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And the key strategy after dousing any workplace fire is to make certain that the complaints in question do not re-occur. That means tone it down and leave it there.

During the 2023 and early ‘24 filming of It Ends With Us, Blake Lively voiced complaints about director and costar Justin Baldoni, who had optioned Colleen Hoover’s source novel for adaptation in 2019, and producer Jamey Heath.

They had behaved in a leering, overly familiar manner, Lively said, which she found sexually intimidating.

But things cooled down after the issues were aired mid-stream and protections were enacted. A 12.21.24 N.Y. Times story about a legal complaint filed by Lively last Friday reports the following:

The current question is therefore obvious as well as perplexing.

Instead of chilling or at least turning down the gas, Baldoni began acting aggressively last summer as It Ends With Us neared its 8.6.24 release.

Perhaps because Lively had challenged his directorial authority by creating an alternate cut that was approved for release, Baldoni decided to go feral by hiring a p.r. crisis firm in order to diminish her reputation.

Why start another fire? Why not just leave well enough alone and move on to the next project? What a mystifying call. Now Baldoni is re-facing the same bad-behavior complaints, and possibly a Lively lawsuit to come.

What is the lesson here? Sexually icky or insinuating behavior during filming is never cool? Or never fuck with the willful Blake Lively and her aggressively protective husband Ryan Reynolds? Or a combination of the two?

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And so September 5 is getting bumped down to sixth place, and Blitz down to seventh place, etc.

“Babygirl is an erotic thriller that is, unlike so many which came before, both erotic and thrilling. But what makes it novel is that the thrills are derived from the eroticism itself.

“Sure, much of the narrative thrust (hah) is borne of our lead not wishing to be caught by her family and colleagues in a sordid workplace affair, but that’s an afterthought to the focus of the film: two horned-up adults messily trying to reconcile their mutual animal attraction while also navigating and negotiating one another’s kinks.” — Scullyvision, 12.7.24.

…in favor of a grayish hat that…I don’t know, kinda looks better. I need a head-warmer for the next few months and I just got sick of the black hat…time to let it go.

The thing I loved about the first two Robert Eggers films (The Witch and The Lighthouse, respectively released in 2015 and 2019) was the sense of restraint and subtlety, the slow-build aesthetic, getting freakier and freakier but on a very gradual basis, etc.

Then along came The Northman (’22) and it suddenly seemed as if the restraint aesthetic had largely been tossed out the window. I wasn’t a fan — it felt as if Eggers had fallen off a cliff.

Last night i tried watching Eggers’ Nosferatu (Focus, 12.25) and I was immediately alienated by the fact that it tries to bury you from the get-go in thick, gloopy horror atmosphere…an atmosphere of such foreboding, a vibe so thick and severe that all you get from it is a feeling of being smeared…an atmosphere that is so forced and extreme that nothing seems to really make sense.

I hated this idiotic vampire movie almost as much as I hated The Brutalist, and that’s saying something.

I took some notes as I went along, and my final note was “I’ll take the 1979 Werner Herzog-Klaus Kinski-Isabelle Adjani version, thanks.”

My random-ass notes don’t fully convey the annoyance I was feeling. Here they are:

“Lily Rose Depp looks too much like Johnny. What is she, 4’10” tall? Most of the color scheme is the same old bluish gray that dozens of other films have used. Dreary. The Carpathian villagers are stupidly eccentric. Same old Dracula shit.

“The voice of Orlok is labored, dopey, ridiculous. Eggers has forgotten about the necessity of a slow build. Nosferatu is so on the nose that it’s almost dull. Eggers really lays it on too thick.

“Irrational story. Portentous to a fault. Wait, hold on…I liked the naked teenage village girl on the horse! But Emma Corrin is too lezzy to play a straight married housewife.

“You’re right — Orlok has one humdinger of a moustache. Too much howling, wheezing, groaning and moaning. Simon McBurney biting off the head of a pigeon. Give me a break.

“You know who Orlok looks like a little bit? Luca Guadagnino if he were wearing horror makeup. Lily Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter has ony one color, one mood — complete submission to shuddering hysteria. In a word, boring.”

Blurry but funny. Peter O’Toole was 74 at the time. This was taped sometime in early December of ’06, the subject being Roger Michell‘s Venus. O’Toole passed in 2013 at age 81. The great Peter Finch (aka “Finchy“) died in ’77 at age 60….heart attack.

I don’t think often about the fun I occasionally had during my drinking days, but every now and then I do.

“If you’re going to look like this, you’ll have to settle for the fat-girl parts.” — a drama teacher to Kate Winslet when she was in her mid teens, according to Winslet’s account during a 60 Minutes essay that aired yesterday (12.1).

By “like this,” the drama teacher meant not slender or rail-thin, a physical state that all competitive actresses aspire to whether they want to admit it or not.

What the drama teacher also meant, I suspect, was that Winslet wasn’t so much “fat” as zaftig (curvy, fleshy, wide-hipped). During the filming of Titanic James Cameron allegedly referred to Winset as “Kate weighs-a-lot.” I’ve personally never said an unkind word to any woman’s face for the misdemeanor of being a bit hefty or bulky, but I’ve held critical thoughts about such qualities for nearly my whole life. Everyone has.

Catherine Breillat made a film about a French obese teen and called it Fat Girl. Was that a size-ist slur or a statement of fact?

Things have changed over the last 30-plus years, but women of size and bulk are still not generally regarded as being in the 8, 9 or 10 categories…be honest. Nobody wants to be so impolite or coarse to put such women down for this, and it’s certainly permissible if this or that guy finds “big girls” attractive…knock yourselves out.

It’s noteworthy that the 60 Minutes interviewer (Cecilia Vega, who blends ardent feminism with standard obsequiousness) didn’t ask Winslet to explain or reiterate her own statement of self-condemnation for the crime of having worked with Woody Allen (Wonder Wheel) and Roman Polanski (Carnage).

Winslet: “It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful.”

I’ll tell you what was disgraceful back in ’21 — knee-jerk #MeToo Stalinist sentiments from Johnny-come-lately, trying-to-curry-favor activist actresses.

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But you’re a black sheep and a wrong one, and you fucked up repeatedly so ya gotta do the time, man. Really. No skating. It’ll build character. You’ll be a better, tougher person at the end of your sentence. It’s a growth opportunity.

HE comment: I think President Biden pardoned his bad-seed son Hunter out of resignation and despair.

Joe’s inner dialogue: “Obviously I’m reversing myself but my reputation is in the toilet anyway. Future generations will be taught to despise me as I’m the obstinate old coot who surrendered our nation to MAGA fascism because I wouldn’t collapse my ill-conceived campaign for a second term until it was way too late.

“You might be horrified by the return of Donald Trump but I’m the deluded scumbag who blew open the border and ushered in his second term so what difference does it make? History hates me now and will certainly hate me going forward.

“At the end of the day I’m defaulting to an age-old sentiment when it comes to broken-down fathers and weak sons: ‘The heart wants what it wants.’”

Zero Day (Netflix, 2.20.25) is an upcoming American political thriller television series created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael Schmidt. “A political conspiracy thriller centering on a devastating global cyberattack”, etc. Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, it costars Robert De Niro and Lizzy Caplan.

Vanity Fair: “Zero Day was conceived, written, and filmed before Donald Trump won reelection as president; he’ll return to the White House for his second term a few weeks before the show’s premiere.

“In other words, Zero Day will launch in an unnervingly appropriate political context, fresh after an election cycle that highlighted Oppenheim’s notion of competing realities. “I’m obviously disappointed as a Democrat that we didn’t win. But as a filmmaker, and as someone who is considering the best window of release for this show, we definitely wanted to get far enough away from the inauguration so that we didn’t get lost in the jet wash of political reportage that’s going to come out,” Newman says. “There are honest people in government who make hard choices and do the right thing—and my hope is that this will be an aspirational component of our show.”

“A vocal (and colorful) Trump critic, Robert De Niro demurs when asked how the show will — or should — be viewed in light of this month’s election.

“By the time you get to the end of Zero Day’s first episode, you’d be forgiven for assuming the show was written very recently, with a clear intention to model itself on the American political scene’s current main characters. De Niro’s Mullen is tapped to lead a Patriot Act–style commission in response to the terrorist attack, resisting pressure to pin it on Russia given current relations and the nature of the cyberwarfare. His perspective gets muddied as he starts showing signs of cognitive decline, recalling the fierce debate surrounding Joe Biden’s candidacy for reelection before he took himself off the ballot.

“From there, more parallels emerge. Mullen’s daughter, Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), is a relatively progressive member of Congress whose popularity and forthrightness on Instagram signals her as a rising, AOC-esque star. His chief adversary, meanwhile, is Evan Green (Dan Stevens), an inflammatory basement-dwelling commentator clearly inspired by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro.

“The sitting US president Mitchell is portrayed by Angela Bassett, notable in the wake of Americans again rejecting the chance to elect the first female president in Kamala Harris.”

“We did not expect Biden’s cognitive issues to become a campaign issue. We did not expect a Black woman to become the candidate,” Newman says. “If anything, in my mind, [President Mitchell] was more based on Michelle Obama or something.”

It’s as if Cormac McCarthy dreamt it up.

I’d forgotten that Fresh Cream was recorded in August ’66, and released four months later (December). If you accept Terry Valentine‘s definition of the ’60s (“It was just ’66 and early’67…that’s all it was”), Fresh Cream was right in the sweet spot. If you ask me N.S.U., Dreaming and Toad are as good as that group ever got. I realize this is a minority opinion, hut there it is.

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Halfdan Ullmann Tondel’s Armand will enjoy a qualifying theatrical run in New York City on 11.29.24. A limited theatrical release will kick off on 2.7.25 with a wide theatrical break slated for 2.14.25. It runs 117 minutes.

Posted from Cannes on Sunday, 5.19: “Armand” — Best Film of the Festival So Far, Hands Down

Scott Feinberg’s Awards Chatter podcast interview with Horizon maestro Kevin Costner begins in a few minutes so distraction levels are high, but there’s no question whatsoever that Halfdan Ullmann Tondel’s Armand, which I caught early this morning, is the finest film here, and I mean way, WAY above the level of Emilia Perez.

All hail the lead performance by Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World)!

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