In fact, IndieWire’s Samantha Bergeson didn’t write the Citizen Kane pullquote in her 11.10 review of Lindsay Lohan’s Falling for Christmas, although she does bend over backwards to be kind.

Daniel Craig cutting loose in Paris is wonderful…wait, wait, why is he slinking around in some swanky hotel? Get back on the streets, bruh! Feel the joy and rapture. You don’t need Belvedere Vodka…you really don’t.

The most emotionally moving moment in Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans comes when we hear the opening passage from Max Steiner‘s score for John Ford‘s The Searchers. It’s a payoff like no other. I beamed and went “aahh, yes…this hits home, feels right.”

Read more

HE acknowledges that Everything Everywhere All At Once may end up with a token Best Picture nomination to placate Zellennials, but the less said about that unpleasant possibility the better. With the unseen Babylon and Avatar: The Way of Water in a limbo position, the best films of the year are as follows…these are the 2022 motion pictures that have earned the serious points except for Water and Babylon, which are likely to score highly before long:

1. The Fabelmans
2. TÁR
3. Top Gun: Maverick
4. Avatar: The Way of Water
5. Babylon
6. Empire of Light
7. She Said
8. Armageddon Time
9. Bardo
10. Close

The early to late ’70s saw the flowering of a revolutionary sexual awakening all over…in showbiz circles, in elite professions, in the major urban areas, in upper middle-class neighborhoods. Hell, everywhere.

And especially for rich, powerful, good-looking actors on the prowl. For them every day was a combination of Plato’s Retreat and I, Claudius. It was madness back then.

Even Average Joes tasted the nectar. From a certain perspective they were lucky to be living and frolicking in one of the most breathtaking nookie eras since the days of Ancient Rome.

In our Salem Witch Trial climate there’s nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by being candid about this. I certainly can’t go there but…

The context of the ‘70s was so dramatically different than the climate of today. We’re living in the midst of #MeToo Puritanism — a very conservative and punitive social movement.

That aside, any adult actor who may or may not have had his way with an under-age teenager…such behavior was selfish and cruel. That was then, but this is now. And criminally is criminality. You don’t mess with jailbait.

So many people today have no understanding of how many people in Hollywood and the pop music world diddled around with jailbait back in the day. They think it was just Warren Beatty and Led Zeppelin. Celebrities, or at least many of them, have little sense of morality when it comes to showing restraint or putting the brakes on. They lead wild lives. But no one seems to understand this. The tabloids present banal addiction and divorce dramas as The Truth. They don’t report on most of what actually goes on.

I’m truly dreading seeing Wakanda Forever later today. It’s going to be awful — I know it. I’m going to suffer and ache and whimper. They’re going to pull my tooth out without an anasthetic…..aaauuuggghhh!

“If Black Panther was Wonder Woman, Wakanda Forever is Wonder Woman 1984. It’s that level of shittiness, and that much of a dive in quality. It’s just like…it succumnbs to pretty much every negative aspect of the MCU. It’s overblown, it’s over-stuffed with ridiculous CG…none of it has any weight or meaning, the villain is forgettable, crappy…his origin story makes no sense and [in fact] none of the characters’ motivations make any sense in this movie…and because it’s Marvel Stage Four, it’s the girl power show naturally,…pretty much the entire cast is female.”

…or work for the first third or first half, but don’t work as an overall story — an HE riff if I ever devised one!

I recently happened to re-watch Sydney Pollack‘s Random Hearts (’99), a forlorn adult romance that flopped financially and totally tanked in terms of critic and ticket buyer opinions.

It’s about a tentative, uncertain love affair between a D.C. cop (Harrison Ford) and a New Hampshire Congressperson (Kristin Scott Thomas) who meet because their spouses (Susanna Thompson and Peter Coyote, respectively) were having an affair before dying in a plane crash.

Random Hearts doesn’t work because it can’t — you can’t launch a loving, adult, non-obsessive relationship with the shattered spouse of the person your husband or your wife was having an affair with. The thing that Ford and Thomas have (they fall for each other and make love in a woodsy cabin) will always be a weird menage a quatre between two living and two dead people. It’s just not in the cards for things to work out, but Pollack and screenwriter Kurt Luedtke try their best to make it work anyway.

And to a certain extent, they succeed. There are several scenes during the first half that work quite well — they really do. Carefully written, well acted, appropriately steady and somber.

And because of the more or less successful first half Random Hearts doesn’t deserve a 15% Rotten Tomatoes rating — that’s ridiculous!

What other films are at least reasonably good during the first third or first half, only to steadily crack and shatter and fall apart during the second half?

…always bothered me. Okay, something very particular. Gallagher was “funny” in a dopey, good-natured, “egoistic drunk guy having fun at a rowdy party” way, but he lacked a hip aesthetic. He lacked thought. He wasn’t an iconoclast. There wasn’t so much as a tiny salt sprinkle of Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor or Louis CK or Bill Burr in the man.

He didn’t seem to have any opinions about anything. I never had a clue if he was a rightwinger or a leftie or what. He just seemed to like goofing around and making people giggle and chortle and spit-take and whatnot, but why was it that I loved it when David Letterman threw watermelons off the top of four-story buildings but I didn’t crack a smile when Gallagher smashed them with a sledge-o-matic?

I didn’t like his face, to be honest. I didn’t like his long stringy ’70s hair and his bullshit golf cap and the threads he wore, and I literally hit the roof back in the ’80s when I noticed that Gallagher was wearing mandals. The first rule of comedy is that stand-up comics can’t wear mandals. He even performed barefoot at times…God.

Gallagher has passed at age 76. Respect and condolences.

Read more

…that anyone who buys a 4K Bluray of Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (‘99) is, to put it as mildly as possible, hardcore. I know this film backwards and forwards and have watched it at least 10 or 12 times, and I can’t imagine that any kind of 4K “bump” will be apparent. I just wanted the 4K to have and to hold —- a keepsake. I’ll watch it later this evening.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s Everything Everywhere All At Once (A24) opened on 3.25.22. It took me nearly six months to finally watch this sucker and get my royal HE hate on — “Frequent Agonies of Everything Everywhere” appeared on 8.6.22. And now, two-thirds of a year after opening, Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman has seen it and shat on it.

Quote #1: “Indeed, just by accident, I wound up discussing [Everything Everywhere] with two pretty solid Academy voters. Their response? ‘We turned it off, and there was good stuff there.'”

Quote #2: The visuals are dazzling, but are put together with some form of ADHD. If there’s a story in the alternate universe, I couldn’t figure it out. This is a comic book movie pretending to be something else — maybe Cloud Atlas, but that movie didn’t work either.”

Quote #3: “So how did this adventure in tediousness make $60 million? It is really a big cult film. The comic book stuff is what sold it to a certain audience, which is fine.”

If Everything Everywhere All At Once was a person napping on a couch in a living room, I would take off my shoes, sneak up and suffocate it with a throw pillow.