Zelda Williams and Diablo Cody‘s Lisa Frankenstein (Focus Features, 2.9), which I will almost certainly hate, appears to be a blend of two basic ideas.

One, the trope of a headstrong teenage girl (Kathryn Newton‘s “Lisa Swallows”) falling for some kind of eccentric, misunderstood outlaw or anti-social weirdo (Cole Sprouse), except in this instance it’s a reanimated corpse who smells bad. (And probably has bad breath.)

And two, a riff on Winona Ryder‘s “Lydia Deetz” in Beetlejuice, a goth girl communing with the dead except in this instance it’s a rotting, stinky dead guy instead of husband-and-wife ghosts (Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis).

Plus Lisa Frankenstein is set in 1989, or one year after the release of Beetlejuice.

Ryder will return in Beetlejuice 2 (Warner Bros., 9.6.24). The Tim Burton-directed sequel stars Michael Keaton, of course, along with Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega, Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe “as a ghost detective who, in life, was a B movie action star.”

Yesterday afternoon Variety’s Clayton Davis reported that AMPAS has officially classified Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Barbie script as adapted and not original.

While this is good news for The Holdovers as far as its chances in the Best Original Screenplay competish are concerned, it’s an unfair call.

Gerwig and Baumbach didn’t adapt a previously written Barbie story — they created a story out of a situational Barbie template.

Imagine if someone had written an original screenplay about Jesus of Nazareth returning to the earth in 2023 and becoming a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur. By the Academy’s thinking this would be classified as an adapted screenplay because it borrows from the lore and template of the New Testament.

But of course screenplays aren’t about templates but stories (initial intrigue, structure, tension, second-act pivot, third-act payoff). Using Jesus or Barbie as a central character does not a screenplay make.

In his latest THR Oscar forecast column Scott Feinberg is claiming that Past Lives helmer Celine Song is a more broadly popular Best Director nominee than Poor Things’ Yorgos Lanthimos, The Holdovers’ Alexander Payne and Maestro’s Bradley Cooper.

This is insanity! What kind of woke-ass, gender-focused sewing circle is Feinberg having tea with?

Past Lives is a nicely assembled but unsatisfying relationship film that doesn’t do the thing or bring it home (i.e., in crude terms it doesn’t let you come). It has been written off as a decent try by sensible industry folk, and yet Feinberg is allowing himself to be fiddle-fiddled by the A24 safe-space mafia…the identity fanatics who are whispering “we need a woman of color in the mix.”

Wanting to become a Catholic deacon is “better” than wanting to become a heroin addict or an Islamic terrorist, but in the realm of Shia LeBeouf it’s the same basic dynamic — an inability to trust his own mystical realm and an urge to submit to a stronger external current.

Meanwhile we all want to see Abel Ferrara’s Padre Pio…seriously.

I just want to come clean and admit that despite my projecting a devotional film buff profile all my life or at least since the ‘80s, I never got around to seeing Carl Dreyer‘s The Passion of Joan of Arc (’28) until last night.

But I finally went there, man, and now I’m “experienced” in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the term.

An English-subtitled version of the definitve director’s cut (i.e., the 1981 Oslo version) became available for free public domain streaming on 1.1.24, you see, and that’s what I watched. Lying in bed, MacBook Pro, best headphones.

Good God, what a lapel-grabbing, no-way-out masterpiece! Right away it leaps out at you and says “stop scrolling and whatever the hell else you’re doing and grim up and give it up and watch this, will you?”

I knew right away it was made by a genius…a no-bullshit artist from the same general gene pool as Eisenstein, Murnau, Fincher, Eggers, Kubrick, Ford, Bresson, Fellini, Kurosawa, Scorsese, Powell.

The incessant close-ups, the feeling of Dreyer being in total control, the penetrating focus, the brilliant use of montage, the tracking shots, the sets (painted pink so as to stand out against the white sky), the anguish, the purity, the pain and the cruelty.

What a bleeding, bllistering, open-hearted titular performance by Renee Jean Falconetti.

And the cinematography by Ruolph Mate, who also shot Foreign Correspondent and Gilda and directed D.O.A., When Worlds Collide and The 300 Spartans (a decent sword-and-sandal epic).

I can’t stand tapping this out on the iPhone with the car running…more later.

We haven’t seen much snow in the northeast recently, and the odds are that with global warming and all we’re not going to see much of the stuff from here on. Spotty, half-assed snowfalls at best.

I grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, and each and every winter we were pretty much blanketed with snowfalls between December and March. Two or three and sometimes four, I mean. Shovelling out the front steps and pathways. Shovelling out driveways. Snowball fights. Carrot-nosed snowmen in the front yard.

Blizzards, I fear, are pretty much a thing of the past. I endured an astonishing blizzard in NYC in ’81 or thereabouts.

It’s going to snow this weekend, I’m hearing, but not that much. It didn’t snow at all last year. Be honest — the world that some of us knew in the mid to late 20th Century is going away. Climate change is affecting everything. We’re all melting.

Otherwise all I can say is that (a) Zac Efron sure looks better without the buffed-up wrestler bod and that godawful Prince Valiant hair, and (b) award–wise Colman Domingo, due respect, isn’t happening,

When the 58-year-old Gene Tierney sat for a chat on The Mike Douglas Show in 1979, she bore little resemblance to the beautiful, tres elegant femme fatale she played in Otto Preminger ‘s Laura (‘44).

The Douglas interview was 35 years later, of course, so why the shade? Because Tierney seemed altered by more than time.

She looked and sounded Lucille Ball-ish, to be honest — like someone who’d been smoking unfiltered cigarettes for decades and enjoying her nightly cocktails.

And she spoke with a slightly coarse accent that didn’t exactly scream “finishing school,” which was how she sounded in Laura. She pronounced “awards” as “awauhds”, Warner Bros. as Wauhnuh Brothuhs” and father as “fahthuh”.

Plus Tierney had sadly been grappling with mental issues off and on since the ‘50s, and given my own younger sister’s decades of battling schizophrenia I know what that shit looked like.

All to say that for those who’ve been blessed with good genes and have revelled in their youth and the fair-weather life that often results when people can’t stop talking about how ravishing your green eyes are, they don’t know what they’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

Tierney and her well-to-do family (her father, Howard Sherwood Tierney, was a flush insurance broker) began living in nearby Westport in the mid 1930s. Their home was in the Greens Farms region, and is located at 2 Tierney Lane, presumably christened in honor of her dad. (I’m wondering if Howard’s middle name was somehow connected in a family way to nearby Sherwood Island.)

I’ve been meaning to visit the Tierney homestead since moving here in the spring of ‘22. One of these days.

Gene Tierney made it to age 70. She died on 11.6.91.

Don’t come back.

Faced with a new round of accusations over plagiarism in her scholarly work and despite the rumored back-channel intercession of Barack Obama, Harvard University’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, has resigned.

Gay’s tenure began on July 1, 2023 and ended on January 2, 2024 — six months total, the shortest of any Harvard president ever. She was the institution’s first Black president, and the second woman to lead the university.

N.Y. Times: “Support for Dr. Gay’s nascent presidency began eroding after what some saw as the university’s initial failure to forcefully condemn the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and some pro-Palestinian student responses. Outrage grew in early December after Dr. Gay gave what critics saw as lawyerly, evasive answers before Congress when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people were violations of school policies.”

All Gay had to do was unequivocally condemn anti-Semitism without any ifs, ands or buts. But instead she hopscotched and equivocated around, and now she’s toast.

“The December congressional hearing also led to the ouster of Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, whose support had already been shaken in recent months over her refusal to cancel a Palestinian writers conference. She resigned as Penn’s president four days later.”

Other than believing that A New Hope and especially The Empire Strikes Back are the only first-rate Star Wars films ever made, HE has no investment in the currently evolving Star Wars franchise.

And I couldn’t care less about the utter ruining of the material, the legend and the lore by Lucasfilm’s Kathy Kennedy (the Critical Drinker has been saying this for some time) and particularly her plan to launch an Untitled New Jedi Order film that will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and star Daisy Ridley as Rey.

Average Joe fanboys hate this, of course. They’re up in arms. They don’t think the Star Wars franchise should be about pushing woke values or feminism but classic escapism, primal themes and the usual yaddah yaddah.

Obaid-Chinoy’s Wiki page describes her as “a Pakistani-Canadian journalist, filmmaker and activist known for her work in films that highlight gender inequality against women.”

…the painting of common objects, starting with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and moving on down the line. Hence my own lowbrow interest in wanting to visit the Ed Ruscha MOMA exhibit before Jan. 15.

Frank Gehry on Ed Ruscha on MOMA platform: