HE to Aleksandr Rodnyansky and Andrey Zyagintsev:

I’m terribly sorry for the anguish and horror you both must be going through now. Anguish and horror by loose association, I mean.

We all understand that millions of Russians are just as appalled and anguished by the chaos and slaughter in Ukraine as the rest of the world.

Most of us (along with the Festival du Cannes guys) think of you and Andrey as residing in the Aleksei Navalny camp, and I’m very, very sorry for what you’re all enduring as we speak.

I take it that the good Mr. Zvyagintsev’s health has improved? Best to both of you!

…and I was honestly not expecting much more than a sporadically engaging in-and-outer. I was praying it wouldn’t be arduous. Well, it’s more than that — a good deal more. It’s not my idea of a stone masterpiece, but it’s awfully damn good for what it is. Much better than expected.

No bathroom breaks! And I have to hand it to RBatz…he holds his own and can regard all the other Bat dudes (Keaton, Bale, Kilmer, Clooney) on an equal footing.

Yes, another brooding, badass, seething, dark-as-shit Batman flick. But on its own terms it stands up to the Nolan aesthetic. It looks Nolan right in the eye, I mean, and says “this is another way to go, bruh…yes, similar in some ways…okay, in more than a few…how could it not be?”

But Matt Reeves has made this nearly three-hour noir work on its own dark, rainy-ass, soaked-in-sewer-water, steaming noir-scape terms.

It’s obvious from the get-go that The Batman has been directed by a sharp, highly intelligent maestro type who wears bow ties…this is no schlocko enterprise, no Peter Hyams paycheck thing.

The unrecognizable Colin Farrell for Best Supporting Actor! Seriously! He looks and sounds like Michael Rapaport under heavy makeup and a fat suit.

I loved the “Ave Maria” opening. Very impressive! Overall it played better than I expected. Paul Dano is fantastic — he out Kevin Spacey’s Kevin Spacey in Se7en.

And they’re both (Dano and RBatz) angels of vengeance, dammit.

The music is great!!

The constant rainy, gloomy, down-at-the-heels noir stylings and a steady stream of haunted minds and ominous undercurrents — The Batman really does have a kind of orchestral symphonic feeling…it all moves and emotes and groans and despairs from a single fierce place…the particulars all blend into a fused and multi-shaded whole.

It’s still a Batman movie, of course, and people keep getting shot, blown up, burned, knocked cold and blasted and bruised all to hell, and they all just kind of grunt and recover. A little bruised and bleeding but we’ll be okay in a while.

And the cape-and-cowl guy dropping off from the tops of super-tall skyscrapers….God, that cliche refuses to die!

I really didn’t recognize Farrell at all…amazing!

I liked Jeffrey Wright’s performance in this thing much more than his heralded performance in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.

Adam West aside, the Batman thing has always been about noirish gloom, sullen moods, feelings of vengeance, downerism, dark shadows, etc. Right?

With great respect and profound sadness Hollywood Elsewhere is acknowledging the death of producer Alan Ladd, Jr, an old-school guy & son of Shane who believed in taking the occasional risk, standing by certain filmmakers and supporting the advancement of women in the ranks.

Ladd was 20th Century Fox’s production chief between ’76 and ’79, and distinguished himself as the guy who stood behind Star Wars and Alien. In ’79 he launched The Ladd Company, which yielded Chariots of Fire (’81), Outland (1981), the truncated & narrated version of Blade Runner (’82), Night Shift (1982), The Right Stuff (1983) and Police Academy (’84). He also produced Gone Baby Gone (2007).

Ladd joined MGM/UA in ’85 (Giancarlo Parretti!), and thereby cranked out A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Moonstruck (1987) and Thelma & Louise (1991). Ladd re-started the Ladd Company with Paramount Pictures in ’93, and thereafter produced The Brady Bunch Movie and Braveheart.

In one corner we have Oliver Stone, who gave Vladimir Putin a friendly interview four or five years ago, suggesting that we’re overly consumed by anti-Putin hysteria while “omitting key facts when inconvenient, and that we’re failing to “understand the full spectrum of what’s happening.” Which boils down, Stone feels, to Putin’s territorial anti-NATO paranoia being justified or at least understandable.

And in the opposite corner we have former chess champion and anti-Putin, pro-democracy activist Garry Kasparov, telling Megyn Kelly that this is Putin’s last stand. Not to mention Michael Moore posting yesterday terms of surrender that Putin might want to consider.

Every now and then we have to remind ourselves how far everything has fallen. Indeed, collapsed. How no one is even attempting this kind of thing in mainstream cinema — how completely shut down things are now. (Obviously not in cable/streaming but theatrically.) This scene was written and shot 42 or 43 years ago, but listen to it…feel it. Nobody’s even trying to deliver this kind of middle-class angsty stuff now, in large part because dramas about wealthy suffering white people are verboten.

Yes, yes…I agree that Raging Bull should have won the 1980 Best Picture Oscar, but if Robert Redford’s 1980 drama had never happened 42 years ago and was made and released sometime in 2021, are you telling me it wouldn’t be the far-and-away favorite to win Best Picture? Because it totally kicks CODA‘s ass. Don’t even mention CODA in the same sentence.

Originally posted on 5.10.19: The late Alvin Sargent was one of Hollywood’s finest and classiest 20th Century screenwriters, especially in the realm of adult relationship dramas. On the same level as Bo Goldman, William Goldman, Ben Hecht, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, David Rayfiel, Paul Schrader, Robert Towne, etc. Ordinary People was the peak, but the runners-up were The Sterile Cuckoo (’69), Paper Moon (’73), Julia (’77), Straight Time (’78, w/ Jeffrey Boam), Dominick and Eugene (’88), Hero (’92 w/ Laura Ziskin and David Webb Peoples) and Unfaithful (w/ William Broyles Jr. — ’02).

Toward the end of his career Sargent wrote or co-wrote three or four Spider Man scripts. Alas, his kind of movie had fallen out of favor and paychecks were there for the taking.