Jimmy (Burns & Co., 11.6.26) is obviously a sentimental, low-budget, family-friendly attempt at ennobling and glorifying James Stewart‘s World War II experience as a bombardier in the European theatre. Pic was directed by Aaron Burns, whose company Burns & Co. also produced.
Burns & Co. mission statement: “In the truest sense of the word, Burns & Co. is a company of creatives crafting timeless adventure films and stories for the enjoyment of families around the world.”
Directed by Claude Autant-Lara, In Case of Adversity (En cas de malheur, titled Love Is My Profession in the U.S.) is a French-Italian film noir about a 50ish established attorney (Jean Gabin) falling for a hell-bent blonde hottie (Brigitte Bardot).
Pic was released in France on 9.17.58, nine months before the appearance of Francois Truffaut‘s The 400 Blows (5.4.59) and 22 months before Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless (5.16.60).
From Owen Gleiberman’s 12.28 Bardot essay: “Looking back and watching Bardot’s movies now, you see hints and echoes of so many of the actresses who would come after her, from Maria Schneider to Nancy Allen to Dominique Sanda to Uma Thurman to Adèle Exarchopoulos to Sydney Sweeney.
“She was marketed as a pin-up, yet she was a singular presence who forged a path of sensual and spiritual fearlessness. And part of it is that she insisted, just as the Madonna of the ’80s and ’90s did, that for a certain kind of performer (her kind), sexuality was inseparable from artistry. Bardot’s eroticized projection of female identity was itself a transcendent performance. If God created woman, Bardot made you feel like she had created herself. Only time will tell if the future is female. But once she’d made her mark, the future was most definitely Bardot.
Just-sent HE email….EXTRA SPECIAL, END-OF-2O25 “MARTY SUPREME” GATECRASHERS OPPORTUNITY…sent to Gatecrashers fraternity at 12:25 om eastern…
Happiest of holidays to Fellow Gatecrashers,
Don’t listen to my obnoxious bigmouth ranting….by all means vote only as you choose on your lonesome…but please consider the thrust of the following….because the spirit is upon me, I swear…I’m speaking not from my own determinations or from this or that tower of arrogant know-it-all-ism…I’m truly speaking for the revolutionary pitch of things…it’s definitely happening right now.
All good people of taste and conscience and especially those who recognize the value of NOT choosing a hard-left ideological film for the Best Picture Oscar as this would further stigmatize the Hollywood community as lefty fruit-loop fanatics who live on their own secular planet, and who have no understanding or appreciation of real life and real values as they exist outside the glitzy woke ghetto….
With Josh Safdie‘s MARTY SUPREME having broken though critically and box-office-wise over the just-finished Christmas holiday weekend, now is the time for The Gatecrashers to recognize the fundamentally populist, artistic and zeitgeist-driven truth of things and get behind SENOR SUPREME as a way of proclaiming the truth of things…of not only stopping ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER’s Oscar momentum but tipping the balance of opinion away from PTA’s admittedly well made, hard-left, ludicrously-plotted, father-daughter fantasy….
MARTY SUPREME is this year’s ANORA, and ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is this year’s THE BRUTALIST….
Join Timothee Chalamet‘s orange-pingpong-ball crusade!…No politics, just pogo sticks ….jump on your steed, unsheath your saber and join Teddy Roosevelt‘s rough riders as they thunder up San Juan Hill…NOW IS THE TIME! Remember that T.R. nutter from Frank Capra‘s Arsenic and Old Lace? “CHAAAAAARGE!”
Obviously you guys are under no obligation to vote for MARTY SUPREME because I’m urging you to do so, but now is the moment….Chalamet’s First Army has blown a hole through the woke siegfried line and NOW IS THE TIME for General George S. Patton‘s Third Army to rush through and seize the initiative! MARTY SUPREME-OLA….yes!!
A week ago the Best Picture race was boring everyine to tears, and now, as Michael Caine would say, the bloody doors have been blown off.
Shut that OBAA shit down!…shut it the fuck down!
Please refresh your ballots ASAP so we can post the results just before or certainly just after New Year’s Day. Claude AI has made the balloting so easy, so snappy….a fucking breeze.
Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere
“‘Bonnie and Clyde‘ is a 1968 French-language song written by Serge Gainsbourg, and performed by Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot. The song is based on an English-language poem written by Bonnie Parker herself a few weeks before she and Clyde Barrow were shot, titled “The Trail’s End”. The French song was released on two 1968 albums: Gainsbourg’s Initials B.B., and Gainsbourg and Bardot’s Bonnie and Clyde.” — Wiki page.
The hyena yelps are fantastic.
So MUBI subscribers should unsubscribe because MUBI France is respectfully acknowledging Brigitte Bardot’s passing or….what, is streaming one or two of her films? Lefty fanatics like Rolo Tomassi…sorry…fanatics like Rolo Tony make me want to vomit.
..but it snags my attention anyway.
When you get right down to it I’ve seen only five Brigitte Bardot films (And God Created Woman, The Night Heaven Fell, A Very Private Affair, Contempt, Viva Maria). On top of which throughout my life I’ve failed to catch what Bardot herself said was her only truly good one — Henri-George Clouzot’s La Verite (’60).
Bardot’s death at age 91 settles it — I’ll stream La Verite (aka Truth) this evening.
You could argue that Bardot’s grandest achievement was splashing into the sexually tepid waters of the straightlaced ‘50s and heating things up by way of brazen, unapologetic nudity and infinite intimations of erotic delight…starting with her break-out performance in And God Created Woman (‘56) and for a good 12 to 15 years after, Bardot inspired hundreds of millions of stiffies among men living grim lives of quiet desperation.
Sex, sex, sex, nudity, nudity, nudity, barefoot barefoot barefoot, pear-shaped ass pear-shaped ass pear-shaped ass…teasing erotica, playfully defiant manner…damp tongue, luscious lips and heavily mascara’ed eyes.
Bardot certainly went her own way, and didn’t shrink from saying what she damn well thought and felt. Passion was her guiding light. From her mid teens through her early ‘40s it was mostly dudes who lit her fire, and then, starting in the early to mid ‘70s, the welfare and protection of pets and animals became her primal cause.
The older Bardot got the less liberal or even tolerant she seemed. When she hit her 70s and 80s her racial views weren’t that far from Alain Delon’s, and in the late 20teens she made it clear she was no friend of the #MeToo movement.
Physically she was primarily known for her pouty expressions and blonde tousled hair (although she was born a brunette). Behaviorally she admitted to being a habitual infidel, time and again. She admitted not long ago to having “done” over a hundred guys in her lifetime…energetic and frisky, yes, but almost par for the course by the standards of the ’70s and ’80s.
Bardot posted this sign next to a country path that leads to her surfside St. Tropez compound:
Earlier this month I posted a list of 20 safe bets to be released in 2026 — i.e., presumptions of quality based upon esteemed critical regard and/or aspirational histories. Most of these represent my idea of festival toppers or possible award-worthy titles, or both.
Within this list, the big festival attractions will almost certainly include (1) Alejandro G. Inarritu and Tom Cruise‘s Digger, (2) Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning, (3) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Entertainment System is Down, (4) Asghar Farhadi‘s Parallel Tales, (5) Anton Corbijn‘s Switzerland, (6) Lukas Dhont‘s Coward, (7) Pawel Pawlikowski‘s 1949, (8) Tony Gilroy‘s Behemoth!, (9) Paul Schrader‘s The Basics of Philosophy, (10) Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, (11) Joel Coen‘s Jack of Spades, (12) Luca Guadagnino‘s Artificial, (13) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur, and (14) Martin McDonagh‘s Wild Horse Nine.
The Joe and Jane Popcorn titles include (1) David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino‘s The Adventures of Cliff Booth, (2) Chris Nolan‘s The Oydssey, (3) Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day, (4) Antoine Fuqua‘s Michael, and (5) Zach Cregger‘s Resident Evil.
Possible Standout Exceptions: (a) Ink (d: Danny Boyle) — Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch back in the old days, based on a James Graham stage play….yes!; (b) David O. Russell‘s Madden, biopic of football coach and commentator John Madden w/ Nic Cage, John Mulane, Kathryn Hahn, Sienna Miller; (c) Ben Affleck‘s Animals, political crime thriller costarring Affleck, Gillian Anderson, Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun; (d) Laszlo Nemes‘ Moulin, French resistance WWII drama w/ Gilles Lellouche, Lars Eidinger, Félix Lefevre.
As always, Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind remains a wild card.
Asking again: What am I missing?
1. Digger (d: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, p: Tom Cruise)
2. The Adventures of Cliff Booth (d: David Fincher)
3. The Oydssey (d: Christopher Nolan)
4. Disclosure Day, (d: Steven Spielberg)
5. Artificial (d: Luca Guadagnino)
6. Jack of Spades (d: Joel Coen)
7. The Entertainment System is Down (d: Ruben Ostlund)
8. Fjord (d: Cristian Mungiu w/ Renate Reinsve, Sebastian Stan)
9. Parallel Tales (d: Asghar Farhadi)
10. Minotaur (d: Andrey Zvyagintsev)
11. Coward (d: Lukas Dhont)
12. The Way of the Wind (d: Terrence Malick)
13. Resident Evil (d: Zach Cregger)
14. 1949 (d: Pawel Pawlikowski)
15. The Basics of Philosophy (d: Paul Schrader)
16. Switzerland (d: Anton Corbijn)
17. Michael (d: Antoine Fuqua)
18. The Social Reckoning (d: Aaron Sorkin)
19. Behemoth! (d: Tony Gilroy)
20. Wild Horse Nine (d: Martin McDonagh)
Anthony D’Alessandro’s Saturday box-office report for Deadline:
In four days, A24’s Marty Supreme will make more than Timothee Chalamet’s Christmas movie from last year, A Complete Unknown, did in 5 days, $26M-$27M to $23.2M.
Rivals are impressed by this number: It’s a period film about a ping-pong player from the Lower East Side, not an easy subject matter that creates a line to the multiplex, but it helps when you have the force of Chalamet in the campaign. The viral of it all sparked with the zoom sketch below. We already told you that the social media universe for Marty Supreme stood at 197M before opening across TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube; that’s with Chalamet standing atop The Sphere in Las Vegas. There was also a Marty Supreme blimp flying over Beverly Hills in further stunts.
When polled by Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak, moviegoers said the most influential form of advertising for Marty Supreme was social media (28%) and friends and family (19%).
Friday was $6.7M, -30% from Christmas Day’s $9.5M for a 3-day that stands at $16M-$17M at 2,668 theaters. Don’t be shocked if it’s higher, like a $17M 3-day and $30M 4-day. A24 has 70MM locations which are generating big bucks, and there’s some PLFs. Comp this to the previous Safdie Brothers movie, the zany gangster drama, Uncut Gems, which went wide over a 2019 5-day Christmas stretch with $18.8M. The Adam Sandler movie finaled at $50M.
The PostTrak definite recommend on Marty Supreme is a great 60% with 4 1/2 stars. Men over 25 are first in line at 36% followed by women over 25 at 27%, followed by men under 25 at 21% and women under 25 at 16%. 18-34 turnout is 66%. Even though women under 25 were surprisingly the smaller to show up yesterday, they love their Marty the most with a 94% positive and a 73% definite recommend. Diversity demos are 51% Caucasian, 23% Hispanic and Latino, 10% Black and 11% Asian American. Very good walk-up business with 52% buying their ticket same days. 50% went for Chalamet.
Marty Supreme is playing best on the East and West with close to half the gross coming from those regions versus a norm of 39% compared to all other films in the marketplace. Overperforming cities are NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Boston, Toronto and more. The trajectory is showing that this Josh Safdie directed movie is playing more broadly than an art film. Regal Union Square is currently the top-grossing multiplex in the nation for the pic with close to $74k.
Six and a half years ago…late May 2019…I think.
