This striking Vogue cover photo is about as good or glammy as it will probably ever get for Lily Gladstone…photography, lighting, the right angle, wardrobe…it all came together.

Leo looks great also…pushing 50 in actuality, he looks like his mid to late 30s.

After being attacked by Bobby Peru for allegedly diminishing Gladstone and her Killers of the Flower Moon performance, I responded thusly:

My conveying an honest, thought-through reaction to Gladstone’s KOTFM performance is not an act of diminishment. It’s a fairly rendered opinion.

My choosing to ignore the New Academy Kidz mindset…an attitude that rewards social-justice bonafides over traditional acting or film-making standards…this is not an attempt to diminish Gladstone. The white-guilt wokester choke hold has been an active political ingredient since 2016 or ’17, certainly by ’18.

My stating plainly that Gladstone talks with a rural (aka “shitkicker”) Montana accent…that’s a fact. You can call it diminishing but I wouldn’t point fingers if someone said that I speak with a slight northern New Jersey twang (which I do). Was it diminishing to say that JFK spoke with a Boston accent**? Or that Stephen King speaks with a reedy Maine accent? Or that Flannery O’Connor sounded like Savannah? Or that Jimmy Carter has a rural Georgian way of speaking? Or that LBJ sounded like the Texas hill country?

My stating an obvious political fact, which is that wokesters like Clayton Davis are promoting Gladstone for Best Actress, and that this is primarily about an opportunity to celebrate her Native American identity — my calling a spade a spade in this regard is not a form of diminishment. It’s a fact.

I’ve said over and over that Gladstone is good enough in KOTFM but she’s certainly not wowser. Mainly because all she mostly does is glare and seethe and lie in bed. Because the script doesn’t give her any big crescendo moments. She doesn’t even get to slap Leo’s face or sharply condemn what he and his evil uncle have done to some of the oil-rich Osage natives.

** It would be diminishing if I wrote that JFK spoke with a pretentious Hahvahd or Boston Irish clam-chowder-slurping accent.

Who would be ideally cast as Lana Turner, Johnny Stompanato, Cheryl Crane and Jerry Giesler?

Do Millennials and Zoomers have the faintest clue about any of the players in this sordid, 60-year-old saga? I doubt it.

Terrence Winter (Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos, The Wolf of Wall Street) has presumably written the screenplay, and would produce.

[Originally posted on 4.6.20]

“Height is to men what breasts are to women,” an HE commenter said three years ago. To some extent yes, but not necessarily. Or not entirely. Tall or tallish guys enjoy an obvious pecking-order advantage, but towering fellows (6’5″ and up) can seem gangly and galumphy. Or even a tad freakish.

The bottom line is that broad shoulders are the real bodacious ta-tas in the XY realm. I came into broad shoulders when I turned 13 or 14, and believe me I know about the benefits. Ask anyone who’s been lucky by way of genetic inheritance. If you have broad-ass shoulders, you’re halfway home in terms of general estimates, job interviews, receptive women, etc.

By the same token narrow, rounded shoulders are generally not a good look. There’s never been a rounded, narrow-shouldered guy in the history of the planet who’s ever said “man, I am so lucky that I don’t have broad shoulders!” I see a fellow with narrow shoulders and I think “well, okay, I’m sorry…he’s obviously had his share of struggles.”

From “Physical Dominance vs. Psychological Security,” posted on 6.19.19: “I was in love with Alan Ladd and I went to a party at Romanoff’s. I’m 5’7” but in heels I’m 5’9” or 5’10”. They said, ‘Shirley, your favorite actor is here…come and meet him.’ I turned around. He was there and I went, ‘Oh hi, Mr. Ladd.’ He was about 4’9” and all my admiration disappeared literally in the dust.” — attributed to Shirley MacLaine but who knows?

Ladd was notoriously insecure about his height, which (to go by most accounts) was somewhere between 5’5″ and 5’6″. For his entire professional life this psychological albatross was draped around the poor guy’s neck. On the other hand James Cagney was roughly the same size (5’6″ or thereabouts) and he never squawked about it. He spent his whole adult life playing tough urban guys who slapped, punched or psychologically dominated other fellows, and nobody ever said “Jeez, he’s kinda short.” They said, “Shit, here comes Cagney…watch out.”

In short (pun), a good part of life is about owning the right kind of psychology — about feeling secure and confident about who you are and what you look like. It’s about planting your feet, looking the other guy in the eye and saying “take or or leave it but this is me…got a problem with that? Because I don’t.”

On the other hand I understand the Shirley MacLaine mindset. I’ve been a tall, slender, broad-shouldered guy with fairly good hair (augmented by Prague-installed follicles when I got older) all my life. I’ve been that guy since I was 11 or 12, and by the time I hit my early 20s I was feeling pretty cool about it. I know my looks helped in my hound-dog days in the ’70s and early ’80s.

But I’ve always had this unfair or prejudiced attitude about short guys, and I mean going back to when I was nine or ten. I’ve always had this belief that guys need to be 5’8″ or taller, and if they’re not…well, not a problem for me personally but they will have a certain gauntlet to contend with on a daily basis. Life is unfair and often cruel.

Early in the evening of Tuesday, 10.3, I chatted with respected Hollywood historian and biographer Joseph McBride about Billy Wilder‘s Stalag 17 (’53), and more particularly about Joe’s commentary track for Kino Lorber’s upcoming 4K Bluray version (out 11.21).

I haven’t seen the 4K Stalag 17 but…well, let’s wait for it. I own an older Bluray version which I’m happy with, but I’m always hot to own the latest upgrade.

McBride’s book on Wilder (“Dancing on the Edge“) came out in September ’21. He’s also written authoritative studies on John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, the Coen Brothers, Steven Spielberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra, etc.

Here’s part one of our discussion (roughly 29 minutes)…

And here’s part two (around 27 minutes):

It’s very easy to talk to Joe about Hollywood histories and backstories and just kick it all around. It was generally a fine, wide-ranging discussion, not just about the genesis and the making of Stalag 17 but about William Holden, Wilder, John Ford…everyone and everything. McBride can chew this kind of fat for hours on end without breaking stride.

Please forgive the occasional intrusions of purring and meowing Katya.

Am I a non-compliant suppressive person in the realm of gay cinema?

In my 9.1.23 review of Andrew Haigh‘s All Of Us Strangers, I praised it for being “a classy, meditative, top-tier capturing of an intimate gay relationship” while admitting that the beard-stubble sex footage made me squirm a bit. Which resulted in attacks, of course. For in today’s realm, if you don’t sing arias about bare-backed slurpy kissing scenes you’re a homophobe.

“Story-wise it’s kind of a gay Midnight in Paris,” I wrote, “except instead of hanging with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway the time traveller in question (a screenwriter named Adam, played by the mid-40ish Andrew Scott) spends a lot of time with his late parents, who are miraculously alive and their old glorious selves, and played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy.

“Their get-togethers allow Adam, of course, a chance to explain to them both (well, his mom) that he’s been gay for decades but that being so inclined is no longer the socially uncertain, vaguely uncomfortable thing it was when mum and dad died in a car crash, back in the ’80s.

How many famous people could be described as “no neck” types? We all have necks, of course, but some celebrities don’t (or didn’t when they were alive) have the kind you would notice. I don’t literally mean no necks — I mean necks that are barely there.

I’m thinking particularly of Mickey Spillane and Claudette Colbert, and of Randy Newman‘s “no-beck oilmen from Texas” (a lyric from his 1971 tune “Rednecks“).

I got started on this when I noticed a Facebook posting by Harlan Jacobson that described Maestro‘s prosthetics manager Kazu Hiru as an “Ears, Nose, and No Throat guy“….what does this mean? Is there a featured player in Maestro who has no visible throat to speak of?

I’m having trouble thinking of other no-neckers besides Spillane and Colbert. They have to be out there. Assistance?

George Clooney speaking in Boys in the Boat featurette: “These guys at the University of Washington are taking on the seniors, and then taking on the fraternity [something], and then taking on the Nazis.”

Clooney is using the usual shorthand, of course, but does he really mean that the young athletes who belonged to Germany’s 1936 Olympic rowing team were devout “seig heil” guys? Yes, Adolf Hitler saw the Berlin ’36 Olympics as a a potential proof of Aryan supremacy (Jesse Owens screwed that pooch), but how many German citizens were ardent supporters of the Nazi party that year, and how many were playing along to get along? A third or less?

How many blue-state liberals today pretend to be wokester sympathizers but are just keeping their heads down in order to stay out of trouble?

Let’s imagine, God forbid, that The Beast might win the ’24 election. He would therefore be president during the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Would it then be fair or accurate to describe the U.S. Olympic team as “the MAGAS”?