Last night everyone jumped on that Fandango report that Wicked Part One (Universal, 11.22) runs 160 minutes. And it’s a musical, mind.

Let’s assume that Wicked: Part Two (11.26.25) will have the same tone and pacing and comes in at two hours or perhaps a bit longer. 160 plus 120 = a 280-minute or a four and a half hour Wizard of Oz-adjacent thing that we’ll all need to sit through.

The applicable term or phrase, once again, is “lack of narrative discipline.”

Unless they’re on camera. Media exposure changes everything.

As previously noted on HE, widespread shock and outrage greeted a recent decision by the cultural troglodytes on the Film Federation of India (FFI) to submit a lightweight sitcom, Laapataa Ladies, over Payal Kapadia All We Imagine As Light for Oscar consideration as 2024’s Best International Feature.

Yesterday The Hollywood Reporter’s Anuska Alves reported a quote from FFI President Ravi Kottarakara that seemed to indicate a sexist or certainly a lowbrow nativist attitude in the part of FFI’s all-male selection committee.

HE to Academy members: Leapfrog over the FFI’s dismissiveness by nominating Kapadia’s film for Best Picture — it’s the only thing to do.

This is real. HE feels that these sociopathic Zoomer eco-activists should have drawn longer sentences. As in, like, “throw away the key.”

Then again what choice did I have?

From Manohla Dargis’s N.Y. Times review:

From HE’s 5.16.24 Cannes Film Festival review:

…for the great Maggie Smith, who never quite “peaked” in the HE sense of the term but kept on rolling on…from the late 1950s through the mid 20teens…I know what I’m obliged or expected to say about her remarkable career and yes, we all think of Smith of having excelled when playing middle-aged or elderly roles, but when I heard of her passing this morning the first thing that came to mind was her deeply stirred and stirring Desdemona in Laurence Olivier‘s Othello (’65), filmed when Smith was 30 or 31.

Tongues are wagging about how overexposed Nicole Kidman is, working nonstop in negligible-to-middling streaming projects, possibly since her agent represents a slew of names that aren’t working and Kidman seems to have some compulsion to be absent from her personal life. It diminishes the mystique of whenever she’s good in a film. Honestly? It’s gotten to the point that when Kidman is costarring in a new streamer or eccentric indie the general response is “oh, her again.”

From Deadline commment thread:

I’m such a huge fan of Russell Metty‘s cinematography on The Misfits that I’m almost tempted to purchase the 4K Bluray. But I won’t because the 2011 Bluray I own is quite the sharp-focused, perfectly lighted freshwater melancholy bath. Metty’s films include All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Man of a Thousand Faces, Touch of Evil, Imitation of Life, Spartacus, The Appaloosa, Madigan and The Omega Man.

I’m also a fan of Alex North‘s Misfits score.

I’m mentioning The Misfits because I’ve just watched a hugely interesting video essay about John Huston and Arthur Miller’s 1961 drama, and the maestro is none other than Isabel “Izzy” Custodio, otherwise known by her YouTube handle, Be Kind Rewind.

Two or three nights ago I watched Judd Apatow‘s Trainwreck again. God, what a cleverly written and affectingly acted hip romcom…loved it for the fourth or fifth time!

Amy Schumer is wickedly hilarious and a total pistolero, and that she also shifts into downshift mode and opens herself up emotionally in ways that truly floored me. I love how you can read each and every flickering emotion and thought that passes through her lightning-fast brain — all at the drop of a hat.

Schumer tears up and touches bottom and whacks the ball just as hard and long as Jennifer Lawrence did in Silver Linings Playbook, and we all know what happened there. She’s delivering something brand new (obviously based on her standup persona and whomever she is deep down) but at the same time channelling the freshness of Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon during his peak period in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

Trainwreck is dryly hilarious and smoothly brilliant and damn near perfect. It’s the finest, funniest, most confident, emotionally open-hearted and skillful film Apatow has ever made, hands down. I was feeling the chills plus a wonderful sense of comfort and assurance less than five minutes in. Wow, this is good…no, it’s better…God, what a relief…no moaning or leaning forward or covering my face with my hands…pleasure cruise.

I finally saw Wolfs yesterday, and I found it…uhm, moderately absorbing. It’s a dry, droll “crime comedy” (i.e., the kind you might snicker at) that unfolds in grade-A fashion, and while I was never riveted or excited it never pissed me off.

The laid-back, wiseacre performances from George Clooney and Brad Pitt are quite skillful and effective, and the supporting cast (which includes Austin Abrams, a dorky-looking guy I’d never heard of, and Zlatko Buric, the fat, white-haired Triangle of Sadness guy) are certainly interesting. Plus the production values are above-average.

I therefore felt placated except at the very end when the soundtrack played Bill Withers‘ “Just The Two Of Us“…fuck you! Take your cloying suggestion that a Wolfs sequel might be a good idea….ram it sideways!

There’s a nifty little scene in which Richard Kind, playing Abrams’ oddball dad, goes into a riff about Frank Sinatra‘s notorious unwillingness to perform more than one take while shooting a scene. Kind talks about Sinatra refusing to fully give it up for the shooting of the stacked-deck Queen oF Hearts sequence in The Manchurian Candidate (’62) despite the dp (Lionel Lindon) having informed director John Frankenheimer that he’d screwed up the shot by failing to capture Sinatra in sharp focus. This was appalling behavior on Frank’s part. The blurry MCU of him talking to Laurence Harvey throws you off every time. Your mind keeps saying, “Why is Harvey in focus but Sinatra isn’t?”

And I really, really don’t care about what may be darkening the brow of Angelina Jolie.