…in which films about interesting female lead characters aren’t about female empowerment or revenge against male scumbags. Stories about women just hanging in there and holding their own as best they can…coping with tough or trying challenges and circumstances, and who suffer setbacks but then pivot and gain the upper hand…women who are adult, anxious, aggressive, capable, angry, defensive, morally conflicted, smart, determined, criminally inclined, scared, corrupted, more stable than unstable…women who have a steady, reasonable, non-fanatical sense of their own power and capabilities, and are (gasp!) straight like 95% of the women out there and aren’t caught up in political theatricality …women who just are what they are without the yoke of #MeToo mythology around their necks.

Adult women, in short, who behave like adult women in French films aimed at adults.

An 18-year-old Steve Wonder wrote this song? You coulda fooled me. I don’t associate Wonder with this kind of bluesy downerism. I’d certainly never listened to his original version until today.

The Rolling Stones version (i.e., the only one I’d ever listened to for decades) is included on Metamorphosis, a rarities compilation released on 6.6.75.

“I Don’t Know Why” was recorded during the sessions for Let It Bleed — on Thursday, 7.3.69 — apparently in the evening. It was this exact same night that everyone learned of the death of Stones founder and guitarist Brian Jones, who had been found at the bottom of his swimming pool three or four weeks after he’d been fired from the band over drugs. (Jones announced his departure from the band on 6.9.69.)

Am I understanding this correctly? And just under one-quarter of all viewers are primarily or entirely watching broadcast. What is a fair term to describe this segment of the populace? Hayseeds?

From Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (‘67):

Berkeley landlord (Norman Fell) to Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman): “You’re not one of those outside agitators, are you?”

Braddock: “No.”

Berkekey landlord: “‘Cause I won’t stand for that.”

James Stewart’s eyeliner makes him look like a mad ghoul in this German one-sheet for Bell, Book and Candle, which opened on 11.11.58.

It was the year’s second pairing of Stewart and Kim Novak, the first being Vertigo, which tanked after opening on 5.9.58. If memory serves Vertigo wasn’t exactly critically praised either.

Why didn’t Alfred Hitchcock’s haunted classic sell more tickets? Dysfunctional sexual vibes. Gray-haired Stewart (49 or 50 during filming but looking closer to 55) was obviously too long-of-tooth for Novak, who was only 24 or thereabouts.

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Full respect and earnest affection for the greatest actress of the late 20th Century (not to mention her stellar performances in The Devil Wears Prada, The Iron Lady and The Post), although I’ve never forgotten this 2015 Telluride discussion.

HE answer: Initially tolerable…irritating and certainly pumped up and obviously spittle and a waste of time, but not felonious. But it began to feel more and more bruising.

I really hate everything about this kind of bullshit megaplex action film…the kind that’s been par for the course for at least a quarter-century if not longer, perhaps going as far back as 48 HRS. and Lethal Weapon.

Except those films are almost Alvin Sargent-level compared to The Fall Guy…I really hate where this genre has gone, the kind of film that directors like David Leitch, a blend of amiable, low-key attitude and truly Satanic intent, have made into a form of surface-skimming pornography.

For me The Fall Guy felt gauche and bludgeoning and generally sociopathic…a cartoonishly violent, motor-mouthed mescaline movie…characters of a shallow or grating or despicable stripe…venal, wafer-thin, smirky, japey, goofball, overbearing and exhausting, like the film itself…for the most part repulsive and certainly draining.

Ryan Gosling is middle-aged stunt veteran Colt Seavers, a bruised and tousle-haired poseur…a Hollow Man whom T.S. Eliot would recognize instantly…a performance that belongs in the same trash bin as his empty Coke bottle zone-outs in Only God Forgives and The Gray Man…the guy I loved or at least related to in Drive, The Big Short and La–La Land has been terminated.

Emily Blunt’s performance as Bony Maronie…sorry, Colt’s ex and first-time director Jody Moreno (the film-within-the-film is a ComicCon nightmare called Metalstorm) is equally empty and narcotizing.

Aaron Taylor Johnson’s tousle-haired bad-guy movie star is nothing…a mosquito.

The most annoying and despicable character, an aggressively phony exec producer of Metalstorm called Gail Meyer, is played by Ted Lasso veteran Hannah Waddingham…black hair dye, screeching chalk.

Story-wise The Fall Guy contains all the real-world grit and gravitas of a Scream movie…Scream with wild-ass stunts.

Leitch orchestrates and choreographs with adrenalized efficiency as far as it goes, but Drew Pearce’s screenplay has less real-world intrigue than a Road Runner cartoon and is oppressively untethered to any semblance of human behavior…the man should be hunted down, arrested and sentenced to ten years on Devil’s Island with Papillon and Alfred Dreyfuss.

I laughed at one bit — when Colt’s hotel room swipe card doesn’t work twice.

Michael DeGregorio to HE: “If you want to be as miserable as you always look in pictures, that’s on you.

“I saw it and had the most fun I’ve had watching a film in a theater in a long, long time.

“This is an audience film, not a critics film and that’s not a lower standard — it’s just a totally different set of guidelines.

“All a filmmaker has to do is film two or three people, always in a love triangle of some kind, make it dreary and sad and hopeless and then kill one at the end (disease, suicide or something), add a nice subdued musical score and the critics will call it spiritual or stunningly romantic or something flowery like that and hail the filmmaker as the next __________(insert cool indie director).

“The Fall Guy is a total unabashed love letter to stunt men and the stunt industry as a whole. It moves like a fast train and even wraps the making of a film and a massive stunt into the climax of the third act.

“I’m sure you will call me a knuckle-dragging ape with no taste who smells up your comment section and anyone who likes this film is an uncultured scumbag who should be put into a reeducation camp, and that’s fine.

“The point is, this is a film for the audience to enjoy and I doubt that David Leitch really cares of the critics call him satan or the devil or anything else.

“Critics don’t pay the rent.”

Emily Blunt reacts as #TheFallGuy stunt team breaks through glass on the red carpet pic.twitter.com/IiiSBxsxWk

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) May 1, 2024

…starts at 7 pm this evening, and God help me. Two hours of guaranteed David Leitch-ian misery. Plus I’ll be bummed out for the rest of the evening.

We all understand that a significant percentage of woke Cannes critics may be looking to slag the first chapter of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga (Warner Bros., 6.28) when the three–hour film plays later this month on the Côte d’Azur.

This is because Costner’s 19th Century narrative focuses upon (and reportedly gives a fair shake to) the perspective of fair-skinned, covered-wagon settlers, and consequently may not be perceived as sufficiently supportive of Native Americans, at least from a most-old-time-whiteys-were-evil-racists, Lily Gladstone-esque perspective.

HE 100% guarantees that a sizable portion of wokester Branch Davidians have already decided to pan Costner’s film, sight unseen. To balance this out, HE has decided sight unseen and if at all possible to bend over backwards in order to…well, give the film as much of a fair shake as I can within the boundaries of honesty and candor.

.

…but at the same time surrounded by so much crap. Which is often par for the course, I realize. If a big-name actor manages to bat between .250 and .333, he/she is doing rather well.

When I think of truly gold-standard Michael Caine films, maybe 10 or 12 come to mind…Get Carter, Sleuth, Alfie, A Shock to the System, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Quiet American, Mona Lisa, Children of Men, Zulu, Youth, Harry Brown, Educating Rita, The Man Who Would Be King, Funeral in Berlin, The Ipcress File…what is that, 15?

Caine himself (or an assistant) posted this photo of his DVD and Bluray highlights. Give them credit for humorously including The Swarm (“A bee movie,” Caine once remarked) and Jaws 4.