…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.

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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.”

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Two days ago and nearly six years after debuting at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, Roman Polanski‘s An Officer and a Spy finally opened stateside, courtesy of a two-week booking at Manhattan’s Film Forum.

80% of the critics reviewed the actual film as opposed to Polanski’s decades-old personal history, and were naturally, totally thumbs up. There is simply no intelligent way to pan this brilliant film.

20% of the critics chose to review Polanski instead of the film, and these virtue signalling prigs were mixed-positive (but mostly kinda mixed).

You can feel Manohla Dargis’s clenched discomfort at having to acknowledge that An Officer and a Spy “is well-crafted…Polanski’s movies generally are.” And her subsequent relief when she adds that the film’s “contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling seems largely as an allegory about Polanski.”

Will there be any other theatrical bookings? Will an HD streaming version be made available? Right now, as before, the only way to see AOAAS is via some pirate torrent or by buying the English-subtitled Russian Bluray, a copy of which is sitting on one of my Bluray shelves.

It’s also the only kind that never dims in intensity, and certainly never runs out of fuel.

The fact that the bearer is guaranteed to suffer is almost rote as almost everyone who’s fallen head-over-heels knows (or eventually comes to know) that “love hurts”…that emotional anguish and even humiliation are almost always part of the deal.

And I don’t want to hear about enduring love between longtime silver-haired marrieds being just as strong and blissful and life-sustaining as ever. That kind of love-through-the-=decades is fine and good and certainly nourishing in a quietly slumbering, almost-nodding-off sort of way, but it doesn’t hurt, and if you can’t feel that terrible stab in the chest, where’s the dimensional residue?

Excellent Lolita montage by HD Film Tributes.

Sinners and Weapons are both supernatural horror films, snd are therefore occupying the same award-season popcorn genre slot. The problem for Sinners is that Weapons is a far superior film. This will soon be known everywhere, by everyone. At which point Sinners will begin to experience a precipitous drop in terms of Oscar nom cred…sorry.

Many will insist that Sinners is the “better” of the two, and that will be their right as citizens of a great democracy. But alongside Weapons, Sinners (which will still be nominated in this or that category because of the identity component) is now more or less finished…no longer the hot-to-trot, bold-as-brass, multi-category contender because Weapons is the sexy new gunslinger in town, and that’s life in the big city, unfair as this sounds.

This will sound funny coming from me, what with my constant contempt for spoiler whiners since this column launched 21 years ago. But you really, really don’t want to read any reviews of Zach Cregger ‘s Weapons before seeing it.

It follows that the community conversation is sure to spill over and spoil. Stay away from X and Reddit chatter and just hightail it down to the plex. I’ll post a deeper-into-it piece sometime tomorrow or maybe Sunday.

I saw it last night in a fairly virginal state, and “blown away” is a reasonably accurate, non-hyperbolic description of my reaction.

I wasn’t just gripped and fascinated by the radical strategy of shifting POVs with occasional plot-point overlaps. I was almost completely unable to guess what would happen next, and you really don’t want to ruin things by reading discussions. And the finale…amazing!

I hate low-rent horror, and Weapons certainly isn’t that — it’s fucking elevated, man! I haven’t been this knocked out by…let’s call it a “horror exercise” rather than a mere horror film…by any thing in this realm since The Babadook.

Except Cregger isn’t just a grade-A horror film guy…he’s a grade–A filmmaker.

All hail Variety’s Peter Debruge for comparing Weapons to a classic, sporadically horrific Grimm Brothers fairy tale (remember the bear slicing open his own stomach? Hansel and Gretel munching on the witch’s fingers?). Totally spot-on.

And an extra-hearty bro hug for Josh Brolin, who has the lead male role but also executive produced this fucking thing. Weapons is absolutely one of the wowser highlights of Brolin’s career, right up there with No Country for Old Men.

When my 6:45 pm Weapons showing ended, a guy sitting behind me clapped and went “whoo-whoo!”

Even when people like a film, they rarely ever clap. This film is masterful…a landmark thing.

Jordan Ruimy agrees with my take and wouldn’t be surprised, he said this morning, if it generates Oscar buzz.