HE Sensitives to Jeremy Halna, a 22-year-old French tourist who has recounted the horror of that New Year’s Eve inferno: “Can you please watch your language? We’re very offended by your frank description about what happened to the victims of this tragedy. Saying they were ‘completely burned’ is no different than saying they were ‘burnt toast.’ Have some basic decency. Shame on you.”
Neville’s “Breakdown: 1975” Is Okay, But Aimed At Simpletons
Last night I finally watched Morgan Neville’s Breakdown: 1975 (12.19.25), a 92-minute Netflix doc that hurriedly recaps and, in a sense, celebrates the fertile and provocative moviescape of the mid ’70s. Glorious times!
Except Neville doesn’t strictly focus on 1975 films. The doc covers ’74, ’75 and ’76, during which, Neville asserts, the real meat and marrow of New Hollywood came to fruition. But every so often the early ’70s pop through and then, at the end, the ’77 finale (Rocky, Star Wars) is heard from.
Plus anyone who had hit puberty by the late ’60s or who’s read Mark Harris‘s “Pictures at a Revolution” or Peter Biskind‘s “Easy Riders, Raging bulls” knows that New Hollywood was launched in ’67 with The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.
So let’s cut the crap — Breakdown: 1975 is really about the whole span of the mythical New Hollywood era. Neville should’ve called it Rough-and-Tumble ’70s Free-For-All! or Hollywood Neverland: When The Inmates Ran The Asylum or something in that vein.
The problem is that Breakdown: 1975 is generally too fast and loose and simple-minded — it just skims along and barely gets into any nitty-gritty specifics. It’s primarily aimed at your none-too-bright kids who are too lazy or ADD-afflicted to have paid the slightest attention to what Harris and Biskind were on about.
Is it a good thing that Neville has made a dumbed-down primer for younger folks (Millennials, Zoomers, Gen Alpha) who haven’t a clue about films that were made before the 1980s? Okay, yeah, I suppose.
As I watched Neville’s doc I recalled that the same basic saga was concisely passed along in Spotlight on New Hollywood (‘24), a 15-minute Criterion Channel essay that was offered last summer as a supplement to Criterion’s streaming of The Graduate.
Alas, it has since been erased, at least according to a cursory Google + Criterion search.
Why can’t “Spotlight on New Hollywood” be offered as a stand-alone video essay on YouTube? That’s what I’m basically asking here. It would be terrific if readers of this piece could savor it.
The truth is that in 15 minutes Spotlight on New Hollywood delivers a much better, tighter, more sophisticated history of this fabled era than Neville, whom I know, respect and admire, manages in 92 minutes.
Such a shame that Harris’s 15-minute essay has been sent to the Criterion dustbin. Unless I’m missing something.
Back Into The Frying Pan
Message from VRBO guy repping the rental of the rue Etats Unis pad that was confirmed yesterday: “Oops!…sorry! That rental you locked in ($2300 for eleven days) is dated and therefore invalid because the owner’s greed has soared over the last several months. You can still rent it, but it’ll cost you an extra grand…hah!”
Cameron Needs To Reclaim His Honor
..by walking away from the Avatar franchise here and now…as the Ayatollah Rock ‘n’ Rollah said in The Road Warrior, “Just walk away.” Just say no to all that easy Avatar money you could earn, Jim, and make something new and fresh and real. Let someone else direct the subsequent Avatar chapters. Move on with your life, bruh. Just do it.
“He Just Doesn’t Like Her”
Trump Mussolini likes N.Y. Mayor Zohran Mamdani (chemistry, paternal admiration for a young go-getter) but he has a gut dislike for Venezuela’s Maria Machado, the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner who won (by proxy) à landslide victory against Nicholas Maduro in 2024.
From Jonathan Blitzer’s “Who’s Running Venezuela After The Fall of Maduro?”, a 1.5.26 New Yorker article (posted at 9:40 am):
Submissive Critics Choice Members Didn’t Even Have The Balls…
…to split the top two awards between Best Picture and Best Director.
Going with One Battle After Another for Best Picture meant they could / should have gone with Marty Supreme‘s Josh Safdie for Best Director. Or vice versa — Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Director and Marty Supreme–ola for Best Picture. At least that.
No one would dispute that both films, cultural period pieces with stylistic fervor and punchy technique, are prime examples of big-swing auteurist audacity.
I’ve never argued that OBAA, craft-wise, doesn’t have excellent chops — it’s the tribal rigidity of its social scheme (French 75 girlbosses brave and radiant, Sean Penn‘s Lockjaw ready to murder his own daughter over racial derangement) that brings it down. Supreme, to me and many others, is obviously more of a sweeping vision thing…a commanding, heebie–jeebie knockout.
Instead these obsequious little Critics Choice go-alongers have totally kowtowed to OBAA…Best Picture plus Best Director. Lefty circus elephants…no balls, no vision, no backbone.
At least Supreme‘s Timothee Chalamet won for Best Actor….deserved! Ditto Jessie Buckley‘s Best Actress trophy for Hamnet.
Methinks the Best Picture vote might have been close. If One Battle After Another had been an overwhelming favorite Benicio del Toro or Sean Penn would have won for Best Supporting Actor, no? But they didn’t. Frankenstein’s Jacob Elordi snatched it away.
Handing their Best Original Screenplay award to Ryan Coogler for Sinners, a bloody, pulpy, under-lighted AIP exploitation flick (musical vampires, the primal joy of cunnilingus, machine-gunning the KKK) instead of giving it to Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier for their obviously exquisite Sentimental Value script was truly embarassing….totally driven by identity politics**. Where is the virtue signalling in saluting a pair of white Norwegians?
** If Clem Yeehaw had written the Sinners screenplay, there’s no way it would’ve been nominated.
Definitely Looking Forward to Reading “Hamnet” Subtitles
Because for the first two thirds or three quarters (the prolonged Stratford-upon-Avon portion) I was able to understand only about half of the dialogue, if that.
I understood Jessie Buckley ‘s “Agnes” when she complained to Paul Mescal’s “Will” Shakespeare that “you weren’t here” when poor Hamnet died, but a fair amount of their Stratford-upon-Avon dialogue is muttered and whispered and swallowed to a fare-thee-well…it generally drowns in the muck of their Elizabethan dialects.
I understood every word from the rehearsal scene in which Will repeats “again” over and over and over…everything from that scene onward.
Snagged A Well-Located Cannes Pad….”Hah!” to Skeptics, Naysayers
Located on rue Etats Unis, south of rue d’Antibes. All the usual tension and anxiety has been stilled, at least temporarily.
While Marty Mauser Was Hustling Around Town in 1952
…or more precisely on 4.12.52, the following plays were lighting up Tin Pan Alley:
Pre-Roman Holiday Audrey Hepburn in Gigi!
Maria Machado Has Obviously Earned the Venezuelan Presidency
What exactly is wrong with the 58 year-old María Corina Machado, who ran in absentia (i.e., by proxy) against Nicholas Maduro in a 2024 president election and won by a landslide….what is wrong with her assuming the presidency in Maduro’s absence?
She’s obviously a smart, canny, enterprising, pugnacious, rough-and-tumble politician, and the country gave her a decisive win last year. Plus she won the Nobel Peace Prize last October.
So what’s the problem? I’ll tell you what the problem is. Trump is the problem. Machado “is a very nice lady but she doesn’t have the respect,” he’s reportedly said. Translation: She’s too decent, too humanist, too progressive, and not corrupt enough in terms of oil revenues.
Wiki excerpt: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Machado as ‘one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times’.
“At the time of the prize’s announcement, Machado was in hiding inside Venezuela, fearing repression from the government of Nicolás Maduro. She secretly escaped the country to reach Oslo with the help of international allies, but vowed to return to Venezuela to continue opposing the Maduro regime.”
Wokey “OBAA” Is As Simple-Minded As a Minecraft Movie
The only problem I have with this anti-One Battle After Another essay is the name of the guy who wrote and narrated it — Adam Friended. What the fuck kind of last name is that? As in “he/she friended me on Facebook”? The fuck? Otherwise it’s a totally on-target OBAA takedown.
Excerpt: “If Sean Penn‘s Colonel Lockjaw would have married Perfidia Beverly Hills had she not left him, maybe he could have lived a normal life. The evidence of a real biological daughter from Beverly Hills could have awakened in him a need to revisit that life that could have been setting our villain on a new path to save his biological daughter, sparking in Lockjaw something I like to call a character arc.
“If Lockjaw, in the face of this new biological reality, decided to protect his daughter from the Christmas Adventurer assassin who is coming to kill both of them, we have a far more interesting story than the cartoonish slop of a racist killing the daughter he’s ashamed to have brought into this world. The protect-the-daughter scenario dives into the complexity of racism and the greater human condition far more than PTA’s woke-pandering trash ever could.
“Instead of exploring this far more complicated and compelling story, PTA abandons the story at its most critical climax. And likely because it would be woke blasphemy to depict some sort of redemption arc for any racist character. Once a straight white male character contemplates anything close to a microaggression, he is damned to the pit of progressive hell for all eternity.
“Most good movies are a debate over a contentious point of view. OBAA is a perfect vehicle to debate the age-old belief that blood is thicker than water. But instead of admitting that sometimes blood is a compelling force for good, the movie would rather comically cling to the ideal notion of a blended family based more in progressive dogma than any social or cultural reality.
“Ultimately, it’s this dogmatic stance that has made this movie a hit with those living inside the moral matrix of progressivism (i.e., wokeys).
“But it has left people like me, people desirous of a movie subversive enough to depict the world as it actually is, totally unsatisfied.
“Though this movie is garbage, the cinematic equivalent of a tire fire, rabid fans will no doubt lampoon this review, citing the movie’s widespread critical acclaim. And you know what? That’s fine. I get it. While this movie may rake in accolades and critical acclaim and awards noms, any success it enjoys is ultimately kind of similar to, I would say, that of a Minecraft movie. One Battle After Another has stayed true to its leftist fans.
“Instead of depicting any kind of normal through-line that makes logical sense with a cohesive conflict and resolution, we are dragged through another Hollywood cliche depicting strong women and marginalized communities, no matter how many innocent security guards they may kill.”