Hollywood Elsewhere

No, seriously….Aaron Couch’s 1.30.26 THR story sounds all too familiar, unfortunately.

The ADD fast-forward trend has been increasing over the last 12 to 15 years, and certainly over the last ten.

That said, I could probably come up with a fairly long list of acclaimed films that I’ve also had trouble sitting through, or have even dozed through portions of. Unlike the vast majority of snooty, know-it-all film crickets and essayists, I’m just being honest. This is mostly a failure on my part, of course, but in the case of, say, Mascha Schilinski‘s Sound of Falling or Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee…

I’m sorry but this is mildly effective as far as it goes:

@bryanjacoby This is what it would be like if the MSM of the United States existed in the Star Wars universe. #news #meme #starwars #unitedstates ♬ original sound – Bryan Jacoby

We all understand what Ethan Hawke is talking about here, obviously, but my first reaction, frankly, was that he could be talking about the climate of woke terror that began to permeate the Hollywood-journo realm in ’18.

The Robespierres finally began to weaken and dissipate in mid ’24, thank God, but they’re still with us to a certain extent.

Hawke’s 2026 words could be my own seven or eight years ago: “I never felt scared about what I was gonna say until ’18 or thereabouts. In which you feel, like, ‘oh, I have to be careful.’ There’s a fear in the air that I’ve never felt before. And it’s not America.”

Brett Ratner‘s Melania (Amazon MGM, 2.2.24) is about as empty and unrevealing and bland as a well-polished, kiss-ass documentary could possibly be.

It’s a cover-up thing — pure gloss and lacquer, no vulnerability or emotional honesty except for two moments…no sharing, no letting down the proverbial hair…gleaming surfaces, cliche-ridden narration, stiletto heels and fake eyelashes that never come off.

And I’m sorry but it is a little bit like Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest (A24, 2.2.24).

Glazer’s WWII film conveys the denial mindset of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig and their kids…sitting pretty in a spacious home next to the camp, separated by a 12-foot wall…a sizable kitchen, a horse stable, a nice garden, a nearby lake…a privileged, well–ordered life while Hoss manages the industrial–scale murder of hundreds of thousands.

Melania is also about denial and insulation. (Hell, I felt detached myself.) It’s basically a shallow and surface-y infomercial about a brief chapter in the life of Melania Trump — her last 20 days of being a semi-private citizen before the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. President on 1.20.25.

Separated from the real world by a thick membrane of limitless wealth, security guys in black suits, an abundant wardrobe, fawning assistants, tank-sized SUVs…you get the idea.

Buy your ticket and watch the extremely well-tended, exquisitely dressed Melania living a life of flush banality…maximum privelege and insulation while hubby makes plans for the persecution of wokeys, the rousting of illegal immigrants, the restoration of male-female simplicity, the implementation of authoritarian rule, the punishing of his political enemies by hook or crook, the weakening of the U.S. economy through tariffs and the general undermining of democracy.

Melania touches bottom when she recalls the death of her mom (Amalija Knavs) during an evening visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It also briefly connects when she sings along to Michael Jackson‘s “Billie Jean”. But that’s all there is.

At the very end, an exhausted Melania finally takes her stiletto heels off. Vulnerability at last!

One anecdotal allegation stands out. The second-hand allegation, I mean, about a 14 year-old girl having allegedly “bitten” a 40something Donald Trump “while performing oral sex.” She was then allegedly “hit in the face” after laughing about the biting.

There are so many uncorraborated, unverified stories. And there are many more. Most of them creepy as hell. Demonic.

N.Y. Times, posted on 1.30.26:

Ten months ago I mentioned that the four actors who will soon be playing the Fab Four in Sam Mendes’ quartet of Beatle flicks (due in early ‘28) are, being in their early 30s, simply too old to inhabit the original fellows.

The Beatles were in their early 20s when things ignited, and their late 20s when they broke up.

You can film-flam and tapdance all you want, but unless the four films are set during the ‘69 and ‘70 downturn period, when the lads were a bit older and three of them had beards, it’ll be simply, biologically impossible for Paul Mescal, Harris Dickinson, Barry Koehgan and Joseph Quinn to become Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, respectively.

My concern was slightly lessened yesterday when I glanced at the four officially released photos. “Yes, all right, maybe,” I told myself. “Mendes is indeed focusing on their closing Get Back / Abbey Road chapter.”

But wait…wait!…not as far as that photo of Mescal’s Macca is concerned. It has him wearing a standard 1964 soup-bowl cut and one of those high-collared Carnaby Street shirts that they all wore in the late ‘63 / early ‘64 break-out period. When McCartney (dob: 6.18.42) was 22. Mescal looks older than his years right now..,he’s 30 but looks 36 or 37.

The last 25 years of moviegoing…okay, the last 15 or so…have taught me that I’m part of a shrinking fraternity…a diminishing HE collective that, outside of film festival fare, is always looking for but rarely getting a semblance of human realism in movies…stories and characters that add up to some kind of understandable motivational reality…even (or should I say particularly?) in comedies…films with stories and characters that present at least a vague semblance of the behavior that we’ve all come to understand from real-life humanoids.

Sam Raimi‘s Send Help, which I twitched and spasm’ed through last night, is aggressively anti-realist. Hell, the script (co-written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift) pisses upon the HE fraternity.

The story, if you want to call it that, is a kind of extremist, wink-wink, feminist farce by way of an old-time formula that first launched way back with The African Queen (’51) — an antagonistic man and woman, both willful and stubborn, are forced to survive on a tropical island or in some remote locale after being shipwrecked or plane-wrecked or war-wrecked, and then gradually warm to each other.

Lina Wertmuller‘s Swept Away (’74) comes to mind, only that time it was a primitive working-class guy (Giancarlo Giannini) who took command, only to end up with his heart broken. Ditto Ivan Reitman‘s Six Days, Seven Nights (’98) and, most recently, Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness (’22).

Send Help is a Survivor thing with a turning of the the tables that we’re not supposed to see coming. But if you know Raimi, particularly his disregard for believable behavior and his generally perverse horror instincts, you know Send Help is going to go all wackazoid and nonsensical by the halfway mark.

It’s basically a revenge-horror flick about bringing pain and suffering to the proverbial bad guys (i.e., typically arrogant and ultra-privleged Millennial and Zoomer snots), and trust me when I tell you that watching it is like lying on salty beach sand while Raimi, Shannon and Swift lean over and vomit in our faces.

Alternate analogy: It’s also like Raimi, Shannon and Swift sawing the tops of their heads off, taking their brains out of their heads and mashing them together into a big mushy wad and flinging the pink brain matter upon a stone wall…splat!…gaaaahhh!

It starts out as a crudely exaggerated portrait of a meek 40something mouseburger named Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) who despises her haughty, to-the-manor-born boss, Bradley Preston (the 34 year-old Dylan O’Brien), primarily for having passed her over, promotion-wise.

But anyone who looks and behaves like Liddle would almost certainly suffer the same fate in any slick office environment.

Does it make any sense at all that a woman working in a chilly corporate realm wouldn’t make an effort to keep herself ultra-tidy and cosmopolitan and well-groomed as possible, as well as behave in a politically advantageous way with her co-workers? No, it doesn’t, but McAdams ignores these basic rules anyway and is shocked — shocked! — when she suffers politically for her Mrs. Gooch appearance and for being a private weekend drunk and eating smelly tunafish asandwiches at her desk, etc.

Linda and Bradley are, of course, the only survivors of a Pacific Ocean plane crash. (The CG is fairly awful, by the way.) Once they arrive on the verdant island, Linda not only enjoys the upper hand as far as basic survival skills are concerned, but becomes a much more physically beautiful person. She blooms into a kind of nature goddess, and this, unquestionably, is the most enjoyable section of the film. I actually started to feel hopeful. Go, Linda!

But then, Raimi being Raimi, Send Help goes stark raving mad around the 45-minute mark, certainly by the end of the first hour. And then McAdams breaks the fourth wall at the very end, looking straight into the camera lens as she delivers a winking message to the millions of Linda Liddles out there, and it’s like “WHAT?”

Written a few years back: Last night I watched a high-def stream of Sam Raimi‘s A Simple Plan (’98), which still seems like his finest film ever — the best written (by Scott Smith), the best acted (particularly by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda), the most thrillingly plotted, and certainly the most morally complex.

I hadn’t seen it for 15 or 16 years. It holds up and then some. A filthy lucre film on the level of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fargo, Macbeth (particularly when you think of Fonda’s Lady Macbeth-like wife), Of Mice and Men, etc. But it got me to wondering why Raimi never again came close to making anything like it.

For The Love Of The Game followed A Simple Plan, and then The Gift. And then, for the last couple of decades, web-casting and fantasy — Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Drag Me to Hell and Oz the Great and Powerful. Raimi mades his bones in cult horror (Evil Dead flicks, Darkman, Army of Darkness), and then seemed to step into the world-class, award-calibre league with A Simple Plan, and then…you tell me.