Mr. President — Ever since you began posting your best-movies-of-the-year lists (when was that, late ’16 or early ’17?), Hollywood wags have doubted that they represented your own personal tastes. The assumption was that younger folks on your staff chose the right “tasteful” films and you signed off on them. I, for one, have always (naively?) trusted that your lists represented your own actual preferences, so I’m going to address my comments directly to you, the 44th president of the United States. Here they are…

(1) I’m going to assume you haven’t seen Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers. Because if you had, there’s no way you would have omitted it in favor of Old Henry (who’s even seen that film?) or Passing (c’mon…a 1920s Manhattan-Harlem drama, one that barely had a pulse, about a completely unbelievable interracial marriage…the film’s admirers pretended that Ruth Negga‘s facial features could have passed as European-descended, even to a toxic racist husband who was hyper-attuned to such matters) or Pig (a movie about great organic cooking for the ages vs. blandly catering to to the know-nothings). These are all passable or pretty good films, but Almodovar’s is masterful. Did you not see it or something?

(2) Why did you choose 14 films? Why not 15? Why not 10? Nobody chooses their top 14 films of the year.

(3) Did you honestly feel that Drive My Car needed three hours to make the points that it made? Did you think that the director’s wife had betrayed him just that one time (which is what N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott thought) or did you come to realize that she had numerous other sexual partners as a way of coping with the death of their child?

(4) Hat tip to your including The Worst Person in the World and Quo Vadis, Aida — both triple-grade-A, European-made films.

(5) In The Power of the Dog, did you honestly understand what had happened to Benedict Cumberbatch‘s Phil Burbank during the final reel? Because I didn’t. I had to ask friends and research it before I realized what had happened. Director Jane Campion certainly didn’t make it plain to the dumb people in the audience. This, to me, is not the mark of a triple-A film.

(6) Did you honestly think that the Robert Bresson-like prison ending of The Card Counter worked? Did you honestly think there was a compelling romantic current between Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish? Did you really believe Haddish “was” who she was playing, a sharp casino talent scout?

(7) I thought you would have included the excellent King Richard on your list of 14, but it didn’t make the cut. Why not? It’s the only 2021 film that said “this is what it takes to make it in a difficult realm….only the devoted and highly disciplined succeed.” Plus it has a fascinating lead character, which is arguably Will Smith‘s best performance. You can’t tell me you saw King Richard and didn’t greatly admire it.

(8) In sum, no King Richard and no Parallel Mothers constitute, no offense, a pair of glaring WTFs.

A husband or boyfriend, weak or guilty or both, begging for help or forgiveness or both from a wife or girlfriend who’s angry and disapproves but still loves him. And who’s the up-to-no-good silhouette guy in the doorway?

You don’t hear much about A Hatful of Rain these days. An addiction drama, it was co-written by Michael V. Gazzo (aka “Frank Pantangeli”) and directed by Fred Zinnemann. Shot in black-and-white Scope (2.39:1). Don Murray, Eva Marie Saint, Anthony Francoisa and Lloyd Nolan costarred. Music by Bernard Herrmann.

And the second most romantic scene Tom Cruise ever performed, the most romantic being the Jerry Maguire finale (“You had me at hello”).

What makes this Born on the Fourth of July scene so poignant is that it seems so unreal. You’ve got a naive and patriotic nerd who doesn’t attend the Massapequa High School senior prom because his dream girl (Kyra Sedgwick) is going with another guy, but at the last minute the nerd runs through a rainstorm to attend on his lonesome. He strolls soaking through the gymnasium, finds the dream girl (who of course is bored with her date), asks her to dance and then kisses her, and she’s totally into it.

Awkward high-school romances never experience this kind of perfect romantic climax…I know this for a fact! I went through high school and it was nothing but frustration and heartbreak. But that’s what makes this scene so sweet. Because we want to believe it even though it’s bullshit. (And I don’t care if this actually happened to poor Ron Kovic — it’s still a fantasy.)

Released on 12.20.89, BOTFOJ cost $17.8 million after reshoots. The blistering, well-reviewed anti-war drama grossed over $161 million worldwide, and received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Cruise; Stone won for Best Director. It also nabbed four Golden Globe Awards — Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, Best Director and Best Screenplay.

Today it wouldn’t even open in theatres, and if it did the teens and 20somethings who blew off West Side Story would ignore it. But they would definitely support Spider-Man: No Way Home.

A couple of friends invited me to join them for dinner during the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. I forget the name of the place but it was near a busy walk-street crossroads and adjacent to other eateries, and it had lots of outdoor tables and exquisite food and quite the vibe. You had to be somewhat in the know to know about this place, and I remember approaching and noticing as I scanned the crowd that Jane Campion, the festival’s jury president, was sitting and smiling and laughing with a table of friends.

The reason I spotted her as quickly and easily as I did were those two signatures — that shock of thick white hair and those dark-rimmed glasses.

If legendary caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was still with us, you know what his drawing of Campion would look like. How many famous people over the decades have been known for their dark-rimmed glasses? Campion, Phil Silvers, Woody Allen and who else? I’m asking.

The thing that Campion and Guillermo del Toro have in common is that GDT’s films have often focused on monsters while Campion’s latest film, The Power of the Dog, focuses on one particular monster, Benedict Cumberbatch‘s Phil Burbank.

…in a reasonable, persuasive, non-obsessive, open-hearted way, I will certainly do that. But only for the right reasons. Just because I passionately want to hate a film doesn’t mean I will hate it. If a movie works on its own terms, so be it. I am capable of recognizing and acknowledging that. But if I can find a fair-minded way to dump on this fucking film, I will do so.

Not that it matters, of course. For the degradation of taste and the all-but-total elimination of adult ticket-buyers who are more or less down with the idea of driving to the plex to experience an occasional serving of smart, soulful prestige cinema…those appetites and that tradition are dead and buried now, and Kevin Feige is one of the guys with a shovel, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave.

For the 17th or 18th time, if I could cause the MCU to self-destruct by clapping three times, I would clap three times and shout “whoo-hoo!” while doing so.

You know that 90% of the critics are go-along whores…totally untrustworthy in the realm of superhero stuff…they don’t want to come off like negheads or outliers. Only haters like myself are trustworthy because we don’t give a shit.

“From hell’s heart I stab at thee…for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…oh damn thee, whale!”

Congrats to The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield for teaming up with Janice Min in a brand-expanding venture of some kind. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tatiana Siegel will join the Ankler next month; perhaps others will climb aboard in due time.

The idea, I’m presuming, is to (a) build The Ankler into a multi-voiced mini-trade as well as (b) stand up to the competition posed by Puck and the jottings of their respected film guy, “What I’ve Heard’s” Matthew Belloni (also a Hollywood Reporter alumnus).

I regard Rushfield as a good hombre and a human being. We’ve met, chatted, exchanged. He tried to help me earlier this year when I was thinking about converting the self-built, stand-alone, brick-and-mortar home of Hollywood Elsewhere into a Substack condo unit. In ’18, ’19 and ’20 RR would occasionally end his columns with “Daily Wells” excerpts as “leave ’em laughing” kickers. That felt pretty cool — a tribute to my sardonic prose style or whatever.

Then RR decided to keep his distance after I briefly posted a friend’s analogy between Nomadland and Chloe Zhao‘s Oscar prospects with the effect of the then-raw and horrific news of the Atlanta massage-parlor shootings; Rushfield didn’t want any sort of taint rubbing off on The Ankler. (Thanks again to those who made this into a “thing”, including the reprehensible Jen Yamato and various other two-faced acquintances, colleagues and former friends whom I won’t name.)

I’ve always thought of Rushfield’s reporting and opinion pieces as catchy, brutally honest and perceptive, and always with a touch of dry humor. Everyone agrees. But he’s rarely touched the woke Robespierre terror thing in any kind of candid way, at least not in my limited perception. He alludes, of course, but, being an astute industry politician, never spits it out. If an alien from the planet Tralfamadore were to rely solely on Rushfield to learn about the state of post-2017 Hollywood left-religion culture and the bend-over-backwards, virtue-signalling, BIPOC-kowtowing that more or less resulted in the catastrophic Steven Soderbergh Oscar telecast last April…let’s just say that others are a tad more willing to go there.

Plus lately Rushfield has been Mr. Doom and Gloom about movie-watching in megaplexes. I’m not challenging his assessments in the slightest (he knows his stuff and always keeps close tabs), but he is a dependable deliverer of despair and despondency these days, certainly as far as the sagging fortunes of exhibition are concerned. Again — he’s not wrong but every time I read one of his riffs in this vein I want to pop a Percocet or maybe snort a little heroin. (I don’t drink.)

From his latest column about West Side Story‘s “bellyflop”: “That’s the thing here in my recent forecasts [about] the end of the film industry, I don’t necessarily mean it will cease to exist entirely. Just that the industry as we know it is doomed.

An hour ago a filmmaker friend sent me a link to Luca Guadagnino‘s O Night Divine, a 43-minute short made for Zara. I’ve watched about a quarter of it, and it’s very easy to settle into. Nourishing, inviting…flush digs on Christmas eve, and snow everywhere. Shot at some swanky hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland, O Night Divine costars Alex Wolff, John C. Reilly (as Santa Claus!), Hailey Gates, Samia Benazzouz, Chloe Park, et. al.

My heart skipped a beat when I noticed this morning that the Criterion Channel is streaming Ken Russell‘s The Music Lovers (’71) as part of a Glenda Jackson tribute. And not because I’m a huge fan of this hysterical Peter Tchaikovsky biopic. (Is anyone?) But Douglas Slocombe‘s cinematography is fairly wonderful, and it’s never been offered in HD, and so I allowed myself to fantasize that the film might have been covertly remastered or re-scanned or up-rezzed in 1080p and that Criterion had something to do with this. No such luck — it’s the same old shitty 480p version that’s been around since 2011.

Of course I love Wes Anderson creations…of course I do! It’s just that many of my Anderson faves are his commercials, and those dozens upon dozens of YouTube parodies. Feature-wise I’ve always been and will always be fully respectful of Anderson’s brand or stylistic stamp, and that includes, believe it or not, The French Dispatch, which I had a mostly unpleasant time with at Telluride last September.

But I am a genuine, whole-hearted fan of only a handful of Wes’s films — Rushmore (which I’ve always adored like a brother), Bottle Rocket, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the original black-and-white Bottle Rocket short, most of The Royal Tenenbaums. But I dearly love the Wes signage, specifically the shorts and parodies. The SNL Anderson horror film short is heaven.

I will always be on Team Anderson, and I will never resign. Partly because I’m 100% certain that one day he’ll reach into his heart and decide to broaden his scope, or perhaps even re-think things somewhat. (Wes is still relatively young.) He has to — artists have no choice. I just hope and pray he’ll make more of an effort to blend his hermetic Wesworld aesthetic with the bigger, gnarlier, more complex world that’s been there all along.