I watched Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp’s Black Bag this evening, and nothing happened. I sat, I glared, I waited. Cupped my ears, but couldn’t hear half of the dialogue. I felt lost almost immediately. I began to search for a detailed synopsis on the phone, couldn’t find one. “What am I watching this thing for?”, I asked myself about an hour in. I began to hate the sleekness, the clever shop talk, the icy-cool vibes. Uninterested; not in the least bit engaged, I’ll have to give it another try when there’s a subtitled option.

From a 9.29.09 N.Y. Times article about Soderbergh by A.O. Scott:

“I will put my cards on the table and say that I have disliked quite a few, perhaps the majority, of Mr. Soderbergh’s movies of the past decade. I’ve been unmoved, perplexed, frustrated, repelled. But I’ve wanted to see them all more than once.

“And I always look forward to the next one. Around the time I was being ushered into that screening of The Informant!, news reports were circulating about “Moneyball,” an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s best seller about the business of baseball that was to star Brad Pitt. The studio, Sony, rejected Mr. Soderbergh’s script and dropped him from the project, and the story became a miniature Hollywood morality tale, either about a studio quashing a filmmaker’s bold vision or about a filmmaker’s self-indulgence reined in by the hard budgetary realities of the business.

“Mr. Soderbergh, in any case, has moved on to new problems and puzzles. And I find it hard not to root for him or to avoid paying him a compliment that is sure to sound more like criticism to some ears, but is really an acknowledgment of the risk he takes, again and again. He cares more about the movies than he cares about the audience.”

The comment-thread wokeys won’t let me speculate about the possible fates of Brad Pitt‘s Sonny Hayes and Damson Idris as Joshua “Noah” Pearce. But I’ll tell you this. If one of the two leads dies (remember Yves Montand‘s fate in Grand Prix?) and it’s not Pitt, the tectonic plates will shake and shudder like a 6.0 quake. Because just as there used to be a rule back in the aughts or ’90s that black dudes usually die by the second act of high-risk films (monster movies, war flicks), today that narrative has completely flipped. The odds are that Pitt will buy it…let’s be honest.

No, let’s not be honest. The wokeys don’t want that.

I’m sorry but I’ve been watching this every so often for a good 15 or 20 years…something about Elia Kazan‘s words and way of speaking melts me down.

Perfect summary: “That one person should need so much from another person in the way of tenderness and all that…and we all do, don’t we? We all marry or hopefully marry or hopefully hook up with some lady who’s gonna make us feel that we’re okay or we’re better and all that…we search for it and want it and crave it, and sometimes it happens and sometimes it happens for a while. And something in that basic story is what stirs people. Not the social-political thing so much as the human element.”

Remember that post-coital moment between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall? The one in which he says “well, as Balzac once said, there goes another novel.”

I can’t find the link or attest to the veracity of the following, but back in the late ’90s or early aughts I definitely read about a testy conversation between Bugsy collaborators Warren Beatty and James Toback. Beatty was angry at Toback for being too slow with the script, and at one point he told him to stay away from women until the work was finished. “You’re telling me this?” Toback replied. Beatty was adamant about sex depleting creative energy. I can’t recall the exact quote but Beatty allegedly said something along the lines of “I never come when I’m in the middle of making a film.”

This feeds right into a Steven Spielberg quote from a May 1977 interview with Interview magazine’s Susan Pile and Tere Tereba:

HE agrees — this is a better trailer than whatever they put out before.

If I was a male teen with ambivalent or queer-leaning thoughts in my head, and if I was vacationing with an unregenerately straight older brother who’s always trying to put the moves on any pistol-hot girl or woman who happens along, and if we were to get really high one night and then fall into a menage a quatre with a couple of adventurous women, I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do.

I wouldn’t kiss my older brother because….are you kidding me? Isn’t there a fundamental biological law that forbids any kind of erotic fooling around between brothers? I don’t care what the women are goading me into doing. Being bisexual or even gay, I might impulsively let my hair down with some dude I’ve met at a bar or on the beach, but there’s no way I’d try to slurp-kiss my older brother…are you frickin’ crazy?

And I double-triple-quadruple-quintuple wouldn’t fondle his erect member under a bedsheet and try to whack him off….get outta here! Not happening, dude!

I’m just speaking hypothetically in a general way, of course. If you’re into loose gossip you might deduce that I’m talking about something that may or may not happen in episodes #5 and #6 of The White Lotus and particularly between Sam Nivola‘s Lochlan Ratliff and Patrick Schwarzenegger as Saxon Ratliff, but I haven’t seen either episode so that would be an extremely loose-lippy deal. Okay, I’ve heard stuff from trusted bros.

I don’t know for a fact that this video is “being shown to all 5th graders at elementary schools in…Newton, Massachusetts,” as Tim Urban is claiming, but I do know for a fact that this is why many Americans loathe and despise trans activists, and why, God help us, Mostly Maniacal Orange Beast was re-elected last November. Woke transies brought this chaos upon us.

pic.twitter.com/N0i8X0mj54— Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) March 12, 2025

A video being shown to all 5th graders at elementary schools in my hometown of Newton, MA. pic.twitter.com/N0i8X0mj54

— Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) March 12, 2025

The all-but-forgotten Norman Foster, who has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it performance as a San Fernando Valley abortionist in Frank Perry’s Play It As It Lays (‘72), was indisputably the principal on-set auteur behind Walt Disney’s hugely popular Fess Parker / Davy Crockett shows of the mid ‘50s.

Literally a kind of Steven Spielberg-like maestro behind the biggest Disney franchise of all time, Foster directed all five Parker / Crockett episodes. .

Some may have also forgotten there were in fact five “Crockett” episodes that originally ran on the “Walt Disney Presents” Sunday night anthology show in 1955 and ‘56 — the original THREE in ‘55, followed by TWO episodes in ‘56 (i.e., the river boat prequels).

There were also TWO Crockett theatrical features that were composed of (a) the first three episodes and (b) the final two which costarred Jeff York’s “Mike Fink.”

Born in ‘03, Foster was covertly married to Claudette Colbert between ‘28 and ‘35. He had a decent career as a 1930s screen actor (romantic leads) before moving into directing in the late ‘30s (six “Mr. Moto” films and three “Charlie Chan” features **), ‘40s (including the Orson Welles-produced Journey Into Fear as well as the bizarrely titled Kiss The Blood Off My Hands).

A late-60ish Foster gives a supporting performance in Welles’ The Other Side of The Wind.

To repeat, Foster’s first three Parker / Crocketts were initially broadcast in 1955 on the Disney TV show (Sunday evening):  “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter”, “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress”, and “Dave Crockett at the Alamo”.  (The final episode killed Crockett off without depicting his actual demise.)

These were quickly fused together and theatrically released as Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, also in 1955.

Foster also directed the two Crockett prequel episodes, “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race” and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates.” The prequel episodes were also cut together and released as a 1956 theatrical feature.  

Foster also directed Disney’s The Sign of Zorro (‘58).

** Given the revoltingly racist nature of the Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto film series, will Justin Chang and Bowen Yang pool forces in order to get Foster posthumously cancelled?

Posted by yours truly 22 years ago: “There’s this better-than-pretty-good film about wealthy jaded Hollywood types called Play It As It Lays, and no under-40 person reading this column has heard of it, much less seen it.

“The director was the once-very-hot Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife, Rancho Deluxe, Mommie Dearest), and it was based on a respected 1970 Joan Didion novel of the same name, which Ben Stein once called ‘the best novel about Hollywood ever.’

“The stars were Tuesday Weld, Anthony Perkins (playing a cynical gay producer and giving the second-best performance of his life, after Psycho‘s Norman Bates), Adam Roarke (best thing he ever did), Tammy Grimes, Ruth Ford and several others you’ve probably never heard of.

“It stood out, as I recall, for its unusually dark and nihilistic portrait of some very skewed souls in the employ of the film industry, and for Perry’s fragmented, back-and-forth cutting that was not only in keeping with the style in which Didion’s book was written, but with the randomness of thoughts flicking around inside the head of its main character, Maria Wyeth (Weld).

“It was gloomy, ambitious, ‘different’ (even by unconventional ’70s standards), and Persona-like. It had a chilly, almost spooky fascination with downer attitudes among the moneyed elite. Some of the big gun critics bashed it, but others were admiring and spoke of Oscar-level achievement.

For many, many years there’s been no Bluray or DVD of Play It As It Lays, which opened 52 and 1/2 years ago (10.19.72 or two weeks before Richard Nixon‘s landslide re-election). 15 or 20 years ago it briefly played on the Sundance Channel; a decade ago it screened at the Hollywood Blvd. American Cinematheque, and then at the AC’s Los Feliz theatre three or four years ago.

And now…deliverance! A restored 4K DCP of this brilliant, all-but-forgotten film is currently showing at Manhattan’s Film Forum. (The final day is Thursday, 3.20.) Play it As It Lays wouldn’t have been restored if the rights hadn’t been cleared for a Bluray and streaming. I read somewhere that Indicator has the British Bluray home video rights.

One way or another Perry’s film will be commercially available to home viewers before long. After decades upon decades of absence.

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A first-peek screening of Jessica Palud‘s Being Maria (Kino Lorber), a drama about the making of Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Last Tango in Paris (’72), is happening at the Walter Reade theatre on Saturday, 3.15, under the banner of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

Being Maria will open commercially on Thursday, 3.20, at the Quad Cinema. Palud and Matt Dillon, who portrays Marlon Brando in the film, will show up at the Quad that day and on Friday, 3.21, for a post-screening q & a.

I intend to be there and ask questions about the truthfulness of Being Maria, as it portrays the filming of Last Tango‘s simulated anal-rape scene in a way that sharply differs from an account circulated by Bertolucci, to wit: “Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence on her” — i.e., the acting out of an anal rape scene in which Brando pretends to violate Schneider. “That is false!”

Jordan Ruimy caught an out-of-competition Cannes screening of Being Maria on 5.21.24. He emerged with a view that the film is #MeToo propaganda. Ruimy said that Palud’s film “pretends that the rape scene was unscripted [when in fact it was]. What the film suggests is that Brando and Bertolucci were unsatisfied by a take and plotted to add the rape scene without Schneider knowing it [in advance].”

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Hah-hah!…exhibition source to The Hollywoood Reporter‘s James Hibberd and Pamela McClintock, posted on 3.12.25: