THIS RIFF CONTAINSA SPOILER if you live in a deep, dark, wifi-free cave…:
I explained a few days ago that I’d pretty much decided to shine TheLastofUs, largely because I’m flat-out repelled by Bella Ramsey’s “Ellie”…feral eyes, frosty “they/them” vibes, bunned hair. “Pretty much” meant there was, at most, a one-in-five chance I might watch it again. But now that Pedro Pascal’s Joel has been shot, golf-clubbed and stabbed to death, we’re stuck with Ellie as the lead character and that, to me, is death. I really hate this show, and if Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann…okay, Iwon’tsayit. But I’mdefinitely flushingit. Get outta my life.
Speaking as a skeptical non-Catholic and, of course, a 2025 cinephile, HE’s easiest and most immediate understanding of the inner finaglings and political struggles of Vatican politics stems, of course, from Edward Berger’s Conclave (‘24), which ended with the choosing of a kind of wokePope, aka the intersex, Mexican-born CardinalBenitez, who chose to be called Pope Innocente, played by Carlos Diehz.
And yet the 88 year-old Pope Francis, who suddenly passed last night in Rome, was a bit of an anomaly — a compassionate progressive who had reached out to gay Catholics and, in Conclave terms, was staunchly opposed to the strict conservative dogma of Serge Castellito’s Cardinal Tedesco. Nonetheless Francis spokeout against woke fanaticism and cancel culture, and in so doing presented himself as a fair-minded and well-principled fellow.
A Jesuit from Argentina, the kindly Jorge Mario Bergoglio was, it seemed to some of us, a real-life version of Benitez, minus a certain physical characteristic.
I knew Francis was a good egg when Sarah Palin frowned and harrumphed when he was chosen to be Pope in March 2013.
And now, in a manner of speaking, RalphFiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence will once again be summoning cardinals to Vatican City to select a new pontiff. Who will be Papa Francesco’s successor? Another Benitez or…who knows?…Stanley Tucci’s Cardinal Bellini, Castellito’s Tedesco, John Lithgow’s Cardinal Tremblay, Lucian Msamati’s Cardinal Adeyemi, or perhaps even Lawrence himself?
If I was running the show, I would urge the choosing of a contemporary Pope Joan.
Eight days ago (Saturday, 4.13) I was trying to figure out ways to reduce the crap and clutter on my decade-old Macbook Pro, which has less RAM than my 2019 laptop and is all gummed up.
I had this dumbshit idea, you see, that erasing the music, photo and video files that were sitting on the laptop would accomplish this task.
Why didn’t I simply say to myself “uhm, wait…if you delete these mp3 items from your Apple music library on this computer all your music files will be wiped off your Cloud-based library…all your songs and albums will be gone from all your devices.”
I’ll tell you why I didn’t say this. It’s because I’m a doofus on tech stuff.
Anyway, I deleted the mp3s and realized the next morning that all the music was indeed absent from my Apple music library. Just under 4000 songs, roughly 1200 album portions. Plus there was a ton of music library stuff from burned CDs and old Napster files from…Jesus, a quarter-century ago.
I was told by a couple of senior Apple reps that there was no easy remedy…that the music might simply be gone for good. Then a Genius Bar guy explained after some study that I could at least download purchased song files from my iTunes app, which I began doing on Wednesday….relief. This simple remedy hadn’t been mentioned by those senior Apple tech adviser bozos. The term “iTunes app” never so much as passed through their lips.
A day later I was cleaning out the same Macbook Pro when I realized that the “deleted” music files were still sitting in my trash bin app. It was simply a matter of selecting “all”, going to “actions” and reinstalling the files in the Apple music depository.
As we speak everything (3819 items) is back on the phone and in the Cloud, of course. And I have the option, of course, of downloading new albums and whatnot from my Apple music Library subscription service.
Did anyone even seeTerrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups? Barack Obama was still in the White house when it opened. I reviewed it (“King of Flakes“)during the 2016 Santa Barbara Film Festival.
WhatIwrote: Last night I sat through Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups (Broad Green, 3.4) at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre.
I didn’t watch or absorb it — I “sat through” it like I was waiting for an overdue bus. It’s about warm climes and lassitude and a truly profound lack of effort by everyone involved, particularly Malick.
What a tragic journey he’s been on since The Tree of Life. Self-wanking, anal-cavity-residing…the man is so lost it looks like home to him. And it is a kind of home, I gather, that producers Sarah Green and Nicholas Gonda have seemingly created for the guy. Take your time, Terry…take your sweet-ass time.
Once regarded as one of Hollywood’s great auteurist kings (Badlands, Days of Heaven) but more recently renowned for his whispery mood-trip films (a tendency that began with The Thin Red Line) and for indulging in meditative reveries to a point that the reveries become the whole effing movie, Malick, free to operate within his own cloistered realm, lives to “paint” and dither and go all doodly-doo and mystical and digressive when the mood strikes, which is apparently all the time when he’s shooting and cetainly when he’s editing.
40 years ago I was convinced Malick had seen the burning bush and was passing along God’s-eye visions, and now look at him.
Knight of Cups is To The Wonder Goes To Southern California with a lot more dough and a greater variety of hot women. They could re-title it Terrence Malick’s Wide, Wide World of Delectable, Half-Dressed, Model-Thin Fuck Bunnies.
They could also retitle it Terrence Malick’s Beaches…boy, does Christian Bale love going to the beach at magic hour and sloshing barefoot through the tides! This meandering dream-doze movie is all beaches, all deserts, all swanky condos and office towers and absurdly arrogant McMansions. And all half-captured moods and fall-away moments and conversational snippets.
Who am I? Why am I so damn lazy? Can I do anything besides wander around and gaze at stuff? Either Bale is on Percocets or I need to drop a Percocet the next time I watch this.
The most attention-getting thing that happens in Knight of Cups is a semi-serious earthquake (lasts around ten seconds, feels like a 7 or 7.5). The second is a home robbery by a couple of shaved-head Latinos. The third is a nude blonde standing on an outdoor balcony (possibly Bale’s). The rest is spiritual ether and vapor and kicking sand.
If you know Los Angeles you know Malick is hitting all the visually arresting spots within a 100-mile range — the beaches, downtown LA, Venice, Malibu, LAX, Palm Springs, Joshua Tree rock formations, etc. Malick’s Los Angeles is like Woody Allen‘s Manhattan — all affluent eye candy. I’ve wandered around all these places and looked up at the sky and have channelled the same moods and thoughts that Christian Bale‘s Rick seems to be having. I’ve done it over and over. I know this realm up and down.
I know what this film basically is — cerebral dialogue, icy vibes, convoluted twist-plotting, more cerebral dialogue. I know this sounds dilletante-ish but I didn’t find my first viewing intriguing enough to pay this much for a re-match…sorry. Get that rental down to $4.99 and we’ll be in business.
But the more I kick it around, the more I think “the ’60s” actually began on 5.29.63 — the day that Martin Ritt‘s Hud opened commercially. That was the real beginning of boomer anti-authoritarianism, of “whatever the WWII generation tried to teach us was wrong or at the very least hollow as fuck.”
Except for Cailee Spaeny‘s pain-in-the-ass “look at my shell-shocked reactions” acting style, that is. Otherwise it’s great. Why hasn’t some CG wizard taken this clip and expertly switched out Nick Offerman‘s face for Donald Trump‘s?
George Clooney‘s blackish-brown Edward R. Murrow hair looks wrong. Like a vampire with a bad hairdresser.
If you don’t like an overabundance of gray hair, you have to color your thick locks just so. Don’t use too dark of a color (a nice medium brown), and always let some healthy gray shoot out from the edge of the temples, and never color the sideburns.
I’ve seen the 20th Century Fox / Henry King movie of Carousel two or three times, and while it’s not a great or even an especially high-grade film in a dramatic sense, the finale always melts me down.
But the deepest emotional depth charge, for me, has always come from Frank Sinatra‘s rendering of “Soliloquy,” which he recorded for the film’s soundtrack on 8.16.55
Sinatra sang at least two songs (“Soliloquy” and “If I Loved You”) that day for the 20th Century Fox / Henry King movie. The session happened on a Fox soundstage on Pico Blvd. The orchestra was conducted by Alfred Newman.
On the first day of shooting in Booth Bay, Maine, Sinatra was told he’d have to shoot his scenes twice, once in 35 millimeter and again in Cinemascope 55, a large format process similar to VistaVision and Todd-AO.
Stunned by this news, Sinatra said “no dice” and quit on the spot. He was replaced by Gordon MacRae. The finished film opened on 2.16.56.
“We’d like an authoritative chronicle of everything that happened [during Madonna‘s struggle to make it], since Madonna intersected with as many notable figures as Zelig. And Michael Ogden, the director of Becoming Madonna, churns through these years in a slipshod way.
“The film keeps tossing out stray bits of information, like the fact that Madonna just about moved into The Music Building, the graffiti-strewn beehive of a studio rehearsal fortress several blocks south of Times Square.
“Yet it leaves out so much lore! Like the fact that Madonna studied under Martha Graham, or that she worked as a hat-check girl at the Russian Tea Room, or that she was sexually assaulted at knifepoint, or that she had a relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat, or the pivotal way that she recruited ‘Jellybean’ Benitez to remix her first album.
“And though it’s part of Madonna’s legend that she pestered the DJs at Danceteria to play her demo tracks, it would have been nice if the movie filled in that chapter instead of just…mentioning it.”
Does anyone remember my 12.16.16 HE piece that praised Elyse Hollander‘s BlondeAmbition (“Popstar Bitch is Born”), a still-unproduced script that explores Madonna’s tough Manhattan years (’81 through ’83)?
I hereby pledge to send a PDF of Hollander’s script to anyone who’d like to read it.
