2026’s First Major Must-See

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Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake is finally about to open theatrically in the U.S (2.6.26)…finally! Just under three weeks from now. Sony Picture Classics is banking on Cake being honored on Thursday, 1.22, as one of the five choice nominees for the Best Int’l Feature Oscar.

Cake is an upscale crowd-pleaser in the finest, richest, most culturally authentic sense of the term…my idea of an instant classic and all but guaranteed to be nominated, etc.

I tend to be impatient with movies about young kids but this handmade Iraqi film (the first from that formerly turbulent, war-torn country to be shown in Cannes) is different…it has an impoverished but compassionate Bicycle Thief atmosphere with just a tiny little touch of The Red Balloon and maybe a slight spritzing of Hector Babenco‘s Pixote. You can tell almost immediately that it’s a grade-A, pick-of-the-litter pearl.

The President’s Cake world-premiered on 5.16.25 under Directors’ Fortnight at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It won both the section’s Audience Award plus the Caméra d’Or. It was thereafter selected as the Iraqi entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, and made the December shortlist.

Partially set in the wetland marshes of southern Iraq (which for the 37th time is not pronounced EYE-rack but Uhraq) but mostly in a big city (not precisely identified as Bagdad but shot there) and all of it occuring just before the 2003 U.S. invasion.

It’s basically about a nine-year-old girl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), who lives in a floating straw hut upon the Mesopotamian marshes with grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).

The plot comes from Hadi’s childhood memory of a school event in which one member of each class is chosen to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein‘s birthday (4.28). Lamia is selected to be her class’s cake-baker. She and Bibi are dirt poor and can barely afford, much less find, the chief ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar) but failing to deliver or, worse, refusing this honor is out of the question.

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If Hunter S. Thompson Was Still With Us At Age 88

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…would he be a grumpy-ass liberal, a fanatical progressive leftie, a Trumpie (HST was heavily into firearms, of course) or, like me, a sensible centrist?

Well, he certainly wouldn’t have any truck with the wokeys…I can tell you that. He would despise them with every fibre of his being. Plus I somehow can’t imagine Dr. Gonzo approving of Trump…can’t go there. Maybe he’d find Trump’s perverse egoism amusing on some twisted level.

I don’t know who or what HST would be according to the bizarre social-political terms of 2026.

Why am I mentioning Thompson, who apparently committed suicide just under 20 years ago (2.20.05)? Because of a 12.18.26 N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine piece by Tim Arango, titled “Did Hunter S. Thompson Really Kill himself?”

I read it early this morning and dashed off some reactions to the guy who sent me the link:

“Did you read this thing? It’s not just thin and coy and teasing but…what’s the term?….infuriating. The notion is that somehow Hunter didn’t shoot himself all on his lonesome. Arango dances and tiptoes around this possibility, but that’s all. He certainly doesn’t plant his feet and just say it, whatever it is. He doesn’t even offer possible scenarios.

“Plus there’s not a single mention of the fact that the Owl Farm, the Aspen-adjacent property where Thompson lived for decades, is located in Woody Creek and is quite close to the famed Woody Creek tavern, which I visited in the mid ‘90s. Yes, there are ample mentions of Aspen, which has great slopes and is top-heavy with billionaires but so what?

On top of which Arango’s writing is so compressed and turgid and pretzeled it drives you nuts.

What is the exact evidence or even the loose-talk suppositions that indicate “something more than suicide” or “assisted suicide” may have occurred? Arango doesn’t say diddly squat.

It is faintly hinted that either Anita Thompson, Hunter’s widow, or his son Juan might not be letting on about something or other

Last year Anita, now 53, passed along some presumably compelling evidence to Michael Buglione, the sheriff of Pitkin County, and in so doing triggered a three-month-old, still-unfolding investigation by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. The fact-digging has been simmering since last September.

But wait…whoa…two thirds through the piece Arango parenthetically mentions that Anita declined to speak with him for the article. Well, why? Anita wants some deep, dark secret to be revealed by going to the authorities, clearly, but she ducks the probing eye of the N.Y. Times? Arango doesn’t even speculate about her motive[s] in blowing him off.

Articles like this make me want to take a swing at someone. Has Arango ever heard of plain declarative sentences? Or, you know, basic instructional story construction?

Blue Sky Bubblethink

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AI Sez: “The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) consistently ranks as a top podcast globally, often #1 on Spotify and recently hitting #1 on Apple Podcasts in 2025, averaging around 11 million listeners per episode.”

HE to Fellow Gatecrashers

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With the 2025/26 Oscar nominations due to be announced on Thursday morning, there’s a last-minute Gatecrashers effort to rapidly post our own preferences. And yet there’s a certain lethargy in the air…the OBAA effect, I mean.

Reply from GATECRASHER #1:

Note: I meant to write pit of the stomach.

Scratching My Head Over “60 Minutes” CECOT Segment

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The 60 Minutes CECOT** segment that was spiked by Bari Weiss late last month finally aired this evening. I watched it — solid, classic, grade-A reporting. I also watched the version that Canada’s Global Network streamed last month. I’m presuming there were slight differences between the version that aired this evening vs. the GN version. Whatever the differences are or were, I didn’t spot them. Maybe I need to watch again.

** CECOT = El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, stylized as CECOT) is a maximum security prison in Tecoluca. Built in late 2022 amid a large-scale gang crackdown in the country, CECOT opened in late January 2023.

The Fix Is In For “One Battle After Another”

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Adam Carolla, four days ago, 6:46 mark: “You know, I mean, like One Thing….One Bad Thing After Another? It’s a crappy film. It’s well shot, DiCaprio’s good and the soundtrack’s good, but [the film] is not good. It’s a fever dream for a leftist. It’s comical, it’s insane, and Sean Penn‘s character is comically nuts and the whole thing’s a mess.

“But it’s gonna win [Oscars] because it’s got proud women of color standing up, blah blah blah white guys, you know…it’s a joke. It’s not a well-written movie but it’s shot well, and One Battle After Another is going to win everything because it’s got the right theme, and when you do that” — reward films with Oscars for brandishing the right kind of woke bonafides — “you hurt your franchise.

“When you start handing out Best Picture Oscars to films like Moonlight and [they’re] semi-crappy movies that nobody wants to see…when [older] films that typically won the Best Picture Oscar..an On the Waterfront or Gone With The Wind or The Wizard of Oz, they have a life beyond that moment, beyond that date when they won. Moonlight won Best Picture, but nobody’s ever said “what are you doing tonight?” and the other guy says “oh, I was going to watch Moonlight.” Like, it doesn’t exist. So the [elite Academy members] kind of fucked up their own franchise.”

I’d Rather Be in Key West, or Better Yet Belize

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Right now and for the foreseeable future (i.e., until April), Fairfield County will be a miserable place in which to live. The frigid air, the constant slush and snow, damn slippery sidewalks and driveways. The proverbial indoor feeling of snug warmth and protected calm is nice but the outdoor world is beastly.

Where Is “Sorry, Baby” Hiding? It’s A “Black Comedy”?

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After catching Eva Victor‘s Sorry, Baby at a Director’s Fortnight screening on 5.22.25, I enthused about it and then some. The review was titled “Another Pleasant, Highly Admirable Surprise“.

At the recent 2026 Golden Globes ceremony Julia Roberts called Victor “my hero” and begged audiences to see it.

Again: Apart from an unfortunate, vaguely annoying decision to tell yet another story about a brutish toxic male raping a woman — certainly the reigning or default narrative of present-day feminist cinema — Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby (A24, 6.27) is really quite good.

In terms of being lulled and led along into a lesbian way of thinking to the point of feeling vaguely charmed and kind of fascinated, Sorry, Baby operates in a manner that’s more or less equivalent to Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, and that, for me, is quite an achievement.

I caught this Quinzaine headliner around 8:20 pm.

Not only are Victor’s writing and direction top-tier, but her performance as lead protagonist Agnes, a brilliant literature professor who seems to be mostly gay or certainly bi (i.e., not averse to hetero coupling when candidates like the soft and vaguely squishy Lucas Hedges come along) is about as captivating as such a performance could be.

Victor’s dialogue leaks out in the manner of someone exceptionally bright and introspective and given to thinking out loud — confessional and candid in a cautious and hesitant way, but not overly so. It feels straight and true at every turn.

Sorry, Baby is infused with guarded but self-accepting attitudes that are basically lezzy, for sure, but it’s a quietly realistic small-town social drama that wins you over early on, and then keeps earning more and more points.

I knew it had won raves after debuting at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, but I went into tonight’s screening with doubts and trepidations. They evaporated fairly quickly.

It also delivers excellent supporting perfs from Naomi Ackie (Agnes’s totally gay, male-loathing lover during the first half), John Carroll Lynch, Kelly McCormack, Louis Cancelmi (a Scorsese guy playing the evil animal rapist), Hettienne Park as a whipsmart civil servant in a jury-selection scene, etc.

Produced by Adele Romanski and Barry Jenkins, this is definitely a goodie.

AI sez: Sorry, Baby has limited screenings in NYC, with scheduled times at Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park for midnight on Friday and Saturday nights. It was also listed for screenings at the Roxy Cinema New York. Other listings indicate it is not currently playing at many AMC locations.

AWFUL, A Hate Term For Progressive White Karens, Has Allegedly Caught On

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Before this morning, my first mass-culture association with the word “awful” was a kind of milkshake called the AWFUL AWFUL, which originated in the mid-20th Century. It was primarily promoted by the Rhode island-based Newport Creamery (and later adopted by Friendly’s).

But that’s out the window now (too unhealthy) and the new AWFUL, according to the N.Y Times‘ Clyde McGrady, is a rightwing hate term that refers to ardent, combative, ultra-progressive leftie Karens.

AWFUL is an acronym for Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. Except the late Renee Good, apparently an AWFUL figurehead, wasn’t affluent — just a struggling, Honda-owning middle-class woman with a kid and a wife.

But without agreeing with the idea behind the term (hate grenades aren’t good for anyone), I get what it’s about. AWFULs are shrieking elitist wokeys, the righties are saying. They aren’t just pushing back in force against the Minnesota ICE bullies (which I agree with and totally support), but are also strongly in favor of AOC or Kamala Harris running for the White House in ’28.

HE is for any sensible centrist liberal of any gender who can beat JD Vance, but an AOC/Kamala candidacy will never, ever happen. It would be a flat-out calamity if either of them got nominated, AOC in particular. Both women seem like the epitome of AWFUL, and that would totally kill the Democratic cause. The Dems need to run a sensible, decent, democracy-loving, non-authoritarian normie like Gavin Newsom…please.

Not So Fast, Dan Leo!

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During a recent Paul Schrader-led discussion of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (‘42), Facebook commenter Dan Leo wondered why Welles didn’t play George Amberson Minafer instead of the under-talented, charisma-challenged Tim Holt.

HE response: Welles as young George Minafer? Too fat for that.

Even at age 26, Welles, who had seemed slender** and fresh-faced and unmistakably young man-ish in 1941’s Citizen Kane, which began filming in June 1940 when he had just turned 25…Welles had noticably gained weight during the filming of Ambersons (10.28.41 to 1.22.42).  

Look at the on-set Amberson photos…the proof is clearly in the pudding. At a time when most young men are delighted to be in their trim, athletic, well-toned, glow-of-youth prime, the mustachioed Welles was already on his way to Lardbucket Land.

Every morning Welles probably looked into his bathroom mirror and muttered “not fat enough…I want to look seriously fleshy and large-breasted…I want be bigger boobed than Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth!…I want to be Baby Huey or maybe even Sidney Greenstreet or, you know, some kind of Wisconsin sumo wrestler…I want to be Oliver Hardy’s slightly less girthy kid brother now but in 15 years, upon reaching my early 40s, I want to look like a dessicated, beard-stubbled, Mexican border-town detective…I could call him Hank Quinlan.”  

Flush with success and with easy access to anything he felt like stuffing or shoving or cramming into his mouth, Welles, ruled by ravenous appetites, ate like Henry VIII (huge sizzling steaks, a dozen fried eggs for breakfast, gallons of ice cream with chocolate syrup, mashed potatoes covered in melted butter and steaming hot gravy, crème brulee, tapioca pudding, more steaks). 

** Welles reportedly had to wear a corset for some Kane scenes (i.e., the early New York Inquirer portions) , as his slovenly marshmallow physique made him look besotted and almost middle-aged.