Anxious, financially struggling younger types or even 40somethings rubbing shoulders with older, fairly loaded types in a flush, exotic vacation setting of some kind. Have-nots (or have-not-enoughs), tinged with envy, loathing or spiritual deflation, resentful about nearly everything, trying to con or seduce or merely suck up to the swells.

That’s more or less the White Lotus formula, no?

In their own way the blase, chilly, indifferent rich are almost as miserable as the have-nots, but no matter which way anyone turns, resentment and distrust are stovetop flames that boil all pots while generating endless twitching confusion and fickle-ass vibes blah blah.

I’ve never watched season #1 of Lee Sung Jin‘s Beef, which unfolded in April 2023, but the eight-episode season #2, which I’ve watched three episodes of, is a chip off the old Lotus block.

I can’t figure where the Monte Vista Point Country Club is located, but apparently it’s somewhere in California. Posssibly Montecito, the Big Sur area, La Jolla…who cares?

This is a darkly satirical nest-of-vipers ensemble piece that’s well acted and very precisely written…everyone exudes performative, nimble-minded hostility…every episode is damp with feelings of entrapment…it’s intriguing as far as it goes, although it makes your stomach feel acidic.

I felt no allegiance or comfort with anyone. Anyone could have died and I would’ve been “okay, whatever.”

The four lead characters are antsy, self-loathing, almost-flirting-with-killing-himself Josh (Oscar Isaac), the club’s general manager; Josh’s miserable, brittle-featured, inwardly collapsing wife Lindsay (Carey Mulligan); an aspiring, partly-Korean, would-be personal trainer named Austin (Charles Melton)…a guyho’s basically an empty Coke bottle with a buff bod and a dopey-looking moustache; and Austin’s significant other Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), a variation upon a standard issue twitchmouse, anxiety and uncertainty also being her daily bread.

Their Korean betters are the chilliest of all. The cold-eyed Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), the billionaire owner of the MPCC, is a brusque and soul-less ghost. The zoomer-aged Woosh (Matthew Kim), a tennis player, is another nothingburger nothigngperson. I didn’t get a read on Song Kang-ho‘s Dr. Kim, Chairwoman Park’s second husband and a Seoul plastic surgeon…I just muttered to myself “oh, the Parasite guy again.”

Seoyeon Jang‘s Eunice, an assistant-interpreter to Chairwoman Park, is the only Korean character who seems to be dealing straight, open-hearted cards. I liked her.

I’d really rather not write any more about this show. I feel drained just thinking about it. Do I want to watch the remaining five episodes? Yeah, I guess so but I’m certainly not hot or hungry to do so.

With Miles having agreed to slip into the house to retrieve Jack’s wallet, it’s 85% certain that he’ll be running out a few minutes later with that big gorilla right behind him.

Obviously Miles should have told Jack to keep the engine running and the driver door open so Miles can hop right in and gun it. But no — as Miles runs out Jack has fallen asleep, the car is shut off and the driver door is closed.

In real life Miles would’ve never been made it, and that big, naked, blue-collar ape would’ve grabbed him and pounded away.

Five years before Sideways opened in ‘04, The Limey’s Terrence Stamp, knowing he’ll be leaving Peter Fonda’s afternoon soirée in a hurry, tells Luis Guzman, behind the wheel of his modest white car, to “keep it runnin’’” and then says “oy!…point it downhill.”

20-plus years ago I came across an out-take of this Sideways scene. A second or two after Miles yanks the door latch and jumps into the driver’s seat, the giant naked ape slams into the car window and it shatters into a thousand shards. A shocked Giamatti yells “whoa!” as he pulls away.

This played better than the version in the finished film — wild, unexpectedly startling, believably chaotic. Director Alexander Payne should have approved it.

The term “blockbuster” means “important, heavy-hitting, big-studio powerhouse film that everyone has to see theatrically…an expensive, eye-filling, big-swing spectacle that not only earns a ton of money but feels like a cultural touchstone in hindsight.”

The term does not, however, necessarily mean “rooted in otherworldly CG fantasy.”

Steven Spielberg’s somewhat realistic, 51-year-old Jaws, for example, was a blockbuster. Jim Cameron’s Avatar (‘09) and Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer, for sure. Was David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) a blockbuster? In a certain cultural sense, yeah. Mike Todd’s Around The World in 80 Days (‘56) was a blockbuster; ditto Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (‘56). It is HE’s humble opinion that the richest and most resonant big-scale blockbuster of all time was David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (‘62).

Try telling this to Collider ‘s Diego Pineda Pacheco, who believes that within the realm of the last 50 years, only teen-friendly CG fantasies qualify.

Worse, Pacheco believes that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) sits at the top — the greatest blockbuster flick of the last half-century. To which HE responds by going “eccch!” and spitting on the sidewalk. Jackson was an over-rated flash in the pan, and is pretty much sidelined now; if you ask me the Rings trilogy was an endurance test before and it certainly is now. I’ll never sit through those films ever again.

If the greatest blockbuster of the last 50 years has to be a big-budget, geek-franchise fantasy, The Empire Strikes Back easily rules the roost.

It appears as if Michael (Lionsgate, 4.24) is more into avoiding than lying. I’m sure it blows smoke up its own ass in various ways, but it mainly seems to be about re-creating Michael Jackson’s ‘80s career highs while dodging the deep-down serpents who slither in the soft mud.

Michael ends around ‘88, I’ve read somewhere. The first little boy molestation accusation, the Jordy Chandler thing, broke in ‘93.  

https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/us-celebrity-news/heartbreaking-life-first-child-accuse-34774912.amp  

It sounds as if potential Michael viewers, before buying the popcorn and sitting down, will have to put the “sleeping with attractive little boys within the sanctum of Neverland for years on end” stuff into a steel lockbox and put the box into the trunk of their car out in the parking lot. After seeing Michael some may decide to leave the box in the trunk for an indefinite period.

I myself can double-track it. I can enjoy the secular ‘80s euphoria (Thriller, moonwalking, white socks) while at the same time accepting and respecting Leaving Neverland, which scalds hard.

“Fine Film, Wrong Title” — initially posted on 2.20.20:

“William Nicholson‘s Hope Gap (Roadside, 3.6) is an intelligent, fully felt, nicely layered domestic drama about the sad end of a nearly 30-year marriage in a small coastal town in England.

“Annette Bening and Bill Nighy play the 60ish couple, and the gist is that they don’t part by mutual agreement — Nighy has fallen in love with a local woman (a somewhat younger widow) and proceeds to lower the boom on Bening over tea.

“Both are excellent in a carefully proportioned and ruefully miserable sort of way, Bening in particular with her nicely vowelled British accent.

“The story is based upon the breakup of Nicholson’s own parents when he was somewhere in his early 20s, and how he found himself in the position of the anguished counselor and referee. Nicholson is played by Josh O’Connor (The Crown), who’s fully up to the level of his costars.

“I was pleasantly surprised by how much the film stirred and engaged me, especially given the sappy-sounding title. Hope Gap sounds like some kind of contact-high film — a spirited feel-gooder about things working out for the better. That’s not what this is.

“A much, much better title is The Retreat From Moscow, which is what Nicholson called the play version when it opened in late ’99 at the Chichester Festival Theatre. (Four years later it opened at Broadway’s Booth Theatre with John Lithgow, Eileen Atkins and Ben Chaplin in the lead roles.) Why it took Nicholson 17 or 18 years to film it is anyone’s guess.

“Why was it called The Retreat From Moscow? Because it alludes to acts of cruelty that allow the living to survive. In 1812 Napoleon’s once-huge army was decimated by the Russian winter along with a lack of food and sufficient clothing — only 27,000 troops survived. Those who fell by the roadside were stripped by their comrades and left to die naked in the snow, and drivers of wagons carrying the French wounded sped up over bumpy road in hopes that they might fall off.

“By the same token Nighy’s Edward sits down at the kitchen table and tells Bening’s Grace that they’re done — that he intends to move out because he’s fallen in love with Sally Roger‘s Angela. By any measure this is a brusque and hurtful move, but it also puts an end to a dry, unsatisfying union while allowing for a measure of newfound happiness between Edward and Angela.

“When Grace angrily strolls into Edward and Angela’s home in Act Three, she asks the younger woman what she thought she was doing when she and Edward began to become involved. Angela replies, ‘I think I thought there were three unhappy people, and now there’s only one.’ Whoa.

“Some critics have complained that Hope Gap feels too ‘written’, too much like a filmed play. Except the writing is quite good. All the angles and regrets and after-thoughts emerge in just the right way. I suppose some will find it a bit too solemn and dreary, but when the dialogue is this well-honed and the acting is this affecting, I don’t see the problem.”

From Mark Binelli‘s “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Michael Jackson,” a N.Y. Times Magazine piece posted on 4.14.26:

“For the Michael Jackson estate, leaning into the warts-and-all approach would require a wholesale refutation of the abuse allegations. Graham King and Antoine Fuqua‘s Michael (Lionsgate, 4.24) avoids the issue entirely by embracing the iconic version of Jackson and ignoring the unsettling later stage of his career.

“In trailers and footage of the film that have been released, Jaafar Jackson moonwalks into an uncanny valley of indisputably glorious pop-culture events — the ‘Motown 25’ special, the videos for ‘Thriller’ and ‘Beat It,’ the recording of that indelible high-pitched woooo 15 seconds into ‘Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough’ — and maybe here the gulf opened by the simulacrum will subconsciously comfort viewers, making it possible to enjoy those moments without the queasy feelings stirred by their actual creator.

“Mark Anthony Neal, a professor at Duke University who teaches a class on Jackson, has noticed that students in recent years have been more focused on ‘the Michael Jackson who was the subject of a documentary about pedophilia, the Michael Jackson who has done something to his face and who feels to some of them anti-Black.’ He’s curious to see how Michael will be received ‘specifically in a Black cultural lens: post-Bill Cosby, post-R. Kelly, post-Sean Combs.’

“With so much on the line, it is perhaps unsurprising that there was something of a circling of the wagons around Michael. The Lionsgate publicist handling the film abruptly ceased all contact regarding this article after an initial email exchange, and King also declined to be interviewed. Last year Jackson estate co-executor John Branca told The Financial Times that he “sensed a wavering” among the first people attached to the movie after the release of Leaving Neverland.”

“He went on: ‘Unless you understand that Michael’s innocent, we can’t have you.’

“The estate has also been back in court in recent months to answer challenges from Jackson’s daughter, Paris, who is objecting to bonus payments of up to $1.75 million to outside law firms, while also demanding greater transparency from the executors and questioning the decision to become so closely entangled with the biopic.

“Paris was blunt in her criticism in a series of Instagram posts last fall. Claiming her notes on an early script draft were ignored, she said: ‘The thing about these biopics — it’s Hollywood. it’s fantasy land, it’s not real.” She crumpled her face and mimed adjusting a knob with her finger. ‘The narrative is being controlled, and there’s a lot of inaccuracy and there’s a lot of just full-blown lies, and at the end of the day, that doesn’t really fly with me. I don’t really like dishonesty. I spoke up, I wasn’t heard, I [expletive] off.”

“But even she recognized the likely unstoppability of the movie, given the nature of her father’s fame. ‘A big reason I haven’t said anything up until this point is because I know a lot of you guys are going to be happy with it,’ she said in another post. ‘The film panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy. And they’re going to be happy with it.”

Maybe if it was filmed in gorgeous Technicolor I might have somehow stuck with it? I love the subtle colors of Rome, especially around dusk. I only know that I’ve always found the concept of Audrey Hepburn’s princess living a restricted, regimented, hemmed-in life hard to swallow. Lame fairy-tale stuff.

April is bustin’ out all over:

“My God, there’s no end to it.” — Ned Beatty’s chubby salesman in Deliverance.

The last two episodes of season #2 of The Pitt really work. They feel amped, declarative, crescendo-ish. That baby really and truly saved Noah Wiley’s mega-stressed, chopper-riding Dr. Rabinovitch. He found the proverbial serene plateau. Did I ever believe that Robbie was actually mulling suicide? No, I never did. But I went along with the conceit.

Did I wind up feeling less hostile towards Dr. Trinity Santos because she was karaoke-singing Alanis Morissette at the very end? In a word, no. It was obviously good that Santos was venting all of the collected rage and stress, but I still think she’s bad news. Okay, I no longer think she should get hit by a car….I’ll give her that.