I love Martin McDonagh‘s Wild Horse Nine….John Malkovich vs. Sam Rockwell vs. Steve Buscemi. Obviously funny as fuck.
Not to mention Mariana di Girolamo, Ailín Salas, Tom Waits and Parker Posey.
“How ’bout you shove it up your flabby little ass…how ’bout that?”
Except Timothee Chalamet was mostly correct.
Everyone respects the elite, elevated art forms of ballet and opera, but the vast majority of average Joes and Janes out there have never attended a performance of ballet or opera. Ever. Partly because they don’t care, but also because they can’t afford the tickets.
I attended two or three operas in the mid ’70s, and in ’76 I attended a ballet performance at the old Paris Opera. I’m very glad this happened, but I haven’t returned since.
Chalamet didn’t say “a stupid thing” — he conveyed a needlessly blunt, seemingly uncaring viewpoint. A tactical error, but he didn’t lie.
Chalamet: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore’. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”
@denofgeektv #JamieLeeCurtis has been there. The actress shared her thoughts on #TimothéeChalamet’s recent comments that “no one cares” about ballet or opera, explaining that in today’s world, it’s going to happen and he can use it as a learning experience. Tap the link in bio to read more. #sxsw #sxsw2026 #jamieleecurtisedit ♬ original sound – Den Of Geek
Obviously the openly gay Kristen Stewart was motivated to play closeted astronaut Sally Ride in The Challenger, a locked-down Amazon miniseries, because of their shared LGBTQ experience and perspective.
Does Variety’s Joe Otterson allude to this aspect? Of course not.
Ride was a heroic figure during the official investigation of the January 1986 Challenger disaster as she covertly slipped info about the O-rings being the principal cause. Ride’s long-term relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy was finally revealed after Ride’s death in 2012.
And that question is “how did the movie in question make you feel?”
Film critics almost never answer this, certainly not honestly. What they do is dance around and dilly-dally, and at the very most hint at a kind of dry, conclusive razmatazz. But I always answer it. Most of my reviews, in fact, address this question head-on.
Hence my 3.12 review of Project Hail Mary, in which I confessed that (a) the Lord-Miller-Gosling pic sent me into “a vague depression pit” as “an ‘oh, no’ feeling began to take hold” due to “a slight comprehension struggle”, (b) “I didn’t hate it but vague discomfort certainly flooded my system” and (c) “I wound up feeling sorta kinda nothing.”
I realize that most critics have given PHM ecstatic thumbs-up responses, and that most HE regulars are going to call me a pisshead for saying what I’ve said. Fine. I don’t care. I know what I know. And I damn sure how it feels to have lead weights strapped to my ankles, and to plummet down into black heaving seas with no hope of salvation.
Variety reported earlier today about Val Kilmer‘s AI-fortified return to commercial cinema in As Deep As The Grave, a film directed and written by Coerte Voorhees. The piece stirred a recolllection of an article I wrote for Empire magazine back in ’92, called “Reanimator”.
Excerpted from “Bring Back The Dead,” initially HE-posted on 10.15.06:
Some day down the road emerging digital technologies will one day be able to bring back actors from the grave and put them in new movies in a highly believable fashion.
One computer graphics guy I spoke to for the piece said this could be a reality within 15 or 20 years. And I remember how Army Archerd wrote something in his Variety column not long after that seemed to comment on the piece, and how he faintly pooh-poohed the possibilities.
Well, here we are 14 years later and a Santa Monica-based company called Image Metrics, according to a fairly thrilling article by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, has just about gotten there.
The cyber duplications of human faces that Image Metrics has lately been composing “seem to possess something more subtle, more ineffable, something that seems to go beneath the skin,” writes Waxman. “And it’s more than a little bit creepy. And if you look at the video on the Times website that accompanies Waxman’s piece (which includes footage of Waxman herself being turned into Shrek), you’ll probably agree.
Image Metrics chairman Andy Wood says he likes to call the process “soul transference,” the key process being that “we can have one human being drive another human character…we can directly mimic the performance of a human being on a model.”
“You look and you wonder: Is it the eyes? Is it the wrinkles around the eyes? Or is it the tiny movements around the mouth?” Waxman asks. “Something. Whatever it is, it could usher in radical change in the making of entertainment. A tool to reinvigorate the movies. Or the path to a Franken-movie monster.”
At the very least, this technology will probably one day lead to a situation in which producers and studios will have a certain advantage over difficult or problematic actors, although I’m sure attorneys for actors worldwide are going to be scrambling henceforth to make sure their clients’ organic value will not be challenged or diminished in any way.
Refinements and improvements will inevitably kick in over the coming years, but Image Metrics is pretty much able right now to reconstitute any dead actor and recast him/her in a new movie opposite live actors. There are many other applications for Image Metrics technology besides bringing back the dead, but this has always held a special fascination for yours truly.
Imagine a 33 year-old Cary Grant (i.e., the one who starred in The Awful Truth) starring opposite Rachel McAdams in a new comedy. Or James Dean back from the dead in a new drama directed by Chris Nolan.
“We could put Marilyn Monroe alongside Jack Nicholson, or Jack Black, or Jack White,” Wood reiterates. “If we want John Wayne to act alongside Angelina Jolie, we can do that.”
On 7.11.18 I posted a riff called “High Tower Drive.” I re-posted on 7.6.22. This is the third time.
“I slept and dreamed that life was beauty / I woke and found that life was duty.” — Ellen Sturgis Hooper, from a book of poems called “The Dial,”
In ’06 or thereabouts I misattributed that line to David Mamet, who had used it for a Hill Street Blues episode called “Wasted Weekend.” I repeated the error in a 7.11.18 riff called “High Tower Drive.” So now we have it straight.
I first heard this line during the original broadcast of this episode on 1.13.87. The guy who said the line was Dennis Franz‘s Norman Buntz, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I was watching Steven Bochco‘s fabled series on a 21″ cable-connected color TV. I was living in a cool little pre-war studio on High Tower Drive, a few hundred yards from the Hollywood Bowl and just down the street from Elliott Gould‘s deco-moderne, elevator-accessible Long Goodbye apartment.
Reanimator‘s Jeffrey Coombs lived in the same complex.
I was working for Cannon Films publicity at the time, writing press kits. My future wife Maggie and I had either just returned from Paris or were planning a trip there. We got married the following October, and Jett came along the following June.
Criterion’s 4K Bluray of John Boorman‘s Point Blank (’67) pops on 4.21.26. I love the extras (which include commentary from Boorman and Steven Soderbergh, an interview with critic Mark Harris, and a “New Reflections on Point Blank” essay by Jim Jarmusch), but I despise Jay Shaw‘s jacket art.
Point Blank‘s color scheme is sublimated to an affected, phoney-baloney artist’s impression of old-school cinema. Or a vague impression of Point Blank by someone who’s never seen it.
A “painted” black-and-white image of Marvin sits on the right (the flesh tone simulates the painted monochrome look of yesteryear theatre lobby stills), and — this is the chief offense — four color-saturated, vertically-cropped images of a stressed and wincing Marvin are on the left.
If you know anything about Marvin’s “Walker” character, you know he’s totally stoned-faced…perhaps the least emotionally expressive tough hombre in film history. Except for a brief flashback showing Walker grinning while flirting with his future wife, Sharon Acker‘s Lynne Walker, Marvin never gives up his feelings…even when fighting or dodging bullets he’s all robotic frost and veneer…no apparent stress or uncertainty or struggle of any kind.
Shaw’s decision to use a still of Marvin getting feral and gritting his teeth in some kind of violent altercation is therefore a total misrepresentation…a fucking lie.
Being a total fool for handsomely mastered 1080p versions of silvery black-and-white films of the ’40s, I’ve been saying for years that I’d love to get my hands on a Hold That Ghost Bluray. I think Ghost, a punchy horror comedy released in August 1941, is the greatest Abbott & Costello film of all time…Bud and Lou as Chuck and Ferdie, directed by Arthur Lubin, costarring Joan Davis and Richard Carlson, and featuring a fat, moustachioed gangster character named Moose Matson!
The problem was that back in ’21 a hi-def Ghost wasn’t selling or renting as an individual unit. You had to shell out $105 for an Abbott & Costello Complete Universal Collection box set. And that wouldn’t do.
But now the Universal home video guys have finally eased up and mastered a stand-alone Hold That Ghost Bluray, and 4K UHD one at that. It pops on 4.28.26.
I was watching Kentucky Sen. Ran Paul, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, interrogate Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, whom Trump has nominated as the next homeland security secretary (i.e., Kristi Noem‘s successor).
But I couldn’t fully concentrate because of the woman sitting to Paul’s rear and right, against the wall…the 20-something fashion model type with perfect ash-blonde hair and hoop earrings. I’m assuming she’s Paul’s executive assistant. I know that almost all conservative politicians love hiring foxy blondes or, failing that, foxy brunettes.
Don Simpson once told me that hotties don’t tend to make the best executive assistants because they’ve been catered to and fawned over since they were two or three years old, being beautiful and all, and therefore haven’t been encouraged by life’s rough and tumble to develop inner qualities. Don’t hire a 10, he meant — you’re better off hiring a 7.5 or an 8.
The halo over the head of legendary United Farm Workers founder and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993, has suddenly and irrevocably melted in the wake of a N.Y. Times expose about allegations that he had his way with young teenage girls in the ‘70s and was otherwise quite the ravaging hound with other women in his orbit.
The 3.18.26 Times story by Manny Fernandez and Sara Hurtes, well-sourced and thoroughly vetted top to bottom, topples the Chavez legend in one bold, swift stroke. Another liberal-humanist icon has been redefined as a groin-driven hound.
Chavez’s rep is even more tarnished now than Martin Luther King’s was when it came out that King plowed through a long list of white women in several motel room assignations. Chavez hasn’t been MLK’ed as much as Epsteined.
By comparison JFK seems a lot more civilized because at least he was sensible enough to steer clear of jail bait.
I hate to say this but in a roundabout way the Times story might lessen some of the heat around Donald Trump, who, according to recently released Epstein file reports, may have violated this or that young teenage girl.
If the Times Chavez story had been published a month ago, Trump might not have bombed Iran.
The bottom line is that powerful men, regardless of political philosophy or strategic alignment, have often had their way with younger women. Men are basically dogs, and political power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. I’m nonetheless shocked that Chavez went for girls who were way below the age of consent…Lolita territory.
We’ve all been through a stage-by-stage Iran War learning process. Over the last few days the Strait of Hormuz choke-hold situation has altered everything. To say that Trump is now between a rock and a hard place is putting it mildly. Hinterland bumblefucks will soon be enraged.
At first taking out the monsters who’ve been funding Hamas and Hezbollah and who murdered tens of thousands of anti-government protestors earlier this year…at first this seemed cleansing and possibly restorational. Now, not so much.
[Posted on 3.11.16] Anti-Iranian-war Tucker Carlson asking Col. Douglas Macgregor how the United States can get out of the Iran war:
“Somebody will say, why should we end it?
“Because if we don’t, we’re going to hit $300 per barrel of oil. We’re going to watch 60 to 80% of stock values crash. People are going to lose trillions in wealth.
“It will be a disaster, and it’s not something we’ll recover from.”
“We’ve thrown all caution to the wind. Think of any number of worst-case scenarios; they’re all on the horizon.”
“President Trump is still president of the United States, not president of Israel.”
“He has to think about the consequences here at home for us for the average man…not for the billionaire class, and not the Epstein class.”
Choke Point:
