You can’t write if you’re not under the ice. Very thick ice. I was around 75 feet from my gate, headphones on, tapping away, half-listening for announcements, etc. 50 minutes ago I emerged from my Honore de Balzac membrane and noticed that the crowd around me had vanished. The gate had been moved (not cool!) and it was now too late to board.

No biggie — I’m now waiting for another Albuquerque flight, leaving at 3:30 pm.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is no Beetlejuice, but in the end it’s got just enough [Tim] Burton juice.

“The movie is just a lightweight riff on Beetlejuice — a piece of fan service, really. It doesn’t give you the full monster-kitsch jolt that the original film had. Yet there’s good fan service and bad, and as stilted and gimcracky as it can sometimes be, I had a pretty good time [with it].

“Burton’s once-skewed way of looking at the world long ago got baked into ours (that’s one reason he has struggled, at times, to give his movies that same buzz). But if Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is mostly a lark, kind of like the current hit Broadway version of Beetlejuice, part of what the new movie delivers is honest nostalgia for the moment when Burton’s clown-spirit-from-hell sensibility still had a frisson of shock value.”

And yet BBC.com’s Nicholas Barber is creaming all over the sequel — “surpasses the original in almost every respect.”

I’m sorry but I don’t trust Barber, not for a second.

Earlier today Venice Film Festival Life Achievement Award recipient Sigourney Weaver was asked if there might be a relationship between the heroic inspiration generated by Weaver’s Ripley character in Alien and Kamala Harris‘s current political campaign for the White House.

Woman Journalist: “To what extent are movies…[to that extent can] cinema make it possible that a woman like Kamala Harris could become President of the United States.”

Weaver: “I love that question. Because we’re all so excited about Kamala…to think for one moment that my work would have anything to do with her rise makes me very happy actually…it’s true that so many women come and thank me [choking up]….sorry. Give me my vodka. It’s been difficult since 2016.”

“I’m leaning more right now towards writing for theater…in a comedy play, the audience is a character in the room, and [when] you say this, the audience laughs, the actors kind of wait for a moment until the laugh dies down, then they get to pick up the pace and it’s a rhythm…it’s almost like the audience is almost like a live animal in the room.” — Quentin Tarantino to Bill Maher during 8.25 Club Random chat.

This immediately reminded me of a 20-minute Four Seasons sit-down I did with Tarantino nine years ago, and particularly an idea I shared about his writing an Iceman Cometh-like play that would focus on Kurt Russell‘s “Stuntman Mike” character from Death Proof.

Here’s the WAV file, ands here’s what I posted on 12.8.15:

Airport lounges are not inherently interesting places in which to hang. They’re imbued, however, with feelings of anticipation, expectation.

Flight #1 (LGA to Dallas/Ft. Worth) leaves at 7:35 am. Flight #2 (Dallas to Albuquerque) leaves at 1:45 pm. Then I’ll drive from Albuquerque to Telluride (290 miles, 5 and 1/2 hours) — a great, eye-filling journey.

“I’ve been used, screwed, abused, sued, subdued and tatto’ed.”

Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Warner Bros., 9.6) not only screens tomorrow in Venice but opens domestically a bit more than a week hence. Where’s the buzz? I’m not feeling it. Nobody wants to sit through a cash-grab experience. I adore the 1988 original. Please don’t mess this up.

…but reviews of Todd Phillips‘ Joker: Folie a Deux won’t surface until Wednesday, September 4th.

Variety‘s Alex Hitman is reporting that Cooper Hoffman (Saturday Night, Licorice Pizza) will play a would-be “sexual muse” to an artist played by Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex.

Written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, pic is described as a “provocative thriller” that “blithely explores desire, domination and fantasy.”

I’m sorry but nobody wants to see a film in which Cooper (son of “Philly” Hoffman**) performs sexually in any way, shape or form. Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off. He’s just not sexy or good-looking enough….sorry.

There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.

In fact Paddy Chayefsky wrote a teleplay (and then a movie version of the same script) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that we was on the verge of giving up. It was sad but 1955 audiences understood his predicament because the actor who played the butcher was Ernest Borgnine.

** I’ll allow that the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman was briefly shown slamming ham with Marisa Tomei in Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, but that was a very fast and quick one-off.

After watching Lee last night, I can at least say that I’m much more familiar with the life and times of Lee Miller, and for that I’m grateful. I apologize for my previous ignorance.

For Lee — shot in late ’22, premiered in Toronto 12 months ago, opening on 9.13.24 — is a reasonably sturdy, realistic and believable portrait of a gutsy feminist firebrand who went for the gusto, and under fire at that.

Born in ’07, Miller died 37 years at age 70.

The Lee screenplay was written by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume, and is adapted from Antony Penrose‘s “The Lives of Lee Miller” (’85).

Winslet produced and even personally coughed up for two weeks of expenses during filming.

A 1920s fashion model turned Parisian expat, Man Ray-influenced photographer and renowned WWII Vogue photojournalist (London Blitz, 1944 Paris liberation, horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau), Miller was in her late 30s when her war experiences began. Winslet was in her late 40s when filming started, but she and the 1940s-era Miller clearly resemble each other. Past their foxy prime (weathered, not slender) but with good bones and take-no-shit demeanors.

The film tells us that in real life Miller never rolled over for anyone — bristling with moxie, defiance, bravery. Sipped from a metal flask, smoked like a chimney.

Winslet and Alexander Sjarsgard, who plays her lover Roland Penrose, are only a year apart in age, although he’s in better shape.

Winslet has told journalists that she’s accepting of the fact that she’s become something of a big girl (not fat but fleshy, ample), but she’s also made sure that Lee viewers will understand that her bodacious ta-tas are just as big and bountiful as ever. Lee features three boob-flashing scenes, and one in particular definitely struck me as erotic — a moment when Penrose smears green body paint all over her upper torso.

Lee Miller was tough and gutsy and liked to fuck and smoke and hang out with the swells, and she took no shit or derision from sexist males. She was tough, scrappy, blunt.

Her experiences in war-torn France are tonally grim and draining but enveloping all the same. Kuras makes certain that we understand that war is hell, horror, slaughter. Stinking dead bodies on freight cars…good God. There’s no mistaking that Lee, in a very primal way, was affected by all this carnage. You can feel it in her sad, shaken, traumatized eyes.

I’m not a fan of Winslet’s crude, twangy American accent, but it doesn’t get in the way. Lee is a militantly feminist film. It’s basically saying that many (most?) men back then were smug, overbearing, entitled dicks. Hell, they still are! Men of the world, let’s all get together on a worldwide Zoom call and slit our throats!

Lee boasts a first-rate supporting cast — Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Skarsgard, Andy Samberg, Noémie Merlant, Josh O’Connor.

“Not everyone can believe this. Surely they can see what he is.” — from a Lee scene in which Winslet is watching newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler but is also, obviously, referring to Donald Trump.

Please check out the Lee Miller archives.

…of a Beatles documentary ever written can be found on the 2024 Venice Film festival website. A boilerplate description of Andre Ujica‘s TWST: Things We Said Today calls it “a time capsule of New York City between August 13-15, 1965, framed by the Beatles’ arrival in the city and their first concert at Shea Stadium.” But read this…it’s really good:

[Posted on 9.19.11] Last night Jett, his roommate Sonya and I caught a 7:50 pm screening of Drive at Brooklyn’s UA Court Street Stadium plex. My second viewing. Great film.

I hit the smallish bathroom after it ended. Two urinals and a toilet stall with six or seven guys lined up. I should have bailed right then and there, but I was looking for a little sit-down action and wasn’t sure of my alternate options.

A guy left the stall and a 30something black dude took ownership and, like, didn’t come out. Three, four minutes. Five minutes. Six. Could he be undergoing self-administered surgery? Filling out a mortgage application?

Then, still on the pot, he began talking to his girlfriend on his cell, flirting with her, settling in. “How ya doin’? Movie’s over…yeah. You wanna eat somethin’?,” etc.

If I had any balls I would have knocked on the stall door and, just like Tom Cruise in Collateral, said, “Yo, homey!” I didn’t, of course. I just stood and waited like a sap, listening to this jerkoff go on and on. The idea of showing consideration to others simply hadn’t occurred to him.

Around the seven- or eight-minute mark I gave up and went outside and used the facilities at a nearby Barnes and Noble.

It’s simply a matter of culture and manners. Let’s face it — some people are low-lifes.

I’ll be attending an invitational screening of George Clooney‘s The Ides of March at the Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday. If I happen to hit the bathroom after it ends I can absolutely guarantee that nobody will sit in a toilet stall for several minutes, ignoring the fact that several others are waiting, while chit-chatting with a girl. I’ll put $100 on this right now. I’ll bet anything.