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I don’t regard most of moviedom’s stand-out female villains as odious or reprehensible. Because most of those that come to mind are cartoonish — broadly drawn, lacking any semblance of realism or subtlety…fiendish stereotypes, outlandish behavior, etc.

Glenn Close‘s Cruella DeVille, Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked With of the West, Angelina Jolie‘s Maleficent are histrionic, flamboyantly written comic-book figures…satirical cliches, basically created for children.

In Get Out, I didn’t believe Alison Williams‘ evil racist girlfriend for one single millisecond. Kathy Bates‘ “Annie Wilkes” from Misery (’90) is another over-the-top fanatic. Even Louise Fletcher‘s Nurse Ratched isn’t “real” — she’s more of a personification of a drab and repressive system that stifles the human spirit.

If you eliminate the third-act murder of Neil Patrick Harris, Rosamund Pike‘s “Amy Dune” from Gone Girl is slightly more real-worldish; ditto Close’s Alex Forrest from Fatal Attraction, although Alex isn’t demonic as much as tragically demented.

Honestly? When you tabulate all the thousands of films I’ve seen, the female character I’ve despised the most in terms of actual life-resembling behavior is Diane Venora‘s “Liane” Wigand, the spineless wife of Russell Crowe‘s Jeffrey Wigand in Michael Mann‘s The Insider.

The 1999 drama depicts Liane as a shallow, insulated security queen who leaves the embattled Wigand, taking their kids with her, when the going gets too tough.

Sidenote: Liane is a fictional creation — 23 years ago the ex-wife of the actual whistleblower, named Lucretia Nimocks, told N.Y. Post journalist Jeane MacIntosh “that’s not the way it happened at all.”

Liane is at the top of my list because I regard cowardice and disloyalty as the most abhorrent human qualities on the planet earth.

Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix, 11.22) is an even-steven two-hander about the occasionally turbulent marriage between conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Both are obviously playing leads.

I still haven’t seen it, but performance-wise the buzz since Venice has been that Mulligan decisively outpoints Cooper.

Netflix’s Maestro one-sheet clearly states that Mulligan owns the spotlight.

It sounds as if IndieWire‘s Ryan Lattanzio has seen the film, given that he’s written that “the show is stolen from Cooper by Mulligan.”

And yet two days ago Variety‘s Clayton Davis sugggested that Mulligan should go for Best Supporting Actress. This is advisable, he feels, because the competition from Killers of the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone is too formidable.

Davis doesn’t mention, of course, that Gladstone’s campaign is pretty much about the woke identity militia, and that her actual performance is no more than sufficient. She certainly has no “big” moments. I could even call it an underwhelming performance (i.e., she mainly just seethes and glowers and lies in bed during the film’s second half) but the woke mob would resort to their usual inferences.

This, thank God, is the beginning of the nascent “Stop Barbie!” movement. Enough with the Oscar talk, in other words. Nominations are fine but no above-the-line wins. It’s great that Barbie and Oppenheimer performed so well commercially, and in so doing revived the relative fortunes of exhibition. But c’mon, seriously…calm down on the Oscar front.

“There were two actors who managed to perform in The Ten Commandments without disgracing themselves — Yul Brynner and Edward G. Robinson. He realized the perverse comedy in the part of Dathan. DeMille was completely baffled by what Robinson was doing, and wanted to fire him. if it hadn’t been location shooting I suspect he would have.” — John Ellis on Facebook, recently.

HE comment #1: Every Robinson scene was shot on the Paramount lot — zero location work. HE comment #2: Charlton Heston didn’t embarass hiumself — he obviously knew a lot of what he was called upon to perform was swill, but he got through it with dignity. HE comment #3: Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Vincent Price also played their lines with perverse humor.

I don’t know when I’ll be able to stream Woody Allen‘s Coup de Chance. A streaming bootleg will probably be available before too long, but I’d love to catch it in a nice theatre somewhere. Alas, the #MeToo Stalinists won’t permit it.

How does it feel to suppress art, guys? To still the beating of a pulse? I’ll bet it burns your ass that Woody is alive and thriving.

The new #WoodyAllen film #CoupDeChance opens in France Sept. 27th. Great poster. pic.twitter.com/r43o5gjrDt

— Whit Stillman (@WhitStillman) September 24, 2023

Phillip Noyce‘s Fast Charlie will have its big debut at the Mill Valley Film Festival debut on Saturday, 10.7. Screening invites and links have been received.

I became a fan after catching it at a buyer’s screening during last May’s Cannes Film Festival.

It’s half of a laid-back, settled-down relationship drama between Pierce Brosnan‘s Charlie, a civilized, soft-drawl hitman who loves fine cooking, and Morena Baccarin‘s Marcie, a taxidermist with a world-weary, Thelma Ritter-ish attitude about things. And half of a blam-blam action thriller.

There’s a suspense scene involving a hotel laundry chute that I’m especially taken with.

A trailer will hit in a month, or just after the MVFF debut.

Fleetly performed by Brosnan, Baccarin, Gbenga Akinnagbe and the late James Caan in his final performance, Fast Charlie is….ready?…a mature, unpretentious, character-driven, action-punctuated story of cunning and desire (not just romantic but epicurean) on the Mississippi bayou. Four adjectives plus gourmet servings.

The Brosnan-Baccarin thing reminds me of Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. Sprinkled with a little Elmore Leonard dressing. One of those smooth older guy + middle-aged woman ease-and-compatibility deals.

Richard Wenk‘s screenplay, adapted from Victor Gischler‘s “Gun Monkeys,” is complemented by cinematography by Australian lenser Warwick Thornton (director of The New Boy).

I’m sorry but every time I listen to the brief conversation between James Cagney‘s “C.R. MacNamara” (inspired by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara?) and the painter guy, I bust out chuckling. It happens between 2:12 and 2:19.

“We had to go with Cagney because Cagney was the whole picture. He really had the rhythm, and that was very good. It was not funny, but the speed was funny…the general idea was, let’s make the fastest picture in the world…and yeah, we did not wait, for once, for the big laughs. — One Two Three director-writer Billy Wilder talking to Cameron Crowe.

I feel sorry for any guys out there who’ve never known the deep pleasure of walking around with a serious, old-fashioned, heavy-leather gun belt, holster and Shane-style six-shooter.

I’m not talking about some cheap-ass, nickel-and-dime, half-plastic gun belt and six shooter cap pistol that you might’ve worn as a kid in the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s. (I don’t know when seven-year-old kids stopped pretending to be cowboys, but it was probably in the mid ’70s when Star Wars came along.) I’m talking about the kind of hand-crafted, real-deal rigs worn by Alan Ladd in Shane, Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter, John Wayne in Stagecoach and Red River, Burt Lancaster in Vera Cruz, Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo, Gary Cooper in High Noon, Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks, etc.

I strapped on a serious western leather rig on a movie set back in the late ’70s or early ’80s (I forget the details) and I’ve never forgotten the glorious manly feeling…the smell of well-oiled leather, the weight of those iron guns, those thigh straps, those bullets tucked into the bullet holders…all of it.

“Red River D,” posted on 12.28.22:

There’s something hugely joyful about reuniting with my mail-order John Wayne Red River brass belt buckle. The fact that I’m happy to once again have it in my possession means, of course, that I’m just as much of a racist swine as Wayne was during his lifespan, and has nothing to do with my loving the 1948 Howard Hawks western (which, as the buckle points out, was actually shot in ‘46).

Not to mention that nightmare of a lampshade.

Last night I caught Craig Gillespie‘s Dumb Money (Sony, 9.15), which had its big premiere in Toronto a few days ago.

It’s based upon Ben Mezrich‘s “The Anti-Social Network“, a 2021 non-fiction account of the GameStop short squeeze, which principally happened between January and March ’21.

The key narrative focus, of course, is class warfare.

Dumb Money is a Frank Capra-esque tale of a battle of influence between financially struggling, hand-to-mouth Average Joe stock investors vs. elite billionaires who tried to reap profits out of shorting GameStop.

The legacy of the 2008-through-2010 recession and movies like Margin Call (’11), The Wolf of Wall Street (’13) and The Big Short (’15) resulted in considerable hostility towards Wall Street hedge fund hotshots.

The venting of this anger was enabled by the ability of hand-to-mouth, small-time traders keeping up with fast market changes through social media investment sites like R/wallstreetbets.

I’m too dumb to fully understand the intricacies of the term “short squeeze**,” but I understand the broad strokes.

I didn’t love Dumb Money, but I paid attention to it. It didn’t exactly turn me on but it didn’t bore me either. I didn’t once turn on my phone. I was semi-engaged.

Paul Dano‘s performance as Keith Gill, the main stock speculator and plot-driver, is fairly compelling. The costars — Pete Davidson, American Ferrara, Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan and Shailene Woodley — deliver like pros.

I spent a fair amount of time wondering why the 39 year-old Dano is heavier now than he was as Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad‘s Love and Mercy, for which he intentionally gained weight. The real Gill is semi-slender or certainly not chubby.

Clearly Margin Call, The Big Short and The Social Network have far more pizazz and personality.

** “A short squeeze is a rapid increase in the price of a stock owing primarily to an excess of short selling of a stock rather than underlying fundamentals. A short squeeze occurs when there is a lack of supply and an excess of demand for the stock due to short sellers having to buy stocks to cover their short positions”…huh?

I’ve been wondering about the curious absence of Black Flies (Open Road, 11.30) since its 5.18.23 debut in Cannes.

It may not be a great, game-changing film or what any fair-minded viewer might call piercing or compassionate or startlingly original, but I for one decided right away that it’s a more absorbing dive into the lives of living-on-the-ragged-edge paramedics than Martin Scorsese‘s Bringing Out The Dead (’99).

Like it or not, this is my opinion and I’ve no intention of modifying or watering it down.

Based on a drawn-from-hard-experience 2008 novel of the same name by Shannon Burke, adapted by Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown and directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, Black Flies didn’t deserve a 47% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

It stars Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan, Katherine Waterston, Michael Pitt, Mike Tyson and Raquel Nave.

In a 5.25 assessment of the Cannes Film Festival (“At a Particularly Strong Cannes Film Festival, Women’s Desires Pull Focus“), N.Y. Times critic and gender celebrationist Manohla Dargis not only dismissed Black Flies but called it “ridiculous.” That means it made her angry.

Dargis wasn’t alone. A significant percentage of Cannes critics ganged up on Black Flies due to what they saw as an overly unsympathetic view of Brooklyn’s primitive, ragged-edge underclass.

Film Verdict‘s Jay Weissberg accused it of being “tone-deaf” and hampered by a “problematic treatment of immigrant communities and women.”

Translation: Some critics detected a certain callousness flecked with racism and sexism. I found that view simplistic and ridiculous.

HE verdict, posted on 5.19: “It beats the shit out of you, this film, but in a way that you can’t help but admire. It’s a tough sit but a very high-quality one. The traumatized soul of lower-depths Brooklyn and the sad, ferociously angry residents who’ve been badly damaged in ways I’d rather not describe has never felt more in-your-face.

“In terms of assaultive realism and gritty authenticity Black Flies matches any classic ’70s or ’80s New York City film you could mention…The French Connection, Serpico, Prince of the City, Q & A, Good Time, Across 110th Street.

“And what an acting triumph for Sean Penn, who plays the caring but worn-down and throughly haunted Gene Rutkovsky, a veteran paramedic who bonds with and brings along Tye Sheridan‘s Ollie Cross, a shaken-up Colorado native who lives in a shitty Chinatown studio and is trying to get into medical school.

“Rutkovsky is a great hardboiled character, and Penn has certainly taken the bull by the horns and delivered his finest performance since his Oscar-winning turns in Mystic River (’03) and Milk (’08).

“And Sheridan is also damn good in this, his best film ever. His character eats more trauma and anxiety and suffers more spiritual discomfort than any rookie paramedic deserves, and you can absolutely feel everything that’s churning around inside the poor guy.

“At first I thought this 120-minute film would be Bringing Out The Dead, Part 2, but Black Flies, which moves like an express A train and feels more like 90 minutes, struck me as harder and punchier than that 1999 Martin Scorsese film, which I didn’t like all that much after catching it 23 and 1/2 years ago and which I’ve never rewatched.

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