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!”

To hear it from Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, Barbie director Greta Gerwig managed to transform the material “into an exuberant jokey carnival of fourth-wall-breaking doll’s-house-as-rabbit-hole feminist surrealism — a candy-colored Dreamhouse burlesque that adores Barbie and resents her at the same time.”

He also notes that Barbie “tweaks the patriarchy even as it treats Ken as the film’s most complicated character, and that has the wit to recognize that Barbie isn’t just a plaything [but] a metaphysical projection of feminine ideals who also has the effect of undermining who women are.”

Having seen Barbie last Thursday and having immediately tapped out my reactions (“Undisciplined Barbie Gush“), I was naturally expecting to see something more plain-spoken than “tweaks the patriarchy.” I was actually hoping to see words that actually apply. Words like “misandrist” or “misandry”, I mean.

Gleiberman does have a tendency to lay it on the line, after all. He’ll use diplomatic phrasing, of course, but if an apple tree is full of ripe green (as opposed to red) apples, he’ll say that for the most part.

Well, not this time as neither term was used. “There must be some mistake,” I told myself. Then I realized there was no percentage in being overly candid about Barbie. It had become too big of a hit, too much of an earthquake. I get it — it’s celebration time. If I was a hotshot critic for a major publication I’d probably play my cards this way also.

Telluride ‘23 certainly has the gay pathfinder biopic genre covered.

We’re talking two films about older gay people accomplishing something exceptional in the face of great difficulty or adversity — Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin‘s Nyad, a “you go, girl!” drama about 60ish long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, and George Wolfe‘s Rustin, about gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin (1912-1987).

The latter film is produced by Michelle and Barack Obama‘s Higher Ground Productions.

Because Rustin is (a) about a Black gay activist and (b) emanating from the Obamas (will they attend Telluride’s opening-day brunch?) it will be hailed in progressive showbiz circles as close to the Second Coming, plus star Colman Domingo (whom I’ve always liked) will be pushed as a Best Actor contender, and who will argue against this?

Being gay isn’t a political ideology, although it’s certainly a “yay-yay” thing in progressive circles. Highlighting and promoting gay bravery and assertiveness as the absolutely glorious and wonderful things they are because we all need make a really big positive deal out of gay characters whenever and however they appear, especially at Telluride with the Obamas present…that’s the political side of things.

All I know is that apart from Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers, the two films I was really excited about catching at Telluride are (or were, I should say) Woody Allen‘s Coup de Chance, which of course won’t play there because of the Stalinist refusenik Woody haters, and Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu, which I praised during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and would absolutely love to re-watch in the Rockies.

I wept when I learned that IFC Films and Sapan Studios have acquired Tran Anh Hung’s foodie masterpiece. I don’t know for a fact that The Pot au Feu will be absent from Telluride, but IFC Films distribution deals have always been tantamount to a kiss of death. It’s certainly a guarantee that a first-rate, ecstatically reviewed European film will not be vigorously publicized and hooplah-ed.

What IFC Films seems to do, in fact, is acquire exciting, critically hailed titles only to suffocate and bury them. The Pot au Feu hasn’t been announced as a Toronto Film Festival title either. Things could always turn for the better but right now IFC Film’s Scott Shooman is the apparent villain in this scenario.

Between the certain absence of Coup de Chance, the feared absence of The Pot au Feu and the SAF/AFTRA strike restrictions, my expectations for Telluride ’23 are dimming by the moment.

I was hoping that Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix) might appear at Telluride….nope! The word on the street is that it will debut at the New York Film Festival.

I was hoping that Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon (Apple/Sony, 11.22) might debut at Telluride….nope!

I would also love to see Roman Polanski‘s The Palace….nope! Bad person, suppress his film (a black comedy) at all costs, etc.

I’m despairing and downhearted. My spirit is leaking out of me like sand. Whatta bummer, man.