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Jonathan Tropper‘s Your Friends and Neighbors is, first and foremost, darkly comedic in a dry, deadpan sort of way…a sardonic, amoral, noir-inflected, upper-middle-class, nine-episode Apple series about…well, thievery and nihilism and living on the existential edge of self-destruction, or something like that.

The flush life of a hedge-fund guy (Jon Hamm‘s “Coop”) swiftly falls apart after being canned by his shithead boss (Corbin Bernsen), and then it gets a bit gloomier. And then worse once Coop decides to become John Robie as a way to maintain financial stability.

And Tropper’s dialgoue is really, really delicious. During the first significant conversation scene (Coop and Olivia Munn‘s “Sam” at a bar) I sat up in my chair and went “wow…the repartee is as good in a wise-but-fatigued 2025 way as Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck‘s initial ping-pong seduction scene in Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity.

You just have to figure a way to not judge Coop because he doesn’t feel all that badly about becoming a jewel thief. His attitude is basically “they won’t miss it…they’re filthy rich as well as, no offense, assholes, and I should know because I’m an asshole too, or at least I was before losing my job.”

The entire first episode sits below.

My current preferences for the ’28 Democratic race are Rahm Emanuel (tough, brilliant, street-fighter), Gavin Newsom (tap-dancing former wokey) and Pete Buttigeig (smartest and most compassionate of them all).

Amanpour and Company‘s Walter Isaacson: “A lot of people, including a lot of Democrats, have said that the Democratic brand has become somewhat toxic. Is there some truth to that, and if so, why?”

Rahm Emanuel: “I would take the word ‘somewhat’ out. [The brand] is toxic. No caveats or disclaimers. There are two words that define the Democratic party for the public — ‘weak‘ and ‘woke.’ And neither one is favorable, and that’s been a process of the Democrats being seen as weak in a time in which people prefer strength, and woke being not just woke on the cultural left issues but focused almost entirely [on that] and drowning out everything else you want to say.”

In a cryptic conversation with Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), “Control” (Cyril Cusack) brings up Hans-Dieter Mundt (Peter van Eyck), head of East German intelligence.

Control: “And how do you feel about him?”
Leamas: “Feel?”
Control: “Yes.”
Leamas: “He’s a bastard.”
Control: “Quite.”

Another fascinating Cusack riff:

Control: “Fiedler, my dear Alec, is the lynchpin of our plan. Fiedler’s the only man who’s a match for Mundt, and, uhm… he hates his guts. Fiedler’s a Jew, of course, and Mundt’s quite the other thing.”

I’ve watched The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (’65) several times. Mainly for Oswald Morris’s black-and-white cinematography (the Criterion Bluray is wonderfully rendered in this respect) and especially for the pleasures of Oskar Werner’s performance as the brilliant Fiedler.

Richard Burton is good, of course, but playing the dour, sardonic and scowling Leamas requires him to be relentlessly draining. (He’s such a pill that he even turns down Werner’s offer of free recreational sex with an East German woman.) I actually hate that moment when Burton laughs at Claire Bloom when she confesses to being a devoted commie. She may be naive but at least she deeply cares, and Burton can only snicker at her conviction.

Five years ago I posted about the very first California drive-in theatre — the old Pico Drive-In (10860 Pico Blvd., SE corner of Pico and Westwood Blvds., 1934-1944)

Last night’s viewing of White Heat (‘49) reminded me of the second such operation — the San-Val Drive-In Theatre (2720 Winona Ave. Burbank, 1938-1973).

Newspapers insisted on using a hyphen between San and Val; management disagreed. HE is siding with the news guys.

There’s an Act One scene in which James Cagney‘s Cody Jarrett, Virginia Mayo‘s Verna Jarrett and Margaret Wycherly‘s Ma Jarrett pull into the San-Val to escape a pursuing police car.

And man, the San-Val looks great! — towering big screen, blazing neon signage, car-hops with snazzy outfits.

There are just two…make that three curiosities.

The San-Val’s double feature (right on the marquee) is South of St. Louis (Joel McCrea, Alexis Smith, Zachary Scott, Dorothy Malone) and Siren of Atlantis (Maria Montez, Jean-Pierre Aumont), except the film on the big screen is Task Force (Gary Cooper, Jane Wyman, Walter Brennan).

Curiosity #2 is the fact that South of St. Louis opened on 3.6.49, and White Heat didn’t begin principal photography until 5.5.49…two months later. What are the odds that South of St. Louis played for over two months at the San-Val? I’m presuming White Heat‘s second-unit team shot the San-Val footage soon after the March ’49 debut.

Curiosity #3 is that White Heat opened on 9.2.49 while Task Force didn’t open commercially until 9.30.49. Pissed-off moviegoer: “Hey, I’ve seen a trailer for Task Force…it’s not opening for another month. How come the Jarrett’s are watching it way before the rest of us?”

I’ve repeatedly made it clear that I pretty much despise the British actors who’ve been hired by director Sam Mendes to play Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — Paul “hawknose” Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keohgan, respectively — in his quartet of Beatle biopics.

Only the handsome Harris Dickinson, who will play John Lennon, gets an HE stamp of approval. This despite his towering over Mescal when the actual Lennon and McCartney were both 5’10”.

This may sound disturbing to wokeys and dopeys, but early to mid ’60s pop groups had to have reasonably good-looking members to attract the girls — that was the standard set by the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, etc.

Three of the Beatles (McCartney, Harrison, Lennon) were generally regarded as good-looking and then some, which, like it or not, was a key to the group’s popularity. (Ringo’s puppy-dog charm easily overcame his huge honker.)

Keohgan may or may not be able to overcome his evil-warlock features in an attempt to revive that old Ringo spirit, but the hard fact of the matter is that Mescal and Quinn simply aren’t fetching…certainly not in the darkly handsome way that McCartney and Harrison were perceived to be in the early ’60s. They’re a bit funny looking, and during the LBJ administration funny-looking guys weren’t allowed to be pop stars.

Just ask the fellows who made up The Association.

Posted on 9.23.22:

Mid ’60s pop groups had to have reasonably good-looking members — that was the reality of the day. And then along came The Association — a six member group that had two handsome guys and four with the oddest, most homely-looking faces in pop-music history.

The dorkiest was Terry Kirkman, who could have been cast as a college-aged serial killer. Next came Larry Ramos (died in 2014 at age 72), a chubby guy who looked like a typical member of an A.V. Squad. The thick-featured Brian Cole (who passed in ’72 at age 30) looked like a bouncer or a rugby player. Russ Giguere was semi-presentable but couldn’t pass the dishy-pop-star test — too geeky, granny glasses, thin moustache.

Jim Yester and Ted Bluechel were the only ones you could honestly call “good looking.”

Yes, the “they have to be cute” thing quickly went away when the Rolling Stones, the Byrds and The Who became popular, but not in ’64 and ’65 when the Beatles were just catching on. Plus the Beatles were clearly in their mid 20s while there’s no dodging the fact that Mescal, Dickinson, Quinn and Keoghan are 30somethings.

I realize that Mescal is popular with gay guys, but to me he’s Satan’s emissary. His hawk nose is actually a lot like the actual Lennon’s nose, but the McCartney resemblance factor is off the charts wrong/bad. Plus Mescal’s pointy chin resembles that of John Barrymore’s Mr. Hyde.

Since the CinemaCon appearance of the Mendes quartet I’ve developed a new hate thing for Quinn, who will completely fail to convince anyone that he’s George Harrison or is even half-channeling him. The notion that Quinn, who was okay in A Quiet Place: Day One but generically repulsive in Gladiator II, could “be” Harrison is nothing short of ridiculous.

…for allowing me to step up and rent this Venice Film Festival crib….all paid for and locked down…myself + Jordan Ruimy…just south of Campo Santa Margherita, and close to a vaporetto stop…Monday, 8.25 through Sunday, 9.7.

Unless a major hair-and-beard coloring job is in the offing, we may as well accept the fact that Matt Damon‘s Odysseus is going to look a bit moondoggy-ish in Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey (Universal, 7.17.26). But give Damon credit, at least, for having gotten himself into shape. Look at those arms! Those flat abs!

Welcome to the world of Valerie Van Galder, a 25-year veteran of big-studio publicity and marketing (a total hotshot in her day) and currently a mental health advocate. A resident of one of L.A.’s westside communities, Van Galder recently posted an audio-visual Facebook essay that caught my eye.

VVG basically said that while tourists see only the hotels, freeways, billboards, malls and gas stations, native Los Angelenos see some kind of mellow Garden of Gethsamene…a community built upon nourishing vibes and gentle fragrances, delicious ethnic food, winding two-lane blacktops in the hills, sea air and large swaying eucualyptus trees.

What she meant was that if you live in an affluent nabe and you make a concerted effort to mentally block out all the ugly stuff, Los Angeles can “seem” like a kind of heavenly, laid-back, coast-of-Italy Neverland, or at least something in the vein of Montecito or Mendocino or San Juan Capistrano.

Van Galder blocked and erased my reply so I can’t repeat it verbatim, but I basically said that L.A. can feel like a fairly nice place to hang if you keep to the flush zip codes (Beverly Hills & Bel Air, north of Montana, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Hollywood Hills, Hancock Park, Malibu hills, Trancas beaches, the various canyons, the walk streets of Venice) and tell yourself that the ugly aspects needn’t interfere with your spiritual head space, but the ugly, over-commercialized, heavily-congested, appalling and thoroughly blighted parts of town prevail above all.

Compared to so many European cities I could name, Los Angeles — not counting the above-named exceptions — is a sprawling, vaguely smelly, butt-ugly metropolis. Driving on Pacific Coast Highway alone is enough to trigger a tailspin depression.

L.A. was once was a moderately beautiful town…so much flora and nectar and sparkling clear vistas back in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s…Robert Towne used to tell me all about it.

Here was Van Galder’s reply:

Posted on 12.5.24:

Posted on 10.17.06:

The Hollywood Reporter ran Nicole Sperling‘s nicely sculpted profile of Columbia TriStar marketing group president Valerie Van Galder yesterday…fine. I’ve always respected Van Galder’s aesthetic sense. I really admired that flower-pot concept in the Adaptation one-sheet that she worked on. I remember wanting to do an article on the various Adaptation poster concepts that she’d considered — she loved the film and was very enthused about getting the art just right — but the piece gradually died for some reason. Half me, half her.

I also remember Van Galder wearing one of those cat-in-the-hat hats in front of Park City’s Egyptian theatre in ’96 as I waited to scrounge a ticket for a public showing of Looking for Richard. Van Galder was a Fox Searchlight publicist and, let’s be honest, not exactly a friend. It was my choice to wait and hope — Valerie made no promises — but I stood in increasingly frigid cold for 45 minutes only to be told no-dice. It was nothing in the grand scheme and I naturally moved on, but on some residual level whenever I think of the talented and much-admired Val I think of the total absence of sensation in my toes that night, and the way snow was coming down so heavy and pretty, and how big Sundance kahuna Robert Redford and director-star Al Pacino drove up and jumped out of an SUV about ten minutes after the show was supposed to begin.

Posted on 10.15.06:

The sum effect of coverage of Marie-Antoinette in Vanity Fair, Vogue and the New Yorker along with the Kitson Boutique window treatments, wild posting and pink Converse sneakers…all of that…is “penetrating the culture,” Columbia marketing president Valerie Van Galder has told Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson.

“In just the way that Sofia didn’t treat [the story of Marie Antoinette] as a straight biopic, we’re taking a unique approach,” Van Galder explains. “We’re having fun with the marketing. The movie has captured people’s imagination.”

Surely Van Galder doesn’t mean the movie itself — which I’ve over-campaigned against, I realize — has done the capturing. What she means, I think, is that the idea of Sofia Coppola putting pink converse sneakers into a shot of Marie Antoinette’s closet (or against some other backdrop) has caught on within the culture of female movie journalists, columnists and magazine editors along with, I suppose, some of their male gay counterparts. Kind of a “you go, girl” thing.

Hollywood Bytes columnist Elizabeth Snead has written that “the modern pink footwear creates a funny, girly, rebellious moment in a frothy film about a young girl who just wants to flirt, shop and party in 18th century France. And the sneaks also work with the film’s punky pink ads and the pink-themed court parties, pink champagne, pink wigs, and pink pastries.

“More importantly, the shoes are also a bright pink emblem of Sofia’s creative and independent spirit.”

Snead reports in the same column that “someone asked Coppola about the pink tennis shoes and she explained that it was her brother Roman, her second assistant director on the film, who put them in the shot. Dunst stayed comfortable wearing pink Converse tennis shoes under her royal gowns during filming. You never see them on [her] but there is a funny shot of the tennis shoes that remains in the film.”

I felt underwhelmed by Errol Morris‘s CHAOS: The Manson Murders (Netflix, now streaming). It’s minor Morris — a skeptical-minded, 96-minute documentary that fiddles around with Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring‘s “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties“.

The book is a nonfiction speculation about how the Manson horrors may (emphasis on the “m” word) have been subtly triggered or egged on or possibly even orchestrated by “Jolly” West, an apparently sinister figure with ties to the CIA and the MKUltra project in particular.

The film is basically about the white-haired O’Neill (no, not the squishy Oscar prognosticator Tom O’Neil) trying to sell Morris on his theories and suspicions about West, and Morris asking many, many questions and gradually coming to believe that the West-Manson legend isn’t all that credible.

I feel the same way.

The Manson malice happened in part because of a surreal, over-the-waterfall psychology that took hold among alienated middle-class youths who had sampled psychedelia and took the proverbial cosmic plunge, and especially among a few impressionable ditzoids who populated the Manson family in ‘68, ‘69 and, for a few, well beyond.

Charlie Manson was a crafty, headstrong, drillbit sociopath and a half-decent singer-guitarist who wanted to be a rich and famous rock star, but couldn’t quite pull it off. Manson knew deep down that all of his spiritual guru sermons and posturings were more or less a bullshit side activity.

It’s fascinating to consider some of the particulars about Manson’s interactions with Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher, and how one night Manson even jammed with Neil Young.

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Thank God I don’t have to hate on The Brutalist any more. The debate’s over and nobody of any weight or wisdom or professional merit will want to discuss it ever again. Consigned to history’s dust bin.

Whatever the Brutalist want-to-see factor might have been, it was pretty much suffocated by Adrien Brody‘s six-minute acceptance speech. So many millions of viewers were muttering “good heavens, shut up…just shut the fuck up.” If only Timothee Chalamet or Ralph Fiennes had won…

On the other hand it’s not fair to put Brody down over the chewing-gum toss. Before watching the below video I hadn’t realized that Brody’s age-appropriate g.f. Georgina Chapman emphatically told him, gesture-wise, to throw the gum her way.

Arthur Penn‘s surreal Mickey One (’65) is a black-and-white low budgeter about a hunted, haunted stand-up comic (Warren Beatty) on the bum in Chicago. It’s about paranoia and loneliness and how the game is rigged against the individual. It feels a bit coarse and splotchy at times, but it’s also a kind of loose-shoe, catch-as-catch-can arthouse whatsis with a kind of French nouvelle vague or Italian neorealist vibe (can’t decide).

Is Mickey One a better film than Bong Joon-ho‘s Mickey 17? I never liked Penn’s film all that much, but it feels like a raggedy-ass masterwork compared to the latest Mondo Bongo.

Mickey One is about something that we’ve all sensed or feared at one time or another (i.e., the world is run by predators). Mickey 17 is a woke instructional about the necessity of feeling compassion for society’s lessers or outcasts. Mickey One is an in-and-outer but it’s thematically relatable (at least to existential lone-wolf types). Mickey 17 is about Bong banality.

I posted my jubilant “Kathy Kennedy is stepping down piece” yesterday aftenoon…..whoo!. The Critical Drinker and Echo Chamberlain weighed in several hours later.