Wait…Jesse Eisenberg‘s A Real Pain doesn’t open until 10.18, or four months from now? I’d like to see it right now. It premiered six months ago at Sundance but this shouldn’t prevent it from playing at Telluride…right?

From Owen Gleiberman’s 1.21.24 Variety review: “Keiran Culkin‘s Benji is a loose cannon — a bro who never grew up, the kind of dude who says ‘fuck’ every fifth word, who advance-mails a parcel of weed to his hotel in Poland, and who has no filter when it comes to his thoughts and feelings. He’ll blare it all right out there.

“Since he’s a brilliant and funny guy who sees more than a lot of other people do, and processes it about 10 times as fast, he can (sort of) get away with the running monologue of hair-trigger nihilist superiority that’s his form of interaction. He can also be quite nice, and knows how to play people. Yet he is, at heart, an anti-social misfit, one who’s clinging to the recklessness of youth just at the moment he should be leaving it behind.”

Or, even worse, the apparent fact that Trumpies believe that “evil” — Donald Trump’s shameless criminality, thuggish vindictiveness, anti-fact, anti-democracy, a sociopathic loathing for the “other”, a complete absence of any sort of educated or insightful understanding of anything — isn’t such a bad deal at the end of the day.

Trump supporters are among the lowest forms of life on this planet right now. I hate wokesterism and deplore its pernicious influence more than most, but Trumpsters are pure poison. By blindly supporting a clearly destructive social virus they themselves are viruses. They would destroy democracy in order to suppress woke fanaticism.

Put them all on a large raft, tow it into deep water and sink it.

Last night I watched all three episodes of Hulu’s Cult Massacre, a new, well-honed, very thorough doc about Jim Jones. He was a paranoid user and obviously a stone sociopath, but if you ask me the real villains were his followers, which is to say his enablers.

By the same token the real monsters today are the Trump followers, or so says an HE reader who urged me yesterday to catch Cult Massacre.

“You look at Jones and his heavy-set face and tinted glasses, and listen to his maniacal repeating of cult slogans and phrases, and he really does remind you of Trump, especially against a backdrop of Kool-Aid drinkers.

“Jones’ baseline atttitude, caring for nobody but himself and willing to pull down the temple walls as long as his hold upon his devoted flock is rapt and absolute to the end…that’s about as Trumpian as it gets.

“The story is old, but the comparisons felt new to me. I’ve compared Trump to Hitler before, as many have.  But Jones feels like a closer fit.”

Lex Fridman’s four-day-old interview with Kevin Spacey is magnificent. Completely worth the two-hour-plus investment.

Lex Fridman? It’s spelled Friedman or Freedman.

If you’re any kind of Dr. No fanatic, this nearly 19-minute catalogue of shots, set-ups, sunlight challenges and other technical and logistical hurdles during the first day of shooting in Jamaica is fascinating. Really.

Wiki summary: “Filming began on location at Palisadoes Airport in Kingston, Jamaica, on 1.16.62. The primary scenes there were the exterior shots of Crab Key and Kingston. Shooting took place a few yards from Fleming’s Goldeneye estate, and the author regularly visited the filming with friends.[62] Location filming was largely in Oracabessa, with additional scenes on the Palisadoes strip and Port Royal in St Andrew. 2.21.62, production left Jamaica with footage still unfilmed due to a change of weather.”

…is what Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (‘43) was, but absolutely not what Saboteur (‘42) was…not even close. Not that this concerned the Spanish poster illustrator. Sell whatever sizzle comes to mind; to hell with plot specifics.

Who in their right mind would want to see Barry Lyndon (1.66:1 aspect ratio) on a super-curved Cinerama screen?

Brad Pitt has been sober for nearly eight years, but because he lost his alcoholic temper during that infamous chartered flight (on 9.14.16) and was physically abusive to Maddox, one of the six Jolie-Pitt kids…because he was a belligerent drunken dick that one time, at least two of his daughters, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, 18, and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, 15, are convinced that he’s a living embodiment of Satan and want the Pitt struck from their last names.

Shiloh has in fact filed legal papers to change her name to a Pitt-less Shiloh Jolie. Perhaps Vivienne will follow suit when she turns 18.

We all understand teens who feel estranged from their parents (I was one), but who goes into court and says in effect “strike my father’s last name from my legal history!…he doesn’t exist, his name is anathema!…I judge him damned with the devil and condemn him to molten-lava hell with all the other fallen angels, where he will writhe in terrible pain for all eternity.”

What kind of nutbag daughter thinks this way?

Why is the divorce initiated by Angelina Jolie against William Bradley Pitt still ongoing and unresolved eight years later? Sane exes don’t behave this way as a rule.

Trust me — I’m not the first person on planet earth to rhetorically ask “what exactly is Angelina’s basic psychological malfunction?”

Then again I may be thinking too narrowly. Perhaps Pitt is the devil incarnate, and therefore deserves to be hunted down with clubs and spears and burned like Joan of Arc or Oliver Reed’s Father Grandier from Ken Russell’s The Devils?

In general terms, Richard Linklater‘s Hit Man (Netflix, 6.7) is about Gary (Glenn Powell), a 30something guy who works for a big-city police department (New Orleans) in an undercover capacity.

The story kicks in when Gary falls in love with Maddy (Adria Arjona), a beautiful Latina woman who’s been involved with a not-so-nice guy named Ray (Evan Holtzman) and is also kind of a target of the police, except Gary can’t tell Maddy for procedural and security reasons that he’s with the fuzz.

The story tension is about when and how Gary will come clean with Maddy, and how her troubled relationship with Ray will be resolved (i.e., come to an end) so that she and Gary will have some kind of chance together.

Without divulging what I felt about Hit Man, I need to mention how much it reminded me, in certain ways, of John Badham‘s Stakeout (’87), which was a kind of cop sitcom thriller with a strong emotional pull.

The lead character was Chris (Richard Dreyfuss), a 30something detective who works for a big city police department (Seattle). He and partner Bill (Emilio Estevez) are assigned to spy on Maria (Madeleine Stowe), a beautiful Latina woman who’s been involved with a not-so-nice guy named Stick (Aidan Quinn). Stick has recently escaped from prison and, cops suspect, may be visiting Maria soon.

The story kicks in when Chris falls in love with Maria, but can’t tell her for procedural and security reasons that he’s with the cops. Plus he’s doubly deceived her by pretending to be a phone company technician so he can plant a bug in her phone.

The story tension is about when and how Chris will come clean with Maria, and how her troubled relationship with Stick will be resolved (i.e., come to an end) so that she and Chris will have some kind of chance together.

The storylines of Hit Man and Stakeout don’t line up precisely and diverge in significant ways, but the above described similarities are legit.

Again without tipping my hand about Hit Man, which I caught yesterday afternoon, I have to say that I liked Stakeout a lot more when I saw it…Jesus, 37 years ago? Yeah, it was. Reagan times, Iran-Contra, etc.

Paolo Sorrentino makes eye-bath films. His lustrous visual swooning began to intensify, I feel, with 2013’s The Great Beauty, and was fully maintained in Youth, Loro and The Hand of God.

But there’s a limit to this kind of spell-weaving, and Sorrentino’s Parthenope, which I saw late last night, is exhibit #1.

Two actresses portray the title role, young Celeste Dalla Porta and the considerably older Stefania Sandrelli. But it’s mainly Della Porta’s show as the film is mostly about a series of guys (Italians of all ages plus Gary Oldman‘s John Cheever) staring longingly and hungrily at her.

I was feeling profoundly bored within 30 minutes, and had decided to bail by the one-hour mark if things didn’t improve. I wound up lasting 90 minutes.

If you’ve ever felt humbled or blown away by a woman’s beauty (we’ve all been there), the way to play it is to not stare at her like she’s a bright red apple and you haven’t eaten in three days. The way to play it is the young Warren Beatty way — one, express more interest in her personality and especially her mind than her looks, and two, behave as if you’re the beautiful one.

In the wake of David Fincher‘s Mank, why did Sorrentino want Oldman to play another soused writer whose literary prowess is quite formidable? After watching Mank I resolved to never again watch Oldman playing a chronic drunk, and now I’ve been through the same damn experience. In my mind there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Oldman’s Cheever and his Herman J. Mankiewicz.

While watching I was thinking of two older films that were about the same kind of thing (i.e., a series of guys worshipping a young irresistible woman and wanting desperately to “lay lady lay” her) — John Schlesinger‘s Darling (’65) and Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Stealing Beauty (’96). Both had underlying currents that were at least moderately interesting, Darling in particular. If there’s any kind of subtextual intrigue in Parthenope, I missed it.

It also struck me that Dalla Porta, who’s around 26, resembles the young Mia Sara (Legend, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).

Before last night’s 10:30 pm screening of The Girl With The Needle I slipped into an 8:15 showing of Laurent Bouzereau‘s Faye, an engagingly straightforward life-and-career retrospective about the great Faye Dunaway.

It supplies everything about her career that you’d want to see, everything you’d expect. All the biographical anecdotes, all the required clips, full of respect and appreciation plus healthy servings of Dunaway letting it all hang out (or at least as much as she’s able to do within this format).

It reminded me first and foremost what a great majesterial actress she’s always been. Charisma, timing, energy, just the right amount of push and hesitancy…the whole package.

It barely gets into the strident Faye stories that we’ve all been hearing for decades, but Dunaway’s confession that she was bipolar and occasionally alcoholic helps to explain at least some of her extreme behavior.

The doc offers an amusing retelling of the Roman Polanski-hair-yanking-episode-during-the-shooting-of-Chinatown story, mostly courtesy of producer Hawk Koch.

Dunaway honestly recounts her mad two-year affair with a married Marcello Mastroianni (’68 to ’70). There’s often something reckless and illogical about heated extra-marital romances, and the Dunaway-Mastroianni thing was no exception.

Plus it includes a brief interview with Mommie Dearest director Frank Perry saying that 1981 audiences responding with hoot and howls was fine with him. (Hollywood Elsewhere has always loved this film.)

The doc shows many snaps of young Faye during her youth (she was born in January ’41), and I was surprised to discover that when Dunaway was a teenaged brunette she closely resembled young Barry Gibb of the BeeGees. This resemblance was out the widow, of course, once she turned blonde and glammy in the mid ’60s.

I had to duck out at 9:50 pm so I wound up missing the home stretch and wrap-up, but it’ll be on Max before long.

The entire Fall Guy team and especially Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt and director David Leitch…they’re all in the dumps right now, chins on the pavement, hiding their faces or at least wearing sunglasses and thinking about escaping to Palm Springs for a week or two.

The Fall Guy hasn’t exactly been rejected en masse but it’s certainly been “meh”-ed or half-waved off by Joe and Jane Popcorn.

The whole Gosling balloon is sinking into the wetlands, the swamp. Imagine being Gosling right now and thinking back to your “I’m Just Ken” Oscar moment, which was only a few weeks ago…life can switch around like that.