A Guy Who Knew From Cricket Bats
November 30, 2025
When "The Indian Fighter" Opened at Mayfair in 1955...
November 29, 2025
Persistence of 42 Year Old "Betrayal"
November 17, 2025
Six days ago (Friday, 5.23) I watched a “new 4K digital restoration” of Barry Lyndon, projected upon the big, beautiful screen at the Salle Debussy. I had somehow persuaded myself that it would somehow look better (crisper, cleaner, whatever). Well, it looked fine but unremarkable…un-bumped…about as unexceptional as a 35mm screening I caught in Savannah several years ago…no better, no worse.
If Lyndon has been shot today the images would look considerably more specific and detailed…if it had been shot with an iPhone 15 even… but it was shot on 35mm film by John Alcott 51 years ago, and the lenses of that era were what they were.
But you know what? I have a suspicion that it will look better on the 65-inch Sony 4K when the Criterion 4K disc comes out on Tuesday, 7.8..
HE to Tomris Laffly: “Two or three days ago a colleague attempted to shame me for having only seen and reviewed a miserable 22 films in Cannes….a pathetic tally compared to your having bagged 40 screenings….40!. And you reviewed each and every one, right?
“40 films in 11 days = nearly four films per day. Very impressive!! I guess you didn’t suffer the same reservation + access issues I was forced to grapple with. I’m presuming you also caught a couple of extras on Saturday, 5.24.
“And each review was how long exactly? 5 to 7 paragraphs? Shorter? Longer?
“Rest assured, no one is more impressed with your amazing screening stamina…no one is more impressed than myself.
“You earned a demerit, of course, by approving of the Jafar Panahi film winning the Palme d’Or, but then you couldn’t help yourself, I guess, being a wokey and all.”
The first indication that the culture had said “enough!”…the blessed event that told me the tectonic plates had shifted…was when Lily Gladstone didn’t win the Best Actress Oscar during the 96th Academy Awards.
Woke terror hasn’t been fully eradicated as we speak but at least it’s been losing its grip, thank God. Six and a half years of twisted insanity! And you know why it’s taken as long as this for the string to run out? One reason is people like Bobby Peru saying “there IS no woke terror….its all in your head.”
The first feature film to forsake opening credits was Walt Disney‘s Fantasia (’40), but this version has been jettisoned. Yes, the original 1940 theatrical cut was credit-less, but brief credits were added for an early ’90s home video version.
There were no opening credits for Mike Todd‘s Around the World in 80 Days (’56), although I have a memory of a 1.37:1 introduction about the eternal thirst for adventure and modes of 19th Century travel, narrated (I think) by Edward R. Murrow. But that was a pumped-up, high-tech travelogue movie + a reserved-seats roadshow thing…the first film to be presented in 30-frame-per-second Todd-AO, etc.
In fact the first general audience popcorn movie to forsake an opening credit sequence was Kirk Douglas and Richard Fleischer‘s The Vikings (’58). All the credits (above- and below-the-line) were confined to an animated sequence at the very end.
The next big-deal film to blow off opening credits was Robert Wise‘s West Side Story (’61).
And yet these the last two announced their titles at the very beginning. The first film to completely ignore a title acknowledgment was Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now (’79). The 70mm roadshow version didn’t even present a closing-credits sequence, although the 35mm general release version did.
[Lost, perverted, re-posted…and the piece isn’t all that great to begin with….sorry for the loss of the comments]
I’m trying to assemble a list of supporting actors who lucked into exactly the right role and then marshalled their gifts and delivered knockout, ace-level performances…but only once.
Not that they lacked (or lack) for talent or haven’t had successful careers since, but delivering just so with a performance that really lights up a film….that’s a much rarer thing.
It may sound brusque or cruel to say that for some this kind of performance comes only once in a lifetime, but unfortunately…
Nobody worked more regularly in features and TV than John McIntire (Wagon Train, The Virginian), but if you ask me his only truly memorable role was as Sheriff Al Chambers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Partly because Mcintire played the part exactly right. Had it not been for an interior, three-minute dialogue scene in this 1960 thriller, McIntire would barely be on the radar today.
Take Dallas Roberts‘ low-key but authoritative performance as Sam Phillips in James Mangold‘s Walk_the_Line (’05)…a truly great moment in a first-rate musical biopic, but Roberts hasn’t been that lucky since.
26 years ago the late, great Nicky Katt gave a perfectly perverse performance as Stacy the hitman in Steven Soderbergh‘s The Limey….his three or four scenes rivalled Terence Stamp‘s in terms of sheer stuck-to-the-ribs longevity.
Who else? Which others? I’m not talking about supporting actors who nailed one perfect scene (that’s a separate thing), but whose one, single, diamond-bullet performance really hit home and will probably never be forgotten. But also can’t be repeated.
I’m just sharing my sorrow over the death of Presley Chweneyagae, star of Gavin Hood‘s Oscar-winning drama Tsotsi (’05). The poor guy was only 40 years old.
I met and chatted with Presley and Hood nearly 20 years ago in Toronto.
A little over six months ago I wrote that Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi had become “the big stand-out at the end of the Toronto Film Festival.”
A few weeks later Tsotsi was picked up by Miramax and is playing in theatres starting today (2.24). And it seems safe to say now that it’s the most likely winner of the Best Foreign Language Oscar on March 5th…unless a sufficient number of Academy members take leave of their senses and vote for Joyeux Noel.
Based on a book by South African playwright Athol Fugard and set in a funky Johannesburg shantytown, Tsotsi (pronounced “Sawt-see”) is about a merciless teenage thug (Presley Chweneyagae) who discovers a small spring of compassion in himself when he starts to care for an infant boy he discovers in the back seat of a car he’s stolen.
Tsotsi‘s basic achievement is that it sells the notion in a believably non-sappy way that sparks of kindness exist in even the worst of us.
I knew Tsotsi would probably connect with general audiences when it won the Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice award, which followed a similar win at the Edinburgh Film Festival a month or two earlier.
But I wasn’t certain until my good Toronto friend Leora Conway saw Tsotsi at a Toronto Film Festival screening and was beaming when she told me about it afterwards, and said it made her cry at the end.
On a certain level I am Warren Beatty with the green shirt, and Richard Sarafian‘s Jack Dragma represents all the HE pisshounds packed into one dumpy bod. God, this is delicious.
I never posted about the extreme trauma that I went through during the Cannes Film Festival, but each and every day I was grappling with daily, crippling attacks from malicious IPs, apparently of a Chinese or Indian origin. I think it was sparked by fanatical woke haters, but I can’t prove it.
Liquid Web techies blocked and firewalled as best they could, but the attacks were unrelenting and the site was unloadable for periods of one to two hours minimum, almost every damn day.
In the midst of this horror the LW tech consultants suggested that I incorporate Cloudflare but that I needed to load new Cloudserver-friendly nameservers. Alas, I couldn’t do this during the festival as a name-server change always shuts a site down for roughly eight to twelve hours, to allow the new name-servers to propagate worldwide. (The Web.com/Network Solution tecchies insisted that full propagation could take 24 to 48….bullshit.)
So yesterday afternoon I followed the advice of my Liquid Web tech advisors and switched out the name-servers. The site went down, of course, but I figured I’d be good by the time I woke up this morning.
It took a couple of hours to try to revert back to a generic Liquid Web name-server, and it finally fell into place. But it was awful. Cloudflare is now operational. Who knows what’ll happen when the baddies strike again?
Fake wangs have been peeking through over the last several months, and they’ve all been on the hefty side.
Walton Goggins wore a large dangling sausage in a water-skiing scene in HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones. Jason Isaacs briefly flashed about halfway through Season 3 of The White Lotus. And Joaquin Pheonix is clearly wearing one during a brief disrobing sequence in Ari Aster‘s Eddington, which I just saw in Cannes.
You know right away because Joaquin’s appendage is bigger, longer and thigh-slappier than expected.
Which is why actors are down with realistic bendy-wendies. We’re all in on the game of pretending to have large schlongs, but they enhance an actor’s masculinity all the same.
One thing you don’t want to do is wear an appendage that makes your package look smaller than expected.
Adam Scott did this in Patrick Brice‘s The Overnight (’15). His character was deeply bothered about having a small junk, and so Scott’s character was wearing a small-dick prosthetic. I don’t think it mattered if audiences knew that or not. The fakey-wakey looked like a #2 pencil.
I’d be lying if I said this bizarre scene (Scott and costar Jason Schwartzman dancing nude in front of their wives) didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. Truth be told, it’s one reason why I’ve never wanted to watch Severance. I can’t get rid of the association.
There’s no question that growers who do nude scenes risk — risk, not ensure — career damage. The nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Ken Russell‘s Women in Love didn’t exactly suggest associations with horses or elephants, but the editing saved them. Cillian Murphy did himself no favors when he allowed Danny Boyle and Anthony Dod Mantle to briefly glimpse his package in 28 Days Later.
Guys performing nude should always work up a little heft before the director says “action!” A former girlfriend who used to work for Viva, the women’s magazine that ran nude male centerfolds, once told me that photographers always wanted their male subjects to be in a state of “maximum tumescence in repose.” One way not to look like you’re “hung like a cashew” (a devastating phrase coined by James Ellroy) is to pop Viagra or Cialis. In the military drill sergeants refer to low-level soldiers as “swinging dicks” — said medications actually allow that condition to manifest.
He’s not that old (born in ’51, turns 74 on 6.13.25) but with his sagging features and most of his hair fallen out, Stellan looks as far along as Michael Caine, who was born in ’33.
At the very least he looks like a gent in his early to mid ’80s, and certainly past his sexual activity sell-by date.
Something’s going on. 73 year-olds are young enough to be fucking the prom queen. They’re not supposed to look like they’re preparing for an assisted living facility. Even Walter Brennan looked younger in The Real McCoys.
We all appear older as the wheels turn, of course, but actors aren’t supposed to look strikingly older than their years. It’s not too late for Stellan to resort to the usual remedies, including HE’s Prague hair guy.
Andrey Diwan‘s Happening (IFC Films, 2022) remains one of the most sobering, harrowing and artful abortion dramas I’ve ever seen– only Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which premiered in Cannes 18 years ago, can be fairly ranked as a higher achievement.
My question is how and why could a seemingly mediocre, clumsily written softcore flick like Emmanuelle…how could Diwan have directed it? It doesn’t calculate. Happening was too good, too bracing.
Emannuelle has been kicking around since ’23. Where did I derive the idea that it would be a sapphic variation on Just Jaeckin’s 1974 original? I guess because star Naomie Merlant played lesbian characters to persuasively in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (’19) and in TAR (’22).
In any event Emmanuelle appears to be a hetero thang. Oh, and no theatrical — straight to streaming.
…but Netflix is probably a fitting home for RichardLiinklater’s NouvelleVague, which the streamer has reportedly acquired for $4 million.
It was one thing for Cannes cinephiles who saw this reverent, affectionate tribute to the French New Wave and the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in particular…it was one thing for that crowd to go “whoopee!” But what the odds that Joe and Jane Popcorn would care, much less pay to see it theatrically?
Here’s what I wrote hours after seeing Nouvelle Vague in Cannes:
The toughest, cruelest, most unsentimental comment was posted yesterday in response to Jordan Ruimy’sstory about the Netflix deal:
Nouvelle Vague is not “embarrassing fan fiction”. It’s a clever, spirited time trip…a mild-mannered, light-hearted, generally effervescent revisiting of the Breathless legend. This aside, what Doeberman wrote is reasonably accurate.
