While admitting that he was absolutely randy and ravenous during his Hollywood heyday, Russell Brand is “absolutely refuting” accusations of “rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse” in a 90-minute Channel 4 documentary that will air this evening in England. The Sunday Times is reporting that Brand has been accused of sexual assault by four women between 2006 and 2013.

Band is claiming the sexual encounters were consensual; his accusers are asserting otherwise.

The reported affair between conservative South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, 51, and hair-trigger political operative Corey Lewandowski, 49, is, of course, indicative of outrageous hypocrisy.

They’re both big-time Trump supporters as well as family values proponents. Governor Noem has been married to husband Bryon since 1992. Lewandowski has been married to the former Alison Hardy (her husband was killed on 9/11 as one of the passengers on United flight 175) since 2005, and has four kids with her…four!

Then again when have big-time political players (office holders, candidates, heavyweight operatives, donors) not been hypocrites? It goes with the territory.

Most of us are familiar with the term “the heart wants what it wants.” Most of us understand that certain affairs of the heart (and the loins) can, depending on the chemistry of the participants, result in a form of insanity. I was involved in a crazy extra-marital thing a quarter-century ago. (She was the infidel — I was the unmarried “other man.”) So I know how it feels to have wings on your heels. I know what is to be seized by this kind of madness. Then again Lewandowski and Noem have reportedly been indiscreet, and that’s on them.

Noem has been on the short list of potential vice-presidential running mates alongside Donald Trump in the ’24 campaign. The reports about her thing with Lewandowski will probably kill this talk.

It’s mystifying why the Best Int’l Feature know-it-alls are so in the tank for Anatomy of a Fall, which is a good, talky and well-layered did-she-do-it? film…a smartly written marital mystery-slash-courtroom procedural. It is also, truth be told, a wee bit irksome by way of visual confinement (only two Grenoble locations — an A-frame home and a courtroom interior) and, at 150 minutes, is certainly a prolonged rear-end punisher. Plus I don’t like the kid.

Being what it is Justine Triet’s cerebral bad-marriage film naturally doesn’t try to deliver anything like the emotional-devotional contact high you get from Tran Ahn Hung’s The Pot-au-Feu, a sensual foodie bliss-out if I’ve ever sat through one. There’s no question which film is more seductive and pleasurable but the fix seems to be in all the same for Triet and Sandra Huller’s marathon talkfest.

Is it a political-gender-feminist preference thing? Is it because the feminist smarty-pants set is in the tank for Huller’s likely Best Actress nomination, which was recently proclaimed in a Hollywood Reporter cover story? (She’s also very good in Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest but her character, the wife of an Auschwitz camp commander, is subdued.) Is it because The Pot-au-Feu, directed by a Vietnamese arthouse veteran, has been tagged as too much of a sensual white gentleman’s film and therefore not cool…a film that’s not just about the devotional and spiritual worship of fine French cuisine but Benoit Magimel’s idealized, classically old-fashioned, all-consuming pedestal love for Juliette Binoche?

Should HE file the necessary papers in order to be designated the official website for the Anatomy of a Fall Int’l Takedown Campaign? I don’t really want to do this as it’s clearly an intelligent and (as far as it goes) engaging film. All I know is that THE POLITICAL FIX SEEMS TO BE IN.

A new trailer for THE POT-AU-FEU / THE TASTE OF THINGS, for which Tran Anh Hung won Best Director at this year's @Festival_Cannes. Starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel and in French cinemas November 8. pic.twitter.com/fRZhRvwxiN

— Notebook (@NotebookMUBI) September 15, 2023

…here’s an updated “friendo” interpretation of the latest WGA vs. show–runners vs. producers negotiating contretemps:

“The showrunners have had it up to here with the hardline WGA all-or-nothing rhetoric…they’ve had it!

“And so the showrunners (aka the upper echelon) are applying pressure for a deal to be made, compromises yielded, a willingness to accept 80 percent over 100 percent of the demands, etc.

“The showrunners are also pushing back against mandatory staffing and the like. They have their own selfish agenda, but their income and dues drive the guild so they cannot be dismissed.

“This confirms your HE assessments as well. Enough is enough. The solidarity in the WGA is mostly from the unemployed. Those that are flourishing and have name value are fed up.

“Meanwhile, Disney is considering selling ABC. That means even less scripted programming as linear TV dies. Writers will have better terms when the strike is over, but less opportunity.”

Note: Apart from Sean Penn’s basic, well-founded point, I would still be delighted if AI technology could somehow one day resuscitate dead movie stars and thus allow them to have second careers.

From a 9.13 Sean Penn interview with Variety‘s Stephen Rodrick: “Aggressive pop-offs are a Penn staple and not limited to global events. I ask him his thoughts on the Hollywood strikes. He is particularly livid over the studios’ purported lust for the likenesses and voices of SAG actors for future AI use.

“[Penn] has an idea that he is convinced will break the logjam. It starts with Penn and a camera crew being in a room with studio heads. Penn will then offer trade: ‘So you want my scans and voice data and all that. Okay, here’s what I think is fair: I want your daughter’s, because I want to create a virtual replica of her and invite my friends over to do whatever we want in a virtual party right now. Would you please look at the camera and tell me you think that’s cool?”

“Penn pauses long enough for me to check if he is serious. That is an affirmative.

“’It’s not about business,’ he says. ‘It’s an indecent proposal. That they would do that and not be taken to task for it is insulting. This is a real exposé on morality — a lack of morality.'”

Anyone familiar with the famous jail-cell scene in Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro‘s Raging Bull knows something about irony. For watching a crude and bestial man experience the absolute nadir of his bruising (and bruise-dispensing) life…his explosive acting out of feelings of absolute and overpowering self-loathing…this horrific episode results, for viewers, in something oddly cleansing and almost therapeutic.

This was DeNiro’s all-time peak moment…the kind of bravura acting moment that only a young or youngish fellow can capture or deliver. It was also the grand crescendo of DeNiro’s initial glory chapter (’73 to ’80), the highlights of which were Bang the Drum Slowly, Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, 1900 and Taxi Driver.

Chapter Two began right after Raging Bull and continues until this day — The King of Comedy (’82), Once Upon a Time in America (’84), Brazil (’85), Midnight Run (’88), Goodfellas (’90), This Boy’s Life (’93), Heat (’95), Casino (’95), Analyze This (’99), the Meet the Parents films (2000–2010), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), The Intern (’15) and The Irishman (’19).

If you start with Brian DePalma‘s Greetings (’68), DeNiro has been at it for 55 years.

Two-time Oscar winner Shelley Winters (1920-2006) was the absolute best — no side-stepping, said what she felt, straight-from-the-gut candor at all times. And I’m not just saying this because I ran into her a few times and liked her from the get-go. Always an artist first and a diplomat second. Smarts, steel, liberal-progressive views, etc.

I never realized she was a frank and gutsy personality until I saw her go up against the chauvinistic Oliver Reed on Johnny Carson‘s Tonight Show — a legendary encounter that ended with Winters pouring an alcoholic drink over Reed’s head.

My first conversation with Winters happened inside the Plaza Hotel during the filming of Frank Pierson‘s King of the Gypsies (’78), in which she was costarring with Sterling Hayden, Susan Sarandon and Eric Roberts. A brief exchange of pleasantries, nothing more.

My second Winters encounter happened in Los Angeles around five years later, in late 1983. I was seated right next to her at a Cannon Films press luncheon for Over the Brooklyn Bridge (held just prior to shooting). We were chatting amiably about everything…good vibes. When producer-director Menahem Golan got up before a mike and began making a speech, Winter began shaking her head and said to anyone within earshot at our table, “Don’t like him… nope, don’t like him.”

That was it — I was in love.

I met Winters again in 1997 at the Silver Spoon, a now-destroyed breakfast place in West Hollywood, while interviewing with Jackie Brown‘s Robert Forster She walked up to our table, Forster introduced us, I recapped our slight history, etc. Winters told me I reminded her of an old boyfriend from New York.

Winters knew Marilyn Monroe pretty well, roomed with her for about a year between 1947 and ’48. For decades after Monroe’s passing Winters was repeatedly asked about her, and offered pretty much the same recollections.

Monroe began to enjoy life a bit in the late ’40s, Winters said, and had a genuinely thrilling and abundant life in the ’50s, but not so much in the early ’60s. Monroe wasn’t well educated but was highly intelligent and constantly reading. Totally into older-guy father figures. No family, no support group, suspicious of most would-be friends or acquaintances. Key quote: “If she’d been a little dumber, she would’ve been happier.”

Monroe began to slip into an increasingly troubled place when she hit her mid 30s, which, back in the day, was when actresses needed to begin thinking about transitioning into character roles and/or playing mothers, or so Winters believed. But in the early ’60s the big studios didn’t want Monroe as a character actress — they wanted her to go on being a 25-year-old blonde sexpot forever. (When Winters signed to play a 40ish old-school motherly type in The Diary of Anne Frank, for which she later won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, director George Stevens told her that “because of this role you’ll be able to work for the rest of your life.”)

Winters believed that Monroe’s August 1962 death from a sleeping-pill overdose was most likely an accident, and that she’d just forgotten how many she’d taken earlier. “I’ve done that,” Winters said.