I visited the Academy Museum yesterday. Due respect but after 100 minutes of wandering around I felt that the $25 entrance fee was too high. It’s an impressive collection of exhibits that tell a certain kind of film history, but I felt slightly burned. The phrase I muttered two or three times was “this…this is it?”

For this is a huge, four-story, super-expensive apology installation. In room after room and in display after display, the museum says the following: “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is very, very sorry that white men ran the film industry for 100 years straight, and there are doubtless too many white men running things now, but at least things are changing now for the better — women, Black artists, Asian-Americans, Native Americans and other POCs are making significant inroads, and we the Academy are proudly standing beside them and doing what we can to give them more power and say-so.

“So again, please understand our profound sorrow about how Hollywood’s film industry was run between 1915 and 2015, but the Academy is helping to make things right. Onward, progressive soldiers!”

I was especially entertained by two apology statements that are mounted on walls next to the “Backdrop An Invisible Art” exhibit. It partially salutes the huge Mount Rushmore painting used in Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest (’59) but mostly condemns it, or at least condemns the U.S. government for betraying the Lakota by allowing Mount Rushmore to be carved into a mountain in virgin Lakota territory, and by association condemns North by Northwest.

You’re given the distinct idea that North by Northwest is kind of an evil film, and that it might be better if Hitchcock, Ernest Lehman, Cary Grant and others involved were to be cancelled posthumously.

The best part of the museum is the viewing platform atop the rounded Death Star portion — the view of central Los Angeles is spellbinding. Otherwise you can have it.

Yesterday Jason Reitman‘s Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Sony, 11.19) was screened at New York Comic Con. Naturally the fanboy tweeters and reviewers love it. In line with this, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Sheri Linden has posted a favorable sounding review, running 15 paragraphs.

Seasoned reviewers who want to be briefly candid but don’t want the candid stuff to color the tone of their review rely on a standard ruse, which is to insert an honest paragraph somewhere around the two-thirds mark. This is exactly what Linden has done. Consider the content of paragraph #11:

“The logic here doesn’t bear the slightest scrutiny“? “The supernatural stakes never feel high,” and “the fate of the world never seems in the balance”? “The hauntings [are] neither eerie nor frightening, but a weird mix of pseudoscience, nonsense and f/x overkill“?

Linden knew what she was doing. Her review started out in a very positive, close-to-euphoric vein, and was thus likely to placate most readers. And then in paragraph #11…truth bombs!

Critics just starting out should take note — this is how to be honest and “political” at the same time.

I won’t precisely say what happens at the end of No Time To Die, but it happens for two reasons — partly a dramatic one (which I respect within the realm of the plotting, James Bond‘s character arc, the emotional payoff and whatnot) but mostly for a political one.

The latter is about the producers’ belief that the curtain had to come down on Bond because his studly, smugly sexist, martini-sipping, tuxedo-wearing attitude had become an anachronism, and that this mid 20th Century character had to relinquish the reins in the woke era. Sooner or later all tropes become old hat and need to be retired. We all get that, except that this mid 20th Century character began to relinquish the sexist reins 25 years ago, and for the most part did relinguish them 15 years ago.

For that Bondian current of studly sexism is, in fact, a decades-old cliche — pretty much confined to the Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Roger Moore periods and pretty much brought to a close during the Pierce Brosnan era, and more or less absent during the time of Daniel Craig (’05 to ’21 — Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die).

And the wokesters don’t care — the Bond “thing” had to be symbolically terminated all the same.

Critics won’t say it was a political call, but it was — the last 40 minutes work dramatically on their own terms, as noted (and some will shed tears), but the finale was primarily implemented to satisfy “them.” Don’t kid yourself, and don’t let anyone blow smoke about this.

Excerpt from Matt Belloni‘s latest “What I’ve Heard”…

Is it really possible that a majority of voters will vote to put a deranged rightwing dog from hell…a bloated, fact-averse psychopath back in the White House in ’24? Even if Trump doesn’t win the popular vote, we know he’ll claim victory regardless, and then the same bullshit strategy — challenging vote totals, claiming fraud, “our country is being stolen” etc. — will kick in.

Except this time there will be fewer Brad Raffensberger types left to say no to Trump when he asks them to invalidate this or that state’s vote count. Right now and on a state-by-state basis, Trump is doing everything he can to fix things so that a ’24 Trump coup will succeed. There’s no disputing that. It’s going to happen.

What phrase comes to mind when you think of Justin Bieber, who’s married and 27? The phrase that comes to my mind (and I acknowledge it’s not as current as it could be) is “obnoxious party animal to whom much wealth and media attention have been given.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve despised the idea of Bieber from the get-go (i.e., the start of the Obama administration). Here we are 11 years later, and his name still does the trick.

The gist of “Ghost,” a just-released Bieber song, is that Justin misses his smiling, recently deceased grandfather “more than life.” And so he chooses to celebrate the fragile, all-too-briefly-enjoyed gift of life with his hat-wearing, Tom Ford-glasses-wearing grandma, played by Diane Keaton.

Has a grandson ever melted down this much over the death of a grandparent? If there’s one thing that was drilled into my early childhood, it was the unfortunate fact that grandparents pass on sooner rather than later as a rule. Even the most naive grandsons are acquainted with this sad inevitability, and generally respond with a nodding acceptance.

I’ve never once heard or read about a grandson being, like, gutslammed and shattered to pieces by the passing of a grandparent. Saddened and grief-struck but not decimated. It hurts but you know it’s coming, like leaves turning yellow and falling from trees.

Three things have stuck in my mind about the late Hugh O’Brian, the Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp TV star who passed five years ago at age 91. I should have shown proper respect with a brief obit at the time, but at least I’m saying something now.

Thing #1: A Time magazine item about O’Brian and the Earp show (‘55 to ‘61), and the line “rhymes with burp.” (What the hell did that mean? Who knows but Time printed it.). Thing #2: The long-barreled Buntline special that was mythically (i.e., inaccurately) associated with Earp, largely due to O’Brian’s show. Thing #3: A capsule profile or mini-biography of O’Brian that said he regarded his considerable Earp earnings as “fuck-you money” — I don’t know the origin of that term, but it might have begun with O’Brian.

Observed this morning on Brighton Way in the spirit-of-Dubai shopping district of Beverly Hills. “Flying off the shelves,” according to the woman minding the store.

Imagine being on your death bed at age 89, and telling yourself that you not only made a difference in your career but nudged things along in a human artistic and evolutionary sense when you played a female pinhead in a Hellraiser film.

In a 40-minute conversation with N.Y. Times columnist Kara Swisher, Matthew McConaughey has discussed his feelings about running for Texas governor. They basically boil down to “I don’t know, man…maybe if God gets into it and points to me and says ‘this guy…this guy can save us from the insanely polarized left-right extremes so vote him in and follow his ass’…otherwise I don’t know.”

If and when he becomes governor, McConaughey doesn’t want to just go through the motions. He wants to be a practical-minded poet philosopher slash earthy gov-bruh…a centrist reformationist blend of Sam Houston, George Washington and Martin Luther.

McConaughey #1: “One side I’m arguing is ‘exactly, that’s why you need to go get in there.’ The other side is ‘that’s a bag of rats, man. Don’t touch that with a 10-foot pole. You have another lane. You have another category to have influence and get done things you’d like to get done and help how you think you can help and even heal divides.'”

McConaughey #2: “Is that a place to make real change or is it a place where right now it’s a fixed game, you go in there, you just put on a bunch of band-aids, in four years you walk out and they rip them off and you’re gone? I’m not interested in that.”

In other words, MConaughey is more comfortable riffing on the idea of being Texas governor than actually trying to win the damn job. He doesn’t want to get his hands dirty by diving into the wrestling pit.

McConaughey is right in implying that lefty wokesters and righty Trumpsters are equally horrible, and he’s probably correct in saying that trying to rouse and activate the “sleeping giant” of centrism is the way to go now.

McConaughey #3: “People want a third party and we’ve got one and it doesn’t have a name right now and it is the majority. I’m hesitant to throw labels…but there is a sleeping giant right now. I think it’s necessary to be aggressively centric to possibly salvage democracy in America right now.”

McConaughey #4: “The left and right traffic is so far to the edge, their tires are not even on the pavement. They’re not riding the road of democracy, I don’t believe.”

There’s a two-word term that applies to McConaughey in the realm of Texas politics. That term is “honestly flakey.”

Give McConaughey credit for loving the word “partook”. And for saying “bag of rats.” That’s the best “bag of”expression I’ve heard since “bag of gas,” an Entertainment Weekly term that referred to Robert Redford‘s The Legend of Bagger Vance.

Here’s the Swisher-McConaughey transcript.

Many of us are deeply grateful to Dave Chappelle for being a staunch realist and a dedicated foe of wokester terror. In my heart of hearts and dream of dreams, Chappelle leads us out of this horrible nightmare. Not in a militant sense, but simply by being cool and sensible and unruffled.

The two finest films I saw at last month’s Telluride Film Festival were Joe Wright‘s exquisitely made Cyrano (UA Releasing, 12.31) and Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19). As things currently stand, these are also the most deserving Best Picture contenders…no question. Here, at long last, is the Cyrano trailer:

Posted on 9.2.21: “I’ve been watching filmed adaptations of Edmund Rostand‘s Cyrano de Bergerac for decades (Jose Ferrer‘s 1950 version, Steve Martin‘s Roxanne, the 1990 Gerard Depardieu version, and Michael Lehmann‘s The Truth About Cats and Dogs). Wright’s newbie — an inventively choreographed musical, fortified by first-rate production design and wonderfully lighted cinematography — is arguably the most spiritually and poetically buoyant version of them all.

The acting is top-tier, the musical numbers are arresting, the dialogue is as good as this sort of thing gets, and it’s a truly authentic time-tunnel experience (save for the presentism in the casting, which is par for the course these days).

Peter Dinklage has absolutely hit the jackpot with his titular performance — he’ll definitely be Best Actor-nominated. The film will almost certainly end up being Best Picture-nominated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the year-end consensus is that Cyrano is a “better” musical than Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story and Jon Chu‘s In The Heights combined.

Based on Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical of the same name (in which Dinklage and Haley Bennett costarred before moving onto the film version), Cyrano is easily Wright’s best film since Anna Karenina. Seamus McGarvey‘s exquisite cinematography reminded me of David Watkins‘ lensing of Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) — it’s a real trip just to watch and sink into on a visual level alone.

Kudos to Cyrano costars Kelvin Harrison Jr., Bashir Salahuddin and Ben Mendelsohn.