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At age 37, William Holden was too old to play Hal Carter, a youngish drifter, in Joshua Logan‘s film adaptation of William Inge‘s Picnic. A few weeks after Picnic opened on 12.7.55, Holden appeared on the cover of Time — a semi-official proclamation that he was peaking as a big-time movie star. Except the painting of Holden that Time used made him appear no younger than 45, which was really too old to play a guy who hadn’t yet figured out what to do with his life.

Holden and his Picnic costar Kim Novak had relatively short runs as super-duper movie stars slash sex symbols. Holden’s began with his breakout role in Sunset Boulevard (’50) and ended with his costarring role in The Horse Soldiers (’59). (He kept working until his death on 11.12.81, but the shining glory era lasted only a decade.) Novak’s Picnic performance made her a star, but her peak period lasted only until her lead role in Of Human Bondage (’64).

Sex, nude scenes, great wealth, naked ambition — Daniel Petrie and Harold Robbins‘ The Betsy (’78) is one of the most hilariously offensive groaners in the sub-genre of hothouse soap opera.

But early on there’s a great little scene in which aging auto tycoon Loren Hardeman Sr. (Laurence Olivier) is hiring race-car driver Angelo Perino (Tommy Lee Jones) to build “a groundbreaking fuel-efficient car.” Toward the end Oliver/Hardeman’s enthusiasm gets the better of him — “All right, now build me a car! Wheeee!”

The 71-year-old Olivier also has a brief scene in which he’s ravaging one of the housemaids…bip, bip, bip, bip.

I understand, I think, why The Menu (Searchlight, 11.18) hasn’t sold all that many tickets over the last couple of days.  I saw it Friday, and immediately warmed to the cold, pared-to-the-bone discipline aspect.  It’s basically Michael Haneke‘s  Funny Games transposed to the realm of high-end gourmet dining. 

It’s essentially about contempt for the one-percenters — a contempt especially felt by creatively gifted types.  As well as a general all-round contempt that some of us have deep-down for ourselves. 

I would actually call The Menu dry-ice cold rather than just boilerplate ice-cube cold. 

The Menu‘s Wiki page calls it “an American black comedy thriller.”   That’s misleading.  It’s a dry, pitch-black chamber piece  — archly-written and performed with a chilly, darkly ironic attitude — but it’s certainly not comedic.  It’s about 12 financially flush diners squirming over the distinct prospect of possibly being killed in some horrible way, and if you find this kind of squirming comedic there’s really and truly something wrong with you.

“We’re Gonna Die,” posted on 8.11.22:  “Obviously The Menu is a black social satire. The focus is on the repulsion that some gifted artists feel for consumers, including the rich elite. The idea, apparently, is that Ralph Fiennes‘ Slowik, the celebrity chef behind an exclusive restaurant called Hawthorne, is a sociopath. He’s probably a variation of Leslie Banks‘ “Count Zaroff” in The Most Dangerous Game (’32).”

The fact that Adam McKay and Will Ferrell produced The Menu (along with Betsy Koch)…this fact should tell you something.  None-too-brights have interpreted this to mean that The Menu is a kind of comedy.  In fact it’s a misanthropic fuck-you satire.

I’ve assembled this list with full respect and total affection, but here are the nine Scorsese films that have left me feeling at least somewhat gloomy, faintly angry, unsatisfied, vaguely bored, brought down and under-nourished (and not necessarily in this order):

Hugo, Silence, Bringing Out The Dead, Kundun, The Age of Innocence, The Aviator, Shutter Island, Cape Fear and New York New York (“an honest failure”).

All the others are total winners.

When off-key singers have murdered the “happy birthday“ song, I’ve also been reduced to tears. But the singing wasn’t that bad earlier today.

My intuition is that the Harry Styles-Olivia Wilde relationship, which began during filming of Don’t Worry Darling in October of ‘20, was strongest in the early stages (like all relationships) but faltered when various pressures and complications began to weigh heavily. (Not to mention the ten-year age difference.) My sense was that the current had all but petered out by the time of Darling’s debut at the ‘22 Venice Film Festival. A two-year relationship means there was genuine spirit and substance. No harm, no foul.

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So Robert Richardson‘s lensing of Emancipation (Apple, 12.2) is basically black-and-white with very soft hints of watercolor green. Was Antoine Fuqua‘s period drama shot in full digital color and then desaturated down to near monochrome?

The almost-no-color scheme seems to be about visually blending with the famous black-and-white “scourged back” photo of Gordon, an escaped slave from Louisiana. Will Smith plays Peter, a character based upon Gordon.

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It’s been patently obvious for several years (i.e., early ’17) that President Donald Trump was a criminal, anti-Democratic sociopath and bully boss grifter. The Biden administration has been in power for nearly two years, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has only just announced that potential prosecutions of Trump and his criminal colleagues will henceforth be seriously examined by Jack Smith, a special prosecutor.

People have been calling Garland a wimp and a foot dragger for many months now, and if you ask me for more than sufficient cause. Bring on the new Archibald Cox slash Leon Jaworski!

N.Y. Times‘ Michael Schmidt: “Special counsels were created to put distance between the politics of the moment and the investigative work of the Justice Department. Under the regulations for special counsels, the Justice Department will have to tell Congress about any major investigative moves that the special counsel wanted to take that were overruled by senior department officials. Also, the special counsel can be fired only for cause — essentially, for not doing their job.”

Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, Gabriel Clarke & John McKenna’s 2015 doc, states very plainly that Le Mans (‘71), the semi-legendary race-track pic, was the film that broke McQueen’s spirit as well as his legend to a significant extent, and that things were never quite the same after it.

In my mind McQueen had a great 14-year run from ‘60/‘62 (The Magnificent Seven, Hell Is For Heroes) to his last quality spurt (Junior Bonner, The Getaway and The Towering Inferno) that ended in ‘74. Call it 14 years. Okay, 15 or 16 if you count Wanted Dead or Alive.

But his Godly McQueen aura, that quietly measured and invincible thing that peaked with Bullitt, that Zen-like, supercool man-of-few-words + awesome motorcycle and Mustang-driving era was shorter — The Great Escape (’63) to Le Mans (‘17) or roughly an eight-year stretch. That’s all it was — eight years.