During his 3.14 “New Rules” rant, Real Time’s Bill Maher discussed how various historic terms for those who traffic in performative sexual satisfaction-for-hire have more or less been retired (the terms, I mean) in favor of “sex worker.”

This led to an acknowledgment of roughly 20 such female film performances (prostitute, whore, lady of the evening) that have won Oscars and another 20 that were nominated but didn’t win.

Out of this came a side mention of the Madonna-whore complex, and then a diss about Madonna (Mary Louise Ciccone) having never made “a good one”. Dead wrong — Alan Parker’s Evita (‘96) is completely respectable (80% or 85% of it is actually damn good). Madonna’s all-singing Evita Peron was / is the best she’s ever been. I’ve watched the film several times over the last 29 years. It more than holds up.

“Fate, Luck, Serendipity,” posted on 5.11.17:

The other day Patti Lupone dismissed Madonna‘s performance as Evita Peron in Alan Parker’s 1996 film adaptation (which I’ve always enjoyed and admired). “Madonna is a movie killer,” Lupone said. “She’s dead behind the eyes. She couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. She should not be on film or on stage. She’s a wonderful, you know, performer for what she does, but she is not an actress.”

(Lupone’s performance as Evita in the original 1979 Broadway production is commonly regarded as the summit.)

Except Madonna was never better than she was in Parker’s film. She wasn’t brilliant or staggering, but she gave it everything she had and this, coupled with the fact that Evita itself was a way-above-average musical, makes her performance a fully honorable, good-enough thing. Madonna was more than reasonably decent in the role, at least to the extent that she didn’t get in the way.

Sidenote: I don’t agree about Hayden Christensen‘s performance in Shattered Glass being a high-water mark. I found his manner in that film oppressively phony and cloying, making it impossible to believe that Stephen Glass‘s coworkers at the New Republic would buy into his bullshit.

From a Lee Bollinger interview, posted four days ago (3.11.25) by Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin, The Chronicle of Higher Education:

…to admit that it took me this long to finally sit down with Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. I’d planned to catch it theatrically in Manhattan seven or eight weeks ago…can’t explain, don’t ask. Earlier today I streamed it on Amazon for nearly six dollars. Just me, Leigh, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and the others.

I was riveted by it. Brutally honest writing, acting, sculpture. No “story” to speak of but pared to the bone. With the exception of one dialogue-free scene near the end involving Jean-Baptiste’s son (played by Tuwaine Barrett) that I didn’t believe, there’s not even a faint sprinkling of bullshit in any of it.

Jean-Baptiste is guns-blazing brilliant in a way that really slaps you down — her character’s anger…her misery, I mean…seeps right into your bloodstream. No “acting”, no charm, zero excuses. I’m sorry but I found MJB’s unprovoked acidic rantings kind of funny. (Keep in mind that the Wiki page describes Truths as a “comedy–drama”).

How in the world did Jean-Baptiste not land a Best Actress Oscar nomination? How or why was Hard Truths blown off by Cannes, Venice and Telluride?

Every single costar (Michele Austin and David Webber especially) delivers the same cut-the-crap realism as MJB. Leigh, 82, is such a master.

How much better looking or sounding can Criterion’s forthcoming 4K Bluray of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer possibly be? Ask yourself that.

I’ve asked myself this and more, and I’m still buying the fucker. Despite my owning a perfectly pleasing upgraded Bluray version that came out nine years ago`.

How can I resist a “new 4K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack approved by Friedkin”? Plus an “alternate 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack…one 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features”?

Posted on 5.3.13:

“I’ve seen Sorcerer (a terrible title in terms of what the 1977 Joe Popcorn crowd was led to expect) six or seven times, but until last night I’d never wondered about the gas. The two trucks make a 200-mile journey through the jungle, and driving entirely in first and second gear. Surely they couldn’t make the trip on a single tank each, and yet I didn’t notice any extra cans of gas strapped to the flatbeds. And how long did the journey take? Two days? 36 hours? The film gives you no real clue about the clock.

“And Scheider getting iced at the very end seems wrong. The trip was hell but he made it through and had earned redemption by delivering the nitroglycerin. I wanted his character to taste the satisfaction of a job well done, and perhaps a little serenity.

“Scheider apparently wasn’t happy with how he came off. From the Wiki page: “Scheider was angry that in the final cut Friedkin removed a subplot that showed his character in a more sympathetic light; it involved him befriending a small boy from the village. For that reason, Scheider consistently refused to comment on the film.”

[Originally posted on 4.13.14] “”Again — Why Sorcerer Failed“:

“I’ve never completely bought William Friedkin‘s theory that Sorcerer died because the hugely popular Star Wars, which opened on 5.25.77 (or a month before Friedkin’s film), had ushered in a sudden sea-change in mainstream cinematic appetites.

“He meant that a new comic-book, popcorn-high attitude had taken over, and had brought about a consequential lessening of interest in gritty, noirish, character-driven adult dramas.

“Sorcerer, of course, was never going to be a hugely commercial thing. It’s a fairly downbeat, men-against-the-elements adventure flick made for guys. Women don’t go for sweaty, atmospheric, end-of-the-road Latin American fatalism.

“You But I suspect that Sorcerer would have been at least a modest success if it had delivered a sense of justice in the case of Roy Scheider‘s character, a wise guy on the run from the New Jersey mob.

“Sorcerer is about four desperate men hired to deliver nitroglycerin in trucks to a burning oil well in the middle of the South American jungle. Scheider is the only one who makes it in the end. He’s gone through hell, and despite his previous criminal inclinations, the audience has been taught to respect him for getting through this terrible ordeal. They may not love him, but he’s done a really tough thing and earned, in movie-story terms, a kind of redemption. A little peace and gratification.

“But then Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green turn around and stab Scheider with an icepick. Mob assassins (accompanied by a friend who had helped him escape the country and who has now obviously betrayed him) arrive at the very end to rub him out, and there’s no escape.

“Yeah, yeah, I know — that’s what ‘noir’ is. Life is hard and cruel and then you die. But that’s not how audiences see it.

“I felt this way when I first saw Sorcerer, and I felt it again last night. Scheider doesn’t deserve death — he’s earned a chance to live again and maybe do things right for the first time in his life. But Sorcerer rejects this notion, and that’s why audiences rejected it. It left a sour taste by (a) making it clear that Scheider’s scummy, low-life character is possessed by fierce determination and concentration and courage, and then (b) zotzing him anyway.

“That’s a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the audience, a kind of a burn.

“This, trust me, is a major reason why Sorcerer screwed the pooch. A movie doesn’t have to end happily or sadly, but it does have to end on a note of justice.”

Steven Soderbergh‘s Black Bag made the vast majority of critics critics flutter with joy…RT 97% approval!…Metaçritic 85! HE, however, was less enthused, partly due to an inability to hear roughly half of the dialogue, which was partly augmented by a combination of shitty mixing and gloopy British accents.

I thought I was all alone until discovering that Joe and Jane CinemaScore have given Soderbergh’s film a B. If you know anything about CinemaScore ratings, an A-minus means “good with a couple of problems,” a B-plus means “decent…not too bad” and a B means “meh, not so much.”

In sum, I do not live in an elite ivory tower and I don’t fool around. There’s a lot I despise about mass taste in movies, but at the end of the day “I am a river to my people”**.

On top of which RT popcorn-munchers have given it a not-so-hot 75% rating.

** This line has been stolen from Anthony Quinn‘s Auda Abu Tayi. More precisely from screenwriter Robert Bolt.

Who cares if you can’t feel pain when somebody slices your hand off with a samurai sword? You’re still missing a hand. Or if you fall from the roof of a three-story apartment building and fracture your leg? It’s better not to feel the pain, of course, but your leg is still in two or three pieces and you can’t walk very well and you certainly can’t run.

And if you can’t feel pain doesn’t that also mean you can’t feel pleasure?

I decided to advance-hate-watch Novocaine many weeks ago. It’s obviously a low-rent concept, not only aimed at drooling yahoos but made by three such specimens — co-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen and screenwriter Lars Jacobson. Get outta my life.

“The premise is actually pretty tasteless, and though fans of such cartoonish violence might be willing to overlook that to get their fill of live-action Looney Tunes mayhem, others with more sensitive stomachs will feel differently.” — One Guy’s Opinion, posted on 3.13.25.

How about a movie about a guy who can’t feel emotional pain? In other words, the life of a sociopath?

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.