…you think first and foremost of a kind of gentle but vaguely flinty mindset (intelligence, insight, sensitivity). Then you think of drink-and-dial Miles Raymond in Alexander Payne’s Sideways (‘04). The current focus, of course, is Barton Academy’s ancient history professor Paul Hunham in The Holdovers (Payne + David Hemingson), but in a certain light Miles lingers because of what happened…a grievous wrong that must be addressed and corrected at long last.

…is not Bugsy Malone (‘76), for heaven’s sake. It’s Evita (‘96)…c’mon! I agree, however, that Albert Brooks’ greatest film is Lost in America (‘85).

Posted on 7.24.15:

A year ago Robert Eggers and HE agreed (almost) on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (’48):

Answer: Nobody.

170 formerly anonymous associates of the late Jeffrey Epstein will be mildly embarrassed when names are made public tomorrow in a “doc dump” connected to a Virginia Giuffre court maneuver of some kind.

The bottom line is that the nation’s 42nd President is “not expected to be implicated in any illegal activity,” according to an ABC News report.

The media shorthand equation is that if a person had even a slight social relationship with Epstein, they are automatically evil ogres who deserve to be shunned or cancelled. It’s certainly unwelcome to be associated with a notoriously perverse figure, but does this necessarily add up to deplorable behavior?

Obviously my love for Bradley Cooper’s Maestro has become a minority viewpoint. Obviously the tide of public opinion has turned against it. I was completely swept up by Cooper’s stylistic audacity and particularly by Carey Mulligan’s performance as Felicia Montealegre, but you can’t fight City Hall or at least you can’t instruct or badger people into broadening their aesthetic horizons. All I can say is that I’m very sorry.

Partly because it sounds like woke gobbledygook, I suppose. Because it suggests that the simple bedrock concept of gender (as in primarily two, as in male/female) has been imposed by a foreign power to establish political control over a native culture. Which is bullshit, of course.

Thank you, God, for sparing me from the burden of such terminology throughout most of my life. Thank you for that blessing.

At the same time I felt curiously charmed by the “Little Horse” character in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (‘70), and I loved Chief Dan George’s “Old Lodge Skins” character (a performance that was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor) and his “live and let live” approach to life.

HE agrees with World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy. If Antoine Fuqua is producing, Paul Schrader’s Three Guns at Dawn (great title!), Schrader should just direct it already. Stop pussyfooting around by worrying about cultural appropriation. Fuck ‘em if they don’t like it. Balls up.

In his most recent (12.27) Oscar prediction column, THR’s Scott Feinberg has capitulated to the advancing Macedonian army of Paul Giamatti, star of The Holdovers, and in so doing has merged with the advocacy campaigns of Awards Daily’s Sasha Stone and N.Y. Times columnist Kyle Buchanan.

The whole “you can’t penalize Donald Trump because he hasn’t been convicted of insurrection” argument is a dodge based upon ignorance.

The “leave the animal alone” argument is based upon a mistaken understanding that blocking him from appearing on primary ballots in Colorado and Maine is punitive — an unfair punishment, his defenders believe, because Trump hasn’t been found guilty of insurrection in a court of law.

In fact section 3 of the 14th amendment is not about bitch-slapping an alleged insurrectionist but defending the workings of government from what judges may believe to be potential malignancy.

Leading section 3 scholar Mark Graber (University of Maryland school of law) says the amendment is about “qualification for office, not a punishment for a criminal offense.”

— from a 12.26 Guardian essay by Sidney Blumenthal. The subhead reads, “The [Supreme Court] can only rescue Trump by shredding originalism and textualism. Will it?”

“A Crybaby Year For Men in Movies,” a 12.27 N.Y. Times piece by Natalia Winkelman, lists six 2023 films that featured whiny-ass males weeping and hissyfitting about “a perceived loss of power to a woman.”

The man-babies are played by Mark Ruffalo, Ryan Gosling, Alden Ehrenreich, Samuel Theis, Joaquin Phoenix, et. al.

But one significant crybaby has been overlooked.

Cillian Murphy’s titular physicist character in Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer, set in the 1940s and ‘50s, never frets over anything to do with power dynamics between men and women.

He is, however, called a “crybaby” by Gary Oldman’s Harry S. Truman in a pivotal third-act scene, and he does weep about having figurative blood on his hands over the A-bomb having killed thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And so I figured that a Times article with “crybaby” in its headline…I naturally expected that J. Robert Oppenheimer would warrant some kind of side-mention…no?

“No” because Winkelman’s article is a feminist hit piece about shitty little men, not just in 2023 films but in all corners of the current culture. Oppie is therefore excused as his kind of wailing isn’t sexist in nature.

He does, however, whine about having “become death,” etc. Mainly, I would say, because he lacks a certain adult perspective. Oppie would’ve been fine with the A-bomb murdering tens of thousands of mostiy innocent Germans but he felt badly about tens of thousands of mostly innocent Japanese being wiped out. To this day I’m unsure about the difference.

What I’m really saying, I suppose, is that “crybaby” shouldn’t have been in the headline.

How and why could a smart industry columnist who knows what goes…how could anyone with a semblance of insight and rationality care about the emptiest, most nihilistic and thoroughly repellent franchise in the history of cinema?…what kind of person says “this franchise is important to me” and “I want it to continue”?