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“In the early scenes [of Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon], the titular figure seems to be another of Joaquin Phoenix‘s taciturn, unnervingly volatile, enigmatically damaged, violent men.

“The difference is that this Napoleon, with his bloat, scowls and consuming needs, often resembles nothing as much as an angrily petulant baby, one whose cruelty and pathological vanity make the horror he unleashes unnervingly familiar.” — from Manohla Dargis’s 11.22 N.Y. Times review.

It’s fairly uncommon for critics and the ticket-buying public to feel exactly the same way about a new release. To go by Rotten Tomatoes the elite know-it-alls and your Joe Popcorn types agree that Napoleon is the same kind of problem.

An old HE chestnut, updated:

There’s a very significant difference between all the big-screen King Kongs we’ve seen since Peter Jackson‘s 2005 disappointment and Merian C. Cooper and Willis O’Brien‘s classic, stop-motion, herky-jerky version.

I’m not saying that Jackson and the others made the right or the wrong call in the fashioning of their Kongs, but here’s the thing:

Cooper’s Kong didn’t look like any gorilla, chimp or orangutan that had ever walked the earth. He was something between a prehistoric hybrid and an imaginary monster of the id…a raging nightmare beast designed to scare the bejeesus out of 1933 moviegoers.

O’Brien, the legendary stop-motion phtography pioneer, used three slightly different-looking Kong models during filming, but for me the master stroke was deciding to give his Kong a set of gleaming white teeth and a pair of very bright white eyes.

In some of the darker shots of Kong in the 1933 film those teeth and those eyes just pop right out, and the effect is still primal as hell. Those white eyes and black pupils look so fierce and almost demonic…contrasting as they do with that black bear fur that Kong was covered in…that they almost give you the willies, even now.

There’s no such aura with all the National Geographic Kongs we’ve seen this century. The realism element is awesome but the spook factor is nil. In going for anthropological realism Jackson and the others threw out that creepy, better-than-reality, only-in-the-movies element that gives the 1933 film a serious-nightmare quality.

It was Abraham Lincoln, remember, who, in 1863, officially proclaimed that Thanksgiving would be celebrated on the final Thursday in November. And that’s how it’s been ever since. I don’t know how Thanksgiving worked before that year — does anyone? All I know is that everything was cool until the wokesters came along and began to throw shade upon the origins of Thanksgiving, or more precisely the relations between white settlers and Native Americans.

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“Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

This Oswald family footage, taken on 11.22.62 or Thanksgiving Day, is indistinguishable from tens of thousands of home movies taken that very same afternoon. Family celebrations are pretty much all the same, and are always about facades. The insisted-upon emotions of these gatherings (happiness, contentment, alpha vibes) always mask the undercurrents.

Even the 23-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald wore a happy face that day…imagine.

American Thanksgiving celebrations are about hope and cheer and togetherness. In every home and at every dinner table everyone is presumed to be doing reasonably well or at least trying to do better, and planning for the best. But you never know.

Sasha Stone, currently in Ohio, just told me about joining her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, the boyfriend’s brother and other family members for a pre-Thanksgiving get-together. “And the vibes were really great,” she said, “because the family members seemed genuinely happy…unlike so many extended families today they don’t all hate each other….they get along.”

Happy Sliced Turkey Breast with Micro-Waved, Deli-Prepared Gravy plus Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Green Giant or Del Monte Peas and Beans.

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…and in so doing making it seem as if Focus Features’ decision to announce an early (11.28) streaming date a week and a half after the 11.10 wide-release launch…all I can tell you is that this early streaming detour made me feel badly..

To repeat, Focus will start streaming one of the best-written, best-acted and best character-driven films of the year on 11.28.

Focus platformed Alexander Payne’s universally-praised Oscar contender on 10.27 and then went wide (1478 screens), as noted, on 11.10.

Over-40s showed up (I caught it a week ago at a local AMC plex) but your texting, short-attention-span, snorting-at-rave-reviews Millennials and Zoomers didn’t flock (presumably unenthused about a film set in 1970 and preferring something more personally relatable) and the take so far is a passable but no-great-shakes $9 million and change.

The Holdovers is not a sentimental nostalgia trip. It authentically recreates that 1970-ish atmosphere, but it’s mainly about top-tier chops — witty writing, careful character building, wry humor and Payne’s ultra-refined filmmaking instincts.

Posted today by World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy:

On 11.21.23, in the middle of a Brian Jonestown Massacre show at the Forum Theatre in Melbourne, an onstage brawl — a falling-down slapfight — happened between guitarist and lead vocalist Anton Newcombe, 56, and guitarist Ryan Van Kriedt. The remainder of their Australian tour was cancelled the next day. Many in the audience grew tired of the long gaps between songs – up to three or four minutes – and the “torrent of abuse” that Newcombe hurled at the crowd, and left early. And then the curtain came down.

Here’s an 1.22 report by NME’s Surej Singh.

…was a moderate realpolitik liberal by early ‘60s standards, and yet by the measurement of today’s political thinking (and certainly compared to the beliefs of the post-2017 censorious wacko left) he would have to be seen as a centrist and even in some respects a center–rightist.

In terms of lightning vibes, cool glamour and soaring oratorical panache JFK’s only equal was and is Barack Obama.

If George McGovern (the “Prairie populist”) had miraculously been elected in ‘72 he might have become, I believe, an inspirational Democratic president. His voice was twangy and his speeches often sounded platitudinous, but he had soul and integrity.

Or he could have suffered the unfortunate political fate of the recently widowed Jimmy Carter.

Bill Clinton, for sure, was and is another charisma prince and an exceptional wowser speech-giver, but administratively he was more or less an Eisenhower Republican.

…because some of her texts on the Israeli-Hamas conflict have implied an anti–Semitic bias, or so some have judged. And so the In The Heights costar has been jettisoned from the next Scream movie.

It’s fair to observe, I think, that there’s an apparent racial-ethnic factor affecting reactions to the Israeli-Hamas war.

If you’re a fair-skinned American or European Jew (fully or partly), you’re naturally going to feel an allegiance with Israel. If you’re from a culture of color that has experienced white avarice or white colonialism or white racism (Barrera is Mexican), you’re going to identify or sympathize with the Palestinian viewpoint.

There appears to be no way for an entertainment industry person to express limited support or at least compassion for presumably innocent Gaza Palestinians caught in the crossfire without taking a career hit.

You can’t say, for example, that “the 10.7 Hamas atrocity was satanic and that the responsible Hamas fiends must suffer the necessary consequences, but many thousands of non-combatant Gaza residents have since died from Israeli reprisals and many more thousands of non-combatants will die in the coming weeks, and that too is tragic.”

Apparently you can’t blurt this out without being regarded askance or getting dropped or cancelled.

This is what Barrera recently said:

But in other texts she implied what sounded to some like a form of racial bias — feelings and convictions in support of Gaza victims but also against Israel’s “white” government and its defensive (or suppressive) military policies

However unwise from a careerist perspective, what Barrera has said seems fairly close to what Barack Obama said on 11.5, Here’s a portion:

…in early June ‘17.

Allegedly snapped at a London party in 1957, when Cary Grant was around 53 and Sean Connery was 27. Connery was then filming (or had just filmed) Another Time, Another Place with Lana Turner. His hair was still reasonably thick, or at least not thinning.

I don’t believe that story about Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli offering the 007 role to Grant roughly four years later, sometime in early ’61. The 57 year-old Grant had reached his dashing physical peak when he shot North by Northwest in ’58, and was at least ten years too old to play a hotshot British agent — Grant himself believed this. Plus Broccoli wanted Grant to commit to five Bond films, a proposition which Grant immediately declined.

Connery was hired to play Bond sometime between the late summer and early fall of ’61. Filming on Dr. No began in Kingston, Jamaica, on 1.16.62. It opened commercially later that year. Connery made it through the first two films without a full toupee, but was forced to wear one for Goldfinger.

1. Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro
2. Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (a ’70s character-driven thing, yes, but an absolutely first-rate resuscitation of this type of film)
3. Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (rousing nutter filmmaking…bawdy, nervy, wildly imaginative and yet a tad over-praised at Venice and Telluride due to the hothouse atmosphere of those two gatherings)
4. Cord Jefferson‘s American Fiction
5. David Fincher‘s The Killer
6. Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot-au-Feu (aka Tbe Taste of Things)
7. Michael Mann‘s Ferrari
8. Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant
9. Christian Mungiu‘s RMN
10. Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge (official German submission for Best Int’l feature)

11. Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest
12. Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer — first-rate film but I groaned at the one-hour mark, knowing there were two full hours to go…my soul softly wept.
13. Aki Kaurismäki‘s Fallen Leaves (Chaplinesque, slightly glum relationship comedy-drama..quietly touching performances from costars Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen)
14. Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie [manosphere pissnado demerit]
15. Cruise & McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One
16. Errol Morris‘s The Pigeon Tunnel (richly visual, beautifully scored doc about John le Carre…enveloping and rather dazzling)
17. Eric Gravel‘s Full Time
18. Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon
19. Matt Johnson‘s Blackberry tied with The Burial, a formulaic but satisfying courtoom dramas featuring Jamie Foxx‘s best performance since Ray.
20. Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid

21`. Ben Affleck‘s Air
22. Jean-Stephen Sauvaire’s Black Flies.
23. Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance
24. Nicole Holofcener‘s You Hurt My Feelings

…if, after finishing his famous Thanksgiving dinner painting in 1943, he could somehow see 80 years into the future and contemplate the current American dysphoria.