Return of “No Hugs, Sorrows, Laments — I Prefer Jerry the Flinty Prick“, posted on 8.2.16:

Lewis excerpt from 1995 Sundance Film Festival interview: “I sat down with Jerry Lewis to talk about Funny Bones. The interview happened at the Stein-Erickson. Right away you could feel the testy fear-factor vibe, but I enjoy that as it sharpens your game. Several people (publicists, etc.) were sitting and standing around us in a semi-circle. It was almost like we were performing.

“All through our relatively brief chat I was thinking “shit…Lewis is in a testy mood and it might get testier. But he won’t respect me if I ask kiss-ass questions so fuck it…I’m just going to look jim i9n the eye and taklk straight from the shoulder.

“A year or two earlier I’d read and enjoyed Nick Tosches‘ Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, so I asked Lewis if he’d read it. He had, he said, and I knew right away I’d stepped into it. The book was hurtful to a friend, he said, and that was the end of it. ‘Ask me something else,’ he said, steam literally hissing out of his head like a radiator, ‘before I get pissed.’ Before?

“But I liked Lewis overall. He’s tough, shrewd, funny, been around, done it all, seen it all.”

“What I’d really like to see is a story of 90-year-old Jerry Langford, the late-night talk show star who was kidnapped by Rupert Pupkin back in the early ’80s. Jerry is semi-retired but still plugging away, involved in real estate and other ventures, still playing golf, still on the cryptic and blunt side, still disdainful when the occasion requires and is no one’s idea of a gentle or lovable fellow. And yet he’s largely unbent and, for an old guy, still full of beans. And he’s nice with kids and dogs.

“Does ‘mean’ Mr. Langford feel badly about still being flinty and not all that considerate with each and every person he deals with? Okay, maybe, but he’s ecstatic about the fact that he’s alive and crackling and living a pretty good life for a guy born in 1926. He’s on Twitter and Facebook and owns over 400 Blurays. And he has a 79 year-old girlfriend that he “puts it to” every so often (i.e., extra-strength Cialis), and he rides a bicycle and walks two or three miles every day and lifts weights. Who needs love, kindness and forgiveness when you’ve got your health? Langford pushes on!”

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This is a relatively minor matter but then again it’s not, certainly not in terms of Hollywood’s archival history and shared audience memories and whatnot.

Most of William Wellman‘s The Ox Bow Incident (‘43) was shot by Arthur Miller on 20th Century Fox sound stages (Pico Blvd. in West Los Angeles) under the usual optimum conditions. So why is this legendary scene so effing blurry?

This 75-minute film was Blurayed ten years ago (I own a copy) so what’s the problem?

Savannah Guthrie wouldn’t be returning to Today if she hadn’t accepted the devastating, all-but-confirmed reality about her mother Nancy’s disappearance. She’s thrown in the towel.

Not only is Nancy gone, but the authorities don’t have a clue. It’s a cold case. Worse, as suggested yesterday or the day before, this could be the new Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Rob Shuter shares with Maureen Callahan….good stuff. The Today ratings when Guthrie returns!

I don’t like “rosy”, and I don’t care if it’s a generally approved spelling. The core concept is a pleasantly fragrant, just-bloomed rose, and if you’re talking about a robust and buoyant future, the spelling needs an “e”…rosey.

What’s so terrible about prioritizing the rights of U.S. citizens over those of illegal aliens? Congressional Dems erred by sitting down.

“You fat sorry sack of s**t, people hate you!” James Carville talks directly to Donald Trump for five minutes, and it’s the most brutal five minutes of video you’ve ever seen. pic.twitter.com/xWLf4dkiLN

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) February 24, 2026

If the below films wind up playing at Cannes ’26, I will be happy and jazzed. My blood will be up. Obviously a strong lineup and then some.

1949 (d: Pawel Pawlikowski)
Fjord (d: Cristian Mungiu)
Jack of Spades (d: Joel Coen)
Coward (d: Lukas Dhont)
The Entertainment System is Down (d: Ruben Östlund)
Bitter Christmas (d: Pedro Almodovar)
Minotaur (d: Andrey Zvyagintsev)
Parallel Tales (d: Asghar Farhadi)
Switzerland (d: Anton Corbijn)
The Diary of a Chambermaid (d: Radu Jude)
Bucking Fastard (d: Werner Herzog…a kin of Fitzcarraldo?)
Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (d: Jane Schoenbrun…slasher schlock?)
Paper Tiger (d: James Gray)

I don’t believe that Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind will be submitted. I don’t believe Malick is capable of finishing it. I think he’s flaked and dithered himself into a corner, and can’t figure a way out.

Which is why the truly artful Marty Supreme has been back-handed, mostly, I suspect, by progressive women and mainly because it’s about an overly selfish, callous, non-progressive lead character.

This is also why One Battle After Another and Sinners are such hot Oscar contenders, because they’re about devotional, good-hearted fringe characters doing what they can to help the vulnerable and the oppressed.

First and foremost wokeys want movies that say the right political things…that’s their bottom line. Which was the same bottom line as far as Nikolai Lenin, Mao Zedong, Joseph Goebbels and post-1966 Jean Luc Godard were concerned.

Nick Cave responds to Wim Wenders recent statement about art cinema vs. political films: “Wim Wenders reaffirmed my understanding of him as a passionately principled, thoughtful, and courageous man — a person who cares profoundly about film and the state of the creative world.

“His words were a caring, gentle, and protective gesture, directed not only at the artistic community but at humanity itself, and despite the predictable pile-on, I suspect that many artists, maybe most, will genuinely appreciate his words.”

“[Wenders might have been] trying to save the Berlinale from succumbing to the fate of those festivals that have become little more than a narrowing of the cultural imagination”, criticising many modern events for having become subject to “a single monolithic ideology — one voice, one cause, one dissent”.

Cave: “I do not imagine for a moment that Wim thinks art should ignore the great and persistent injustices of the world. He seems to believe, as I do, that using art to raise awareness of these injustices can be extremely effective, but perhaps he also believes that art is more than the sum of its utility…it is more than a tool or a weapon.”

“Maybe he believes, as I do, that at its core, great art exists purely for its own sake – and that at its most transformative it reveals itself subtly, ambiguously, and curiously; that it is something we approach with awe and wonder, that humbles us whilst also enlarging our hearts, that works its way into our souls and spirits, guiding us towards what is good, beautiful, and true.

“Art captivates us and imparts a sense of what it means to be human, broadening our understanding of the world and our own place within it — that we have the right to love, laugh, cry, and be thrilled by the world. This is art’s largesse — to remind us that life is worth living.”

When I think of the peak triumphs of the late Robert Carradine, the gifted bipolar actor who’s just taken his life at age 71, I don’t think of his work in Jeff Kanew‘s Revenge of the Nerds (’84) or Lizzie Maguire (Disney Channel series, began in ’01), which were both made for mass-market schmucks.

I think instead of Carradine’s edgy, vulnerable performances in a pair of films about frustrated men living outside the straight-and-narrow — his mentally unstable, guitar-playing veterans hospital patient in Hal Ashby‘s Coming Home (‘78) and his West Village gay guy dying of AIDS in Michael Lindsay-Hogg and William Hoffman‘s As Is (‘86), which aired on Showtime and attracted some award nominations but enjoys little recognition today.

Film critic friendo to HE: “I’ve never even heard of As Is.” HE to friendo: “Hah…I rest my case.”

The Carradine obits I’ve read so far (including those by Deadline‘s Tom Tapp and Mike Fleming) have ignored As Is.

Showtime’s adaptation of Hoffman’s 1985 off-B’way play is listed on Carradine’s Wikipedia page, but it isn’t mentioned in Wiki’s narrative summary of his TV career. Which seems odd.

Carradine’s As Is performance, arguably his last in the realm of real-deal anguish and complex emotional damage, was nominated for a CableACE award.

I never wanted to see Revenge of the Nerds, and, to my immense satisfaction, I never have. I realize that my instinctual cowardly fear of submitting to Nerds has no value. A friend insists it was actually a witty, widely liked and much appreciated ‘80s comedy…it wasn’t To Be or Not To Be, but it was genuinely well done.”

HE to friendo: “Not a coarse tits & zits comedy?” Friendo to HE: “It emerged from the swamp of that genre, true, but Nerds was genuinely a cut above. If you do a post on Carradine and Nerds. You’ll witness some nostalgia and affection.” HE to friendo: “Okay.”

There are those who swear by Carradine’s cameo in Mean Streets. He played an unnamed gunman who shoots a drunk, played by Robert’s significantly older half-brother David. The grabber is how Robert slowly, almost ritualistically takes his cap off before firing, which allows his extra-long hippie hair to fall to his shoulders.

“Prostitution”? Joe Gillis simply acquiesced to a semblance of a pay-for-play MILF relationship with Norma Desmond, except he never wanted her sexually.

Call it a standard quid pro quo, cash-on-the-barrelhead transactional relationship. What’s the biggie? Is Gillis lying to Desmond by assuring her that he loves her and will always be loyal? No. Plus he admits at the halfway mark that she’s the only person in Los Angeles who has treated him with a semblance of decency or kindness. Okay, so she wants him to fuck her as a side benefit. Is that a crime?

Flipping the coin over, how many tens of thousands of Los Angeles women have been in such relationships in exchange for security and a flush lifestyle, and nobody bats an eye?

William Holden didn’t have to end up dead in Gloria Swanson‘s swimming pool. And he really didn’t have to submit to self-loathing when he began to fall in love with Nancy Olson’s Betty Schaefer, a fellow screenwriter.

Don’t forget that the second half of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard was largely driven by self-revulsion — a young male screenwriter feeling morally sickened by his willingness to sexually satisfy a 50 year-old former silent-era star in exchange for a swanky lifestyle.

1950 was one sexually uptight year, you bet. It saw both the release of Sunset Boulevard and the widespread condemnation of Ingrid Bergman for having had Roberto Rossellini’s baby outside of wedlock. In the eyes of the general public there was nothing more odious than unsavory sexual behavior, or any kind of hanky panky outside the usual proper, middle-class boundaries.

But Gillis could have have just laid his cards on the table as he explained to Schaefer, “Look, I was broke…the finance company was about to take my car away.…I’m not evil…I’ve simply been using Desmond and living off her largesse while I figure out my next move.

“Plus I did what I could to finesse her awful Salome script. What’s so terrible about that? Okay, so I’ve been to bed with her a few times. I’ve laid there while she rides me like a cowboy on a palamino…big deal!”

Schaefer: “Don’t worry about it, Joe. You did what you had to do in order to survive. Now pack your things. You’re moving in with me.”

Gillis: “But we haven’t even been intimate yet. And what about your devoted fiancé, nice-guy Artie (Jack Webb)?”

Schaefer: “Artie’s a sweetheart but I don’t love him…not really. Largely because he’s too possessive plus he’s not from the creative side, and writing is my lifeblood. We’re not a great match. I’ve submitted to his sexual advances on occasion but he doesn’t turn me on. I’ve never once blown him and I’m sorry but that means something. This may sound cold but all’s fair in love and war.”

HE commenter Dixon Steel (two years ago): “The image of anyone blowing Joe Friday is not a pleasant one.”

HE commenter Naido: “Yeah, my main takeaway is that now I have to think about Webb being blown. Or not blown, which would make me sad.

“I think most guys doing today what Gillis was doing would feel this way about themselves. If it were truly transactional and not a Macron thing. Not all would, but not all would have back then.”

Remember “Mandy” in Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut? The heroin-addicted hooker who nearly od’ed at Sydney Pollack‘s mansion, and then apparently attended the big orgy only to end up in a Manhattan morgue locker?

She was played by Julienne Davis, who’s now 62 or thereabouts. Davis has written a smart, well-honed piece (paywalled) about the parallels between EWS and the Jeffrey Epstein history, as well as the Epstein echoes contained in Kubrick’s Lolita (’62).

Here are excerpts: