Jeffrey Wells I’m still down with the final 25 or 30 minutes of Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly (Netflix, now streaming) but several first- and second-act scenes didn’t land like they did in Venice (for me at least), and certain portions felt arch, forced, artificial.
I don’t know why it felt less effective this time, but it did.
We all understand that you guys respect and admire each other and that certain performances you’ve both given are regarded as serious bell-ringers. But these “Actors on Actors” sessions all feel and sound the same, and it would be wonderful if you could somehow…it’s hard to say this in just the right way, but if you could somehow ease up on the damp fondling and caressing and the smooth talk…if you could back away from giving each other constant pecks on the cheek?
For some reason I’ve decided to re-watch Daniel Petrie and Ron Koslow‘s Lifeguard, which I haven’t seen since the Gerald Ford-Jimmy Carter era…half a century ago!
I love character-driven ’70s films, but this one doesn’t quite get there. It’s fairly compelling or at least interesting in terms of general character tension and low-key social realism (you can really feel the festering ’70s atmosphere), but it leaves you hanging at the end with the slender, dark-haired, good looking protagonist (played by 31 year-old Sam Elliott, who’s currently white-haired and handlebar-stache’d and who sounds like a droopy Deputy Dawg) at some kind of head-scratching, nowhere-man crossroads.
Good character-driven movies have to end with a sense of justice or finality or symmetrical balance…the main characters have to face reality and deal with their decisions in some kind of “okay, you called the shots and now you’re stuck with this” way. Actions have consequences, bruh.
South Bay lifeguard Rick Carlson (Elliott) loves his satisfying beach gig (which allows him to feel like a kind of king mixed with a judicious sheriff) but is bothered by family-and-friendo judgments that he should be manning up professionally and basically making more money and driving a snazzier car.
Rick would kinda like to get married to foxy ex-girlfriend Anne Archer (28 during filming) and vice versa, but she wants him to make more dough and so would he, but “fatten your bank account” isn’t who he is deep down. He tries selling Porsches at a Valley dealership but he hates the routine and quits. He’s reluctant to have sex with the teenaged Kathleen Quinlan (actually 21 during filming) because she’s too young, but he does her anyway. Once, I mean.
So what’s Rick going to do to resolve his situation? Answer: Not much or nothing very different. He’s basically just heading back to the beach. Which leaves you with a feeling of “that’s it?,…aahhh, fuck me.”
That said, Elliott, Quinlan, Archer, Stephen Young (Porsche guy) and Parker Stevenson (a rookie being trained by Elliott) deliver just-right performances. Even with the weak ending and all, Lifeguard is/was Elliott’s best film ever.
What do you do if you don’t care for older people to whom you’re vaguely “related”, and with whom you’ve been invited to share Christmas dinner with? The conventional answer is “grim up and suffer thorough it.” But maybe not, I’m thinking. Plus I’ve always sensed that they don’t care for my company either…fine. It’s almost a relief.
They’re ”nice” people, considerate, unfailingly polite, etc. But also a bit dull, sedate, incurious, not very well travelled and certainly not my idea of attuned to the here-and-now. I find them sleepily oppressive, and I really don’t want that vibe in my head. So I’m politely stepping back from Christmas Day dinner…no offense, not the end of the world.
What’s the problem exactly? A feeling of novocained numbness when they’re in a room. A minimum of verbal out-reach. A general lack of eye contact. A lack of laughter, wit, audacity. A basic lack of interest and inquisitiveness and opinions. I’d much rather hang out with neurotic actors or alcoholics or gambling junkies or Satanists, even, than fuddy-duds and flatliners.
In my mid teens my mother once confided that her mother Dorothy (my maternal grandmother) had made it clear on one or two occasions that she didn’t care for my father’s father (my paternal granddad). Family relations lean this way from time to time. We just have to roll with the fact that certain people are anathema to each other.
Fifteen minutes into my 10.10.25 NYFF viewing of Bradley Cooper‘s Is This Thing On? (Searchlight, 12.19), I knew it was a massive whiff. It will open theatrically 11 days hence, and not a bird will stir in the trees. It’s fine but my God, the congenial vibes! The mildness! No real conflict, no real challenges, no “drama”, no heavy pivots.
HE’s 10.11 review: Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has called Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? (Searchlight, 12.19), which I saw last night at Alice Tully Hall, “a feel-good divorce film”.
That’s a fairly accurate description — it’s a kinder, warmer, far-less-hostile Marriage Story, and the general behavioral drift is amiable. It’s superbly acted all around, but it also has a bit of a flabby belly. For my money it’s way too happy, too mellow, too easygoing, too turn-the other-cheek.
Set in the flush environs of Manhattan’s West Village and a handsome home in Westchester County, it’s mainly about Alex and Tess (Will Arnett and Laura Dern), a 40ish husband and wife with two ten-year-old boys (they’re called “Irish twins” due to having been born less than a year apart).
The key situation is that Alex and Tess have decided to call it quits because…well, because they’ve been written this way. The dramatic engine, if you will, is basically about Alex dipping his toe into the waters of Manhattan stand-up comedy as a form of therapy, using his personal saga for material. It’s also about personal renewal.
But the film, directed and co-written by Cooper, is also about gliding and sliding and loping along without pushing any of the usual emotionally fraught buttons.
Fortune‘s Eva Roytburg and Nick Lichtenberg, posted yesterday afternoon:
“Jared Kushner has quietly reemerged as a player in one of the biggest takeover fights in modern Hollywood. Paramount’s audacious, all-cash $108 billion hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, announced Monday, names Kushner’s fully owned private equity firm, Affinity Partners, as one of four outside financing partners backing the offer, alongside the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.
“The detail is buried in Paramount’s tender offer, with Paramount listing “the Public Investment Fund (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), L’imad Holding Company PJSC (Abu Dhabi), Qatar Investment Authority (Qatar), and Affinity Partners (Jared Kushner)” as investors who would, under a successful deal scenario, hold nonvoting equity and forgo governance rights, including board seats.
“The filing also states that because these investors are structured without such rights, “the Transaction will not be within CFIUS’s jurisdiction,” referring to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Reports have suggested that WBD’s board opted for Netflix’s deal as it lacked any foreign financing components and therefore faced no issues with CFIUS, a notably opaque and powerful antitrust tool that the government can employ to block controversial mergers.”
I’d somehow never seen this local ABC News video report.
Curious as this sounds, watching it whooshed me back not just to a singular dark moment but to a long-ago neverland, 40 years before the sudden double-whammy nightmare of COVID and totalitarian woke terror…I would have that monocultural, pre-culture war time again…a time when the murder of a much-beloved, “Across The Universe”-y fellow…a sometimes feisty snappy brain who dreamt of cosmic fairy dust…a death that touched everyone equally, even the pickup-truck bumblefucks.
Okay, I still haven’t seen Hedda but the other five are aces. Buckley and Reinsve especially.
But I still say Kirsten Dunst‘s achey-breaky, open-heart performance in Derek Cianfrance‘s Roofman was unfairly dismissed. Her best ever, in my view.
Filed from Venice on 8.28.25:
Noah Baumbach‘s Jay Kelly (Netflix, 11.14) — a reflection-and-meditation piece about a 60ish movie star’s life (in some respects literally George Clooney’s, one gathers or infers, and doubly so during a tribute at the very end which presents a montage of Clooney’s films) — is actually fairly decent, and it ends in a very affecting and bittersweet way.
It’s a summary of a rich guy and his famous life and what it’s all meant or seems to mean, and the final emotional residue in terms of friends, family, selfishness, distractions, blessings, highs and lows…really the whole magillah.
It’s generally fast and fleeting and briskly assembled, and is actually reminiscent, in some respects and as curious as this may sound, of Charles Dickens‘ “A Christmas Carol” (in particular the 1951 film version that Brian Desmond Hurst directed and which Alistair Sim brought to life), especially as the film is largely about Clooney’s Kelly absorbing a series of some uncomfortable and sometimes painful realizations about how his business associates, old friends and especially his two daughters really feel about him.
It’s not a masterwork — it doesn’t feel heavy or deep enough, and seems a bit facile at times — and it’s certainly not on the corrupted-adult level of Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton, in which Clooney gave his finest performance.
But Clooney plays it openly and with vulnerability — he knows this line of country like the back of his hand — and the film itself conveys, persuades, penetrates. It sells its own movie-star, “this is the life he’s chosen” narrative.
At times Jay Kelly feels a bit old-fashioned — very “scripted”, very “acted” and a little schmaltzy here and there, and the visual flashback transitions are almost on the level of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (’62).
But it finally feels whole and melancholy and solemnly considered, especially at the very end. It’s expansive and exploratory and fully felt, and is very well acted by not just Clooney but by Adam Sandler (as Jay’s manager), Laura Dern (publicist), Billy Crudup (former acting buddy), Riley Keough (daughter #1), Grace Edwards (daughter #2) and Stacy Keach (roguishly “charming” dad on the downswing).
Jay Kelly is a show and a “movie” but it works according to its own delivery terms, and is certainly better than I thought it would be, and the final line absolutely kills — it even brought a tear to my eye.
It’s therefore a solid A-minus or a B-plus, and Clooney and Sandler really touch bottom, bring the goods.
Quibble #1: Everyone in Kelly’s inner circle has pretty much written him off emotionally. They regard him as flaky, immature, undependable, self-absorbed. But that’s what many big-time actors are for the most part, no? Doesn’t everyone accept this? Many and probably most famous actors are in love with themselves first, and their family and friends second. Big deal. Roll with it.
Quibble #2: Billy Crudup plays a 50ish might-have-been actor who resents and is actually enraged at Kelly for having stolen a key part that Crudup had auditioned for and badly wanted at the time, but the annals of film acting are filled with stories about a friend who was just tagging along who wound up getting the role from an impromptu audition instead of the primary guy. Just because Crudup was extra-hungry for the role in question doesn’t mean he was entitled to it, or that he was right for it. Mature people understand that life can be an unfair.
Quibble #3: Nobody would ever refer to a big film tribute event taking place in “Tuscany”…they would say Siena or Florence or Volterra or Radda in Chianti. Just like no one would talk about a similar-type event in the States happening in the “Deep South” or the “Pacific Northwest.”
I’m good with Paramount’s hostile Warner Bros. takeover bid because of that infamous, gut-slamming Lawrence of Arabia-is-cool-on-an-iPhone quote that Netflix honcho Ted Sarandos gave to the N.Y. Times last year, and which was posted/published on 5.25.04:
The smallest acceptable indoor screen for a Lawrence of Arabia viewing is a 65-inch 4K screen, although an 80-inch or 100-inch UHD screen would be better. I’ve seen David Lean’s 1962 epic on big-ass theatrical screens at least five or six times, but I’m not a 70mm freak like I was in the mid-to-late 20th Century. DCPs are the best image generators.
