I’m thinking about writing a Hollywood book about the deranged and hysterical media war against Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (‘18), but also about something bigger and broader — how the Green Book maelstrom launched the not-fully-concluded era of the woke baddie-waddies —- the censorious, ultra-sensitive identity fanatics who all but suffocated the film business during the … Read more
With A Complete Unknown opening tomorrow (Wednesday, 12.25), consider a brief riff on Martin Scorsese‘s No Direction Home, which was first unveiled at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival: I remember watching this 208-minute doc with 18-year-old Jett in the summer of ’06, and his saying around the 70- or 80-minute mark, or roughly where Dylan’s … Read more
Please listen to this 2017 interview between Andrew Goldman and the late, legendary Bobby Zarem. Please pay particular attention to what Zarem says between the 18-minute and 22-minute marks. I’m inclined to half-disbelieve Zarem’s stories about (a) John Travolta and Gerard Depardieu having had a thing sometime in the late ’70s and (b) Katie Holmes … Read more
You go into a Michel Franco film (New Order and Sundown are recent HE favorites) with an understanding that dysfunction, severity and obsession will be served, and that some kind of rug will be be pulled out at some point. Franco doesn’t traffic in compassion and heartfelt currents as a general tendency; he does radical … Read more
I saw Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro yesterday afternoon at Dolby 88, starting around 4 pm. 130-something minutes later I came out positively elated and humming…floating on a cloud. It’s one of the two or three best films of the year (right up there with Poor Things and The Holdovers, and may even possibly be the El … Read more
A generally shared view about Thom Zimny and Sean M. Stuart‘s Sly (Netflix, 11.3) is that Sylvester Stallone comes off as refreshingly candid and self-aware. Which is one of the nice things about being a wealthy, senior-grade celebrity with nothing to lose — you can let it all hang out and the reactions are cool … Read more
It only took me five weeks to finally watch John Patton Ford‘s Emily The Criminal, which is pretty close to being as good as I’ve been told. It’s not crazy-holy-shit good but good-good, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s basically a realistic and wholly unpretentious small-time crime film…no muss or fuss and down to … Read more
Late last week I was asked to tap out a response to Jeff Sneider‘s “Is Tom Cruise the Biggest Movie Star in the World?“, a 6.3 Los Angeles magazine piece. I was in the middle of my stuck-in-Toronto nightmare but I said “sure.” And then I forgot about it. Here’s what I would have written … Read more
…after staying with Peter Jackson’s 468–minute Beatles doc over a two-day period: Somewhere during the third or fourth hour I began to feel a little bit Beatle–ed out. But I’d suspected that would happen so it wasn’t a big surprise and I knew I’d eventually…well, feel proud about having watched the whole thing. Which I … Read more
Bobby Zarem, the whipsmart, highly-charged, occasionally volatile New York publicist who “conceived” the “I Love N.Y.” campaign and represented a cavalcade of big Hollywood clients (Sylvester Stallone, Jack Nicholson, Eddie Murphy, Alan Alda, Cher, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Caine, Sophia Loren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pee-Wee Herman) during his ’70s and ’80s heyday, and whom I dealt with … Read more
I wouldn’t call myself “sad and lonely,” at least not in the Buck Owens sense of that term. But I do understand and relate to those anxious, intensely focused, mostly melancholy fellows who tend to populate Paul Schrader‘s films — aka “God’s lonely men”. Because I’m more or less one of them. Not in a … Read more
I am gratified to report that I’ve seen Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter, and so that’s one film, at least, that I can write about before the Telluride Film Festival begins. I’ll most likely post my review concurrent with the Venice Film Festival debut. I could share a vague impression or two, but let’s hold … Read more