In his Bugonia review, New Yorker critic Justin Chang offhandedly admits that Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt wasn’t critically trashed by for its cinematic shortcomings but for political-cultural reasons — for being “noxiously reactionary.”
I’m About To Be Hate-Bombed For What Helen Andrews Has Said
My Critics Choice membership was stupidly, hysterically terminated in March 2021, and with it HE’s advertising income. Thanks, fellas! I’ve known from the get-go that the people who called for my professioonal death in the wake of this absurd, sickening episode were primarily brittle, progessive-minded, industry-based women (fellow female Critics Choice members, publicists, trans biomales).
But until this morning I’d never considered what happened to me in scholarly, professorial, concisely written, delightfully articulate and on-target terms.
Consider Helen Andrews‘ “The Great Feminization,” posted on 10.16.25.
It is understood, of course, that the vast majority of HE commentators will ignore the substance of this article and just attack Andrews based upon their dislike of or disagreement with this or that excerpt. Some of you might want to actually read it.
“All cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis: Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.
“If wokeness really is the result of The Great Feminization, then the eruption of insanity in 2020 was just a small taste of what the future holds. Imagine what will happen as the remaining men age out of these society-shaping professions and the younger, more feminized generations take full control.
“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.
“Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.
“The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.”
Helen Andrews’ address delivered at NatCon 5 in Washington, D.C. on 9.2.25:
Springsteen Flick Cost $55 Million…WHAT?
I don’t know the detailed financial particulars behind Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, but I do know that this modestly-scaled, indie-flavored period drama (set in 1982) cost $55 million to produce, and that’s just fucking ridiculous.
If I was a studio chief and this Scott Cooper-directed feature had been pitched to me at that budget, I would have thought about it for 40 or 50 seconds and said, “$55 million for a movie about a depressed, New Jersey-born rock star recording a no-frills album in his bedroom? Even with great reviews a film like this might earn $25 or $30 million theatrical…maybe. Bruce’s heyday was 40, 50 years ago. This film would lure aging white GenXers and boomers and that’s all. Figure a way to make it for $17.5 million all in and maybe we can talk. Okay, I might approve $20 million but not a cent higher.
“Oh, and the guy who plays Springsteen needs to sorta kinda look like him…right? Jeremy Allen White looks nothing like him. Ridiculous. White-as-Springsteen is as bad of an idea as casting Paul ‘hawknose’ Mescal as Paul McCartney or Joseph fucking Quinn as George Harrison. Seriously…take the needle out of your arm.”
Coarse, Classless Goombah Sociopath
“Build a $300 million, 90,000-square-foot gilt ballroom — which will overshadow the central edifice — while the government is shut and people have been thrown out of work; plaster tacky gold all over the Oval; sue everyone willy-nilly; put foes through legal torture; send troops to American cities; shrug off due process and blow alleged drug runners out of the water.
“’We the People’ is quaint. Now we are governed by the whims of one person.
“Congress is adrift. The White House is a shipwreck. Trump is marauding in the Caribbean. James Comey and Letitia James are being forced to walk the plank, and next up could be Jack Smith and Adam Schiff.
“We are awash in nautical metaphors as the president plunders and pillages. He’s a pirate — and not the fun Halloween kind.”
–from Maureen Dowd‘s “Burnin’ Down the House“, 10.25.25.
HE’s Heart Goes Out To Springsteen Flop (Critical & Commercial)
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere hasn’t been critically panned across the board, but enthusiasm has certainly been lacking. And now it’s tanking financially. I feel sorry for Bruce Springsteen, Jeremy Allen White, director Scott Cooper. They put their hearts and souls into this thing, and nobody’s digging it. I haven’t even seen the poor thing, for some reason.
Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro (posted Saturday morning): “If Springsteen hits the bottom of its tracking range at $9M, it won’t be ‘Glory Days’ for this net $55M Jeremy Allen White-Jeremy Strong starring production. On the upside, the movie has a 60% definite recommend on PostTrak, so we’ll see if this improves.
“Why isn’t this brand-name rock performer movie not being released over Christmas a la last year’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown when a bigger audience is available? While older Springsteen fans showed up last night at 40% over 55 (the pic’s biggest demo) and 59% over 45, it was clearly not in bulk judging from the grosses. Also, Springsteen was largely female leaning movie at 52%. Women over 25 bought tickets at 46% and men over 25 went at 42%.
“Overall, this is very Caucasian-leaning movie at 85% with few diverse demos showing up. We’ll get into this more as the weekend goes on, but off the bat, the release date isn’t doing this making-of-the-Nebraska-album any favors.”
From Owen Gleiberman‘s “What’s the Problem with ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’? The Problem Is That ‘Nebraska’ Is a Bore“:
“Jeremy Allen White doesn’t look very much like Springsteen. The lack of an acute resemblance isn’t fatal in a biopic, but it’s one of a number of things about Deliver Me from Nowhere that just feels…off.
“At home, when I’m making dinner with my daughters, we always play music, and mixed in with the new stuff I like to give them a dose of music history, so I’ll play everything from Nina Simone to Steely Dan to the Clash to ELO to Dylan to the Spinners to the Ramones. But the one time I put on “Nebraska,” we were four tracks into it when Sadie, who is 13, looked at me with a wince of pain and said, ‘Can we play something else?’
“She had never said that before, and I was amused to see her reaction directly echoed in the movie by the Columbia Records executive Al Teller (David Krumholtz), who hears a couple of minutes of the record and then says can you please take it off. It’s not just that the album ‘isn’t commercial.’ For many of us, there’s a punishing monotony to Nebraska.
“The album, in its way, is all about pain, and Deliver Me from Nowhere captures how creating the record all by himself in his New Jersey bedroom was therapy for Bruce. That’s a moderately interesting chapter in the larger Bruce saga, and when he actually goes to therapy, the film treats it as cataclysmic — as if millions of us haven’t been there, and as if he was the first rock celebrity who ever walked into a shrink’s office.”
“Boorman and the Devil” Triggered Hearty Laughter at Brooklyn Horror Fest
My Venice Film Festival viewing of David Kittredge‘s excellent Boorman and the Devil was greeted with blissful vibes and subdued awe. Critics and industry folks are like that — their emotions always in check.
But when it played last Wednesday night at the Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema under the aegis of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, the crowd was frequently laughing at the litany of blunders and terrible misfortunes endured by director John Boorman as he attempted to shoot the artistically ambitious Exorcist II: The Heretic during the summer and fall of ’76, followed months later by the buckshot scorn of critics and paying audiences when it opened on 6.17.77.
For Kittredge’s doc dispenses gallows humor in spades, and everyone over the age of ten knows what it’s like when things start going really badly…laughter is the only sane response when fate and the gods have allied against you…when a bad luck streak not only won’t stop but gets worse and worse.
Teal Vandals Have Infected Criterion’s 4K “Eyes Wide Shut”
The ghost of Stanley Kubrick is choking, hissing and sputtering over the apparent teal-tinting in portions of Criterion’s 4K Eyes Wide Shut disc, which pops on 11.25.25.
I’ve seen Eyes Wide Shut at least eight or nine times (twice theatrically, once or twice on DVD, the rest via WHE’s unrated 2008 Bluray), and the blue-and-amber nocturnal accent scheme has always been the same.
Nocturnal accent colors adorning the wooden window-sill-and-frames of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman‘s bedroom, the window sill-and-frame lighting outside of Sydney Pollack‘s pool room salon, the bluish-amber tints in the Harford kitchen…we’re talking lots of blue and amber. Unmistakably.
Remember the iron-bar gates of that Long Island estate where the orgy was held? They were painted vivid, bordering-on-radiant blue, and with a fresh coast of paint at that.
But the proverbial teal monster has reared its revoltingly ugly and disgusting head in Criterion’s forthcoming 4K version of this 1999 film.
A DVD Beaver rendering of a still from that daylit scene (Cruise staring at the gates) shows a distinct teal flavoring — the gates were luminous plain blue in an older version, but now they’re unmistakably a dark somber teal-green.
Even the frequently obsequious and kowtowing Gary W. Tooze, owner and proprietor of DVD Beaver, admits in his review that the Criterion 4K “does have some teal-leaning.”
Up To Their Old Dumb-Ass Tricks
One Battle After Another has a certain “not quite rooted upon planet earth” attitude, okay, but at least a couple of hundred miles away from comedic. It sure as hell isn’t musical.
Quickie “Blob Me Tender” FX Are 20 Times Better Than ’58 Original’s
“For the diner scene, a photograph of the building was put on a gyroscopically operated table onto which cameras had been mounted. The table was shaken and the oozy Blob stuff rolled off. When the film negative was printed in reverse, it appeared to be oozing over the building.
“The Blob was filmed in color and projected at a 1.66 ratio, then known as the ‘Paramount format’.” — from The Blob‘s Wiki page.
If A Film is About An Approaching Nuclear Missile…
In Sidney Lumet‘s Fail Safe (’64), New York City gets nuked at the very end. In Kathryn Bigelow‘s A House of Dynamite (now streaming on Neflix), Chicago is in the nuclear crosshairs.
Fair question for those who’ve seen Lumet’s 61-year-old film: What would your reaction have been if there was no dramatization or depiction of the terrible nuclear climax? What if Lumet had decided to cut the last 8 to 10 minutes?
Paglia Was Correct Eight Years Ago
…and she still is. One of our greatest minds, hands down.
Paglia: “Women should model their persona on me, and on fellow Amazon feminists of the 1960s, which is that you are responsible for how people treat you.”
HE’s Best Supporting Actor Keepers
The top five or six will do, thanks.
Stellan Skarsgard‘s flawed, charmingly neurotic, brazenly egoistic dad in Sentimental Value is likely to win.
Sean Penn‘s Lt. Col, Steven J. Lockjaw is a broad, stiff-backed caricature and not really a performance that yields any depth or sensitivity, but he’ll be nominated anyway because there’s a lot of lickspittle One Battle After Another kowtowing going on right now.
You know which OBAA player should be nominated in this category? Benicio del Toro‘s “Sensei”.
Paul Mescal‘s William Shakespeare in Hamnet will be nominated — I recognize this, no disputing.
Adam Sandler‘s Jay Kelly performance as a manager of a flaky big-name Hollywood actor deserves to be nominated, and he will be.
I sill haven’t seen Deliver Me From Nowhere, but it’s been obvious for several weeks that Jeremy Strong‘s performance as Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau…it’s been obvious from the get-go that he’d be nominated.
