No one will ever, ever accuse The Bride! of being plodding or conventional.  It is really, really looney-tunes in a headache-inducing way.  Manic this and that, turned up to eleven or even twelve.  

Thematically it exudes sputtering feminist rage and an all-around, never-say-die contempt for…well, dudes, obviously, but also the sensibilities of Joe and Jane Popcorn. It all but vomits in their laps.   

It’s wildly “creative”, you bet, but it also struck me as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s professional suicide note.

Friendo:  “Stop it!  Maggie Gyllenhaal will be fine! Mark my words: She’ll make another film every bit as good as The Lost Daughter.”

HE to Friendo:  “Okay. She just had to get the spitting, shrieking rage out of her system, you’re saying.

“But Jessie Buckley’s licking, cat-shrieking, super-wackazoid performance is all on the surface. Superficially grotesque. Will you please tell me what she was so enraged about in that opening nightclub scene? She was just growling, howling and hissing…it all boils down to showboating.

“We all know Martin Landau’s famous observation that when called upon to play a character with a drinking problem, only bad actors pretend to be sloppy drunk. Real alcoholics do everything in their power to conceal the fact that they’re bombed. 

“Buckley is delivering a howling, brute-male-hating feminist fury, but she’s so unplugged and such an exhibitionist in this instance, she’s like Landau’s bad actor playing a lush.

“Thank God for the logical, plain-spoken normality of Annette Bening; ditto Peter Sarsgaard’s grubby, unshaven detective.”

…are the things you chickened out on when young, or even not too long ago. Or avoided because they seemed too thorny or challenging.

“Of all words by thought or pen, none so sad as ‘it might have been’” — spoken by Stanley Holloway in The Lavender Hill Mob (‘51).

“Building a model from your own material…that’s how this works…it’s about taking out all the technical, logistical stuff that gets in the way.” — from Ben Affleck‘s attempt to explain Interpositive.

But there’s something incongruent about the term “Oscar season expert” and Chris Rosen‘s blue-plaid flannel shirt.

Flannel shirts are downmarket “normcore.” Back in the 20th Century they were favored by lesbians. Today their wearers are basically saying “I don’t care how much of a rural Maine backwater hayseed type I resemble or how indifferent or unconcerned wearing one of these shirts make me seem.”

You just can’t sell the idea of being on top of the antsy, prickly, terminally diseased, ever-shfting world of Oscar-odds calibrating while wearing a blue-plaid flannel shirt. I haven’t done an on-camera thing for several months, granted, but if I did one I wouldn’t consider wearing anything other than small-collared Kooples shirts or black Zara T-shirts, possibly shielded by a dark leather motorcycle jacket.

Richard Rushfield‘s threads are okay; ditto Katey Rich‘s unpretentious, open-collared Iowa college professor shirt.

Apparel-choices aside, this is a reasonably “engaging” discussion. I didn’t find it boring, exactly, but I began to lose patience early on. Why don’t they just blurt stuff out? You know what I mean. Have these guys ever heard the terms “woke-friendly” or “virtue-signalling” or “culturally isolated”? Or, you know, “completely indifferent to the likes and dislikes of Joe and Jane Popcorn”? Academy voters live on their own little planet. Just effing say that.

The fact that I’m flirting with the idea of buying a 4K UHD Bluray version of Hell or High Water, even though i’ve seen it five or six times….this means something.

Posted on 11.13.16:

Trump voter hinterland food (smoked meats, ribs, baked beans, mac ‘n’ cheese) served at Hell or High Water party.

I was going to title this post “God help me.” But God has never once helped me get through a problematic film so why the hell would he suddenly change course and come to my assistance a few hours hence? God doesn’t care if I suffer through a downer movie. He/She/It is supremely indifferent. God to HE: “If you’re enough of a sadomasochist to submit to Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s just-opened film, that’s on you. But I’ll watch it with you, and we can talk it out after the show, if you want.”

“Hit me”, said the masochist. “I won’t”, said the sadist.

Sony Picture Classics’ upcoming release of Kirk Jones I Swear (4.24). an origin story about Tourette’s syndrome sufferer John Davidson in the ’80s and ’90s, is suddenly a hot-potato thing.

Davidson sparked a furor during the recent 2026 BAFTA award ceremony by shouting out the N-word while Sinners costars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage. Davidson’s Tourette-spasm outburst led to Jordan winning the Best Actor prize at the SAG Actor awards a week later, primarily due to a virtue-signalling sympathy vote.

Suggested slogan for SPC’s I Swear poster: “He said it, but he didn’t mean it.”

Posted on 2.23.26: Tourette’s sufferers have no ability to control their tics, spasms and vocalizings, but it’s hard to believe that Davidson’s terminology had nothing to do with Jordan and Lindo being front-and-center. Davidson is more specifically grappling with coprolalia, or “the utterance of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks.”

Did Davidson shout out “ferris wheel!” or “muff diver!” or “Lamborghini!” or “muscle car”? No, he shouted out a racial slur. How can anyone argue that this wasn’t a form of commentary?

Consider the famous Tourette’s scene from Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square (’17).

During a one-on-one between Dominic West‘s Julian, a famous artist, and Annica Liljeblad‘s Sonja, a Tourette’s sufferer starts interrupting with sexually provocative taunts like “show us your boobs!,” “whore!” and “camel-toe!”

These remarks were responses to Liljeblad, an attractive Nordic blonde with great gams. The Square guy didn’t blurt out anything racial or scatalogical — he went sexual for an obvious reason.

I haven’t had a brewski in almost 14 years (I went sober on 3.20.12) so I’m hardly an authority on old-fart beers. But allow me to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut and say that the brands nobody seems to drink any more are Rheingold, Schaefer, Schlitz, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Ballantine Ale (“What’ll you have?”).

I know nothing, but the only old-time beers that seem to be still commercially vital are Budweiser, Miller High Life and Heineken. Am I wrong? Probably to some extent.

I don’t know from craft beers.

During my drinking years I used to swear by lime- or guave-flavored beers. I used to buy six-packs of Desperado bottled beer in Cannes….loved that taste.

This too.

The atrociously reviewed The Bride! will not become a Norbit situation for Jessie Buckley — her Hamnet Best Actress Oscar is 100% locked and assured — zero Bride! fallout.

In the view of N.Y. Post critic Johnny Oleksinski, Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Bride! is “one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job. Only seconds in, I regretted leaving my trusty torch and pitchfork at home.”

Den of Geek‘s David Crow: “At the risk of banality when discussing Frankenstein, The Bride! is a monstrosity of half-finished flourishes and fancies that’s been stitched together into what could charitably be called an abomination.”

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “The Bride! is a stitched-skin-and-black-lipstick version of an outlaws-in-love saga. It’s like Joker 2 starring a grunge version of the Munsters, with dollops of Sid and Nancy and Natural Born Killers.”

“Pretty much everything here feels like it’s being done for effect rather than to convey real emotion. That’s the case especially with Jessie Buckley’s shouty performance in the title role. What a strange quirk of timing that the Irish actress will likely be winning an Oscar for Hamnet just as this wretched mess is unleashed upon the world.” — THR‘s David Rooney.

N.Y. Times reporter Shawn McCreesh, posted yesterday morning (3.3.26):

“While meeting with Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany in the Oval Office on Tuesday morning, President Trump decided to publicly answer reporters’ questions about his war on Iran for the first time.

“One of the first questions he got was this: What does he imagine the worst-case scenario in Iran to be?

“’I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,’ Trump said. ‘Right, that could happen? We don’t want that to happen. It would probably be the worst…you go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who’s no better.”

This means, obviously, that Mojtaba Khamenei, the 57 year-old son and likely heir apparent of the recently murdered Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader until last weekend…this means that Mojtaba has to be blown into a lumpy mound of strawberry preserves…splattered brain bits, hair on the walls.