Hollywood Elsewhere

If, God forbid, Project Hail Mary elbows its way into the Oscar conversation later this year, it would represent yet another sad degradation of a once-lofty brand that has endured more than enough slings and arrows. A kin to The Martian in more ways than one, PHM is making big money….fine, whoo-hoo. Fucking leave it there.

Those entitled scumbags who assaulted the once-beautiful daughter of Bonasera, the undertaker…fine, they deserved the beatings that Clemenza’s goons surely gave them. But the Corleones were always presented as civilized hoods…nobody to mess with but also a clan that first and foremost honored family, loyalty, fraternity, hearth fires, Italian immigrant tradition, etc.

Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli is reporting that the second season of Seth Rogen‘s multi-Emmy-winning The Studio is currently lensing in Venice, Italy, and that the setting, of course, is not just the Venice Film Festival but the forthcoming 83rd edition, which will unfold between 9.2.26 and 9.12.26.

Using the Lido’s Palazzo del Cinema, which is currently adorned in full festival regalia, the satirical showbiz series is pre-creating the 83rd gathering with Madonna, Micheal Keaton, Bryan Cranston, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz and Julia Garner costarring.

I’m especially amused by the fact that Venice Film festival topper Alberto Barbera will perform a speaking cameo in the show.

Yesterday Madonna posted an Instagram video in which she and Garner lip-sync to “Like a Virgin”. Garner has been attached to star in a “long-delayed” (read: scrapped) Madonna biopic that the singer has been wanting to make since ’22 and which may now be blended into a Studio story line.

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…who played the airplane-wing gremlin in the 1983 feature version of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” with John Lithgow in the William Shatner role. It was a matter of supreme indifference even when Twilight Zone: The Movie first popped. The original gremlin was played by Nick Cravat.

Anthony Perkins as a “young American who can’t control his exploding passions”…an inside allusion within the ad department.

Only one of these nine directors ever forced a lead actor to wear a tennis-ball coif in a major feature:

What do you do, precaution-wise, if you’re approaching a major highway intersection or airport runway upon which vehicles travel at high speeds?

I can tell you what I’d do. I would first of all stop my vehicle before crossing and then — this is kind of important, not to mention a utilization of common sense — I would look both ways on the highway or runway to make sure there are no cars or big trucks or jets approaching from the right or left.

Short version: Even if there’s a green light telling you it’s okay to cross, you still make sure by looking both ways for rogue traffic.

Shorter version: I would use my effing eyeballs before crossing.

Apparently the LGA air-traffic controller screwed up by telling the fire truck he was good to cross runway #4, but the fire truck driver was a total fool.

Whatever happened to Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake? It was released by Sony Pictures Classics six or seven weeks ago — February 6, 2026 — and then more or less sank beneath the waves. Where is it? Has it vaporized into thin air? One of Cannes ‘25’s most celebrated films was blown off by the Academy, which apparently made SPC run for cover. At the very least this beautiful little film deserves to be Blurayed and streamed ASAP.

“This Film Is Going To Sink in and Spread Out“, posted on 2.21.26:

I’m just going to spit this out: Richard Brody‘s New Yorker review of Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake is more eloquent and deeply felt than the Cake review I tapped out in Cannes nine months ago.

Brody shares some of the same observations that I mentioned last year, but his review really digs in…it’s more fully considered…plus the construction is smarter, better. Here’s the whole Brody piece, and here’s my favorite portion:

“It’s no surprise that the children’s frantic quest fosters a deep friendship. The pairing is an old one—the principled book-smart girl and the rough-edged streetwise boy—but Hadi revitalizes it with meticulous observation that links their struggles to those of the country at large. The children playing Lamia and Saeed had no training as actors, yet both are fanatically precise, effortlessly expressive, and pensively deep-hearted. The girl achieves perfect comic timing when she holds a recipe in one hand and her pet rooster in the other as it pecks at the paper.

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Variety‘s Esa Keslassy to Cannes topper Thierry Fremaux: “What is the status of the Cannes Film Festival’s selection today?”

Fremaux: “It’s March, and we’re still waiting for many films. We’re seeing some great things. The excitement comes from the artists themselves. The announcement that Peter Jackson or Barbra Streisand are coming, for example, already makes you want to be on the Croisette, doesn’t it?”

A good portion of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival lineup will be revealed in Paris on April 9th. Last-minute additions always pop through between mid and late April.

I’m still hopeful and excited about catching Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Fatherland, which is apparently destined to debut on the Croisette after all; ditto Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur (a lock), Anton Corbijn‘s Switzerland, Joel Coen‘s Jack of Spades, Pedro Almodovar‘s Bitter Christmas, Asghar Farhadi‘s Parallel Tales, Radu Jude The Diary of a Chambermaid, and possibly James Gray‘s Paper Tiger.

But I’m still horribly bummed out by news that Ruben Ostlund‘s The Entertainment System is Down and Lukas Dhont‘s Coward will be no-shows.

We’re all sensing or intuiting on some level that Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day may be a vague alien programmer of some kind (certainly compared to Close Encounters and E.T.), and we all understand that Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey was never even on the table (the notoriously reclusive Nolan never unveils his films in Cannes), and that Digger, the Alejandro Inarritu-Tom Cruise collaboration, is being held for Venice.

Jordan Ruimy‘s last spitball rundown included All of a Sudden (d: Ryusuke Hamaguchi), Her Private Hell (d: Nicolas Winding Refn), Out of this World (d: Albert Serra), Butterfly Jam (d: Kantemir Balagov), Wake of Umbra (d: Carlos Reygadas)

Keslassy: “The next season of The White Lotus** will be filmed on the French Riviera, with a plot centered around the Cannes Film Festival. What discussions have you had with Mike White and HBO regarding this?”

Fremaux: “I cannot answer that. You’ll have to ask the production team, who are currently working on it.

Keslassy: “How many films have you already selected for the competition [thus far]?”

Fremaux: “About half.”

Keslassy: “And how many do you have left to watch?”

Fremaux: “As I speak, there are 400 in the screening room. I’m heading back!”

Fremaux: “I’m the first to wonder if Cannes is the right place for a particular film to have its world premiere on the Croisette. If I don’t think so, I’m not going to sacrifice a film’s life for a red carpet.”

Ruimy on Fremaux-Keslassy: “Nothing we didn’t already know. The Inarritu-Cruise is going to Venice. Nolan has never premiered a film at Cannes. Ostlund is nowhere near done editing and will go to Cannes next year.”

HE reply: “The Ostlund is a chamber piece set on an airborne 747, right? Pure dialogue, pure interiors, pure eccentric social conflict. Saying a film is ‘not ready’ can sometimes be a cover term that indicates it’s not currently working and — who knows? — that Ostlund needs to fiddle around a bit more.”

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If, God forbid, a semblance of today’s manosphere and more particularly a “looksmaxing” theology had been culturally influential when I was 15, I might have become a follower, or at least a secret one.

For I was mostly a miserable mopehead and an odd, socially insecure duck, seemingly loathed by girls in their mid teens (they certainly had enough agency back then to repeatedly tell me to buzz off…one actually called me “buster” when I tried to launch a convo at the Mindowaskin swim club) and facing all manner of taunts and teasing from my so-called male friends.

I might well have admired Braden Peters (aka “Clavicular”) for I was also convinced I was homely and unworthy of any socially honorable distinction, on top of which I was mostly earning shitty grades.

I eventually grew out of that misery, but long is the way and hard that, out of hell, leads up to light.

The shaking and rattling of mailboxes and railroad signal poles is ridiculous…makes no sense at all…but the first 100 seconds are perfect. The set-up comes when the first pair of headlights comes along, Richard Dreyfuss signals him and the guy pulls up and yells “you’re in the middle of the road, jackass!” And then the payoff: A second “car” appears behind Dreyfuss’s truck, he signals it to go around and….

If only the rest of Close Encounters was this clever, this subtle.

The lyric goes “and all the joy within you dies”…not “hope.”

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The internet’s psychotic thrashing of Timothee Chalamet in the wake of his losing the Best Actor Oscar…the binge lasted five days and is finally done. (I think.) But one last article in this vein appeared yesterday in the right-leaning New York Sun — not another witch-burning piece but a calm and rational assessment of why it happened.

The author, Tom Teodorczuk, interviewed yours truly and posted a two-paragraph quote. My agreeing to discuss the Chalamet thing with a Sun staffer doesn’t mean I’m a rightie. I remain a sensible centrist.

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Jordan Ruimy is hearing (but doesn’t definitely know) that the following films won’t play Cannes ’26 — Ruben Östlund‘s The Entertainment System Is Down, James Gray‘s Paper Tiger, Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind, Lukas Dhont‘s Coward, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Fatherland (previously titled 1949), and Mike Leigh‘s untitled whatever.