But there’s something incongruent about the term “Oscar season expert” and Chris Rosen‘s blue-plaid flannel shirt.
Flannel shirts are downmarket “normcore.” Back in the 20th Century they were favored by lesbians. Today their wearers are basically saying “I don’t care how much of a rural Maine backwater hayseed type I resemble or how indifferent or unconcerned wearing one of these shirts makes me seem.”
You just can’t sell the idea of being on top of the antsy, prickly, terminally diseased, ever-shfting world of Oscar-odds calibrating while wearing a blue-plaid flannel shirt. I haven’t done an on-camera thing for several months, granted, but if I did one I wouldn’t consider wearing anything other than small-collared Kooples shirts or black Zara T-shirts, possibly shielded by a black leather motorcycle jacket.
Richard Rushfield‘s threads are okay; ditto Katey Rich‘s unpretentious, open-collared Iowa college professor shirt.
Apparel-choices aside, this is a reasonably “engaging” discussion. I didn’t find it boring, exactly, but I began to lose patience early on. Why don’t they just blurt stuff out? You know what I mean. Have these guys ever heard the terms “woke-friendly” or “virtue-signalling” or “culturally isolated”? Or, you know, “completely indifferent to the likes and dislikes of Joe and Jane Popcorn”? Academy voters live on their own little planet. Just effing say that.
It was clearly no blockbuster, but as I left the Venice screening I was figuring that TheStranger would attract attentive smarthouse auds when it opened, I presumed, sometime in the winter or early spring of ‘26.
Music Box Films will open it super-limited on 4.3.26. (I think.) But the Music Box website doesn’t even mention it. The early April opening is some kind of well-guarded secret. The apparent plan or idea is to keep everyone in the dark. Smother the Ozon baby in the crib.
This is an identity-propelled insult to the concept of “Best Actor” by any definition, in any context.
If there was going to be an overturn-the-apple-cart winner in this category, it should have been Ethan Hawke in BlueMoon. But no — SAG members gave the big prize to a guy who played the dual role of Smoke and Stack in a 1930s Delta blues vampire exploitation film…but of course!
On top of which Sinners has won SAG’s Best Ensemble award…what a revoltin’ development. This is total bullshit…identity over merit. Sinners might actually win the Best Picture Oscar. At least the lack of certainty makes for a palpable suspense element.
PackRecords partners Jett Wells (center) and SkyMcElroy (r.) celebrating the visibility factor, corner of Seventh Ave. and 34th Street. The flame-haired Pack employee at left is named Rachael.
Before today I hadn’t mentally revisited Jack Nicholson‘s brief bit in Ken Russell‘s Tommy (’75) for decades. I hadn’t even thought of it, much less sat down and re-watched.
In a 1974 interview with Sight and Sound‘s John Russell, Nicholson said he agreed to play Dr A. Quackson** because “Russell’s films intrigue me…some I like very much, some I don’t like at all, and I want to find out what makes them tick.”
** N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canbydescribed the character as “a vacuous Harley Street medical specialist.”
Lewis excerpt from 1995 Sundance Film Festival interview: “I sat down with Jerry Lewis to talk about Funny Bones. The interview happened at the Stein-Erickson. Right away you could feel the testy fear-factor vibe, but I enjoy that as it sharpens your game. Several people (publicists, etc.) were sitting and standing around us in a semi-circle. It was almost like we were performing.
“All through our relatively brief chat I was thinking ‘shit…Lewis is in a testy mood and it might get testier. But he won’t respect me if I ask kiss-ass questions so fuck it…I’m just going to look him in the eye and talk straight from the shoulder.’
“A year or two earlier I’d read and enjoyed Nick Tosches‘ Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, so I asked Lewis if he’d read it. He had, he said, and I knew right away I’d stepped into it. The book was hurtful to a friend, he said, and that was the end of it. ‘Ask me something else,’ he said, steam literally hissing out of his head like a radiator, ‘before I get pissed.’ Before?
“But I liked Lewis overall. He’s tough, shrewd, funny, been around, done it all, seen it all.”
“What I’d really like to see is a story of 90-year-old Jerry Langford, the late-night talk show star who was kidnapped by Rupert Pupkin back in the early ’80s. Jerry is semi-retired but still plugging away, involved in real estate and other ventures, still playing golf, still on the cryptic and blunt side, still disdainful when the occasion requires and is no one’s idea of a gentle or lovable fellow.
“And yet he’s largely unbent and, for an old guy, still full of beans. And he’s nice with kids and dogs.
“Does ‘mean’ Mr. Langford feel badly about still being flinty and not all that considerate with each and every person he deals with? Okay, maybe, but he’s ecstatic about the fact that he’s alive and crackling and living a pretty good life for a guy born in 1926. He’s on Twitter and Facebook and owns over 400 Blurays. And he has a 79 year-old girlfriend that he “puts it to” every so often (i.e., extra-strength Cialis), and he rides a bicycle and walks two or three miles every day and lifts weights.
“Who needs love, kindness and forgiveness when you’ve got your health? Langford pushes on!”
Corrin is not quite what she seems. She came out as queer in ‘21, but then dated Rami Malek for two years and then hooked up last year with Zachary Hart. Ambivalent or undecided?
Okay, it’s me, not Corrin. I just don’t like her. Plus she’s just about 30 and looks it. Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett is about 20.
Stanley Donen’s Charade (‘63) is lightly charming but often silly and cloying and full of inelegant distractions. It’s engaging but not top-tier. I’ve seen it exactly once, and I felt vaguely bored throughout..
Charade was made only four years after North by Northwest, and yet Cary Grant appears to be late 50ish at best, or at least ten years older than Roger Thornhill appeared to be in Hitchcock’s film (i.e., 47 or 48).
Too old, in short, to play Audrey Hepburn’s would-be boyfriend, although Grant would have been perfect, Hepburn-wise, if he’d played Humphrey Bogart’s role in 1954’s Sabrina. Billy Wilder offered him this, but Grant declined — mistake.
Manhattan is glorious after a big snowfall. I’ve done it a few times. So much energy and camaraderie to be shared. If you’re dressed for it, walking around the West Village is heaven. Wonderland vibes.
After months of HE irritation and complaining due to an apparent commitment on the part of Greenwich Entertainment to under-promote if not suppress Michel Franco‘s Dreams and only days before the film’s limited 2.27 opening, I’ve finally seen this 98-minute film and have come away…well, certainly not annoyed or negative-minded, as some critics have been.
It’s a smart, bracing, well-honed thing by a top-tier auteur known for cold films (I think Franco is one of the toughest, sharpest directors working today). And yet the last 20 minutes left me a bit puzzled.
Dreams is about a passionate sexual affair between Jennifer (the 40ish Jessica Chastain), a privileged, headstrong, San Francisco-based rich woman who runs her family’s arts foundation, which includes a sponsorship of a prestigious ballet school in Mexico City. During her visits there she’s been discreetly “doing” a gifted ballet dancer named Fernando (the 30something Isaac Hernandez), but has been keeping this hot-and-heavy affair from her brother Jake (Rupert Friend) and, more importantly, from her Daddy Warbucks father (the dreary, dull-faced Marshall Bell), who of course covers all the bills.
The story is activated when Fernando decides to expand the cultural perimeters of this relationship by entering the U.S. illegally and then making his way north to San Francisco and into Jennifer’s Russian Hill condo and soon after her bed.
Jennifer, seemingly delighted with all of the dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick, helps Fernando land an audition with a top-tier SF ballet school, which he aces. And yet Jennifer, we gradually come to learn, is unsettled by Fernando having invaded her home turf. She tries, as noted, to keep their relationship on the down-low, but he smells this and shows resentment, reacts angrily.
Jennifer won’t say this in so many words, but as much as she loves Fernando she wants him back in Mexico City, tucked safely away. She wants the lid kept on.
Franco makes it clear that while Jennifer feigns the brisk and aloof attitude of a cosmopolitan woman of means, she knows where her bread is buttered and therefore does what daddy suggests when he tells her (although not in so many words) to cool it with the beaner. (HE to woke pearl-clutchers: By using the “b” word I’m pretending to think and speak like her flinty father and brother do deep down.)
Dad basically says (a) “you can’t brazenly fuck your Mexican boytoy with all our San Francisco friends looking on”, (b) “fucking this guy is bad for appearances, out of bounds” and (c) “do what you want during your Mexico City trips but not here.”
SPOILER PARAGRAPH: Jennifer winds up doing a really shitty thing to Fernando, and then she feels compelled to admit what she’s done (can’t lie, can’t hold it in) and he gets even angrier and treats her harshly and brutishly (including fucking her in the ass in a rapey way), and then she brings her brother into the situation and Fernando is beaten up and made to howl in pain.
Basic lesson for rich white women: Never fuck the help or your social lessers. But if you do anyway and the lessers start behaving presumptuously or inappropriately, you need to do the hard thing. You need to be cruel in order to make your point.
I didn’t find Jennifer’s harshness toward Fernando dramatically satisfying. Franco basically goes with a “white people are racist shits who don’t give a damn about south-of-the-border people so fuck them and the horses they ride on” message. Except racism always obscures the truth of things, and that’s what this film more or less does.
If you want to be liberal about it, Dreams is an efficient capturing of a certain social malignancy. Chastain and Hernández are excellent in their roles; everything in this film feels steady, straight and believable. HE urges you to catch it.
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.
“When things go sour, both kids spew insults and indignation with a matter-of-fact insolence. At moments of exceptional gravity, they play a staring contest that fills the screen with an ingenuous romanticism. The bonds of the children, Bibi, the postman, and a very few others in their circle endow “The President’s Cake” with a grandly humanistic warmth that’s all the stronger for the mighty pressure under which it’s forged.”
5.16.25: “I tend to be impatient with films about young kids but this handmade Iraqi film (apparently 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, and you can tell almost immediately it’s a grade-A, pick-of-the-litter pearl.
“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.
“And so Lamia, Bibi and Lamia’s pet rooster Hindi head for the big city (Basra, Nasiriyah and Amarah are closest to the marshes). And yet the diabetic, overweight Bibi has a secret agenda in visiting the city, and this freaks Lamia out. So she takes off and hooks up with Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a school friend and an Artful Dodger-like thief who’s roughly her age. The heart of Cake is about these two scrounging around Bagdad in a search for the cake ingredients and coping with a few Dickensian twists and turns.
Boiled down, the film is essentially a portrait of Bagdad street life and all kinds of crafty, hustling, struggling denizens (including a devious would-be molester) trying to save or make a buck or otherwise stay afloat.”
