Two weeks ago (11.26) I posted a Twitter reaction to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (Searchlight, 12.25). I was free this morning to post a longer review but I couldn’t get into it. I felt I’d already said what was important in concise form, and that expanding with more words and sentences wasn’t full necessary on this particular day. Maybe tomorrow.

A Complete Unknown has at least three great scenes (more actually) so it definitely meets the Howard Hawks test. The first knockout is when Dylan sings “Song for Woody” to Woody Guthrie in his hospital room. The second is Dylan trying out a half-writt4n song before Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and his family. The third is Dylan playing “Blowing in the Wind” to Joan Baez in his or her Manhattan apartment, which is preceded by her “you’re kind of an asshole” line. The fourth is when the chorus of boos and howls greet Dylan and his electric bandmates at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival. I could go on.

I like this passage from Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review:

“A Complete Unknown is a drama of scruffy naturalism, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as lope right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. Yet the feel — the effect — is that of a musical. You’d assume that might be true of any classic rock biopic, but in this case the film, with its beautifully haphazard song-cycle structure, truly is about Dylan and his music, and how the music changed everything.

“Each new song is a dramatic episode, whether it’s Dylan performing ‘Masters of War’ in the Gaslight Cafe just after the Cuban Missile Crisis or trying out ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with Baez in [her] living room or singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ at Newport, where the audience, by the end, sings along as if it was a song they always knew.”

This morning a friendo shared the excitement conveyed in Gleiberman’s rave. I asked him “what say ye to the pisshounds who are calling it a folkie jukebox musical or a lounge-act movie?”

Friendo response: “I only know that I loved watching it and am haunted by it. I haven’t read any of the other Complete Unknown reviews, but here’s what what the pisshounds are saying — they’re saying that boomer culture must be bashed, and that white-male rock culture must be bashed — we must take this all down a peg. So they’ll find a reason.”

My pre-Thanksgiving reaction was that I felt compelled to forgive its primarily structural, non-lethal shortcomings. I certainly felt an urge to brush them aside while chatting with a smattering of the AMC Lincoln Square cool kidz (including the Hoboken-residing twin Oscar Expert bruhs) while outside theatre #7.

The tail end of the final sentence should read “so much of Unknown is spot–on, the real thing, a bell ringer. I was sorta kinda emotionally melting during the first half hour or so — literally on the verge of tears. Yes, I’ve been deeply invested in Dylan my entire life so I’m especially susceptible but still…

My second viewing of A Complete Unknown will be on Wednesday, 12.18 on an IMAX screen at the AMC Kips Bay in Manhattan.

Luigi Mangione, am intelligent guy, presumably understood all along that cameras are everywhere in NYC (including youth hostels), and that if he wanted to escape capture after shooting Brian Thompson in the back on 12.4.24, he needed to wear a blonde Beatle wig, dyed eyebrows, a paste-on blonde beard and tinted glasses at all times.

Did he wear a disguise? Of course not, and so yesterday he was popped at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. It’s almost as if he wanted to get caught.

The common theme is that Average Joes (subway riders + health-challenged people getting raw deals from United Health) are angry about the elite constantly giving them the short end of the stick.

People are not so much suffering these days from shitty health coverage as they are from obesity, sedentary life styles and poor eating habits.

20 minutes into last night’s viewing of Babygirl, I texted a friend who’d seen it a while back.

HE to friendo: “Babygirl is pretty good!”
Friendo to HE: “Kidman amazing.”
HE to friendo: “Halina Reijn is a really good director!”
Friend to HE: “And Reijn wrote it too. Kidman heard about the script and sought it out. The trouble is that Americans have problems with sexual situations in movies.”
HE to friendo: “It’s wild!!! I felt lit up inside….crazy, slurpy, over-the-waterfall sexual films are still being made. George Michael‘s ‘Father Figure’, INXS‘s ‘Never Tear Us Apart’…man! When sex is really good, it constitutes a form of madness. Babygirl doesn’t feel histrionic…it feels real and conversationally casual and verite…but at the same time it’s so highly charged during the sex scenes that I forgot about Nicole’s juvoderm injections…totally forgot about that.”
Friendo to HE: “Nicole had a nicer, larger, more luscious ass in Eyes Wide Shut.”
HE to friendo: “And your package is just as wang-schlongy as it was when you were 28? She’s doing just fine for 58.”
Friendo to HE: “And poor Antonio Banderas.”
HE to friendo: “When you get older and you’ve been with someone for 20 or 25 years, the hormonal magic just isn’t there anymore, and if your wife or partner is one of those ‘okay, I’m here so service me and no moody, half-staff erections’ types, sex can feel Sisyphusian…like digging ditches.”
Friendo to HE: “When the husband confronts the extra-marital lover, it’s time to rassle!”

AOC: The subway will be safer if we lock up people like Daniel Penny pic.twitter.com/6R5SyndtHc

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 10, 2024

“The outsiders predict the Oscars for a change. We are a motley crew of writers, pundits, critics and industry professionals who have decided to crash the party. With so much of the Oscars sucked into the money machine, we thought we’d get back to our roots, away from the publicity churn that decides the awards. This is for the love of the game.” — Sasha Stone‘s mission statement for The Gatecrashers.

After much blood, sweat and tears on the part of Ms. Stone (who happens to be travelling cross-country as we speak), The Gatecrashers is now a stand-alone website. Smartphone thing, laptop thing…good to go. Everything clarified, probed, investigated, instinctualized. All the important award-season categories spitballed by Sasha, yours truly, Chris Gore, Jeff Sneider, Jordan Ruimy, Bill McCuddy, Ed Douglas, Matthew Pejkovic, Scott Kernens, Christian Toto, Scott Menzel, John Nolte, The Cinescape and Bee Garner.

And not just our gut award calls but links to our own websites with — added attraction! — various posts, stories, riffs and reviews highlighted as we go along. A movable feast if you will. A living, shifting, breathing place to call home.

Right now Sasha and I are the only ones with a user name and a password, but that won’t last long. I’m sending out a mass email and allowing all the members to use my info to sign in, and thereby allowing them to create their own individual user names and passwords. Once Sasha does a bit more tweaking all the members will have the option to change their predictions on a dime….any time at all, day or night…high noon or in the wee small hours.

“I feel like a gate crasher. But a very warmly received one. Massive thanks to the Golden Globes and to Scott Beck and Bryan Woods for spotting my need to kill, and to A24 for sponsoring it.” — Hugh Grant.

I’ve been thinking. It’s been 26 years and change since I began penning an online column. Hollywood Confidential, a forerunner of my present endeavor, launched in October ’98. 26 years of rapture and anxiety. I don’t suppose I’ve been in a state of true transcendental serenity more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it’s been a good life. All my life I’ve loved the magical getaway realm of movies. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But there are times…when suddenly you realize you’re nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself…what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything, or it made any difference at all really. Particularly in comparison with other journalists’ careers. I don’t know whether that kind of thinking’s very healthy, but I must admit I’ve had some thoughts along those lines from time to time.

Rockin’, grindin’ and raunchy, sure, but The Pretenders lived for discipline…they rehearsed and rehearsed the living shit out of their songs. Nothing left to chance.

The word is out among all mentally unstable bums who ride New York City subways…party’s over, trim your sails. MTA passengers have their champion.

How corrupt, laughable and dismissable is the 2024 version of the Golden Globe awards? Especially with Penske Media owning the Globes alongside its ownership of Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire and Gold Derby? If you ask me the Globes are a bought-and-paid-for woke whore show, and for proof of this you needn’t look any further than the ten Emilia Perez nominations that were announced this morning…ten!

A better-than-decent film that I liked or at least respected after seeing it in Cannes last May, Perez is audaciously conceived, directed and performed, but it is first and foremost a trans identity showhorse, and without this social-political element few would be cheering or perhaps even paying attention. On top of which nobody outside the entrenched wokester chorus, which is led in this instance by the LGBTQ whoo-whoo brigade and their media lapdogs…nobody really loves Emilia Perez.

I can sense it, feel it…they love the “idea” of Karla Sofia Gascon, a transitioned biomale, being touted for Best Actress, and they certainly don’t want to mutter the slightest criticism of Perez lest they be labelled as transphobes, but deep down they’re just pleased or “okay” with it. It’s not touching them where they live. They’re not jumping up and down. And the Golden Globes nominations can’t brush this aside.

And how, by the way, can the Globes have nominated Anora, Emilia Perez, Challengers, A Real Pain, The Substance and Wicked for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy, and not A Complete Unknown — the Dylan biopic that soars on the wings of music, music and more music? It’s nominated in the drama category but how can it not be considered a musical?

On top of which the corrupt Globies nominated the all-but-unbearable The Brutalist, a cigarette-smoking, heroin-shooting, bamboo-shoots-shoved-under-your-fingernails experience if I’ve endured one, for six or seven nominations…get outta my life! Average Joes and Janes will be throwing soft-drink containers at the screen when it opens commercially.

HE is very pleased, however, that the great Yura Borisov, the compassionate Anora thug, has been nominated for Best Supporting Performance. He was also handed this award yesterday by the LAFCA foodies.

Borisov’s competition: A Real Pain‘s Kieran Culkin, A Complete Unknown‘s Edward Norton, The Apprentice‘s Jeremy Strong, Gladiator II‘s Denzel Washginton and The Brutalist‘s Guy Pearce.

Friendo who attended this evening’s A Complete Unknown screening at the old Academy theatre (Wilshire & La Peer): “The house waas completely full, and the audience went crazy for the film and actors. i’ve never seen a response like this in many decades of watching films at The Academy. Extraordinary.”

HE: “A bigger, more exuberant response than the one for Emilia Perez a a few weeks ago?”

Friendo: “Bigger response, bigger audience. Standing and clapping through the credits. Huge applause for each of the actors.”

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HE continues to frown upon the bourgeois brunch-munching but LAFCA has done a good thing by boosting Sean Baker’s farcical Brooklyn dramedy.

HE also applauds the Boston Society of Film Critics for heaping even more praise upon Anora — Best Picture, Best Director (Sean Baker), Best Actress (Mikey Madison) and Best Original Screenplay (Baker).