Now That Netflix Is Finally Streaming “Jay Kelly”

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Filed from Venice on 8.28.25:

Noah Baumbach‘s Jay Kelly (Netflix, 11.14) — a reflection-and-meditation piece about a 60ish movie star’s life (in some respects literally George Clooney’s, one gathers or infers, and doubly so during a tribute at the very end which presents a montage of Clooney’s films) — is actually fairly decent, and it ends in a very affecting and bittersweet way.

It’s a summary of a rich guy and his famous life and what it’s all meant or seems to mean, and the final emotional residue in terms of friends, family, selfishness, distractions, blessings, highs and lows…really the whole magillah.

It’s generally fast and fleeting and briskly assembled, and is actually reminiscent, in some respects and as curious as this may sound, of Charles Dickens‘ “A Christmas Carol” (in particular the 1951 film version that Brian Desmond Hurst directed and which Alistair Sim brought to life), especially as the film is largely about Clooney’s Kelly absorbing a series of some uncomfortable and sometimes painful realizations about how his business associates, old friends and especially his two daughters really feel about him.

It’s not a masterwork — it doesn’t feel heavy or deep enough, and seems a bit facile at times — and it’s certainly not on the corrupted-adult level of Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton, in which Clooney gave his finest performance.

But Clooney plays it openly and with vulnerability — he knows this line of country like the back of his hand — and the film itself conveys, persuades, penetrates. It sells its own movie-star, “this is the life he’s chosen” narrative.

At times Jay Kelly feels a bit old-fashioned — very “scripted”, very “acted” and a little schmaltzy here and there, and the visual flashback transitions are almost on the level of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (’62).

But it finally feels whole and melancholy and solemnly considered, especially at the very end. It’s expansive and exploratory and fully felt, and is very well acted by not just Clooney but by Adam Sandler (as Jay’s manager), Laura Dern (publicist), Billy Crudup (former acting buddy), Riley Keough (daughter #1), Grace Edwards (daughter #2) and Stacy Keach (roguishly “charming” dad on the downswing).

Jay Kelly is a show and a “movie” but it works according to its own delivery terms, and is certainly better than I thought it would be, and the final line absolutely kills — it even brought a tear to my eye.

It’s therefore a solid A-minus or a B-plus, and Clooney and Sandler really touch bottom, bring the goods.

Quibble #1: Everyone in Kelly’s inner circle has pretty much written him off emotionally. They regard him as flaky, immature, undependable, self-absorbed. But that’s what many big-time actors are for the most part, no? Doesn’t everyone accept this? Many and probably most famous actors are in love with themselves first, and their family and friends second. Big deal. Roll with it.

Quibble #2: Billy Crudup plays a 50ish might-have-been actor who resents and is actually enraged at Kelly for having stolen a key part that Crudup had auditioned for and badly wanted at the time, but the annals of film acting are filled with stories about a friend who was just tagging along who wound up getting the role from an impromptu audition instead of the primary guy. Just because Crudup was extra-hungry for the role in question doesn’t mean he was entitled to it, or that he was right for it. Mature people understand that life can be an unfair.

Quibble #3: Nobody would ever refer to a big film tribute event taking place in “Tuscany”…they would say Siena or Florence or Volterra or Radda in Chianti. Just like no one would talk about a similar-type event in the States happening in the “Deep South” or the “Pacific Northwest.”

Remember The Sarandos!

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I’m good with Paramount’s hostile Warner Bros. takeover bid because of that infamous, gut-slamming Lawrence of Arabia-is-cool-on-an-iPhone quote that Netflix honcho Ted Sarandos gave to the N.Y. Times last year, and which was posted/published on 5.25.04:

The smallest acceptable indoor screen for a Lawrence of Arabia viewing is a 65-inch 4K screen, although an 80-inch or 100-inch UHD screen would be better. I’ve seen David Lean’s 1962 epic on big-ass theatrical screens at least five or six times, but I’m not a 70mm freak like I was in the mid-to-late 20th Century. DCPs are the best image generators.

For Those Who (a) Weren’t Paying Attention or (b) Couldn’t Be Bothered Several Weeks Ago

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Posted on 10.10.25, it was called “Another Exercise in Mute Nostril Agony.”

Mary Bronstein and Rose Byrne’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is about miserable, gloomed-out Linda (Byrne), a weary, facially-lined, stressed-out, emotionally and psychologically gutted therapist and struggling mother of a young ailing daughter (heard but unseen until the very end)…

Call her a 40ish woman under siege…anguished to a fare-thee-well and at her absolute wit’s end…a victim of a tortured, infuriating, harrowing, one-urban-indignity-after-another gauntlet that — surprise! — assaults and saps the life force out of the audience as much as Linda if not more so.

Within the first five minutes I was telling myself “you’re not going to last through this whole thing”. But I decided I would tough it out, dammit, for at least an hour. Which I did. It was agony and I was checking my watch every ten minutes, but I made it!

In Jeannette Catsoulis ‘s N.Y Times review (10.9), she calls If I Had Legs “wrenching and at times suffocating”, as well as “a horror movie…a howling maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor”.

There is no humor-spiking at any point in this film, trust me. Zero.

Catsoulis also writes that “some viewers could find the movie’s relentlessness exhausting“.

Famous Steve Martin line in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (‘88), spoken to John Candy: “Do ya think so?”

Golden Globe Noms Blow Off “Wicked: For Good”, The Only Truly Legit Musical Contender, In Comedy/Musical Category!

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Bottom–line HFPA statement: “Eff you, Jon Chu…not good enough.”

While at the same time they’ve handed a Best Film Comedy / Musical nomination to One Battle After Another, that all-singing, all-dancing laugh riot from Paul Thomas Anderson, the Stanley Donen of the 2020s.

Seriously — fraudulent or self-satirizing inclusions in the GG comedy / musical category have been a running joke for a long time, but apart from Sean Penn’s played-straight erection scene, there isn’t so much as a single sincere snicker in the whole film..,not a one.

What this means, of course, is that Hamnet will most likely win the Best Drama prize. But it’s not a shoo-in because of the unrelenting grief-and-grime factor during the first 85%. Which means that HE fave Sentimental Value has a reasonable shot.

Critics Groups, Industry Gangbangers to Joe & Jane Popcorn: “Dismayed That ‘OBAA’ Is Winning All These Best Picture Trophies? Perplexed By Our Devotional Celebration of Girlboss Activist Agitprop? Well, We Don’t Care What You Think. We Live On Our Own Lefty-Ass Planet. Deal With It.”

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Put another way, we don’t want Joe Schmoe ticket buyers to feel any kind of tingly excitement when OBAA starts winning big-time.

We want them to scratch their heads and wonder what the fuck is going on here, etc.

Remember how badly most of you guys felt when Everything Everywhere All At Once won everything in ‘22? How you howled and screamed and repeatedly punched the refrigerator when Jamie Lee Curtis won for Best Supporting Actress? Well, grim up and get ready for a repeat.

Because we not only hate you, but we want you to really, truly and fully comprehend that.

Thank God, at least, that Sinners and the dragon-fingered Cynthia Erivo will almost certainly be getting the bum’s rush.

Not Necessarily HE’s Most On-Target Pan of 2025

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…but it was certainly the most fun to write, and remains to this day the most fun to re-read:

Earlier this afternoon I suffered through most of Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling (Mubi) and I want credit, dammit, for toughing it out for just short of two hours. (It runs 149 minutes.)

A hellish, multi-chapter, visually dreary, narrative hop-around from the perspective of a few suffering women and young girls at different times during the 20th Century, Sound of Falling brings the grim and the soul-drain in the usual suffocating ways.

You could say that the soft, muddy, under-lighted cinematography is meant to inject the same shitty, misery-pit, lemme-outta-here feeling the women and girls are experiencing at every turn. Sure, I’ll buy that.

Is Schilinski an auteur — a feisty, willful, go-for-it filmmaker with a persistence of artistic vision and a stylistic stamp all her own (albeit a stamp that brings you down, down, down)? Yes, she is that.

Does her film have something to say? Yep. It’s saying that 20th Century farm women in northern Germany were miserable as fuck, and that the men were either smelly pigs or abusers or both, and that most of them smoked and a few had massive pot bellies.

Sound of Falling doesn’t make you think about dying before your time, but it does prompt thoughts of escaping the mortal coil early on.

On top of which I was sitting in the Grand Lumière balcony, scrunched between two women and with no leg room at all, and my thighs and calves were stuck in a kind of purgatory, suspended between numbness and screaming pain.

But I didn’t leave for the longest time. I wanted to but I couldn’t be the first balcony-sitter to bail. I said this to myself — “no quitting until a couple of viewers go first”.

So I hung in there with the patience of Job, waiting for some intrepid soul to man up and bolt the fuck outta there, but nobody did for the first…oh, 100 minutes or so.

And then a woman got up and walked. And then another. Thank you, sisters, and thank you, my sweet Lord…glory be to God!

I stood up with my bag and retreated to the main walkway, and then decided to watch from a standing position. And then another person threw in the towel. And then another. And then a trio of Zoomers left at the same time. Hey, we’re really livin’ here!!!

I’ve never felt such wonderful kinship with strangers as I did at that moment.

Variety’s Guy Lodge, the bespectacled king of the Cannes filmcrit dweebs, has totally raved about Schilinski’s punisher.

I respect Lodge’s willingness to drop to his knees and kowtow to a feminist filmmaker who has the chutzpah to subject viewers to a drip-drip gloom virus, but at the same time I think he’s either left the planet or had simply decided to praise this fairly infuriating film no matter what.

Average Joes and Janes, trust me, are going to hate, hate, hate this exactingly assembled, artistically pulverizing tour de force.

Only Fifth Ranked? If You Say So.

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This is a woke hit piece. Listen to the eerie music. Seriously, listen to it. It’s from an elevated horror film about witches and warlocks living in the woods.

On top of which the AI narrator pronounces Darien as DAIRien rather than the commonly used DahriENN.

@geousadiscovery Do you know? #unitedstates#usa#connecticut#whitest#places ♬ original sound – GeoUSA Discovery

From “Tender Is The Tale“, posted on 10.10.21:

And then The Tender Bar doubles down by changing the identity of a wealthy Westport white girl named Sydney, whom Moehringer fell in love with during his time at Yale and who represents the unattainable ideal for a working-class kid from Manhasset. Clooney has changed Sydney from a blonde, Daisy Buchanan-like character with a small nose, ample breasts and whiter-than-white parents (her father is described by Moehringer as Hemingway-esque) into a beautiful woman of color (Briana Middleton) and her parents into an interracial couple (mom is played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine).

The first word that came to mind was “again?”

This is yet another example of virtue-signaling, inclusion-mandate casting, and particularly Clooney and producers Grant Heslov and Ted Hope wanting to groove along with the ethos of progressive woke Hollywood.

I grew up in Wilton and Westport, and I personally knew of one couple of color (opera singer Betty Jones, a friend of my mom’s, and her husband) and heard about no interracial couples at all. That’s not to say there were none, but if they existed in the Wilton-Westport-Weston region they were, like, waay under-the-radar.

Gary Cooper’s Stock Just Plummeted

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One word: mandals. Men of substance and conviction have never, ever worn them…period. Indian moccasins, tennis sneakers, unlaced brown suede bucks, even penny loafers…any of these would have been tolerable.

The year was 1954, by the way. Cooper was only 53, and yet he looked 60ish and his hair was half gone. When did he start wearing rugs? He must have been wearing one when he shot High Noon in ‘52. He had double the amount of hair in that adult western.