Why is Peter Debruge leaving Variety? Why would he throw away a nice, well-salaried gig at the top of the heap…why abandon his position one of the industry’s most listened-to film critics? It doesn’t calculate.
Apparently Debruge, who’s been with Variety since ’05 (21 years), just wanted to make a change in order to make a change. A friend says “he’s got a lot of irons in the fire”, and apparently wants to do something aside from (or above and beyond) the cricket game.
Super-smart, uber-knowledgable and never missing a trick, Peter has always seemed (to me anyway) like an obliging, generous-hearted fellow who has always been reluctant to scold filmmakers. He’s always had much more in common, attitude-wise, with the film buff-ish Martin Scorsese or Francois Truffaut in his Cahiers du Cinema days.
I’m not saying “butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth” but Debruge has certainly never written with any kind of stinging, knife-like, John Simon-ish mentality.
Rumor has it that Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake opened theatrically two days ago. You coulda fooled me**.
If there was a God this Iraqi drama, winner of the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award as well as the Cannes Film Festival’s Caméra d’Or, would win the Best Int’l Feature Oscar. Maybe it will despite the cold, barren emptiness of the cosmos.
Posted on 5.16.25: All hail Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake, which I saw this morning at 8:45 am. It’s EASILY the best Cannes ’25 film thus far…EASILY.
The only thing that scares me is that I saw Netflix’s Albert Tello at the screening, and it would be awful if Netflix were to capture this jewel of a children’s adventure film and bury it in their streaming feed. Cake is an upscale crowd-pleaser in the finest, richest, most culturally authentic sense of the term, and it needs to be seen theatrically….please. It’s my idea of an instant classic — all but guaranteed to be nominated for a Best Int’l Feature Oscar.
I tend to be impatient with films about young kids but this handmade Iraqi film (apparently the first from that formerly turbulent, war-torn country to be shown in Cannes) is different…it has an impoverished but compassionate Bicycle Thief atmosphere with just a tiny little touch of The Red Balloon and maybe a slight spritzing of Hector Babenco‘s Pixote, and you can tell almost immediately it’s a grade-A, pick-of-the-litter pearl.
Partially set in the wetland marshes of southern Iraq (which for the 37th time is not pronounced EYE-rack but Uhraq) but mostly in a big city (not precisely identified as Bagdad but shot there) and all of it occuring just before the 2003 U.S. invasion, it’s basically about a nine-year-old girl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), who lives in a floating straw hut upon the Mesopotamian marshes with grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).
The plot comes from Hadi’s childhood memory of a school event in which one member of each class is chosen to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein‘s birthday (4.28). Lamia is selected to be her class’s cake-baker. She and Bibi are dirt poor and can barely afford, much less find, the chief ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar) but failing to deliver or, worse, refusing this honor is out of the question.
And so Lamia, Bibi and Lamia’s pet rooster Hindi head for the big city (Basra, Nasiriyah and Amarah are closest to the marshes). And yet the diabetic, overweight Bibi has a secret agenda in visiting the city, and this freaks Lamia out. So she takes off and hooks up with Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a school friend and an Artful Dodger-like thief who’s roughly her age. The heart of Cake is about these two scrounging around Bagdad in a search for the cake ingredients and coping with a few Dickensian twists and turns.
Boiled down, the film is essentially a portrait of Bagdad street life and all kinds of crafty, hustling, struggling denizens (including a devious would-be molester) trying to save or make a buck or otherwise stay afloat.
Nayef and Qasem are not only perfect in a way that only non-actors can be, but they blend together beautifully.
The brilliant cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru and the nimble editing by Andu Radu are genius touches.
Eric Roth and Marielle Heller helped bring Cake to life from a Sundance Screenwriting Lab. Roth: “It’s a small miracle…dear Hasan has a poet’s soul…in this too public business of absorbing the blows of outrageous fortune, Cake is that sweet taste of honey.”
Chris Columbus and Michelle Satter also pulled strings on the film’s behalf.
…which teams are battling each other in today’s Super Bowl LX. Not out of HE snideness or derision or dislike of the nationwide community of football fans…it just hadn’t penetrated. But now I know! The New England Patriots (AFC) vs. the Seattle Seahawks (NFC). And the Seahawks are likely to win.
The game, happening in Levi’s stadium (northwest of San Jose. just south of the salt ponds), starts at 6:30 pm eastern. Kickoff time, I mean. NBC, Peacock, and Telemundo.
N.Y. Times (i.e., The Athletic): “If our staff’s Super Bowl picks are any indication, Sam Darnold and the Seahawks will bring the Lombardi Trophy home to Seattle.
“Most of our voters acknowledge that the New England Patriots have top-tier leadership in coach Mike Vrabel and second-year quarterback Drake Maye, but they believe the Seahawks are the better team overall, featuring an elite defense.
“Overall, 78 percent of our 45 voters picked Seattle to beat New England.
“The Seahawks have been a tough out all season because of how effective they are in all three phases,” The Athletic’s Michael-Shawn Dugar, who covers the Seahawks, says. “When the offense isn’t humming, the defense and special teams can pick up the slack. When the defense has a rough night against Matthew Stafford, the offense is ready to drop 30 points on a top-10 defense.
“Seattle has been the best and most complete team all season. Its defense is suffocating and dominant up front. The offense is explosive. The special teams units are elite. If the Seahawks play their usual style, they should earn the second championship in franchise history.”
Big deal, yeah yeah, who cares? No — that’s small. PTA deserves serious respect. Always has. OBAA is very well crafted, and the Minnesota ICE horrors have ratified it socially and politically. Let it go at that.
In his mid 20s Indiana Jones was a bit of a Jeffrey Epstein guy, or so legend has it. It happened concurrent with the ravenous heyday of CharlesChaplin but several decades before the Epstein psychology became known as a social malignancy. At 25 or 26, Indy (born around 1900) had a torrid affair with Marion Ravenwood when she was 15 and perhaps even younger. According to an AI search, that is.
HE’s 2026 Cannes pad is a bit north of Le Suquet and just south of the Voie Rapide…roughly a 10-minute walk to the Palais, maybe a bit less.
The Venice pad is right smack on the big Castello promenade, facing the lagoon…a stone’s throw from the San Marco vaporetto stop.
Gushing gratitude to all those fine souls who dropped cash into HE’s 2026 GoFundMe project. I didn’t get to the $8K target — maybe I’ll re-boot the ask sometime in late March or thereabouts.
(1) The second note from the odious abductor, a “layered, well-constructed” message sent to Tuscon’s KOLD, reportedly indicates (according to TMZ’s Harvey Levin) there will be “no talk” with the Guthrie family. In other words, no interest in providing proof of life.
(2) No effort to provide proof of life suggests that the abductor is Steve Buscemi‘s Carl Showalter in Fargo…some kind of intemperate nihilist who’s not an especially bright bulb. Everyone over the age of ten knows you can’t hope to score ransom bucks unless you provide proof of life…period. Why kidnap anyone unless you understand the rules of the game and are ready to abide by them?
(3) Upon nabbing Nancy a week ago, the idiot abductor didn’t think to grab her medication. This suggests he/she was too stupid or brutally inclined to understand that keeping Nancy in a state of relatively good health would be a necessary component in any attempt to snag a ransom.
(4) What kind of kidnapper uses brutal violence upon an 84-year-old victim, leading to several blood drops splattered near her front door? What kind of an animal would bash or punch out an old lady? The perp sounds like Peter Stormare’s Gaear Grimsrud.
(5) The abductor having not thought things through, the hair-trigger violence, the impulsive thoughtlessness and now an apparent lack of interest in providing proof of life…all of this indicates that poor Nancy may not have survived this brutal ordeal. A frail woman going a full week without medication? Plus unable to walk very far on her own, plus her pacemaker disconnected from her iPhone watch, etc. It breaks my heart but I’m very afraid that Nancy may be a goner, as the Lindbergh baby was not long after the March 1932 kidnapping.
The FBI has reportedly offered $50,000 to anyone who can supply pertinent information about the abductor. That’s chicken feed. In the wake of the 94-year-old Lindbergh kidnapping, “the New Jersey State police offered a $25,000 reward, equivalent to $576,000 in 2024, for anyone who could provide information pertaining to the case.”
Rod Lurie and his Facebook homies have lost their minds over Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s murky, inexplicably muddy cinematography in the second half of Sinners. Saner sensibilities need to look this hyperbole in the eye and clear the air.
Over the last two nights I re-watched Wolfgang Petersen‘s In the Line of Fire (’93), which I hadn’t seen in over three decades.
Clint Eastwood was 62 during filming, and he looks like a fit-as-a-fiddle 54 or 55, at the oldest. Such a good looking hombre, in such good shape (the old-guy exhaustion bits are just fake acting) and with such a great haircut. The camera loves him.
He’s playing a kind of Clint Hill figure named Frank Horrigan — a haunted Secret Service agent who was riding right behind JFK in Dallas on 11.22.63, and who can’t shake the guilt pangs…a deep-down feeling that after the first shot he could’ve leapt on top of the Presidential limo and saved the day by taking Oswald’s head-shot bullet.
Did I just say that? Yes, I did. The brain-matter blowout shot didn’t come from the grassy knoll.
Frank, in any event, finally puts that Dallas nightmare to bed at the very end.
Horrigan is an old-school sexist who thinks of Renee Russo‘s Lilly Raines, a fellow Secret Service agent, as political “window dressing.” No film made today would even flirt with using a character like Frank, who even in the early ’90s was skirting the edge of uncoolness.
Lilly sees Frank for the dinosaur that he is, but she still finds him charming and even fuckable. (Not an incongruent notion, Russo being 38 at the time.) They don’t quite “do it” in the course of the film, but they’re together at the finale.
Bill Clinton had just been elected when ITLOF began filming in late ’92, and that was a long time ago, you bet. The technical aspects feel quite creaky and analogue-y. The computer screen fonts are positively prehistoric.
John Malkovich, 39 during filming, has enormous fun playing the bitter, unhinged, wackjob assassin, alternately known as Mitch Leary, Joseph McCrawley, James Carney and Booth.
There’s a great bit in a third-act scene in which he’s getting dressed for a swanky black-tie party at L.A.’s Hotel Bonaventure. Petersen and dp John Bailey (who became AMPAS president) deliver an insert shot of Malkovich’s hairy pot belly, and he slaps it twice…pohp, pohp!
In The Line of Fire is a flush-looking, slightly above-average, big-studio action thriller…nothing more or less than that. A diverting, highly competent popcorn thing.
By affectionately praising her mom’s character and kindness, Guthrie was appealing to the humanity of the kidnappers. Exactly like Diane Baker‘s Sen. Ruth Martin did in her video appeal to Buffalo Bill, her daughter’s kidnapper.
I want credit, I mean, for having recognized the Lambs dialogue but also allowing myself to get sidetracked by other stuff and eventually forgetting to mention it. I want credit for this.
Diane Baker is still with us at age 87; her 88th birthday is on 2.25.26.
Oh, and that forthcoming, yet–to–be–shotmovie based on Samantha Geimer ‘s “TheGirl: ALifeintheShadow of RomanPolanski”, a 2013 account of the media maelstrom that had dominated and permeated Geimer’s life from 1977 until the date of publication (and which still hangs over Geimer’s head as we speak)?
If it’s at all true to Geimer’s 13-year-old book, Marina Ziolkowski’s film won’t be a “RomanPolanski is evil and still deserves to be punished” thing — it’ll be a condemnation of the Polanski pitchforkers, many of whom have posted rabid RoPo condemnations on HE for many, many years.
