I’m not saying all high-school girls are fickle and flighty, but a lot of them are. Or they were, at least, when I was an awkward, insecure WASP schlemiel.

I’ve mentioned this once or twice before, but in my senior year I had it bad for a luminous Irish blonde named Sally Jo Quinn. Short, slender, magnificent blue eyes, straight blonde hair, smallish feet, slender hands with chewed nails. No dad at home; just her single mom who worked as an administrative something-or-other at the high school. I can’t recall if the parents had divorced or if the father had died or what.

Anyway Sally had several concurrent boyfriends. I was fourth in line, I gradually learned. (Or was I fifth?) The others included a football jock (since deceased), a wealthy man’s son from Ridgefield (dead from drug overdose) and a local cop in his mid to late 20s. I was strictly backup. Scraps, leftovers. For someone already beset with low self-esteem, this situation fit perfectly.

Flash forward to the mid ’80s, when I had a brief thing with an extremely dishy lady who was dealing with an unstable ex. So unstable, in fact, that when I visited her one night he called up and came over and rang the bell (she told me to ignore him) and then started pacing back and forth on the front lawn, calling out to her and talking to himself and generally creating a neighborhood spectacle.

Girls sometimes choose badly, some guys can’t handle rejection, and sometimes you have to put up your dukes.

It did occur to me as this psychodrama was unfolding, of course, that anyone with a looney-tunes ex might be a little screwy themselves, or might be a little dishonest or manipulative or flaky. You are who you go out with.

This ex-boyfriend episode wasn’t enough to put me off (she was beautiful and curvaceous and breathtaking in bed), but it did give me pause. I know that if she’d had two ex-boyfriends knocking on the door I would have said “wow, this is really weird” and “something isn’t right.” And if she’d had three guys pleading for forgiveness and restitution I would have said “okay, she obviously likes guys fighting for her affections” and taken a hike.

Director-writer pally: “What’s interesting is that despite the forehead-slapping quality of Last Night in Soho…what’s interesting is how the whole industry and especially every young exec…they’re all still lined up to work with Edgar Wright.”

HE to director-writer pally: “They don’t care how shitty his films are? Okay, the first two thirds of Baby Driver works, but have you seen Last Night in Soho? Once you get past the concept and the 1966 time-trip design, it’s really awful. Stupid, crude, ham-fisted, tedious, repetitive.”

Director-writer pally: “Edgar is a really nice, engaging, genteel person and every comedy executive, especially in TV and streaming, hold him in messianic esteem. He’s Teflon — even Scott Pilgrim tanking didn’t harm his rep, and is now viewed as some sort of classic. The mantra from his fans is ‘he’s one of us.’

HE to director-writer pally: “Yes, Wright is very likable and personable, very easy to chat with, a good bullshitter. I’ve listened to Edgar in interviews. He talks a good game.

“Unfortunately, his movies (the first two-thirds of Baby Driver aside) are awful to sit through. So things like taste, clever plotting, refinement, dialogue that makes sense, cinematic coherence, directorial finesse…none of that stuff matters to these guys, you’re saying? Because Scott Pilgrim vs. The World s one of the worst films I’ve ever seen IN MY LIFE.”

Snapped during a glammy dinner in honor of Australia’s Phillip Noyce, the current recipient of a ten-day tribute by the Cinematheque Francaise.

Attendees included Noyce, wife Vuyo Dyasi, daughter Ayanda, dp Svetlana Cvetko plus Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton and Gillian Bird, Australian Ambassador to France. The Australian embassy is located at 4 Rue Jean Rey, 75015 Paris, France.

I understood why Saving Private Ryan began with a closeup of a billowing, wind-flapping, desaturated U.S. flag. But what do the stars and stripes have do with Tony and Maria‘s love story in Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story? Seriously, what is this?

Has Spielberg shifted the locale to Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton? Is Tony a U.S. Army recruiter? Do Tony and Maria initially bond over their patriotic love of our country? Will West Side Story begin with the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Will there be a 21-gun salute on the night of the big premiere?

The last time I checked West Side Story was not about the U.S. of A. or any uniquely American issue or theme. It’s a story about tribalism, racism, prejudice, territoriality and the glorious madness of hormonal love.

Arthur Brooke‘s “The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet“, set in Verona, was published in 1562. William Shakespeare‘s English-language version, also set in northern Italy, was written between 1591 and 1595. Until now no one has ever claimed that it’s a particularly American-type story.

Please explain why the red white and blue is mixed up in this…seriously, I’m lost.

The best I can come up with (and I’m just spitballing here) is that Spielberg and the Disney marketers are telling us that the above-mentioned bad stuff (racism, etc.) has a particular resonance with United States culture right now and that the citizenry needs to pay particular attention. We have to “woke” ourselves up to the problem and address it with progressive measures.

SPOILERS HEREIN: 18 hours ago I saw Edgar Wright‘s Last Night in Soho. I had suspected I would probably have a bad time with it, but my God, it’s dreadful. Mindless, gaudy throwaway trash. Not to mention dull by way of a mind-numbing repetition of a #MeToo mantra — older men with bulging wallets are toxic beasts.

Wright got hold of something cool and throttled in the first two-thirds of Baby Driver, but now it’s gone. The bottom line is that he’s a completely untethered geek fetishist — he’s all about design and visual intensity and comic-book-level characters, and at the same time completely disengaged from anything even vaguely resembling an adult sensibility or, perish the thought, an ability to absorb and re-process life as a semi-complex, multi-layered thing. In short, Wright is 47 going on 14.

In the mid ’60s context of Last Night in Soho, Wright isn’t interested in trying to (let’s get creative!) partially channel the spirit of Roman Polanski by way of recalling or reanimating the 1965 atmosphere of Repulsion…God, what a stone cold slasher masterpiece that film is, especially compared to the slovenly Soho. Repulsion and Last Night in Soho are one year apart, and at the same time based in entirely separate galaxies.

Last Night in Soho essentially says one thing over and over. Ready? Older London men who went to flashy nightclubs in the mid ‘60s were cruel sexist pigs (which many of them doubtless were) and they all wanted to sexually exploit and abuse young women who needed the money. Which made them Hammer horror monsters of the darkest and scuzziest order.

But that was mid ‘60s London for you! Forget the seminal beginnings of the rock revolution. Forget the Yardbirds. Forget the mid ’60s Soho club scene that had begun to be dominated by London’s rock virtuosos and their many followers. Forget the musical and spiritual explosions conveyed by Aftermath and Rubber Soul. Forget John Lennon and George Harrison being dosed by a dentist in ’65 and experiencing their first-ever acid trip. Forget all that. Because in Wright’s view, 1966 London was crammed with creepy, sex-starved, Sexy Beast guys in their 40s and 50s who worshipped the Kray brothers.

Not to mention those four Heather bitches from fashion design school who do nothing but taunt and snicker at Thomasin McKenzie‘s innocent “Elly”.

But at least there’s one compassionate young dude (Michael Ajao‘s “John”) who genuinely cares for her, mainly because the Maoist woke mindset of 2021 has declared that all people of color are sainted figures. Which confirms that on top of his unrestrained geek indulgences Wright is just another obedient woke whore, singing the same hymn from the same “sing it or we might cancel you” hymn book…people of color are so good, so blessed, so pure of heart.

Mckenzie’s over-emoting drove me mad. In Wright’s view she’s Heidi..a country-girl waif who’s completely incapable of not being gobsmacked by everything and everyone she encounters, and incapable of restraining or modifying her emotional reactions.

I don’t know for a dead cold fact that Grant Williams, star of The Incredible Shrinking Man (’57), was gay, but he almost certainly was. And in this context Shrinking Man becomes more than just a sci-fi drama about a guy getting smaller and smaller. It’s a film about a repressed ’50s guy feeling smaller and smaller due to the anguish of the closet — fear of being outed or found out, career anxiety, a general sense of isolation, constantly having to hide and skulk around.

The cat who almost kills Willams’ character…hell, choose any metaphor. The Los Angeles vice squad, homophobic agents and producers, Williams’ father, the general atmosphere of disapproval.

A West Hollywood resident, Williams never married or had any kind of ongoing relationship with anyone of either gender. (Or at least none that was ever written about.) Written on the Wind, The Incredible Shrinking Man and Susan Slade aside, the poor guy made almost nothing but B-level crap. He died of peritonitis in July ’85, at age 53.

This was snapped sometime in ’01 or ’02…somewhere in there. I’ve been to Prague seven or eight times. My first visit was a honeymoon thing with my ex-wife Maggie in October ’87. (Prague was a total Commie town back then, celebrating the 70th anniversary of the ’17 Russian revolution, scent of soft coal everywhere.) My second visit was in ’92 — managed to shake Vaclav Havel‘s hand at a bookstore. This visit, I think, was my third.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has posted an intriguing list of films that should (and probably will) be released in 2022. I’ve boldfaced the ones I’m especially interested in, which come to 18 or 19.

Note: Terence Malick needs between two and three years in post-production to prepare a film for release. The Way of the Wind began filming a couple of years ago, so by my estimation it probably won’t be out for another year.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” (Martin Scorsese)
“The Killer” (David Fincher)
“The Northman” (Robert Eggers)
“Babylon” (Damien Chazelle)
“Armageddon Time” (James Gray)
“Asteroid City” (Wes Anderson)
“Disappointment Blvd.” (Ari Aster)
“Amsterdam” (David O. Russell)
”Poor Things” (Yorgios Lanthimos)
“The Fablemans” (Steven Spielberg)
“White Noise” (Noah Baumbach)
”Owl” (Kelly Reichardt)
“The Zone of Interest” (Jonathan Glazer)
“Crimes of the Future” (David Cronenberg)
“Bardo” (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
“The Whale” (Darren Aronofsky)
“Decision to Leave” (Park Chan-Wook)
“Fire” (Claire Denis)
“Tar” (Todd Field)
”Kimi” (Steven Soderbergh)
”Bones and All” (Luca Guadagnino)
“Next Goal Wins” (Taika Waititi)
“The Batman” (Matt Reeves)
”Kitbag” (Ridley Scott — Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte)
“Don’t Worry Darling” (Olivia Wilde)
“Bullet Train” (David Leitch)
“Nope” (Jordan Peele)
”Men” (Alex Garland)
”Pinocchio” (Guillermo del Toro)
“Elvis” (Baz Luhrmann)
“The Son” (Florian Zeller)
“The Stars at Noon” (Claire Denis)
“Blonde” (Andrew Dominik)
“The Bubble” (Judd Apatow)
“Women Talking” (Sarah Polley)
“3000 Years of Longing” (George Miller)
“Triangle of Sadness” (Ruben Ostlund)
“The Eternal Daughter” (Joanna Hogg)
“Tori et Lokita” (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
“Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Adventure” (Richard Linklater)
”Rebel Ridge” (Jeremy Saulnier)
“Deep Water” (Adrian Lyne)
“The Way of the Wind” (Terrence Malick)