Obviously grade-A direction, writing, acting (not just Jeremy Allen White as Bruce but the great Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau, his manager) and everything else.
Please, please debut this biopic at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
Why isn’t it just called Deliver Me From Nowhere? Why did they have to fecking call it Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere? You know the answer. You know why they added his last name to the title. Because a significant portion of American moviegoers are too ignorant, and because they’d be alienated by a title that sounds a bi despairing and melancholy.
Deliver Me From Nowhere is the coolest sounding movie title since Zero Dark Thirty. But the 20th Century marketers have killed it…they’ve killed the poetic vibe.
Long is the way and hard that, out of darkness, leads up to Oscar light.
Cary Grant famously labored as a (mostly leading) Hollywood actor for 35 years before retiring. He began at Paramount in 1931 and retired after Walk Don’t Run in 1966. He had been Best Actor-nominated for Penny Serenade (’41) and None But the Lonely Heart (’44), but Grant never had his golden-statue moment until landing a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1970. 39 years in the making**.
On 11.16.25, Cruise, one of the most popular, hard-working and quality-aspiring stars in Hollywood history, will receive the same kind of award given to Grant — an Honorary Oscar — at a Governors Awards ceremony inside the Ray Dolby ballroom.
He’s been Best Actor-nominated three times — Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia — but, like Grant, has never won, and he damn well should have been nominated for playing Vincent-the-hit-man in Collateral. And now after 44 years of acting in major-league films (1981’s Taps was his first standout role) and serving as a major theatrical magnet since Risky Business, Cruise’s moment in the sun as at hand.
Grant was 66 when he finally took the Oscar stage; Cruise will be 63 when his big moment occurs five months hence.
** In my book Grant should have been nominated for his lead performances in Only Angels Have Wings, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, To Catch a Thief and absolutely North by Northwest.
I’ll admit it — I’m emotionally invested in F1 enjoyment, regardless of however good or great or so-so it might turn out to be. I’ve read that it has issues, but I don’t want to play in that playground.
“F1 isn’t deep or layered or complex enough, dammit! Adrenaline highs are well and good, but we’re hoity-toity film critics, and and we want more. We want something that’s friskier and woolly-bullier and deeper and more emotional than a proverbial ‘dad movie’. Something that attempts the unexpected.
“Why wasn’t F1 directed by James Cameron of the ’80s and ’90s? Or by the Michael Mann of the ’90s and aughts? You know what we mean…by a director who’s more inward and contemplative and a bit less formulaic and synthetically-minded than Joseph Kosinski seems to be.
“Why couldn’t it have been directed by the Tony Richardson who made The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runner, say? Or the Karel Reisz who made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning? Why are we stuck with a hugely exciting but very standard slam-bang vroom-vroom?” — the Rotten Tomato & Metacritic pissheads (Owen Gleiberman, Kevin Maher, Whitney Seibold, Ian Sandwell, Wiulliam Bibbiani)
From Gleiberman’s review: “There have been very good auto-race dramas, like Ford v Ferrari, centered around conventional macho-rivalry plots. That F1 flirts with cliché isn’t necessarily a problem; just look at how commandingly Pitt takes a character we’ve seen before and paints him with a fresh coat of rusty glamour.
“But what a movie like this one needs is for the drama to play out within the races themselves. That’s what happened in Ford v Ferrari, and in the aerial dogfights of Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick (which were shot and edited with bedazzling precision), and in the car-race film that raised this sort of thing to the level of art — the staggeringly underrated Ferrari.
“But as F1 sprawls across the Formula One World Championship, moving through the last nine Grand Prix contests of the season, the races generate a surface buzz, but the stories they’re telling are less than razor-sharp.”
HE to Gleiberman: I wasn’t totally floored by Ford v Ferrari, but I really like Grand Prix, and you’ve just called the non-racing portions of that 1966 John Frankenheimer film “late-studio-level claptrap.” The hell you say! The non-racing portions are assured and acceptable as far as they go, and don’t hinder the basic scheme.
According to a 6.16 Variety aricle by Abigail Lee, Dakota Johnson‘s matchmaker character in Materialists — Lucy — pays $3,200 per month for her apartment in Brooklyn Heights (technically a region between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill).
Lucy’s annual salary is $80K, which works out to $6153 monthly and $1538 weekly before taxes. Subtract her rent from her pre-tax monthly gross and she’s left with $2953 monthly or $738 weekly to cover everything else — food, utilities, MTA card, savings, clothing, entertainment (dinners, movies, clubs). God knows what her income is after taxes. But to live like a human being, Lucy would have to earn an annual salary of $125K, no?
I went last Friday to an ear doctor and discovered that my left ear canal and especially the left ear drum were totally jammed. I was told to go home and squeeze several drops of Debrox into this afflicted ear two or three times on Saturday and Sunday. Which I did.
I returned to the doctor’s office this morning and an assistant whirred and vacuumed me out with warm water, and guess what? Both ears are now totally clean and semi-purified, and now my hearing is better…really.
What I mean is that I can now hear as well as I did 20 or 25 years ago, or maybe even 30. My hearing isn’t as good as my granddaughter’s, but I feel renewed regardless.
And if I can’t quite hear what you just said in the midst of a loud clattery party, it’s your fault because you’re slurring your words and/or failing to speak with the diction of a RADA-trained Shakespearean actor. Learn to project and enunciate like Ian McKellen (whom I’ve hung with on a couple of social occasions so don’t tell me) and we’ll both be better off.
The general consensus has sunk in all over, and it’s this: Trump’s military parade in Washington, D.C. felt rote, pallid and under-attended while the NO KINGS demonstrations across the nation were broadly supported and far more vigorous. I think that’s fair to say.
“I have never experienced such a joyless, lifeless, and sterile mass event in my entire life. Grim-faced soldiers, marching past half-empty grandstands, many of them obviously wanting to be somewhere else. No bands. Little bunting. Just piped-in rock music and MAGA hats. If this truly was meant to honor the 250 years of the United States Army, all we got was an endless procession of uniformed troops looking like they’d prefer to have been at Valley Forge. The president, sitting on the reviewing stand in that weird, forward-leaning attitude that he has, rarely smiling, a skunk at his own garden party.
“I think there probably was more good feeling and genuine emotion when they took Jack Kennedy out to Arlington for the last time.” — Esquire‘s Charles P. Pierce, 6.15.25.
I’m going to say this plain and straight and no bullshit. I hate (i.e., am totally bored by) Ennio Morricone‘s score for John Carpenter‘s The Thing (’82), and all my life I’ve completely worshipped and adored Dimitri Tiomkin‘s score for Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby‘s The Thing From Another World (’51).
This video of Brad Pitt and g.f. Ines de Ramon was shot yesterday in Manhattan. It immediately sent me into a tailspin of depression.
One, the poor guy looks awful — at least 15 or 20 pounds heavier that I’ve ever seen him before, and his hair all but completely shaved off. I’m presuming this is because Pitt has been playing a former Navy SEAL in David Ayer‘s Heart of the Beast, but nobody wants to see a handsome movie star looking all bloated and grunted up.
Even worse is Pitt’s ghastly baby-blue velour suit — oversized, extra-baggy pants. Plus he’s wearing a beige-yellow striped shirt that looks like he snagged it at a Goodwill store…what the hell are you doing, man?
I was going to call this post “Fat Pitt”, but that would’ve made me feel worse.
Five days hence (6.20.25) marks the 50th anniversary of the release of StevenSpielberg‘s Jaws.
Given its reputation as the film that pioneered the ubiquitous wide-release saturation strategy, HE is again reminding that the real saturation trailblazer was Chartoff-Winkler’s Breakout, a quasi-exploitation prison-break flick costarring Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland and Robert Duvall.
HE update: Commenter Sonny Hooper argues that 1974’s The Trial of Billy Jack (11.13.74) began with a thousand-theatre break on a four-wall basis, and therefore launched the practice of saturation bookings six months before Breakout and Jaws. I’ve always thought that the indie nature of that film plus the four-walling thing…I’ve always thought these factors constituted an asterisk.
Put it this way: Breakout and Jaws were the first studio-distributed films (Columbia and Universal being the studios) to launch with saturation bookings.
Postedon4.17.16: A veteran filmmaker reminded me yesterday that Breakout, a 1975 B-grade action flick that’s basically about a helicopter pilot (Charles Bronson) air-lifting a framed American prisoner (Robert Duvall) out of a Mexican jail, was the first film to open via wide saturation booking, and not Jaws, which usually gets the credit.
After Breakout opened internationally on 3.6.75, Columbia opted for a radical, roll-the-dice decision to open this mezzo-mezzo actioner in 1350 situations on 5.21.75. After two weeks it had grossed a then-head-turning $12.7 million.
Impressed, Universal chairman Lew Wasserman and studio president Sid Sheinberg decided to ape this strategy by opening Jaws, which they knew would be a big hit, on 6.20.75 in a similar fashion.
The initial Jaws plan was to open it in 900 theatres, but Wasserman cut that figure down to 464. Wikipedia claims that Breakout opened on 1300 screens, or nearly three times the opening-day screen count of Jaws. The veteran who reminded me about Breakout recalled a screen tally more in the 600 range.
I just think it should be recognized or remembered that the Breakout guys were the saturation pioneers and not the Jaws copycats.
Full disclosure: I don’t think I’ve ever seen Breakout. (Or have I?) It was regarded as a harmless, enjoyable diversion at the time, although no one thought it was anything more than a throwaway for drive-ins and sub-runs. Now that it’s been re-activated in my mind I intend to stream it soon.
