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I Am Sorta Kinda Max Von Mayerling

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In Billy Wilder Sunset Boulevard (‘50), the regal, curiously old-world, organ-playing, stiff-necked Max von Mayerling (Eric Von Stroheim) is not just Norma Desmond’s chauffeur. He is also her ex-husband and a once-powerful Hollywood director.

In the 1920s and early ‘30s Stroheim himself was a major, auteur-level Hollywood director (Greed The Merry Widow, Queen Kelly), which is why the snickering, smart-assed Wilder cast him as Max — a “wink wink” meta thing.

Like Von Mayerling, Von Stroheim’s imperious manner, exacting standards and creative arrogance had led to his being elbowed out of the elite circles of Hollywood power before he was 50.

I was never a filmmaker, of course, but I was undeniably an influential and consequential industry reporter and freelance commentator, print-wise, in the ‘90s, and then I became a major columnist, opinion-monger and “Oscar whisperer” when Hollywood Elsewhere took flight in ‘04 until…oh, roughly ‘21 or thereabouts, which is when I was Twitter-torpedoed by the Stalinist wokezoids, and by the femmebot-trans contingent in particular.

I hadn’t “done” a damn thing — it was all about my not-woke-enough or anti-woke views and opinions.

The 2025 version of HE is just as perceptively snap-dragon and on-target and lusciously well-written as it was in my Clinton-Bush-Obama-early Trump heyday.

But supplemental-income-wise I have become, in a sense, a Max Von Mayerling variation, chauffeuring Fairfield County swells to the four NYC-area airports while radiating a certain worldly, “oh, I’ve been around and done a few little things in my time” mentality or attitude, although always with a wink and a smile.

On top of which after his fall from grace Max Von Mayerling wasn’t a well-read, Bhagavad Gita-fortified columnist who annually attended the major film festivals (Cannes, Telluride, Venice) by way of crowd-funding and the kindness of certain friends.

In a certain light I’ve sorta come full circle. The first really cool job I ever had was driving for Checker Cab in Boston (’70s), and all the while I was a secret genius.

Von Stroheim never accepted the humiliation of becoming his ex-wife’s chauffeur, but he certainly suffered an industry-mindset comedown in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. He was only 72 when he died in 1957.

Clarification on HE’s Sole Takedown Campaign

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HE is not really trying to effectuate a One Battle After Another takedown campaign.

Yesterday’s VistaVision carping aside, I’m simply saying that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s insurrectionist POC girlboss epic hasn’t a prayer of winning the Best Picture Oscar because winning in this category will, in the minds of Average Joe and Jane ticket buyers, permanently underline a notion that Hollywood is hopelessly aligned with the wokeazoid left.

OBAA could win in other categories (although not in the Best Actress race — Chase Infiniti has zero chance in this regard) and more power to it in this regard. PTA’s film is a very well-made, full-throttle, zing-zang achievement, and it certainly deserves respect as far as that goes.

HE is, of course, definitely trying to persuade as many people as possible that the second half of Sinners is low-rent, Samuel Z. Arkoff-level, drooling vampire bullshit, and is therefore undeserving of any Oscar wins. HE recognizes that many industry members are nonetheless persuaded that identity campaigns are a valid way to go, and so Ryan Coogler will probably end up being nominated for direction or screenplay but that’s all…nominations but no wins.

“Sentimental Value” Ascending

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Five months ago in Cannes I experienced my first (and so far only) spiritual levitation by way of Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value (Neon, 11.7). And now, at long last, it’s finally starting to percolate stateside.

Value screened last weekend to an adoring crowd at the Hamptons Film Festival, and is currently press-screening in Manhattan prior to the early November debut, which is only 24 days off.

It’s a guaranteed Best Picture Oscar nominee; ditto Renate Reinsve and Skellan Skarsgard for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor, respectively. We all understand that Hamnet is the Oscar frontrunner as we speak, but don’t sell Value short.

Posted on 5.21.25: I saw Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value last night at 10:30 pm, exiting around 12:40 am. I was afraid it might not live up to expectations, but no worries — I began to feel not only stirred and satisfied but deeply moved and delighted by the half-hour mark, and then it just got better and better.

For my money this is surely the Palme d’Or winner. I wanted to see it again this morning at 8:30 am. Yes, it’s that good, that affecting, that headstrong and explorational. A 15-minute-long standing ovation at the Grand Lumiere, and all the snippy, snooty Cannes critics are jumping onboard.

But what matters, finally, is what HE thinks and feel deep down, and that, basically, is “yes, yes…this is what excellent, emotionally riveting family dramas do…especially with brilliant actors like Renata Reinsve (truly amazing…she really kills) and Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning topping the ensemble cast.”

But I was really too whipped to tap anything out when I returned to the pad at 1:15 am. I managed a grand total of 4.5 hours of sleep, and am now at a Salles Bunuel screening of Eugene Jarecki‘s The Six Billion Dollar Man…beginning in a few.

Sentimental Value (why do I keep calling it Sentimental Gesture in my head?) is a complex, expertly jiggered, beautifully acted Ingmar Bergman-esque family drama that feels at times like Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters but with less comic snap…it’s more of a fundamentally anxious, sad, sometimes very dark but humanist dramedy (a flicking comic edge, a Netflix putdown or two).

It’s a film that’s completely receptive and open to all the unsettled cross-current stuff that defines any shattered, high-achieving family, and this one in particular.

Emotional uncertainty and relationship upheavals are in plentiful supply.

Set in Oslo, it’s basically about an estranged relationship between Skarsgard’s Gustav Berg, a blunt-spoken, film-director father who hates watching plays, and his two adult daughters — Reinsve’s Nora Berg, a prominent stage and TV actress who’s a bundle of nerves, anxiety and looming depression, and Lilleaas’s Agnes, Nora’s younger sister who’s not in “the business.”

Gustav’s career has been slumping but now he’s returning to filmmaking with a purportedly excellent script that’s partly based on his mother’s life (although he denies this), and he wants Nora to star in it. She refuses over communication and trust issues, and so Gustav hires Fanning’s Rachel Kemp, a big-time American actress, to play Nora’s role.

I could sense right away that Kemp would eventually drop out and that Nora would overcome her anger and step into the role at the last minute. And I knew the film would explore every angle and crevasse before this happens.
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Value really digs down and goes to town within a super-attuned family dynamic…steadfast love, familial warmth, sudden tears, extra-marital intrigue, stage fright, film industry satire, thoughts of suicide…nothing in the way of soothing or settled-down comfort until the very end, and even then…but it’s wonderful.

Remember The Bad Old Woke Days of Body Positivity?

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…when whalebods were seen as sexy, healthy, and life-affirming in the most wonderful way imaginable? Ozempic and other crash-diet drugs put an end to that, thank God, and now it’s even okay for a semblance of the male gaze to make a slight comeback. Because a vibe shift (lo and behold) has happened, and the once-bullying woke Stalinists have fled into the forest.

Triggered by a recent CNN article about the return of the male gaze, “After Party”‘s Emily Jashinsky and Spencer Klavan, Associate editor for Claremont Review of Books and Author of “Light of the Mind, Light of the World”, on a recent CNN article on the “male gaze” and how mainstream outlets frame timeless human desires as outdated or problematic, contrasting the body-positivity era of 2020 with today’s renewed focus on fitness.

From Sasha Stone’s “CNN Frets That The “Male Gaze” Might Be Coming Back“, posted on 1.014:

’50s VistaVision Films Popped — “OBAA” VistaVision Is Kinda Meh

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The large-format, high-resolution VistaVision process only lasted from ’54 to ’61, but it certainly made films look extra-sharp and luscious during that brief heyday — The Ten Commandments, Richard III, Strategic Air Command, To Catch a Thief, The Searchers, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Loving You, Gunfight At The O.K. Coral, North by Northwest, One-Eyed Jacks, etc.

VistaVision generally made color features look like eye-popping, high-calorie desserts, and the black-and-white ones — The Desperate Hours, Fear Strikes Out, The Joker is Wild, Desire Under The Elms, The Tin Star — looked extra smooth and needle-sharp with wonderful deep blacks. Present-tense Bluray and 4K renderings of these films are always extra-pronounced…good enough to eat.

So why don’t the new VistaVision films — Paul Thomas Anderson One Battle After Another and Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist — look as good as the oldies? To me the newbies look okay but that’s all. The 35mm process via the Beaumont VistaVision camera or “Beaucam”, which Anderson and Corbet used, is roughly the same calibre as the VV cameras used in the ’50s, but neither OBAA or The Brutalist deliver that special VistaVision schwing. There isn’t a single moment in Anderson’s gritty-ass film that delivers any kind of super-pleasurable eye bath.

I’m presuming that Anderson wasn’t interested in giving his films a ’50s visual sheen and may have been looking to deliver that hand-held, you-are-there verite quality that Gillo Pontecorvo used for The Battle of Algiers, and that’s fine. But why shoot the fucking thing in VistaVision then? Because OBAA just looks like a normal, no-big-deal 35mm movie. It certainly doesn’t make your eyes go boiiiinng!

Still Seeking Monochrome “Darling” Orgasm

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Nothing quite gets me off visually like a rich, luscious, black-and-white ’60s film. Particularly those wonderfully detailed flicks shot between the early to mid ’60s, when the competition from color TV was starting to breathe down everyone’s neck, which prompted certain dps to try harder or push it on some level. This Sporting Life, Sons and Lovers, Seven Days in May, The Train, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, A Hard Day’s Night, etc.

But for some curious reason, Kenneth Higgins‘ monochrome capturing of John Schlesinger‘s Darling (’65) has never quite done it for me. Appreciation sans levitation.

The lighting in some portions seems unexceptional, the details and textures don’t quite pop, here and there it almost flirts with humdrum. It’s a wee bit underwhelming.

But next week I’ll be giving Darling another chance at Manhattan’s Film Forum, which is showing a newish 4K restoration.

Julie Christie is incandescent, of course (Darling launched her into the stratosphere), despite the fact that she’s playing a shallow, opportunistic, fairly loathsome person. Dirk Bogarde is wonderful, as usual.

Wiki excerpt: “In 1971, New York magazine wrote of mod fashion and its wearers: ‘This new, déclassé English girl was epitomized by Julie Christie in Darling — amoral, rootless, emotionally immature, and apparently irresistible.”

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’70s Icons Redford and Keaton, Gone With 25 Days of Each Other

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It was startling enough when the universally loved and seriously admired Robert Redford suddenly slipped beneath the waves on Tuesday, 9.16. But within a mere twinkling of time….three and a half weeks or 25 days later…the cosmic trap door suddenly gave way underneath Diane Keaton also and she, too, was gone like that.

A half-century ago Redford and Keaton, who probably met a few times but never worked together…in the mid ’70s they were as magnetic and glistening and era-defining as it got…both commandingly charismatic and wrapped up in the social-political-cultural current like few other Hollywood hyhenates.

Even the HE readers who hate my “hot peak period” obits have to admit Redford and Keaton were seriously peaking in ’75. Okay, Keaton’s Everest moment didn’t happen until Annie Hall popped on 4.20.77 but still…

Redford (born on 8.18.36) and Keaton (1.5.46) will receive extended tributes at the end of the Oscar death reel on Sunday, 3.15.26, but who will be given the very last spot?

“A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.” — Francis Coppola by way of George C. Scott by way of George S. Patton.

So Many Appalling Woody Haters Out There…So Many…Sickening

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Joe Leydon is completely correct. When Mia Farrow passes, the expansively written obits and summing-up essays will have no choice but to conclude that, like all successful actresses, she was a very shrewd and calculating careerist who boosted her profile and cultural standing big-time by connecting with Woody Allen in the ’80s. And that she turned feral and ferocious in August ’92 over you-know-what and that Moses Farrow knows a thing or two about that (as do many others), and that she’s long praised and stood solidly behind her genius-level Rosemary’s Baby director, Roman Polanski, and admirably so.

@askdarlingnikki Today the has two less child/sexual abuse perps and defenders. #childabuseawareness #sexualabuse #lostprophets #dianekeaton #woodyallen ♬ original sound – askdarlingnikki

Perfect Denouement

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“I’ve been poor my whole life. So were my parents, and their parents before them. It’s like a disease, passing from generation to generation [and] becomes a sickness. That’s what it is.”

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Astrological Bigotry

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I’ve been coping all my life with astrology bigots who’ve been describing me and my flock (Scorpios) as scalpel-tongued, stingingly judgmental, mysterious, secretive and overbearing, not to mention ravenous sex serpents.

To which I’ve been saying for decades, “Okay, sure, here and there… HE would be nothing if not for my surgical precision with words and a natural tendency to cut through the bullshit, but otherwise take your toxic character assassination tropes and shove them up your ass, and sideways at that.”

This is the basis for my empathy with POCs who’ve been fending off crude cultural stereotype descriptions all their lives.

The idea that everyone born each year between October 24th and November 22 shares many of these basic traits is, of course, absurd. Plus whatever I may have been (or have been like) in my youth and early middle age…all that hormonally intense crap sailed a long time ago.

According to The Astrology Bible, Scorpio’s colors are deep red, maroon, black, and brown. Bullshit — all my life I’ve been drawn to deep blues, blacks and grays. I own one deep red garment — a 1950s James Dean Rebel Without A Cause jacket — but I always feel uncomfortable wearing it. Plus I hate maroon, burgundy, or ox-blood colors.

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