Daily

Certain types of movie characters are impossible to relate to, much less feel any sort of rooting interest for. Minus-zero allegiance. James Caan in The Gambler aside, gambling junkie flicks are a one-way toilet flush. Even if a gambler protagonist wins a big glorious pot, you know it’s just a passing distraction because he/she has no interest in anything other than the next roll, the next card, the next horse or the next wheel spin. Talk about a film that hasn’t a prayer…the very definition of dramatic futility. With the exception of Leaving Las Vegss, the same terms apply to films about chronic boozers (Under The Volcano).

If I was Zohran Mamdani right now, I wouldn’t do this with any regularity or consistence. He obviously doesn’t want to give nutters any bad ideas.

Any half-honest film critic or columnist (a few actually exist) will admit the truth of things, which is that roughly 75% or 80% of commercial features have problems of varying degrees and are therefore a drag to wade through, some more than others.

On a year-by-year basis, how many films tend to be really and truly primal on some level…imbued with grace and poetry and levitational perception? Less than 5%…hell, closer to 3%. And that’s just the way it is. Fear inhibits receptivity. Inspiration is fleeting, sporadic…comes and goes.

But most critics, terrified of sounding like old-fart sourpusses, tend to slip on their ballet shoes and dance around the groaning reality when they write their reviews. That’s the basic difference between Hollywood Elsewhere and the Scott Mantz congregation. I don’t dance. Or at least I try not to.

The only pure capturing of last night’s Eiffel Tower eruptions….no commentary, no title cards. And I don’t think it’s fake. It looks and sounds “real.” Things have almost gotten to a point in which you can’t trust anything you find on YouTube. Everything, it seems, has been AI-tweaked or AI-enhanced. It’s all AI cartoons.

I post this every year, but no New Year’s Eve celebration of any kind will ever match what the kids and I saw in front of the Eiffel Tower when 1999 gave way to 2000. A bit dippy from champagne and standing about two city blocks in front of the Eiffel Tower and watching the greatest fireworks display in history. And then walking all the way back to Montmartre with thousands on the streets after the civil servants shut the Metro down at 1 a.m. No cabs anywhere. We didn’t arrive home at our rue Durantin pad until 2:30 am.

“I’m okay…you can write whatever you want…it doesn’t really matter what people write or say.”

Read more

Jeffrey Wells to Eric Kohn, the New York City-residing artistic director of the Southampton Playhouse:

Eric,

Happy New Year and all the best, etc.

I’ve just read Hope Hamilton’s puzzling 27east softball piece about the Southampton Playhouse and particularly about you and Maria A. Ruiz Botsacos and the honor of being named “people of the year” by some vague Southampton press org.

ANYWAY, I’m a tiny bit perplexed by a few details (or a lack of them) in the Hamilton article.

We all understand that the Southampton Playhouse is a grade-A aspirational nonprofit experience, one that incidentally houses “the smallest IMAX theatre in the nation”, according to Hamilton. (What could be the possible point of showing a big Chris Nolan event film on a teeny-weeny IMAX screen?)

We also understand that exhibition is a sadly dying industry (breaks my heart) and that most of the super-wealthy boomers and GenXers who can afford to live in the Hamptons (but whose ranks are almost certainly thinned out during the cold months) prefer to stream HD films at home on their 75-inch 4K screens.

So how does the eight-month-old Southampton Playhouse, even with the unacknowledged, unmentioned grants and secret donations and tax breaks and you-name-it that fund the overall operation…how can the SP cover the basic operating expenses (which have to be sizable) plus your salary plus Maria’s…how does it all add up?

Not to mention yours and Maria’s Southampton lodging and commutation expenses (rents are ridiculous out there, even in the winter). I mean, who’s the secret arms-dealing billionaire who’s paying for all this?

And why doesn’t Hamilton even mention the Harmony Korine EDGLRD thing, even in passing?  You left your lofty position with IndieWire for the Harmony thing, right?  Is that job still happening?

At the very least Hamilton’s article reads and sounds like a carefully phrased, very carefully edited, ignore the elephant in the room, blah-blah profile.  

Seriously, what’s really going on?  Without blowing smoke, I mean.

At the end of the day, the Southampton Playhouse is just a movie theatre (technically a quad, right?)  and movie theaters in general are struggling to survive.  At best this or that indie showcase in Key West or Savannah or Austin or hipster Brooklyn MIGHT be breaking even, but only with salaries and expenses pared to the bone…right? Are flush Saudi billionaires cutting checks on the side for the SP? 

I’m obviously not familiar with the ins and outs of financing blue-chip operations like the SP, but way back when I was a fully licensed Connecticut projectionist plus I also worked as a manager of Sid Geffen ‘s Carnegie Hall Cinema so there’s that. 

Best to you and the family. How old is your son now?  My granddaughter Sutton just turned four.

Jeff

P.S.: We all understand that the spelling of Southampton includes only one “h”, which breaks down to “South” and “ampton.” (Or, if you will, “Sout” and “Hampton.) And yet the neighboring community of East Hampton is spelled like it looks and sounds.

Also: I understand the motive behind Alejandro G. Inarritu’s decision to substitute a G. for Gonzalez so his name would sound less pretentious or more concise…9 syllables vs. the original 11…but on top of her three-pronged, 8-syllable name why does Maria insert an A. for a grand total of 9 syllables?…as long as she’s piling up the syllables why not really go for it and insert the name that the A. stands for, in which case she might possibly out-syllable George Fortescue Maximilian de Winter?

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival (5.12 through 5.23) is only four and a half months away, which means I’ll need to lock down an affordable crash pad by January or February, early March at the latest.

I’ve been looking around, and rental-wise Cannes is once again a miserable proposition. Within last year’s price range (2200 or 2300 euros for ten days) the available places are either the size of broom closets or located too far away from the Palais, or both. One humiliating shit-level rental after another. There’s a notion of possibly bunking at that horrible little studio Jordan and I shared last May…ugghh!

If you want to stay at some half-decent Cannes apartment during the festival, you need to be able to shell out 3500 or 4000 Euros for 10 days. The greed factor makes me sick. Venice rentals are so much more humane.

Chumbawamba’s biggest single was released on 8.11.97. I find this numerical fact hugely depressing.

I still disagree with the spelling of the group’s name. For the last 28 and 1/2 years I’ve been calling them ChumbaWUMba. Obviously the last two syllables being spelled “wamba” doesn’t work in this context.

I’m not in league with the nyah-hyah blamers and fault-finders who love to point their tanned, well-manicured fingers and accuse dicky, flinty, less-than-gracious people of being “dicks” or “ayeholes”.

Were they wrong about Chevy Chase during his late-20th-Century heyday? Apparently not, but they also used to point fingers at Jerry Lewis and he was always fine in my book. I always accepted who and what Lewis was. He was a “prick” but fine…shrug it off. Show business breeds performers with over-sized egos and cavalier attitudes. It goes with the territory.

Now 82, Chase seems a bit diminished. His diction seems a bit off. Maybe I’m wrong.

Read more

HE to candy-ass woke brainiacs and male-hating TikTok feminists who are calling Marty Supreme socially dangerous because it clearly admires and in fact glorifies a hungry, selfish, ruthlessly ambitious pogo stick and out-for-number-one ping-pong athlete…

I’m talking to those who are basically calling Josh Safdie out for inspiring toxic, anti-social behavior amongst your impressionable basement-dwelling bros…bitch-slapping Safdie for having made a new version of The Wolf of Wall Street, which people like LexG admired “for the wrong reasons”…

Those who are lamenting that Safdie and Timothee Chalamet have created a new version of What Makes Sammy Run?….

Sadie and Chalamet have valorized, they fear, a lower-Manhattan beanpole who isn’t much different, morally or ethically, from Robert DeNiro‘s Johnny Boy in Mean Streets…

The Marty haters need to get a clue.

Marty Supreme is about a selfish young dude’s journey across the heaving seas…a journey that begins with an epic hustle and ends with tears in a maternity ward,….but it’s mainly about the same primal hunger that drives salmon to swim upstream.

Consider the opening-credit footage of sperm cells furiously swimming toward the egg in order to fertilize. This is what Safdie is telling us in so many words…young men are sperm cells, and they have to furiously swim and scramble their way into a place of warmth, growth and nurture because nobody will do their swimming for them…life is struggle, bruh…move it or fucking lose it.

All exciting or dynamic art strikes the gatekeepers and bluenoses as dangerous…Igor Stavinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps had people howling.

@josephholmesstudios #martysupreme #filmtok #masculinity #femisim #men ♬ original sound – Joseph Holmes

Read more