Any agent or talent manager will tell you that once an actor has broken into the Hollywood big leagues by starring or costarring in a critically hailed or commercially successful film, they need to score again within, say, the next five to ten years. They can’t just cruise along indefinitely in a moderate or mezzo-mezzo fashion — they need to equal what they accomplished with their first flurry of hits.

Ten years ago Margot Robbie was launched with a spritzy, attention-getting role as Leonardo DiCaprio‘s gold-digger wife in The Wolf of Wall Street, a critical knockout that earned over $400 million.

Robbie has done relatively well for herself since, save for her recent losing underwhelming streak of the last four years — Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey (’20) and The Suicide Squad (’21), a puzzling, dead-end lead performance in David O. Russell‘s perplexing and calamitous Amsterdam (’22) and especially her abrasive and misbegottten Nellie LaRoy in Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon (’22), a breathtaking critical and commercial flop.

Then again Robbie delivered an appealing cameo in Adam McKay‘s enjoyable, critically praised The Big Short (’15). Two years after that (’17) she not only starred in but produced I Tonya (’17), an indie-level mockumentary that was mostly critically approved (I hated it) and earned $53.9 million — not bad for a hand-to-mouth indie that cost $11 million to produce. Two years later she played Sharon Tate in Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (’19). The same year she played a fictitious character in Jay Roach‘s Bombshell, a Fox News / Roger Ailes expose. The following year she produced Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman (’20).

So she’s hung in there pretty well, but Barbie, it appears, will be Robbie’s first heavy-throttle, high-octane hit since The Wolf of Wall Street.

Whether or not it’ll score critically is another story.

A regional friend who gets around says he’s hearing “very mixed” reactions to Barbie. There are tea leaves to be read…tea leaves under a cloak of secrecy. A couple of pallies saw Barbie over the last couple of days and were asked to signed NDAs.  If Barbie was some kind of great or exceptional, wouldn’t exciting buzz be circulating now, like the Mission Impossible 7 buzz was all over the place for the last several months? In the same sense downbeat reactions to Indy 5 were detectable for months on end. So if Barbie is a big winner, why would you have industry vets sign NDAs? I’ll tell you why. Because loose lips sink ships.

Posted by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy about a week ago:

Everyone is welcomed, embraced and celebrated in Barbie-land. Unless, of course, you’re a white, middle-aged or older cis male like Will Ferrell’s Mattel CEO or, you know, someone like myself. In which case you’re a bit of a problematic life form.

Which is sorta kinda how it works in the real world these days, no?

Now as before, the smart play is to keep your head down and operate within the herd, so to speak. Don’t mouth off or make waves, don’t stand out, conform or be silent. And if you’re an older white cis male, be as invisible as possible. That or get the hell outta Dodge.

Better to get Barbie out of the way early, allowing myself time to tap out a brief, in-depth review before settling in for the main course at 7 pm.

I stared at Adele Lim‘s Joy Ride (aka Joy Fuck Club) like an Egyptian sphinx. I was honestly hoping to laugh but I didn’t. At all. I just fucking sat there…sorry. I seem to recall having the same reaction to the Hangover movies. I hate movies about people drinking shots. I really do.

Others in the audience laughed, however, so there’s that. High-pitched hyena laughter, I mean. And certain critics have called it funny. So blame me….it’s my fault that I didn’t so much as smirk or guffaw or even crack a smile.

Actually, that’s not true — I smirked at the sex scenes. Particularly an oral sex scene with two guys eating out Ashley Park‘s character at the same time, and I don’t mean one of them licking her anus while the other does the clitoris…I mean both of them chowing down side by side. That I laughed at.

And I did respect much of what I was watching. Joy Ride is not some sloppy-ass, improvisational bullshit anarchy comedy like…I don’t know, What’s New Pussycat or something. It’s a real movie with a sense of structure and three acts and an aspirational heart. It emotionally touches bottom during the last 20 or 25 minutes.

And I respected the decisive, highly sprung energy…the shallow but spritzy feel of it…the lively performances…Lim’s fast-paced, high-velocity direction…the screwballish, His Girl Friday-like script by Cherry Cheva (aka Chevapravatdumrong) and Teresa Hsiao. It’s really not bad.

It’s silly and shallow and formulaic but comedies like this are expected to dive into this kind of jaundiced fuckwad swimming pool.

I didn’t much care for Sabrina Wu‘s “Deadeye”, the obligatory trans-non-binary character with (not a pun) slightly dead eyes, but I pretty much loved the other three — Park’s “Audrey Sullivan”, a lawyer and an allegedly Chinese child of adoptive white parents who lives in White Hills, Washington (there has never been any town or village or real-estate district in the world called White Hills…a completely bullshit and thoroughly racist name of a cliched Anglo hamlet), Sherry Cola‘s “Lolo Chen”, and Stephanie Hsu‘s Kat.

And I really loved Daniel Dae Kim, who plays the husband of Audrey’s birth mother.

Much of Joy Ride feels inhabited by at least a semblance of recognizable human behavior. Not actual human behavior, mind, as it adheres to the rules of farce, but at least it tries to go there now and then. I respected that effort.

Don’t let the fact that I smirked at only one scene and sat stone-faced throughout the rest of it….don’t let that stop you from giving it a whirl.

The first two thirds to three-quarters of Joy Ride made me feel like my life is winding to a close and that perhaps I need to think about killing myself, but I gradually got past that. What matters, I think, is that it pays off during the final 20 or 25.

…before James Mangold and Timothee Chalamet finally start shooting the endlessly delayed A Complete Unknown or Going Electric or whatever they’re calling it now? Fish or cut bait, cowards.

…who was busted a few days ago for carving his own name and that of his girlfriend (“Ivan + Haley ‘23”) into a Roman Colisseum wall should face two (2) distinct punishments — one for defacing a priceless ancient monument and a second for professing ignorance about the age of the 2000-year-old amphitheater. The guy should definitely be jailed and slapped around.

Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and written by Zach Baylin, Frank E. Flowers and Terence Winter, Bob Marley: One Love is a rise and fall of a superstar biopic. Green (King Richard) is an excellent director and Marley (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir) is a fascinating subject, so why is Paramount sidestepping award season and opening it on 1.12.24?

Irritating Canadian director Xavier Dolan, 34, has announced that he’s quitting filmmaking.

El País has quoted him saying “I no longer have the desire or strength to commit myself to a project for two years that barely anyone sees…I put too much passion into it to have so many disappointments…it makes me wonder if my filmmaking is bad, and I know it’s not.”

HE reaction #1: Don’t be a quitter…keep at it, never say die, refine your game. HE reaction #2: What’s Dolan going to do, become a bartender or a travel guide? He could direct more Adele music videos until inspiration taps him in the shoulder. No respect for guys who throw in the towel. HE reaction #3: I’ve never really liked a Dolan film. The best that has happened (when I saw Mommy in 2014) is that I felt a certain respect or tolerance.

The French-speaking Dolan was born on 3.20.89. Last May another major-league, French-language film star quit the business — Adele Haenel, who is also 34 and was born one month earlier than Dolan.

Posted on 5.22.16: In a sharply phrased piece about Sunday’s Cannes Film Festival awards and particularly Xavier Dolan‘s It’s Only The End of the World, which won the festival’s Grand Prix (or second place) award, L.A. Times critic Justin Chang has let go Sam Peckinpah-style.

“Quebec’s Xavier Dolan, the 27-year-old world-cinema enfant terrible, pretty much horrified the press audience by inexplicably winning the runner-up Grand Prix for It’s Only the End of the World.

“In my 11 years of attending Cannes I cannot recall a worse jury decision than this one. A badly shot, shrilly performed and all-around excruciatingly misjudged dysfunctional-family torture session that felt far longer than its 97-minute running time, World was by far the least endurable film in competition (and that includes Sean Penn’s dreadful but dreadfully entertaining The Last Face).

“Far inferior to Mommmy, the director’s 2014 jury-prize winner, World failed to win over even Dolan’s many fans, and I have counted myself among them on more than one occasion.”

The already much-celebrated Lily Gladstone performance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is rooted in the rudiments of woke representation. She plays the sadly fabled Molly Burkhart, but her arc is solely about being a victim of greed — she mostly just sits (or lies) there and seethes, glowers and casts daggers of suspicion.

Truth #1 is that Gladstone doesn’t really have much of a part. Not much in the way of emotional scope or specificity. Truth #2 is that her supporters will be loathe to admit this.

Native American tokenism (or, in an award-season context, ethnic novelty as she’d be the first Native American actor to seriously compete since Will Sampson) will see her through in the Best Supporting Actress category, agreed, but those who contend for a Best Actress Oscar are expected to qualify with some kind of rip-snortin’, full-bodied, go-for-the-gusto performance, and the Killers of the Flower Moon script simply doesn’t allow Gladstone to do that.

You just know it’s a smartypants box–office trade term that will stick like glue. (Credit to HE’s Daniel Zelter for spotting Barber’s article early.)

Could this possibly have something to do with…I don’t know, concerns about stuff being taught in schools that Average Joe & Jane parents don’t agree with? And other stuff like…I don’t know, maybe drag queen performances?

For a hinterland-focused Jim Caviezel movie like Sound of Freedom — a grassroots thing, not much mainstream media publicity — to come out on top on Tuesday, July 4th…this means something. Mira Sorvino and Bill Camp costar.