…and tripping on LSD is not what anyone who knows anything would call a “stoned” excursion — it’s more like the intoxication of sailing clear-headed on the Long Island Sound under marmalade skies.
And I think Grant stopped tripping when his daughter Jennifer came along in ‘66.
At the 1957 Oscars Grant accepted Ingrid Bergman’s Best Actress Oscar (Anastasia) on her behalf.
“And therefore, being completely post-partum-depressed and hating my dreary motherhood existence and unable to generate any further interest in writing, I am lock-and-load determined to descend into feral madness as well as drag my husband and the audience down into the very same hell-pit….aaaagggghhh!”
HE to JLaw’s “Grace”: “You’re deeply unlikable, as in spitty, sputtering, hell-bent, self-loathing…Jesus.
“If I was in RPatz’s shoes I wouldn’t want to fuck you either. Hell, I wouldn’t even want to receive oral pleasuring from you because you’re in a crazy enough space to abruptly bite into Mr. Happy…I would honestly be afraid of you drawing blood or leaving teeth marks.”
From “Die, My Love Warrants Respect But Joe and Jane Will Hate It,” posted from Cannes on 5.17.25:
“While I respected Lynne Ramsay‘s Die, My Love and what it was on about (i.e., “aaagggghhh!”), the Debussy journos didn’t go for it. Too grim, too downish in a one-note sense, no plot pivots of any kind….just a downward swirl into the gathering storm of Jennifer Lawrence‘s postpartum derangement….down, down, down.
“Then again it’s presented in 1.37…boxy is beautiful, bruh.
“What is Die My Love really about?
“Just as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds wasn’t so much a restrained horror film about malicious winged demons as an indictment of social complacency, Die, My Love isn’t so much about JLaw’s descent into self-destructive madness as a portrayal of the dull horror of doing almost nothing with your life while caring for a child…an indictment of middle-class, stay-at-home-and-burp-the-baby-while-baking-cookies momism.”
Well, guess what? HE loves the idea of sitting through a two-and-a half-hour Oscar bait flick from that electric season of George Bush-vs.-Michael Dukakis-vs.-Willie Horton-vs.Lee Atwater. I really like “competent and watchable”!!
And yet Sony Pictures Classics, the film’s distributor, has been playing a little bit of “hide the ball” as far as screenings and streaming access is concerned. We all know what that means.
Ironic “Nuremberg” Nudge to MAGA Slowboats: “You can reclaim your former glory.”
From Owen Gleiberman’s 9.7 review: “Written and directed by James Vanderbilt, Nuremberg presents itself as lavishly somber and important and includes several not-so-veiled references to the rise of intolerance, and the need to maintain international standards of justice, in the world today.
“But competent and watchable as it is, Nuremberg isn’t big on psychological tension or insight. As Herman Goring, Russell Crowe acts with consummate command even as Göring, by design, keeps the audience at arm’s length. But Rami Malek‘s Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley brings a weird insecurity; along the way, his Kelley almost seems to forget what his job is.”
I distinctly recall being taught in my teens that the central character’s last name was spelled Goering. (The Wiki page confirms this.) So what is this “Goring” shit?
10:06 pm: It’ll probably be another hour or so before the vote on California’s Prop. 50 is known, but here’s hoping for a decisive majority.
11:08 pm update: Prop. 50 passes! — 65% pro, 35% con. Gov. Gavin Newsom rolled the dice with his political ass on the line, and he’s won big.
This Gold’s Gym member (POC on the left) is obviously arrogant, egoistic and horridly insensitive. If there was a God she would be sentenced to a year in a damp isolated dungeon for her trans hate.
Listen to every word.
The last ten seconds are
Any man who thinks he’s a woman who listens this and still says IDGAF I’m going in, should not be anywhere near women. Ever. Zero empathy. He’s a significant danger.
A sane person in an insane world https://t.co/TLmuMkKxZs
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 3, 2025
— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) November 4, 2025
Vice-President Dick Cheney having shot a guy he was hunting with isn’t funny. The victim, a 78 year-old lawyer named Harry Whittington, could have been seriously hurt and thank fortune he’s in stable condition, etc.
What is funny to me is that New York Times report that said Cheney “fired his shotgun without realizing that Mr. Whittington had approached him from behind, spraying his fellow hunter on his right side, on his cheek, neck and chest.”
Full disclosure: I once mistakenly shot one of my own guys with a paintball during a war game I took part in north of Los Angeles, so I know how Cheney might feel. But at least I didn’t tag the guy in the neck and face.
Sasha Stone and Claude 4.5, the AI mechanism, have assembled a beautiful multiple-choice Gatecrashers ballot that’s super-easy to use, and which you can change any time of day or night…all on your own.
Until last night I had ducked Jack Clayton and Harold Pinter‘s The Pumpkin Eater (’64) for decades. I never even thought about giving it a whirl, mainly out of fear that it might smother me in dreary wifey nihilism and perhaps make me feel morose. (It’s based on a novel by Penelope Mortimer.)
But I finally gave in last night, and it’s actually quite exceptional — a sophisticated, finely wrought, moderate-mannered parlor drama about a gradually deteriorating London marriage.
Vaguely similar to David Jones Betrayal‘ (’83), which Pinter also wrote, of course, based on his 1980 play, The Pumpkin Eater has a wry, half-fleeting, matter-of-fact quality. But it also conveys genuine compassion for a woman who’s slowly perishing within.
It’s basically about Peter Finch‘s chilly screenwriter husband — an aloof, constantly disloyal hound who in his heart of hearts needs to be constantly worshipped and massaged and, I’m guessing, blown for good measure — quietly and relentlessly cheating on the poor, wounded, downhearted Anne Bancroft, who allows their many children to basically run their marriage.
This is going to sound shallow but I felt deflated by the fact that Bancroft’s hair is rather gray throughout — only in the very beginning are her locks dark and ravishing in the style of Mrs. Robinson, whom she would play two or three years later. It makes her look drained and faded. Bancroft was only 32 or 33 when the film was shot, and yet Clayton tries to make her look at least 47 or 48, if not older. But her performance is staggering, and it resulted in her second Best Actress Oscar nomination.
Costarring James Mason, Maggie Smith, Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Webb, Richard Johnson and Yootha Joyce. Oswald Morris‘s black-and-white cinematography is generally delicious; ditto Georges Delerue‘s score.
Pauline Kael: “Bancroft’s performance as the (compulsive childbearing) Englishwoman whose nerves are giving out has an unusual tentative, exploratory quality. (It ranks with her more straightforward acting in The Miracle Worker.)
“The Pumpkin Eater is a stunning, high-style film — fragmented yet flowing. The murky sexual tensions have a fascination, and there are memorable moments: Bancroft’s crackup in Harrods; glimpses of Mason being prurient and vindictive, and Maggie Smith being a troublemaking ‘other woman.'”
That’s correct — the first hit is Ladd’s Flo Castleberry, a world-weary, sharp-tongued waitress in Martin Scorsese‘s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More. The second hit is her performance as the doomed Ida Sessions in Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown.
Chinatown was released in the atmospheric heat of Watergate — 6.20.74. Alice opened almost exactly six months later — 12.9.74.
Paddy Chayefsky won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Marty (’55), but it wasn’t adapted from a book or a play or any non-cinematic source. The Delbert Mann-directed Marty was, line for line, Chayefsky’s own live-TV play — same dialogue, barely “adapted”. It was simply filmed on celluloid and slightly “opened up” with two or three exteriors rather than captured on live TV.
Initially posted on 6.2.14: “There’s one thing wrong with Delbert Mann and Paddy Chayefsky‘s Marty, which won 1955’s Best Picture Oscar and launched the career of Ernest Borgnine after he took the Oscar for Best Actor. (Mann also won for Best Director; ditto Chayefsky for Best Adapted Screenplay.)
“The problem is that jaunty Marty theme song, which apparently wasn’t written by score composer Roy Webb but songwriter Harry Warren and arranger George Bassman. The brassy and fanfare-ish waltz is entirely out of synch with the simple, somewhat sad story of a lonely Bronx butcher and his loser friends and a girl he falls in love with.
“The purpose of the song was purely about marketing — the idea was to persuade audiences that Marty wouldn’t be too much of a downer. It succeeded in that goal but the music sure feels like a downer now.”
