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.
“Since it was announced that the Safdie brothers, the lads behind Uncut Gems and Good Time, would be splitting up, the one question on everyone’s mind has been ‘so which brother has the sauce?’ Having seen Benny’s The Smashing Machine and Josh’s Marty Supreme, the answer, I’m afraid, is painfully obvious” — from Karsten Rundquist‘s “Is Marty Supreme The Movie of the Year?”
Over the last two or three years, Deirdre‘s removal of the vocals in a large portion of the entire Beatles song library has been — for me, at least — a kind of blessing.
….but Herman J. Mankiewicz‘s use of “rosebud” in Citizen Kane‘s wasn’t a reference to Marion Davies‘ “vagina” (as Gus says at 1:45) but her clitoris. That’s a nickname that William Randolph Hearst allegedly used for it. Yes, it was also the name of Charles Foster Kane‘s boyhood sled.
Last night, inspired by the idea of visiting the Holy Land, I enjoyed my third viewing of HanyAbu–Assad’s suspenseful, decidedly un-Christian Omar (2013), which began filming in Nazareth Nablus in late 2012.
My first viewing was during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival; I caught it a second time at the Palm Springs Film Festival in January 2014.
Posted on 1.15.14: I was so taken with my first viewing of Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar, a Palestinian-produced thriller about betrayal and double-agenting in the West Bank, that I caught it again last night at the Palm Springs Film Festival.
It’s a taut, urgent, highly realistic thriller that squeezes its characters and viewers like a vise.
Omar is among the Academy’s short-listed Best Foreign Language Feature contenders, and with my personal favorites, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past and Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (which is quite similar to Abu-Assad’s film) out of the running, I guess I’m an Omar guy at this stage.
Omar costars Waleed_Zuaiter (l.) and Adam Bakri (r.) following last night’s screening at Palm Spring Int’l Film Festival
I’m a serious admirer of the two leads, Adam Bakri, who plays the titular character, a Palestinian youth whose decision to take part in an assassination with two friends seals his fare, and Waleed Zuaiter, an Israeli agent who presses Omar into his service as an informer.
Bakri and Zuaiter did a q & an after last night’s screening.
Bakri, probably 21 or 22, is making his feature film debut with Omar. He’s currently living stateside (either LA or NY). He was wearing a really handsome military-styled dark blue jacket, and so I asked him where he got it. Zara at the Grove, he said, so maybe he’s living here.
From Jay Weissberg‘s Variety review, filed during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival: “As he did with Paradise Now, Abu-Assad refuses to demonize characters for their poor choices. Only too aware of the crushing toll of the Occupation on Palestinians, he shows men (the film is male-centric) making tragic, often self-destructive decisions as a result of an inescapable environment of degradation and violence.
“With Omar he’s finessed the profile, depicting how the weaknesses that make us human, especially love, can lead, in such a place, to acts of betrayal. It’s as if he’s taken thematic elements from Westerns and film noir, using the fight for dignity and an atmosphere of doubt to explain rather than excuse heinous actions. Viewers with a firm moral compass, who see killing as an act always to be condemned, won’t need Omar to tell them what’s right and wrong.”
Late yesterday afternoon at the Jacob Burns Center in Pleasantville, two successive showings of Marty Supreme were sold out. At the AMC Westport today (Thursday, 12.25) three showings of Marty Supreme are currently sold out, according to the AMC app. And a 6 pm showing at the AMC Sono is nearly sold out.
HE to Bill McCuddy: This is what happens when a film is “tanking.”
…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.
In the context of this highly divisive, incorrectly color-graded Bluray, the names Larry Smith and Criterion’s Lee Kline will live in infamy…talk about burnt bridges!
Las night I re-watched Matt Tyrnauer‘s seven-year-old Studio 54, and it still delivers a great high for those who were young or youngish and occasionally clubbing and quaaluding back in the late Jimmy Carterera. It feels really soothing and heartwarming to revisit that bacchanalian atmosphere of yore, and it’s also a great Christmas movie in a certain sense.
The first half (i.e., before the downfall) delivers a robust high….the feeling is just as rich and levitational as the one you get from watching Alistair Sim‘s Scrooge (a.k.a. A Christmas Carol).
Studio 54 wasn’t just an immersive alternate-reality trip on West 54th near 8th Avenue — it was Shangrila. Swirling sounds, dancing until 2 or 3 am, possible sex, cocaine, nocturnal delights, quaaludes, drinks and that pounding thump-thump-BUHMP-BUHMP.
Oh, to have been a young buck in ’77 and ’78 and get waved through by Steve Rubell himself and then run into the levitational coolios (rock stars, journalists, models, authors, actors, producers, politicians) in that cellar-level salon…sniff, snort, stop it, you’re dreaming.
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I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Tyrnauer’s film is a fascinating, well-told tale — exciting, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad — that invites you to really sink into a mad Manhattan era (mid ’77 to early ’80) that was a real bacchanalian sweet spot — post-pill, pre-AIDS, sexual liberation and an abundance of cocaine and quaaludes (and the operational assistance of the beloved Edlich Pharmacy).
A few weeks ago it hit me why I’m so affected by Studio 54, above and beyond the nostalgia. It’s because it uses a brilliant up-and-down narrative strategy that works as a metaphor for how briefly youth lasts and how suddenly the best of times can end, and how two crafty fellows — Rubell and Ian Schrager — foresaw and caught hold of a special hedonism in the air, a certain what-the-fuckness that happened at just the right time and in just the right way, and all under the cultural auspices of a somewhat prudish and puritanical peanut-farmer president.
And for the first time ever, Schrager actually pokes his head out, sits down and talks to Tyrnauer about the whole saga, start to finish, no holds barred.
Tyrnauer’s strategy for the first hour is to give you a great contact high with the saga of Studio 54’s success — the cinematic equivalent of dropping a Lemmon 714 on an empty stomach.
Then it shifts into wistful melancholy as he relates how Rubell and Schrager struck it enormously rich only to see the whole thing collapse less than three years later. Their version of Studio 54 (it re-opened in 1981 under Mark Fleischman and continued for five years) launched in April of ’77 and closed in February ’80, right after which Schrader and Rubell went to jail for tax evasion.
Schrager recovered and went on to great success as a boutique hotelier; Rubell died of AIDS in 1989 at age 45.
