From Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (‘67):

Berkeley landlord (Norman Fell) to Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman): “You’re not one of those outside agitators, are you?”

Braddock: “No.”

Berkekey landlord: “‘Cause I won’t stand for that.”

Full respect and earnest affection for the greatest actress of the late 20th Century (not to mention her stellar performances in The Devil Wears Prada, The Iron Lady and The Post), although I’ve never forgotten this 2015 Telluride discussion.

HE answer: Initially tolerable…irritating and certainly pumped up and obviously spittle and a waste of time, but not felonious. But it began to feel more and more bruising.

I really hate everything about this kind of bullshit megaplex action film…the kind that’s been par for the course for at least a quarter-century if not longer, perhaps going as far back as 48 HRS. and Lethal Weapon.

Except those films are almost Alvin Sargent-level compared to The Fall Guy…I really hate where this genre has gone, the kind of film that directors like David Leitch, a blend of amiable, low-key attitude and truly Satanic intent, have made into a form of surface-skimming pornography.

For me The Fall Guy felt gauche and bludgeoning and generally sociopathic…a cartoonishly violent, motor-mouthed mescaline movie…characters of a shallow or grating or despicable stripe…venal, wafer-thin, smirky, japey, goofball, overbearing and exhausting, like the film itself…for the most part repulsive and certainly draining.

Ryan Gosling is middle-aged stunt veteran Colt Seavers, a bruised and tousle-haired poseur…a Hollow Man whom T.S. Eliot would recognize instantly…a performance that belongs in the same trash bin as his empty Coke bottle zone-outs in Only God Forgives and The Gray Man…the guy I loved or at least related to in Drive, The Big Short and La–La Land has been terminated.

Emily Blunt’s performance as Bony Maronie…sorry, Colt’s ex and first-time director Jody Moreno (the film-within-the-film is a ComicCon nightmare called Metalstorm) is equally empty and narcotizing.

Aaron Taylor Johnson’s tousle-haired bad-guy movie star is nothing…a mosquito.

The most annoying and despicable character, an aggressively phony exec producer of Metalstorm called Gail Meyer, is played by Ted Lasso veteran Hannah Waddingham…black hair dye, screeching chalk.

Story-wise The Fall Guy contains all the real-world grit and gravitas of a Scream movie…Scream with wild-ass stunts.

Leitch orchestrates and choreographs with adrenalized efficiency as far as it goes, but Drew Pearce’s screenplay has less real-world intrigue than a Road Runner cartoon and is oppressively untethered to any semblance of human behavior…the man should be hunted down, arrested and sentenced to ten years on Devil’s Island with Papillon and Alfred Dreyfuss.

I laughed at one bit — when Colt’s hotel room swipe card doesn’t work twice.

Michael DeGregorio to HE: “If you want to be as miserable as you always look in pictures, that’s on you.

“I saw it and had the most fun I’ve had watching a film in a theater in a long, long time.

“This is an audience film, not a critics film and that’s not a lower standard — it’s just a totally different set of guidelines.

“All a filmmaker has to do is film two or three people, always in a love triangle of some kind, make it dreary and sad and hopeless and then kill one at the end (disease, suicide or something), add a nice subdued musical score and the critics will call it spiritual or stunningly romantic or something flowery like that and hail the filmmaker as the next __________(insert cool indie director).

“The Fall Guy is a total unabashed love letter to stunt men and the stunt industry as a whole. It moves like a fast train and even wraps the making of a film and a massive stunt into the climax of the third act.

“I’m sure you will call me a knuckle-dragging ape with no taste who smells up your comment section and anyone who likes this film is an uncultured scumbag who should be put into a reeducation camp, and that’s fine.

“The point is, this is a film for the audience to enjoy and I doubt that David Leitch really cares of the critics call him satan or the devil or anything else.

“Critics don’t pay the rent.”

Emily Blunt reacts as #TheFallGuy stunt team breaks through glass on the red carpet pic.twitter.com/IiiSBxsxWk

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) May 1, 2024

…starts at 7 pm this evening, and God help me. Two hours of guaranteed David Leitch-ian misery. Plus I’ll be bummed out for the rest of the evening.

We all understand that a significant percentage of woke Cannes critics may be looking to slag the first chapter of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga (Warner Bros., 6.28) when the three–hour film plays later this month on the Côte d’Azur.

This is because Costner’s 19th Century narrative focuses upon (and reportedly gives a fair shake to) the perspective of fair-skinned, covered-wagon settlers, and consequently may not be perceived as sufficiently supportive of Native Americans, at least from a most-old-time-whiteys-were-evil-racists, Lily Gladstone-esque perspective.

HE 100% guarantees that a sizable portion of wokester Branch Davidians have already decided to pan Costner’s film, sight unseen. To balance this out, HE has decided sight unseen and if at all possible to bend over backwards in order to…well, give the film as much of a fair shake as I can within the boundaries of honesty and candor.

…but at the same time surrounded by so much crap. Which is often par for the course, I realize. If a big-name actor manages to bat between .250 and .333, he/she is doing rather well.

When I think of truly gold-standard Michael Caine films, maybe 10 or 12 come to mind…Get Carter, Sleuth, Alfie, A Shock to the System, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Quiet American, Mona Lisa, Children of Men, Zulu, Youth, Harry Brown, Educating Rita, The Man Who Would Be King, Funeral in Berlin, The Ipcress File…what is that, 15?

Caine himself (or an assistant) posted this photo of his DVD and Bluray highlights. Give them credit for humorously including The Swarm (“A bee movie,” Caine once remarked) and Jaws 4.

Following two interviews with The Beast, a summary from Time reporter Eric Cortellessa:

“To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.

“He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.

“He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers.

“He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.

“He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.

“He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense.

“He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

Zero Day is an upcoming political thriller series for Netflix. Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, it costars Robert De Niro, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Bill Camp, Angela Bassett and Matthew Modine. Logline: “A political conspiracy thriller centering on a devastating global cyberattack.”

@user5469336782915 #robertdinero #zerodays #newmovie #nyc #newyork #wallsreet ♬ original sound – user5469336782915

[Posted six months ago — go to 1:45]

Scott Galloway: “We all know women…I’m sure this happens to you all the time…really interesting, high-character, successful, attractive women…usually in their 30s, some into their 40s…who will say ‘I can’t find anyone to date.’ But it’s not that they can’t find anyone to date. It’s that they can’t find anyone they want to date.

“And there’s some dynamics here. Warren Buffet said that the key to a successful marriage is low expectations.

“A podcaster named Chris Williams…he calls it the high-heels effect. And that is that every year for the last 50 years [or since the mid ’70s] women have become better educated and are making more money. They’re also getting [physically] taller every year. 50% of women say they won’t date a guy who’s shorter than them, except that figure is probably more like 80%. Also women are getting ‘taller’ and men are getting ‘shorter’ metaphorically. The pool of viable men is shrinking every year. Women have been told they can have it all. What I’ve found is that you can’t have it all, or certainly not all at once.”

“A woman of average attractiveness can have a ‘relationship’, and when I say relationship that’s code for sex…[within the straight realm] they can have a relationship with [a man] who’s in the top ten percent. But that male individual is probably not going to establish a longterm relationship.

“The bottom line is that the top 10% of men” — financial stability, looks, apparent emotional stability — “are getting 80 or 80-plus percent of the opportunities for short-term relationships. So they can engage in what’s called Porsche polygamy. So the guys that most women want are the least likely to establish a longterm relationship.”