Directed by Claude Autant-Lara, In Case of Adversity (En cas de malheur, titled Love Is My Profession in the U.S.) is a French-Italian film noir about a 50ish established attorney (Jean Gabin) falling for a hell-bent blonde hottie (Brigitte Bardot).
Pic was released in France on 9.17.58, nine months before the appearance of Francois Truffaut‘s The 400 Blows (5.4.59) and 22 months before Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless (5.16.60).
From Owen Gleiberman’s 12.28 Bardot essay: “Looking back and watching Bardot’s movies now, you see hints and echoes of so many of the actresses who would come after her, from Maria Schneider to Nancy Allen to Dominique Sanda to Uma Thurman to Adèle Exarchopoulos to Sydney Sweeney.
“She was marketed as a pin-up, yet she was a singular presence who forged a path of sensual and spiritual fearlessness. And part of it is that she insisted, just as the Madonna of the ’80s and ’90s did, that for a certain kind of performer (her kind), sexuality was inseparable from artistry. Bardot’s eroticized projection of female identity was itself a transcendent performance. If God created woman, Bardot made you feel like she had created herself. Only time will tell if the future is female. But once she’d made her mark, the future was most definitely Bardot.
Just-sent HE email….EXTRA SPECIAL, END-OF-2O25 “MARTY SUPREME” GATECRASHERS OPPORTUNITY…sent to Gatecrashers fraternity at 12:25 om eastern…
Happiest of holidays to Fellow Gatecrashers,
Don’t listen to my obnoxious bigmouth ranting….by all means vote only as you choose on your lonesome…but please consider the thrust of the following….because the spirit is upon me, I swear…I’m speaking not from my own determinations or from this or that tower of arrogant know-it-all-ism…I’m truly speaking for the revolutionary pitch of things…it’s definitely happening right now.
All good people of taste and conscience and especially those who recognize the value of NOT choosing a hard-left ideological film for the Best Picture Oscar as this would further stigmatize the Hollywood community as lefty fruit-loop fanatics who live on their own secular planet, and who have no understanding or appreciation of real life and real values as they exist outside the glitzy woke ghetto….
With Josh Safdie‘s MARTY SUPREME having broken though critically and box-office-wise over the just-finished Christmas holiday weekend, now is the time for The Gatecrashers to recognize the fundamentally populist, artistic and zeitgeist-driven truth of things and get behind SENOR SUPREME as a way of proclaiming the truth of things…of not only stopping ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER’s Oscar momentum but tipping the balance of opinion away from PTA’s admittedly well made, hard-left, ludicrously-plotted, father-daughter fantasy….
MARTY SUPREME is this year’s ANORA, and ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is this year’s THE BRUTALIST….
Join Timothee Chalamet‘s orange-pingpong-ball crusade!…No politics, just pogo sticks ….jump on your steed, unsheath your saber and join Teddy Roosevelt‘s rough riders as they thunder up San Juan Hill…NOW IS THE TIME! Remember that T.R. nutter from Frank Capra‘s Arsenic and Old Lace? “CHAAAAAARGE!”
Obviously you guys are under no obligation to vote for MARTY SUPREME because I’m urging you to do so, but now is the moment….Chalamet’s First Army has blown a hole through the woke siegfried line and NOW IS THE TIME for General George S. Patton‘s Third Army to rush through and seize the initiative! MARTY SUPREME-OLA….yes!!
A week ago the Best Picture race was boring everyine to tears, and now, as Michael Caine would say, the bloody doors have been blown off.
Shut that OBAA shit down!…shut it the fuck down!
Please refresh your ballots ASAP so we can post the results just before or certainly just after New Year’s Day. Claude AI has made the balloting so easy, so snappy….a fucking breeze.
“‘Bonnie and Clyde‘ is a 1968 French-language song written by Serge Gainsbourg, and performed by Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot. The song is based on an English-language poem written by Bonnie Parker herself a few weeks before she and Clyde Barrow were shot, titled “The Trail’s End”. The French song was released on two 1968 albums: Gainsbourg’s Initials B.B., and Gainsbourg and Bardot’s Bonnie and Clyde.” — Wiki page.
Earlier this month I posted a list of 20safebets to be released in 2026 — i.e., presumptions of quality based upon esteemed critical regard and/or aspirational histories. Most of these represent my idea of festival toppers or possible award-worthy titles, or both.
Possible Standout Exceptions: (a) Ink (d: Danny Boyle) — Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch back in the old days, based on a James Graham stage play….yes!; (b) David O. Russell‘s Madden, biopic of football coach and commentator John Madden w/ Nic Cage, John Mulane, Kathryn Hahn, Sienna Miller; (c) Ben Affleck‘s Animals, political crime thriller costarring Affleck, Gillian Anderson, Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun; (d) Laszlo Nemes‘ Moulin, French resistance WWII drama w/ Gilles Lellouche, Lars Eidinger, Félix Lefevre.
In four days, A24’s Marty Supreme will make more than Timothee Chalamet’s Christmas movie from last year, A Complete Unknown, did in 5 days, $26M-$27M to $23.2M.
Rivals are impressed by this number: It’s a period film about a ping-pong player from the Lower East Side, not an easy subject matter that creates a line to the multiplex, but it helps when you have the force of Chalamet in the campaign. The viral of it all sparked with the zoom sketch below. We already told you that the social media universe for Marty Supreme stood at 197M before opening across TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube; that’s with Chalamet standing atop The Sphere in Las Vegas. There was also a Marty Supreme blimp flying over Beverly Hills in further stunts.
When polled by Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak, moviegoers said the most influential form of advertising for Marty Supreme was social media (28%) and friends and family (19%).
Friday was $6.7M, -30% from Christmas Day’s $9.5M for a 3-day that stands at $16M-$17M at 2,668 theaters. Don’t be shocked if it’s higher, like a $17M 3-day and $30M 4-day. A24 has 70MM locations which are generating big bucks, and there’s some PLFs. Comp this to the previous Safdie Brothers movie, the zany gangster drama, Uncut Gems, which went wide over a 2019 5-day Christmas stretch with $18.8M. The Adam Sandler movie finaled at $50M.
The PostTrak definite recommend on Marty Supreme is a great 60% with 4 1/2 stars. Men over 25 are first in line at 36% followed by women over 25 at 27%, followed by men under 25 at 21% and women under 25 at 16%. 18-34 turnout is 66%. Even though women under 25 were surprisingly the smaller to show up yesterday, they love their Marty the most with a 94% positive and a 73% definite recommend. Diversity demos are 51% Caucasian, 23% Hispanic and Latino, 10% Black and 11% Asian American. Very good walk-up business with 52% buying their ticket same days. 50% went for Chalamet.
Marty Supreme is playing best on the East and West with close to half the gross coming from those regions versus a norm of 39% compared to all other films in the marketplace. Overperforming cities are NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Boston, Toronto and more. The trajectory is showing that this Josh Safdie directed movie is playing more broadly than an art film. Regal Union Square is currently the top-grossing multiplex in the nation for the pic with close to $74k.
Something’s Gotta Give (’03) is probably a better film that I’ve given it credit for over the last couple of decades.
This is a first-rate dinner table scene. Awkward discussion, truth grenades. Jack Nicholson and Frances McDormand (playing a brutally honest lesbian playwright) are especially good.
The film’s speed bump (a big one) is director-writer Nancy Meyers insisting upon the then-39-year-old Keanu Reeves‘s cardiologist character feeling serious romantic hots for the eternally attractive Diane Keaton, who was then 57.
A 39 year-old doctor might fall into a serious relationship with, say, a 45 year-old woman, or maybe even a 50-year-old if you want to push it. But not a 57 year-old, especially one who refuses to have “work” done (hence the incessant turtlenecks). There’s just no buying it.
Frances McDormand (around 45 or 46 during filming) looks so young here!
HE was out and about during last night’s snowstorm, which began around 6 pm Friday (12.26) and came down hard and heavy. Mounds and ridges of the stuff, 4″ or 5″ deep. Traffic necessarily slowed on Westchester County’s Hutchinson River Parkway and Connecticut 95 northbound, but the real problem wasn’t so much the snowfall (quite heavy with very little snowplowing going on) as the chickenshit drivers.
In a deluge of this intensity you have to keep your speed down to 25 or 30 mph for fear of skidding (everyone had their flashers on), but the 95 was congested as fuck — much slower than necessary because of all the pussies driving 10 or 15 mph, if that. I just pushed on through, bypassing this and that slowpoke as I changed lanes like a champ. Did I slip and slide a little bit? Yeah, but not to any scary degree.
JFK to Stratford usually takes a couple of hours — last night it took a little more than four. If I had kept pace with the wimps it would have taken five or longer.
When I dropped off the client (a Parisian dude) he shook my hand and said “good driver!” What he meant was that my wheel-and-breaking skills were appropriately cautious but Steve McQueen-ish, and that I don’t drive like a 85 year-old candy ass.
…in which I casually, briefly engaged with dozens upon dozens of Average Joes and Janes about this and that chit-chat topic…many times, over and over…and when the subject of the year’s best, most see-worthy films briefly surfaced, Joe and Jane had never even heard of the tip-tops….Sentimental Value, Marty Supreme, Hamnet, et. al.
It would have been one thing if these titles had stirred some level of Joe-and-Jane recognition, resulting in a vague interest in streaming these vaguely-familiar films down the road, but these and other titles drew a total effing blank.
Morever, no one had even heard of last year’s Best Picture winner — Anora.
I chatted with quite a few Yale University undergrads — exceptional, cream of-the-crop Zoomers! — and not a single one had heard of Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt, which is set in New Haven and within an elite Yale academic demimonde.
The finest films used to jar and sometimes electrify large portions of the populace. Moviegoing in general used to be an accessible, mass-interest thing, at least as far as the end-of-the-year Oscar chasers were concerned.
But the pandemic, streaming and woke-lefty instructional theology flicks (a fraternity to which One Battle After Another belongs) suffocated the golden goose. Movies have devolved into an elite cottage industry of concentrated but marginal cultural value, and the Oscars will be moving to YouTube in ’29.
I know, I know…the getting-smaller-and-narrower-and-less-vital trend has been apparent for many years, but 2025 was the year in which this numbing realization became inescapable. The mooks have mostly checked out, given up, lost that lovin’ feelin’.
And in this order. Yes, that’s correct — The President’s Cake is judged to be a better, more nourishing film that One Battle After Another
1. Josh Safdie‘s Marty Supreme (the finest, most adrenalized, most type-A-meets-grade-A film of the year….no politics, just pogo sticks)
2. Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value (generates honest current, nails it, gets nothing wrong)
3. Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet (60% to 70% of the dialogue is unintellligible — finale rules)
4. Zach Cregger‘s Weapons
5. Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake (brilliant, transporting)
6. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (the second most overpraised film of the year, the first being Sinners)
7. KentJones‘ LateFame
8. Kaouther Ben Hania‘s The Voice of Hind Rajib
9. Noah Baumbach‘s Jay Kelly.
10. (Special Feature Documentary Stand-Out) DavidKittredge‘s BoormanandtheDevil.
