Jeffrey Wells I recall Keanu Reeves’ Siddartha sitting in the lotus position and offering a decent impression of a man experiencing satori. (I’ve known satori by way of LSD so don’t tell me.) But that’s all. I don’t recall the little blonde kid or Bridget Fonda or Chris Isaak…total blank. Due respect to the late Bernardo Bertolucci but Little Buddha played dodgeball with my perceptions.
An HE reader suffering from acute spiritual toxicity as well as cancer of the anus wrote this morning with the following message: “The name of Lynn Ramsay ‘s 2011 psychodrama wasn’t Let’s Talk About Kevin but We Need To Talk About Kevin, you dementia-riddled jackass.”
HE reply: “Thanks, fixed.
“Dementia issues aside, We Need to Talk About Kevin is just too damn shit-piss long.
“My gut reaction when I first heard the title 14 years ago was ‘well, you may feel it’s important to talk about Kevin but I sure as shit don’t, especially with Lynne Ramsay at the helm and especially with that clearly demonic, warlock-eyed psycho, Ezra Miller, playing the titular character. So why don’t you and Kevin and everyone else in Kevin’s circle…why don’t you all go fuck yourselves?’
“Most movies with six-word titles tend to fail with Average Joes because six words (or five even) seem to indicate that the viewer will be in for a slog —a difficult or needlessly complex sit.
“One of the very few six-word-title movies to succeed was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although nine out of ten people just called it Close Encounters.
“How many people, honestly, even toyed with the idea of seeing Ramsay’s emotional torture flick, much less calling it something shorter? ‘Hey, honey, ya wanna see that psychotic fuckhead Kevin movie tonight?’
“How about seven words? Back in ‘65 nobody called Richard Lester’s latest The Knack (and How To Get It) — they just called it The Knack.
“My favorite seven-word-title flick? Hands down, The Loneliness of the Long–Distance Runner. Now, that was an intriguing long title! I’ve seen Tony Richardson’s 1962 film at least four or five times and have always enjoyed it much more than Wim Wenders‘ The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.”
Sent this morning: “Scott — I read your Cannes ‘25 projection piece yesterday, and have two questions
“(1) You wrote that Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme is “said to be Anderson’s strongest work since The Grand Budapest Hotel”. Good to hear! And yet it’s commonly understood that Anderson films are always primarily about the visual style and signature that I call “WesWorld.” Which basically means dry, ironic scenarios about aloof characters with a minimum of emotionalism.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel connected because it conveyed an emotional lament about declining old-world Europe and the falling away of tradition. What, pray tell, is The Pheonician Scheme actually about thematically? A rich guy’s (Benicio del Toro) regret about not being a better dad to his daughter?
“(2) You described Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) as ‘egregiously’ snubbed or overlooked in terms of award-season accolades. Well, in my view it was righteously snubbed. That movie was beautifully shot but FUCKING RANCID inside. I called Ezra Miller’s titular performance and in fact the entire film ‘emotional rat poison.’
”It’s good to hear that J–Law has scored with a strong performance in Ramsay’s Die, My Love, but how can I trust your aesthetic if we’re so far apart on Kevin?”
Feinberg:
Talk about your powerhouse second-bananas! In one 1957 western just about every formidable mid ‘50s character actor appeared — Lyle Bettger, Frank Faylen (Dobie Gillis), Earl Holliman (“Where is Everybody?”), Dennis Hopper (Giant) Whit Bissell (foot and mouth disease guy in Hud), Martin Milner (Route 66), Kenneth Tobey (The Thing), Lee van Cleef (High Noon), Jack Elam…who didn’t they hire?
I was actually planning to post this yesterday (4.29) but odd thoughts and incidental crap interfered.
“Nobody in this corner is the least bit confused or thrown over Sinners. I’m not even occasionally scratching my head over the cultural currents that Ryan Coogler’s film has seemingly stirred. I know exactly and precisely what this super-expensive excursion into early 1930s rural Mississippi Blackitude is (an unabashedly heterosexual Samuel Z. Arkoff popcorn horror film with cunnilingus detours and transportational music sequences) and what it’s tapped into over the last two weeks. Rarely has an exploitation flick connected in such a primal, across-the-board way.” — HE comment-thread retort below yesterday’s “Has Sinners Become An Online Political–Cultural Moment?”
Initially posted in 2011: “It was the early ’90s, and I was tooling along Santa Monica Blvd. on a nice, sunny afternoon in my relatively new but not quite super-hot Nissan 240 SX. But the car looked and felt pretty damn good, and I was in a pretty good mood. An atypical thing as I’m usually sullen, but every so often life feels like a sparkling proposition.
“A ’60s muscle car of some kind (a yellow ’65 Mustang convertible?) with whitewall tires pulled alongside. It had a 4 SALE sign without a number in the rear window. A very pretty…okay, hot girl was at the wheel, and her passenger window was rolled down.
“I pulled up at a red light, smiled at her and said, ‘How much?’ This sounded like a double-entendre, of course — I should have said ‘what’s the asking?’ Either way she took one look at me and my wheels, waited a beat or two, shook her head slightly and said, ‘Too much.’
“Fragile as this makes me sound, on a certain level I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from this…the most withering L.A. social putdown I’ve ever suffered in my life. That’s Los Angeles in a nutshell…the attitude that runs it. And the fact that I let that remark hurt me means that I’d bought into this mentality as much as she had. A 60-40 deal.”
A Facebook gush about Paul McCartney duet-ing with Neil Young, a testament about how wonderful this musical moment was…
It happened yesterday (midday by the Pacific clock). Tail-end wrap-up sequence.
Carolla’s sardonic, regular-guy skepticism plus his standard-issue loathing of woke derangement syndrome meshes well with Sasha’s traumatic saga of ‘24 (incoming missiles launched by THR’s Rebecca Keegan led to a significant award-season income plummet) and her continuing discomfort with left-instructional content (i.e., all women, POCs and LGBTQs are glorious, all straight males are kinda bad), which I regard as healthy. The discomfort, I mean.
Did they discuss Sinners? Well, they might have but Sasha still hasn’t seen it. Did they get into the over-and-done-with Anora Oscars? Did they kick around Minecraft or Adolescence or season 2 of The Last of Us? Or…whatever, the upcoming Cannes or Venice film festivals? Naaah, too elitist…too fringe!
Carolla boiled down: “Stop force-feeding us your woke shit!”
