Re-submitting to the epic, sand-choked saga of Dune: Part Two didn’t thrill me in a narrative sense, but to my great surprise I adored watching Denis Villeneuve’s 168–minute, richly immersive, alternate–reality dream trip from a purely visual perspective.

Greig Fraser’s desaturated color (and briefly monochromatic) cinematography, Brad Riker’s art direction, Patrice Vermette’s production design and Joe Walker’s editing…Villeneuve’s visionary, deep-dive scheme provides the maestro-like guidance…conducting these four fellows…this is where the genius comes from, where it lies.

Dune: Part Two is a serious trip, an exotic world unto itself…one of the most eye-opening, original-feeling geek films I’ve ever seen.

If you can put aside the Frank Herbert story and just tune in to the other-worldliness, it’s quite a feast for the eyes — a major league art film. Stunningly exotic and quite original…quite the aural-visual knockout.

Rags and monster worms and pyramids and sand, sand, sand, sand, sand, sand. Mr. Sandman, man. Everyone and everything coated and smothered in trillions upon trillions of sparkling micro-crystals. Endless sand dune vistas…sand in my pores, in my ears and eyebrows…sand crystals in my pants, my mouth, my hair, my lungs…surrounded, enveloped…I couldn’t fucking breathe but in a different way Villeneuve opened me up.

Who the fuck cares about any of this? Forget the convoluted, forehead-slapping plot about dynasties and corruptions and revolutionary fervor and the arc of the chosen…just forget it, bruh. If you try to follow the labrynthian twists and turns you’ll be driven insane…bats in your belfry.

Just turn on the fucking phone and follow Herbert’s plot on the film’s Wikipedia page (which is what I did, starting around the one-half mark) and focus on the commanding, mind-bending, majesterial all of it…the dizzy, dancing way it looks, feels, sounds…the desaturated palette…the Fremen language rendered in subtitles. Scene after scene…some other planet…wowser exotica. I felt as if I had mescaline in my system. I forgot about the popcorn.

But at the same time I felt swamped and surrounded by the superhero, epic-saga cliches. So you know what I did? I said to myself “fuck all this…just concentrate on the textures, the brushstrokes…the wondrous style of it.”

The surprising aspect (at least from my perspective) is that Dune, Part Two truly abounds with excellent performances from everyone…Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya (as the messianic Paul Atreides and the pretty, half-feral Chani) deliver their career-best. Really — babygirl Timothee has turned into a man. And I never thought Zendaya’s acting was especially good. Now I feel differently.

Cue-ball bald, albino, eyebrow-less Austin Butler (as the totally psychotic Feyd–Rautha Harkonnen) has saved himself from the Curse of Elvis. He’s also saved himself from that awful ’60s motorcycle movie, The Bikeriders.

Not to mention the devotional Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem. The demented, royal-robed Chris Walken. The bald, white-skinned, animal-eyed beast (Glossu-Rabban Harkonnen) played by Dave Bautista. All of the spacey and spooky women in robes and veils (Rebecca Ferguson, Lea Seydoux, Florence Pugh, Charlotte Rampling, Anya-Taylor Joy). And that bald, massively obese, sprawling mountain of sickening flesh in a dark pullover tunic (Baron Vladimir Harkonnen), played by Stellan “fat as a cow” Skarsgard…what a complete, Trump-like animal.

I really wanted to hate Dune: Part Two, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t let me. Hats off to the team.

Just remember to bring your phone and read the plot as you go along.

Eeeyaagghhh!!! Nightmares, convulsions, tears of rage. howls and jowls. My back is arched…hissss!!

I can’t wait for these fucking guys to fail. You know what would be absolutely dead perfect? If the Daniels give a lead role in this new film to the manatee-like Lily Gladstone…please do this!

I don’t hate my VW Passat (love the sound system, the shiny black color) but I’m starting to grow truly weary of the constant problems. It won’t stop costing me more and more money for repairs (labor, parts).

The latest migraine is a leak in the heater core, which warms up the car interior. This mechanism circulates and heats up the coolant inside the round plastic reservoir container and thereby creates warm air, but the coolant has been leaking out and forcing me to re-fill it every 10 to 14 days.

I could let this situation passively ride along by simply replacing the coolant every couple of weeks, but if I want to seriously fix the problem it’ll set me back a minimum of $1800 and possibly a bit more.

Early this morning my local mechanic (Georgetown Shell) told me I need to replace the leaking heater core plus a gasket that goes with it. Cost: $315.

Soon after the official VW Danbury mechanic rep estimated that removing the leaker and installing the brand new heater core will take five hours at $289.00 per hour = $1445.00 + $315 + tax and whatnot for a total of roughly $1775.00. And what if it takes a bit longer?

I can’t drop almost $2K so I’m going to have to hire Vinnie, the mellow Bridgeport freelancer, to do the installing. Vinnie is my idea of a good hombre with reasonably good skills, but he hasn’t delivered like those VW Danbury guys, or at least he hasn’t so far. But I like and respect him.

I also bought some K–Seal, some gloop that you pour into the circulatory system that finds leaks and seals them. With the engine purring I poured it into the plastic reservoir and said a little prayer.

Plus it was really cold and extra windy today, and along with a general sense of uncertainty and anxiety I was feeling slightly more downhearted than usual.

As I was entering a Danbury Auto Zone store around 11:30 am I was flinching and slightly wincing and shuddering and glancing at my reflection in the store window and muttering stuff like “I’m in hell…my life is hell to some extent…it didn’t feel anywhere near this oppressive during the the 2006-to-2018 heyday….it really felt kinda wonderful during that 12-year run.”

I don’t mean actual hell. I mean that every so often my life feels like brimstone and treacle. I truly love my movie-driven life and the rigors of writing the column each and every day, but the idea of sitting through Dune: Part Two this evening fills me with absolute dread.

I don’t care what everyone else has been saying. Denis Villeneuve and I have never really gotten along. If it turns out to be better or even much better than expected, great. But my gut tells me it almost certainly won’t be.

I would love to live a nice, car-free life in Paris, and just take the Metro around town and do a lot of walking. A free man in Paris, unfettered and alive.

Unless you suffer from insomnia, a good night’s sleep is like experiencing “a little slice of death.” We all know what sleep and death are, and neither are all that big of a deal. If you’ve lived a relatively healthy and robust and crackling 76 years, as Richard Lewis did, it’s not a hugely devastating tragedy to submit to long slumber. The loss of a beloved person of value is always a sad event, of course, but the key determination is quality of life, not quantity of days. (Unless, that is, you have an especially good thing going with a young grandchild or two, in which case it is a bit of a tragedy — terribly sorry if that was the case.) At least Lewis was active and enjoying his life until a sudden heart attack got him. We’re all gonna get there. When your number’s up, Mr. Death doesn’t know from negotiations.

This Brett Ellis-Quentin Tarantino conversation was posted on 12.3.23, so I’m two months late. But this is real soul food, and I’m very glad that I finally got around to it.

Here’s Ellis’s intro riff, ending just prior to starting the conversation with Quentin. I’m not stealing anything as it’s mostly Ellis reading from “Cinema Speculation.”

What the hell has happened to the inevitable Oscar triumph of The Holdovers’ Paul Giamatti? This was Paul’s year, his deserved payback moment for the Sideways snub of ‘05…and the SAG-AFTRA plebes have blown him off? My heart is breaking for the poor guy. Can the sardonically soulful Giamatti pull off an Oscar win regardless? You tell me. I’m really downhearted.

Major acting awards should be about major effing delivery…grand-slamming it…soul, gravity, reaching deep inside. Not this time. Congrats to the architects of Lily Gladstone‘s identity campaign. The Best Actress Oscar is now almost certainly hers, and everyone in the room knows the meaning…the final value of this.

SAG-AFTRA awards voters have been lowering industry property values for years…onward!

Posted on 2.23:

Two days ago I saw Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding (A24, 3.8), and tonight [Thursday, 2.22] I watched Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Drive–Away Dolls (Focus Features, now playing).

Both are quite dykey — hungrily, aggressively sexual. The Coen-Cooke is mildly crazy in a nervy, farcical way (vaguely recalling the tone of Raising Arizona, the 1987 Coen Bros. film) while the Glass is like a volcano that spews more and more lava. And from my surprised perspective, both are moderately approvable.

This is not what I expected. I was a little bit afraid that both would piss me off in some way or would at least be annoying, and neither did that. Neither film is truly double grade-A but at the same time neither has anything to apologize for. And the Coen-Cooke is often fleet and clever, and it ends perfectly with a reaction shot from a peripheral character…bingo!

Glass’s film, which really uncorks the madness during its final third, is subversive in a way that I didn’t see coming.

The Coen-Cooke is deadpan droll — much lighter and goofier than the melodramatic Bleeding, which deals straight cards until the end and never fools around — although with a fair amount of violence. But you also know it’s basically comedic and is therefore going to observe boundaries.

Maybe it’s me but both films seem determined to be as provocative as they can be with the sex scenes. A lot of slurping and smooching and fingering and muff-diving, and the Coen-Cooke even goes in for sizable wang prosthetics toward the end.

I flinched a bit when the Glass went in for some light toe-chewing — sorry but the toes in question struck me as too thick and knobby. A voice inside went “eeeww, no…too much.”

Call me full of it if you want, but I have this impression that U.S. filmmakers aren’t allowed these days to make sexually graphic hetero-love-affair films. They can only dive into hot sex if it’s from a gay or lesbian serving tray. The prohibiting of Last Tango in Paris-level presentation is understood in every progressive corner of the industry (you certainly couldn’t make a film about a couple of saucy women who love to get fucked by Glenn Powell-type guys and are totally into hungry blowjobs, not in today’s environment) and you can sense that Glass and Coen-Cooke knew they had carte blanche approval and that now (i.e., last year) was the time to go for it and pull out the stops.