During my initial viewing of One Battle After Another I had an immediate problem with Teyana Taylor‘s obviously worked-on facial features, which look unnaturally inflated and scrunched and super-sculpted. But I chickened out. I was afraid I’d be accused of racist pigeonholing or something, so I kept my arrows in the quiver.

But while listening last night to Maureen Callahan’s 3.13 pre-Oscar interview with “James From Corporate”, I heard the term “cat-face” and immediately went “yes!…of course it is!…this is my turf and I should’ve said this last November, but I chickened out! Because I’m a candy-ass.”

Who am I to talk with my Prague eyelid and neck-wattle surgery plus my two hair-plug treatments, which happened in ’12, ’14 and ’15? Obviously I’m not one to talk. I’m agreeing with James, however, that Taylor’s knife-styles gets in the way of the reality of her Perfidia Beverly Hills character.

“James From Corporate’ to Maureen Callahan, 9:40 mark: “So my whole take with One Battle After Another starts with the miscasting of Teyana Taylor. I think a lot of people have an issue with this movie because the prologue doesn’t work [but] just her casting alone…

“I’m trying to find a better way to say this, but [my problem is that] her plastic surgery is very distracting. She has sort of like a cat face that resembles Lauren Sanchez. And it just doesn’t read to me at all as being authentic of a hand-to-mouth revolutionary as someone like of that world.

Callahan: “That’s a great point. She’s partnered in the film with her lover, Leonardo DiCaprio, and they are aggressively depicted as having no money.”

“James From Corporate”: “So yeah, where is she getting the money for this to look plastic surgery-ized, almost Kardashianized? So casting-wise Taylor is sort of anointed as someone new and important. I’m not sure who is behind this and who’s backing her, but Taylor really took me out of the movie. It took like another full hour for me to sort of settle into it. Although I really like the young actress, the daughter…Chase Infiniti.”

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HE was lucky enough to live off and live within a mostly healthy Hollywood atmosphere (spiritually, creatively, economically) for 50 years, starting in mid ’70s Manhattan and alighting to Hollywood in ’83, shifting into big-time journalism in ’91 and eventually leaping upon my own independent online platform horse starting in ’98, launching HE in August ’04 and then gaining strength the following year (i.e., earning better and better ad income) and continuing flush into the late teens and very early 2020s, when Covid and woke terror killed everything.

Thank you, oh loving and merciful white-bearded God, for the difficult but wonderful lusciousness of that life…a life that I lived on a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth, West Village and WeHo rumblehoggy + worldwide festival travels + Vietnam and Argentina + suede lace-ups + 4K UHD Blurays + heavenly granddaughter + excellent health + Prague touch-ups and hair plugs + the blessed unbuttoning of 175 blouses. Marc Antony in Julius Caesar: “This…was a life!”

The reason Average Joes and Janes are “meh” or largely uninterested in the Oscar telecast and, indeed, will often sidestep or even ignore award-season movies until they hit streaming…the reason Joe and Jane have tuned out (i.e., slept through) woke-infected Hollywood fare for the last 10 years…the reason is because they realize that Hollywood is, as Bill Maher said last night, “a secret cabal of people terrified of looking like racists”. Or homophobes. Or transphobes. Even in a historical, centuries-old context, POCs magically appear.

Idea: Let’s remake Becket with Michael B. Jordan as King Henry II and, if you insist on bending over backwards, Paul Mescal at Thomas a’Becket.

Loud and proud: HE was one of the prominent horsemen who led San Juan Hill charge against the Lily Gladstone identity campaign for Best Actress, and when she lost to Emma Stone there was a great cry of relief across the land….a joyful wailing that said “the identity crazies are no longer dictating the terms.”

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Last night I was inspired to re-watch The Year of Living Dangerously after writing about it two days ago. It’s still rich and magnificent and 100% genuine. You can really feel the Indonesian heat and humidity, and the Mel Gibson-Sigourney Weaver affair is one of the most erotically charged in film history. And Maurice Jarre‘s score — primarily the delicate, gently dancing theme that is often repeated — is perfect.

Slimmed-down Pete Hammond during yesterday’s (3.12) Gold Derby discussion about Sunday’s Oscar ceremony: “The most surprising thing [of the about-to-end award season] is that Timothee Chalamet has turned into a massive underdog in a Best Actor race that was his to lose.”

And the trio of cautious, consensus-reflecting pundits sitting next to Pete (Variety‘s Clayton Davis, THR‘s Scott Feinberg, IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson) explain why — Chalamet’s Marty Supreme character is unlikable, Josh Safdie‘s film is unlikable, TC sounded too cocky at the Golden Globes, he’s too young.

This same combination of complaints “is why Paul Newman lost [the 1961 Best Actor Oscar] for The Hustler,” Hammond says. No — the also-young Maximillian Schell won for Judgment at Nuremberg because he was effing brilliant in that film. His German prosecutor was blue flame, a hard-cut diamond

I despise the mediocre minds who’ve been scolding Chalamet or giving him the back of their hand. They’re the human equivalent of mashed potatoes or, worse, Hostess Twinkies. The fact is that Chalamet is Maximillian Schell this year, and a lot of Academy voters out there (i.e., mostly women) are too feather-ruffled or agenda-driven to honor that fact.

None of these mushballs is able to summon the character to admit two plain truths about possible Best Actor winner Michael B. Jordan. One, Jordan gives a good performance but he’s far from phenomenal or super-dynamic in Sinners. (He’s the lead in a musical vampire film…c’mon.) And two, he almost certainly won SAG’s Best Actor award because of a last-minute reaction to the John Davidson N-word thing at the BAFTA awards.

Universal will open Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure on 6.12.26.

Is there a slight possibility that, for once in his career, Josh O’Connor might play a suave cool cat with a good haircut?

Phil Lord and Chris Miller‘s Project Hail Mary (Amazon/MGM, 3.20) deserves approval points for originality, I suppose, and for not dumbing down the science — it’s mainly for sharp sci-fi nerds. It’s not for none-too-brights like me, I can tell you that much. I always hated science class.

It is, however, a kind of bruh love story between Ryan Gosling’s Ryland Grace, an extra-brilliant junior high school science teacher who’s been forced to join a years-long mission to somehow save the earth from freezing to death…I feel a tad blurry from the effort of trying to recall the particulars…and Rocky, the rock-crab alien who vaguely resembles a small-scale The Thing.

I did, however, find myself emotionally responding to a scene in which Gosling hugs the plastic-encased Rocky. Not quite on the level of Henry Thomas hugging E.T, but in that general vicinity.

But that was just a brief respite. Because overall watching PHM (156 minutes!) sent me into a vague depression pit. An “oh, no” feeling began to take hold. Anticipating a slight comprehension struggle, I read the Wiki plot synopsis of Andy Weir’s “hard” science fiction novel twice before settling into today’s 1 pm screening. And I still felt a bit lost.

The science is gobbledygook, but it helps to familiarize anyway.

The scientific villain of the piece — the bad, earth-freezing organism that consumes electromagnetic radiation and which will cause our sun to cool — is called Astrophage. (Different from Arbitrage, no relation whatsoever to decolletage.)

It also helps to know what “the Petrova line” is, although I’m still not sure what “a dim infrared line from the Sun to Venus” actually looks or behaves like. (Is it a bit like the infrared laser beam that Auric Goldfinger used to sexually terrorize Sean Connery?)

You should also get hip to xenonite, taumoeba and the spelling difference between Eridani, Rocky’s home planet, and the native Eridians. (Shouldn’t they be called Eridanians?)

The bottom line is that Project Hail Mary made me feel…well, not exactly like a dumbass but a bit like that kid in the back of the seventh-grade classroom who always flunked pop quiz tests.

I knew early on that I would feel vaguely distanced from this thing. I didn’t hate it but vague discomfort certainly flooded my system. I wound up feeling sorta kinda nothing. Okay, I felt relieved when it finally ended. Because I really hate films that make me feel this way…films that gun the brain engine and converse with exotic, ahead-of-the-curve techno-jargon. PHM sure as shit does this.

So I began looking at my watch around the one-hour mark. And I kept checking it every 15 minutes or so. I checked it six or seven times in all.

Apart from the serving of feel-good “I love you, man” vibes during the second half, what is this fucking thing really? It’s basically a two-hander that’s a great, big, fat science-project brain teaser.

Sandra Huller doesn’t count. She’s basically flashback filler. In a big scene she sings Harry Styles‘ “Sign of the Times”, which I didn’t immediately recognize. I knew the singing scene was coming, and I, being a clueless, old-school dumbass, thought it might be the Petula Clark version…nope.

This film really filled me with alienation. Existential gloom. I sat there thinking about death, and how being dead would be one way, at least, of avoiding any more Phil Lord and Chris Miller films.

Part of the reason I didn’t much care for PHM is Ryan Gosling’s over-acting. But it’s also Gosling himself…those vacant, close-together eyes. The shouting, the geek laughter, the slapstick physicality. What it is about this guy that I find so cloying, so irksome, so alienating? I haven’t really liked Gosling in anything since La-La Land.

From Owen Gleiberman’s 3.12 Variety essay, “The Oscar Best Picture Winners Have Long Been a Sign of the Times — This Year Even More So.”

“It is not the purpose of this column to predict which [Best Picture nominee has the winning edge]. But this much can be said.

“If One Battle After Another wins, it will play as an affirmation of the power of movies to tap our most traumatic social and political anxieties and elevate them to a cathartic place. There may be no Oscar winner in history that has owned the zeitgeist like One Battle After Another.”

HE correction: There may be no Oscar contender in recent history that has owned the fraught and frazzled progressive psychology under Trump authoritarianism like One Battle After Another.

14 months ago I posted HE’s top 30 films of 1986. I’ve since rewatched Bruce Beresford‘s Crimes of the Heart, and I hated it so much I turned it off after a half-hour. So I took it out and popped in John Carpenter‘s Big Trouble in Little China and Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge.

So here’s HE’s top 23 films of ’86, along with 8 good ones that were compromised by minor flaws.

It’s very hard to accept that 1986 was 40 effing years ago.

(1) Oliver Stone‘s Platoon
(2) James Cameron‘s Aliens
(3) Oliver Stone‘s Salvador
(4) David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet
(5) Jonathan Demme‘s Something Wild
(6) Michael Mann‘s Manhunter
(7) Neil Jordan‘s Mona Lisa
(8) Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters
(9) David Cronenberg’s The Fly
(10) Jim Jarmusch‘s Down By Law
(11) Mike Nichols‘ Heartburn
(12) James Ivory‘s A Room with a View
(13) Jean-Jacques Beineix‘s Betty Blue
(14) Spike Lee‘s She’s Gotta Have It
(15) Adrien Lyne‘s 9 1/2 Weeks
(16) Hal Ashby‘s 8 Million Ways to Die
(17) Randa Haines‘ Children of a Lesser God
(18) Martin Scorsese‘s The Color of Money
(19) David Anspaugh‘s Hoosiers
(20) Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge
(21) Jamie Foley’s At Close Range
(22) Sidney Lumet‘s The Morning After
(23) Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge

Generally Good but Slightly Second Tier:

(24) Roland Joffe‘s The Mission, (25) Claude Berri‘s Manon of the Spring, (26) Tony Scott‘s Top Gun, (27) Fons Rademakers‘ The Assault, (28) David Zucker‘s Ruthless People, (29) Paul Mazursky‘s Down and Out in Beverly Hills, (30) John Hughes‘ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, (31) John Carpenter‘s Big Trouble in Little China.

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