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.

Pro-Gaza, anti-Israel Columbia Zoomers to world media: “Speaking as militant, keffiyeh-wearing revolutionaries, we’ve occupied Hamilton Hall in order to dramatically demand an end to Israel’s policy of murder and terror in the Gaza Strip. But at the same time our stomachs are growling…waaahhh….Columbia University administrators need to send us food and drink…pizza and sodas anyway…waaahhh.”

I somehow don’t recall anything about radical student activist David Shapiro, who was notoriously photographed smoking a cigar while sitting at the desk of Columbia University president Grayson Kirk during a six-day revolt in late April of ’68…I don’t recall Shapiro or any of his SDS comrades demanding food. They either toughed it out or snuck out and grabbed takeout for the occupiers.

JUST IN: Columbia student short-circuits when reporter corners her after she demanded that the university feed protesters who seized Hamilton Hall.

Student: The school is obligated to bring us food.

Reporter: But you guys put yourself in that position?

Student: Nobody is… pic.twitter.com/1qimmoQc8O

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 30, 2024

Following two interviews with The Beast, a summary from Time reporter Eric Cortellessa:

“To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.

“He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.

“He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers.

“He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.

“He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.

“He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense.

“He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

Zero Day is an upcoming political thriller series for Netflix. Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, it costars Robert De Niro, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Bill Camp, Angela Bassett and Matthew Modine. Logline: “A political conspiracy thriller centering on a devastating global cyberattack.”

@user5469336782915 #robertdinero #zerodays #newmovie #nyc #newyork #wallsreet ♬ original sound – user5469336782915

[Posted six months ago — go to 1:45]

Scott Galloway: “We all know women…I’m sure this happens to you all the time…really interesting, high-character, successful, attractive women…usually in their 30s, some into their 40s…who will say ‘I can’t find anyone to date.’ But it’s not that they can’t find anyone to date. It’s that they can’t find anyone they want to date.

“And there’s some dynamics here. Warren Buffet said that the key to a successful marriage is low expectations.

“A podcaster named Chris Williams…he calls it the high-heels effect. And that is that every year for the last 50 years [or since the mid ’70s] women have become better educated and are making more money. They’re also getting [physically] taller every year. 50% of women say they won’t date a guy who’s shorter than them, except that figure is probably more like 80%. Also women are getting ‘taller’ and men are getting ‘shorter’ metaphorically. The pool of viable men is shrinking every year. Women have been told they can have it all. What I’ve found is that you can’t have it all, or certainly not all at once.”

“A woman of average attractiveness can have a ‘relationship’, and when I say relationship that’s code for sex…[within the straight realm] they can have a relationship with [a man] who’s in the top ten percent. But that male individual is probably not going to establish a longterm relationship.

“The bottom line is that the top 10% of men” — financial stability, looks, apparent emotional stability — “are getting 80 or 80-plus percent of the opportunities for short-term relationships. So they can engage in what’s called Porsche polygamy. So the guys that most women want are the least likely to establish a longterm relationship.”

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Initially posted on 4.21.21: After re-watching Sam Peckinpah and Steve McQueen‘s The Getaway (’72) a couple of nights ago, I’m all the more certain that Roger Donaldson’s 1994 remake, in which Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger took on the same Doc and Carol McCoy roles that McQueen and Ali McGraw played 22 years earlier, is a smoother, more involving watch.

The Peckinpah version has a few moments, but it’s also nonsensical at times.

Why doesn’t McQueen shoot Al Lettieri in the head after the bank job?

Those middle-aged, cowboy-hat-wearing goons who work for Ben Johnson and his moustachioed brother are ridiculous.

There’s no reason for McGraw’s bizarre lurching the car when McQueen’s about to get in.

The sappy ending with Slim Pickens after crossing the border…c’mon.

And why would Richard Bright‘s train station con artist, who’s pocketed a couple of wads of cash, go to the cops just because McQueen beat him up? He can’t find a local clinic?

Huisache: “With the exception of Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs all of Sam Peckinpah’s films are messes of one magnitude or another, with Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia the biggest mess of all.

“The Getaway is enjoyable but the Slim Pickens ending is emblematic of Peckinpah’s resort to just saying ‘screw it, how do I get out of this mess? It was just nailed on. Sam had a mess and he called Pickens for help and the old feller bailed him out with a glorious good-ole-boy bit.

“I saw the film when it came out and was living in the area where it was filmed in central Texas. I thought it a very enjoyable mess and the Pickens ending a hoot. But that’s all the film is — an enjoyable hoot. Acting like it’s some kind of worthy project is a bridge too far.

“I suppose Sam’s problem was his alcoholism and his anti-social personality disorder. Either way the guy had a hard time making the pieces fit into the holes.”

HE reply: “Thank you — 100% correct about the nagging ‘mess’ factor. Totally dead-on. That said, Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and, as you noted, Straw Dogs are not messes. And there are many reasons to respect Junior Bonner. And I’ve never even seen Noon Wine.”

By the way: At the end of The Getaway Slim Pickens’ character tells Steve McQueen‘s Doc McCoy that he makes around $5K annually, or roughly $31,683 in 2021 dollars. That works out to roughly $2640 a month — an impoverished lifestyle. McQueen offers Pickens $10K or over $60K in 2021 dollars for his beat-up, piece-of-shit pickup truck. Pickens figures they’ll pay more so he says “how about $20K?” or the 2021 equivalent of a bit more than $120K…for a shitty pickup truck! And then Ali McGraw counters with “how about $30K?” or the 2021 equivalent of a bit more than $180K…for a piece-of-shit pickup truck! That, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s known as a messy ending.

“Momala of the country”…

In a May 2019 letter to Elle magazine in celebration of Mother’s Day Sen. Kamala Harris explained the origin.

“When Doug and I got married, Cole, Ella and I agreed that we didn’t like the term ‘stepmom’ [so] they came up with ‘Momala.'”

Fine and good but Kamala Harris‘s rickety whiney voice still grates. Her speeches lack a certain musical quality…a gift that Barack had in abundance. We all know there’s a reason she dropped out of Democratic primary contention in December 2019. Women (particularly women of color) are in her corner but that’s about it.