“What is the basis of Denmark’s territorial claim? Obviously Greenland should be part of the United States. Military action? Greenland has a population of 30,00 people, Jake.”” — Stephen Miller to Jake Tapper earlier today.
HE to Miller: Greenland’s actual population is around 56.5 thousand, give or take.
Wiki: “Most residents of Greenland are Inuit, and it’s the least densely populated country in the world. The population is concentrated mainly on the southwest coast. Greenland is socially progressive, like metropolitan Denmark; education and healthcare are free, and LGBTQ rights in Greenland are some of the most extensive in the world”…not if Trump takes over!
My first viewing was without subtitles, and I couldn’t understand a fecking word. I have a general aversion to dark medieval dramas in which main characters don’t take baths or even given themselves whore baths. Sorry, but I have my standards.
Last night I finally watched Morgan Neville’s Breakdown: 1975 (12.19.25), a 92-minute Netflix doc that hurriedly recaps and, in a sense, celebrates the fertile and provocative moviescape of the mid ’70s. Glorious times!
Except Neville doesn’t strictly focus on 1975 films. The doc covers ’74, ’75 and ’76, during which, Neville asserts, the real meat and marrow of New Hollywood came to fruition. But every so often the early ’70s pop through and then, at the end, the ’77 finale (Rocky, StarWars) is heard from.
Plus anyone who had hit puberty by the late ’60s or who’s read Mark Harris‘s “Pictures at a Revolution” or Peter Biskind‘s “Easy Riders, Raging bulls” knows that New Hollywood was launched in ’67 with The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.
So let’s cut the crap — Breakdown: 1975 is really about the whole span of the mythical New Hollywood era. Neville should’ve called it Rough-and-Tumble ’70s Free-For-All! or Hollywood Neverland: When The Inmates Ran The Asylum or something in that vein.
The problem is that Breakdown: 1975 is generally too fast and loose and simple-minded — it just skims along and barely gets into any nitty-gritty specifics. It’s primarily aimed at your none-too-bright kids who are too lazy or ADD-afflicted to have paid the slightest attention to what Harris and Biskind were on about.
Is it a good thing that Neville has made a dumbed-down primer for younger folks (Millennials, Zoomers, Gen Alpha) who haven’t a clue about films that were made before the 1980s? Okay, yeah, I suppose.
As I watched Neville’s doc I recalled that the same basic saga was concisely passed along in Spotlight on New Hollywood (‘24), a 15-minute Criterion Channel essay that was offered last summer as a supplement to Criterion’s streaming of The Graduate.
Why can’t “Spotlight on New Hollywood” be offered as a stand-alone video essay on YouTube? That’s what I’m basically asking here. It would be terrific if readers of this piece could savor it.
The truth is that in 15 minutes Spotlight on New Hollywood delivers a much better, tighter, more sophisticated history of this fabled era than Neville, whom I know, respect and admire, manages in 92 minutes.
Such a shame that Harris’s 15-minute essay has been sent to the Criterion dustbin. Unless I’m missing something.
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.
I can handle coldtemps in the low 40s and 30s, but forget the 20s and don’t even mention the teens. And no wind, for God’s sake! Half the time I dream about living in Key West or, better yet, Cuba or Belize or Turks and Caicos. I hate windy cold. Stuff of nightmares.
From Owen Gleiberman‘s obliging, carefully phrased review of Paul Feig‘s The Housemaid (Lionsgate, 12.19):
“The Housemaid [is] a movie of diabolical developments, and that’s what’s captivating about it. That, and Elizabeth Perkins’ droll performance as a mother-in-law from WASP hell, and the fact that in following the ins and outs that made the novel such a hit, the film creates an ideology of male-female relationships that’s at once timely, glibly mythological, and born to be milked by a Hollywood thriller.
“There’s a note of pop sadism at work in the material; The Housemaid features scenes of people terrorizing each other in violently gaudy ways. Yet the scenes don’t feel exploitative, because they express the characters’ drives, and the audience is hanging on the outcome. In the thick of awards season, when those of us in the media are busy nattering on about prestige films, this is the kind of stylishly tricky high-trash movie that can steal some of the limelight.
Indications are that Paul Feig‘s The Housemaid (Lionsgate, 12.19), based on Freida McFadden‘s three-year-old novel, a feminist potboiler that has since grown into a multi-book franchise, is going to be a bit of a groaner…perhaps even a forehead-slapper.
All feminist airport fiction is based upon a single premise, which is that the principal male character is a toxic piece of shit who has made his own bed and deserves all the bad karma that’s sure to come his way.
It certainly seems unlikely that Feig’s film will deliver the intrigue and complexity of Im Sang-soo‘s The Housemaid (’10), which I recall as being half-decent.
Both versions have vaguely similar plots with the husband banging (or at least looking to bang) the housemaid, and the wife freaking out and the usual blowback kicking in.
The Housemaid costars Sydney Sweeney as the titular character; Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar (the bearded, nice-guy suitor in It Ends With Us) are her wealthy employers.
Sources have told People that Nick Reiner was allegedly acting erratically with guests at Conan O’Brien‘s Christmas party last Saturday night. Source: “Nick was freaking everyone out, acting crazy, kept asking people if they were famous.”
Us Weekly was told that the 32 year-old drug-susceptible asshole behaved “creepily” at O’Brien’s soiree, while a third insider told TMZ that Nick looked out of place at the party, wearing a hoodie when the dress code was formal.
And yet the prevailing view among comment-thread predators in yesterday’s “Odious Aftermath” discussion was that if an obviously disturbed youth is fated to kill his or her parents, it’s better for the parents to just say “okay, we accept this…bring it on”.
I was in a not-great, probably-going-nowhere place for a certain period in my early to mid 20s, but writing and journalism gradually lifted me out of that hole. Maybe a three-year period, give or take. Okay, call it four years. Hell, make it five.
I just barely crawled out of that attitude, that downward swirl kind of life, but while I was “under the weather” I could feel the weight of my vague gloom getting a bit worse each succeeding year.
Yes, I was drinking and drugging back then (pot, speed, Coors beer and Jack Daniels-and-ginger-ale were my constant companions, my beloved hermanos) but not — or so I’ve long told myself — to the point of any kind of insane self-destructive addiction. Thank God I had a certain inner decency or resolution of some kind within…some kind of fortunate spiritual inheritance, probably from my mother’s side of the family. Call it luck or God’s grace.
But to have lived in this kind of sinkhole for 17 years like Nick Reiner apparently has?….for more than half of a 32-year span of life? Forget it. You’re sunk. I’ve seen and felt that downhead vibe in others who never found their way out of the pit…some who just couldn’t turn things around and make something good or half-promising happen.
After 17 or so years of anguish Nick Reiner has finally found his catharsis. He’s murdered the people who brought him into this world and loved and nurtured him as best they could but ironically (or in Nick’s all-screwed-up head at least) never stopped making him feel depressed and enraged. He’s clearly a self-hater of epic proportions…a demonic figure.
When you gain weight, grow a beard and shear your hair off, you’re saying something about your mental-emotional condition or world-view. Nothing good. Hollywood kids have it rough, so to speak. A crushing blessing-slash-burden.
For some reason I’ve decided to re-watch Daniel Petrie and Ron Koslow‘s Lifeguard, which I haven’t seen since the Gerald Ford-Jimmy Carter era…half a century ago!
I love character-driven ’70s films, but this one doesn’t quite get there. It’s fairly compelling or at least interesting in terms of general character tension and low-key social realism (you can really feel the festering ’70s atmosphere), but it leaves you hanging at the end with the slender, dark-haired, good looking protagonist (played by 31 year-old Sam Elliott, who’s currently white-haired and handlebar-stache’d and who sounds like a droopy Deputy Dawg) at some kind of head-scratching, nowhere-man crossroads.
Good character-driven movies have to end with a sense of justice or finality or symmetrical balance…the main characters have to face reality and deal with their decisions in some kind of “okay, you called the shots and now you’re stuck with this” way. Actions have consequences, bruh.
South Bay lifeguard Rick Carlson (Elliott) loves his satisfying beach gig (which allows him to feel like a kind of king mixed with a judicious sheriff) but is bothered by family-and-friendo judgments that he should be manning up professionally and basically making more money and driving a snazzier car.
Rick would kinda like to get married to foxy ex-girlfriend Anne Archer (28 during filming) and vice versa, but she wants him to make more dough and so would he, but “fatten your bank account” isn’t who he is deep down. He tries selling Porsches at a Valley dealership but he hates the routine and quits. He’s reluctant to have sex with the teenaged Kathleen Quinlan (actually 21 during filming) because she’s too young, but he does her anyway. Once, I mean.
So what’s Rick going to do to resolve his situation? Answer: Not much or nothing very different. He’s basically just heading back to the beach. Which leaves you with a feeling of “that’s it?,…aahhh, fuck me.”
That said, Elliott, Quinlan, Archer, Stephen Young (Porsche guy) and Parker Stevenson (a rookie being trained by Elliott) deliver just-right performances. Even with the weak ending and all, Lifeguard is/was Elliott’s best film ever.
Curious as this sounds, watching it whooshed me back not just to a singular dark moment but to a long-ago neverland, 40 years before the sudden double-whammy nightmare of COVID and totalitarian woke terror…I would have that monocultural, pre-culture war time again…a time when the murder of a much-beloved, “Across The Universe”-y fellow…a sometimes feisty snappy brain who dreamt of cosmic fairy dust…a death that touched everyone equally, even the pickup-truck bumblefucks.
