Oh, Stop It…She’s Okay in “OBAA” But Only That
January 13, 2026
Timelessness of Divinity?
January 13, 2026
I Still Say Stacy Martin Is Too Hot To Portray A Sex-Averse Religious Zealot
January 13, 2026
“Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough star in SasquatachSunset, an absurdist comedy [that] follows a family of Yetis over the course of a year.
“With zero dialogue or narration but plenty of grunts, the film captures an immersive, ‘true’ depiction of the daily life of the Sasquatch. That apparently involves sex, masturbation, vomiting, flatulence and plenty of other gorey acts that aren’t fit to print.
“A smattering of audience members appeared to be too squeamish about these quotidian experiences, shielding their eyes during bloody moments and stomping for the exit at the Eccles Theater well before the credits began to roll.
“Others delighted in the gastrointestinally graphic sequences. One scene, involving liquids spouting out of every — and we mean every — orifice of the female Bigfoot, played to raucous applause in the room. Less than 15 minutes into the film, one moviegoer announced to nobody in particular, ‘This is the weirdest movie ever.’
“Sasquatch Sunset is the kind of movie you need to see to believe.”
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s.
By which he meant films that spend more time on criminals than people trying to catch them, or no time with the catchers at all.
No cop movies, he said, which eliminates Dirty Harry, The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, etc. Also no period caper or con movies (The Sting, The Great Train Robbery), no historical gangster flicks (The Godfather I and II). Strictly contemporary crime pictures in which the protagonists are engaged in criminal activity. Hence Friedkin’s Sorcerer (desperate struggle over rough terrain) and Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz don’t qualify. And no Juggernaut because it’s told almost entirely (98%) from the point of view of the catchers.
Three of his picks I immediately scratched off — Richard Brooks‘ $ (aka Dollars), Michael Cimino‘s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (fuck Cimino) and Walter Hill‘s The Driver (too loud, brutalist, mechanical). Which left seven.
I then added seven more for a total of 14 films, all released between 1.1.70 and 1.1.80.
Three of my top ten opened in ’77 and ’78, but the other seven were released between ’71 and ’73. In order of preference…
I’m going to stick my neck out by saying I’m probably the only tristate area guy with a Red River belt buckle and a “Kennedy for President” sticker on my car’s rear bumper.
I never bought a single S.I. issue or read a single article but it was a respected, top-rank publication from the early Eisenhower era all the way to the age of Joe Biden — nearly 70 years of publishing. All I did was glance at the swimsuit issues.
I’m presuming that Thelma ‘s Sundance ‘24 reviewers, very few of whom you can trust due to their whore-ish tendencies, are bendingoverbackwards to be nice to 94 year-old star June Squibb (who was born three years after Marilyn Monroe). But maybe not.
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965CivilWar–erawestern, and I’ve frankly stopped trying.
Was the 156-minute version ever seen by anyone except R.G. Armstrong? The 136-minute version is longer but is it necessarily, positively better? I’ve only seen the shortest version (126 minutes) with the Mitch Millersing–alongers on the soundtrack.
I know two things — during the ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s Peckinpah allowed his career to be stained and diminished by raging alcoholism, and that with the exception of three films (Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs) everything he was involved in was to varying degrees colored by rage and snarls and waste.
Over the years his persistent asshole-ishness overwhelmed his creative visions, and people just got sick of him.
I own a Bluray of BringMeTheHeadofAlfredo Garcia (‘74) and I’ve watched it exactly once. There’s a reason for that. The nihilistic finale leaves you with nothing. Maybe I should give it another go.
I’ve seen Cross of Iron (1977) once, and while I have a favorable recollection of James Coburn and Maximilian Schell’s lead performances, I mostly recall Gene Shalit calling it “a movie of bad.”
All this aside, I sure do envy Joe Dante for having seen the 152-minute version of TheWild Bunch (7 minutes longer than the official, definitive 145-minute Bluray) during the 1969 Bahamas press junket.
FrancesMcDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led to an idiotic ending.
Her old white van was indisputably on its last legs, and 60ish DavidStraitharn, lonely but harmless, clearly would’ve settled for simple, no-big-deal companionship.
I’m sorry but there’s this notion out there that choosing a healthy or constructive path in life requires (a) not being a stubborn egoistic purist and (b) understanding that opting for common-sense security isn’t necessarily a death sentence or a prison term.
The curious ending of Nomadland refuses to acknowledge this. It basically says “better to die destitute and alone on a two-lane blacktop while shitting in a bucket in the middle of the night than to accept kindness and sensible adult friendship.”
In paragraph #6, Mailer writes that early in the Bernardo Bertolucci film “Brando abruptly cashes the check Stanley Kowalski wrote for us twenty-five years ago — he fucks the heroine standing up. It solves the old snicker of how do you do it in a telephone booth? — he rips her panties open.
“In our new line of New Yorker–approved superlatives, it can be said that the cry of the fabric is the most thrilling sound to be heard in World Culture since the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.”
Tango premiered at the 1972 New York Film Festival (10.14.72), but opened commercially on 2.1.73 at Manhattan’s Trans Lux East (Third Avenue between 57th Street and 58th Street). Tickets went for a then-unheard-of price of $5.00.
USA Today: “Today Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee gave Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis until Feb. 2 to formally respond to explosive allegations that she has been in an improper romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the private lawyer she hired as a special prosecutor overseeing the election fraud case against former President Donald Trump and 14 alleged co-conspirators.
“McAfee also scheduled a Feb. 15 hearing — likely to be televised — to hear arguments on the issue from Willis and a lawyer for Michael Roman, the Trump-co-defendant and 2020 campaign official who made the allegations last week.
“Willis has declined to specifically address the accusations that she was having an affair with Wade, and that she hired him for the job and paid him more than $650,000 even though he is unqualified to oversee the high-profile case.”
HE reaction #1: Willis and Wade possibly schtupping each other while working on the prosecution of Trump’s Georgia-election-interference case is technically no one’s business but their own. Intimate relationships between high-powered people who work together (whether attached or unattached to others) are fairly common. However…
HE reaction #2: If the rumors of an intimate relationship are true, it was astonishingly arrogant and stupid of Willis and Wade to have opened themselves up to potential ridicule and wagging tongues, and thereby compromise, at least in terms of public image, the integrity of the prosecution’s case against Trump.
What matters at the end of the day is whether or not Willis, Wade and their prosecutorial colleagues have the proof to convict Trump or not — that’s the bottom line. It shouldn’t matter what Willis and Wade were up to after-hours. But that aside, what mind-blowing carelessness on their part…God! This is out of a Harold Robbins novel.
Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, repped by Atlanta lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, is contending that the allegations are serious enough to have Willis, Wade and the entire Fulton County DA’s office disqualified and thrown off the case.
In a 1.4.24 N.Y. Times essay titled “The Case for Disqualifying Trump Is Strong,” columnist David French focused mainly on the legal argument for disqualifying Donald Trump from the presidency on the basis of the text and history of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
French: “I made the case that the plain language of the amendment should disqualify Trump regardless of the consequences, which many observers — including some strongly opposed to Trump — believe would be dire and violent.
