“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.

Jordan Ruimy to HE: “I need your five best films of the 1930s for a poll I’m doing.” Only five? You couldn’t at least have asked for ten? Too much elimination!

HE’s top five represent my strongest emotional bonds. Not my idea of the greatest, deepest, most artful vessels of that cinematic decade, but the films I simply like the most on a gut level.

1. Only Angels Have Wings

2. King Kong

3. The Wizard of Oz

4. The Informer

5. The Rules of the Game

The last 40 to 45 minutes of Part One of Gone With The Wind (shelling of Atlanta, evacuating of Atlanta, trip back to Tara, the radish scene) are really and truly GREAT. I’ve been saying this for years.

I don’t care what The Brink of War says — the world was not on the brink of war when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had their big 1986 summit in Reykavik, Iceland.

I was “there”, in a very real sense…I was walking around and reading newspapers and paying attention to NPR newscasts…and the vibe was nothing like the Cuban Missile Crists of October 1962.

J. K. Simmons‘s George Shultz, speaking to Reagan: “If we fail here, there will be war.” Don’t feed me that crap!

Secondly, Jeff Daniels is too heavy and jowly to play Reagan. He’s almost twice the size, width-wise, of the Real McCoy. He looks like Reagan might have looked if he’d gained 55 or 60 pounds. I’m not trying to be cruel here — I’m just reporting what eyes are telling me.

Angel Studios will begin distributing The Brink of War on 8.14.26.

…happened ten and a quarter years ago (1.25.16) and I was right in the middle of it, bruh….a front-row seat at Park City’s Eccles theatre…and I called it what it was, blunt and straight and true….”one of the biggest self-congratulatory circle jerks and politically correct wank-offs in the history of the Sundance Film Festival.”

This flashpoint event marked the birth of the cultish woke insanity that would begin to engulf Hollywood two years later and which ignited big-time during the COVID–infected, George Floyd summer of 2020.

One of the more significant responses to my 1.25.16 report came from Variety ‘s Steven Gaydos, who more or less implied that I was some kind of racist Unibomber who needed to face my own ugliness and get my head straight and so on.

2026 hindsight: Gaydos had his head up his woke-cheerleading glee club woo-woo rectum, and I was channeling the spirit of Dalton Trumbo.

When I was in my early to mid 20s I had a thing for “older women”…30somethings, early to mid 40somethings. I stuck to the same appetites when I reached my 30s. Brief episodic affairs with women of a certain age, etc. Moms, older librarian types, curvy women with gray-streaked hair.

Today’s 20something males are reportedly in a similar place.

In Matt Donnelly’s 4.16 Variety story about Michael B. Jordan‘s forthcoming The Thomas Crown Affair (Amazon, 3.5.27), a remake of a remake of Norman Jewison’s 1968 original, there’s a Jordan quote that suggests some kind of righteous, score-settling reparation angle may be a central element.

Besides directing, producing and starring as the slickly felonious lead character (i.e., more or less the same wealthy, sexy smoothie played by Steve McQueen in ’68 and Pierce Brosnan in John McTiernan’s 1999 refresh), Jordan is turning Crown into a social revenge agent — a thief who’s looking to correct or counter-balance historical crimes against people of color.

Thomas Crown, according to Donnelly, “wants to retrieve precious artifacts misappropriated, stolen from their rightful creators [and] sold over the centuries [by] the 1% monsters who buy and trade history and human lives.”

Jordan is referring, of course, to the usual demonic racist white-guy baddies, represented in this instance by Kenneth Branagh. Branagh’s shithead will either suffer a grievous financial loss or perhaps be murdered as payback for heinous crimes. Remember Jordan machine-gunning those overweight KKK crackers in Sinners? Same basic revenge deal, I’m presuming, in next year’s Crown.

“I didn’t want a reboot,” Jordan told Variety last November. “I wanted a reimagination. The first two films were about rich white guys stealing for fun. That doesn’t land today. Ours is more personal. The stakes are higher. [But our film’s] still got the fashion, romance.”

McQueen’s Crown was into the thrill of stealing and getting away with it, sure, but Jewison’s film presented him as a kind of romantic, super-rich, three-piece-suit-wearing Clyde Barrow, a quietly rebellious loner striking a symbolic blow against the establishment and straightlaced bourgeois values.

Considering the repeated emphasis on cunnilingus in Sinners and Faye Dunaway‘s notorious simulation of sex with chess pieces in the ’68 version, it’s pretty much guaranteed that Jordan and costar Adria Arjona (in the Dunaway role) will indulge in some kind of heated activity, symbolic or otherwise.

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