We all clean house every so often, but (and I know this is familiar to every older person in this racket) it’s very emotionally difficult to toss or put aside articles from 25 and 30 years ago. You think back to the blood, sweat and tears that went into each one, and the feeling swells. A little eye moisture. We all have to refresh and let the past go, but it hurts so much.

Director–writer: “If you check the blacklist, as well as talk to agents and writers around town, there were a whole slew of meta comedies written for stars to play themselves, and those have since been scuttled or shifted to streaming, perhaps after Unbearable Weight tanked.

“There was one written for Mickey Rourke to play himself and there are a half dozen of these meta pieces. A few spec scripts were penned for Liam Neeson to spoof his image, now on the backburner after Lionsgate failed to open yet another comedy. The marketing over there is the worst.”

So the Being Mortal production shutdown happened a week and a half ago and Bill Murray (moody rambunctious boomer offender) and Keke Palmer (“Millennial Diva”) are still trying to work things out? They can’t come to a rapprochement after ten effing days? Obviously one of them has an attitude and an arched back. Thoughts?

HE to Barbara Broccoli: Yes, it will take a long time to bring a dead man back to life. Unless, of course, the next two or three Bond films will be prequels. Then it’ll be fine. Set in the early ‘60s, let’s say.

Sidenote: Does anyone believe that Broccoli, a timid, finger-to-the-wind franchise caretaker if there ever was one, would even flirt with committing to a prequel realm?

Back to message: Wait, hold on…killing Daniel Craig’s 007 in No Time to Die was more of a metaphorical gesture to feminist #MeToo cadres than an actual dramatic death, you say? And with that gesture now part of movie history you feel free to reanimate “James Bond” except make him (or her) trans or gay or an agent of color? Is that what you have in mind?

HE to Robespierre Woke Comintern: Please consider HE’s solemn, bended-knee plea that the international woke terror brigade not cancel or otherwise severely punish Mickey Rourke for having earlier this month praised director Roman Polanski from the set of The Palace, which may (rushed as it sounds) debut at the ‘22 Venice Film Festival.

Last night I watched two and a half episodes of The Offer, the Paramount + series about the making of The Godfather. The early reviews had been mostly negative, so I was semi-intrigued by the fact that it seemed fairly competent. Michael Tolkin‘s script struck me as above average. Alas, I began to lose interest during episode #2, and then I started to impatiently fast forward. I was hoping that the Marlon Brando videotape audition sequence would turn up in episode #3, but nope.

And yet — AND YET! — I quickly fell for Matthew Goode‘s portrayal of Robert “The Kid Stays in the Picture” Evans. Having been a moderately close journalist “friend” of Evans in ’95 and ’96 and having spent a lot of time at his French Chateau home on Woodland, I knew the guy pretty well and right away I was nodding appreciatively at Goode’s performance. He nails the murmuring voice, the improvisational smoothitude, the wit, the street cunning.

The last time I was genuinely turned on by a famous-person-impersonation performance was Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris (’11).

Why did I lose interest early on? Simple — seething guineas aren’t very interesting.

The New York Italian-American community was pissed and paranoid about Mario Puzo‘s best-selling 1969 novel being made into what they presumed would be a run-of-the-mill gangster film, and for whatever reason nobody (not Evans, not Francis Coppola, not producer Albert Ruddy) was able to sell them on the possibility that The Godfather might become the greatest Italian-American epic ever made, and that it would romanticize Italian-American culture more than anything — a movie that would be much more about family and culture than crime.

The history is the history, but listening over and over to Giovanni Ribisi‘s Joe Colombo, Frank John Hughes‘ Frank Sinatra, Danny Nucci‘s Mario Biaggi and Anthony Skordi‘s Carlo Gambino bitch and moan about “what a disastuh this fuckin’ film will be”….Jesus, guys, give it a rest.

Having hated Dan Fogler for years, I was a wee bit surprised that I liked his performance as Francis Coppola. I was also more or less okay with Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller‘s performance as Ruddy.

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Thousands of copies of Roget’s Thesaurus fell off a truck yesterday on a New York-area boulevard. Random witnesses were taken aback, stunned, startled, aghast, stupefied, gobsmacked, thrown for a loop, bewildered, shocked, rattled, dazed, surprised, dumbfounded, blown away, flabbergasted, confounded, astonished, etc.

…happens in supermarket aisles. Second only to showers. My third most productive meditations happen while driving.

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Posted on 1.22.22: Set in present-day Bucharest and costarring Maika Monroe (It Follows), Karl Glusman and Burn Gorman, Chloe Okuno and Zack Ford‘s Watcher (IFC Midnight, 6.3) is unquestionably scary and unnerving.

In my view it stops short of elevated horror — it’s more of a low-key, Roman Polanski-level thriller in the vein of Repulsion and The Tenant. First-rate chills and creeps nonetheless.

The Scream-level morons may respond in their usual way, but Watcher is as good as it gets with this kind of palette and approach.

Greta Gerwig‘s currently filming Barbie, based on a script by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, is almost certainly not going to be a John Waters film. There would be nowhere to go if she did that. Gerwig is too crafty and edgy and invested in #MeToo consciousness to make a simple-minded, empty-headed flick about Barbie and Ken wallowing in Nothingville.

As far as I can determine there’s only one way for Gerwig to go story-wise, and that’s to make a Barbie variation of The Truman Show. Put another way, Gerwig and Baumbach’s film will most likely be Barbie and Ken Become Woke.

Margot Robbie is Barbie; Ryan Gosling is Ken.

It goes without saying that in Act One Ken will leave Barbie because he’s gay. (Ken has been totally gay since the ’60s.) Barbie herself could decide to go lezzy. Or it could be a 1950s period thing in which Ken and Barbie get married and buy a Southern California tract home and become one of those miserable couples in Martin Ritt‘s No Down Payment (’57). Or it could be set in the ’60s with Barbie becoming a member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Excerpt from Margot Robbie 2021 interview: “Barbie comes with a lot of baggage, and a lot of nostalgic connections. But with that comes a lot of exciting ways to attack it. People generally hear ‘Barbie’ and think, ‘I know what that movie is going to be,’ and then they hear that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing it, and they’re like, ‘Oh, well, maybe I don’t.’”

Warner Bros. will release Barbie on 7.21.23.

The Wiki page for Susquehanna Polling & Research says that the company “specializes in polling services for Republican candidates,” among other concerns. That doesn’t necessarily mean they cook data to please their clients, but there is a question about a seeming lack of neutrality.

That said, a recent SP&R poll strongly indicates that Democratic candidates are going to be slaughtered like lambs next November.

It also makes clear that Average Joes & Janes support Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis‘s “don’t try to indoctrinate young kids (third-graders and younger) with teachings about gender fluidity, non-straight sexual behaviors and trans ideology” bill — otherwise known as the “don’t say gay” bill.

This is why Democrats are going to die next fall. Step outside the urban progressive Twitter bubble and it’s a whole different world out there. The same people who voted for Glenn Youngkin in Virginia are standing with DeSantis now. Same thing with those San Francisco voters (Asians in particular) who voted to eject those moronic woke school board members.

How stupid can the Democrats (and the Biden White House in particular) be? It’s almost like they’re taking out ads that say “please…please don’t vote for us!”