A few hours ago a friend texted that Benny Safdie‘s The Smashing Machine (A24, 10.3) “felt a bit flat.”

HE RESPONSE: “Yeah, maybe a bit but it mainly felt real and honest and committed to avoiding the usual sports-saga tropes…a probing, hand-held verite thing that adheres to an atmosphere that feels like lived-in reality.”

I was generally pleased with Johnson, whom I’ve found annoying for years, for having actually dug into a role and delivered in intimate, actorish terms…startling! I only know that I believed his Mark Kerr. Pain and Gain aside, Johnson has played the same, strapping, canned-dialogue icon in all his previous films, which have mostly been formulaic shit. He dropped the pose this time.

And Johnson’s argument scenes with Emily Blunt‘s Dawn Staples, whom Kerr was married to for roughly 15 years, touch bottom. Staples is portrayed as half a traditional heart-of-gold girlfriend, and half a pain-in-the-ass egotist who “cares” but is primarily focused on her own life designs — the very definition of a non-Zen partner.

Cheers also for Ryan Bader, who plays Kerr’s best friend Mark Coleman with relaxed assurance and conviction.

Captured this morning around 10:40 am:

Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee is certainly striking and, for what it’s worth, a wackazoid original — a regimented, pageant-like, nutbag historical musical about Ann Lee, the eccentric Shakers founder who was into ecstatic God-praising and celibacy and fervent denial of sexuality.

Lee was a devoted, shrewish-looking miserabalist who left northwest England, along with a couple of dozen followers, to re-settle in upstate New York (who’s ever even heard of Niskayuna?) and dedicate themselves to unmatched religious fanaticism.

How do you make a film about radical secularists who were into hymn-singing and general shrieking and, one presumes, pissing off the normies? Credit Fastvold, at least, for giving in to the crazy…for surrendering to Lee’s ecstatic mystical whateverisms, and really going for it willy-nilly.

While shooting near Budapest at the cost of a mere $10 million, Fastvold and her cast (Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Stacy Martin, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott, Matthew Beard) and crew went mad with the Shaker spirit, and you have to respect that.

Congrats to composer Daniel Blumberg and choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall. The madness clearly engulfed them also, and they’ve created otherworldly asylum vibes.

The movie pulsates with extreme this and that — extreme behavior, extreme denial of life, extreme visual murkiness despite being shot in 70mm, the embrace of puritanical madness. All of the terrible spiritual suppressive stuff that has given old-time Christian religion such a bad name for centuries is abundant.

Plus I couldn’t understand a single word of it, and for whatever reason there were no English subtitles, which every Venice Film Festival entry has brandished so far.

I knew early on that The Testament of Ann Lee would almost certainly give me pain because Fastvold cowrote it with husband Brady Corbet, whose direction of The Brutalist made people like myself writhe in agony last year, and whom I regard as a kind of louche anti-Christ of modern cinema. I knew, in short, that the Corbet influence would be bad news, and boy, was it ever!

HE to industry friendo after last night’s press screening: “Fastvold’s Shaker film is mute nostril agony. A journo pally concurs — ‘Awful’. I noticed five to six walkouts, heard a couple of boos when it ended.”

Friendo to HE: “It sounds like this year’s Women Talking.”

HE to friendo: “It’s much, MUCH worse than Women Talking. Somebody has called it The Brutalist: Folie a Deux.”

The real Ann Lee, who lived until age 48, was rather ugly, and Seyfried (who turns 40 in December) is, of course, beautiful, so the film’s realism is lacking in this regard.

And as long as hotness is on the table, 35-year-old Stacy Martin, who plays Jane Wardley, a British born co-founder of the Shakers, is way too attractive to play a woman who’s into a no-sex, God-and-only-God lifestyle…one look at Martin and you’re thinking “what is she doing with this bunch?”

Fastvold: “I thought Ann Lee deserved something grandiose and wonderful. How many stories have we seen about male icons on a grand scale, again and again and again? Can we not see one story about a woman like this?”

Seyfried on her Shaker singing: “A lot of it was animal sounds as opposed to melodic sounds.”

Woody Allen is a heavenly get for Bill Maher and Club Random. Obviously.

Woody Allen on the “capsule meaning” ofThe Purple Rose of Cairo (starting at 25:30):

“We are all, in my opinion, forced to choose between reality and fantasy. And it’s very pleasurable to choose fantasy. But that way, in the end, lies madness. So you have to choose reality, and reality always kills you. It always hurts you. but you have no choice. You can’t choose fantasy because you’ll go nuts [if you do]. So you have to choose real, and real is always heartbreaking because life is heartbreaking.”

2nd best observation, Maher quoting Allen (33:20): “The line that I loved was, uh, I think about about one of your early dates, and you said ‘I was so exhausted when I got home…so exhausted from being charming. I felt like I’d run a marathon’.

Allen: “But I would not want to give the impression that I was some kind of ladies man who scored all the time. Most of the time I struck out. I succeeded only a few times.”

Allen is too refined and discreet to use HE’s baseball analogy, but what he’s basically saying is that he probably batted around .400. (Okay, maybe .350.) The engulfing tragedy of 2025 and the generally disparaging view of intellectually limited or non-adventurous men among feminist-minded, #MeToo-influenced women is that so many average guys — the ones who aren’t flush, I mean, and are living marginally or modestly with a vaguely shitty car and perhaps an atrocious dress sense — a majority don’t even get lucky one time out of 100, if that.

Scott Galloway calls them “a generation of young men filled with rage and shame.”

A cheap, callous, antagonistic post from the Variety scumbags. Just a casual joke on Woody’s part, and they’re suggesting that he’s somehow on the team:

I could call Jim Jarmusch‘s Father Mother Sister Brother inert and threadbare and let it it go at that. I’m thinking of Casey Affleck‘s three-word confession to Michelle Williams in Manchester By The Sea — “There’s nothin’ there.” And that’s it, man.

Jarmusch has always been into less-is-more dialogue and fill-in-the-blanks minimalism, but this doesn’t even meet that standard.

Father Mother Sister Brother isn’t “about” Rolex watches (Chinese knockoffs), water, tea, “Bob’s your uncle”, stillnesses, absent parents in more than one sense, and most certainly the absence of dialogue. But these are what the film leaves you with.

Two of the three short films that comprise this 110-minute feature — the “father” opener with Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik and Tom Waits, and the “mother” follow-up with Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps — aren’t just about parents and kids who no longer matter much to each other, and are unable or unwilling to summon the will to indulge in polite, banal, family-style chit-chat…family members who really don’t care any more, and are just going through the motions.

Okay, to a certain degree Driver cares about Waits, his economically-strapped dad, as he slips him some cash from time to time. But Driver and Bialik can’t spend more than 45 minutes with Waits; ditto Blanchett and Krieps’ quality time with Rampling (their mom), which boils down to a short tea-and-cakes session in Rampling’s living room. As short as possible, I mean. Their little-sit-downs are over before they begin.

These chapters are basically about the expression of brittle, hostile indifference by way of silences. And these pregnant silences do nothing more than drain the viewer’s soul. It is baked into our DNA, of course, to fill empty, awkward, little-or-nothing-to-say encounters with vacuous small talk — we’ve all been there, and so has Harold Pinter, you bet. But these trios can’t be bothered with the blah-blah, and so the silences scream. And it’s fairly close to unbearable. Because it’s fundamentally inhuman.

Thank God for the brother and sister finale, costarring the attractive, Millennial-aged Indya Moore and Luke Sabbat. It’s basically about these two reminiscing about their dead, fondly recalled, mixed-race parents (mom was white, dad was Afro) while sitting in their emptied-out apartment in a large French city. (Possibly but not necessarily Paris.) This chapter offers a little warmth, at least. Moore and Sabbat actually talk to each other. What they say is mostly about about lazy regrets and resignation, but at least it’s something.

Obviously Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet has been getting gangbuster reviews after debuting at the Telluride Film Festival. Critics are doing cartwheels and backflips, but can they be trusted? What about those research screening tipsters who had problems with it? Either way Hamnet is an apparent lock for a Best Picture and Best Director nom. I noted a few days ago that Jessie Buckley is overwhelmingly assured of a Best Actress nomination.

Earlier today I arose at 6 am to catch an 8:30 am screening of Olivier Assayas‘s eloquently written, intriguingly acted The Wizard of the Kremlin, a sprawling historical film which I was wholly taken with despite its 156-minute length. Paul Dano stars as influential Kremlin counsel and Vladimir Putin spin doctor Vadim Baranov, a semi-fictional character who’s largely based upon the still living Vladislav Surkov.

I was especially impressed by Jude Law‘s supporting performance as Putin. A critic friend sneered that it’s basically a TV movie — a view I sharply disagree with. My review will run this evening or early tomorrow…whichever.

Tonight I’ll be catching Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee, a historical musical about the founding leader of the Shakers religious sect with songbird Amanda Seyfried in the lead role. It screens at at 7:15 pm. I might as well be honest and admit I’m scared to death of submitting to this 130-minute film, mainly because HE nemesis Brady Corbet co-wrote the script with Fastvold, his wife.

The final film of the day will be Alexandre O. Philipe‘s Kim Novak’s Vertigo, which press-screens at 10 pm.

Incidentally: A restored version of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s House of Strangers will screen at the Venice Film Festival on 9.2 and 9.3 (Tuesday and Wednesday). Until reading about this on the festival site, I’d honestly never even heard of this 1949 release. All due respect for the great Joseph L., but I’m presuming it’s a stiff.

Read more

How many Frankenstein features have been released over the last 90-plus years? Several dozen. And how long have I been on a “no more Frankenstein flicks” diet? At least three decades, or since the release of Kenneth Branagh‘s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1994. I’ve never seen it, and I never will.

No offense to the great Guillermo del Toro, but there was never the slightest chance in hell of my not ducking his version, which screened yesterday (Saturday, 8.30) at the Venice Film Festival.

The diet was inspired by the 1973 double whammy of Paul Morrisey‘s Flesh for Frankenstein and Frankenstein:The True Story, a British made-for-TV flick with poor Michael Sarrazin (5.22.40 – 4.17.11) as the creature. Actually the Morrisey, a black comedy, isn’t that difficult to watch.

I’d been told not to expect too much from Kent Jones’ Late Fame, that it was on the minor side. This turned out to be hooey.

Based on a 1914 Arthur Schnitzler novella with the same title, Jones’ film is a fine, true-to-itself, cut-to-the-chase rendering that has a fine short-story economy.

Willem Dafoe‘s performance as the late-60ish Ed Saxberger, a onetime celebrated poet who peaked 45 years ago (sometime between ‘79 and the very early ‘80s) only to abandon poetry for a humdrum job at the post office, is one of his all-time greatest.

And Greta Lee is wonderful as Gloria, an arresting, electrically flirtatious, life-of-the-party type who sings and acts in small clubs and regional productions. Soon after Saxberger is embraced and celebrated by a small group of rich-kid fans who want him to start writing again, Gloria and Ed take to each other immediately, and the prime current and intrigue of Late Fame is whether or not this attraction will lead to something or just be a passing, flash-in-the-pan fancy…this is what holds you.

It’s clear early on that the latter scenario is the most likely, and so the viewer is seized with concern about whether or not Saxberger will make a fool of himself. Don’t go there, bruh! Step back and hold yourself in check.

Sharply sculpted by screenwriter Samy Burch, Late Fame wins you over early on with well-honed dialogue and a tone of no-bullshit clarity, and within 96 minutes it hits the melancholy mark with admirable bull’s-eye precision.

It’s easily one of HE’s best films of the year (and surely of the festival) because it holds a tight and true focus from start to finish. Congrats to Jones, Dafoe, Lee and also costar Edmond Donovan as one of Saxberger’s rich-kid admirers, and a tip of the hat to everyone else on the relatively small production team. Excellent, character-driven filmmaking of this sort is all too rare.