If (a) you can’t pronounce the fecking title, (b) you don’t even know what it fecking means, and (c) the trailer is selling a downhead gloom vibe, the movie is fecking dead in the water.

Sorry, mate, but aside from the “reclusive Daniel Day Lewis returns to the screen” factor, Anemone (Focus Feautres, 10.3) is a fecking suicide mission.

Directed by the cherry-haired Ronan Day-Lewis…here’s hoping it’s a film of substance.

Watching the gray and grizzled DDL do his usual intense-darkman thing will, of course, be worth the price of admission for hardcore cinefiles, but Joe and Jane Popcorn will shine this thing so fast that Ronan and DDL’s heads will spin.

The jowly-faced Sean Bean (remember when he was lean-faced in Patriot Games?) appears to be the principal costar. Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley and Safia Oakley-Green also appear and presumably act.

Over-the-cliff woke shit has all but destroyed the Democratic brand among a plurality of voters, as a new N.Y. Times voter registration survey implies. The Democrat registration fall-off is “staggering,” according to Times reporter Shane Goldmacher.

When I say “over-the-cliff woke shit”, I’m partly referring to the purist progressive mentality represented by your scolding, deeply-in-denial Hollywood Elsewhere nutters like Glenn Runciter and Victor Laszlo.

We all hate wokesters and their “white-savior complex” derangement (i.e., all POCs and women are saints) and especially their having cancelled the lives and careers of so many fine fellows and lassies (Sasha Stone among them) between ‘17 and ‘24. We hate the “all white folks are bad” mentality and the disenfranchising of young white males. We hate incessant trans shit and men in women’s sports. We hate that these twisted fucks have been messing around with gender identity issues among minors. We hate drag shows in elementary schools.

Honestly? The best thing for the Democratic Party is to jettison these loons. Should wokesters be exterminated like rats? Or should they be rounded up and thrown to the lions in the Colisseum or, better yet, tossed into Viking-style hunger pits filled with salivating wolves?

All hail sensible liberal-centrist moderates pols. All hail Rahm, Gavin, Pete.

Posted on 9.7.21:

You’re sitting down and interviewing (or simply speaking with) a somewhat older and certainly more famous fellow than yourself, and as the conversation is winding down he affectionately, quickly, semi-aggressively grips your knee.

That’s a gesture of courtly approval — it means that you’ve passed inspection.

I don’t know how many times this has happened to me personally, but I’d say a few. I’m thinking in particular of a 1999 Toronto Film Festival party for The Limey, and hanging for a half-hour or so with the great Terence Stamp. As the party was ending and we were all starting to disengage, Stamp gave me a nice fatherly knee-grab — not too gentle, not too aggressive, right in the middle.

I can’t honestly say I’ve ever knee-gripped some younger guy. I tend to prefer shoulder grips or upper back pats.

Slight Woody Allen correction: Dracula slept in a coffin on a bed of damp earth, not “in” damp earth, as Woody put it.

(a) What artist wrote the following? Plus name the song and the album.

“Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor….I’ll piss on ‘em. That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says.”

(b) What famous actor said this to what famous director?

“You can write this shit, [name], but you can’t say it.”

In and of itself, the commercial failure of Stephen Frears’ The Hit (‘84) amply illustrates the validity of the below illustration and caption:

Reid Rosefelt on Facebook:

What film, which character said it, who played this character, what was the context, and who wrote the script?

If you don’t answer all five, you’re disqualified.

“Whatever piece of ass you get in this world you’re gonna have to pay for, one way or the other.”

That feeling of hopelessness and bottomless malaise that pours into the souls of trapped highway drivers on a daily basis in the major urban corridors…all I can say is that the gloomy authors and philosophers of yesteryear never knew this kind of anguish…they never knew they had it so good.

Industrial asphalt downerism became an American “thing” in the 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower‘s vast interstate highway system began construction.

One of the first cinematic depictions of this stifling nationwide depression happens in the first minutes of Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (‘62), a mostly middling family comedy with James Stewart and Maureen O’Hara in the leads. Stewart, playing a banker, is trapped in his sedan during a highway commute, and a truck just ahead belches out a cloud of brown exhaust.

But it wasn’t the exhaust and smog that so weighed on drivers. It was the sheer number, the tens of thousands of other commuters.

I’m getting distinct Leaving Las Vegas vibes from this trailer for Edward Berger‘s Ballad of a Small Player (Netflix, 10.15). Honestly? I’m not looking forward to this.

Would I rather re-watch Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray‘s Macao? Yes.

From Gerard Woodward‘s 4.26.14 Guardian review or Lawrence Osborne’s “Ballad of a Small Player“:

“The son of a vacuum cleaner salesman from Croydon, Lord Doyle has more reason than most to want to shed his wealth. It is loaded with the guilt of ill-gotten gains.

“As a lawyer back in England, he fleeced an elderly widow; now he has fled the country, hiding out in Macau, mainland China’s Las Vegas, across the bay from Hong Kong. The casinos he inhabits resemble fantasy versions of the European culture he has deserted, with names such as The Greek Mythology and The Mona Lisa: schmaltzy, sham palaces as tinselled as anything in Nevada.

“His game of choice is punto banco baccarat, ‘that slutty, dirty queen of casino card games’. It is the game Bond plays in Casino Royale (though in the film it was replaced with poker), the game of instant death, the guillotine. It is a game of no skill or strategy, the card-game equivalent of tossing a coin. The only hope the punter has is in the timing and pacing of his bets. But Doyle cares little for winning or losing. His life seems given over to the laws of chance, as though he were trying to gamble himself out of existence.

“The beauty of this novel is in the elegance and precision of its prose, which renders the glaring kitsch of Macau into a series of exquisite miniatures, and draws on Osborne’s reserves as a travel writer. The problem is that, apart from Doyle himself, there is no one else in the novel of much interest — the casino staff, the expat colleagues, the remembered family and friends back home: none of them comes to life with any conviction. The story itself begins to feel as though it is on a loop as the money comes and goes.

“Even when Doyle carries his winnings to his room in seven suitcases stuffed with cash, that isn’t the end of it, and one tends to lose interest in how many times Doyle goes from bankruptcy to riches and back again.”

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…it’ll be too soon.

It would have been so much easier and simpler to have seen Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest three months ago in Cannes, but easy-access press screenings were’t scheduled. Lee wanted the media bounce of a gala black-tie screening but cared not for persons like myself having a looksee, obviously calculating that reviews would be mixed.

I finally saw Highest 2 Lowest last night, and guess what? It’s mildly fine — a smoothly engaging, well-jiggered kidnapping drama for the whole family — a total popcorn movie that’s more or less about celebrating the color and vibrancy and musicality of New York City’s black and brown culture…a Spike joint that, for me at least, never bored or dragged (even during the first plot-light, character-driven hour).

Swanky Brooklyn pad, a high-profile son-snatching, a $17.5 million ransom in Swiss currency, a nifty second-act chase sequence, etc. Whatever, bruh…enjoy the ride.

This is basically a movie about wealth and happiness. Spike is flush, Denzel is bucks-up, NYC looks beautiful. It’s all good. (Did I feel left out because of my own lean portfolio? Yeah, kinda, but I got over that.)

Tightly assembled and visually punched-up (dare I say “balls-up”?), H2L is well-charged fun…panache, pizazz, an emphatically flush vibe (i.e., it’s kinda wealth-porny).

It boasts several fine, filled-out performances by several commanding, good-looking actors (Denzel Washington, ASAP Rocky, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera), plus ample servings of luminous Matty Libatique images. And it begins with a Rodgers & Hammerstein cityscape montage that’s pure emotional pleasure.

It goes down easy, man — schmaltzy, emotionally heightened and made to charm and entertain the popcorn-munching serfs (including schmoes like yours truly).

Akira Kurosawa’s noirish High and Low (‘63) struck everyone as a grim, hard-nosed, visually unengaging downer — Spike’s remake is pretty much a tonal opposite.