I finally saw Ron Howard‘s Eden last night, and yeah, I get it — it’s not much fun to watch. This doesn’t make it a “bad” film — just an unpleasant one. It’s basically a grubby, sandy, hand-to-mouth survival story, set in the early 1930s, about a few German settlers of Floreana, one of the Gallapagos Islands…a gnarly, rocky, non-tropical, water-poor place roughly 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador…dogs, cows, lizards, steep paths, scrub brush, etc.

I like Owen Gleiberman’s capsule description — “a misanthropic survivalist Robinson Crusoe meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with deranged footnotes by Friedrich Nietzsche.”

It’s not Howard’s fault that all but two of the characters are generally foul, perverse types. Well, okay…Howard chose to re-tell this calamitious true story but he’s just passing along what happened…just sticking to the facts.

All I knew last night was that it felt like a real drag to hang with three of the characters — Jude Law‘s Dr. Friedrich Ritter, a chilly, judgmental misanthrope…Vanessa Kirby‘s Dore Strauch, Ritter’s significant other and a chilly, malevolent blonde in her own right…and Ana de Armas‘s haughty Austrian bitch, Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn, who has an entitled attitude from hell.

There’s also a half-grown son (Jonathan Tittel), a pair of boy-toy types (Toby Wallace, Felix Kammerer) and a well-educated fellow with a movie camera who briefly visits the island (Richard Roxburgh).

The two decent settlers are Sydney Sweeney‘s Margret Wittmer, who lived on Floreana from 1932 until her death at age 95 in 2000, and Margret’s husband Heinz (Daniel Brühl).

Sweeney’s performance has nothing to do with her big boobs, and everything to do with real-deal, dug-in acting that feels genuine and un-“performed”. Zero makeup, her convincing German accent, Margret’s no-nonsense dialogue…Sweeney is the clear standout. Yes, viewers will talk about her baby-birthing scene while dogs are growling and snapping at her, but I believed each and every line and gesture. In every one of her scenes Margret touches the bottom of the pool.

For the last seven years or so Sweeney has struck me as a somewhat breezy lightweight with bodacious ta-tas…Under the Silver Lake, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Reality, Americana, Anyone but You, Madame Web, Christy, the sure-to-be-trashy The Housemaid. Now I respect her. Now I’ve seen through the facade.

Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s Bride of Frankenstein is angry, seething, appalled…naturally. But like every assertive, defiant, hoping-to-be-liberated woman made from odd body parts, she wants to be known, heard and recognized for who she is deep down, and not for being…you know, the bride of this or that dude or hulking creature or whatever.

And so she asks at one point, “What’s my name?” And then chuckles cynically at the silence that greets her. Men…men! Beasts! Egoistic assholes!

Who thought up that splattered inkwell tattoo that extends out of the right corner of Jessie Buckley‘s mouth and onto her right cheek?

Makeup guy to Maggie Gyllenhaal: “Whaddaya think? Maybe…?” Gyllenhaal to Makeup Guy: “I like it. I like it a lot.”

Imagine a momemt as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is just starting to be filmed. Imagine director George Roy Hill taking the moustachioed Robert Redford aside and showing him a pencil sketch that closely resembles the below photo of Buckley’s hissing, screaming bride, and saying “look at this, Bob…are you digging that scowling, tumultuous rage? That angry-rattlesnake expression on her face? That’s what I want from you, Bob…I want the Sundance Kid to be fucking feral. Forget that internal, implacable, cool-cat gunslinger thing that you do so well. I want snarling reptilian rage in almost every scene…can you give me that?”

Jimmy Kimmel will resume his late-night ABC talk show tomorrow night (Tuesday, 9.23), a Disney statement has announced.

Perhaps Disney’s decision had more to do with trying to arrest the Disney-subscriber-bleeding and less to do with Disney honcho Bob Iger showing a little moxie…you tell me.

Kimmel was suspended last week after making an odd, bordering-on-clueless remark during a monologue…a remark that seemed to question the conventional narrative about accused Charlie Kirk murderer Tyler Robinson may have been motivated by his feelings for a live-in transgender biomale furry “girlfriend” named Lance Twiggs…let me start again.

For some reason Kimmel’s monologue remark avoided or sidestepped a prevailing (if unproven) view that Robinson pulled the trigger because he was enraged by what he and others believed were hateful, dismissive attitudes toward the LGBTQ and/or transgender communities from Kirk.

One presumes that Donald Trump, his kneejerk-acolyte brute squad and FCC chairman Brendan Carr are seething and punching the refrigerator as we speak.

How will the Nexstar-owned affiliates react to this?

Disney statement quoted by N.Y. Times reporter John Koblin:

“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country.

“It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

I’m presuming that the financial situation is still not good for Kimmel’s show (ditto the situation regarding CBS’s Late Night with Stephen Colbert) as far as a cost-vs.-earnings comparison is concerned. But against all odds and despite the repressive, sabre-rattling, authoritarian bully-boy maneuvers of the Trumpies, Disney clearly wasn’t comfortable with the free-speech-blowback reaction that was activated by the Kimmel suspension.

Question for Kimmel: Did you honestly think that if it turns out that Robinson is in fact guilty…did you honestly suspect or believe that he wasn’t motivated by rage over Kirk’s statements about the LGBTQ and trans communities in particular?

Bari Weiss‘s five-day-old FP interview with Woody Allen delivered, for me, a wonderful current of calm…a soothing and settled feeling of luscious well-being. It made me feel as if I understand everything…all of it. I felt like I was cruising on a Lemmon 714. I could have listened to a three- or four-hour version.

The only thing I didn’t care for was Allen’s refusal to condemn the woke insanity wave of 2019 to 2024…five or six fucking years of red-book-waving, career-destroying terror, and to this day 90% of the perpetrators STILL don’t even acknowledge that it happened. Of all the cancelled people in the world, Allen shrugs it off and says that “doesn’t affect me” or words to that effect. It does, of course — Allen mined his anger and outrage over the Mia-and-Dylan accusation quite throughly in “Apropos of Nothing“. But he doesn’t want “that” conversation to color his mind, mood or basic attitude, so it gets tossed.

Earlier this morning I watched two Charlie Rose Show interviews with the late, great Lou Reed — a 2003 interview that included his wife Laurie Anderson, and a 1998 solo interview. More bliss.

If I was still living in West Hollywood I would have definitely have driven to Las Vegas by now to see the Las Vegas Sphere presentation of The Wizard Of Oz. It began showing about a month ago. Ticket prices are punishing ($140 or $150 for one decent seat — close to $300 for two people without popcorn, and closer to $400 if you’re buying through a greedy broker).

They’re not even showing the whole, original 102-minute 1939 film — the Sphere version runs only about 70 minutes. But it’s reportedly worth it.

Sphere Oz began showing on 8.28.25, and has earned $55 million so far…in one theatre. The cost of transforming the original 35mm Oz into Sphere’s stunning 16K dimensions took about $100 million. Although the arena seats over 17000 when full, Oz showings only offer the middle section, or roughly a third of its capacity. Two to three shows a day (why not four or five?), nearly every day, through the end of March 2026, with a ticket price that starts at $114 for shitty seats.

Sphere theatres should obviously be built all over the country, but which films should be Sphere-icized? Please, please don’t suggest the fucking Harry Potter films…no!

In HE’s realm the obvious calls would be the classic big-screen spectacles — Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (but not the prequels!), Apocalypse Now, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, Titanic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the original 1933 King Kong…which others?

I would particularly love to see North by Northwest in this format. Image the crop-dusting sequence with all the directional sound and dust and the aroma of dirt and corn crops and a slight whiff of pesticides, and that magnificent blue sky above.

How can any sensible, Democracy-respecting person be against Gavin Newsom‘s Prop. 50, which will try to counterbalance the perversely pro-right gerrymandering of Texas by Donald Trump and Texas governor Greg Abbott? Who could actually support the rogue tilting the electoral map in favor of MAGA brutalism? Note: I’m saying this despite being in limited league with Trump’s anti-woke leanings — the anti-woke stuff is fine, but the repressive authoritarian stuff obviously isn’t.

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…and yet when it finally began streaming last weekend, I “forgot” to watch it. Because the reviews have been so shitty.

Friendo who watched it yesterday: “Eden is no one’s idea of good.”

HE: “Owen Gleiberman called it ‘terrible.’”

Friendo: “There’s a surreal scene in which Sydney Sweeney’s Margret Whitmer, all alone in a cave, goes into labor just as her cabin is being robbed by Ana de Armas’s boy-toy lovers.

“On the brink of birth a pack of dogs arrive and begin to attack Sweeney. Cut to the two robbers escaping with canned foods, and then just as the baby drops Sweeney screams at the dogs until a rescuer artives with a gun and starts shooting them. All of this happening at once — a scene that lasts nearly ten minutes. The dogs!”

HE: “My bad for not watching it. I knew it would give me annoyance and frustration, and my spirit wilted. But I’ll sit through it later today or tonight.”

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.
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Kogonada and Seth Reiss‘s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has failed so completely — tank RT scores with both critics and ticket-buyers, a lousy $3.5M haul in 3,330 theaters — that I suddenly feel sorry for it.

Surely a few HE regulars saw it this weekend — did anyone even half-like it or, you know, find at least some merit in it?

Four days ago (9.17) I mentioned that I had seen Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin‘s Splitsville (Neon, now playing), a freestyle, marital infidelity, fuck-everything-and-everyone sitcom.

I didn’t exactly “like” it because the schlubby-looking, bordering-on-homely Covino and Marvin play the two sexually active male leads, and that’s a stopper right there. Especially with their significant others being played by the seriously fetching Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona, who in real life wouldn’t give guys who look like Covino and Marvin the time of day, much less kiss or fuck them.

You can’t expect an Average Joe with a suburban upbringing and more or less conventional standards (i.e., me) to watch an indie sex farce of this sort and go “yeah, I can relate to these half-ugly, dweeby-looking guys in their early 40s…that could be me up there!…show me a curly-haired guy in a pair of dorky-looking brown shorts and sneakers and a moss-green polo shirt…a guy who takes a shower early on, allowing us to contemplate his milky white skin, narrow shoulders, slight pot belly and prosthetic schlong…you can’t expect me to relate to this shit, man…you can’t!

“Because in my head I’m Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor or at least I used to be that in my prime, and that’s the kind of guy I want to see married to the thirtysomething Dakota Johnson or engaged to Adria Arjona.”

Boiled down, I don’t want to know about homely guys in any sexual context at all. Fair?

But I did laugh with Splitsville a few times, particularly during a sloppily destructive, drawn-out fight scene between Covino qnd Marvin…an exquisitely clumsy fight scene that could’ve been choreographed by a Buster Keaton wannabe in the mid ’20s. And I did find Splitsville unusual and semi-diverting and therefore tolerable. I certainly didn’t dislike it.

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