I’ve just decided to re-watch Lawrence Kasdan‘s Mumford (Touchstone, 9.24.99). It’s about a fraudulent but extremely charismatic small-town therapist (Loren Dean), whom almost everyone loves to chat with and confess to. I loved it from the get-go (it has a dead perfect ending), but too many critics disapproved and it managed only a lousy $4.5 million gross. But it’s a really, really good film, I swear. Exudes a certain sly, low-key charm.

Roger Ebert, 9.24.99: “There are no earth-shaking payoffs here. No dramatic astonishments, vile betrayals or sexual surprises. Just the careful and loving creation of some characters it is mostly a pleasure to meet. And at its deepest level, profoundly down there below the surface, it is something more, I think: an expression of Kasdan’s humanist longings, his wish that people would listen better and value one another more. It is the strangest thing, how this movie sneaks up and makes you feel a little better about yourself.”

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I’d love to re-see Poor Things (Searchlight, 12.8) next week, but I’m obliged to wait until Monday, 12.4.

Just don’t forget — it’s eight or nine times better than Barbie!

I don’t feel an obligation to state what I’m thankful for today, just because the calendar says this is the day to put your feelings on the table. For I feel thankful 24/7/365.

I’m especially grateful, very grateful, for the luck that has come my way. And for the bad luck, in a way, as all misfortune is character-building. And for the daily opportunity to show love for my two sons and the overall community (old friends, business pallies, colleagues, cats) and the general feeling of loving or liking or aligning with others in whatever way.

Plus I’m hugely grateful that I wasn’t born to a downmarket family in Nebraska or Montana or to some resigned, lethargic, drinking-class environment. I’m very thankful, in other words, for what my parents and grandparents bequeathed.

“In the early scenes [of Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon], the titular figure seems to be another of Joaquin Phoenix‘s taciturn, unnervingly volatile, enigmatically damaged, violent men.

“The difference is that this Napoleon, with his bloat, scowls and consuming needs, often resembles nothing as much as an angrily petulant baby, one whose cruelty and pathological vanity make the horror he unleashes unnervingly familiar.” — from Manohla Dargis’s 11.22 N.Y. Times review.

It’s fairly uncommon for critics and the ticket-buying public to feel exactly the same way about a new release. To go by Rotten Tomatoes the elite know-it-alls and your Joe Popcorn types agree that Napoleon is the same kind of problem.

An old HE chestnut, updated:

There’s a very significant difference between all the big-screen King Kongs we’ve seen since Peter Jackson‘s 2005 disappointment and Merian C. Cooper and Willis O’Brien‘s classic, stop-motion, herky-jerky version.

I’m not saying that Jackson and the others made the right or the wrong call in the fashioning of their Kongs, but here’s the thing:

Cooper’s Kong didn’t look like any gorilla, chimp or orangutan that had ever walked the earth. He was something between a prehistoric hybrid and an imaginary monster of the id…a raging nightmare beast designed to scare the bejeesus out of 1933 moviegoers.

O’Brien, the legendary stop-motion phtography pioneer, used three slightly different-looking Kong models during filming, but for me the master stroke was deciding to give his Kong a set of gleaming white teeth and a pair of very bright white eyes.

In some of the darker shots of Kong in the 1933 film those teeth and those eyes just pop right out, and the effect is still primal as hell. Those white eyes and black pupils look so fierce and almost demonic…contrasting as they do with that black bear fur that Kong was covered in…that they almost give you the willies, even now.

There’s no such aura with all the National Geographic Kongs we’ve seen this century. The realism element is awesome but the spook factor is nil. In going for anthropological realism Jackson and the others threw out that creepy, better-than-reality, only-in-the-movies element that gives the 1933 film a serious-nightmare quality.

It was Abraham Lincoln, remember, who, in 1863, officially proclaimed that Thanksgiving would be celebrated on the final Thursday in November. And that’s how it’s been ever since. I don’t know how Thanksgiving worked before that year — does anyone? All I know is that everything was cool until the wokesters came along and began to throw shade upon the origins of Thanksgiving, or more precisely the relations between white settlers and Native Americans.

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“Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

This Oswald family footage, taken on 11.22.62 or Thanksgiving Day, is indistinguishable from tens of thousands of home movies taken that very same afternoon. Family celebrations are pretty much all the same, and are always about facades. The insisted-upon emotions of these gatherings (happiness, contentment, alpha vibes) always mask the undercurrents.

Even the 23-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald wore a happy face that day…imagine.

American Thanksgiving celebrations are about hope and cheer and togetherness. In every home and at every dinner table everyone is presumed to be doing reasonably well or at least trying to do better, and planning for the best. But you never know.

Sasha Stone, currently in Ohio, just told me about joining her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, the boyfriend’s brother and other family members for a pre-Thanksgiving get-together. “And the vibes were really great,” she said, “because the family members seemed genuinely happy…unlike so many extended families today they don’t all hate each other….they get along.”

Happy Sliced Turkey Breast with Micro-Waved, Deli-Prepared Gravy plus Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Green Giant or Del Monte Peas and Beans.

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…and in so doing making it seem as if Focus Features’ decision to announce an early (11.28) streaming date a week and a half after the 11.10 wide-release launch…all I can tell you is that this early streaming detour made me feel badly..

To repeat, Focus will start streaming one of the best-written, best-acted and best character-driven films of the year on 11.28.

Focus platformed Alexander Payne’s universally-praised Oscar contender on 10.27 and then went wide (1478 screens), as noted, on 11.10.

Over-40s showed up (I caught it a week ago at a local AMC plex) but your texting, short-attention-span, snorting-at-rave-reviews Millennials and Zoomers didn’t flock (presumably unenthused about a film set in 1970 and preferring something more personally relatable) and the take so far is a passable but no-great-shakes $9 million and change.

The Holdovers is not a sentimental nostalgia trip. It authentically recreates that 1970-ish atmosphere, but it’s mainly about top-tier chops — witty writing, careful character building, wry humor and Payne’s ultra-refined filmmaking instincts.

Posted today by World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy:

On 11.21.23, in the middle of a Brian Jonestown Massacre show at the Forum Theatre in Melbourne, an onstage brawl — a falling-down slapfight — happened between guitarist and lead vocalist Anton Newcombe, 56, and guitarist Ryan Van Kriedt. The remainder of their Australian tour was cancelled the next day. Many in the audience grew tired of the long gaps between songs – up to three or four minutes – and the “torrent of abuse” that Newcombe hurled at the crowd, and left early. And then the curtain came down.

Here’s an 1.22 report by NME’s Surej Singh.

…was a moderate realpolitik liberal by early ‘60s standards, and yet by the measurement of today’s political thinking (and certainly compared to the beliefs of the post-2017 censorious wacko left) he would have to be seen as a centrist and even in some respects a center–rightist.

In terms of lightning vibes, cool glamour and soaring oratorical panache JFK’s only equal was and is Barack Obama.

If George McGovern (the “Prairie populist”) had miraculously been elected in ‘72 he might have become, I believe, an inspirational Democratic president. His voice was twangy and his speeches often sounded platitudinous, but he had soul and integrity.

Or he could have suffered the unfortunate political fate of the recently widowed Jimmy Carter.

Bill Clinton, for sure, was and is another charisma prince and an exceptional wowser speech-giver, but administratively he was more or less an Eisenhower Republican.

…because some of her texts on the Israeli-Hamas conflict have implied an anti–Semitic bias, or so some have judged. And so the In The Heights costar has been jettisoned from the next Scream movie.

It’s fair to observe, I think, that there’s an apparent racial-ethnic factor affecting reactions to the Israeli-Hamas war.

If you’re a fair-skinned American or European Jew (fully or partly), you’re naturally going to feel an allegiance with Israel. If you’re from a culture of color that has experienced white avarice or white colonialism or white racism (Barrera is Mexican), you’re going to identify or sympathize with the Palestinian viewpoint.

There appears to be no way for an entertainment industry person to express limited support or at least compassion for presumably innocent Gaza Palestinians caught in the crossfire without taking a career hit.

You can’t say, for example, that “the 10.7 Hamas atrocity was satanic and that the responsible Hamas fiends must suffer the necessary consequences, but many thousands of non-combatant Gaza residents have since died from Israeli reprisals and many more thousands of non-combatants will die in the coming weeks, and that too is tragic.”

Apparently you can’t blurt this out without being regarded askance or getting dropped or cancelled.

This is what Barrera recently said:

But in other texts she implied what sounded to some like a form of racial bias — feelings and convictions in support of Gaza victims but also against Israel’s “white” government and its defensive (or suppressive) military policies

However unwise from a careerist perspective, what Barrera has said seems fairly close to what Barack Obama said on 11.5, Here’s a portion: