“Building a model from your own material…that’s how this works…it’s about taking out all the technical, logistical stuff that gets in the way.” — from Ben Affleck‘s attempt to explain Interpositive.
Daily
All Due Respect
But there’s something incongruent about the term “Oscar season expert” and Chris Rosen‘s blue-plaid flannel shirt.
Flannel shirts are downmarket “normcore.” Back in the 20th Century they were favored by lesbians. Today their wearers are basically saying “I don’t care how much of a rural Maine backwater hayseed type I resemble or how indifferent or unconcerned wearing one of these shirts makes me seem.”
You just can’t sell the idea of being on top of the antsy, prickly, terminally diseased, ever-shfting world of Oscar-odds calibrating while wearing a blue-plaid flannel shirt. I haven’t done an on-camera thing for several months, granted, but if I did one I wouldn’t consider wearing anything other than small-collared Kooples shirts or black Zara T-shirts, possibly shielded by a black leather motorcycle jacket.
Richard Rushfield‘s threads are okay; ditto Katey Rich‘s unpretentious, open-collared Iowa college professor shirt.
Apparel-choices aside, this is a reasonably “engaging” discussion. I didn’t find it boring, exactly, but I began to lose patience early on. Why don’t they just blurt stuff out? You know what I mean. Have these guys ever heard the terms “woke-friendly” or “virtue-signalling” or “culturally isolated”? Or, you know, “completely indifferent to the likes and dislikes of Joe and Jane Popcorn”? Academy voters live on their own little planet. Just effing say that.
Relentless Resonance of “Hell or High Water”
The fact that I’m flirting with the idea of buying a 4K UHD Bluray version of Hell or High Water, even though i’ve seen it five or six times….this means something.
Trump voter hinterland food (smoked meats, ribs, baked beans, mac ‘n’ cheese) served at Hell or High Water party.
God Is My Co-Pilot
I was going to title this post “God help me.” But God has never once helped me get through a problematic film so why the hell would he suddenly change course and come to my assistance a few hours hence? God doesn’t care if I suffer through a downer movie. He/She/It is supremely indifferent. God to HE: “If you’re enough of a sadomasochist to submit to Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s just-opened film, that’s on you. But I’ll watch it with you, and we can talk it out after the show, if you want.”
“Hit me”, said the masochist. “I won’t”, said the sadist.
Origin Story About Guy Who Recently N-Worded Jordan and Lindo at BAFTAs
Sony Picture Classics’ upcoming release of Kirk Jones I Swear (4.24). an origin story about Tourette’s syndrome sufferer John Davidson in the ’80s and ’90s, is suddenly a hot-potato thing.
Davidson sparked a furor during the recent 2026 BAFTA award ceremony by shouting out the N-word while Sinners costars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage. Davidson’s Tourette-spasm outburst led to Jordan winning the Best Actor prize at the SAG Actor awards a week later, primarily due to a virtue-signalling sympathy vote.
Suggested slogan for SPC’s I Swear poster: “He said it, but he didn’t mean it.”
Posted on 2.23.26: Tourette’s sufferers have no ability to control their tics, spasms and vocalizings, but it’s hard to believe that Davidson’s terminology had nothing to do with Jordan and Lindo being front-and-center. Davidson is more specifically grappling with coprolalia, or “the utterance of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks.”
Did Davidson shout out “ferris wheel!” or “muff diver!” or “Lamborghini!” or “muscle car”? No, he shouted out a racial slur. How can anyone argue that this wasn’t a form of commentary?
Consider the famous Tourette’s scene from Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square (’17).
During a one-on-one between Dominic West‘s Julian, a famous artist, and Annica Liljeblad‘s Sonja, a Tourette’s sufferer starts interrupting with sexually provocative taunts like “show us your boobs!,” “whore!” and “camel-toe!”
These remarks were responses to Liljeblad, an attractive Nordic blonde with great gams. The Square guy didn’t blurt out anything racial or scatalogical — he went sexual for an obvious reason.
Beer Nostalgia
I haven’t had a brewski in almost 14 years (I went sober on 3.20.12) so I’m hardly an authority on old-fart beers. But allow me to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut and say that the brands nobody seems to drink any more are Rheingold, Schaefer, Schlitz, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Ballantine Ale (“What’ll you have?”).
I know nothing, but the only old-time beers that seem to be still commercially vital are Budweiser, Miller High Life and Heineken. Am I wrong? Probably to some extent.
I don’t know from craft beers.
During my drinking years I used to swear by lime- or guave-flavored beers. I used to buy six-packs of Desperado bottled beer in Cannes….loved that taste.
Buckley Can Breathe Easy — No Oscar Harm Foreseen From “The Bride!”
The atrociously reviewed The Bride! will not become a Norbit situation for Jessie Buckley — her Hamnet Best Actress Oscar is 100% locked and assured — zero Bride! fallout.
In the view of N.Y. Post critic Johnny Oleksinski, Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Bride! is “one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job. Only seconds in, I regretted leaving my trusty torch and pitchfork at home.”
Den of Geek‘s David Crow: “At the risk of banality when discussing Frankenstein, The Bride! is a monstrosity of half-finished flourishes and fancies that’s been stitched together into what could charitably be called an abomination.”
Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “The Bride! is a stitched-skin-and-black-lipstick version of an outlaws-in-love saga. It’s like Joker 2 starring a grunge version of the Munsters, with dollops of Sid and Nancy and Natural Born Killers.”
“Pretty much everything here feels like it’s being done for effect rather than to convey real emotion. That’s the case especially with Jessie Buckley’s shouty performance in the title role. What a strange quirk of timing that the Irish actress will likely be winning an Oscar for Hamnet just as this wretched mess is unleashed upon the world.” — THR‘s David Rooney.
Trump Has No Choice But To Blast This Guy Into Chunks of Flesh, Blood and Bone
N.Y. Times reporter Shawn McCreesh, posted yesterday morning (3.3.26):
“While meeting with Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany in the Oval Office on Tuesday morning, President Trump decided to publicly answer reporters’ questions about his war on Iran for the first time.
“One of the first questions he got was this: What does he imagine the worst-case scenario in Iran to be?
“’I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,’ Trump said. ‘Right, that could happen? We don’t want that to happen. It would probably be the worst…you go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who’s no better.”
This means, obviously, that Mojtaba Khamenei, the 57 year-old son and likely heir apparent of the recently murdered Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader until last weekend…this means that Mojtaba has to be blown into a lumpy mound of strawberry preserves…splattered brain bits, hair on the walls.
Women Have Been Down on “Marty Supreme” All Along
If Marty Supreme‘s Timothee Chalamet somehow loses out on the Best Actor Oscar later this month, you can blame the womenfolk. They just don’t like Marty’s attitude…his relentless jazzcat pogo-stick amorality…and the film’s hellzapoppin vibe in general, and that’s why Josh Safdie‘s film was elbowed aside at the BAFTA and SAG awards. Or so I’m telling myself.
Just as chicks jeopardized the Best Documentary chances of Louis Psihoyos‘ The Cove (they wouldn’t even go see it), the XX chromosone suppressionists are dead set against embracing Marty Supreme because the lead character is not a stalwart nest defender…he’s footloose and careless…a me-me-me chaos agent…a stone-skimmer.
THR‘s Scott Feinberg recently tried to explain the Marty animus as follows:
Feinberg doesn’t want to get into trouble so he says “many” find Chalamet’s titular character “repellent”. But deep down he’s saying the gals aren’t digging him.
Eleven weeks ago I called Marty Supreme “a primal knockout thing… entirely driven by Timothee Chalamet’s amoral, selfish, thoughtless, greedy-as-fuck young guy (but greedy for juice, triumph, acclaim and glory rather than money) who’s a serious go-getter, prick, thief, pusher and hustler, not to mention a gifted ping-pong athlete…a guy who never stops and never hesitates…okay, he acquires a little character and a couple of twinges of self-doubt toward the end, but ladies and germs and all the ships at sea…this is world–class cinema!…an alive, contentious and heavy-chugging run-around and hop-around fever dream that never lets you know what’ll happen next.”
For a while there the dynamic Chalamet looked like the presumptive Best Actor Oscar winner of 2026. And then more and more of the rank-and-file began to see it, and by this I mean more and more progressive feminists who kinda sorta hate guys anyway. They frowned and sniffed and shared their thumbs-down reactions around town…not just their disapproval of the obnoxiously self-consumed, intractably amoral Marty Supreme character but also, correspondingly, Chalamet himself because he’s so good at inhabiting this frenetic, appalling fellow.
HE review: “Chalamet constantly, compulsively, deplorably and always half-charmingly lies, takes, deceives, uses, goads, wounds, gives head, impregnates, insults, boasts, bullshits. And it’s not about morality or ‘story’ or even who wins the big climactic ping-pong match in Japan, this thing…well, it’s finally about shards of decency and morality toward the end, but Marty Supreme is primarily and gloriously about character…and that’s what’s exciting about it. Character, values (or lack of), choices. Coming aggressively from the gut.”
HE to Music Box Films: “Wake Up!”
Two days ago (4.2.26) I asked why Music Box Films is “suppressing awareness” of its 4.3.26 release of Francois Ozon‘s The Stranger, which premiered six months ago at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. I called these lazy bones out on the carpet, you bet. Today, shaken out of their lethargy, the Music Box guys finally got their act in gear by releasing a Stranger trailer.
