For nearly a quarter-century Michael Mann made a series of intensely male-ish, high-stakes grand-slammers — hardcore films about headstrong fellows forging their own paths, sometimes outside the bonds of legality but always single-mindedly. And man, did they hit the spot!

The hot streak began with 1981’s Thief and ended with 2006’s Collateral, and also included Manhunter (’86), The Last of the Monicans (’92), Heat (’95), The Insider (’99) and Ali (’01) — seven films in all.

Then came the “excellent work but not quite a bell-ringer” period…Miami Vice (’06), Public Enemies (’09) and Blackhat (’15)…movies that registered as ground-rule doubles or triples. Which felt disorienting to Mann-heads given his 23-year home run history.

Now comes Ferrari (Neon, 12.25), which is made of authentic, bruising, searing stuff. In my eyes it’s another grand-slammer but what do I know? Obviously the reaction so far has been mixed-positive — many admirers but also a modest-sized crowd of dissenters.

The shithead critics who’ve pissed all over George Clooney‘s The Boys in the Boat — easily his best directed film since Good Night and Good Luck — have been themselves pissed on by Joe and Jane Popcorn.

Good for this — Clooney’s underdog-vs.-overdog Olympic sports film is familiar but elegant — a confident effort that believes in itself and presents grace and simplicity for the virtues they’ve always been.

The difference is that critics are hung up on racial signage (i.e., the woke comintern has instructed them to regard any all-white, non-diverse movie that isn’t about building the A-bomb…they’ve been ordered to regard such films askance) and Joe and Jane simply aren’t distracted by same…they’re just watching the movie and going “hmm, yeah, pretty good.”

My first thought while watching The Iron Claw was “my God, what has Zac Efron done to himself? He looks like the Incredible Hulk…not to mention that awful Prince Valiant hair…good heavens.”

Professional wrestling is a joke. I’ve always hated the crude theatricality, the over-amped machismo. Fuck this “sport” and fuck me for being gullible enough to believe I might have an okay time with this low-rent, on-the-nose, over-pumped waste of time.

Bodies dropping to the canvas, guys screaming in pain, the exaggeration of anguish.

I hate wrestling culture even more than bowling culture (Kingpin) and NASCAR culture (Talladega Nights) and that’s saying something.

It took me less than ten minutes to decide I didn’t give a damn about the Von Erich family and their ludicrous blue-collar braggadocio and strange penchant for self-destruction and tragedy — Kevin (Efron), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson), Papa Fritz (Holt McCallany), Mama Doris (Maura Tierney), Pam Adkisson (Lily James) and Mike (Stanley Simons).

Which HE commenters urged me to see this fucking film? As they brought pain into my life, I will bring some kind of pain into theirs. It’s only fair.

Three dead brothers embracing at lakeside…

The Iron Claw has another half-hour to go. I feel obliged to stick it out but God, this is awful.

Posted 13 years ago: There are the rote facts of life, the plain material truth of things, and then there are the currents within. The singing angels, the demons, the fireflies, the banshees, the echoes, the dreams…the vague sense of a continuing infinite scheme and how we fit into that. Every last one of us can define our lives as a constant mixing of these two aspects, but the charm and final value of a person, for me, is about how much he/she seems to be cognizant of and dealing with the interior world, and how much he/she comments and refers to those currents and laughs about them, and basically lives on the flow of that realm.

Some go there more frequently or deeply than others, and some are just matter-of-fact types who let their spiritual side leak out in small little droplets from time to time, but Sterling Hayden, by my sights, was almost entirely about those currents.

He never just said, “I’d like a little sugar in my coffee” and let it go at that. Well, he would…but if you asked him to expand upon that notion he would just take off and you’d just sit back and marvel. Hayden knew various coffees and coffee growers and had walked through coffee plantations in the Caribbean at dawn and he knew all about how sugar was refined and would speak metaphorically about the sweetness of sugar being the enticement but coffee being the reality of it all, the bean from the earth, the bean that needed to turn brown and then be ground down and prepared just so, and then he’d be off on some tangent that took the coffee-vs.-sugar metaphor and ran with it, or took it and jumped off a cliff as it were.

Hayden was a fascinating, hungry and obviously vulnerable man, insecure and ridden with guilt about naming names in the ’50s, jolly or surly depending on the time of day, very singular, a great contentious bear of a man, unsettled, always the thinker, certainly a poet or a man trying all the time to be one, a man of the sea and a boy in some ways. He and Patti Smith would have gotten along famously. He loved pot. And he loved his Johnnie Walker Red.

“We were once speaking about his role as the farmer in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 and he started to talk about his final line in the film, which he wrote, and I said it before he did — ‘I’ve always loved the wind’ — and he loved that. He chuckled and patted my knee and said ‘God love ya.'”

I’ve posted a roster of the 35 best films of 1973 twice before — this is the third time. Here’s my rundown of the best of ’23 and it only comes to 24 films. A lot of them are excellent or highly commendable, but overall they simply can’t compare to Team ’73…different culture, different atmosphere. blessed by the gods.

1973 stone-cold classics (10):

1. Badlands (d: Terrence Malick)
2. The Long Goodbye (d: Robert Altman)
3. The Exorcist (d: William Friedkin)
4. The Outfit (d: John Flynn)
5. Mean Streets (d: Martin Scorsese)
6. The Last Detail (d: Hal Ashby)
7. The Sting (d: George Roy Hill)
8. Last Tango in Paris (d: Bernardo Bertolucci)
9. American Graffiti (d: George Lucas)
10. The Last American Hero (d: Lamont Johnson)

1973 creme de la creme (12):

11. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (d: Peter Yates)
12. Blume in Love (d: Paul Mazursky)
13. O Lucky Man! (d: Lindsay Anderson)
14. Charley Varrick (d: Don Siegel)
15. Serpico (d: Sidney Lumet)
16. The Way We Were (d: Sydney Pollack)
17. Papillon (d: Franklin J. Schaffner)
18. Paper Moon (d: Peter Bogdanovich)
19. The Laughing Policeman (d: Stuart Rosenberg)
20. The Three Musketeers (d: Richard Lester)
21. Don’t Look Now (d: Nicolas Roeg)
22. Westworld (d: Michael Crichton)

1973 very good, highly respectable or at least enjoyable (13):

23. Amarcord (d: Federico Fellini)
24. The Last of Sheila (d: Herbert Ross)
25. The Paper Chase (d: James Bridges)
26. Save the Tiger (d: John G. Avildsen)
27. Scarecrow (d: Jerry Schatzberg
28. Sleeper (d: Woody Allen)
29. Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid (d: Sam Peckinpah)
30. Day For Night (d: Francois Truffaut)
31. La Grande Bouffe (d: Marco Ferreri)
32. The Holy Mountain (d: Alejandro Jodorowsky)
33. Emperor of the North Pole (d: Robert Aldrich)
34. Live and Let Die (d: Guy Hamilton)
35. Extreme Close-up (d: Jeannot Szwarc)

If you’re lucky or industrious enough to enjoy a peak period, it almost always happens between your mid 20s and early 40s. (Mine didn’t begin until my early 40s — go figure.) Any way you slice it youth is a ferociously fast train, and is over before you know it.

Johnny Depp was 31 when this Annie Leibovitz photo was taken in ‘94; Kate Moss was 20.

Gene Tierney was 23 when this shot was taken. She peaked in the 1940s — all was gravy, her life knew no bounds, she had a thing with JFK, etc. Career-wise and otherwise things got tough for her in the ‘50s.

Luce Potter was a Mexican actress (born in Chihuahua in 1914) whose best-known performance was entirely about silence and the power of seeming passivity. Augmented by way of reptilian pincer “fingers.” Nor was she expressive in terms of her eyes or facial features —she just stared and calculated and commanded. Okay, her eyes moved once when she glanced downward at a young boy but otherwise she was impassive. She had a slight assist from William Cameron Menzies, but no one who’s seen this wordless performance will ever forget it.