Shelley Winters once said of Marilyn Monroe, with whom she had roomed, “If she’d been a little less smart, she might have been happier.”

By the same token, it can be surmised that a fair number of dumber (or less smart) people are interested in seeing Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry, Darling.

Okay, they’re not so much dumb as not especially attuned or curious, and so they don’t care about Wilde schtupping Harry Styles during filming or Styles getting paid more than Florence Pugh or any of that stuff. Simple folk, common clay, etc. Movie, darkened theatre, comfy seat, popcorn…done.

Delicious film reviews can be either pans or raves, but the raves are better. And the ones that really get you going and stick to your ribs aren’t just concise or articulate or well-phrased. The very best ones absorb the artistry and special energy of a film and somehow convert it into charged prose. You’re reading but you can feel the film.

Read Owen Gleiberman’s Tar review and see what I mean.

…should ever wear a dark suit with a white-shirt-and-red-tie combo. Because Donald Trump has contaminated that scheme forever. No slam against Rod Lurie, of course — it just didn’t occur to him. Others may want to take note.

Posted by Letterbox a little while ago…

My only issue is with the words “this is healthy.” It is most certainly not healthy. That’s all I’m saying.

The squishy blue pillow saved my life. It made it possible to catch a few zees on the floor of Reagan National between midnight and 5 am. Terminal D is being vacuumed and wiped down by graveyard shifters. Could there be a sadder, grimmer way to earn a paycheck?

I decided against taking the rolled-up sleeping pad as they probably wouldn’t let me board with it anyway. Three or four terrible hours on a lounge floor inside Reagan National! Waiting for 10 pm departure from LaGuardia. I can do this.

It would appear that Noah Baumbach‘s White Noise has been more or less downgraded, at least as far as Venice Film Festival critics are concerned. The last time I checked a 69% Metacritic rating signified something between teetering and over and out.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s less-than-ecstatic Variety review: “On the page, Don DeLillo‘s ‘White Noise’ achieved total heaviosity. It was a novel of ideas. But that’s a tricky thing to translate to the big screen. As a movie, White Noise announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them.

“Greta Gerwig has one of the best scenes — a tearfully extended, ripped-from the-gut monologue in which she confesses her adultery to Jack, though her transgression isn’t about any desire to stray so much as her compulsion to get those [mood-stabilizing] pills by any means necessary. By the time Jack heads out with a tiny gun to confront the man Babette slept with, White Noise has found its heart of darkness but lost its pulse. We no longer buy what we’re seeing, even as we’re told, explicitly, what it all means. The film ties itself into knots to explicate the bad news.

“How telling, then, that it’s so much more effective when it’s willing to be upbeat, notably in a triumphantly daffy closing-credits dance sequence that takes place in the brightly lit aisles of the A&P. Set to the joyful thumping groove of ‘New Body Rhumba’ by LCD Soundsystem, the place really does seem like ironic nirvana. That’s a quality White Noise could have used more of.”

Yesterday a friend called this teaser for Florian Zeller‘s The Son (Sony Pictures Classics 11.11) “a parody of an older, well-educated white person’s Oscar bait film.”

All I know is that I hate the kid (played by Zen McGrath). He’s playing a character called Nicholas, and within the realm of the film my basic attitude is “whatever it is you’re shaky or unstable or feeling hurt about it, get over it and shut the fuck up…okay? Really. I’m sick of young sensitive guys whose feelings are hurt about whatever. Seriously, fuck off.”

Directed by Zeller from a screenplay he co-wrote with Christopher Hampton, The Son is part of a “spiritual trilogy” that includes The Father and The Mother. Costarring Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, McGrath, Hugh Quarshie and Anthony Hopkins. Premiering in Venice on 9.7.22.

The current population of the United States of America is 332,403,650. A travel statistics site estimates that in 2019, or before the pandemic struck, 5.6 million Americans visited Italy. That comes to 1.68% of the U.S. population, which surprises me. It’s hard to guesstimate how many Americans have visited Venice altogether, but I’m guessing fewer than 3%. I’ll bet the same affluent people visit time and again.