No question mark because “Who Are You” is a statement of spiritual-sociological fact — you / we / all of us are The Who.

Or we were, at least, when Who’s Next popped on 8.18.78. My early impoverished-desperation-and-existential-anxiety NYC period had begun in the spring of ’78, when I moved into my cockroach-infested Sullivan Street apartment (my color TV was was a 28-incher, if that) while working at the Spring Street Bar and Grill.

Over the last four or five days I’ve gotten completely buried in this 37-year-old album. One of the seven discs contains Glyn Johns‘ original mix, which was rejected by John Entwistle because it didn’t have enough bottom.

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If I were strolling around Paris and happened to notice Jeremy Irons sipping red wine at Les Deux Magots, which he and wife Sinead Cusack were actually doing a day or two ago, I wouldn’t say a word. I would discreetly glance in their direction and move on, although I would probably wonder why Irons was even there, given the presence of rube tourists and the general absence of coolness.

But if I’d been waved at and somehow invited to sit down and chat (bizarre as that sounds), at some point during the conversation I would lean over and suggest to Irons that his most penetrating screen moment, in my humble but long-held opinion, is a non-verbal one.

I’m speaking of a silent passage in Louis Malle‘s Damage (’92) that I described three-plus years ago. [See directly below.] Excerpt: “Irons’ wealthy politician, having just arrived home, makes himself a drink and strolls into the living room. He takes a sip and looks around, and the expression on his face says everything — unfulfilled, unchallenged, drained.”

With Imprint’s 2023 Bluray of Damage now out of stock and even unpurchasable from the usual scalpers and with no apparent HD streaming options, it can be stated that Irons’ two greatest filmed performances — Dr. Stephen Fleming in Damage and Jerry, a sly literary agent and a marital cheat, in David Jones and Harold Pinter‘s Betrayal (’83) — are un-purchasable, un-rentable and unviewable in 1080p high-def, much less 4K. Which is ridiculous. A film that can only seen in standard 480p is all but extinct — a fossil.

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In two words, undramatic and restful.

A very slightly condensed opening of Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review of Olivia Wilde‘s The Invite:

“When you catch a film about two couples who get together for a dinner party, there are certain expectations.

“You expect that the dialogue, for a while, is going to be light, funny, brittle, caustic. You expect that as the evening wears on, the masks of civility will come off, revealing something more painful and maybe brutal under the surface. You expect that there might be serious flirtation (between the people who aren’t partners), and that the whole thing will wind up structured as a kind of truth game. And you expect that by the end, there will be wreckage…but maybe, in that destruction, a kind of healing.

“The Invite, directed by Wilde from a script by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones and starring Wilde and Seth Rogen as a grousing, long-married San Francisco couple who have their upstairs neighbors over to dinner, is a movie that lives up to every one of those expectations. Yet it does so in a way that’s so original, so brimming with surprise, so fresh and up-to-the-minute in its perceptions of how relationships work (or don’t), that you watch it in a state of rapt immersion and delight.”

Yesterday THR critic David Rooney called Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex “a blast.”

I for one am highly suspicious of Rooney’s review for three reasons. One, he’s often generous to a fault. Two, I stopped trusting Rooney when he raved about The Secret Agent, a “good” but somewhat scattered and underwhelming film, during last May’s Cannes Film Festival. And three, I Want Your Sex was turned down last year by the Cannes and Venice film festivals. What does that tell you?

As Araki’s film has recently premiered at Sundance, it is fair to repeat HE’s fundamental opposition to watching Cooper Hoffman simulating the performance of sexual acts. The problem isn’t Hoffman alone. Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off.

There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.

In response to this rule-of-thumb Paddy Chayefsky wrote Marty, a teleplay (and then a movie version of same) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that he was on the verge of giving up.

It was sad but 1955 audiences understood the poor guy’s predicament because the actor who played Marty was Ernest Borgnine.

Things are different these days. Now it’s “whoa, Marty the Butcher totally deserves to not only find love but experience great, Last Tango-level sex in his lonely-ass life, and here’s hoping he finds both, and — this is even better — that Delbert Mann will allow us to share in Marty’s orgasmic satisfactions.”

…when even slightly provoked. As today’s shooting victim — a 37 year-old intensive care nurse named Alex Jeffrey Pretti — apparently did by being legally armed. Except he was disarmed right before being shot multiple times.

Dangerous hombres, those ICE guys. Hair-trigger psychos. Public enemies.

Five or six (more?) ICE guys all over Pretti, pepper-spraying and punching his ass and then pinning him down, and then they shoot him full of holes?

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Scott Galloway on Gavin Newsom, 7:57 mark: “And by the way, you wanna hear serious vibe, serious juju, serious mojo, serious riz? Governor Newsom is walking around [here] like he’s the next president, and guess what? Everyone believes him. He has an entourage…I’m not exaggerating…it’s like there’s light shining on the guy. I walk down to the Congress Hall, and there was a crowd of people around this guy, and no matter how big the crowd you see him like he’s Rhianna standing on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s shoulders. He’s just…it’s like God, like he’s the chosen one.”

Funniest bit concerns Karoline Leavitt…4:20 to 4:42.

Second best: “The kind of privelege hating that you can only get for $95,000 a year.”

Jordan Ruimy saw Daniel Roher‘s ostensibly thrilling Tuner (Black Bear, 5.26) at last September’s TIFF, and found it “well made and fairly tense, but compromised by a botched ending.”

Just-unveiled at Sundance, pic costars Leo Woodall, Dustin Hoffman, Havana Rose Liu, Jean Reno, Lior Raz and Tovah Feldshuh. The screenplay is by Roher and Robert Ramsey,

My personal view, if you really wanna know, is that Jacob Elordi isn’t too tall to play 007 — he’s too pretty. He doesn’t have that vaguely cruel, tough-as-nails vibe that Sean Connery had without breaking a sweat.

…Rod Lurie and his Facebook homies will slap you around with the “r” word…fair warning, bruh. Incorrect viewpoints won’t be tolerated.

I feel the same way you do about the lunatic woke left. Many in my orbit feel the same way. The Bill Maher brigade feels the same way. Many millions of us, ex-leftists in the same center or even center-right boat because the left became a complete insane asylum between ‘18 and ‘24.  

The validity of our observations about the thankfully weakened but still persistent progressive left cabal is what matters to me…the basis of our bond…what I share with you and care deeply about…our basic foundational allegiance.

And Trump is clearly losing it…an obviously malignant mind…the Greenland thing is just off-the-reservation nuts…that horrifically vulgar East Wing ballroom…blatantly lying about poor Renee Good (who, yes, brought about her own demise because she panicked in the face of odious ICE vibes)… calling the honorable Jack Smith an “animal who shouldn’t be practicing law”…the Sopranos vibe he radiated in Davos. 

I cherish my personal memories of JFK, whose grace and eloquence and movie-star magnetism and general aura of intellectual rigor…a projection (never mind the underlying reality) that mattered so much to so many…(his private sexual behavior was another matter in a separate shoe box)…

Even Reagan, whom I never admired or related to culturally in the ‘80s…even Reagan exuded sanity before his age-related frailties set in …even Nixon in a certain light!…the general 20th Century climate of semi-sensible Oval Office policy or at least a semblance of that…

You know as well as I that the once more-or-less intact dignity of the office has been degraded by our sociopathic bully boss… a beast who has truly poisoned the culture and coarsened the national conversation.…a blathering, muttering, heavy-lidded, stream-of-consciousness, foam-at-the-mouth Queens gangster who has strange bruises on his hands and can’t even walk in a straight line.