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I’ll tell you what happened to it. This is what happened to it, generally speaking.

Sharp-minded friendo to HE: “Go see Weapons.”
HE to sharp-minded friendo: “Out Friday.”
Sharp-minded friendo: “Don’t read anything about it. The less you know, the better.”
HE: “Horror.”
Sharp-minded friendo: “It’s a film.”
HE: “Missing kids, all from a single classroom, outraged parents.”
Sharp-minded friendo: “Just see it.”
HE: “It’s…what is it, a metaphor for middle-class hostility…anger vented at woke women? Something like that?”
Sharp-minded friendo: “Don’t go in with baggage and preconceived expectations.”
HE: “Is it okay if I watch the trailer?”

Yesterday Alice Newell-Hanson’s N.Y. Times Style Magazine profile of Jessie Buckley, an endlessly flattering exercise in kiss-ass portraiture, appeared online.

It’s a longish, elegant, very well-written article, but given Newell-Hanson’s commitment to flattery, it totally ignores what in-the-know types are allegedly thinking and saying about Buckley’s next two envelope-pushing films.

These would be (a) Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet (Focus Features, 11.27), an allegedly glum historical fiction about Agnes Shakespeare (Buckley) and her errant, responsibility-shirking playwright husband, William (Paul Mescal), and (b) Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Bride! (Warner Bros., 3.6.26), apparently some kind of feminist, toxic-male-hating take on James Whale‘s The Bride of Frankenstein (’35).

Key Newell-Hanson passage: “Buckley has earned a reputation for playing complicated roles with devastating power. Zhao, the director of Hamnet, says that as soon as she read Maggie O’Farrell‘s book, she knew the role had to be Buckley’s. Few other actresses of her generation can gain access to such a wide spectrum of emotions, or seem as willing to risk being disliked for exploring the tougher ones.

“‘She has no fear in terms of how she’s perceived,’ says Mescal. ‘She’s never trying to hide or draw lines.'”

Buckley’s choppy scarecrow haircut, posted below and featured in the Times article, lends a certain credence to Mescal’s observation.

Straight Hamnet dope, as reported two weeks ago (7./25.25) by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy:

Excerpt: “While Buckley and Mescal’s performances are said to be solid, Zhao’s direction — and especially her screenwriting — are being called flat, with a tone that feels completely off. One viewer summed it up as ‘two hours of Buckley looking miserable,’ without much emotional depth or nuance to her grief.”

Straight Bride! reporting, dated 3.19.25:

Obviously The Bride! was bumped into ’26 because…well, WB distribution certainly didn’t do this because it’s some kind of glorious knockout.

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In yesterday’s Jay Kelly thread, HE commenter “We’re Totally Fine” said the premise of this upcoming Noah Baumbach film seems to belong to a favored sub-genre — films about Hollywood guys who’ve run out of gas, are going through a bad patch or have otherwise lost their way.

HE additions to this list:

(a) Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (‘62), which is about an alcoholic, burnt-out actor (Kirk Douglas) trying to get back into the swing of things while assisting an old director friend (Edward G. Robinson) in Rome.

(b) Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (‘63)…obviously. I don’t want to even glancingly mention Rob Marshall’s Nine (‘09), but it’s closely wedded to the Fellini so I haven’t much choice.

(c) Paul Mazursky’s Àlex in Wonderland (‘70) — another 8 1/2 descendant.

I’m not including Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (‘93) because except for that one gloomhead scene with Orson Welles in Musso and Frank’s, Johnny Depp’s titular protagonist doesn’t behave like a filmmaker who’s lost his way — he’s actually a relentless optimist.

Sacha Jenkins‘ Sunday Best (Netflix, now streaming) is a heartfelt, somewhat simplistic tribute to the late variety show host Ed Sullivan and particularly a celebration of Sullivan’s defiance of racist norms in this country back in the ’50s and early ’60s by booking top black performers on The Ed Sullivan Show (1948 to 1971)

If you’d asked me for a capsule description of Sullivan before viewing this 87-minute doc, I would have said something like “famously stiff-necked TV host with a sharp eye for emerging stand-out performing talent…particularly Elvis Presley in 1956 and The Beatles in ’64 and ’65…whatever and whomever was beginning to attract big attention, Sullivan booked them on his one-hour Sunday night show (CBS, 8 pm), always leaving them bigger names than before they’d appeared.”

But to hear it from Jenkins (who passed last May at age 53), Sullivan’s proudest historical achievement was his support of black entertainers. In this respect Sullivan was damn near revolutionary or at the very least bold as brass, Jenkins is saying.

Within this country’s generally racist whitebread culture during the eras of Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, JFK and even Lyndon Johnson, Sullivan was way ahead of the social curve — impassioned, color-blind, conservative but adamant.

Sullivan biographer Gerald Nachman: “Most TV variety shows welcomed ‘acceptable’ black performers like Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey and Sammy Davis Jr….but in the early 1950s, long before it was fashionable, Sullivan was presenting more obscure black entertainers…Bo Diddley, Jackie Wilson, Fats Domino, the Platters, Brook Benton, the Supremes, Nina Simone.”

TV critic John Leonard: “There wasn’t an important black artist who didn’t appear on Ed’s show. [The Irish, Harlem-born Sullivan] defied pressure to exclude black entertainers or to avoid interacting with them on screen. Sullivan had to fend off his hard-won sponsor, Ford’s Lincoln dealers, after kissing Pearl Bailey on the cheek and daring to shake Nat King Cole‘s hand.”

If you search around there are several anecdotes that suggest Jenkins’ portrait of the straightlaced, somewhat prudish Sullivan is less than fully candid, if not sugar-coated. (Read his N.Y. Times obit, which is much tonally dryer and more circumspect than Jenkins’ cheerleader approach.)

Of course it’s partisan! Jenkins’ film is sharing a cultural-political viewpoint that many boomers (kids during the show’s heyday) probably haven’t considered, which is that in terms of encouraging liberal thought and condemning racism, Sullivan, by ushering scores of black performers into America’s living rooms, was as much as a positive social influencer, in a certain sense. as Martin Luther King.

Over the last 60 or 70 years Sullivan’s default associations have been Presley and the Beatles, slam dunk. Ask anyone. Jenkins doc, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in ’23, pushes the “ballsy racial reformer” portrait much more than any colorful side sagas or anecdotes about white performers.

How good is Sunday Best on a craft or audience-absorption level? Passable, not great.

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Last night I watched the second half of Billy Joel: And So It Goes, and honestly? I didn’t like it as much as Part One, which is like the first half of Lawrence of Arabia — troubled beginnings, difficult development, Joel’s relationship with wife #1 (Elizabeth Weber), the gradual finding of success in the ’70s and then up, up, up into the early ’80s…pow!

The second part is about basically about the pressures and difficulties of life at the top — 1982’s Nylon Curtain album, trying to connect with his emotionally remote father, the initially very happy Christie Brinkley years and the arrival of his first daughter Alexa, getting financially ripped off by his manager Frank Weber, “We Didn’t Start The Fire“, the Katie Lee Biegel marriage, serious alcohol abuse (Joel dried out at Silver Hill in ’02 or thereabouts), the marriage to Alexis Roderick and their two daughters, but gradually running out of gas and losing the drive to write new songs, etc.

Hell, the documentary runs out of gas. The general narrative drift is “things are harder, more complicated, boozier as the creative fire gradually dims,” etc.

Being married to a driven creative type with a turbulent emotional past is never a day at the beach…guaranteed.

It’s a bummer to think that the most recently composed Joel song that I’ve really liked is The River of Dreams (“In the middle of the niiiight”), which came out in July ’93. There hasn’t been an album of original songs since. 32 fucking years ago, man. Joel explains that songwriting-wise he’d become a burnt-out case, “tired of the tyranny of the rhyme,” etc.

Except it’s just The Adventures of Cliff Booth. Forget the “Continuing.”

One problem: When F1 opened a few weeks ago, Brad Pitt’s hair was tennis-ball length. Which is way too short for 1977. Nobody who swaggered around in the disco era had tennis-ball hair….nobody. Not even gay guys.

Last night I caught Part One of Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin‘s Billy Joel: And So It Goes (HBO Max). It runs 140something minutes but flies right by.

I was a little worried at first — the beginning is way too obsequious and celebrative and adoring — but it soon after settles down into the basic story of Joel’s youth and early career (late ’60s to early ’80s). And it motors right along.

And it’s really not half bad. It generally feels honest, fairly raw. I didn’t feel the least bit distracted or bored. It’s a solid, well-crafted, first-rate thing. No shade or complaints.

I was reminded what a shrimp Joel is — 5’5″. Which is the same height as James Cagney and Dustin Hoffman, and one inch shorter, even, than Alan Ladd, who was very hung up about standing only 5’6″.

Part One mainly examines Joel’s New York area upbringing (Hicksville, Long Island) and how he had tightly curled, Afro-like hair, and how his mother insisted that he learn the piano, etc. Then comes his deep plunge into suicidal despair (he tried to off himself twice) and then his gradual rocketing to fame between the early and late ’70s (“The Stranger,” “52nd Street”), focusing mainly on his relationship with longtime wife and business manager Elizabeth Weber, from whom he split in ’82.

It ends before Christie Brinkley (four inches taller than Joel and almost certainly with bigger feet than his) strolls into the arena in ’83.

The most surreal moment is Weber recalling how there was a “Stranger” listening party with a few Columbia Records execs and other cool cats in ’77, the idea being to pick which tracks would sell best as a single. And guess what? Nobody responded with much enthusiasm to “Just The Way You Are.” Joel himself didn’t think it was good enough to put on the album, but was persuaded to include it at the last minute.

“Just The Way You Are” is the song that put Joel over the top and made him into a superstar. Paul McCartney says it’s the one Joel song he really wishes he had written and performed himself.

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Presuming that the WSJ has 100% confirmed that Donald Trump drew this, Trump obviously has a thing for women with nice boobs, zaftig bods, no “innie” navels and well-trimmed pubic hair.

His pubic hair signature tells us he’s into oral, because this is actually fairly well drawn…it has a certain professional flair, a certain facility. Some people can’t doodle at all — Trump isn’t half bad.

…during my first and only viewing 36 years ago, in the fall of ‘78. So I gave it another whirl last night on the Criterion Channel, and I couldn’t even pay attention to the particulars because the late Berry Berenson prominently costars, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the last few minutes of her life.

Berenson was on American flight #11 on 9.11.01.

The sister of Barry Lyndon’s Marisa Berenson, Berry was married in the Rudolph film and in real life to Remember My Name costar Tony Perkins, whom I saw and rather admired in a B’way stage version of Equus in ‘77 or thereabouts. (He died in ‘92 from AIDs-related maladies.) Geraldine Chaplin (34 then, 80 now) is the nutter lead. Berry is/was the mother of horror director Oz Perkins.

Anyway I tried and tried but couldn’t get past the 9/11 association.

Poor John Milius is grappling with the big C. Here’s to a great eccentric gun owner, a great individualist, a great commentary-track raconteur, an allegedly devotional surfer and one of the most influential director-writers of the ‘60s, 70s and ‘80s. Salute!

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How do you write about Lena Dunham’s semi-autobiographical Too Much, a 10-part Netflix series that popped on 7.10, without stepping on a land mine or stepping over the woke-terror line by addressing the elephant in the room?

You start by praising Dunham’s writing, I suppose. (Right?) The dialogue is well honed and just right — wise and zeitgeisty and agreeably settled-in and never less than perceptive. I immediately felt at ease because of this talent, this signature, this attitudinal stamp.

And because of Megan Stalter’s believably dug-in and disarming lead performance.

But we can’t just sail along and pretend that Too Much, despite its emotional precision and candor and generally elevated vibe, isn’t a chubbo sell-job.

The truth is that I briefly gasped when a shot captured a partially disrobed Stalter in profile. I didn’t gasp because I wanted to earn or ratify my ayehole credentials. I gasped because a voice deep inside went “holy shit!”

Remember when the great Shelley Winters (who once told me I reminded her of an old boyfriend) ballooned up in the mid ‘60s? In Jack Smight and Paul Newman’s Harper (‘66) she was candidly and unapologetically described with the “f” word. Imagine!

Remember James Mangold ‘s Heavy (‘96)? And Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (‘01)? Remember that moment in Sideways when Thomas Haden Church described Missy Doty as “the grateful type”? The Stalinists would never tolerate this terminology now..

Too Much is an engaging, faintly downish but agreeably hip and certainly chuckle-worthy feminist romcom that is also (I’m repeating myself but an emphasis is warranted) an attempt to normalize.

Normalize what? Well, what has always seemed to me and tens of millions of others like an exotic concept, which is that obese, whipsmart, Type-A women and lean, open-hearted, chubby-chasing dudes often hook up and wind up happily entwined or even married. Not to be spoil-sportish but this kind of thing is not by any stretch a common relationship occurence, not even among size-affirming Millennials and Zoomers.

We all understand the basic appeal of curvy, zaftig and even a little Rubenesque action. As far back as the ‘70s a friend used the term “tons of fun”, and I knew exactly that he was joking about, conceptually speaking.

Speaking as a trim guy from way back, how many overweight women have I “been” with? One. Okay, maybe two. (And I don’t mean obese.) Did I mostly steer clear of calorically challenged lassies because I’m a bigot? It sure didn’t seem that way back then (i.e., the 20th Century). Nobody “slept” with fatties.

Backstory–wise, Too Much is about a moderately fetching Dunham-esque producer-writer-whatever (Stalter) who moves to London in the wake of a traumatic breakup with a longtime Brooklyn boyfriend (the trimly proportioned Michael Zegen) who’s dumped her for a model-esque hottie (Emily Ratajkowski).

The main order of business is about Stalter falling for a poor, well-sculpted musician and kindred spirit (The White Lotus’s Will Sharpe) who, in a non-wokey, normal-seeming world, would almost certainly be seeing a girl more his own size and shape. Or at least a zaftig rather than a tubby tuba.

What happens between Stalter and Sharpe is the meat and essence of the show, of course. Most of it romantically resonates and touches bottom and all that good stuff. (Including, I’ve read**, one or two harsh stand-offs.) Dunham is grade-A all the way. But how do you get around those gasp moments?

** I’ve only seen the first three episodes