IndieWire‘s Jim Hemphill, posted on 1.19.26: “On Saturday (1.17), the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles presented the world premiere of a new 4K restoration of George Stevens‘ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), one of the most ambitious and experimental of all Hollywood epics.

“Director Martin Scorsese, whose Film Foundation was instrumental in restoring the film (and whose The Last Temptation of Christ is the only biblical epic that rivals Stevens’ film in its audacity and complexity), provided a video introduction in which he celebrated Stevens’ masterpiece as the summation of his work.”

“Masterpiece”? Stevens film is arguably the shallowest, phoniest, most oddly constipated saga-of-Christ film ever made. Let there be no doubt that Scorsese’s low-budgeted The Last Temptation of Christ (’88) is the richest, finest and trippiest of the bunch…the ending is truly magnificent. Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a close second.

Methinks Scorsese primarily fell for the idea of restoring The Greatest Story Ever Told because it was lusciously shot in Ultra Panavison 70, which has an aspect ratio of 2.76:1.

Production-wise Stevens’ film was a a flat-out fiasco, and in viewing terms is truly painful to sit through. I will never, ever see it again. It feels inauthentic and sound-stagey…a pricey, corporatized big-Hollywood presentation with everyone wearing the same white flowing robes and with bizarre American Southwestern backdrops (Nevada, Colorado, Utah) standing in for ancient Judea.

Max Von Sydow‘s Nordic, blue-eyed Jesus wore a far-too-short, much-too-tidy wig, and somehow managed to appear even less authentically Judean than King of Kings‘ Jeffrey Hunter.

And the non-stop cavalcade of Hollywood faces! Dorothy McGuire as the Virgin Mary, Charlton Heston as John the Baptist, Claude Rains as Herod the Great, José Ferrer as Herod Antipas, Telly Savalas as Pontius Pilate, Martin Landau as Caiaphas, David McCallum as Judas Iscariot, Donald Pleasence as “The Dark Hermit”, Roddy McDowall as Matthew, Van Heflin as “Bar Amand”, Sal Mineo as “Uriah”, Ed Wynn as “Old Aram”, and Sidney Poitier as Simon of Cyrene…Jesus.

Plus Michael Ansara, Carroll Baker, Ina Balin, Robert Blake, Pat Boone (!!!), Victor Buono, John Considine, Richard Conte, Jamie Farr, David Hedison, Angela Lansbury, Robert Loggia, John Lupton, Janet Margolin, Nehemiah Persoff, Marian Seldes, Paul Stewart, Harold J. Stone and Shelley Winters.

John Wayne was cast as a Roman Centurion for the crucifixion sscene on Calvary. Invented story: Wayne couldn’t quite deliver his only spoken line in the film, “Truly this man was the Son of God”, with sufficient feeling. Stevens: “Can you give it a little more awe, Duke?” Wayne: “Aww, truly this man was the Son of God.”

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.