party. And that shouldn’t be the case.

“Parental rights are a bipartisan issue. And so I feel like the Democrat Party is missing a moment and it’s going to hurt them.”

“Every day at 5pm Andrew, a middle-aged man working a white-collar job in a community legal centre, drives home through Melbourne’s outer suburbs in peak-hour traffic. The long commute affords him time to phone in on his ailing mother and his wife, and occasionally offer a lift home to a younger colleague, David.

“Over a year, their tentative small talk gives way to a warm friendship and open conversation within the confines of the vehicle, incrementally revealing their lives. Talkback radio provides some connection to the greater community.

“One may wonder: what can a three-hour film set almost entirely in a car, shot with a fixed camera from the rear, offer cinematically? The answer is an unexpectedly engaging observation of the rhythms of daily life and a catalogue of suburban worries.

“Sensorially, The Plains charts the passage of time as the seasons change. The pitter-patter of rain on the windows and the familiar cocoon of the car provide a sense of comfort and safety from the outside elements. The drive home as liminal space between work and home, as the day is pondered, the night planned. Documentary elements exist beyond the windshield, as a fiction courses through the vehicle. Drone shots of a place far away provide a different perspective, a glimpse of what is hinted at in the car.

“The Plains is a road movie unlike anything you have seen before.”

Has anyone seen it?

I’ve only watched half of Judd Apatow‘s George Carlin’s American Dream — maybe this Muhammud Ali clip is part of it. I wouldn’t know.

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