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There is one term that sums up the “Bradley Cooper‘s prosthetic nose in Maestro is a form of Jewface anti-Semitism” on Twitter/X.

That term is “deranged, saliva-spraying, ethnic-aggressive lunacy.”

In May ’22 Variety‘s Clayton Davis complained about Carey Mulligan being miscast because a Brit shouldn’t play a Chilean or Costa Rican. Where is Clayton on Bradley’s schnozz? Has he joined his fellow firebrands in standing up against this?

Twitter/X statement from Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein: “It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of Bradley’s efforts…it happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”

Sometime in the mid ’90s the late Robert Evans shared a biological observation with me: “When you get older your nose gets bigger, your ears get bigger and longer and your teeth get smaller.”

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We’ve all sampled food-and-atmosphere moments to die for…perfect transitional serenity…that quietly radiant feeling in which the place and the warmth (and not just the climatorial kind) are so calming and poignant that time itself has seemingly stopped…much more than just sitting at a table…enveloped by bliss and rapture.

Two nights ago I happened upon a brief video of such a moment…12 years and three months ago (late May 2011) on a calm and sunny day in Venice, Italy…placid, a gentle breeze, the faint sound of water lapping at pilings…sitting at an outdoor table at Trattoria San Basilio, a fairly small (you could even call it tiny) restaurant, waterside in southern Dorsoduru…no tourists, no madding crowd…Calle del Vento, 1516, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy.

Right now I feel as strongly about this moment as Mr. Bernstein felt about the girl in the white dress on the Staten Island ferry.

Video shot on a Canon camera….the quality of iPhone videos wasn’t good enough back then…good God, I was still filing on Movable Type!

In the tradition of James Agee, Otis Ferguson, Andre Bazin, Francois Truffaut, Andrew Sarris, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, Penelope Gilliat, Todd McCarthy, Joseph McBride and Owen Gleiberman…kidding.

TikTok or Movietok? Maddi Moo = Maddie Koch + many others. Posted in the N.Y. Times on 8.15, written by Reggie Ugwu.

We may not be talking about empty coke bottle realms, but we’re certainly not talking about much in the way of savvy insight or, like, extensive film knowledge.

Cocaine Bear review.

Check out the moustachioed boyfriend!

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Halfway through her q & a transcript (8.14) with Sound of Freedom director Alejandro Monteverde, Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel asks whether he has any regrets about casting QAnon nutter Jim Caviezel in the lead role.

Monteverde: “I try to never look back into any regrets because there’s nothing I can do about it now. Jim came to the set. I’ve never seen somebody so committed and so professional on set. He came in and really bled for the film.”

Siegel’s follow-up question, obviously, should have gone something like this: “So your film won a fair amount of respect for sticking to the basics, for being a lean and mean thriller that was almost entirely free of rightwing talking points, and it’s made a ton of money — $173 million in the U.S. and Canada, which is higher than the domestic tally of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning.

“So given all the this accomplishment and begrudging respect from at least the fair-minded critics and pundits out there, what is your understanding about why Angel Studios and Caviezel arranged a special golf-club screening for Donald Trump, who, you may have heard, is a proven criminal, a salivating sociopath and a deranged, egomaniacal Mussolini who’s under three criminal indictments and is facing a fourth in Georgia?

“Why, in short, did Angel and Caviezel poison the well by doing this? Why invite Hannibal Lecter into the chicken coop?

There can be no final closure on the life and career of the late and great William Friedkin until someone in the Friedkin camp spills the beans about what actually happened with the French Connection censorship thing.

They can’t just leave this confounding, weird-ass episode hanging in the air. C’mon, spill it already…give it up!

Woke-censoring his own Oscar-winning film runs so contrary to who and what Friedkin was his entire life, or certainly since he became big in the early ’70s…totally insane. Maybe, strange as it sounds, he approved it or even instigated it. Maybe he’d gone squishy on some level…I don’t know.

Either way the facts have to come out. Someone in authority has to say “this is why it happened, and why the woke-censored version is streaming only in the U.S. but not Canada or the British isles or other territories.” And when the French Connection 4K disc comes out, the entire film has to be represented. C’mon, please…air it out once and for all and put this stupid issue to bed.

On the night that Unforgiven won the Best Picture Oscar, which happened on 3.29.93, none of us had the slightest inkling that roughly two decades into the 21st Century (or 30 years hence) corporate Hollywood would be operating under the adhere-or-die principles of China’s Great Cultural Revolution, and that films that reflected the creative vistas, mindsets and inclinations of the dudes who were pretty much running things back in the early Clinton era would be all but suffocated.

Which isn’t to say that the moral, administrative and attitudinal changes brought about by wokester commandants starting around five or six years ago (post-Moonlight and post George Floyd BLM-ers, LGBTQ-ers, #MeToo) didn’t transform the Hollywood industry into a much more fair, just and humane thing. They did.

These changes also ensured, however, that the kind of urgent, occasionally irreverent and sometimes super-bull’s-eye films that occasionally poked through between 1930 and 2015…those kind of films would, for the most part, never again be made for theatrical.

Because the Hollywood Maoist system (“Don’t offend Zoomers or Millennials!…don’t wink at or even acknowledge outmoded attitudes!…don’t allow any representations of the way life was on the planet earth before woke-ism came along…all casts must prominently feature women, actors of color and LGBTQs”) has largely outlawed this approach or aesthetic.

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The wolves are circling and the hyenas are hee-hee-ing over yesterday’s Vanity Fair story, penned by Charlotte Klein, about THR columnist and executive awards editor Scott Feinberg allegedly asking for me-first screening access as far as hot film festival titles are concerned.

Let every Oscar pundit and chatterbox know, whether it wishes Feinberg well or ill, that the headline of Klein’s article is flat-out erroneous, and that the jackals looking to lick Feinberg’s blood are also dead wrong.

In an email to studios and strategists last week, Feinberg did not request “priority” access (as in “me before everyone else!”) to early-bird screenings. He asked for concurrent access along with the other swells. Not “me first!…me! me! me!” but “please allow me to see hot-buzz festival films at the same time as the elite trade critics and long-lead journos and editors.”

Feinberg didn’t say the following but he could have also put it this way: “Please don’t favor these guys and gals over me…the people who are routinely shown the hot-ticket films early and who have filed their reviews before the big premieres in Cannes or Telluride and Toronto…please let me into this elite fraternity…don’t give them preferential treatment over me as every second counts during film festivals, and it’s not fair to let a tiny handful of hotshot critics have the first crack while I have to scramble and hyperventilate and file reactions on the fly.”

Again — the implication of Klein reporting that Feinberg “requested priority access to the hottest movies coming this year” is an obscuring of the truth. Asking for priority access doesn’t mean exclusive priority access. In some people’s minds the word suggests “me first” but that’s not what Feinberg wrote or meant.

Feinberg: “As you plan the rollout of your film(s), I would like to respectfully ask that you not show films to any of my fellow awards pundits before you show them to me, even if that person represents himself or herself to you as (a) a potential reviewer of it, (b) needing to see the film in order to be part of decisions about covers, or (c) really anything else.”

As for the portion of Feinberg’s email that implied a certain degree of THR pushback if publicists fail to consent to his request…well, that’s not what any experienced industry vet would call a capital crime. There isn’t a power player in Hollywood who hasn’t said at one time or another “do not fuck with me because if you do…well, actions have consequences.” I’m sorry but this falls under the heading of standard negotiating postures.

A publicity source confides that Feinberg has already sent a clarifying letter to the recipients of his original email, but if I were in his shoes I would plainly state that (a) the word “concurrent” was and is key to the original import, and (b) that he shouldn’t have implied any sort of quid pro quo retaliation if publicists failed to consent to his request.

We all make tactical or phrasing errors from time to time. Feinberg wasn’t wrong in the first place, but just to cover the bases I would apologize for the sabre-rattling and for temporarily overplaying his hand. Not a huge deal. This is merely a Twitter/X flurry.

I would also bicker with Erik Anderson’s claim about Feinberg having posted “misogynistic” tweets about Letitia Wright last November, which was more bullshit. Feinberg simply stated that Wright, who didn’t have a prayer of landing any kind of acting nomination for Wakanda Forever, had baggage due to allegedly promoting anti-vax messaging. Which she did.

Statement of values: There are few things more disgusting than Twitter/X predators ganging up on this or that person who has allegedly said or written or tweeted the wrong thing. You can hear the snarls and see the saliva-coated sabre teeth and feel the hot breath of pathetic pisshounds…”the genius of the crowd,” as Charles Bukowksi once wrote. I have never taken part in a mass pile-on, and if I have I’ve forgotten about it. Wokesters are great at this stuff, and I am completely proud to spit in their faces for this behavior.

Joel Schumacher and Ebbe Roe Smith‘s Falling Down opened on 2.26.93 — 30 years and six months ago. No one would dare remake it today, but if someone did it would certainly be portrayed by the wokester congregation (all those who praised Women Talking and hated Empire of Llght) as a rightwing movie in the vein of Sound of Freedom.

Which means that apart from what the few truly independent-minded reviewers out there might say, no mainstream critics (i.e., the go-along-to-get-along types who represent the vast majority) wouldn’t be allowed to write anything praise-worthy. On top of which Clayton Davis would strongly disapprove.

Even if Son of Falling Down turned out to be good or half-decent or at least popcorn-worthy, it would nonetheless have trouble finding a distributor because the focus is too Joe Rogan or Daily Wire-ish…doesn’t follow the woke party lne. But if it found a distributor and managed to open theatrically, it would most likely become a word-of-mouth flick among MAGA types.

From Roger Ebert’s 2.26.93 review: “Some will even find it racist because the targets of the film’s hero are African American, Latino, and Korean…with a few Whites thrown in for balance. Both of these approaches represent a facile reading of the film, which is actually about a great sadness, which turns into madness, and which can afflict anyone who is told, after many years of hard work, that he is unnecessary and irrelevant.

“What is fascinating about the Michael Douglas character, as written and played, is the core of sadness in his soul. Yes, by the time we meet him, he has gone over the edge. But there is no exhilaration in his rampage, no release. He seems weary and confused, and in his actions he unconsciously follows scripts that he may have learned from the movies, or on the news, where other frustrated misfits vent their rage on innocent bystanders.”

I posted a shorter version of an HE Falling Down piece on 6.20.19.

Another crazy white guy movie that couldn’t be remade…forget it.

I was so disengaged during my one and only viewing of Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess From Hong Kong (‘67) that I can’t remember Tippi Hedren’s cameo performance as “Martha” — her first post-Hitchcock gig.

She had a more substantial role in The Harrad Experiment (‘73) as a married sex instructor, although her cool and somewhat icy manner in The Birds and especially Marnie made that kind of character a difficult sell. Her Harrad husband was played by James Whitmore…go figure.

Speaking of icy I was surprised to come upon this Coppertone ad the other day. I honestly didn’t think the mid ‘60s Hedren, who began as a model, was capable of wearing a two-piece bathing suit, much less posing in one for a magazine ad. The frigid-chilly Marnie persona had really sunk in by that time.

I’m trying to think of another actress during that era who conveyed such anxiety or acute discomfort with any sort of erotic presence or expression. She was like a brittle nun of some kind, tense and guarded and buttoned up.

From Fionnuala Halligan‘s Screen Daily review of Golda (2.20.23):

“When an iconic actor portrays an iconic figure, the success or failure of the project tends to depend on the power of the performance blasting away the wigs and prosthetics. Helen Mirren achieves all that while playing Israeli politician Golda Meir. But, in Golda, director Guy Nattiv and writer Nicholas Martin haven’t quite kept up their end of the bargain.

“Dropping the audience into the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur war with the chain-smoking caretaker premier, the film is a tense story of a woman and her generals around a cabinet table over the course of the conflict. Endless cigarette smoke, overflowing ashtrays, maps, a fat suit, a wiry wig, hairy eyebrows, orthopaedic shoes — but who was Golda Meir? The film prefers to avoid her as a human being, swerving into her politics and replaying the war from the perspective of her military cabinet over 10 charged days.”

Posted on 2.29.16: “In a few days Quentin Tarantino‘s New Beverly Cinema will be screening a beware-of-Ryan O’Neal double bill — Love Story (’70) and Oliver’s Story (’78).

“A little more than 37 years ago I laughed at a defaced version of an Oliver’s Story one-sheet on a New York subway station wall. It won’t be very funny if I use the original graffiti so I’m going to use polite terminology. The dialogue balloons had O’Neal saying to costar Candice Bergen, “I’m sorry but may I have sex with you in a way that can’t get you pregnant?” Bergen answered, “If missionary is really and truly out I’d prefer oral.”

“I was poor and struggling and mostly miserable, but the graffiti made me laugh. It still makes me laugh today. I guess you had to be there.”

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