In the late summer of ‘24 Emma Stone totally shaved her head for the making of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, which will world premiere at the Venice Film Festival about two weeks hence (Thursday, 8.28). So we’re looking at roughly a year’s growth here.

Of all the hated big-studio franchises, Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey, Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes films (and there were only two, thank God, released in 2009 and 2011) delivered the most anguish.

I was dropped or ghosted with such regularity by girlfriends of the ‘70s and ‘80s that I decided that “seeing” two or even three women simultaneously was the wisest…okay, the safest policy because the inevitable abandonments would be easier to cope with that way.

“Always nurture one or two back-ups” was the general motto.

And no pearl-clutching or moralistic finger-pointing either. Many women back then played their cards this way.

A couple of times in the ‘80s I was literally told “I like you and you’re promising, but no sex for the time being because I’m seeing two guys right now. But don’t lose hope! When one of them drops out you’ll be out of the bullpen and the recipient of all of my pleasurings, and I’m worth the wait…trust me.”

Three days from now Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, a remake of Akira Kurosawa 1963 kidnapping drama, opens theatrically in select venues. But you’d never know it from the weak, bordering-on-nonexistent advance hype.

It’s playing only at low–key smarthouse venues (the Jacob Burns is my best option) — i.e., avoiding the big chains entirely. Apple wants people to see it theatrically, but not too many.

The producers played the same low-profile bullshit game in Cannes three months ago, screening it for the black tie lah-lahs but making it difficult for the press to RSVP on the festival app (plus no Salle Debussy showing, and no morning-after screening at the Salle Agnes Varda).

You can’t trust the 91% Rotten Tomatoes score as most of the critics are invested whores who feel obliged to kowtow for safety’s sake. I heard a littie shit-talk about Highest 2 Lowest from a couple of guys in Cannes, and I’d like to hear more.

The Apple + streaming begins on Friday, 9.5.

…when confronted with the leading-role castings of Pedro Pascal, Adam Driver or Florence Pugh. Sorry but I’m not alone. Joe and Jane Popcorn are sulking, quietly grumbling about this trio.

I’m not instinctually repelled by Pascal like I am by, say, the dreaded Paul Mescal, but he’s definitely been in too many damn films over the last couple of years and I need a break from the guy…Jesus.

The Driver saturation effect peaked a couple of years ago. Portraying two wealthy Italian company hotshots in fairly rapid succession (Maurizio Gucci, Enzo Ferrari) darkened my brow, and then that Ceasar haircut in Megalopolis pushed me over the edge.

I don’t know when I began to flinch at the notion of Pugh, but if we had attended the same high school I don’t think we would’ve been friendly. I think my vague feelings of alienation began with Pugh’s Little Women performance, and then her feud with Olivia Wilde, and then I really, really didn’t care for her downish, pissy performance in Oppenheimer. I just don’t like her vibe.

Read more

Variety’s Rebecca Rubin has pretty much confirmed that Scott Cooper’s Deliver Me From Nowhere, the forthcoming Bruce Springsteen feature** starring Jeremy Allen White, will have its world premiere at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival.

The specific focus of Rubin’s 8.11 report is the official announcement of a regional “premiere” screening of Nowhere at the New York Film Festival on Sunday, 9.28.

Rubin’s giveaway is in the final sentence of her story’s second paragraph, to wit: “Deliver Me From Nowhere will host its world premiere elsewhere at an earlier date.”

Cooper’s film isn’t slotted for the 2025 Venice Film Festival (Wednesday, 8.27 through Saturday, 9.6) so that kinda narrows it down. Telluride runs from Friday, 8.29 to Monday, 9.1.

** In an attempt to reach the none-too-brights, 20th Century has retitled Cooper’s film as Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.

A month ago I learned I was afflicted with atherosclerosis….hardening of the arteries. So I arranged to submit to a stress test, the results of which might have warranted a balloon agioplasty and maybe a stent for good measure.

So I finally had the stress test done five days ago, and two days later I got the verdict. And it wasn’t alarming or even that concerning. My situation is “normal“, according to my primary care physician.

I don’t believe that altogether. I still think I need to do something about the plaque, which is what stents are supposed to be good for. But my diet has improved, and my bad habits have been amended. Well, some of them.

Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard opened exactly 75 years ago — August 10, 1950. Everyone involved is dead, of course, except for the intrepid Nancy Olson, who turned 97 a month ago.

The Paramount marketers who created the below newspaper ad on behalf of the Radio City Music Hall took the art of lying to new absurdist heights, of course. Sunset Boulevard remains one of the darkest and most acidic portraits of Hollywood psychology ever crafted, and they were selling a happy, smiling, lovey-dovey glamour ride.

“Gillis Was Too Hung Up on Morality,” posted on 12.8.18:

The thing about Sunset Boulevard that doesn’t quite play in today’s terms is Joe Gillis‘s refusal to confide to Betty Schaefer what he’s up to — that he’s become a kind of screenwriting gigolo, living high on the hog with a 50 year-old silent movie star.

Gillis cares for Schaefer and vice versa — audiences can tell they’d be a good match — but he’s too consumed with self-loathing to let her know what’s up. That doesn’t figure. He was broke and ready to skip town when he met Norma Desmond. Now he’s hustling a rich meal-ticket while he plots his next move. What’s so shameful about that?

The first 30 minutes of Sunset Boulevard are sharp and catchy, and the last 15 are grand-slammy. But the middle 65 of this 110-minute film are a little slow and frustrating.

And why hasn’t Gillis insisted to Desmond that he has to be paid an actual weekly salary? If he got one he could save up enough to buy a new car and move back into his apartment and get his career going again, especially with Schaefer as his new writing partner.

Cameron Crowe: “There is a famous story from the first Hollywood screening of Sunset Boulevard [in 1950]. Louis B. Mayer [head of MGM] was standing on a stairway, railing about ‘How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him?’ What did you say to him when you overheard all this?”

Billy Wilder: “I am Mr. Wilder, and go fuck yourself.”

Crowe: “What did he say to that?

Wilder: “He was astonished. He was standing with the great MGM bosses who were below him, there at the studio, Mr. [Eddie] Mannix and Mr. [Joe] Cohen. And that so astonished them, that somebody had the guts to say, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” [And that’s when] I knew that I had a good picture there. — from October 1999 Vanity Fair piece, “Conversations With Billy.”

I’ve been on the Richter train for decades.

Posted on 11.16.20: The famous animal bone sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey lasts one minute and 54 seconds. It shows the moment in which Moonwatcher (Dan Richter) discovers a certain killer instinct that will save his tribe from extinction. My favorite part is the final six seconds, starting at 1:48. This is when Moonwatcher says “okay, that was cool, I now understand how to kill prey for food…and now that I’ve figured this out I’m going to throw the fucking bone in the air and forget about it.” Which he does. And then he runs his fingers through the sand and starts…whatever, daydreaming. I love this part…”fuck it, fuck the bone, I’m not doing this all day, I’m taking a break.”

Read more