Did anyone even see Terrence 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.

What I wrote: 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.

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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.”

…from the guy who got lucky, once, by impressing a racial stamp upon a certain Ira Levin novel.

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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.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s 4.17 Variety review of Becoming Madonna:

“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 Blonde Ambition (“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.

Alas, Madonna didn’t like it and that’s where it ended.

An instant negative verdict was rendered after Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck won the 2024 Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice award.

Just about every visiting industry pro said “why did a film that generated zero festival conversation win the top trophy? What is wrong with the Toronto residents who voted for it? Are they saps? Why didn’t they show a little more taste?”

THR‘s Scott Feinberg on 9.15.24: “The Life of Chuck may be a lovely film, but it had virtually no profile coming in to the fest [and] generated virtually no discussion at the fest.”

An adaptation of a Stephen King novella, the “genre-trippping” feature costars Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, Chiwetel “Chewy” Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Mark Hamill (73 going on 94), Annalise Basso, Mia Sara and HE fave Nick Offerman narrating.

Neon will open Chuck stateside on 6.6.25 with a nationwide expansion a week later (6.13).

It was unnecessarily invasive and even cruel of Santa Fe authorities to release video of a cop examination of the Santa Fe residence of the late Gene Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa.

Okay, they blurred out the bodies but c’mon…this is humiliating.

That said, why were several rooms in their sprawling home such a revolting mess? It looks like a home occupied by alcoholics or druggies…people with no discipline or any sense of sanitation.

Why did they allow their home to become infested by rats? Is this an age thing? Do old folks just give up and surrender to chaos because it’s somehow more comfortable to do so rather than maintain order and cleanliness?

And the size of the place….Jesus. It looks like a sprawling hotel or a sporting lodge of some kind…at least twice as large as any reasonable older couple might require. What couple would choose to live in a place this cavernous?

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a popcorn movie…a cheeseball thang…half-promising, half-wallow, aimed at the schmoes. And you’d better believe it’s been overpraised. I suspected as much when the first reactions broke, and now I know.

At first it’s a Mississippi folklore comic-book fable (great music, ecstasy dancing, sweaty sex, good cunnilingus), and then Coogler flips a switch and it becomes an ultra-violent schlock vampire flick that hits too hard and just bleeds, howls, groans and sweats all over the place.

Sinners is peddling comic-book country lore…actually impactful, storied, mythical and not half bad during the semi-realistic first 40%, but once the X-treme vampire stuff kicks in it’s basically coarse, bloody, gut-punch schlock. Crimson geysers, ragged bite wounds, wooden stakes, burnt flesh. Primitive slop.

Young Miles Caton is a gifted Delta Blues singer-guitarist — Robert Johnson reincarnated. And hangin’ with 89 year-old Buddy Guy at the very end is a treat. The musical sequences in the juke joint are joyful and jumpin’. And yes, the sight and sound of a chorus of Irish vampires singing Irish folk tunes under the moonlight as the bloody-faced Jack O’Connell dances an Irish jig is wonderful (O’Connell is probably doomed to play surly villains from here on) — the most bizarre spectacle I’ve ever seen or heard in a monster film.

And the buffed-up Michael B. Jordan, playing twin criminal brothers from Chicago, is straight and sturdy enough. He also gets laid twice, or rather the brothers make out separately, one with Hailee Steinfeld (turning 30 next year), another with Wunmi Mosaku.

But the second half is just crude vampire mulch. Much of the drawlin’ dialogue is unintelligible…so slurry and mumbly that I knew early on that I had no choice but to resort to the Wiki synopsis. Skim through this sucker….Eugene O’Neill, it ain’t…crazy, cartoonish gruel…pulp mythology.

And Autumn Durald Arakawa’s cinematography is way too dark. That or the Westport AMC’s projector lamp is close to death.

Yeah, there’s an obvious racial current or metaphor…Coogler sprinkles in a few Klanners, fat rednecks and dumb crackers straight out of Mississippi Burning, and they all meet with just desserts. Jordan filling them with hot lead a la Billy Wilder‘s St. Valentine’s Day massacre is part of the grand finale…yeah!

Sidenote for fanatical bully contingent:

I’m a deepwater cinephile with the usual exacting standards…the standards met and fulfilled by thousands of filmmakers throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.

All the Metacritic and RT critics know there’s virtually no upside to slamming (or partially slamming) an ambitious Ryan Coogler movie that deals with deep-south racism and plays like a grindhouse flick from Sam Arkoff, and so they all put on their ballerina shoes before reviewing it.

I don’t play that tip-toe game.