It’s Okay To Not “Like” Certain People
What do you do if you don’t care for older people to whom you’re vaguely “related”, and with whom you’ve been invited to share Christmas dinner with? The conventional answer is “grim up and suffer thorough it.” But maybe not, I’m thinking. Plus I’ve always sensed that they don’t care for my company either…fine. It’s almost a relief.
They’re ”nice” people, considerate, unfailingly polite, etc. But also a bit dull, sedate, incurious, not very well travelled and certainly not my idea of attuned to the here-and-now. I find them sleepily oppressive, and I really don’t want that vibe in my head. So I’m politely stepping back from Christmas Day dinner…no offense, not the end of the world.
What’s the problem exactly? A feeling of novocained numbness when they’re in a room. A minimum of verbal out-reach. A general lack of eye contact. A lack of laughter, wit, audacity. A basic lack of interest and inquisitiveness and opinions. I’d much rather hang out with neurotic actors or alcoholics or gambling junkies or Satanists, even, than fuddy-duds and flatliners.
In my mid teens my mother once confided that her mother Dorothy (my maternal grandmother) had made it clear on one or two occasions that she didn’t care for my father’s father (my paternal granddad). Family relations lean this way from time to time. We just have to roll with the fact that certain people are anathema to each other.
The Silence That Will Greet “Is This Thing On?” Will Be Deafening
Fifteen minutes into my 10.10.25 NYFF viewing of Bradley Cooper‘s Is This Thing On? (Searchlight, 12.19), I knew it was a massive whiff. It will open theatrically 11 days hence, and not a bird will stir in the trees. It’s fine but my God, the congenial vibes! The mildness! No real conflict, no real challenges, no “drama”, no heavy pivots.
HE’s 10.11 review: Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has called Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? (Searchlight, 12.19), which I saw last night at Alice Tully Hall, “a feel-good divorce film”.
That’s a fairly accurate description — it’s a kinder, warmer, far-less-hostile Marriage Story, and the general behavioral drift is amiable. It’s superbly acted all around, but it also has a bit of a flabby belly. For my money it’s way too happy, too mellow, too easygoing, too turn-the other-cheek.
Set in the flush environs of Manhattan’s West Village and a handsome home in Westchester County, it’s mainly about Alex and Tess (Will Arnett and Laura Dern), a 40ish husband and wife with two ten-year-old boys (they’re called “Irish twins” due to having been born less than a year apart).
The key situation is that Alex and Tess have decided to call it quits because…well, because they’ve been written this way. The dramatic engine, if you will, is basically about Alex dipping his toe into the waters of Manhattan stand-up comedy as a form of therapy, using his personal saga for material. It’s also about personal renewal.
But the film, directed and co-written by Cooper, is also about gliding and sliding and loping along without pushing any of the usual emotionally fraught buttons.
What’s Worse For WB and Film Culture — Netflix / Sarandos or Ellison, Kushner and the Arabs?
Fortune‘s Eva Roytburg and Nick Lichtenberg, posted yesterday afternoon:
“Jared Kushner has quietly reemerged as a player in one of the biggest takeover fights in modern Hollywood. Paramount’s audacious, all-cash $108 billion hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, announced Monday, names Kushner’s fully owned private equity firm, Affinity Partners, as one of four outside financing partners backing the offer, alongside the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.
“The detail is buried in Paramount’s tender offer, with Paramount listing “the Public Investment Fund (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), L’imad Holding Company PJSC (Abu Dhabi), Qatar Investment Authority (Qatar), and Affinity Partners (Jared Kushner)” as investors who would, under a successful deal scenario, hold nonvoting equity and forgo governance rights, including board seats.
“The filing also states that because these investors are structured without such rights, “the Transaction will not be within CFIUS’s jurisdiction,” referring to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Reports have suggested that WBD’s board opted for Netflix’s deal as it lacked any foreign financing components and therefore faced no issues with CFIUS, a notably opaque and powerful antitrust tool that the government can employ to block controversial mergers.”
Before Last Night’s 45th Anniversary…
I’d somehow never seen this local ABC News video report.
Curious as this sounds, watching it whooshed me back not just to a singular dark moment but to a long-ago neverland, 40 years before the sudden double-whammy nightmare of COVID and totalitarian woke terror…I would have that monocultural, pre-culture war time again…a time when the murder of a much-beloved, “Across The Universe”-y fellow…a sometimes feisty snappy brain who dreamt of cosmic fairy dust…a death that touched everyone equally, even the pickup-truck bumblefucks.
GG’s Highly Respectable Best Actress Roster
Okay, I still haven’t seen Hedda but the other five are aces. Buckley and Reinsve especially.
But I still say Kirsten Dunst‘s achey-breaky, open-heart performance in Derek Cianfrance‘s Roofman was unfairly dismissed. Her best ever, in my view.
Now That Netflix Is Finally Streaming “Jay Kelly”
Filed from Venice on 8.28.25:
Noah Baumbach‘s Jay Kelly (Netflix, 11.14) — a reflection-and-meditation piece about a 60ish movie star’s life (in some respects literally George Clooney’s, one gathers or infers, and doubly so during a tribute at the very end which presents a montage of Clooney’s films) — is actually fairly decent, and it ends in a very affecting and bittersweet way.
It’s a summary of a rich guy and his famous life and what it’s all meant or seems to mean, and the final emotional residue in terms of friends, family, selfishness, distractions, blessings, highs and lows…really the whole magillah.
It’s generally fast and fleeting and briskly assembled, and is actually reminiscent, in some respects and as curious as this may sound, of Charles Dickens‘ “A Christmas Carol” (in particular the 1951 film version that Brian Desmond Hurst directed and which Alistair Sim brought to life), especially as the film is largely about Clooney’s Kelly absorbing a series of some uncomfortable and sometimes painful realizations about how his business associates, old friends and especially his two daughters really feel about him.
It’s not a masterwork — it doesn’t feel heavy or deep enough, and seems a bit facile at times — and it’s certainly not on the corrupted-adult level of Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton, in which Clooney gave his finest performance.
But Clooney plays it openly and with vulnerability — he knows this line of country like the back of his hand — and the film itself conveys, persuades, penetrates. It sells its own movie-star, “this is the life he’s chosen” narrative.
At times Jay Kelly feels a bit old-fashioned — very “scripted”, very “acted” and a little schmaltzy here and there, and the visual flashback transitions are almost on the level of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (’62).
But it finally feels whole and melancholy and solemnly considered, especially at the very end. It’s expansive and exploratory and fully felt, and is very well acted by not just Clooney but by Adam Sandler (as Jay’s manager), Laura Dern (publicist), Billy Crudup (former acting buddy), Riley Keough (daughter #1), Grace Edwards (daughter #2) and Stacy Keach (roguishly “charming” dad on the downswing).
Jay Kelly is a show and a “movie” but it works according to its own delivery terms, and is certainly better than I thought it would be, and the final line absolutely kills — it even brought a tear to my eye.
It’s therefore a solid A-minus or a B-plus, and Clooney and Sandler really touch bottom, bring the goods.
Quibble #1: Everyone in Kelly’s inner circle has pretty much written him off emotionally. They regard him as flaky, immature, undependable, self-absorbed. But that’s what many big-time actors are for the most part, no? Doesn’t everyone accept this? Many and probably most famous actors are in love with themselves first, and their family and friends second. Big deal. Roll with it.
Quibble #2: Billy Crudup plays a 50ish might-have-been actor who resents and is actually enraged at Kelly for having stolen a key part that Crudup had auditioned for and badly wanted at the time, but the annals of film acting are filled with stories about a friend who was just tagging along who wound up getting the role from an impromptu audition instead of the primary guy. Just because Crudup was extra-hungry for the role in question doesn’t mean he was entitled to it, or that he was right for it. Mature people understand that life can be an unfair.
Quibble #3: Nobody would ever refer to a big film tribute event taking place in “Tuscany”…they would say Siena or Florence or Volterra or Radda in Chianti. Just like no one would talk about a similar-type event in the States happening in the “Deep South” or the “Pacific Northwest.”
Remember The Sarandos!
I’m good with Paramount’s hostile Warner Bros. takeover bid because of that infamous, gut-slamming Lawrence of Arabia-is-cool-on-an-iPhone quote that Netflix honcho Ted Sarandos gave to the N.Y. Times last year, and which was posted/published on 5.25.04:
The smallest acceptable indoor screen for a Lawrence of Arabia viewing is a 65-inch 4K screen, although an 80-inch or 100-inch UHD screen would be better. I’ve seen David Lean’s 1962 epic on big-ass theatrical screens at least five or six times, but I’m not a 70mm freak like I was in the mid-to-late 20th Century. DCPs are the best image generators.
For Those Who (a) Weren’t Paying Attention or (b) Couldn’t Be Bothered Several Weeks Ago
Posted on 10.10.25, it was called “Another Exercise in Mute Nostril Agony.”
Mary Bronstein and Rose Byrne’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is about miserable, gloomed-out Linda (Byrne), a weary, facially-lined, stressed-out, emotionally and psychologically gutted therapist and struggling mother of a young ailing daughter (heard but unseen until the very end)…
Call her a 40ish woman under siege…anguished to a fare-thee-well and at her absolute wit’s end…a victim of a tortured, infuriating, harrowing, one-urban-indignity-after-another gauntlet that — surprise! — assaults and saps the life force out of the audience as much as Linda if not more so.
Within the first five minutes I was telling myself “you’re not going to last through this whole thing”. But I decided I would tough it out, dammit, for at least an hour. Which I did. It was agony and I was checking my watch every ten minutes, but I made it!
In Jeannette Catsoulis ‘s N.Y Times review (10.9), she calls If I Had Legs “wrenching and at times suffocating”, as well as “a horror movie…a howling maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor”.
There is no humor-spiking at any point in this film, trust me. Zero.
Catsoulis also writes that “some viewers could find the movie’s relentlessness exhausting“.
Famous Steve Martin line in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (‘88), spoken to John Candy: “Do ya think so?”
Golden Globe Noms Blow Off “Wicked: For Good”, The Only Truly Legit Musical Contender, In Comedy/Musical Category!
Bottom–line HFPA statement: “Eff you, Jon Chu…not good enough.”
While at the same time they’ve handed a Best Film Comedy / Musical nomination to One Battle After Another, that all-singing, all-dancing laugh riot from Paul Thomas Anderson, the Stanley Donen of the 2020s.
Seriously — fraudulent or self-satirizing inclusions in the GG comedy / musical category have been a running joke for a long time, but apart from Sean Penn’s played-straight erection scene, there isn’t so much as a single sincere snicker in the whole film..,not a one.
What this means, of course, is that Hamnet will most likely win the Best Drama prize. But it’s not a shoo-in because of the unrelenting grief-and-grime factor during the first 85%. Which means that HE fave Sentimental Value has a reasonable shot.
No, They Don’t
@dareal08_ can i just watch a cheesy holiday movie where a guy and a girl fall in love?