I haven’t seen Laura Piani‘s Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, but leaving aside this Sony Pictures Classics release, we’re obviously looking at a dreary weekend.

The only respectable diversion, for some, is Wes Anderson‘s The Phoenician Scheme, which I saw a couple of weekends ago in Cannes. And yet it only has a 77% RT rating, which by high-school grading standards is equivalent to a C-minus. Has anyone seen it?

I felt immediately mystified hy the casting of Mia Threapleton, the 25 year-old daughter of the once-married Kate Winslet and painter-filmmaker Jim Threapleton, in the lead female role. She delivers the same kind of standard deadpan performance that Wes always gets from his actors. The odd thing is Threapleton’s appearance. She’s not only short and chubbyish, but her face is wider than it is tall, and I’m sorry but she simply doesn’t stir the pot. I just couldn’t understand why she was cast.

Otherwise The Phoenician Scheme is another Wes comfort zone movie. Too much so.

Posted on 5.19.25: It’s not important or even noteworthy, trust me, to explain the plotline of Wes Anderson‘s exactingly composed The Pheonician Scheme. Because it’s just (stop me if you’ve heard this before) another serving of immaculate style mixed with ironic, bone-dry humor — another signature tableau exercise in WesWorld stuff — wit, whimsy, staccato dialogue, a darkly humorous attitude, faintly detectable emotional peek-outs. Plus the usual symmetrical framings, immaculate and super-specific production design and the Anderson troupe reciting their lines just so.

I’ve written repeatedly over the last couple of decades that Wes needs to recover or re-charge that old Bottle Rocket / Rushmore spirit and somehow climb out of that fastidiously maintained Andersonville aesthetic and, you know, open himself up to more of the good old rough and tumble. Maybe there’s no remedy. Maybe we’re all just stuck in our grooves and that’s that. What’s that Jean Anouilh line from Becket? “I’m afraid we can only do, absurdly, what it has been given to us to do. Right to the end.”

Otherwise you should live your life, manage your affairs and achieve your goals cold sober. There’s really no other way.

I kinda like floating around on Ketamine from time to time but I wouldn’t touch Adderall or any other speed-like substances with a ten-foot pole.

Elon Musk to himself: “I can do what I want as long as I stay lucid and keep it together and, you know, maintain a respectable front.”

I saw A Complete Unknown three times in theatres last December, and then once more on my phone (not recommended).

The truth is that between Timothee Chalamet’s frequently mumbled dialogue, today’s imperfect on-set dialogue recording tech and the decent but less-than-immaculate sound systems in mainstream theatres today, I never heard each and every line. I heard most of the screenplay, but missed maybe 25% or 30%.

Last night I watched it on Bluray with subtitles, and what a difference! Every previously slurred, half-articulated line was revealed and clarified, and it really bumped up the enjoyment factor. It’s almost like watching an entirely different film. Not to mention the fact that it looks better on Bluray than it did at those various AMCs (two in Manhattan, one in Westport).

I’d still like to know which scene is the fictitious one…the scene that Bob Dylan cooked up…the one that director James Mangold expressed concern about including because it never happened in actuality, in response to which Dylan said “what do you care?…if the scene works, it works.”

You may see a casual shot of Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds and David Wayne on the set of The Tender Trap (‘55). I see that also, of course, but my eyes go right to Sinatra’s elevator heels, which may or may not have added two and 1/2 to three inches. Sinatra stood between 5’7” and 5’8” just out of the shower. Wayne was also 5’7”; Reynolds stood 5’2”.

Read more

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.”

Read more

[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.

And never forget Gladys George‘s wordless emoting in that reading-the-citation-letter scene in The Best Years of Our Lives.

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.

“Spark of Goodness”, posted on 2.27.06:

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.

Read more

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.

But at 6 am, it wasn’t good. Two respected tracker sites (www.dnschecker.org and https://www.whatsmydns.net/#NS/www.hollywood-elsewhere.com) said it hadn’t really propagated at all. The Cloudflare-friendly nameservers weren’t kicking in….disaster. A bullshit suggestion as it turned out.

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?