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Alternate title: What would former shoemaker Daniel Day Lewis say?

HE to Italian shoemaker, sent this morning: “My feet used to be size 12, but over the past eight to ten years I’ve had to wear size 13. I own two pairs of boots and several lace-up shoes that are size 13, and they’re all fine.

“Two or three months ago I ordered a pair of size 13 Bass Weejuns black loafers. They felt stiff and tight at first, but after wearing them a couple of times they’ve loosened up slightly. They’re not what I would call comfortable but they’re wearable.

“Your loafers are beautifully made and very attractive. But they feel a bit tighter than the Bass Weejuns. Last night I wore them indoors for an hour or so, and without socks. (I don’t think I could even put them on while wearing thin socks.) I really need to somehow loosen them up. I need to make the leather softer and more malleable, which only happens from wearing them and walking around.

“I could ask my local shoe repair guy to forcibly stretch them out but the leather has to be softer and more malleable to begin with, right?

“Your shoes only arrived yesterday but right now a voice is telling me they’ve been constructed a bit tighter and snugger than my other size 13 shoes. I’m really afraid that even after the leather has become looser and more relaxed, they’ll STILL feel too tight.

“I’m not saying I should be wearing a size 14 — my feet aren’t that big — but I’m thinking it might be better if I had a size 13 and 1/2. Would it be possible for you to send me a size 13 and 1/2 if I return the current shoes?

“Or should I just hope and pray that they’ll gradually become more wearable or perhaps even comfortable once the leather stretches out?

“I know all about cruel shoes and the suffering that goes along with this. But right now I don’t feel good about this. I’m a little worried.”

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Eight years ago I watched roughly a half-hour’s worth of footage from Jerry Lewis‘s The Day The Clown Cried. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Poasted on 6.16.16: “The Day The Clown Crieed is a kind of ghost cult film, one that’s been written about and discussed and derided in absentia by film sophistos for several decades.

“It’s a fascinating piece. I’m glad I saw what I saw. I now have a rough idea of how TDTCC plays and feels emotionally. It may not be anyone’s idea of a great or profound film, but it’s nowhere near as bad as I’d heard it was for so many years.

“Yes, the basic scheme is labored. One could call it grotesque in its attempt to whip up emotions via the cold-blooded mass murder of an isolated group of small children. But it’s a bit more measured and shaded than I expected — not absurdly over the top but delivered in smoky, grayish tones, and crafted with a feeling of noirish, downbeat gradualism.

“The ultimate consensus may be that it’s not a profoundly effective film, but nor is it the gaudy wipeout I had expected. It’s somewhere in between.”

It’s a stretch to imagine that ’25 will generate much in the way of pleasant, nourishing vibes…be honest. We all know what’s coming.

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Bill McCuddy recently had the absolute gall to celebrate Skywalkers: A Love Story as his #1 film of the year.

I responded as follows:

Not to mention that below-the-title slogan — “What will they risk to touch the sky?” Words fail.

I should be more open-minded, I realize, in part due to Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman having put Skywalkers on his ten-best list. But that title is so repulsive that I really don’t want to see this film, ever. My life will not be even slightly diminished by my avoiding it.

Skywalkers opened last summer and nobody jumped up and down. Not in my orbit, they didn’t. Flatline flatline flatline. And then all of a sudden McCuddy and Gleiberman perform last-minute cartwheels.

There’s one thing that elite film critics like Bilge Ebiri never touch with a ten-foot pole, and that’s how a given film feels at the very end. And the way a film feels at the finale is, of course, always a measure of whether or not the ultimate fate of the characters seems fair or reasonable.

Did a character fuck up badly and maybe hurt someone as a result? Then he or she deserves to feel some degree of pain at the finale. Has a character been falsely accused of something he/she didn’t do? Then his/her lack of guilt should be revealed at the end. He/she doesn’t have to end up rich or married to a movie star or elected President of the United States, but the record needs to be set straight to some extent.

If a more or less decent, fair-minded character is hit by lightning or a falling tree limb at the very end of a film and dies, that’s a completely shitty ending. “What did that happen for?”, the audience will say. No good reason, says the director or screenwriter. We just felt like killing him/her off because, you know, life can be randomly cruel at times. Audience: “Yeah? Well, fuck you then!”

A film doesn’t have to end happily or sadly or humorously or tragically, but you have to feel on some level that the characters have met with a fair and even-handed fate — that what happened or didn’t happen to them seems justified.

When George Kennedy‘s psychopathic asshole character was killed and eaten by guard dogs at the end of Michael Cimino‘s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, there was no disputing that he’d gotten what he deserved.

Ditto when Elliot Gould‘s Phillip Marlowe shot Jim Bouton‘s Terry Lennox at the end of The Long Goodbye.

I’ve noted a couple of times that the ending of The Godfather, Part II wan’t an upper but it felt justified. Michael Corleone has grown into a monster, and at the end he’s left all alone with his recollections of the idealistic youth he used to be and a realization that this younger version of himself has more or less died. Not a happy ending but a fair one. Corleone has accrued all the power but lost his soul.

Same thing with Paul Newman at the end of Hud. He takes a swing of beer and says “fuck it” but he’s no happy camper. He will have very little love or serenity in his life, and he knows it and so do we.

The ending of Million Dollar Baby totally works. Clint’s character is devastated for what he felt he had to do, and he’s alone at the end in that diner. But he did what he felt was right. A sad but even-handed ending.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is a tragedy that ends with Jane Fonda‘s character getting what she wants, in a sense. Obviously an unhappy fate but she gets what she wants. The ending works. It feels fair, I mean, given who she was and the dark forces weighing upon her (including her own fatalistic attitude) and the options she no longer has.

I know that life can be horribly unfair at times and that the worst things can happen to the nicest people, but we’re not talking about life here but the scheme of good drama. If the characters in a film don’t meet with a fair fate, something feels wrong and audiences get angry.

The ending of The Deer Hunter is one of the oddest, least morally satisfying finales of all time. I sat there seething and hissed through my teeth, “You stupid rural fuckheads…singing ‘God Bless America’…God, not a clue!”

So fuck the critical elite for having given films like The Brutalist, Maria and (from what I’ve been told by trusted viewers) I Saw The TV Glow a pass without noting how it makes you feel at the end, which is fucking awful.

This is why people don’t trust elite film critics. They don’t lay it on the line about how movies feel and more particularly about whether the payoff feels “right.” I do this all the time because that’s how I roll, but they don’t. Just saying.

And the key strategy after dousing any workplace fire is to make certain that the complaints in question do not re-occur. That means tone it down and leave it there.

During the 2023 and early ‘24 filming of It Ends With Us, Blake Lively voiced complaints about director and costar Justin Baldoni, who had optioned Colleen Hoover’s source novel for adaptation in 2019, and producer Jamey Heath.

They had behaved in a leering, overly familiar manner, Lively said, which she found sexually intimidating.

But things cooled down after the issues were aired mid-stream and protections were enacted. A 12.21.24 N.Y. Times story about a legal complaint filed by Lively last Friday reports the following:

The current question is therefore obvious as well as perplexing.

Instead of chilling or at least turning down the gas, Baldoni began acting aggressively last summer as It Ends With Us neared its 8.6.24 release.

Perhaps because Lively had challenged his directorial authority by creating an alternate cut that was approved for release, Baldoni decided to go feral by hiring a p.r. crisis firm in order to diminish her reputation.

Why start another fire? Why not just leave well enough alone and move on to the next project? What a mystifying call. Now Baldoni is re-facing the same bad-behavior complaints, and possibly a Lively lawsuit to come.

What is the lesson here? Sexually icky or insinuating behavior during filming is never cool? Or never fuck with the willful Blake Lively and her aggressively protective husband Ryan Reynolds? Or a combination of the two?

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And so September 5 is getting bumped down to sixth place, and Blitz down to seventh place, etc.

“Babygirl is an erotic thriller that is, unlike so many which came before, both erotic and thrilling. But what makes it novel is that the thrills are derived from the eroticism itself.

“Sure, much of the narrative thrust (hah) is borne of our lead not wishing to be caught by her family and colleagues in a sordid workplace affair, but that’s an afterthought to the focus of the film: two horned-up adults messily trying to reconcile their mutual animal attraction while also navigating and negotiating one another’s kinks.” — Scullyvision, 12.7.24.

…in favor of a grayish hat that…I don’t know, kinda looks better. I need a head-warmer for the next few months and I just got sick of the black hat…time to let it go.

The thing I loved about the first two Robert Eggers films (The Witch and The Lighthouse, respectively released in 2015 and 2019) was the sense of restraint and subtlety, the slow-build aesthetic, getting freakier and freakier but on a very gradual basis, etc.

Then along came The Northman (’22) and it suddenly seemed as if the restraint aesthetic had largely been tossed out the window. I wasn’t a fan — it felt as if Eggers had fallen off a cliff.

Last night i tried watching Eggers’ Nosferatu (Focus, 12.25) and I was immediately alienated by the fact that it tries to bury you from the get-go in thick, gloopy horror atmosphere…an atmosphere of such foreboding, a vibe so thick and severe that all you get from it is a feeling of being smeared…an atmosphere that is so forced and extreme that nothing seems to really make sense.

I hated this idiotic vampire movie almost as much as I hated The Brutalist, and that’s saying something.

I took some notes as I went along, and my final note was “I’ll take the 1979 Werner Herzog-Klaus Kinski-Isabelle Adjani version, thanks.”

My random-ass notes don’t fully convey the annoyance I was feeling. Here they are:

“Lily Rose Depp looks too much like Johnny. What is she, 4’10” tall? Most of the color scheme is the same old bluish gray that dozens of other films have used. Dreary. The Carpathian villagers are stupidly eccentric. Same old Dracula shit.

“The voice of Orlok is labored, dopey, ridiculous. Eggers has forgotten about the necessity of a slow build. Nosferatu is so on the nose that it’s almost dull. Eggers really lays it on too thick.

“Irrational story. Portentous to a fault. Wait, hold on…I liked the naked teenage village girl on the horse! But Emma Corrin is too lezzy to play a straight married housewife.

“You’re right — Orlok has one humdinger of a moustache. Too much howling, wheezing, groaning and moaning. Simon McBurney biting off the head of a pigeon. Give me a break.

“You know who Orlok looks like a little bit? Luca Guadagnino if he were wearing horror makeup. Lily Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter has ony one color, one mood — complete submission to shuddering hysteria. In a word, boring.”

Blurry but funny. Peter O’Toole was 74 at the time. This was taped sometime in early December of ’06, the subject being Roger Michell‘s Venus. O’Toole passed in 2013 at age 81. The great Peter Finch (aka “Finchy“) died in ’77 at age 60….heart attack.

I don’t think often about the fun I occasionally had during my drinking days, but every now and then I do.

“If you’re going to look like this, you’ll have to settle for the fat-girl parts.” — a drama teacher to Kate Winslet when she was in her mid teens, according to Winslet’s account during a 60 Minutes essay that aired yesterday (12.1).

By “like this,” the drama teacher meant not slender or rail-thin, a physical state that all competitive actresses aspire to whether they want to admit it or not.

What the drama teacher also meant, I suspect, was that Winslet wasn’t so much “fat” as zaftig (curvy, fleshy, wide-hipped). During the filming of Titanic James Cameron allegedly referred to Winset as “Kate weighs-a-lot.” I’ve personally never said an unkind word to any woman’s face for the misdemeanor of being a bit hefty or bulky, but I’ve held critical thoughts about such qualities for nearly my whole life. Everyone has.

Catherine Breillat made a film about a French obese teen and called it Fat Girl. Was that a size-ist slur or a statement of fact?

Things have changed over the last 30-plus years, but women of size and bulk are still not generally regarded as being in the 8, 9 or 10 categories…be honest. Nobody wants to be so impolite or coarse to put such women down for this, and it’s certainly permissible if this or that guy finds “big girls” attractive…knock yourselves out.

It’s noteworthy that the 60 Minutes interviewer (Cecilia Vega, who blends ardent feminism with standard obsequiousness) didn’t ask Winslet to explain or reiterate her own statement of self-condemnation for the crime of having worked with Woody Allen (Wonder Wheel) and Roman Polanski (Carnage).

Winslet: “It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful.”

I’ll tell you what was disgraceful back in ’21 — knee-jerk #MeToo Stalinist sentiments from Johnny-come-lately, trying-to-curry-favor activist actresses.

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