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.

Springsteen Flick Was Totally Blown Off by Critics Choice Noms — Not Even Jeremy Strong Made The Cut

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I knew that the Critics’ Choice bowl-lickers would deny Deliver Me From Nowhere a Best Picture nom because it flopped critically and commercially. Because they were unimpressed along with everyone else, but also (primarily?) because the CC gang knew that dismissing it would be politically safe.

I also knew they’d snub Jeremy Allen White‘s portrayal of Bruce Springsteen.

But I figured they’d at least hand Jeremy Strong a Best Supporting Actor nom for playing Springsteen manager Jon Landau, largely because it was an intelligently rendered perf and wholly believable, and because Strong is widely respected. Nope!

“Semper Fi”

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Anthony Zerbe: I was just reading your play. I liked a lot of it. I don’t like the main character though. This Marine. Sounds like a real jellyfish. I guess you’re supposed to like him because he’s against the Marine Corps. Is that it?
Michael Moriarty: Something like that.
AZ: Why doesn’t he do something? Go over the hill, refuse an order. I couldn’t sympathize with a character like that.
MM: Not everyone did.
AZ: The Marine in the play, that supposed to be you?
MM: No.
AZ: Maybe a little?
MM: Maybe on some level.
AZ: Uhn-huh. You know what I think, “on some level”? I think you’re the kind of wise-ass cocksucker that writes a tearjerk play against the Marines and then turns around and smuggles a shitload of heroin into this country.
MM: I deny that. And no more literary conversation until I call my lawyer.
AZ: You mean Ben Odell? No Commie lawyer’s gonna help you now.