A 7.26 Variety story about the 2023 Toronto Film Festival’s documentary program, written by Addie Morfoot, pays special attention to Caroline Suh’s Sorry/Not Sorry, a TIFF doc about career difficulties and impediments suffered by women who accused Louis C.K. of gross sexual harassment a few years ago after he jerked off in front of them.

I haven’t seen the doc but five of the accusers are comedians Tig Notaro, Rebecca Corry, Abby Schachner, Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov.

Morfoot reports that Suh’s film is one of “several” TIFF docs that focus on women “who have been unjustly ignored for their achievements.”

One can probably assume that Suh explores how and why Louis C.K.’s five accusers have paid a certain price for blowing the whistle on the guy.

Innocent question: LCK’s behavior was diseased and ridiculous but what exactly did the five accusers expect would happen in response? Did they expect cheers and hosannahs and paper confetti in the air?

If I was a woman who was once an unwilling or appalled witness to LCK whacking off, I would have rolled my eyes, muttered “jeez, what a fucking creep” and moved on with my life and career.

I would have figured, in other words, “if I go public with this, I might experience a little professional pushback from comedy club owners and friends of LCK and whatnot so why go there? As much as I resent the political reality of things, it’s probably better to let it slide.”

Luc Besson’s Dogman, a Venice ‘23 selection, has two guaranteed elements: (a) the relentlessly spacey Caleb Landry Jones and (b) a whole lotta dogs. And yet the mirror image is of a red-haired glam chick with bright red lipstick.

HE to Bresson: Is Dogman about about what I’m afraid it might be about? This poster is scaring me.

Whatever the facts behind the various accusations thrown at Kevin Spacey since 2018, time and again efforts to convict the Oscar-winning actor (today is his 64th birthday) have failed. The U.K. trial (nine sexual asssult charges) is the latest whiff. Elton John’s recent pro-Spacey testimony was almost certainly a key factor in his acquittal. That or the prosecution’s case may have been weak or flawed all around. Or both.

Hail, O Great Gods of Rome!

If you haven’t yet watched, here it is. But please also revisit my two-year-old (7.6.21) article, titled “Diverse Exorcist & Torturing of Ellen Burstyn.”

My Detroit references are few and far between. Urban decay. Bankruptcy in 2013. The first act of Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance (‘93) happens in the grubby downtown area. Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. The MC5. Martha and the Vandellas. Michael Moore‘s Roger and Me…wait, that was set mostiy in Flint, right?

You’d never know Detroit was originally settled by French colonists, I can tell you that. As you approach downtown everything looks a bit blighted, undernourished, down at the heels. Flat landscape. Blah architecture. A cinder-block strip club or two. Empty lots with overgrown grass and tall weeds.

Suburban Detroit is like a thousand other sprawling areas in the Midwest that are largely defined by…nothing. Okay, by the general draining of spirit. The scourge of soul-less corporate commercialism.

Downtown Detroit is even worse. You can feel the enervation and the lethargy. This must be what Berlin or Nurnberg or Dresden felt like in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Detroit is one of those cities that present three choices — become a heroin addict, commit suicide or pack up and leave.

And then you go across the Detroit river to robust and well-tended Windsor, Ontario, and it’s like a breath of fresh air.

5:20 pm: Anyway I’m well out of Detroit and on a Flix bus heading east to Londön. I’ll be visiting a friend in Grand Bend, a bucolic lakeside village in Ontario, for six days. I’ve never seen Lake Huron before.

…who mumbles and gulps and swallows dialogue with a haunted look on his face, Caleb Landry Jones has it all goin’ on.

“Hurricane Billy” Friedkin has been ducking press inquiries about the notorious and ignoble French Connection censorship matter, but if he attends the ‘23 Venice Film Festival to promote his latest film, The Caine Mutiny Court–Martial, which will play out of competition, we’ve got him! He won’t be able to wiggle or slither or sidestep his way out of it.

Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance and Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar will also screen in Venice a few weeks hence…yay!

This is only a working theory or, if you will, an undeveloped premise, but the theory is that Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie and Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles drink from the same well water. Simmering frustration and anger at men, resulting in a sense of feeling trapped or stuck and needing to redefine or break through.

I won’t be burrowing into this idea any further (or at least not today), but the analogy hit me early this morning and I’m convinced that despite Barbie and Jeanne Dielman being hugely dissimilar in many ways, there’s a certain validity to saying “they aren’t that far apart.”

Posted on 12.2.22: In the wake of Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (’75) topping the BFI Sight & Sound poll, I had to give it another shot. So I watched it on the Criterion Channel, on my Macbook Air. Most of it, I should say. I made it through the first 90 minutes the hard way (i.e., without cheating), but then something inside me began to wither and crumple, and I began to watch ten-minute portions. But I missed nothing.

Jeannie Diulman is a statement, all right. Three hours and 21 minutes of torpor, tedium and depression. Such a sad, suffocating and listless film. (Yes, that’s the point but c’mon.) It’s about a life of a prim and proper sex worker (Day of the Jackal’s Delphine Seyrig) that’s mainly about servitude and the renunciation of joy and the suppression of the spirit. A film about regimented motherhood and the raising of a dull, homely, tragically obedient son whose life is doomed to the same kind of repetition, the same dutiful stiflings and silences and submissions.

Seyrig is Spartacus in the kitchen — a sex-hating sex gladiator without a sword. A slave who endlessly prepares meals and adheres to regularity, regularity and more regularity. She never breaks out of Capua, so to speak, and we never see her having sex except at the very end, and in an odd, ugly and curious way at that. But we do see her prepare many dinners.

“The WGA and SAG/AFTRA strike is about more than the particulars of how the so-called creative class gets paid. It’s really about whether or not there can be a creative class at all.

“My working assumption is that within 20 years, if not much sooner, A.I. will be able to write, direct and act (via computer-generated images that are indistinguishable from real people) movies and TV shows. It will write credible novels and news stories and opinion columns and compose film scores and pop music. It will mean a growing number of creative endeavors will no longer easily find meaningful vocational outlets. It will amount to a kind of material degradation of human civilization that may prove irreversible.” — N.Y. Times columnist Bret Stephens, posted on 7.24.23.

Posted a little more than 15 years ago (i.e., 6.19.07):

Jett and I were at a Carl’s, Jr. around 1:15 pm today, and there were about 25 or more Latino kids there, and every last one was either bulky, chunky, over-fed or fat.

I was watching a Braves-Red Sox game yesterday on ESPN, and I was struck by two Atlanta pitchers — one who was relieved in the ninth inning, and the guy who relieved him — who were both pretty big…barrel-chested, round faces, Babe Ruth-ish.

Earlier this month Jett and I stayed for two nights at a youth hostel in Positano, Italy, and I noticed several zaftig American college-age girls…female Seth Rogens with surprisingly large girths.

“What’s with all the pot bellies on the girls?” I asked Jett. “If you’re going to be in great shape, there’s no better time than your early 20s.” Jett, about to start his sophomore year at Syracuse University, laughed and said, “All college girls look like that…well, almost all of them. It’s college and all those fatty foods.”

I don’t think it’s college as much as good old American sloth. This is not my usual-usual — this country is getting fatter and fatter. I know, I know…who cares? Order another whopper, have some more fries, turn on the tube.

Were the Greeks fat? Were the Romans waddling around like Jabbas in togas? What great civilizations have had populations who were this roley-poley? It’s another sign of the wind-down of the American empire.

If the ghost of Julius Caesar were to visit this country, he would take one look and sneer, “These people aren’t warriors or conquerors…look at them! They’re cattle!”