Ethan Coen‘s Drive Away Dolls (Focus Features, 9.22) seems like a harmlessly broad innocents-in-jeopardy road comedy. Innocent lesbians, that is, which Ethan had to commit to, given the times and the culture. The only alternate option would have been to focus on a gay or trans couple. The original title was Drive Away Dykes.

It seem like an apparent riff on a No Country-like chase plot among some dumbshit lower-class types, written and performed in the usual deadpan Coen style.

A youngish couple inclined toward despair and glumness (Margaret Qualley with a yokel accent + Geraldine Viswanathan, a good actress with a last name that no one will be able to spell much less pronounce) accidentally get hold of a MacGuffin suitcase (money, drugs, whatevs) and it’s off to the races.

The rotund Beanie Feldstein is the sardonic cop (i.e., a philosophical perspective stand-in for Tommy Lee Jones?) who’s keeping tabs, following the situation. The mere presence of Pedro Pascal, who has a significant role in just about every damn film being made or released these days, is driving me crazy. Further deadpan humor from Colman Domingo, Bill Camp, Matt Damon, etc.

James Cameron didn’t fuck around during his chat with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“The guys at OceanGate” (particularly CEO Stockton Rush, who died on 6.18 along with the other four passengers) “didn’t remember the lesson of the Titanic,” he said, and that “the arrogance and the hubris” that doomed Titanic is exactly what doomed the Titan five days ago and actually long before that.

No sugar-coating or pussy-footing — the accountability for this tragic accident is on Rush.

Cameron had not only been confidentially persuaded but knew “in his bones” last Monday, he says, that the Titan had almost certainly experienced a catastrophic implosion. He stayed silent while strongly suspecting that the truth would eventually come out.

Cameron didn’t address this, but the likelihood of the bodies of the five Titan passengers being recovered is almost certainly nil. Concern for the families of the deceased is presently discouraging anyone from acknowledging that the term “bodies” is probablv inapplicable in this situation.

The people who knew (or had been confidentially told by trusted sources) what had almost certainly happened apparently decided en masse to commit to a kind of spiritual narrative or theatrical passion play based on hope — a less than 1% chance that the Titan might still be intact and that the five men might still be alive and perhaps stranded on the ocean floor. They all decided to “play along” as an emotional gesture to the families. Nobody wanted to sound heartless by acknowledging the likelihood that the five men were almost certainly dead and most likely fish food. It was decided that maintaining a kind of hope vigil was the more humane and compassionate way to go.

1. Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu
2. Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant
3. Christian Mungiu‘s RMN
4. Eric Gravel‘s Full Time
5. Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest
6. Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon
7. Matt Johnson‘s Blackberry
8. Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid
9. Ben Affleck‘s Air
10. Celine Song‘s Past Lives
11. Jean-Stephen Sauvaire’s Black Flies.
12. Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance

James Cameron to ABC News, posted this morning: “People in the community were very concerned about this sub. A number of the top players in the in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified. [For] deep-sea diving is a mature art…warnings went unheeded.

“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result. For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded. To take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing…it’s really quite surreal.”

Stockton Rush is the Bruce Ismay figure here. His actions in this tragedy will forever be regarded as a huge “what the hell was he thinking?”…an unforgettable cautionary tale.

Cameron on the potential pitfalls of a carbon fibre hull, as expressed decades ago: “I told these guys, somebody’s gonna get killed.”

Start to finish, No Country For Old Men is filled with scenes of this calibre. Perfectly shaped and performed….exactly right, triple or quadruple spot-on.

And now their souls have been psychedelicized or, you know, cosmically fulfilled in some perfect way.

Life is an endless valley of pain, struggle, boredom and torment, broken up by little moments (occasional, relatively brief) of peace, chuckles, solace and euphoria. All of that is now over for the five men whose lives ended a few days ago aboard the Titan. There is, at least, that finality. All things come to an end. Every last living thing on this planet (myself included) will face such a moment.

Are the five bodies recoverable? The depth where they died — nearly 12,000 feet down — is “a very unforgiving environment,” a Coast Guard spokesperson has just said. The bodies were certainly subjected to a sudden and intense increase in pressure so use your imagination. I’m very sorry but at least it was quick.

Stockton Rush, the founder and chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that operated the submersible, is the principal bad guy here. There’s no other rational conclusion.

Not for a single delusional second did I believe that Jack Nicholson‘s Melvin Udall and Helen Hunt‘s Carol Connelly had a snowball’s chance in hell of actually working out as a couple, but I so loved that moment when Melvin tells Carol that she “makes [him] want to be a better man” that I suspended my disbelief.

In Billy Wilder‘s Sabrina (’54), the idea of Humphrey Bogart‘s Linus Larrabee somehow filling the heart and soothing the soul of Audrey Hepburn‘s Sabrina Fairchild for a decade or two…no way in hell. The age difference alone (Bogart was around 55, Hepburn in her mid 30s) said “forget it.”

At the close of North by Northwest, I could imagine Cary Grant‘s Roger O. Thornhill and Eva Marie Saint‘s Eve Kandall giving it a go and maybe lasting for a decade or so. Who knows?

What other romantic couples seem good to go or not? I realize we’re talking about a vast number of potential relationships — choose and pick as your whims may suggest.

Billy Bean (Brad Pitt) to Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) in Moneyball: “Would you rather get one shot in the head or five to the chest and bleed to death?”

Brand to Bean: (beat) “Are those my only two options?”

In Titan submersible “you’re fucked” terms, would you rather die instantly from a catastrophic implosion (and I mean so fast you probably wouldn’t even have a half-second to say “oh, shit!” before hearing the angels sing) or would you rather die slowly from a lack of breathable oxygen and grapple with all the psychological torment and panic that goes with that?

If (and I say “if“) the five travellers perished from a submersible implosion, they obviously, in a manner of speaking and given an either-or death scenario…they caught a kind of break. Compared to the other agonizing option, I mean. If the sub imploded, they wound up dying faster and smoother than any of us probably will.

Reported by The Daily Mail‘s Martin Robinson, Rory Tingle, Darren Boyle and Jen Smith / Updated at 13:24, 6.22.23:

“The landing frame and rear cover of the missing Titan submersible have been discovered on the ocean floor, according to experts involved in the search. [The experts] say it points to the vessel suffering a ‘catastrophic implosion‘ that will have claimed all five of the lives on board.

“The US Coast Guard announced on Twitter that the ‘debris field’ had been found on Thursday.

“They are yet to confirm what was found, but Richard Garriott, President of the Explorers’ Club, tells DailyMail.com his understanding from the teams involved in the search is that those items were found.

“It would mean the sub suffered a crack and imploded, killing all five men on board instantly.

“A debris field implies there’s a break up of the submersible and at that depth, because we know that they lost communications at around [garbled] so that really indicates what is the worst case scenario which is a catastrophic failure, an implosion.

“The only saving grace is that it would have been immediate, literally in milliseconds and the men would have no idea what was happening,’ David Mearns, a friend of two of the men on board, said during an appearance on Sky News in the UK this evening. He added: ‘My worst fears have now been realized.’

“A Boston press conference has been scheduled for 3pm EST (10pm BST) where the Coast Guard said it would discuss the ‘findings’.

“It brings a devastating development to the search mission, which had been emphatically categorized as rescue effort — and not a recovery — by US officials. The world has been praying for a ‘miracle’ after rescuers estimated the vital oxygen supply would end at 7.08am EST (12.08pm UK time).

Halfway into a story about a few likely or at least promising 2023 Venice Film Festival highlights, Variety’s Elsa Keslassy has almost begrudgingly mentioned that Woody Allen‘s Coup de Chance has been invited to screen outside competition.