A 50ish showbiz buddy thing meshed with a European road movie….sounds good!

Noah Baumbach‘s Jay Kelly, a dramedy written by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer, “follows a friendship between a famous actor (George Clooney) and his manager (Adam Sandler) as they travel through Europe and reflect on their life choices, relationships, and legacies.”

Plus Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Grace Edwards, Stacy Keach, Riley Keough, Jim Broadbent, Greta Gerwig, Patrick Wilson.

Pops at the Venice Film Festival roughly three weeks hence; enters Netflix streaming feed on 12.5.

Posted on 3.12.17: Early last evening we visited Chez Jay, the legendary dive-bar eatery on Ocean Avenue. It’s still noisy as hell and the service faintly sucked, but the entrees are still delicious. The faintly grubby aura, reddish lighting, checked tablecloths, peanut shells on the floor, banners on the wall, thunky-sounding music system — walk through the front door and you’re Marty McFly in 1971.

Chez Jay has been one of those lowdown, cool-cat, special-vibe places since ’59. Very few Los Angeles establishments feel this time-machiney.

I somehow managed to afford dinner there two or three times during my Los Angeles lost-weekend period in the early to mid ’70s, or right before I drove back east to work at becoming a film writer. This was when Chez Jay was a serious celeb haunt. Jack Nicholson (sporting the tight curly hair perm that he wore for The Fortune) and Lou Adler and a couple of women had the back table one night; I spotted a flannel-shirt-wearing Jeff Bridges during another visit.

I knew Jay Fiondella, the owner-founder and sometime actor, very slightly back then. Every time I ran into him I’d mention how much I liked John Flynn‘s The Outfit (’73), in which he played a poker player who gets held up by Robert Duvall and Joe Don Baker.

Jay died in ’08 of Parkinson’s. The place is currently run by Michael Anderson, Fiondella’s longtime business partner, who co-owns it with Fiondella’s daughter and son, Anita and Chaz. Here’s a four-year-old L.A. Times piece that sums up the lore.

A few hours ago THR’s Mike Barnes posted a report on the death of director Jonathan Kaplan, whose finest feature was and always will be Over The Edge (‘79), a fact-based teen crime film that included the screen debut of Matt Dillon.

The subhead of Barnes’ story acknowledges Over The Edge, but the article doesn’t mention this 46-year-old film (made when Kaplan was 30 or so) until paragraph #16, and even then in a no-big-deal, keep-your-shirt-on fashion. That’s not cool. It’s also derelict. Over The Edge is historic…drills it down, wakes you up.

This Jonah Hill scene was shot and subsequently cut out of Knocked Up 18 or 19 years ago, and before today I’d honestly never seen it. Really. Semen milkshake chug-a-lug.

I hated this effing film after first glancing at the one-sheet, and now most of the world, it seems, has joined HE’s hate team. Tears of joy…weeping with gratitude.

In 1946 Hermann Goering was convicted of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials. He was no one’s idea of an Albert Speer-like moderate, but he was primarily a go-alonger. A Hitler ally and almost certainly an anti-Semite from way back, he played the political game in order to gain and wield power. He liked to eat (a total fatty until the final year of his life) and collect art and swagger around. He doesn’t appear (emphasis on the “a” word) to have been a rabidly racist Nazi ideologue like Heinrich Himmler. He got what he deserved at Nuremberg, but was fundamentally no more and no worse than, say, Dick Cheney during the Dubya years.

“Well, so was Ulysses S. Grant. Maybe it’ll work out like that.”

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Justine Bateman, starting around 4:30 mark: Before streamers and tech companies came to regard more or less everything as content, “the goal was this excellence…you wanted to be associated with something really good…something that would last beyond this era…[back then it was almost] shameful to do something [just] for money…sometimes you had to but you didn’t feel good about it.

“But what happened 10 years ago was that [we had] this streaming situation and studio chiefs chasing after the streamers and not wanting to look like chumps, so [that] really screwed things up. The studios started looking at films and TV series just as content. There have been exceptions over the last 10 years, of course, but the focus became volume content.”

I voted for Harris because I wanted someone semi-sane and mostly sensible running things, but I understand why the battleground schmoes didn’t like her.

“A party of scolding, bullying, cancel culture…this is actually what fascism is.”

Piers Morgan on 8.1.25:

@mimzie2.0

Piers Morgan Says Democrats Should reevaluate themselves, before next election

♬ original sound – Mimzie

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It strikes me as vaguely odd that for the filming of Lolita (‘62), director Stanley Kubrick chose to build a sizable sound-stage set for a simple daylight scene in Shelley Winters’ suburban backyard.

This seems like an awful lot of trouble and expense for a boilerplate dialogue scene that might last 50 or 60 seconds.

It’s interesting, however, to discover stills of James Mason and Sue Lyon chatting in this backyard — presumably from a cut scene that follows the initial first-glance or “cherry pies” scene between Mason, Lyon and Winters.

But Rodney Dangerfield in shorts and open-toed whatevers (they’re not sandals)…no, man…just no…can’t unsee this either.

2005 Emmons Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11235 (shuttered now). Late ‘70s, maybe ‘80 or so, judging by the bell-bottoms.

The HE chorus has been repeating the same thing over and over…”ixnay on Gavin Newsom but goorah for Andy Beshear”…oh, yeah?

HE strongly suspects that a majority of the haters who saw red yesterday and went crazy toxic over a mild-mannered notion that Liam Neeson ought to take certain measures in order to look 63 again…

HE strongly suspects that many of these meltdown cases haven’t even caught one of Neeson’s finest films ever, 2024’s In The Land of Saints and Sinners, much less urged their friends to see it or talked it up on HE or whatever.

Some may have seen and admired it, I’m guessing, but the others need to wake the fook up.

In The Land of Saints and Sinners is “a Liam Neeson movie,” and we all know what that means. It means adherence to a certain slow-build formula.

Repeating for the record: To a steady and stalwart Neeson fellow who’s not looking for trouble and in fact would like to back off into a shelter or backwater of some kind, shit inevitably happens.

A slow burning, a gradually tightening situation, implications of tough terms, bad people up to bad stuff (including the threat of serious harm to a couple of innocent characters as well as to Neeson’s guy) until it all blows up in the end.

But the story, set in rural Ireland in the mid ’70s, pulls you in bit by bit, and the script has been carefully and compellingly written by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane.

In The Land of Saints and Sinners began shooting in Ireland (County Donegal, Dublin) in March ‘22. It premiered 18 months later at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Netflix began streaming it on 4.26.24.

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