Paul Mescal as Weak-Ass William Shakespeare...My Heart Sinks
April 24, 2025
Ethical "Pitt" Pothole Turns Me Off
April 23, 2025
"It's Really Good To Know..."
April 22, 2025
Nobody is a more passionate fan of Olivia Colman than myself, but she’s just not young or hot enough to play Benedict Cumberbatch‘s wife in The Roses (Searchlight, 8.29).
The 51-year-old Colman is only a year and a half older than Cumberbatch, but she looks…okay, not like his aunt but his slightly older attorney or business partner. She doesn’t look wifey-wifey.
When it comes to marriage, men who are doing well professionally always choose someone younger and hotter (i.e., arm-candy factor). Okay, some marry women their own age but if they do, the women are always significantly more attractive than the man, according to boilerplate male hotness standards. Regardless of age, the wife never looks older and is always hotter than the husband.
This was true of the dynamic between Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in the original The War of the Roses (’89). Turner was and is a decade younger than Douglas, and pretty much looked like her Body Heat self in that Danny DeVito-directed 20th Century Fox release.
The discussion of “InconvenientStatsThatJournosWouldBeWiseToIgnore” (4.15) was apparently shut down by socially concerned persons within the WordPress matrix. This may have been incited by the posting of 2022crimestatistics from the City of London website. Or not…I wouldn’t know. I know it wasn’t me.
I’m posting this because I used to be way behind the eight ball when young…I’ve forgotten some of the psychological particulars, but it was murder. Talk about being “misplaced inside a jail”…yeesh.
However you slice or strategize it, the 2025 Venice Film Festival (8.27 through 9.6) will likely constitute a much richer assortment of films than the Cannes Film Festival, which unfurls three and half weeks hence. Here’s a list of 2025 films that are somewhere between fairly and somewhat likely choices for the Venice gathering.
HE’s dream roster includes the Guadagnino, the Bigelow, the Cooper, the Nemes, the Aronofsky, the Berger, the Cianfrance, the Corbijn, the Greengrass, the Baumbach, the Assayas, the Schnabel and the Gibney…13 in all.
Not the Safdie, not the Lanthimos, not the Zhao, not the Fastvold, not the Winocour.
21. WIZARD OF KREMLIN / d: Olivier Assayas (a film adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli‘s 2022 book, directed by Olivier Assayas and starring Paul Dano, Alicia Vikander, Jude Law, Zach Galifianakis and Tom Sturridge with Dano playing Vadim Baranov.)
4.17, 6:45 am update: Caught the first two episodes last night. The urgent pacing and well-chiselled, fat-free narrative quickly affected me, especially as I got to know the crew (and even some of the patients). Even with the scampering rats I was hooked. Expectations exceeded.
Very few speedbumps and yet uncomfortable moments are part of the scheme…I get that. That said, I could’ve done without (a) that one, thankfully brief bit with the fat male patient using a bedpan (TMI) and (b) that woke moment when the young, good-looking doctor says a young couple whose son has accidentally ingested cannabis gummmies won’t face legal consequences because “they’re white”. Otherwise episode #2 just flew right by while pretty much flooding my system. The humanity fills your cup to the brim.
Noah Wylie is great, but then they all are. My “Shitsburgh” concern meant nothing as the show could be set in Portland or New Orleans or anywhere. I cried out when the damaged crimson fingernail of the dweeb med student was lanced with a needle…Jesus Christ! I know that more discomfort awaits, but I’m in. As long as the show doesn’t subject me to any close-ups of fat, swollen feet with fungus-y toenails, I’ll be okay. And the absence of soap opera stuff is wonderful.
Wednesday pm: I don’t like coming into a limited series three months late, but I’ve now decided I’ll suck it up and watch all 15 episodes of The Pitt. I don’t like this kind of long-haul commitment, but I guess I can get through it.
Why didn’t I jump in last January? Because (a) it looked like just another E.R. drama starring Noah Wylie, and (b) I’ve never liked Pittsburgh.
I haven’t been to the area since ’82 when I visited the set of George Romero‘s Creepshow (actually a suburb near Monroeville), and I remember muttering to myself that not having been born there was probably a blessing. Plus I didn’t like Rowdy Herrington and Bruce Willis‘s Striking Distance. And let’s not forget when Sienna Miller called it “Shitsburgh” back in ’08 or thereabouts.
I’m so sick of TheLastofUs, which is to say the draining, dispiriting genre of disease, rot and decay…dystopian finality ain’t what it used to be, you see.
I’m more or less okay with Pedro Pascal‘s Joel Miller, I suppose, but I really, really don’t care for the company of 21-year-old Bella Ramsey, who plays the brittle, glaring, strange-looking Ellie (really weird icy eyes).
Ellie is certainly “a lot.” And not just because she’s something of a Jackson Hole rock star in this godawful end-of-everything realm because she’s immune to the Cordyceps infection.
Early on Ellie and Dina (Isabella Merced) go after some growling zombies inside a warehouse of some kind, but instead of relying on firearms for protection Ellie decides upon wrestling and knifing them to death. Absolute 100% lunacy.
Ellie and Dina are sexually aroused by each other (of course! what else?) and gradually decide to make out on a dance floor during a community celebration. This prompts a local homophobe to bark and complain and call them “dykes.” And then right away Joel steps in and decks the guy, which naturally angers Ellie…such a snarly-face.
I’m not saying Ramsey is an unskilled actress or anything; I’m saying I don’t like her frosty, edgelord vibe. And I really do dislike the branding of actors who refer to themselves as “they/them” (i.e., sexually fluid or ambivalent) while wearing breast-binders and oddly identifying as Christian and autistic / neurodivergent, not to mention being a former pescatarian as well as a onetime victim of anorexia nervosa, and being sorta kinda “vegan-ish.”
Bella is so bold, so brave. If only Cary Grant or Kate Hepburn had mustered the courage to be fully and unapologetically non-binary…if only Kate had broken out of confinement and worn her hair in a tight bun along with some chest-binders while playing Tracy Lord in ThePhiladelphiaStory. Did Grant hide his autism? How long and hard did he struggle with his they/them-ness?
They, they, they, they, they, they….
Ellie’s youth and immunity mean viewers are unfortunately stuck with her unless the producers read the writing on the wall. But of course they won’t / can’t because Bella Ramsey is such a heavily branded Zoomer — an autistic they/them lesbian who’s worn breast-flatteners, etc.
Some actors have eyes that radiate and reach in and establish an immediate emotional rapport. You want their characters to win through or at least not be crushed by tumbling tides. I for one would be delighted if Bella were to vanish like that…poof! Her eyes are hard and frosty and oddly feral on some level. She’s almost like a new hybrid species. She’d actually be effective as some kind of fang-toothed daughter of Dracula.
Earlier this month I experienced a mixed reaction to Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne‘s Adolescence (Netflix). My reaction was basically “okay, an absorbing, blistering British social drama about a family dealing with their 13-year-old son being accused of a knifing murder of a teenage girl, an incident that seemingly stems from a virulent culture of incel-shaming and toxic masculinity (i.e., the influence of Andrew Tate) among teenage boys.
And yet I had heard that statistically-speaking, the Andrew Tate white-kid incel/manopshere factor in England wasn’t as much of a pervasive social malignancy as Adolescence had contended. I had heard, in fact, that immigrant kids from broken families were a much greater problem in terms of teenage stabbings.
I dismissed this allegation because I hadn’t seen any stats that backed this up, but more fundamentally I knew that if I were to post reliable stats that supported this view, I would immediately be slandered as a racist scumbag by the HE commentariat.
Yesterday I came upon a London.gov.ukpress release from 2.10.22 — 38 months ago. It stated that as far as the city of London was concerned, the following was statistically true at the time: “Despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators and 53% of knife crime perpetrators.”
We know, of course, why Thorne and Graham’s Netflix miniseries didn’t come within 50 miles of the london.gov.uk statistic in question. I don’t think I need to explain why.
I realize that the usual HE haters are going to say that only a racist at heart would allude to the London.gov statistic, and that the smarter thing would be to simply blow it off and go on my merry way. But Adolesence has stirred a lot of concerned-citizen discussion (“what should parents do about this ghastly problem?”) in recent weeks, and nobody has alluded to the possibility that teenage stabbings might have been caused or provoked by anything other than the angry incel-Andrew Tate factor. Have I missed something?
I know which Steiger performances I’m expected to praise, of course. OnTheWaterfront’s Charlie, the original lonely butcher in Delbert Mann’s televised Marty, Sergio Leone’s Duck, YouSucker, Sidney Lumet’s ThePawnbroker, the cultured serial killer in NoWayToTreatALady (my second favorite), and, of course, the Dr. Pepper-sipping bohunk sheriff in NormanJewison’s InTheHeatoftheNight.
And yet the Steiger performance that always comes to mind first and foremost is the cynical, perverse, sophisticated and ruthless Victor Kamarovsky in David Lean’s Dr.Zhivago.
I chatted with Steiger during a press schmooze at the ‘97 Montreal Film Festival (late August). A man of vague sorrow, unassuming, meditative, dressed in black. The death of PrincessDiana (8.31.97) so upset Steiger that he got up and delivered an impromptu scolding that night about the motorbike paparazzi who had chased her and Dodi Fayed. Hey, man, don’t look at me…I’m Otis Ferguson with a touch of Neal Casady.
Posted in late ‘22: Remember the bad old mask days? The mask nightmare lasted, roughly, for two awful years — March ’20 to March/April ’22. As recently as seven or eight months ago you could get into trouble for not observing mask protocols aboard commercial flights. It seems so long ago, but it wasn’t.
Mask mandates began to lift in February ’22, but the emotional trauma will linger for years. Particularly the aggressive behavior of mask Nazis.
On 12.12.21 I flew from New York to Los Angeles aboard United #517. I was happy to sit in the first row of coach, left front, next to the main exit door…acres of leg room. But this also meant I was constantly in view of flight attendants, and so I was reprimanded three times for allowing my mask to slip beneath the tip of my nose. If I hadn’t been sitting in row #1 nobody would’ve said boo, trust me.
Passengers were allowed to take masks off during meals, of course, and I was eating some kind of snack during one of these infractions. I didn’t argue with anyone, of course, and I apologized each time I was reprimanded. It’s not like I refused to wear my mask — I just wore it in a respectful but casual, no-big-deal way.
United Airlines Passenger Incident Review Committee (PIRC) to HE, sent on 12.12.21: “Based on the nature of the reported incident that occurred on flight 517 on December 12, 2021, this shall serve as a notice that you are not permitted to fly on United Airlines or any regional carrier operating as United Express until a review of this incident by United’s Passenger Incident Review Committee (PIRC) has occurred.
“The PIRC would like to consider your version of what occurred in this incident in making its determination. In order to ensure this information is considered a written report must be submitted within 96 hours of receiving this notice.”
HE to United PIRC, 12.13.21: “I duly apologize for letting my mask slip below the tip of my nose three times. It won’t happen again. After 21 months of wearing masks I’ve never once been scolded or reprimanded, much less been met at the gate by a United security rep. Not once. Plus I’ve been vaccinated three times. I always follow protocol when it comes to masks. Please accept my apology.”
United PIRC to HE, 12.20.21: “Based on your refusal to comply with our policy, we believe that your presence onboard future United flights creates a threat to the health and safety of our employees and passengers. Consequently, we are banning you from travel on United and United Express flights while our face covering policy is in effect. During this period, we hope that you will not attempt to fly with United. If you attempt to fly with us while our policy is in place, you will be refused transport. We do not take this regrettable action lightly.”
HE to United PITRC, 12.22: “Dear United PIRC — No offense but your decision strikes me as needlessly harsh. As I explained twice, I never refused to wear my mask, and I pledged twice in written replies to never again incur the wrath of United attendants. I also apologized twice for allowing the mask to slip beneath the tip of my nose. This was a complete non–incident. You were obviously committed to a punitive response from the get-go, regardless of the basic facts or my explanation. You, not I, have a serious attitude problem.”
“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...
