Herewith films that have always made me seethe with hatred, twitch with revulsion and convulse with contempt. I’m naturally excluding films that are merely dull or excessive or appalling…or so bad they’re funny (Irwin Allen‘s The Swarm).

1. Richard Curtis‘ Love Actually (’03).
2. Frank Darabont‘s The Green Mile (’99)
3. Peter Jackson‘s Lord of the Rings franchise, especially Return of the King (’03).
4. Stephen Sommer‘s The Mummy (’99).
5. Joel Schumacher‘s Dying Young (’91).
6. Sir Lew Grade and Jerry Jameson‘s Raise The Titanic (’80).
7. Jerry Jameson‘s Airport ’77 (’77).
8. Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots (’18).
9. Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus (’12).
10. Randall Kleiser‘s The Blue Lagoon (’80).
11. Steven Spielberg‘s Hook (’91).
12. George Stevens‘ The Only Game in Town (’70).

Special bonus: The animatronic baby scene in Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper (’14).

The closest competitors are Charlie Meadows (aka “Madman Mundt”) in Barton Fink (’91) and, of course, Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski (’98). But the heroin-addicted Roland Turner in Inside Llewyn Davis (’13) is nastier and snarlier, and therefore funnier.

Goodman: “Well, if you make a livin’ at it, more power to ya. (beat) Solo act?”
Isaac: “Yeah, now.”
Goodman: “Now? Used to…what? Work with a cat? Every time you played a C-major he’d puke a hairball?”
Isaac: “Used to have a partner.”
Goodman: “What happened?”
Isaac: “Killed himself off the George Washington Bridge.”
Goodman: (beat) “Well, shit, I don’t blame him. I couldn’t take it either, havin’ to play Jimmy Crack Corn every night. Uh, pardon me for saying so but that’s pretty fuckin’ stupid, isn’t it? George Washington Bridge? You throw yourself off the Brooklyn Bridge…traditionally. George Washington Bridge? Who does that? What was he, a dumbbell?”
Isaac: “Not really.”

It occasionally happens to recently-arrived Americans, and anyone who tries to make fun of this syndrome is a hopeless asshole.

We’re allowed to mention the fact that Elvis Presley was attracted to women who had petite, geisha-like feet and that the sight of non-dainty feet made him run for cover.

We’re allowed to acknowledge that John Wayne had relatively small feet for a guy who stood six-four — his shoe size was eight and 1/2.

We’re allowed to write about Greta Garbo having had long feet and long toes — a combination that would have made Presley shriek with horror.

But we’re not allowed to mention the fact that a certain, much beloved actress had feet that might (I say “might”) have been larger than her husband’s, and possibly larger than Wayne’s.

Ethan Hawke would never touch this topic with a 20-foot pole, I can tell you.

I can only say generally that perception-wise, a woman with man toes is…well, somewhat on the periphery. That’s fair to say, surely.

…can suck on a baguette. Okay, I don’t mean that. No, wait…I do mean that.

There’s nothing “wrong” with the strategy behind Ethan Hawke’s The Last Movie Stars, the six-part HBO Max series that examines the lives of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

It’s actually half-inspired in a workmanlike way. Shot during the pandemic dog days, the (roughly) 360-minute epic leans upon 20-plus actor pallies (George Clooney, Laura Linney, Sam Rockwell, Vincent D’Onofrio, et. al.) to voice scores of transcribed interviews conducted by Newman collaborator Stuart Stern along with 20-plus original interviews. (All of it Zoomed.) The doc reps a livelier, more inquisitive approach to this kind of worshipful tribute, and Hawke certainly deserves points for orchestrating.

But it wore me down. I felt the sand particles of my soul starting to drain out of the hourglass. Hawke’s opus gradually made me feel as I was carrying it rather than vice versa. Too much gush, not enough meat. It was sometime during the third episode that I started to say “man, I’m getting a little sick of all these performative Zoom players expressing so much damnable delight and fascination for this rightly admired power couple…can we wrap this up, please?”

Three hours would’ve sufficed; I might have even been okay with four. But not six.

I’m certainly indebted to Hawke for educating me about Newman-Woodward in various ways that I wasn’t expecting. Newman’s description of himself as an “emotional Republican” is not something I’m likely to forget. We all knew he was a steady beer drinker but somehow the term “problem alcoholic” had never sunk in. The doc afforded me a fuller understanding of Newman’s journey, of how much better he was when he got older and stopped trying so hard. And it made me want to watch Hud for the 13th or 14th time.

I’d like to believe that my own Hud-like traits have been schooled and diminished over the years, and perhaps even locked in a box. But they haven’t been erased, and I strongly suspect that traces of same existed within Newman himself. Nobody’s perfect; some people behave badly from time to time. Hawke’s doc implies this but mostly slip-slides away.