…who played the airplane-wing gremlin in the 1983 feature version of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” with John Lithgow in the William Shatner role. It was a matter of supreme indifference even when Twilight Zone: The Movie first popped. The original gremlin was played by Nick Cravat.

Anthony Perkins as a “young American who can’t control his exploding passions”…an inside allusion within the ad department.

Only one of these nine directors ever forced a lead actor to wear a tennis-ball coif in a major feature:

What do you do, precaution-wise, if you’re approaching a major highway intersection or airport runway upon which vehicles travel at high speeds?

I can tell you what I’d do. I would first of all stop my vehicle before crossing and then — this is kind of important, not to mention a utilization of common sense — I would look both ways on the highway or runway to make sure there are no cars or big trucks or jets approaching from the right or left. Even if there’s a green light telling you it’s okay to cross, you still make sure by looking both ways for rogue traffic.

Short version: I would use my effing eyeballs before crossing.

Apparently the LGA air-traffic controller screwed up by telling the fire truck he was good to cross runway #4, but the fire truck driver was a total fool.

Whatever happened to Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake? It was released by Sony Pictures Classics six or seven weeks ago — February 6, 2026 — and then more or less sank beneath the waves. Where is it? Has it vaporized into thin air? One of Cannes ‘25’s most celebrated films was blown off by the Academy, which apparently made SPC run for cover. At the very least this beautiful little film deserves to be Blurayed and streamed ASAP.

“This Film Is Going To Sink in and Spread Out“, posted on 2.21.26:

I’m just going to spit this out: Richard Brody‘s New Yorker review of Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake is more eloquent and deeply felt than the Cake review I tapped out in Cannes nine months ago.

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.

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Variety‘s Esa Keslassy to Cannes topper Thierry Fremaux: “What is the status of the Cannes Film Festival’s selection today?”

Fremaux: “It’s March, and we’re still waiting for many films. We’re seeing some great things. The excitement comes from the artists themselves. The announcement that Peter Jackson or Barbra Streisand are coming, for example, already makes you want to be on the Croisette, doesn’t it?”

A good portion of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival lineup will be revealed in Paris on April 9th. Last-minute additions always pop through between mid and late April.

I’m still hopeful and excited about catching Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Fatherland, which is apparently destined to debut on the Croisette after all; ditto Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur (a lock), Anton Corbijn‘s Switzerland, Joel Coen‘s Jack of Spades, Pedro Almodovar‘s Bitter Christmas, Asghar Farhadi‘s Parallel Tales, Radu Jude The Diary of a Chambermaid, and possibly James Gray‘s Paper Tiger.

But I’m still horribly bummed out by news that Ruben Ostlund‘s The Entertainment System is Down and Lukas Dhont‘s Coward will be no-shows.

We’re all sensing or intuiting on some level that Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day may be a vague alien programmer of some kind (certainly compared to Close Encounters and E.T.), and we all understand that Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey was never even on the table (the notoriously reclusive Nolan never unveils his films in Cannes), and that Digger, the Alejandro Inarritu-Tom Cruise collaboration, is being held for Venice.

Jordan Ruimy‘s last spitball rundown included All of a Sudden (d: Ryusuke Hamaguchi), Her Private Hell (d: Nicolas Winding Refn), Out of this World (d: Albert Serra), Butterfly Jam (d: Kantemir Balagov), Wake of Umbra (d: Carlos Reygadas)

Keslassy: “The next season of The White Lotus** will be filmed on the French Riviera, with a plot centered around the Cannes Film Festival. What discussions have you had with Mike White and HBO regarding this?”

Fremaux: “I cannot answer that. You’ll have to ask the production team, who are currently working on it.

Keslassy: “How many films have you already selected for the competition [thus far]?”

Fremaux: “About half.”

Keslassy: “And how many do you have left to watch?”

Fremaux: “As I speak, there are 400 in the screening room. I’m heading back!”

Fremaux: “I’m the first to wonder if Cannes is the right place for a particular film to have its world premiere on the Croisette. If I don’t think so, I’m not going to sacrifice a film’s life for a red carpet.”

Ruimy on Fremaux-Keslassy: “Nothing we didn’t already know. The Inarritu-Cruise is going to Venice. Nolan has never premiered a film at Cannes. Ostlund is nowhere near done editing and will go to Cannes next year.”

HE reply: “The Ostlund is a chamber piece set on an airborne 747, right? Pure dialogue, pure interiors, pure eccentric social conflict. Saying a film is ‘not ready’ can sometimes be a cover term that indicates it’s not currently working and — who knows? — that Ostlund needs to fiddle around a bit more.”

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If, God forbid, a semblance of today’s manosphere and more particularly a “looksmaxing” theology had been culturally influential when I was 15, I might have become a follower, or at least a secret one.

For I was mostly a miserable mopehead and an odd, socially insecure duck, seemingly loathed by girls in their mid teens (they certainly had enough agency back then to repeatedly tell me to buzz off…one actually called me “buster” when I tried to launch a convo at the Mindowaskin swim club) and facing all manner of taunts and teasing from my so-called male friends.

I might well have admired Braden Peters (aka “Clavicular”) for I was also convinced I was homely and unworthy of any socially honorable distinction, on top of which I was mostly earning shitty grades.

I eventually grew out of that misery, but long is the way and hard that, out of hell, leads up to light.

The shaking and rattling of mailboxes and railroad signal poles is ridiculous…makes no sense at all…but the first 100 seconds are perfect. The set-up comes when the first pair of headlights comes along, Richard Dreyfuss signals him and the guy pulls up and yells “you’re in the middle of the road, jackass!” And then the payoff: A second “car” appears behind Dreyfuss’s truck, he signals it to go around and….

If only the rest of Close Encounters was this clever, this subtle.

The lyric goes “and all the joy within you dies”…not “hope.”

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The internet’s psychotic thrashing of Timothee Chalamet in the wake of his losing the Best Actor Oscar…the binge lasted five days and is finally done. (I think.) But one last article in this vein appeared yesterday in the right-leaning New York Sun — not another witch-burning piece but a calm and rational assessment of why it happened.

The author, Tom Teodorczuk, interviewed yours truly and posted a two-paragraph quote. My agreeing to discuss the Chalamet thing with a Sun staffer doesn’t mean I’m a rightie. I remain a sensible centrist.

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Jordan Ruimy is hearing (but doesn’t definitely know) that the following films won’t play Cannes ’26 — Ruben Östlund‘s The Entertainment System Is Down, James Gray‘s Paper Tiger, Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind, Lukas Dhont‘s Coward, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Fatherland (previously titled 1949), and Mike Leigh‘s untitled whatever.

Posted on 3.2.13: I had a nice 20-minute chat this morning with actress Valerie Perrine, who’s best known for her Oscar-nominated performance as Honey Bruce in Bob Fosse‘s Lenny (’74). (And for which she won Best Actress at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival and Best Supporting Actress from the New York Film Critics Circle.)

As I mentioned yesterday, Perrine will be doing a q & a with Larry Karaszewski between screenings of Lenny and George Roy Hill‘s Slaughterhouse Five on Thursday, 10.7, at Santa Monica’s Aero.

Perrine started in show business as a Las Vegas topless revue dancer, which she did for several years. She didn’t land her first screen role in Diamonds Are Forever, she says — that’s an IMDB error.

She was around 28 when she lucked into the supporting role of Montana Wildhack in Slaughterhouse Five (which came out in June 1972). She then made history as the first actress to do a boob-baring scene on American televison during a May 1973 PBS airing of Bruce Jay Friedman‘s Steambath. And then came Lenny — her career peak.

Perrine costarred in the first two Chris Reeve Superman films, of course, playing Lex Luthor’s (i.e., Gene Hackman‘s) girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher.

Her career peak era ended after costarring in Nancy Walker‘s Can’t Stop the Music (’80), which Perrine believes pretty much killed her career or at least kept her from being cast in first-rate films.

Perrine costarred in Tony Richardson‘s The Border (’82), although, she says, she had signed for that film before Can’t Stop the Music. And from then on acted in whatever came along — TV, indie movies. Never say die, keep on plugging, tomorrow’s another day. Perrine’s last mainstream score was a costarring role in Nancy Meyers‘ What Women Want (’00).

Perrine isn’t given to expansive answers but that’s cool.

She’s a bit like Jennifer Lawrence in that she’s not into arduous preparation for a part — she just likes to walk on set and keep things as spontaneous as possible. She didn’t have a huge amount to say about working with with Fosse on Lenny or about Lamont Johnson‘s Last American Hero (’75), an excelllent film in which she also co-starred. But she told a pretty good tale about getting the attention of Slaughterhouse Five casting agent Marion Dougherty.

She mentioned that her health isn’t in the greatest condition these days but that it might be just a temporary setback (let’s hope). Really nice lady, good to touch base.

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…is if the film in question is still locked in the DVD dungeon…no high-def streaming, no 1080 Bluray, no 4K.

This is the situation with Alan Pakula‘s Rollover (’81), a noirish thriller set in the world of high-stakes banking. Whoever owns the home video rights has calculated that it’s a loss leader…”fuck it…nobody remembers this film, and the financial world shenanigans no longer apply…and nobody cares about Kris Kristoffersion or Jane Fonda in a romantinc context”…something like that.

Rollover has been written off…extinct.

In ’80 I was treadmilling along as a Manhattan journalist when portions of Rollover were being shot there, and I remember talking to a very sharp, well-connected female journalist who had written a profile of Kristofferson, and she said that he and Fonda had an affair during production.

It was strictly one of those “only during principal photography” deals that never crossed over into their off-set lives, she said, and so nobody (including Fonda’s then-husband Tom Hayden) was the wiser. Or gave a shit…whatever.

…can go fuck itself. I watched it late yesterday afternoon and didn’t so much as crack a smile. I didn’t just dislike it — I turned it off after 45 minutes. It’s silly and oafish in a forced kind of way. Costello’s adolescent antics are truly, excessively unfunny. All the supporting players (including Crocker Jarmon from The Candidate**) just stand there like bowling pins as they watch Bud and Lou recite their jibber-jabber material. Plus Lou yelps too much.

** Don Porter