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If there’s one genuinely funny gag in this whole film, I’ll eat my gray, Chinese-made cowboy hat. Because it’s understood that this reboot will lean heavily on the same kind of gags that defined the old Leslie Neilsen versions. We know the newbie won’t even flirt with being truly subversive.

Witness testimony from a guy who’s seen it: “The O.J. Simpson gag is ostensibly the biggest laugh in the film, but I will give credit to a protracted sequence centering around Liam Neeson and Pam Anderson innocently making dinner in a kitchen while being observed through infrared surveillance equipment that makes it look like they’re having wild, savage sex. When they bend over an oven, the device translates it into something really funny visually. That bit felt fresh while the majority of the jokes are Antediluvian Marx Bros. one liners like ‘Would you like a chair?’ and ‘No, I have one at home’, and set within uninspired, rote situations.

“And there’s really no social commentary on law enforcement, save for one passing gag in a bar that hints of race relations. This entire film smacks of Seth MacFarlane’s patented derivativeness. He was obviously brought aboard to imitate instead of create. The studio wanted a redo of the first film and got that.

“Neeson< seems too old to start lampooning his serious action career, so there’s a sadness in watching him in this, but Anderson does really well. Her character isn’t a dimbulb like Priscilla Presley since she possesses a personal vendetta against the villain, a tech giant, and wants payback. THAT felt like an update.

“What I groaned at most were some puerile toilet jokes, something the original films never reveled in, as well as misplaced attempts at ‘warmth’ as Neeson pines for his lost ‘old man’ meant to dovetail affection for the late Leslie Nielsen. At least Neeson doesn’t mug as much as Nielsen increasingly did. Oh, there’s a touch of topicality from a driverless car and AI references. The bag guy invokes Elon Musk, and not just his technology but personal life.

“At one point, they were going to call this NAKED GUN: DREBIN’S INFERNO, which hints of where the finale goes. This is a cheapjack ‘in name only’ sequel. There’s some breaking of the fourth wall in the third act that aficionados will recognize as lifted from a few Monty Python episodes. This film looks so cheaply made that they’ll probably eke out enough money the first weekend, especially if there are review embargos, but this feels very much like the sort of sequel that normally Netflix would debut since a living room couch is more forgiving than a theater seat. Consider this a warning shot for the 2nd SPACEBALLS as well.”

All hail the late Sly Stone (aka Sylvester Stewart), whose racially integrated, mixed-gender, brass-drums-and-guitar band was one of the greatest things to happen in pop music ever, certainly between the mid ’60s to early ’70s (the band enjoyed a seven- or eight-year peak) but throughout the span of the 20th Century.

I’m feeling it all over right now…”Dance to the Music” (’68), “Everyday People” (’68), “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” (’69), “Wanna Take You Higher” (’69) “Family Affair” (’71), “Stand”, “If You Want Me to Stay” (‘3), “There’s a Riot Goin’ On (’71).

Alas, sometime in the mid ’70s it all started to drift away. “Sly never grew out of drugs,” his ex-wife Kathy Silva was quoted as saying. “He lost his backbone and destroyed his future.” It was reported five years ago that Stone was living out of a van.

I’ve been mulling over the ongoing anti-ICE, immigrant-rights street protests in Los Angeles (now in their fourth day) and last night’s San Francisco solidarity demonstration, and I’m starting to suspect that anti-ICE sentiments are just the nominal motivators.

The underlying emotional fuel, I believe, is coming from pools of serious rage that many (not just progressive lefties but sensible liberals and perhaps even a smattering of centrists) are feeling about Trump’s bully-boy authoritarian regime. Trump’s troops are about manufactured televized theatre…basically about conveying brutality…a message being sent not just to malcontent scruffs but everyone.

Do I personally believe it’s a bad thing to round up alleged illegals and send them down to Guantanamo or otherwise deport their asses? Not entirely. Do I suspect that a sizable percentage of the targets are bad guys? I wouldn’t know but some of them probably qualify. (It would surely be naive to assume they’re all pure as the driven snow.) Is Trump exploiting this unrest for his own ends? Obviously. Was it really necessary to send in the National Guard? Of course not. These disturbances should be handled by California authorities, not the feds.

Do I admire Governor Gavin Newsom for standing up to Trump and ICE chief Tom Homan, and daring them to arrest him? Yeah, kinda. Given that Trump is Benito Mussolini in the 1930s, it’s better overall for people to shout and shriek and stomp around than to sit indoors and cower and play video games. At the end of the day activism (even the car-burning kind) is better than passivity.

Newsom: “Trump’s border czar is threatening to arrest me for speaking out. Come and get me, tough guy. I don’t give a damn.”

Trump’s border czar is threatening to arrest me for speaking out.

Come and get me, tough guy.

I don't give a damn.

It won’t stop me from standing up for California.pic.twitter.com/DvVQljAgir

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 9, 2025

I’m sorry but for the last few months I’ve been under a distinct impression that everyone hates the obnoxiously aggressive Blake Lively for trying to destroy the life and career of poor Justin Baldoni.

So what’s going on here? “Accusations of sexual harassment” are “legally protected”? But trying to destroy a man’s career with questionable claims and agitated #MeToo hyperbole is cool?

Will someone please explain this dismissal to me in “regular guy standing on a sidewalk and eating a hot dog” terminology? Like I’m a six year old? King Henry II to Thomas Becket: “I’m an idiot then! Talk to me like I’m an idiot!”

In fact….

Woke terror — the U.S. version of China’s Great Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and early ‘70s — became a thing in ‘18, and it absolutely ruled the culture until it started to ebb in the middle of last year.

The first indication that the culture had said “enough!”…the blessed event that told me the tectonic plates had shifted…was when Lily Gladstone didn’t win the Best Actress Oscar during the 96th Academy Awards.

Woke terror hasn’t been fully eradicated as we speak but at least it’s been losing its grip, thank God. Six and a half years of twisted insanity! And you know why it’s taken as long as this for the string to run out? One reason is people like Bobby Peru saying “there IS no woke terror….its all in your head.”

Posted by N.Y. Times contributor Jeremy Peters on 11.2.24:

The first feature film to forsake opening credits was Walt Disney‘s Fantasia (’40), but this version has been jettisoned. Yes, the original 1940 theatrical cut was credit-less, but brief credits were added for an early ’90s home video version.

There were no opening credits for Mike Todd‘s Around the World in 80 Days (’56), although I have a memory of a 1.37:1 introduction about the eternal thirst for adventure and modes of 19th Century travel, narrated (I think) by Edward R. Murrow. But that was a pumped-up, high-tech travelogue movie + a reserved-seats roadshow thing…the first film to be presented in 30-frame-per-second Todd-AO, etc.

In fact the first general audience popcorn movie to forsake an opening credit sequence was Kirk Douglas and Richard Fleischer‘s The Vikings (’58). All the credits (above- and below-the-line) were confined to an animated sequence at the very end.

The next big-deal film to blow off opening credits was Robert Wise‘s West Side Story (’61).

And yet these the last two announced their titles at the very beginning. The first film to completely ignore a title acknowledgment was Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now (’79). The 70mm roadshow version didn’t even present a closing-credits sequence, although the 35mm general release version did.

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On a certain level I am Warren Beatty with the green shirt, and Richard Sarafian‘s Jack Dragma represents all the HE pisshounds packed into one dumpy bod. God, this is delicious.

Andrey Diwan‘s Happening (IFC Films, 2022) remains one of the most sobering, harrowing and artful abortion dramas I’ve ever seen– only Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which premiered in Cannes 18 years ago, can be fairly ranked as a higher achievement.

My question is how and why could a seemingly mediocre, clumsily written softcore flick like Emmanuelle…how could Diwan have directed it? It doesn’t calculate. Happening was too good, too bracing.

Emannuelle has been kicking around since ’23. Where did I derive the idea that it would be a sapphic variation on Just Jaeckin’s 1974 original? I guess because star Naomie Merlant played lesbian characters to persuasively in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (’19) and in TAR (’22).

In any event Emmanuelle appears to be a hetero thang. Oh, and no theatrical — straight to streaming.

HE continues to maintain that Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake is the finest film to play at Cannes ‘25 so far, although Richard Linklater ‘s Nouvelle Vague, which I was knocked out by last night, is surely a very close second.

Today’s Nouvelle Vague press conference included Linklater and costars Guillaume Marbeck (Jean-Luc Godard), Zoey Deutsch (Jean Seberg) and Aubry Dullin (Jean Paul Belmondo).

1:08 update: Just shook hands & exchanged cursory pleasantries with the great Guillermo del Toro.

…while waiting to see Harris Dickinson’s Urchin at the Debussy ( 8:28 am).

Cannes programmers have made it damn near impossible to score press tickets to (a) Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest, which screens on Monday evening, 5.20 and on Tuesday, 5.21, and (b) Kristen Stewart‘s The Chronology of Water, which I tried to get into this evening on a last-minute, wait-and-hope basis.

This morning at 7 am I tried to reserve a ticket to Spike’s Kurosawa remake, but the app said it was ALL filled up. But how could it be at 7 am? You come all the way here at great expense, and Spike’s film is off limits?

I wrote Cinetic marketing about this…silencio.

Word around the campfire is that Stewart’s reps, friends and associates had gobbled up around half of the orchestra seats to tonight’s Water screening, although I know nothing for an absolute solid fact in this regard.

The general idea seems to be “limit press seating and perhaps minimize the effect of so-so or adverse reactions”…maybe.

This suggests that both films may be problematic on some level, but who knows?

Yesterday morning I read a 5.7.24 Richard Brody appreciation of the late N.Y. Times film critic Andrew Sennwald, who served as the paper of record’s senior film authority between 9.18.34 and 1.12.36.

Hired by the Times as a reporter at age 23, Sennwald soon became a top-tier, unusually perceptive examiner of the art and hoopla of film, Brody writes. Sennwald was an ardent admirer of director Josef von Sternberg, for one thing.

I’ve since read a few of Sennwald’s reviews. He wrote confidently and well, and certainly knew the realm.

It’s a shame that this highly respected guy died at age 28 and suddenly at that, and possibly by his own hand despite reportedly being in excellent health, not to mention in the professional prime of his life.

Weird as it sounds, Sennwald died of gas-stove poisoning, apparently or at least possibly a suicide.

On top of which the gas, which Sennwald, being dead, was unable turn off, exploded and wrecked his penthouse apartment at 670 West End Avenue, and not just the penthouse but the top three floors of the 17-story building. Investigators found Sennwald in his pajamas, on the floor of his kitchen.

Was this an accident? Why in heaven would a young man who’d quickly vaulted to a highly eminent position in his chosen field (it doesn’t get much better than being a top critic at the Times), a guy who lived in a fairly swanky abode and presumably had everything to live for…why would he off himself on a Saturday around midnight, and in his pajamas yet?

If I intended to do myself in, I would do so in my finest apparel — silk shirt, knotted tie, spit-shined shoes.

Sennwald’s last review focused on Rene Clair‘s The Ghost Goes West. Sennwald was succeeded at the Times by Frank Nugent.

Sennwald’s marriage to journalist Yvonne Beaudry, whom he met while going for his journalism degree at Columbia University, had apparently gone south. Sennwald’s Wiki page describes her as an ex-wife, although they were reportedly on cordial terms. Beaudry was out on the town when he died.

Sennwald may have been suffering from a serious eye ailment called Uveitis, but there’s not much info on this. He was also an insomniac.

While reporting that Sennwald’s death was seemingly a “suicide”, Brody otherwise focuses entirely on his film criticism. I respect his decision to ignore the curious circumstances that attended Sennwald’s passing, but that’s still one hell of an ignore.

It’s not like Sennwald swallowed some pills and slipped away quietly while slumping on a bench in Central Park. His death triggered a violent spectacle and a major neighborhood trauma — collapsed walls, fellow residents evacuated, a busted water main…bluh-DOOM!!

Brody could have just as easily have written about the Skull Island life of King Kong (wrestling an occasional T-Rex, killing Teradactyls, roaring a lot) and then blown off what happened on his final day of life in midtown Manhattan.

Not to mention the fact (I’ve made this point but indulge me) that a top N.Y. Times critic would never kill himself inside his West End Ave. penthouse at a fairly young age…does this make any sense to anyone at all?

A film critic hypothetically pulls the plug when (a) he/she can’t find decent employment, (b) is past his/her prime (65 or older) and (c) is barely making ends meet in a grubby flat in the East Village.

Reported by The Brooklyn Eagle on 1.13.36:

Brody: