The new Bond just has to be British…that’s the main thing. I’m okay with Aaron Pierre, 31, filling the slot. He’s an above-average actor (admired him in Rebel Ridge) with great eyes and a buff bod.

But nobody cares about the Bond franchise, do they? The concept of a stand-alone Bond film has been all but terminated with Amazon intending to strip-mine 007 for all he’s worth.

I think the current was destroyed when (a) Daniel Craig was killed for absolutely no reason, and then (b) the toxic, deeply loathed Jennifer Salke stalled the development process interminably.

I’ll admit it — I’m emotionally invested in F1 enjoyment, regardless of however good or great or so-so it might turn out to be. I’ve read that it has issues, but I don’t want to play in that playground.

“F1 isn’t deep or layered or complex enough, dammit! Adrenaline highs are well and good, but we’re hoity-toity film critics, and and we want more. We want something that’s friskier and woolly-bullier and deeper and more emotional than a proverbial ‘dad movie’. Something that attempts the unexpected.

“Why wasn’t F1 directed by James Cameron of the ’80s and ’90s? Or by the Michael Mann of the ’90s and aughts? You know what we mean…by a director who’s more inward and contemplative and a bit less formulaic and synthetically-minded than Joseph Kosinski seems to be.

“Why couldn’t it have been directed by the Tony Richardson who made The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runner, say? Or the Karel Reisz who made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning? Why are we stuck with a hugely exciting but very standard slam-bang vroom-vroom?” — the Rotten Tomato & Metacritic pissheads (Owen Gleiberman, Kevin Maher, Whitney Seibold, Ian Sandwell, Wiulliam Bibbiani)

From Gleiberman’s review: “There have been very good auto-race dramas, like Ford v Ferrari, centered around conventional macho-rivalry plots. That F1 flirts with cliché isn’t necessarily a problem; just look at how commandingly Pitt takes a character we’ve seen before and paints him with a fresh coat of rusty glamour.

“But what a movie like this one needs is for the drama to play out within the races themselves. That’s what happened in Ford v Ferrari, and in the aerial dogfights of Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick (which were shot and edited with bedazzling precision), and in the car-race film that raised this sort of thing to the level of art — the staggeringly underrated Ferrari.

“But as F1 sprawls across the Formula One World Championship, moving through the last nine Grand Prix contests of the season, the races generate a surface buzz, but the stories they’re telling are less than razor-sharp.”

HE to Gleiberman: I wasn’t totally floored by Ford v Ferrari, but I really like Grand Prix, and you’ve just called the non-racing portions of that 1966 John Frankenheimer film “late-studio-level claptrap.” The hell you say! The non-racing portions are assured and acceptable as far as they go, and don’t hinder the basic scheme.

I’m not saying we need incontrovertible proof that IndieWire’s cinematic soothsayers are living on a separate rarified planet…I think most of us have absorbed this repeatedly over the years, particularly since Team IndieWire went wacko wokey starting in the late teens….

But if you want proof of this, read no further than their “100 Best Movies of the 2020s” rundown, which posted yesterday (6.16).

I’m not going to nitpick the entire list, and yes, I’m either agreeing or am largely comme ci comme ca with a fair amount of their selections. These guys are nutty but not completely untethered

But at the same time they’re saying with a straight face that Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (which plague-dogged us wih the insufferably sensitive weepy-ass Paul Mescal) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Drive My Red Saab (primarily an ode to Parliament cigarettes)…they’re saying these films deserve third- and ninth-place rankings. C’mon!

They’re also declaring that Jordan Peele’s Nope (#12), Jane Campion’s stifled, soul-draining (if visually handsome) The Power of the Dog (#14) , Martin Scorsese’s colossally miscalculated Killers of the Flower Moon (#29), The Daniels’ mostly infuriating Everything Everywhere All At Once (#36), David Lowery’s all-but-unwatchable The Green Knight (#45) and the Wachowski’s 100% unbearable The Matrix Resurrections (#49) deserve special consideration among the top 50 films…lunacy!

They’re also saying that these eight migraine-inducers are better than five incontestably superior releases from the same era…Janicza Bravo’s Zola (#59), Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (#62). Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Eva Victor’s Sorry Baby (#77) and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (‘88)..

I’m going to slap together HE’s own roster of the best films from the first half of the ‘20s. Give me a couple of hours.

If nothing else the below image welcomely reminds that the William Bradley Pitt who stars in F1 bears no resemblance whatsoever to the “fat Pitt” guy who appeared on a flush Manhattan sidewalk a couple of days ago….thank God!!

Here’s Paul McCartney’s son, James McCartney. The 47-year-old James is a serious musician (but man, what a generational burden) as well as a vegetarian; his mom is the late Linda McCartney. Hail fellow well met.

Dennis Hopper took this famous photo, titled “Standard Standard”, sometime in the early 1960s. He was driving south on Doheny Blvd. and making a left turn onto Santa Monica Blvd just before the Melrose Blvd. right-leaning juncture.

Look at this photo — it’s nothing. I know, that’s the point — flatness, gas station, billboards, parked cars, and those stark, scarecrow-like telephone poles and streetlamps — but there’s “nothing, really nothing to turn on”…nothing to contemplate or meditate upon except the general blandness of West Hollywood before it turned gay.

Okay, the large, bulky phantom car in the rearview mirror adds a certain intrigue. Peter Sellers’ Clare Quilty could be behind the wheel.

Posthumously cancel Van Johnson (who stood 6’2″ in his prime) for hanging with Roman Polanski? Joan Crawford is already a villainous figure. Mia Farrow has been a steadfast Polanski friend all along.

Even AI bullshit should have higher standards than this.

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According to a 6.16 Variety aricle by Abigail Lee, Dakota Johnson‘s matchmaker character in Materialists — Lucy — pays $3,200 per month for her apartment in Brooklyn Heights (technically a region between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill).

Lucy’s annual salary is $80K, which works out to $6153 monthly and $1538 weekly before taxes. Subtract her rent from her pre-tax monthly gross and she’s left with $2953 monthly or $738 weekly to cover everything else — food, utilities, MTA card, savings, clothing, entertainment (dinners, movies, clubs). God knows what her income is after taxes. But to live like a human being, Lucy would have to earn an annual salary of $125K, no?

I went last Friday to an ear doctor and discovered that my left ear canal and especially the left ear drum were totally jammed. I was told to go home and squeeze several drops of Debrox into this afflicted ear two or three times on Saturday and Sunday. Which I did.

I returned to the doctor’s office this morning and an assistant whirred and vacuumed me out with warm water, and guess what? Both ears are now totally clean and semi-purified, and now my hearing is better…really.

What I mean is that I can now hear as well as I did 20 or 25 years ago, or maybe even 30. My hearing isn’t as good as my granddaughter’s, but I feel renewed regardless.

And if I can’t quite hear what you just said in the midst of a loud clattery party, it’s your fault because you’re slurring your words and/or failing to speak with the diction of a RADA-trained Shakespearean actor. Learn to project and enunciate like Ian McKellen (whom I’ve hung with on a couple of social occasions so don’t tell me) and we’ll both be better off.

…but it’s still funny regardless. Especially the “Jesus, I really need to take a dump” sequence.

What the hell happened to Paul Walter Hauser? He used to be much, much fatter.

What Dustin Hoffman achieves in this second-act portion of Kramer vs. Kramer would never, ever happen, but it’s fun to ride with it regardless.

The best part is the contrast between Hoffman’s anxious isolation as he waits for a decision amid all the boozy pre-holiday gaiety.

The general consensus has sunk in all over, and it’s this: Trump’s military parade in Washington, D.C. felt rote, pallid and under-attended while the NO KINGS demonstrations across the nation were broadly supported and far more vigorous. I think that’s fair to say.

“I have never experienced such a joyless, lifeless, and sterile mass event in my entire life. Grim-faced soldiers, marching past half-empty grandstands, many of them obviously wanting to be somewhere else. No bands. Little bunting. Just piped-in rock music and MAGA hats. If this truly was meant to honor the 250 years of the United States Army, all we got was an endless procession of uniformed troops looking like they’d prefer to have been at Valley Forge. The president, sitting on the reviewing stand in that weird, forward-leaning attitude that he has, rarely smiling, a skunk at his own garden party.

“I think there probably was more good feeling and genuine emotion when they took Jack Kennedy out to Arlington for the last time.” — Esquire‘s Charles P. Pierce, 6.15.25.

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