The other night I happened to re-watch this famous scene from Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America. To me it represents the summit of what HE has been hailing for years — the art of no-laugh funny. Anxious vibe, character-driven, but never more than darkly, oddly amusing.

The only conventional laugh line comes when casino manager Gary Marshall takes offense when Brooks alludes to “all the schmucks who come to Las Vegas to see Wayne Newton,” etc.

Brooks and Marshall are treating each other correctly and amiably as far as it goes, but there’s a fascinating tension between the latter, a smart, perceptive, no-nonsense type, and Brooks’ David Howard, a 30something advertising guy who’s recently persuaded his wife (Julie Hagerty) to join him in a drop-out adventure in which they’d live out of their mobile home and become nomads. Except Hagerty has blown their nest egg at roulette, and Brooks is thisclose to melting down, etc.

Why have I posted this? Because Marshall pronounces “Santa Claus” as “Santy Claus”, and I’m wondering where that pronunciation comes from. Maybe nowhere. Perhaps Marshall, a once-powerful signature helmer of mainstream studio relationship comedies, was the first, last and only guy who said “Santy Claus.” He was born in the mid 1930s to an Italian dad and a German, English and Scottish mother. It’s presumably an immigrant-class ethnic thing — no relatively well-off, college-educated, middle-class person has ever said “Santy” Claus. I’m just asking.

Every parent the world over has had this conversation with their kid. This one happened 30 years ago. The topic was a rabbit that Jett (now 33 and 1/2) and Dylan (32) had been chasing around the large front yard of our Cape Cod rental, and had taken refuge in some bushes and shrubbery. Jett was nearly 3 and 1/2; Dylan was three months shy of his second birthday.

Earnest apologies for failing to post a few words of tribute to Oscar-winning Italian helmer Lina Wertmuller, who passed two days ago at age 91. My summary is no different than anyone else’a. I was around for her mid ’70s heyday and I channelled the same things — a strong tide lifts all boats. As we speak I can’t summon a single original Wertmuller thought. I’m just another fanboy.

Wertmuller’s first two Giancarlo Giannini films in the ’70s — The Seduction of Mimi (’72) and Love and Anarchy (’73) — were warm-ups for her historic one-two punch — Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (’74) and especially her crowning achievement, Seven Beauties (’75). It landed Wertmuller a Best Director Oscar nom. And right after that her hot streak was more or less over, never to return. But at least she had one.

A little more than two years ago (’19) Wertmuller was honored with a career tribute Oscar.

Three Wertmuller signatures that always come to mind — (a) the “Oh Yeah” newsreel montage at the beginning of Seven Beauties (wonderful, pure joy), (b) that third-act moment in Swept Away when a purring Mariangela Melato asks the Marxist Giannini to “sodomize me” and Giannini doesn’t know what that means, and (c) those white-framed glasses.

“The ones who were there…”

In an interactive N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine piece, critic A.O. Scott celebrates 11 actors whom he believes delivered the creme de la creme of 2021 screen performances. Spencer‘s Kristen Stewart, Passing‘s Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, King Richard‘s Will Smith, The Tragedy of Macbeth‘s Denzel Washington, Drive My Car‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima, et. al.

One presumes that if one of Scott’s favorites somehow couldn’t make himself or herself available for a special N.Y. Times photo session with Ruven Afanador, they were replaced by another favorite. So let’s be liberal and hypothesize that the two finest female performances of the year — Penelope Cruz as a woman with child in Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers and Renate Reinsve as a young woman of solitude in Joachim Trier‘s The Worst Person in the World — were on Scott’s initial list but couldn’t fit Afanador into their schedule.

HE sez: A for vision, A for speaking comic truth, A for Leonardo DiCaprio’s explosive acting in two temper-tantrum scenes and…uhm, somewhere between a B-minus and a C-plus for execution.

Very ballsy and bold Strangelove-like satire that feels like an extended, gargantuan, improv-y, effects-laden SNL super-skit about massive self-delusion & self-destruction, and yet oddly inert in certain portions. But not entirely.

Because at the same time it’s really out there and righteously wackazoid, and it works now and then.

The cast of Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth, a play about medieval Scotland, is pretty close to one-third African American. Presentism is par for the course these days, of course, but Coen and wife-producer-costar Frances McDormand seem to have moved beyond your obligatory woke casting requirements.

Which is a switch for Joel, at least compared to remarks he and brother Ethan made during an interview with The Daily Beast‘s Jen Yamato in February ’16 while promoting Hail Ceasar.

Yamato had brought up the issue of diverse casting and multi-ethnic representation. Even though Hail Ceasar was set in the racially illiberal early ’50s, her beef was basically #WhyIsHailCaesarSoWhite? Joel’s attitude was quite resistant and in fact fairly dismissive. Boiled down, his view was “why should I ethnically mix up my cast just for political reasons?”

It’s probably fair to say that a different Joel was at the helm when it came to casting The Tragedy of Macbeth. I know nothing, but I suspect that McDormand told him “you can’t really play it that way now, plus there are so many great actors of color out there…you should get in on this.”

Obviously Joel could have ignored the presentism requirement and made Macbeth as a traditional all-paleface play a la Roman Polanski and Orson Welles, and if anyone had complained he could have used the same argument he threw at Yamato. So why didn’t he? Because the Yamato mindset is industry-wide now, and he figured “well, I guess I need to get with the program…why make trouble for myself?…why not just embrace presentism and turn it into a plus?”

Great story about integrity — all hail Larry David.

…in which Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, one of the best of the year and one of the most inventively alive remakes of all time plus a likely winner of the Best Picture Oscar, is looking at a first-weekend gross between $12 and $17 million. Because under-25s see it as a GenX and boomer nostalgia thing, which is what it partly is — let’s face it. It cost over $100 million to produce, and will probably end up losing money.

Meanwhile Jon Watts, Kevin Feige and Amy Pascal‘s Spider-Man: No Way Home (12.17) is looking at opening-day gross of $40 million and probably $200 million by 12.19. WSS is mostly an older-audience thing (30-plus) while Spider-Man (which I would watch only under Clockwork Orange-style restraints) owns the 25-and-unders.

Really hope people safely return to movie theaters this weekend to watch a beautiful film from one of our greatest filmmakers—Steven Spielberg’s WEST SIDE STORY—in the way it deserves to be seen. It’s a beauty, and we’ll be talking about Rachel Zegler for the rest of our lives.💃🏽 pic.twitter.com/yA8s28WnGX

— Scott Feinberg (@ScottFeinberg) December 10, 2021

Michael Nesmith, to his credit the most contrarian and independent-minded member of the mid to late ’60s embarassment known as The Monkees, passed early today at age 78.

Nesmith hated the fakeness and pushed for the band’s right to play their own instruments and not just go through the motions as network-controlled Beatles imitators. Nesmith wrote and performed ““Papa Gene’s Blues” and “Joanne.” In ’81 Nesmith won a Grammy Award given for Video of the Year for his hour-long TV show, Elephant Parts. He was also an exec producer of Repo Man (’84).

Three Monkees have now merged with the Great Beyond — Nesmith, Peter Tork and Davy Jones. Only drummer-singer Mickey Dolenz, 76, remains to hold down the fort