THR‘s James Hibberdreported yesterday morning that a pair of hardcore woke directors — 40 year-old writer-director Ally Pankiw (Black Mirror, Ponies) and 38-year-old Kate Herron (Loki, Doctor Who) — are declining offers to direct episodes of HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter TV series, apparently over objections to author J.K. Rowling‘s trans views.
Is Rowling really, truly “transphobic”? It’s been so argued but is it really so crazy to take exception to the term “people who menstruate”? Rowling has said that such terminology “erases the concept of biological womanhood”. Are there sane people claiming that men menstruate? Am I missing something?
Rowling has also campaigned against certain transgender rights reforms, arguing that “self-identification laws threaten women-only spaces like domestic abuse shelters and public restrooms“.
And she’s openly supported folks who’ve lost their jobs or contracts over alleged anti-trans statements. It’s surely fair to ask what kind of people would say “fire that woman!” or “cancel that older white guy!” over the wrong trans views? People like Pankiw and Herron perhaps?
It’s been common knowledge all summer that the massive financial success of Obsession (Focus, 5.15.26) has put Inde Navarette, 25, into an enviable career position.
An array of choice film roles are being offered to her, a Best Actress Oscar campaign is reportedly in the offing…all the requisite hoo-hah.
It goes without saying that if Navarette wanted a “real” acting career, she would choose her next couple of roles very carefully and not just go for the easy moolah. She would try to become Debra Winger of the ’80s or Julia Roberts of the ’90s or even Dustin Hoffman after the huge success of The Graduate.
Marvel Studios exec Kevin Feige announced at D23 yesterday that Navarette has been cast as Rogue in the next Marvel X-Men flick. Her costars will be Sadie Sink (Jean Grey), Kit Connor (Cyclops), Samara Weaving (Emma Frost), Christopher Abbott (Prof. X), Adam Driver (Mr. Sinister). Pic will release on 3.5.28.
So that’s it. There is nothing lower or shallower in the eyes of the Movie Godz than costarring in a superhero flick. So Navarette will almost certainly not go on to major heavyweight stardom. She’s decided instead to grab those Marvel bucks. Done, finito, chiselled in stone.
HE hereby apologizes to Andrew Kavanaugh and his YouTube channel, Cavanaugh’s Corner, for failing to link to Cavanaugh’s takedown essay about Criterion’s 4K Bluray of John Boorman‘s Point Blank (’67), which popped last April. Unlike most of the online whores and slobbering suck-ups who gave this Criterion disc a pass, Cavanaugh just burts out the truth and let the chips fall. Cavanaugh’s essay posted three months ago, or sometime in mid-May.
Cavanaugh: “I don’t know if this was an artistic choice or what happened, but I am extraordinarily disappointed in the way this disc looks.”
AI sez: “The ‘teal desecration’ of Point Blank refers to a heated controversy among film enthusiasts regarding The Criterion Collection’s April 2026 4K UHD release of John Boorman’s 1967 neo-noir classic.
“Physical media collectors and prominent home video reviewers have heavily criticized the restoration for featuring a heavy, digitally applied cyan/teal-green color grade that drastically alters the film’s original color palette.
“Boorman originally utilized a highly specific, shifting color spectrum to reflect the protagonist’s changing emotions. The new color grading pushes natural blues, grays, and concrete surfaces into heavy teal tones. Critics point out that famous vibrant colors are ruined.
“Physical media forums frequently refer to this modern digital color-pushing trend as an ongoing ‘disease” or ‘vandalism‘ affecting classic movie restorations. Despite the community backlash, the release is explicitly marketed as a new digital restoration supervised and approved by director John Boorman.
“If you want to experience the film without the heavy teal push, media preservationists recommend tracking down the 2014 Warner Archive Blu-ray release. This older master retains a warmer, highly faithful, and naturalistic presentation of the 1960s Technicolor hues.”
The expression on Debra Winger‘s face as she peers through the glass and into the cafe is…hard to describe but I find it more than levitating. It’s almost heart-stopping. The look of excited hunger in her eyes, I mean.
Initially posted on 10.25.22: Here are HE’s choices for Ralph Fiennes 11 greatest performances, be they lead or supporting…if your performances ring true, the amount of screen time matters not:’
1. Monsieur Guystave H. in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Fiennes has a classic line about graceful aging and adjusting one’s appetites. Gustave is telling Tony Revolori‘s Zero Moustafa, a Grand Budapest hotel bellboy, that he Biblically “knew” Tilda Swinton’s recently deceased Madame D. Noting that she was “great in the sack,” Fiennes explains that “in your youth it’s all fine filet but as you get older you have to settle for the cheaper cuts.” Or words to that effect.**
2. Amon Goth in Schindler’s List — a performance that spoke for itself from the get-go. I interviewed Fiennes in the fall of ’93 for a regular Sunday column I did for the N.Y. Daily News — the piece called “The Reich Stuff.”
6. Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
7. Dennis “Spider” Cleg in David Cronenberg‘s Spider.
8. Count László de Almássy in The English Patient (though I find his performance a bit labored, a bit of a slog).
9. Coriolanus in Coriolanus.
10. Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair.
11. Justin Quayle in The Constant Gardener.
** That’s generally true if you’re not married, but for the middle six months of 2013 I was utterly blessed by a relationship with an exquisite, marbled, grass-fed filet mignon, to go with the metaphor. God smiled, and I will never forget His generosity. Despite the woundings at the end I caught an amazing break.
I’ve always half-admired Fiennes for that 2007 seven-mile-high episode aboard Quantas Airlines. Only good-looking movie stars get away with this kind of thing, and I had to chuckle with I first read about it. Fiennes had most of his hair back then and his natural good looks were still untouched my middle-aged crease, and Quantas steward Lisa Robertson had loved him in The English Patient so he was in like Flynn.
In ’03 I was writing a weekly column for the N.Y. Daily News…interviews, trend pieces. In early November of that year I interviewed the Oscar-touted Ralph Fiennes about his perversely cold performance as Amon Goeth in Steven Spielberg‘s Schindler’s List. When the piece ran it was called “The Reich Stuff.”
Honestly? I derived more pleasure from reading that N.Y. Daily News headline than from watching Phillip Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff, which had opened a decade earlier.
I was moved…okay, mildly stirred by portions of The Right Stuff, but it was mainly a popcorn denigration — an attempt to make populist puree out of almost everything fascinating in Tom Wolfe’s seminal book.
Wolfe delivered an absorbing, insightful take on a governmental program that promoted personalities and heroism to sell itself to the public. It passed along the technical intrigues of the early flights and especially the seminal Chuck Yeager lore and how that cockpit attitude influenced every pilot who ever lived, etc. But the film was primarily aimed at commoners.
I really don’t see what kind of appreciable bump could come out of the 4K Criterion Bluray, which will pop on 11.24.
The Right Stuff is a diverting film with some above-average passages, agreed, but too much of it feels aimed at the proles…coarse, primitive. I expected some kind of semblance of what I’d read on the page…eloquent, savvy, well-researched and often funny, at least in a snickering sense.
Almost every amusing element in the Wolfe book fails to land in the film. Every scene in the Kaufman film feels broad and over-acted in order to appeal to the cheap seats. Urination jokes (i.e.. Alan Shepard letting go in his space suit), masturbation jokes, seasick-vomiting jokes, rubber-tube-up-the-ass jokes — everything primitive is used. Very little in the way of low-key, the-way-it-really-was pilot stuff. Almost every scene feels “performed” by actors.
Wolfe wrote about John Glenn (Ed Harris) telling Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn) that he needs to stop catting around at the local cocktail lounges because it’ll be bad for the Mercury astronaut’s image if it gets out, and how Shepard told Glenn that girls are none of his damn business and to bugger off — great in the book, doesn’t work in the film.
Wolfe wrote about Gus Grissom‘s “death dimes” — two rolls of dimes that he took with him on his Mercury flight in order to pass them out to friends later on, but which made it difficult for him to tread water in the Atlantic after his capsule sank, because of their weight. (“And now this big junkheap of travel sentiment stuffed in his knee pocket was taking him under… dimes!…silver deadweight!”). Great in the book, ignored by Kaufman.
Did Annie Glenn really stutter that badly, and was Lyndon Johnson really so insensitive to her situation? I didn’t buy any of this. LBJ was not some stupid, intemperate oaf.
Plus I hate those awful, over-emphatic San Francisco mimes, cast as journalists, with their stubby little moustaches and narrow-brimmed hats running around like the Keystone Cops.
And Kaufman making a big deal about Aborigine natives lighting bonfires as Glenn soars over Australia? What was that? I remember watching this back in ’83 and saying to myself “who gives a fuck if Aborigines are lighting bonfires or not? What have Aborigines got to do with the space program?”
To me, Mark Rydell‘s performance as the comically eccentric, deeply diseased Marty Augustine in Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye (’73) was his peak achievement — Augustine imbued Rydell with a sick legendary aura — when he smashed that Coke bottle across the face of Joanne, his girlfriend (played by the non-pro Jo Ann Brody)…okay, that was horrible but Rydell’s acting nonetheless turned a twisted key…a current of vicious psychopathic sadism.
I respected and in some cases admired Rydell’s directing — not so much The Fox, The Reivers, The Rose and The River, but I definitely enjoyed Cinderella Liberty (’73) and On Golden Pond (’81). (The later resulted in a nomination for a Best Director Oscar.)
But honestly? The Rydell-directed film I admired the most was James Dean (’01), a made-for-TV venture that starred the 22-year-old James Franco as Dean. Okay, I didn’t care for the recreation of Dean’s fatal car crash but otherwise I was on board and then some.
The 97-year-old Rydell passed at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills. Hugs and condolences.
David Robert Mitchell‘s The End of Oak Street is basically a Steven Spielberg ’80s tribute film — a leave-your-brain-in-the-car popcorn flick about dinosaurs eating suburbanites.
The basic plot trigger is that an entire middle-class neighborhood (people, homes, lawns, garages, asphalt roads, cars, tool sheds, lawnmowers) is somehow transported back to the dinosaur era by way of a time-portal wormhole.
Get outta town!
I might have surrendered to this ludicrous concept if Mitchell had adopted a tone of cynical, put-on goofery, and especially if he’d chosen to emulate the tonal attitude of Luis Llosa‘s Anaconda (’97), which many of us were huge fans of.
Alas, Mitchell decided instead to pretty much play Oak Street straight at every turn, and the poor actors (Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery) are left holding the bag, resorting to every acting-class trick in the book to sell this slop as best they can.
Hathaway pours it on like she’s starring in a stage version of Hedda Gabler, and I felt so badly for this vigorous veteran. The script basically humiliates her for the sin of agreeing to a paycheck gig. Ditto poor Obi Wan Kenobi-of-the-prequels, who commits to this foolishness as fully as possible, but the poor guy is trapped.
My heart bled for both of them.
On top of which The End of Oak Street wrapped over two years ago (6.2.24), and now it’s finally opening 26 months later. (What does that tell you?) On top of which McGregor is wearing a fake-hairline rug in an early scene. Obviously additional shooting was required.
The End of Oak Street adheres to a basic roaring dino playbook, depicting a series of bloody chompings and swallowings, etc.
Mitchell goes a little nuts with one oddball scene in which Hathaway and McGregor come upon a pair of mating behemoths (“The Joy of Dino Sex”) in someone’s backyard.
There’s also a really slimey-looking snake monster who slithers up staircases and whatnot. But he looks way too tidy and unblemished — not a single stray leaf or stick is stuck to his entire icky body.
Can a suburban dad knock a dinosaur to the ground with a sledgehammer? Gee, I don’t think so but McGregor does this anyway. I also got a decent chuckle out of Hathaway firing several bullets at this and that beast, but not to much effect.
People go to dinosaur flicks in order to shout “whoo-whoo!” when an irksome or dislikable or overweight character gets eaten. This is the basic ball game. This happens exactly once to The Wolf of Wall Street‘s P. J. Byrne, but that only leaves us hungering for more.
As a neighborhood bully is beating up the teenaged Convery, your immediate thought is “why isn’t a dino rushing over and biting this asshat’s head off? I want to see this!”
I wanted, frankly, to see the family dog get shredded and swallowed or maybe one of the kids, or maybe even McGregor. (It goes without saying that the socially virtuous, trans-embracing Hathaway will never suffer any kind of grisly fate — she’s politically untouchable.) I was therefore kind of overjoyed when a family member is dino-chomped (eureka!), but leave it to Mitchell to cop out at the end.
As the film starts Hathaway and McGregor are an unhappy couple on the brink of divorce (he’s recently become unemployed and is secretly delivering pizza for extra coin while the glum, nitpicky Hathaway has been writing a novel). McGregor also occasionally sips from a half-pint of booze that he has stashed in the cellar.
All I can say is that you’ll be shocked…shocked!…when their combined effort to dodge the monsters and save each other from gruesome deaths leads to their marriage being rejuvenated. This is that kind of movie, you bet.
HE idea: When Hathaway and McGregor come upon the copulating dinos, the bizarre sight somehow and very strangely turns them on and leads to…you know what I’m imagining.
In real life Roberta Maxwell, the gifted New York actress who’s quietly riveting as Jake Gyllenhaal‘s bereaved mom during a four- or five-minute scene near the finale of Brokeback Mountain, barely resembles her emotionally bruised character.
Maxwell’s face is pale and plain and vaguely trembling in Ang Lee’s film, and with short, sort-of-mousey red hair. Very much a cowering but compassionate farmer’s wife from Wyoming. But the woman who opened her apartment door at 6 pm on New Year’s Eve was a pert and sophisticated New Yorker — glasses, her blondish-gray hair cut even shorter, her eyes the opposite of morose.
Imagine that! An actress who can not only manipulate her appearance but do a little internal tossing of the emotional salad.
Maxwell isn’t the only Brokeback Mountain actress who supplies a strong dose of hurt — there’s also the excellent Kate Mara and Linda Cardellini as Heath Ledger’s daughter and jilted girlfriend, respectively, on top of Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway‘s lead performances as unhappy wives — but Maxwell makes her mark in what is arguably the film’s penultimate scene.
It’s obvious that Maxwell’s mom and her scowling homophobic husband (played by the great Peter McRobbie) know what kind of relationship Ledger’s Ennis del Mar had with their son Jack, but her grief-ridden face is all acceptance and compassion when del Mar pays a visit, and hemmed in by fear of her husband’s rattlesnake temperament.
It’s the quiet but devastating interplay between Maxwell, McRobbie and Ledger that increases the film’s sadness to peak strength and sets up the film’s final hit, which comes when Mara tells Ledger she’s getting married to an oil-field worker named Kurt, and then leaves him alone in his trailer with Jack’s shirt hanging in the closet.
In fact, the more you watch Maxwell’s scene, the more clear it becomes that her underperforming of this exquisitely shot denouement is the emotional springboard of that last ten- or twelve-minute section. She’s got the whole film in her eyes.
Maxwell shot her footage in July 2004, not on a set but inside the rundown farmhouse seen in the film, which is located about an hour outside Calgary, Alberta, which was a cheaper place to shoot than Wyoming, where most of the film’s story unfolds.
“When I arrived at the set, people were getting ready to leave,” she recalls. “It was the very end of the shoot.”
Jack’s mom is “a lifelong Pentecostal Christian,” says Maxwell. “And in this last scene we see this tension and fear about what she knows her husband feels about this relationship, and about great cruelty and suffering she has endured herself, but she shows compassion to Ennis because she can see Jack was obviously very much loved.”
Maxwell suspects that Brokeback Mountain‘s casting director Avy Kaufman arranged a meeting with director Ang Lee a few months earlier because she had played the mother of Sean Penn‘s condemned prisoner in Dead Man Walking (’95) and “so I have a history of sad mothers.”
I can recall being distressed by large, beefy, odd-looking feet at a very early age.
Female-wise I’m always on the lookout for smallish or slender, well-pedicured, nicely proportioned feet, and I’m telling you that over 95% present a problem of one kind or another. I always avert my eyes, of course.
I was reminded last night of one of HE’s most deeply-held beliefs, which is that the mark of a truly rich and seductive film is igniting a yearning within the proverbial viewer to literally step into it and live there.
I fell head-over-heels in love with Paris four years before my first visit in the summer of ‘76, and I have Bernardo Bertolucci to thank for this. The one-room rental was at 9 rue Gregoire du Tours. (Long since refurbished and transformed into Hotel Victoire & Germain.)
Last Tango in Paris ignited something else in my epicenter — my lifelong worship of Francis Bacon.
This thought arose from my ongoing Bertolucci prep for the Venice Film Festival showings of Luca Guadagnino’s Joie de Vivre.
