In a comment thread following an 11.29.24 piece about an English-subtitled Russian Bluray of Roman Polanski‘s An Officer and a Spy (“#MeToo Suppressionists Are Powerless In This Regard“), the redoubtable Clemmy wrote, “If you financially support a child rapist, you do not care about your granddaughter’s future.”

HE response to Clemmy: “While most many intelligent people support the cinematic art of the obviously gifted and indisputably great Roman Polanski, HE does not and never has supported the notion that anyone proven guilty of sexual abuse or assault should skate. Crimes of the loins have penalties. Nobody’s disputing this.

“Then again are you telling me that Polanski hasn’t been made to suffer and submit to the proverbial lash for the last 47 [now 48] years?

“Are you telling me that Polanski’s kids, Morgane and Elvis, live in a state of perpetual fear about what their allegedly monstrous dad might do to them?

“We’re talking about two twains here, two separate boxes.

“History is flooded with accounts of great artists who didn’t behave well at certain points in their lives, or who behaved abusively or with cruelty toward this or that person. Isolated incidents, I mean.

“Enlightened art scholars have long argued and understood that at the end of the day you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

“#MeToo ideologues will never understand or accept this.”

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I won’t be arriving in town until 2:30 pm or so on Tuesday, 5.13. Not a chance of catching the 3 pm screening of Charles Chaplin’s 1925 classic (no narration, just music). I’ll have time to pick up the press pass, and not much more.

The Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost, now known worldwide as Pope Leo XIV, seems like a mild-mannered devotional…sensible, practical, political-minded…a facilitator type…perhaps a Ralph Fiennes-y type of guy. What do I actually know? He doesn’t strike me as a fire-and-brimstone type. He has a face that says “okay, I get it, we be cool.” Willing to forgive.

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Confession: I’ve never seen James Foley‘s After Dark, My Sweet (’90), which Roger Ebert insisted was “one of the purest and most uncompromising” film noirs ever, capturing above all “the lonely, exhausted lives of its characters.”

I’ve decided to finally watch this respected but all-but-forgotten film, even though I suspect I’ll probably hate it. (I’ve come to fear adaptations of Jim Thompson novels — brutality and heartlessness are his calling cards.) Why am I catching After Dark, My Sweet regardless? I feel I owe it to the memory of Foley, who died from brain cancer earlier this week. He was only 71.

There’s no question that Foley’s At Close Range, written by Nicholas Kazan, will always be regarded as his masterpiece. It taught me to think of rural Pennsylvania as a place where blue-collar bad guys thrive and ugly things happen at night. Patrick Leonard‘s haunting score + Madonna‘s iconic recording of “Live to Tell”…perfect. Chris Walken‘s demonically twitchy performance as the sociopathic Big Brad is surely his all-time finest. Walken to Sean Penn in that third-act kitchen scene: “You think you have the guts?…to kill?…me?”

Foley’s direction of David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross (’92) is also top shelf, although nothing will ever touch the original 1984 Broadway play version (which I caught on opening night with all the big-gun critics) with Joe Mantegna, Robert Prosky and the others. I’ve alwaye loved the slogan on the Glengarry film poster: “A film for everyone who works for a living.”

Everyone knows that Joe Biden‘s arrogant decision to run for re-election two and a half years ago (i.e., right after the ’22 midterm elections) pretty much ushered in Trump 2.0. He fucked us, and in my book that makes him a really bad guy.

Asked on The View about his mental decline over the second half of his term, Joe muttered and wheezed and gurgled a denial of sorts.

And then wife Jill jumped in to shore him up during the interview’s second half. All through ’23 and ’24 Joe and his Democratic gaslighting squad did what they could to spin and dodge and obfuscate. Joe actually said today that had he stayed in the ’24 race, he would have beaten Trump. This is ridiculous!

What about the books that have been written about his cognitive decline? “They are wrong,” Joe mumbled.

Jill: “The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us. If you look at things today, give me Joe Biden any time.”

Sasha Stone and I fed a premise about a pair of weathered Oscar bloggers to Gemini 2.5 Flash (released on 5.7.25), and here’s what it yielded…

Most of Chaz Palmintieri‘s A Bronx Tale (’93) is set in 1968. Back then the “door test” was a legitimate and reliable way to figure out if a prospective girlfriend was selfish or not. Remote door locks, which became common in US-made vehicles starting around ’90 or thereabouts, gradually put the door test out of commission.

I was driving a 1990 Nissan 240Z when I saw A Bronx Tale, and I distinctly recall it had no remote door lock. With some relish I subjected a couple of women I was seeing to the door test. They both passed with flying colors, or so I recall.

A new 4K restoration of Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon will screen at the grand and immaculate Debussy theatre on Friday, 5.23 — my final night at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

There’s no way this Criterion-supervised version (due to “street” via 4K Bluray on 7.8.25) will deliver any kind of noticable bump over the current Criterion manifestation. It’ll look magnificent of course, but the viewing experience, boiled down, will be the same one I saw projected at the Ziegfeld in late December of ’75.

I’ve seen Lyndon at least 10 or 12 times since, and I know every line and frame by heart. And Marisa Berenson‘s empty, blank-faced performance has sapped my spirit on each and every occasion. She was such a drag to hang with.

However, the 5.23 Cannes screening will probably be my last opportunity to see the handsome, downbeat, darkly humorous Barry in a truly first-rate venue — really big screen, perfectly projected light levels, state-of-the-art sound. So I’ll probably have a seat.

“Speaking of Flatline Elements“, posted on 5.14.23:

Stanley Kubrick was famous for encouraging lively, eccentric and even over-the-top performances. Steven Spielberg’s 1999 recollection abut a 1980 dinner with Kubrick at Childwickbury Manor, during which Kubrick explained that Jack Nicholson‘s over-the-top performance in The Shining was a kind of tribute to the acting style of James Cagney, is a case in point.

It is therefore strange if not bizarre that during the making of Barry Lyndon, Kubrick directed Marisa Berenson to give such an opaque non-performance. In each and every scene, her Lady Lyndon conveys utter vacuity…absolutely nothing behind the eyes.

Did Kubrick realize too late in the process that he’d made a mistake, that Berenson was profoundly ungifted and had next to nothing inside, and that the best course would be to emphasize (rather than try to obscure) this fact?

Berenson is the primary cause, in fact, of Barry Lyndon‘s “dead zone” problem.

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Obviously another shallow social satire by way of a gumshoe investigation…another Drive-Away Dolls, except set somewhere in Bakersfield or in the upper desert. The style feels Raising Arizona-ish. Poor Ethan Coen needs to disengage from this odd lesbian bag, and keep it that way. And a trilogy? One was enough, two is too much and three…please.

If a Cannes screening fits into my schedule, fine. Out of respect for Ethan’s history, but only that. In the old days the creative hand of Ethan Coen (along with Joel) meant something…mostly. Then again I never liked the overly broad Raising Arizona or, truth be told, The Hudsucker Proxy.

Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day, Billy Eichner, Gabby Beans (great name!), Talia Ryder.

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This is not about celebrity parents loving and supporting their queer, trans or nonbinary kids. Any parent with a heart and a soul would and should do the same.

Nor is this about the appearance of Los Angeles-based celebrities apparently rearing a much higher percentage of queer, trans or nonbinary children than typical parents statistically appear to do in Tampa, Mobile, Tenafly, Peoria or Sandusky, Ohio (the girlhood home of Sugar Kowalczyk!)

This is about the mathematical likelihood of a parent, be they a resident of Pacific Palisades or Duluth or Burlington, raising and supporting three queer, trans or nonbinary kids. A trifecta….three out of three!

Marcia Gay Harden has a trio of such kids — one non-binary, one gay, and one identifying as “fluid”. Megan Fox also has three — Noah, 12, Bodhi, 11 and Journey, 8.

Can we please cut the shit? Just for a few short seconds, and then everyone can crawl back into their little gopher holes of denial.

Many if not most of these kids are almost certainly trendsexuals…proclaiming their queerness or gender fluidity or transiness because they’ve been instructed by the entertainment industry’s woke-progressive culture that there isn’t anything less cool or more embarassing, even, than to be straight and white, or, worst of all, to be a straight white male. Because they can’t bear the stain or the congregational verdict of being terminally clueless or out-to-lunch or socially hopeless by way of gender identity (I was terrified of being labelled as schlumpy or twerpy or dweeby by my tweener or high-school peers), they opt for gayness or gender fluidity and — presto! — they’re no longer a pariah, no longer looked down upon, part of the avant garde.

This would be a fascinating topic of a 100-minute Alex Gibney documentary, or for a PBS Frontline examination or for an in-depth NPR series. But of course, Gibney, Frontline or NPR would never, ever go there. Ditto Anderson Cooper or Ross Douthat or Chris Cuomo or any other MSM journalist. If they did they would be shunned and shredded and carpet-bombed on social media. They would be putting themselves in not just social but professional jeopardy. Among the timid their names would be mud.

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