Although the legendary Dustin Hoffman is costarring in Into The Labyrinth, a forthcoming Italian-made film, he hasn’t been in any U.S.-produced films since The Meyerowitz Stories (’17). Allegations about Hoffman having been a sexual harasser in the ’80s surfaced that same year, and then came the infamous John Oliver incident in 12.3.17. So at age 82 he may be done.

I was watching the below clip from Kramer vs. Kramer last night, and thinking about his best performances. When I say “best” I mean the most engaging and likable as opposed to the most fiercely committed or energetic.

Hoffman’s glory decade was the ’70s, of course. He actually had a pretty great run between The Graduate and Death of a Salesman in ’85 — a span of roughly 18 to 19 years.

I have to be upfront and admit that I always felt removed from his Rain Man performance, which was technically adept but struck me as too mannered and tricky. And I’ve always really disliked his Lenny Bruce in Lenny — too much practiced charm, too hungry for affection. I hated him in Hook (along with the whole film), and I never liked his slightly dazed, open-mouthed Papillon performance either.

My top 15 are as follows: (1) The Graduate, (2) Marathon Man, (3) Kramer vs. Kramer, (4) Straight Time, (5) All the President’s Men, (6) Tootsie, (7) Straw Dogs, (8) Midnight Cowboy, (9) Death of a Salesman, (10) Dick Tracy, (11) Ishtar, (12) Wag The Dog, (13) I Heart Huckabees, (14) Meet the Fockers and (15) The Meyerowitz Stories.

What am I overlooking?

I should’ve watched Dave Chapelle: Sticks & Stones before going to Telluride, but I didn’t. Napping, shopping, watching a comfort film, distracted, caught up in this or that. And then Telluride happened. Then I returned Monday night (actually around 1:30 am) and worked yesterday. Then I finally watched it last night.

And I LQTM’ed all through it. Or at least, you know, smirked. I actually laughed out loud (not loudly but vocally) during the Jussie Smollet bit. But mostly I happily smirked. Partly at the material itself (although not at the “I don’t believe Michael Jackson‘s HBO accusers, and even if he did molest them he was still Michael Jackson” riff…I didn’t believe a single word of that) and partly in celebration of his skillful tweaking of the Outrage Police. Right now and for the foreseeable future, anyone and anything that riles cancel culture is good. And this, bless him, is what Chapelle does with casual but wonderful expertise.

“All The Worst White People Love Dave Chappelle’s Sticks & Stones“…really? I disagreed with a good 50% or perhaps even 60% of what Chappelle said during the show, and I loved it anyway. Because he agitates and aggravates the honorable descendants of Maximilien Robespierre.

Thank you, dearest Dave, for your snowflake imitation: “‘Duhhh…hey, duhhh…if you do anything wrong in your life, and I find out about it, I’m gonna try and take everything away from you….if I find out, you’re fucking finished.’ (To audience) Who’s that? That’s you. That’s what the audience sounds like to me. You are the worst motherfuckers I’ve ever tried to entertain in my fucking life.”

Old Chapelle: “I give all married men the same advice, gay or straight. Get a dog. A dog will love you all the time, but she’s not going to.”

Ten years ago I wrote a similar-sounding sentence — “life would be heavenly and rhapsodic if women had the personality and temperament of dogs” — and I’ve been paying in spilt arterial blood for that ever since. All I meant was that constant, non-judgmental love (which is what dogs and cats will give you if you show them tender love from the get-go) is a very soothing and comforting thing. My mistake was implying that I wanted to control women like some owners control their dogs. I’ve only had one dog in my entire life, and I never trained her to do a damn thing. I never said “sit” or “heel” or “roll over” to her…never. What I should have said was cats, not dogs.  Because I’ve been a cat man all my life. Cats do whatever they want, but if you’re kind and loving they’ll always reciprocate in kind. And it’s wonderful to be loved without being judged and scolded and side-eyed half the time.

Chapelle is wonderful because he says risky stuff despite the risks. We’re all living through The Terror right now, and most people are saying “showflake twitter terror is wonderful because only the bad people are paying the price!” Chapelle knows this and says what he says anyway. I didn’t agree with half of what he says in Stick & Stones, but I love him for being who he is.

Meghan McCain, after saying there will be "violence" in America if the AR-15 is banned because it's "the most popular gun" in the country, then declares that she's "not living without guns." pic.twitter.com/YlDtQwkFr0

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 3, 2019

What would Leni Riefenstahl say? Witholding reactions from this horse for the time being. Soliciting reactions from HE community. Your sense of the tone, tempo, attitude and whatnot?

One reaction: The little Nazi kid (Roman Griffin Davis) screaming when he discovers the Jewish refugee (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding in the attic? It’s irksome. Exaggerated, slapstick-level screaming to convey shock or surprise — a cheap trick.

After playing TIFF, Jojo Rabbit (Disney/Fox) opens on 10.18.

Two days ago Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg stated the conventional view that Noah Baumbach‘s Marriage Story is a 21st Century version of Robert Benton‘s Kramer vs. Kramer (’79).

Marriage Story, agreed, is Kramer-like in some ways, and at the same time less so in others.

The key difference, I believe, is that Kramer delivers a stronger, more emotional gut punch in terms of primal family conflict, step-by-step character revelation and especially by way of a gripping courtroom climax, and all of it fortified by flawless, profoundly effective performances.

Baumbach’s lead characters, Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), are sensible, perceptive and intelligent 30somethings with careers in the performing arts, and with a mild issue or two. Both are afflicted with somewhat selfish, competitive and headstrong attitudes, or at least in each other’s presence. But because of their self-knowledge and reasonableness there isn’t much in the way of character arcs or changes. Baumbach isn’t playing on that court.

But Benton is playing this game by way of Dustin Hoffman‘s Ted Kramer, a Manhattan ad agency creative who starts out as an aggressively nervous, insensitive, somewhat brittle alpha male and certainly no one’s idea of a good father. Meryl Streep is Ted’s wife Joanna, initially a woman suffering from depression and a floundering sense of identity.

But after Joanna leaves Ted is, for the first time in his life, the sole guardian and caretaker of his son (Justin Henry, who’s now pushing 50!) and grappling with each and every parental challenge on his own. Measure by measure he undergoes a gradual emotional growth arc — advanced dickishness to tolerably flawed to 100% devotional passion to his son.

Kramer may sound formulaic on paper but it’s believable and well-observed for the most part. It’s a movie about gradual, initially-fought-against changes for the better. And yet Benton’s script doesn’t oppressively spoon-feed.

Plus Kramer vs. Kramer is only 104 minutes long (it’s so skillfully assembled that you don’t notice the density as time flies by) while Marriage Story is 136 minutes, or roughly a half-hour longer.

This isn’t to suggest that Marriage Story doesn’t get you. It was the biggest hit of Telluride ’19, and for good reason. I felt completely at home and intimately involved every step of the way.

But side by side Kramer is, I feel, the slightly more poignant of the two. It has a way of seeping into your chest cavity, especially during Benton’s second and third acts. You can feel it coming together and gathering strength.

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As noted previously, Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman (debuting at the New York Film Festival on 9.27) runs in the vicinity of 209 minutes, give or take. This morning the NYFF’s press screening schedule stated that the Netflix release runs 210 minutes but that this is “approximate and subject to change.”

But of course. All directors like to fiddle around until the last minute. They usually stop editing under duress because distribution deadlines demand it. In Scorsese’s case this could mean some kind of last-minute subtraction or addition. No worries either way. Like any artist Scorsese is a constant searcher and rephraser, but always the master of his own house.

“I’m a white man and I’m straight, and I deserve it”…hah-hah.

In and of itself, behaving like an antagonistic asshole on purpose (i.e., inappropriate meta performance art) has never been “funny”, not to me and certainly not consistently, and therefore Between Two Ferns with Zack Galifianakis has, for myself and presumably others, always been a flatline experience.

Okay, every now and then this kind of material raises a smirk but that’s all. I half-chuckled when Brad Pitt spit at Zack five years ago.

The idea of myopic dickead-ism may be conceptually “funny” in a certain ironic light, but Galifianakis himself has never been funny, not really and not even in the first Hangover. I recognize this is a minority opinion as far as that 2009 film is concerned, but everyone was with me by the time the third Hangover film appeared.

Galafianakis managed to deliver a truly engaging performance exactly once, as Michael Keaton‘s agent in Birdman.

Almost everyone has appeared on the show as a way of asserting that they’re heh-heh-wink-wink cool and perceptive enough to get unfunny performance art and make fun of celebrityhood (and themselves) in the bargain, but theatrically or dramatically speaking it doesn’t make the slightest lick of sense that Matthew McConaughey, Benedict Cumberbatch, Peter Dinklage, Chrissy Teigen, David Letterman, Jason Schwartzman, Tiffany Haddish, Paul Rudd, Rashida Jones, John Legend, Adam Scott, Brie Larson, Jon Hamm, Awkwafina, Hailee Steinfeld, John Cho, Keanu Reeves, Chance the Rapper and Tessa Thompson would agree to sit with this meta-asshole.

And therefore Between Two Ferns: The Movie (Netflix, 9.20) is going to be, like, “seriously, c’mon…whatever.”

Obviously Hurricane Dorian, a Category Five storm, is a terrible beast that needs to be avoided at all costs. Winds between 185 to 200 miles per hour. But at the same time there’s something less than 100% fearsome about a storm that’s only moving along between one and five miles per hour. Obviously this is a serious life-and-death threat, but if I was Long John Silver with a wooden crutch I could probably out-walk this thing. For a storm to be truly scary it has to move swiftly. I’m talking about vague impressions here, not the meteorological reality.

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Fernando Meirelles‘ The Two Popes is an interesting, mildly appealing two-hander as far as it goes. I had serious trouble with the refrigator temps as I watched, but I probably would have felt…well, somewhere between faintly underwhelmed and respectfully attentive even under the best of conditions.

It’s a wise, intelligent, non-preachy examination of conservative vs progressive mindsets (focused on an imagined, drawn-out discussion between Anthony Hopkins‘ Pope Benedict and Jonathan Pryce‘s Pope Francis a few years back) in a rapidly convulsing world, and I could tell from the get-go that Anthony McCarten‘s script is choicely phrased and nicely honed. But I couldn’t feel much arousal. I sat, listened and pondered, but nothing ignited. Well, not much.

Possibly on some level because I’ve never felt the slightest rapport with the Catholic church, and because for the last 20 or 30 years I’ve thought of it in Spotlight terms, for the most part.

I love that Pope Francis (formerly or fundamentally Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina) is a humanist and a humanitarian with simple tastes, and I was delighted when he jerked his hand away when Donald Trump tried to initiate a touchy-flicky thing a couple of years ago. And I’m certainly down with any film in which two senior religious heavyweights discuss the Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby” and Abbey Road, etc.

But it just didn’t seem to amount to that much. For me. Maybe because I’m a lapsed Episcopalian from way back, or maybe because I’ve always considered myself, spiritually speaking, to be an LSD mystic by way of the Bhagavad Gita.

No disrespect to Meirelles, Pryce and Hopkins and the other principals. I just didn’t feel it. Please don’t let this stop you if you’re inclined to give it a shot when it starts streaming on Netflix. It’s fine. Just because a film is good, sturdy and respectable doesn’t mean you’re obliged to sing hosannahs.

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