Jeff Wells The latest Gatecrashers tabulations are up and rolling. (Here are HE’s initial picks.) A few slackers are still deciding but…
HE’s preferred Oscar-worthy acting quartet: Best Actor: Marty Supreme‘s Timothee Chalamet, Best Actress: Sentimental Value‘s Renate Reinsve, Best Supporting Actor: Sentimental Value‘s Stellan Skarsgård; Best Supporting Actress: Weapons‘ Amy Madigan.
“And therefore, being completely post-partum-depressed and hating my dreary motherhood existence and unable to generate any further interest in writing, I am lock-and-load determined to descend into feral madness as well as drag my husband and the audience down into the very same hell-pit….aaaagggghhh!”
HE to JLaw’s “Grace”: “You’re deeply unlikable, as in spitty, sputtering, hell-bent, self-loathing…Jesus.
“If I was in RPatz’s shoes I wouldn’t want to fuck you either. Hell, I wouldn’t even want to receive oral pleasuring from you because you’re in a crazy enough space to abruptly bite into Mr. Happy…I would honestly be afraid of you drawing blood or leaving teeth marks.”
From “Die, My Love Warrants Respect But Joe and Jane Will Hate It,” posted from Cannes on 5.17.25:
“While I respected Lynne Ramsay‘s Die, My Love and what it was on about (i.e., “aaagggghhh!”), the Debussy journos didn’t go for it. Too grim, too downish in a one-note sense, no plot pivots of any kind….just a downward swirl into the gathering storm of Jennifer Lawrence‘s postpartum derangement….down, down, down.
“Then again it’s presented in 1.37…boxy is beautiful, bruh.
“What is Die My Love really about?
“Just as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds wasn’t so much a restrained horror film about malicious winged demons as an indictment of social complacency, Die, My Love isn’t so much about JLaw’s descent into self-destructive madness as a portrayal of the dull horror of doing almost nothing with your life while caring for a child…an indictment of middle-class, stay-at-home-and-burp-the-baby-while-baking-cookies momism.”
Well, guess what? HE loves the idea of sitting through a two-and-a half-hour Oscar bait flick from that electric season of George Bush-vs.-Michael Dukakis-vs.-Willie Horton-vs.Lee Atwater. I really like “competent and watchable”!!
And yet Sony Pictures Classics, the film’s distributor, has been playing a little bit of “hide the ball” as far as screenings and streaming access is concerned. We all know what that means.
Ironic “Nuremberg” Nudge to MAGA Slowboats: “You can reclaim your former glory.”
From Owen Gleiberman’s 9.7 review: “Written and directed by James Vanderbilt, Nuremberg presents itself as lavishly somber and important and includes several not-so-veiled references to the rise of intolerance, and the need to maintain international standards of justice, in the world today.
“But competent and watchable as it is, Nuremberg isn’t big on psychological tension or insight. As Herman Goring, Russell Crowe acts with consummate command even as Göring, by design, keeps the audience at arm’s length. But Rami Malek‘s Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley brings a weird insecurity; along the way, his Kelley almost seems to forget what his job is.”
I distinctly recall being taught in my teens that the central character’s last name was spelled Goering. (The Wiki page confirms this.) So what is this “Goring” shit?
After last night’s anti-Trump blowout, Democrats with political aspirations coast to coast now absolutely understand two things:
(1) The way to further winning is to run on average-guy affordability issues, which is to say mimic Zohran Mamdani‘s campaign minus the free buses (because we don’t want any smelly, urine-stained bums riding the buses in the afternoons and early evenings); and…
(2) Totally abandon woke identity politics in all its forms, and that especially means throwing the trans issue (including gender-affirming care) under the bus. Just dump that identity shit while embracing affordability issues…simple.
I love (a) Mamdani’s quick mind and smile, (b) his considerable rhetorical skills, (c) the fact that he had the balls to mention Eugene Debs and Fiorello LaGuardia last night (I 100% guarantee that the vast majority of Millennials and Zoomers who voted for Zohran have NEVER HEARD of Debs or LaGuardia), and (d) the fact that he’s a couple of years younger than my two owns, Jett and Dylan.
Posted on 10.30.25: Neil Rosen and Roger Friedman have un-posted (i.e., taken down) a convivial discussion with Woody Allen. The chat happened two weeks ago ago inside Woody’s downstairs den.
Friedman to HE (received at 6:54 pm eastern): “I don’t know how you came upon the unlisted link to our Woody Allen interview. It was not yours to publish. We’re always grateful for publicity, but the piece was not finished. It’s been removed and will launch soon properly. I’m disappointed that you didn’t contact me before posting it. Just so there’s no question, Woody loves the interview. It’s our decision to launch it properly.”
Friendo: “Right now Sentimental Value is one of the most profound arguments against AI. Whatever you may feel about Chat GPT 5, Grok 4, Claude 4.5, Deepseek R1 and Gemini 2.0, they can’t replicate what Sentimental Value holds and nurtures and quietly delivers in a couple of hundred different ways.”
I’ll finally be seeing Joachim Trier‘s film again tomorrow night (Wednesday at 7:15 pm)…my first and only previous viewing was six months ago in Cannes.
Am I sorry that director-cowriter Trier didn’t write a role for an obese, wheelchaired LGBTQ-of-color character? Or that he didn’t least insert a South Korean maid who gets stuck in a heavy rainstorm while shopping? Am I sorry that he decided against making Stellan Skarsgard‘s paterfamilias into a late-blooming homosexual (like Chris Plummer in Beginners)? Yes, I’m sorry for this…all of it. Because Sentimental Value would have a much better chance of taking the Best Picture Oscar if he’d constructed his film with a nice, diverse Wicked: For Good attitude.
Too many white Norweigans = definite Academy issues.
This Gold’s Gym member (POC on the left) is obviously arrogant, egoistic and horridly insensitive. If there was a God she would be sentenced to a year in a damp isolated dungeon for her trans hate.
Listen to every word.
The last ten seconds are
Any man who thinks he’s a woman who listens this and still says IDGAF I’m going in, should not be anywhere near women. Ever. Zero empathy. He’s a significant danger.
A sane person in an insane world https://t.co/TLmuMkKxZs
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 3, 2025
— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) November 4, 2025
Zohran Mamdani will win big tonight. Gavin Newsom‘s Prop. 50 will also win — yes! –but who knows by how much? New Jersey’s sensibly liberal Mikie Sherill will be elected governor. And these are the only races I’ve focusing on.
Sasha Stone and Claude 4.5, the AI mechanism, have assembled a beautiful multiple-choice Gatecrashers ballot that’s super-easy to use, and which you can change any time of day or night…all on your own.
Until last night I had ducked Jack Clayton and Harold Pinter‘s The Pumpkin Eater (’64) for decades. I never even thought about giving it a whirl, mainly out of fear that it might smother me in dreary wifey nihilism and perhaps make me feel morose. (It’s based on a novel by Penelope Mortimer.)
But I finally gave in last night, and it’s actually quite exceptional — a sophisticated, finely wrought, moderate-mannered parlor drama about a gradually deteriorating London marriage.
Vaguely similar to David Jones Betrayal‘ (’83), which Pinter also wrote, of course, based on his 1980 play, The Pumpkin Eater has a wry, half-fleeting, matter-of-fact quality. But it also conveys genuine compassion for a woman who’s slowly perishing within.
It’s basically about Peter Finch‘s chilly screenwriter husband — an aloof, constantly disloyal hound who in his heart of hearts needs to be constantly worshipped and massaged and, I’m guessing, blown for good measure — quietly and relentlessly cheating on the poor, wounded, downhearted Anne Bancroft, who allows their many children to basically run their marriage.
This is going to sound shallow but I felt deflated by the fact that Bancroft’s hair is rather gray throughout — only in the very beginning are her locks dark and ravishing in the style of Mrs. Robinson, whom she would play two or three years later. It makes her look drained and faded. Bancroft was only 32 or 33 when the film was shot, and yet Clayton tries to make her look at least 47 or 48, if not older. But her performance is staggering, and it resulted in her second Best Actress Oscar nomination.
Costarring James Mason, Maggie Smith, Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Webb, Richard Johnson and Yootha Joyce. Oswald Morris‘s black-and-white cinematography is generally delicious; ditto Georges Delerue‘s score.
Pauline Kael: “Bancroft’s performance as the (compulsive childbearing) Englishwoman whose nerves are giving out has an unusual tentative, exploratory quality. (It ranks with her more straightforward acting in The Miracle Worker.)
“The Pumpkin Eater is a stunning, high-style film — fragmented yet flowing. The murky sexual tensions have a fascination, and there are memorable moments: Bancroft’s crackup in Harrods; glimpses of Mason being prurient and vindictive, and Maggie Smith being a troublemaking ‘other woman.'”
That’s correct — the first hit is Ladd’s Flo Castleberry, a world-weary, sharp-tongued waitress in Martin Scorsese‘s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More. The second hit is her performance as the doomed Ida Sessions in Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown.
Chinatown was released in the atmospheric heat of Watergate — 6.20.74. Alice opened almost exactly six months later — 12.9.74.