Ancient Chinese movie director’s curse: “May you peak during your first six years, and then experience a long, very gradual, mostly erratic decline over the next 25 years.”

Friendo: Did you ever get to meet/interview Michael Ritchie? Yes, he made stinkers like The Golden Child and The Island. but don’t you miss the guy who directed The Bad News Bears, Smile, The Candidate and Downhill Racer?

HE: Downhill Racer, The Candidate and Smile comprise Ritchie’s masterful trio. In late ’23 I finally saw and had an okay time with The Bad News Bears, but I don’t swear by it. Plus I was agreeably amused by Semi-Tough (’77).

Friendo: You don’t think BNB was his masterpiece?

HE: No — Downhill Racer and The Candidate, both starring peak Robert Redford, are the top two. Smile is a close third.

Friendo: Disagree, pal. Ritchie’s best, in the correct order, are BEARS, SMILE, CANDIDATE, FLETCH, RACER, DIGGSTOWN and SEMI-TOUGH. I might add AN ALMOST PERFECT AFFAIR to the mix as Monica Vitti is my #1 time-travel crush.

HE: Diggstown?

EW‘s Chris Willman on 4.26.01: “It’s difficult to think of any director, ever, who had a more consistently uneven career.”

Ritchie died of cancer in 2001, at the age of 62.

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Just about everything that ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith said last night was incisive, spot-on, brilliant.

Posted on Axios on 1.19.25: “The $TRUMP memecoin — a financial asset that didn’t exist [last] Friday afternoon — now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.

“Why it matters: The coin (technically a token that’s issued on the Solana blockchain) has massively enriched Trump personally, enabled a mechanism for the crypto industry to funnel cash to him, and created a volatile financial asset that allows anyone in the world to financially speculate on Trump’s political fortunes.”

Posted on The Byte, also on 1.19: “The whole thing reeks to high heaven. Trump’s crypto isn’t shooting up in value because of any intrinsic technical or business acumen; it’s doing so because investors believe — rightly, in all likelihood — that it will be a lucrative conflict of interest over the next four years.”

Just saw it minutes ago…”Buster!”

1.25.25 update — posted this morning in below comment thread:

The idea behind yesterday’s “Anguished, Scowling, Bitter” post was not hate per se. I was mostly okay with Emilia Perez, remember, when I first saw it in Cannes eight months ago, and I don’t hate it now.

But it certainly DOES flirt with mediocrity during the second half. And the bottom-line truth is that if not for the trans signpost factor, Perez would simply not be a Best Picture nominee.

This is a plea for Academy voters to emerge from the cultural woke cocoon of the past six or seven years, and to finally put aside sexual-identity or gender issues as deciding criteria. Enough with the social justice warrior crap.

Please consider voting for the Best Picture nominee that doesn’t do the woke two-step (please give that nagging “revolutionary” ethos a rest) while actually fulfilling and delivering a certain kind of high on its own emotional and cinematic terms. Which is what Anora, Conclave and A Complete Unknown manage to do, handily.

Joe and Jane Popcorn voted for Trump in order to get rid of the crazy wokey or at least keep it on the sidelines. For the love of God, smell the coffee. The woke point has been made, and now it’s time to set that bird free.

HE commenter K. Bowen: “It seems like the Academy is about to hand the trophy to a movie no one actually likes.”

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will be able to score very handily now, and a 5 pm “happy hour” inside the Pentagon will become an instant thing.

I sympathize with owners of burnt-to-the-ground homes who want to clean up and remove debris as quickly as possible. I’m no Trumpie but The Beast telling L.A. mayor Karen Bass that residents should be allowed to start clearing out rubble with all due haste…that’s a good thing. Don’t keep them from doing so because of this or that nickle-and-dime regulation…regulations which always slow things down by weeks if not months.

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From Zack Sharf‘s 1.24.25 Variety story about Sophie Hyde‘s Jimpa, a story about “queerness and queer joy and trans joy,” according to costar Aud Mason-Hyde, Hyde’s non-binary son.

Mason-Hyde plays the gender-ambiguous Frances, Olivia Colman portrays Frances’ mom Hannah, and John Lithgow becomes Jimpa, Frances’ Amsterdam-residing gay granddad.

Sharf: “One of the most notable aspects of Jimpa is that it features full-frontal nudity from Lithgow, who is 79 years old.

“The actor says that ‘nudity is an extraordinary tool in creating an impact…it’s the one thing all of us hide from the rest of the world…it’s the one thing we keep guarded and very much to ourselves [but] if you’re willing to expose that for a good reason in the telling of a story, then there’s nothing more powerful.’”

Thanks to Scharf and Lithgow for their candor. I wasn’t all that interested in seeing Jimpa, frankly, but now I’m really not interested.

Three years ago Hyde’s Good Luck To You, Leo Grande (’22), which also featured an older actor (i.e., mid 50-ish Emma Thompson) performing a nude scene, played Sundance. I wrote a piece about the film on 1.26.22, and here’s one of my comments:

“I wouldn’t want to see a nude scene with anyone who’s too old or saggy or out-of-shape. There are very few older actors whom I’d be willing to watch without clothing, but think about the possibilities. Imagine, for example, if Neil Young or Jack Nicholson decided to star in a film that called for full-frontal schlongola. My reaction would be filled with terror.

“Even a nude scene with a muscular, rugged-looking old actor like Harrison Ford…even that might be a problem.”

If Joe Biden had kept his word about being a one-term “bridge” president and encouraged a competitive Democratic Party primary process to start in the summer of ’23, a strong candidate (possibly Kamala Harris, possibly someone better) might have emerged…a candidate who might have defeated Donald Trump on 11.5.24.

But of course, Joe turned arrogant and decided that God wanted him to successfully run for re-election, and that decision basically doomed democracy in the U.S. of A., and here we are. Joe caused it, Joe did it…Joe is the bad guy. Which is precisely what James Carville said to Al Hunt a couple of days ago.

Personal HE plea to Academy members: Don’t follow through with crowning Emilia Perez. Joe and Jane Popcorn hate this film (especially in Mexico!) and you’ll just be spitting in their faces if you give Jacques Audiard’s film a Best Picture Oscar.

How would you process an Audiard/Netflix win if you were among the Rotten Tomatoes naysayers? “Whee, goodie!”? 70% of the mass audience isn’t feeling the Perez love, and your response is going to be…what, “suck on it because we know better?”

Please step outside yourselves and your identity-above-all, “send Donald Trump a message” agenda…cinematic transportation over wokeism…begging on my knees.

1.25.25 update — posted this morning in comment thread:

The idea behind this post is not hate per se. I was mostly okay with Emilia Perez, remember, when I first saw it in Cannes eight months ago, and I don’t hate it now. But it certainly DOES flirt with mediocrity during the second half. And the bottom-line truth is that if not for the trans signpost factor, Perez would simply not be a Best Picture nominee. This is a plea for Academy voters to emerge from the cultural woke cocoon of the past six or seven years, and to finally put aside sexual-identity or gender issues as deciding criteria. Enough with the social justice warrior crap. Please consider voting for the Best Picture nominee that doesn’t do the woke two-step (please give that nagging “revolutionary” ethos a rest) while actually fulfilling and delivering a kind of high on its own emotional and cinematic terms. Which is what Anora, Conclave and A Complete Unknown manage to do. 

Joe and Jane Popcorn voted for Trump in order to get rid of the wokey or at least tone it down. For the love of God, smell the coffee. The woke point has been made, and now it’s time to set that bird free.

Penned by Sasha with significant Jeff edits: The film industry and the Oscars have dug themselves into a hole, and that hole is called “not celebrating movies for normal people.” They celebrate movies made for themselves. They make movies to look good to define who they are…their utopian diorama.

In the late teens they brought in international voters, who don’t care about the film industry here. They don’t care about movies that we care about. Or if our movie theaters survive. That’s not their ultimate goal. They like to pick movies that they like, which is fine. Nothing wrong with that.

But the Academy basically made its bed when they invited in all those international voters, which they did to solve the problem of the screeching activists who were coming at them for Oscars So White and all that.

Oscar voters have shown “not just their disdain for the public but also the American studio system. This is the second year in a row in which two films from the International Feature category hav also landed in Best Picture, taking slots away from A Real Pain, September 5 and Sing Sing. Why? Why can’t there be any way to recognize American studio films to help, you know, salvage a collapsing empire? Revive a corpse? Save movie theaters? Just spitballing here.

So the Oscars are going “international” and on streaming, specifically Netflix, which is also international. How convenient for them, eh? Shame about Hollywood though. Shame about movie theaters. Shame about all of us who love them.

I don’t think there is any bringing back the industry we all knew and loved, and I mean one that was somewhat vibrant and semi-humming along as recently as ten years ago.

Consider the opening paragraph of David Rooney’s Sundance review of Jimpa. It contains a word that gave me pause. Correction — vaguely pissed me off.