In two words, undramatic and restful.

A very slightly condensed opening of Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review of Olivia Wilde‘s The Invite:

“When you catch a film about two couples who get together for a dinner party, there are certain expectations.

“You expect that the dialogue, for a while, is going to be light, funny, brittle, caustic. You expect that as the evening wears on, the masks of civility will come off, revealing something more painful and maybe brutal under the surface. You expect that there might be serious flirtation (between the people who aren’t partners), and that the whole thing will wind up structured as a kind of truth game. And you expect that by the end, there will be wreckage…but maybe, in that destruction, a kind of healing.

“The Invite, directed by Wilde from a script by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones and starring Wilde and Seth Rogen as a grousing, long-married San Francisco couple who have their upstairs neighbors over to dinner, is a movie that lives up to every one of those expectations. Yet it does so in a way that’s so original, so brimming with surprise, so fresh and up-to-the-minute in its perceptions of how relationships work (or don’t), that you watch it in a state of rapt immersion and delight.”

Yesterday THR critic David Rooney called Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex “a blast.”

I for one am highly suspicious of Rooney’s review for three reasons. One, he’s often generous to a fault. Two, I stopped trusting Rooney when he raved about The Secret Agent, a “good” but somewhat scattered and underwhelming film, during last May’s Cannes Film Festival. And three, I Want Your Sex was turned down last year by the Cannes and Venice film festivals. What does that tell you?

As Araki’s film has recently premiered at Sundance, it is fair to repeat HE’s fundamental opposition to watching Cooper Hoffman simulating the performance of sexual acts. The problem isn’t Hoffman alone. Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off.

There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.

In response to this rule-of-thumb Paddy Chayefsky wrote Marty, a teleplay (and then a movie version of same) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that he was on the verge of giving up.

It was sad but 1955 audiences understood the poor guy’s predicament because the actor who played Marty was Ernest Borgnine.

Things are different these days. Now it’s “whoa, Marty the Butcher totally deserves to not only find love but experience great, Last Tango-level sex in his lonely-ass life, and here’s hoping he finds both, and — this is even better — that Delbert Mann will allow us to share in Marty’s orgasmic satisfactions.”

…when even slightly provoked. As today’s shooting victim — a 37 year-old intensive care nurse named Alex Jeffrey Pretti — apparently did by being legally armed. Except he was disarmed right before being shot multiple times.

Dangerous hombres, those ICE guys. Hair-trigger psychos. Public enemies.

Five or six (more?) ICE guys all over Pretti, pepper-spraying and punching his ass and then pinning him down, and then they shoot him full of holes?

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Scott Galloway on Gavin Newsom, 7:57 mark: “And by the way, you wanna hear serious vibe, serious juju, serious mojo, serious riz? Governor Newsom is walking around [here] like he’s the next president, and guess what? Everyone believes him. He has an entourage…I’m not exaggerating…it’s like there’s light shining on the guy. I walk down to the Congress Hall, and there was a crowd of people around this guy, and no matter how big the crowd you see him like he’s Rhianna standing on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s shoulders. He’s just…it’s like God, like he’s the chosen one.”

Funniest bit concerns Karoline Leavitt…4:20 to 4:42.

Second best: “The kind of privelege hating that you can only get for $95,000 a year.”

Jordan Ruimy saw Daniel Roher‘s ostensibly thrilling Tuner (Black Bear, 5.26) at last September’s TIFF, and found it “well made and fairly tense, but compromised by a botched ending.”

Just-unveiled at Sundance, pic costars Leo Woodall, Dustin Hoffman, Havana Rose Liu, Jean Reno, Lior Raz and Tovah Feldshuh. The screenplay is by Roher and Robert Ramsey,

My personal view, if you really wanna know, is that Jacob Elordi isn’t too tall to play 007 — he’s too pretty. He doesn’t have that vaguely cruel, tough-as-nails vibe that Sean Connery had without breaking a sweat.

…Rod Lurie and his Facebook homies will slap you around with the “r” word…fair warning, bruh. Incorrect viewpoints won’t be tolerated.

I feel the same way you do about the lunatic woke left. Many in my orbit feel the same way. The Bill Maher brigade feels the same way. Many millions of us, ex-leftists in the same center or even center-right boat because the left became a complete insane asylum between ‘18 and ‘24.  

The validity of our observations about the thankfully weakened but still persistent progressive left cabal is what matters to me…the basis of our bond…what I share with you and care deeply about…our basic foundational allegiance.

And Trump is clearly losing it…an obviously malignant mind…the Greenland thing is just off-the-reservation nuts…that horrifically vulgar East Wing ballroom…blatantly lying about poor Renee Good (who, yes, brought about her own demise because she panicked in the face of odious ICE vibes)… calling the honorable Jack Smith an “animal who shouldn’t be practicing law”…the Sopranos vibe he radiated in Davos. 

I cherish my personal memories of JFK, whose grace and eloquence and movie-star magnetism and general aura of intellectual rigor…a projection (never mind the underlying reality) that mattered so much to so many…(his private sexual behavior was another matter in a separate shoe box)…

Even Reagan, whom I never admired or related to culturally in the ‘80s…even Reagan exuded sanity before his age-related frailties set in …even Nixon in a certain light!…the general 20th Century climate of semi-sensible Oval Office policy or at least a semblance of that…

You know as well as I that the once more-or-less intact dignity of the office has been degraded by our sociopathic bully boss… a beast who has truly poisoned the culture and coarsened the national conversation.…a blathering, muttering, heavy-lidded, stream-of-consciousness, foam-at-the-mouth Queens gangster who has strange bruises on his hands and can’t even walk in a straight line.  

But I do get “paid” in at least two senses of the term.

For the daily effort of tapping out this column I derive serious pride as well as abundant spiritual compensation….it makes my day and then some. And I do receive annual monetary payment in the form of round-trip passages to southern France and northern Italy plus a decent place to crash at the Cannes and Venice film festivals plus modest meals and whatnot, courtesy of HE supporters.

That’s not nothing. I actually feel pretty great about this set-up. The generous loyalists, I mean.

If what you’re doing with your life, professionally and/or creatively, feels insufficient or unsatisfying without the boost of lush payment, that’s not exactly a “bad” thing. Then again it suggests that you’re not in a terrific place, job-wise.

I realize that most people do what they do for the money they earn and that’s fine, but the best jobs are “payment” in and of themselves. If you make great money from these gigs or devotions, terrific. If you make mezzo-mezzo or even shitty money from them, that’s still moderately okay or at least tolerable because — hello? — you still have a great job. And that’s a relatively rare thing.

Today the Republicans who constitute a majority on the House Judiciary Committee “claimed that Jack Smith and his team had ‘weaponized’ the criminal justice system on behalf of the Biden administration — an accusation that Mr. Smith repeatedly and adamantly denied.

“Several times, under questioning by Democratic lawmakers, Mr. Smith said that he had never received orders from the attorney general at the time, Merrick B. Garland, or from anyone else in the Biden administration about how to pursue his cases against Donald Trump.

“’I am not a politician and I have no partisan loyalties,’ Mr. Smith said during his opening statement.

“He said that, after three decades as a prosecutor, he had simply followed the facts and the law without ‘fear or favor.’

“’No one should be above the law in this country, and the law required that he be held to account,’ he said of Mr. Trump. ‘So that is what I did.’

“Mr. Smith insisted that he would not be cowed by any of the vitriolic broadsides that Mr. Trump has continued to make against him personally. Those included a message that was posted online in the middle of the hearing by an official White House social media account, saying, “Jack Smith is a deranged animal, who shouldn’t be allowed to practice Law.”

“Mr. Smith acknowledged that he believed that Trump officials would ‘do everything in their power’ to indict him ‘because they’ve been told to do so by the president.’ But he said he would not bend in the face of the threats.

“’I will not be intimidated,’ he declared.” — from reporting by N.Y. Times correspondents Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush.

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