Oscars Round Up - Comfortably Dumb

OSCARS ROUND UP

Well…the Oscars happened last night and I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that once again I won my Oscar pool! The bad news is that the only reason I won my Oscar pool is because I have no friends and no family left to compete against (Fyi – my one-legged wife left me for a sexy Neil Diamond impersonator with a bad heart). Such is the plight of the unlovable loser – or winner as the case may be!!

I thought Sinners was going to be the big winner, and while it did pretty well, it wasn’t the juggernaut I thought it would be…proving once again that I am still slightly flummoxed by the “new” Academy. Sinners did well but it didn’t win the middle of the road awards a juggernaut needs, and it lost head-to-head against One Battle After Another too much to be Oscar champion.

Speaking of One Battle After Another, it is well-documented that I am no fan, but PT Anderson is one of my all-time favorite directors, so his winning Best Director and Best Picture did not fill me with rage…only a touch of ennui with a dash of malaise. My one hope is that he gets his mojo back and starts making masterpieces again. I admit I am not optimistic.

Jessie Buckley, Amy Madigan and Sean Penn winning acting awards is fine…but Michael B. Jordan winning Best Actor is so ridiculous as to be clinically insane. Jordan seems like a nice guy, but over the years he has shown himself to be a remarkably limited…and often bad, actor.

I once thought, back in The Wire and Friday Night Lights days, that Jordan was going to be Denzel 2.0…but as he’s become more famous, he’s become much worse an actor, which is disheartening. On the bright side, at least he’s not an asshole.

Ryan Coogler winning Best Original Screenplay is…predictable and absurd. Sinners is the type of movie that stupid people think is smart and dumb people think is deep…and the script is a perfect monument to that thesis.

I loved Coogler’s first big film Fruitvale Station – also starring Michael B. Jordan…but since then he’s churned out big studio slop that people have fawned over and that I’ve been repulsed by.

Black Panther is a middling Marvel movie…Black Panther II is…GARBAGE. Creed is much the same. And Sinners is sort of an amalgam of all of the things wrong with those franchise films stuffed into a derivative new franchise. Ugh.

Also on the bright side…Coogler seems like a good guy…so I am glad for him but not glad for what his success means for the art of cinema.

Cinematography went…as I predicted, to Autumn Durald Arkapaw of Sinners, the first woman to win the award. The cinematography of Sinners is actively awful (as was her earlier work on Black Panther)…but because she is a woman, and a woman of color to boot, she was a shoe in to win this award over a bevy of white dudes. Shrug.

The actual Oscar telecast seemed to me to be a disaster. Conan O’Brien hosted and to put it mildly…he struggled. I’ve never understood the appeal of Conan and never thought he was ever funny…and he proved those sentiments to be accurate on Sunday night.

Hosting the Oscars is a tough gig…hosting the Oscars when you aren’t funny but are trying to be seems like a Herculean task…one that Conan is incapable of doing well.

The ceremony was stuffed with cringy bits by award presenters and a bevy of technical glitches. The only two funny parts were when some poor bastard desperately wanted to say something after winning an award but was played off and his mic turned off…which made me laugh out loud, and the other when the luminous Anne Hathaway presented an award with fashion queen Anna Wintour. Hathaway and Wintour did two funny bits that were so well executed they deserved Oscars themselves. Bravo!!

As for me, there will be no “Bravo!!” My shameful performance in my Oscar picks is a true embarrassment and will be a stain I will never, ever be able to wash off. I got a measly 18 out of 24 picks correct…and that’s with giving me the benefit of the doubt on the tie in the Best Short Film category.

My hope is that since we live in a country and culture that has a chronic case of alarmingly aggressive myopia and has the memory of a Tsetse fly, that by next year’s Oscars everyone will have forgotten my abysmal performance this year and I will be able to arrogantly boast about my Oscar picking prowess once again.

But for now, I will, like our degenerate and corrupt ruling class when they’re exposed as being deviant criminals, simply feign humility and promise to “do better” going forward.

Thanks for reading and keep an eye out later this week for the pinnacle of cinema awards…THE MICKEYS©®…and also THE SLIP-ME-A-MICKEY©® awards which recognize the very worst of 2025’s movies.

©2026

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 152 - It Was Just and Accident

On this episode, Barry and I bask in the glow of the brilliance that is Jafar Panahi's fantastic film, It Was Just an Accident - nominated for Best International Feature Film at this year's Academy Awards. Topics discussed include the film's simplicity, Panahi's artistry, and the benefits of creation through limitation. Then stay tuned for a brief rundown of the Oscars and our Oscar picks. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 152 - It Was Just and Accident

Thanks for listening!

©2026

98th Academy Awards - 2025 Oscar Predictions Post

98TH ACADEMY AWARDS

It is that time of year again when the good narcissists of Hollywood gather round to pucker up and kiss some ass and break their arms patting themselves on the back…IT’S OSCAR TIME!!

Everyone knows that the Oscars are the most important, most profound, and most holy of events in the human calendar. God created the earth in six days and on the seventh day he watched the Oscars…and was flabbergasted that a pedestrian piece of shit CODA won Best Picture a few years ago.

Speaking of pedestrian, don’t believe the hype regarding 2025. This past year has been a rather mundane movie year…there were a handful of movies I liked but none of them rose to the level of being called “great”. That hasn’t stopped the ever-growing collection of sycophants and shitheads who have declared the relentlessly sub-par One Battle After Another and Sinners to be cinematic masterpieces. Yawn.

The Oscars have diminished greatly in the 21st Century, and its loss of cultural cache has been hard-earned. The film industry has forgotten how to make great movies and that is a function of poor leadership and decision-making at the studio level, and artistic atrophy at the filmmaking level.

Movie stars are a relic of the past…and influencers are the medium of the moment…Timothee Chalamet seems to be a little bit of both and not enough of either.

As for the awards come Sunday…well…I have not lost an Oscar pool since I’ve been swimming in them…so if you want to be a big hit at the Oscar party you no doubt will not be attending because no one has Oscar parties anymore because no one cares about the Oscars…then you’ve come to the right place.

In all honestly…I would not put money on my Oscar picks this year. I have struggled to figure out what the hell the Academy has been doing in recent years and all the usual Academy tells seem to be getting turned on their heads. Will that stop me from boastfully declaring my picks while acting like I know what I’m talking about? No, of course not.

Thankfully the world is deeply enmeshed in a plethora of peace and prosperity and no pedophile cult of Satanic elites is running roughshod over the world and no war where innocents and schoolgirls are callously slaughtered rages anywhere – especially not in the Middle East…so since everything is calm and cool and safe and peaceful so we can all focus on what really matters the most…THE ACADEMY AWARDS!!

So…let’s get to it!!

This year it is an all-out battle between One Battle After Another and Sinners. Sinners has a record 16 nominations, and OBAA has won all the precursor awards. I disliked both movies so I have no dog in this fight…and would be happy to see either of them lose. There should be some indications early on which movie will win big on Oscar Night…and the first two awards will be pretty important.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Benicio del Toro – One Battle After Another

Jacob Elordi – Frankenstein

Delroy Lindo – Sinners

Sean Penn – One Battle After Another

Stellan Skarsgard – Sentimental Value

Who will win: DELROY LINDO - SINNERS

Who should win: I guess Jacob Elordi?

Indicator win: Sean Penn – OBAA big night/Delroy Lindo – Sinners big night

Ok…this is a really tough one…Sean Penn has won a bunch of pre-cursors…but Delroy Lindo has all the momentum somehow and is the pandering choice. My guess is…pandering wins. Lindo is a fine enough actor but he does nothing even remotely interesting in the over-rated Sinners. If I am being honest the only performance that I thought was good in this group was Jacob Elordi. (I have not seen Sentimental Value – and Skarsgaard could definitely win). If Lindo wins then Sinners is going to have a HUGE night!!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Elle Fanning – Sentimental Value

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas – Sentimental Value

Amy Madigan – Weapons

Wunmi Mosaku – Sinners

Teyana Taylor – OBAA

Who will win: AMY MADIGAN - WEAPONS

Who should win: Amy Madigan (Note that I’ve not seen Sentimental Value)

Indicator win: Wunmi Mosaku – Sinners huge night/ Teyana Taylor – OBAA huge night.

Teyana Taylor was the leader for a long time but her momentum seems to have diminished…and now it appears to be a race between Amy Madigan and Wunmi Mosaku. I really like Wunmi Mosaku…but she does nothing of note in Sinners…and if she wins here, it is completely a pandering pick. Madigan on the other hand has two things going for her – this is essentially a lifetime achievement Oscar, and also…she is very good in the role. So, I am going with Madigan but will not be the least bit surprised if Mosaku wins – and if she does it is an indication that Sinners is going to have a BIG night.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Blue Moon

It Was Just an Accident

Marty Supreme

Sentimental Value

Sinners

Will win: SINNERS – RYAN COOGLER

Should win: It Was Just an Accident

Indicator win: If Sinners loses then this night is turned upside down…would be genuinely shocking.

Sinners is winning this…end of story. The script and the film is garbage….but it’ll win.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Bugonia

Frankenstein

Hamnet

OBAA

Train Dreams

Will win: One Battle After Another – PT ANDERSON - OBAA

Should win: Train Dreams

Indicator win: If OBAA loses this award this will be a major shock and turn the night on its head.

This could be much tighter than people expect…but I do think One Battle After Another pulls it off…but don’t be surprised if Frankenstein or Hamnet sneaks in for the win.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Arco

Elio

KPOP Demon Hunters

Little Amelie or the Character of Rain

Zootopia 2

Will win: K-POP DEMON HUNTERS

Should win: I’ve not seen any of these movies.

KPOP Demon Hunters is a phenomenon and it’ll win here. If it doesn’t then I assume that Zootopia 2 will win.

BEST INTERNATRIONAL FEATURE

It Was Just an Accident (France)

The Secret Agent (Brazil)

Sentimental Value (Norway)

Sirat (Spain)

The Voice of Hind Rajab (Tunisia)

Will win: SENTIMENTAL VALUE

Should win: It Was Just an Accident

This may be the very best category of the night. It Was Just an Accident and The Secret Agent are the only two films I’ve seen and they are definitely deserving of the award…and word is that Sentimental Value and The Voice of Hind Rajab are as well. My pick is Sentimental Value only because director Joachim Trier is also nominated for Best Director and it got two acting nominations as well which would indicate the film has deep support. Another thing to keep in mind is that The Secret Agent is a Brazilian film and Brazil has a very powerful contingent in the Academy….so don’t be shocked if it wins.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

The Alabama Solution

Come See Me in the Good Light

Cutting Through Rocks

Mr. Nobody Against Putin

The Perfect Neighbor

Will win: THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR

Should win: I’ve not seen any of these

The Perfect Neighbor deals with race and that is usually a ticket to Oscar gold. Wouldn’t be a shock if Mr. Nobody Against Putin wins because anti-Russia stuff is always a big favorite.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

All Empty Rooms

Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud

Children No More: Were and Are Gone

The Devil is Busy

Perfectly a Strangeness

Will win: ALL THE EMPTY ROOMS

Should win: I’ve not seen any of these

All the Empty Rooms is about children and gun violence. Check!

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT

Butcher’s Stain

A Friend of Dorothy

Jane Austen’s Period Drama

The Singers

Two People Exchanging Saliva

Will win: TWO PEOPLE EXCHANGING SALIVA

Should win: I have not seen any of these.

Two People Exchanging Saliva is the favorite but Butcher’s Stain has a shot to win…but it might on the “wrong” side of the Israel-Palestine divide to get Oscar gold.

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

Butterfly

Forevergreen

The Girl Who Cried Pearls

Retirement Plan

The Three Sisters

Will win: BUTTERFLY

Should win: I’ve not seen these.

Your guess is as good as mine…but Butterfly looks good…and it’s a Holocaust movie – so it’s a shoe in.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Bugonia

Frankenstein

Hamnet

OBAA

Sinners

Will win: SINNERS

Should win: No one

Indicator win: If OBAA wins it’s a big deal and will portend a big night…if Sinners wins as expected – it will be part of a Sinners juggernaut

I think this is a very important category as it will indicate how the evening will go…if OBAA wins giving Johnny Greenwood a “make-up” Oscar then OBAA will dominate…if Sinners wins…big night for Sinners. I have Sinners winning.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

“Dear Me” – Relentless

“Golden” – KPOP Demon Hunters

“I Lied to You” – Sinners

“Sweet Dreams of Joy” – Viva Verdi!

“Train Dreams” – Train Dreams

Will win: K-POP DEMON HUNTERS

Should win: No idea.

I think that KPOP Demon Hunters wins but if Sinners wins this award – a distinct possibility, then the juggernaut is in full swing and the film will win a record number of awards.

BEST CASTING

Hamnet

Marty Supreme

OBAA

The Secret Agent

Sinners

Will win: SINNERS

Should win: The Secret Agent

Indicator win: If Sinners loses this it will be a big deal and portend a lesser night.

Sinners will win for some reason.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

F1

Jurassic World: Rebirth

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Sinners

The Lost Bus

Will win: AVATAR FIRE AND ASH

Should win: F1

Indicator win: If Sinners wins this award – look out!!

No one gives a shit about Avatar movies but they always seem to win technical Oscars like this one…and I think that trend continues. If Sinners wins this then the universe might collapse in on itself as it is going to win the most Oscars of any movie ever made…quite an accomplishment for a shitty movie!

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

Frankenstein

Sinners

The Smashing Machine

The Ugly Stepsister

Kokuho

Will win: FRANKENSTEIN

Should win: The Smashing Machine

Indicator win: Sinners.

I think The Smashing Machine, which is a terrible movie, should actually win…but it won’t. So, it comes down to Frankenstein and Sinners…just like in Production Design…and I think the outcome is the same…Frankenstein.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Frankenstein

Hamnet

Marty Supreme

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Sinners

Will win: SINNERS

Should win: Frankenstein

Indicator win: Frankenstein – if it wins a handful of awards, it will blunt Sinners’ momentum.

Once again it is Frankenstein vs Sinners and once again Sinners racks up the victory as the juggernaut continues…it should be noted that if Frankenstein wins this, Hair and Makeup and Production Design…my prediction of Sinners dominance is down the toilet and OBAA is the movie that will be the juggernaut.

FILM EDITING

F1

Marty Supreme

OBAA

Sentimental Value

Sinners

Will win: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

Should win: One Battle After Another

Indicator win: If Sinners wins then the night is over and we can all go home.

F1 is getting some buzz for this…but the real battle is between OBAA and Sinners…and this is a big one…but this time I think OBAA gets the win…but if Sinners wins this one…LOOK OUT!!

BEST SOUND

F1

Frankenstein

OBAA

Sinners

Sirat

Will win: F1

Should win: OBAA

Indicator win: This is a neat little category that if either Sinners or OBAA win will let us know which movie will have a big night.

I think F1 will win…cars make cool sounds…BUT…this is another category that might go to Sinners just because it is pandering time. My pick though is F1.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Frankenstein

Hamnet

Marty Supreme

OBAA

Sinners

Will win: FRANKENSTEIN

Should win: Not sure.

Indicator win: Sinners. If it wins here and in Hair and Makeup and in costume…a real possibility…then Sinners is an all-time juggernaut.

Frankenstein is the favorite and could very well win…but Sinners is the potential juggernaut…and this is the type of award a juggernaut might win.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Frankenstein

Sinners

OBAA

Train Dreams

Marty Supreme

Will win: SINNERS

Should win: Train Dreams

Indicator win: OBAA should win this as cinematographer Michael Bauman has won all the pre-cursors…so if Sinners wins it is an upset and means Sinners is having a huge night.

Sinners is winning this despite looking like shit. It will win because its cinematographer, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, is not only a woman but a woman of color and no woman of any color or any non-color has ever won this award. Signal of virtue achieved!!

BEST ACTOR

Timothee Chalamet – Marty Supreme

Leonardo DiCaprio – OBAA

Michael B. Jordan – Sinners

Ethan Hawke – Blue Moon

Wagner Moura – The Secret Agent

Will win: MICHAEL B. JORDAN - SINNERS

Should win: Ethan Hawke/Leonardo DiCaprio/Wagner Moura…even Little Timmee when measured against Michael B. Jordan.

This is a very tough category…little Timmee had momentum and that seems to have gone up in smoke. Leo never had any momentum at all for some reason…and Hawke and Moura, who both gave great performances, were never taken seriously it seems. So, it would seem that Michael B. Jordan – who has proven himself over the years and in Sinners in particular, to be a truly dreadful and awful actor, will win Best Actor…and we will have to pretend he is worthy. Michael B. Jordan is easily the very worst actor in this group and gives the worst performance. I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

BEST ACTRESS

Jessie Buckley – Hamnet

Rose Byrne – If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Kate Hudson – Song Sung Blue

Renate Reinsve – Sentimental Value

Emma Stone – Bugonia

Will win: JESSIE BUCKLEY – HAMNET

Should win: Jessie Buckley/Rose Byrne/Emma Stone

Jessie Buckley is winning this thing and she definitely deserves it. I would also argue that Rose Byrne is most definitely deserving of the award as well…and I would be happy if either of them wins. One can only hope that Kate Hudson is happy to be there because she is not deserving of being there and should go away as quickly as possible.

BEST DIRECTOR

Chloe Zhao – Hamnet

PT Anderson – One Battle After Another*

Josh Safdie – Marty Supreme

Joachim Trier – Sentimental Value

Ryan Coogler – Sinners

Will win: PT ANDERSON – OBAA

Should win: No idea…not a fan of any of these films – but have not seen Sentimental Value

There’s a chance Coogler gets the victory here but I think this is a lifetime achievement Oscar for PT Anderson. The funniest part will be if PTA wins Best Director and Sinners wins Best Picture the usual suspects will still be crying racism because Coogler didn’t get Best Director…either way I will laugh heartily.

BEST PICTURE

Bugonia

F1

Frankenstein

Hamnet

Marty Supreme

One Battle After Another

The Secret Agent

Sentimental Value

Sinners

Train Dreams

Will win: SINNERS

Should win: Train Dreams/Bugonia

I know the odds-on favorite is One Battle After Another…but the vibes I’m getting are that Sinners is going to have an enormous Oscar night. I think the movie is a steaming pile of pedestrian horseshit…but I also think it will win Best Picture because it gives the Academy a chance to pander and virtue signal – their favorite thing to do! Maybe I’m wrong…and don’t get me wrong…I have no love for One Battle After Another either…but it could win…or we could get a reverse split and have Coogler win Best Director and OBAA win Best Picture…or Sinners could win both or OBAA could win both. It is going to a big fight between these two movies all night and from what I’m gathering it looks like Sinners will be the big winner. We can all rest assured though that no matter how many Oscars Sinners wins…and I think it will win a lot…it won’t be enough and people will be crying “racism!” in the wake of the Oscars…so at least we have that to look forward to.

Well…that wraps up the Oscar predictions for this year…but my predictions for next year are essentially the same…there will be a cornucopia of underwhelming movies everyone pretends is great and I will once again want to light myself on fire. YAY!!!

Alright everybody….I’ll see you at the after party!!

©2026

It Was Just an Accident: A Review - Profound Film for our Dark Times

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW. - Unquestionably one of the very best films of the year.

It Was Just an Accident, written and directed by Jafar Panahi, tells the story of Vahid, a mechanic who struggles with a monumental decision about whether to confront his past or to move on from it.

The film, which is a French/Iranian production (in Farsi with English sub-titles) that is nominated for the Best International Feature Film award at this year’s Academy Awards, is currently streaming on Hulu, which is where I just watched it.

It Was Just an Accident was surreptitiously shot in Iran by acclaimed filmmaker Jafar Panahi – who, besides being imprisoned for his outspoken criticism of the Iranian government, was also banned from making films. Panahi shot the film essentially guerrilla style without any permits or permission...a bold and daring choice to make in authoritarian Iran.

Considering the current state of the world…which includes a brutal war between Israel and the U.S. against Iran, Panahi’s fantastic film takes on a much greater power and meaning than its simple, poignant and profound story already tells.

The film, which I will not spoil in any way shape or form so as to keep its impact preserved for those that haven’t yet seen it, is a relentlessly compelling and captivating meditation on the struggle between revenge and forgiveness, and about how difficult it is to fight against tyranny without becoming a tyrant and losing one’s soul.

It Was Just an Accident is one of the very best films of the year. It is a mesmerizing mixture of a morality tale, comedy caper, road picture and a thriller wrapped in an indictment of the Iranian regime and a plea to the humanity of all.

The film, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, starts slow but then builds and builds and builds to a truly phenomenal ending, gaining dramatic momentum with every scene and every performance.

That this movie could be so simple and yet spotlight such a complex moral and ethical conundrum and its consequences speaks to the brilliance of the script and of Panahi’s direction. The film could have been a Manichean manifesto that gives viewers what they want – but instead it is one of those movies that reveals a confounding complexity through its storytelling simplicity.

It Was Just an Accident was the third film I watched this week, the first two being The Secret Agent – a Brazilian film also nominated for Best International Feature, and Nuremberg, a big studio movie about the Nuremberg trials. I will review The Secret Agent and Nuremberg later this week. The one thing all three of these films have in common is that they address fascism and its toxic and corrosive effect on individuals and on society.

The most notable thing about fascist societies (whether they know they are fascist or not is irrelevant) is that they are riddled with corruption…not just moral and ethical corruption but actual physical/financial corruption.

In all three films corruption is so prevalent as to be the air that people breathe. Cops are corrupt, businesses are corrupt, nurses are corrupt, bureaucrats are corrupt…bad guys are corrupt, good guys are corrupt, everyone is corrupt. Corruption is contagious until it just becomes normalized…just like it is here in the U.S.

I am always amused when I read an article or hear some talking head in the U.S. bemoaning the corruption in some far-off land like Russia or China or Brazil and they use some study that shows the amount of corruption in those countries as opposed to the pristine nature of the U.S. as proof of their thesis. The problem with studies and theories like these is that corruption in the U.S. has simply been codified into law…so it is no longer considered corruption….but it is still corruption. Look no further than the ungodly amounts of money thrown around in the American political system for proof of that. In other countries that would be considered corruption…here it is just considered business as usual.

What makes It Was Just an Accident so remarkable is that is transcends its national and cultural borders and places all of us in the same predicament as its Iranian protagonist Vahid. We know the monumental question he grapples with and the danger it poses. We also understand how not only his life but his soul is on the line. We don’t just see what he is struggling with…we struggle right along with him.

All of this is a credit to Jafar Panahi, his brilliant writing, his exquisite filmmaking, and his uncompromising attitude and artistry.

Panahi obviously made this film as an indictment against the Iranian regime that has persecuted him, but this story simply cannot be contained within those borders. The moral and ethical insights Panahi provides can be applied just as equally to Iran’s attackers – Israel and the U.S., as it can to the despotic Iranian regime itself. Which is why this filmmaker and this film are so brilliant.

It has not been easy writing a review of this movie without giving any of its plot to readers, but I think that is necessary in order to enjoy the film to its fullest.

I cannot recommend this film enough and urge people to go check it out on Hulu. If you don’t have Hulu…get a free week or something and then go watch It Was Just an Accident and also watch The Secret Agent – which is also streaming there.

My recommendation is to turn off the mindless, flag-waving, disinformation, propaganda news channels here in the U.S. (I assume you’re not watching the propaganda news channels in Iran), and instead go spend an hour and forty minutes and watch It Was Just an Accident right now…you will be very glad you did.

©2026

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 150 - If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

On this episode, Barry and I climb through a gaping hole in our ceiling to discuss filmmaker Mary Bronstein's terrific movie meditation on the madness of motherhood, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, starring Rose Byrne. Topics discussed include the undeniable talent of Rose Byrne, Bronstein's deft direction, and the small movie's big time friends. Also included in the pod is a discussion about the all-time great acting icon Robert Duvall, who died this week at 95.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 150 - If I Had legs I'd Kick You

Thanks for listening!

©2026

Blue Moon: A Review - Ethan Hawke Hits it Over the Moon

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed film that features a very noteworthy performance from Ethan Hawke that makes it well-worth watching.

Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke, tells the story of famed lyricist Lorenz Hart (Hawke) navigating emotional turmoil as he attends the 1943 opening night party of his former writing partner Richard Rodgers’ new Broadway musical Oklahoma!

The film, which has garnered two Academy Award nominations – Best Actor for Ethan Hawke and Best original Screenplay for Robert Kaplow, hit theatres on October 17th with little fanfare and is now available to stream on Netflix…which is where I just watched it.

For those of you unfamiliar with Lorenz Hart, he – along with his collaborator Richard Rodgers, made up Rodgers and Hart - one of the great musical duos in music theatre history – creating such notable numbers as “Lady is a Tramp”, “Isn’t it Romantic?”, “My Funny Valentine”, and of course, “Blue Moon”.

Hart was a notorious drunk and difficult collaborator, and so Rodgers looked for other writing partners and found one in Oscar Hammerstein…and remarkably that duo outdid the success of Rodgers and Hart – churning out a bevy of Broadway box office smash hits like Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music among others.

Which brings us to Blue Moon, which is a curious venture.

The film is, in a clever nod to its subject, essentially a stage play, as it is set in Sardi’s bar – the famed apres-show eatery for Broadway big wigs, where Lorenz Hart, struggling with alcoholism mixed with self-doubt and existential angst, holds court amongst wannabes and some notable somebodies, as he awaits a party to start for his former partner Richard Rodgers on opening night of his soon-to-be smash hit musical Oklahoma!

Anyone who has spent even a modicum of time in the theatre or entertainment world is very familiar with the archetype of the aging gay queen that poor Lorenz Hart is occupying as he holds court at the corner of a bar regaling sycophants, stoics and sad sacks alike with his wondrous tales, which, if seen through more discerning eyes are less funny comic confessionals than they are malignant, narcissistic ramblings.

The film is contained within the walls of Sardi’s, and that is the stage for Ethan Hawke to spin his masterful brilliance as Hart flails with flair on the downward spiral of his life.

Ethan Hawke has done some of his very best work with Richard Linklater at the helm (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, and Boyhood) and Blue Moon is the very best of the bunch. He is utterly fantastic in this role. Hawke’s Hart is a magnetic, brilliant, and existentially sad shlub, marinated in a profound melancholy of his own making and it is absolutely captivating to behold.

Hawke’s Hart is funny, frustrating and at times deeply moving and always compelling. Hawke is nominated for Best Actor at this year’s Academy Awards and while he stands no chance to win, he certainly is deserving of the award.

As much as I loved Ethan Hawke in the film and also loved that it is essentially a stage play, Blue Moon does have some major flaws to it.

First off, the character of Elizabeth – the Yale undergrad theatre student with whom Hart has become infatuated despite his being homosexual, is, despite being a cornerstone of the storytelling, a not-needed and often annoying distraction.

To be clear, I love Margaret Qualley – the actress who plays Elizabeth, and have ever since I first saw her in Novitiate in 2017. She is a dynamic talented and a luminous beauty…but both the Elizabeth character and Qualley’s performance just don’t work for me.

The same is true of Bobby Cannavale as the bartender Eddie. I must admit that I think Bobby Cannavale is awful in everything I see him in…and he makes everything he is in worse…and Blue Moon is no exception.

Andrew Scott and Patrick Kennedy fare much better in supporting roles as Richard Rodgers and E.B. White respectively…so there’s that.

But again…even as much as I liked Kennedy’s reserved performance as E.B. White, it touches upon another issue I had with the film…namely the Zelig/Forest Gump-esque quality of Lorenz Hart in this film to touch history with his nearly every interaction.

For example, Hart gives prescient writing advice to E.B. White (who goes on the write Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little), prescient storytelling advice to George Roy Hill (who goes on the direct Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid among others), and prescient insight to a pre-pubescent Stephen Sondheim (who goes on to be a giant in musical theatre).

This series of historical interactions is so cheesy it made my lactose intolerance act up…and most importantly…it is entirely made up…it never happened in real life. Why the writer Kaplow and Linklater thought the story needed this corny nonsense is utterly beyond me.

Kaplow did write a strong one-man show for Hawke to flex his acting monologue muscles as Hart, and he should be credited for that, but he stumbles badly in terms of structure and secondary characters and storylines.

As for Linklater, Blue Moon is the second film he has put out this year, the other being Nouvelle Vague – the story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic French new wave film Breathless. Nouvelle Vague served little purpose but to get people to watch Breathless again…or for the first time…and that’s a noble cause, but Blue Moon feels like the more compelling movie to me…maybe that’s because I know less about Lorenz hart and musical theatre than I do about Breathless and French New Wave cinema….who knows?

The truth is that neither film is quite as good as it should have been…but Blue Moon is a much better movie because Ethan Hawke is absolutely crushing it in the lead role.

The bottom line is that while Blue Moon certainly has its flaws, it is an undeniably compelling watch simply because Ethan Hawke is so damn good as Lorenz Hart.

If you are a current or former theatre muffin, or if you are a devout and devoted lover of musical theatre, I think Blue Moon will be worth a watch to get a glimpse of Hawke masterfully bringing the troubled Lorenz Hart back to life before your eyes.

For those not as enamored of musical theatre, fret not…Blue Moon still works as a one-man Ethan Hawke acting show that will hold your attention despite its unevenness. So, if you get a chance, you could do worse than check out Blue Moon.

©2026

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 149 - The Smashing Machine

On this episode, Barry and Mike square off in the octagon and do battle over Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's UFC drama, The Smashing Machine, directed by Benny Safdie. Topics discussed include The Rock's troubled career arc, director Benny Safdie's sad solo future, and the unbridled joy of everything Emily Blunt.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 149 - The Smashing Machine

Thanks for listening!!

©2026

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 148 - Bugonia

On this barn-burner of an episode, Barry and I shave our heads and castrate ourselves as we fight over Yorgos Lanthimos' Academy Award nominated film Bugonia, starring Emma Stone. Topics discussed include the positives and negatives of Lanthimos' particular taste and style, challenging audience expectation, and Alex Jones, David Icke and the current conspiracy cultural moment.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 148 - Bugonia

Thanks for listening!

©2026

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You: A Review - The Madness and Mania of Motherhood

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Be forewarned, this film isn’t so much a dramedy as it is a horror-comedy that is nightmare fuel for parents…it also features a terrific performance from Rose Byrne.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, written and directed by Mary Bronstein, follows the travails of Linda, a mother who must deal with a plethora of disasters in her life all while caring for her chronically ill daughter.

The film, which stars Rose Byrne – who is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work, opened in theatres back on October 10th, and is now streaming on HBO Max…which is where I just watched it.

The basic plot of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is that Linda (Rose Byrne) is caring for her daughter, who I guess is maybe 7 or 8 years old, who has a mysterious chronic condition that requires a feeding tube. Linda is caring for her daughter while working full-time as a psychotherapist and while her husband is away for a few months for his work. In other words, Linda is on her own and has her hands full…and life keeps throwing one catastrophe after another at her until she is overwhelmed by the sheer scope and scale of disasters in her life.

The film bills itself as a psychological comedy-drama…which is sort of a tortured way to describe it. When I was about two-thirds of the way through the film I finally recognized what the movie really is…it is a horror movie. I think if you watch the movie as a horror film it will actually make a lot more sense and it will heighten its positive attributes.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a difficult film to watch…that’s not to say it’s bad because it isn’t, but it is extremely effective and affecting. The odyssey that Linda goes on and the gauntlet she endures is the stuff of real-world nightmares. Any parent will immediately recognize the hell on earth that Linda is living through and will be greatly uncomfortable. Every parent has been through those times when everything is off and everything goes wrong and you have a bad day…or even a bad week…but Linda’s torment goes on for months and it is excruciating to witness.

Filmmaker Mary Bronstein does a terrific job of using all the tools at her disposal to increase the anxiety of viewers throughout, most notably through sound…the constant sound of the daughter’s over-night feeding device beeping, or the incredulously grating sound of the daughter’s voice whenever she opens her mouth…all of it adds to the tension.

Bronstein also is very clever in that she puts all the focus on Byrne’s Linda and just uses the child as a prop of agitation…so much so that you never see the daughter’s face. The faceless daughter is not an object of love to be adored, she is an irritant to be endured. In this way Bronstein effectively captures what it’s like to be in the worst moments of parenthood…unfortunately for Linda this moment lasts for months on end and not an afternoon.

Rose Byrne has gotten much acclaim for her performance in the film, and there’s an outside chance she wins a Best Actress Oscar for it…and it would be well-deserved. She is fantastic as the haggard Linda, who is constantly on the verge of absolutely losing her mind and with it her shit.

Byrne has always been an under-rated actress, and seeing her embrace such a tortured and ugly role is a joy and reveals her to be quite the subtle craftswoman. Watching Byrne’s Linda shift the masks she wears in public for differing audiences…be they her daughter, her daughter’s doctor, her clients, her own therapist, her neighbors…and have it all be believable no matter how unbelievable she is, is impressive. Her performance is akin to watching as frog in a pot of water as it slowly boils…as it is both captivating and cruel.

The film is not perfect though, as it has some stories and character arcs that are pretty ineffective. For example, there’s a whole storyline involving James, Linda’s neighbor, that doesn’t make a bit of sense and sort of sucks the life out of the film every time it takes center stage. James is played by rapper ASAP Rocky, and he is, to be kind – a lifeless screen presence.

On the plus side, Conan O’Brien has a small supporting role as Linda’s therapist and he does a good job at being a douchebag…which I found amusing.

Speaking of amusing, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You certainly has funny moments but it doesn’t feel like a comedy. The laughs it generates are more a function of anxiety and tension than anything else. The biggest joke of all, of course, is just the Book of Job-like, continuous onslaught of horribleness that is perpetually inflicted upon poor Linda.

Ultimately, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a grueling endurance test for parents to watch…but it does bring with it some psychological insight and the briefest sprinkling of profundity, which all parents will recognize when it rears its head.

That said, I watched the film on my own, and I would be very curious to know what mothers think of it as I think it may cut way too close to the bone for even the most-hearty of matriarchs to endure. I mean, if a mother finally gets some free time, and they use it to watch a movie, do they want that movie to essentially be a horror film about a cavalcade of awful parenting shit being thrown at the lovely Rose Byrne who gets buried under a mountain of said shit? I honestly don’t know.

Mothers may find catharsis in the film by seeing themselves and their struggle, or they may leave the movie more anxious than when they went in. Who knows?

All I will say is that I think overall, the film is well-made by Mary Bronstein, and Rose Byrne gives a terrific performance as Linda. If you have the stomach for it, I recommend you at least give If I Had Legs I’d Kick You a try…but go in knowing it is essentially a horror film for parents…with a few laughs sprinkled throughout.

©2026  

The Smashing Machine: A Review - MMA Drama Lacks Punch

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A missed opportunity of a movie that wastes a good performance by Dwayne Johnson with a bad script and sub-par filmmaking.

The Smashing Machine, written and directed by Benny Safdie, is a biopic that chronicles the personal life and career of esteemed amateur wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr.

The film, which stars Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson and Emily Blunt, was released in theatres on October 3, 2025, and is now available to stream on HBO Max, which is where I watched it.

Director Benny Safdie, who along with his brother Josh, made his name as a member of the Safdie brothers directing duo, is flying solo with The Smashing Machine just like his brother Josh was alone at the helm on his new movie Marty Supreme. I reviewed Marty Supreme yesterday and revealed how underwhelmed and annoyed I was with that movie…now it’s Benny’s turn in the barrel. (As an aside, a scandal broke yesterday regarding the Safdie brothers and the mistreatment of an underage actress on the set of their 2017 film Good Time – but that is a discussion for another day.)

The Smashing Machine follows the ups and downs of Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson), a decorated amateur wrestler turned mixed-martial arts fighter, as he navigates the early days of MMA, a tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), and drug addiction.

The Smashing Machine is a truly perplexing movie. It is one of those films where you are constantly waiting for the actual story to start, but it somehow never does. The whole venture feels entirely cursory, scattered and frivolous, which is an odd thing to feel considering the rather compelling life that Mark Kerr has lived.

It is also a movie that seems at odds with itself. For example, the film’s star, Dwayne Johnson, is notorious for his rather putrid filmography and The Smashing Machine was supposed to be his big-breakout as a “real” actor and a potential Oscar contender. But that didn’t happen because the film flopped at the box office and with critics. What is crazy though, is that Johnson is actually pretty good in the role of Mark Kerr.

Johnson, aided by some fantastic make up by Kazu Hiro, is…as incredible as it is to say since he is such a distinctive star – unrecognizable as Kerr. His face is altered to look like Kerr – or at least to not look like The Rock that we all know. And Johnson does a good job in the dramatic scenes where he must navigate a character that is both guarded and yet also on the verge of being out of control.

The problem though is that the film never lives up to the good work Johnson does in it. The script is a dramatically incoherent mess that flits from one inconsequential scene to another, inhabited by paper thin caricatures pretending to be characters.

You would think that the fight scenes would at least be where Safdie and his cinematographer Maceo Bishop would flex their muscles…but no. The fight sequences in this movie are so visually stilted and relentlessly dull that it is rather shocking to behold.

It isn’t just the fight scenes that are cinematically flaccid, as the entire film looks like a second-rate tv movie.

Emily Blunt plays Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn, who is both a loving partner and an insidious influence on him. Blunt looks amazing, and actually does decent work in the role, but her character makes absolutely zero dramatic sense thanks to the abysmal script.

Both Johnson and Blunt deserved better…a better script, better direction, better cinematography. But what they got was a series of disconnected scenes where they do their best but it is all for naught.

The Smashing Machine eschews traditional sports movie structure and narrative arc, and that would have been a noble arthouse choice to make if the film were even remotely well-made…but it isn’t and so this eschewing of sports movie orthodoxy becomes nothing more than just another frustration for viewers.

The most frustrating thing about the film is that it could have, maybe even should have, been great…and it had many paths to greatness but Benny Safdie chose none of them.

It could have been a straight forward sports movie…sort of an early MMA Rocky movie. Or it could have been an arthouse exploration of a fighter’s dark side and decline…like Raging Bull. But for some reason Benny Safdie took the very worst aspects of both of those type of movies and threw them together haphazardly and turned out a movie so instantly forgettable it feels like it doesn’t even exist when you’re watching it. Hell, it could have been an intimate and in-depth study on the intricacies of mixed-martial arts and the clashing of fighting styles…but it isn’t that either…and it isn’t a redemption story or addiction story or relationship story.

One would assume that since Dwayne Johnson did not get the Oscar nomination and critical-praise he was seeking with The Smashing Machine, that he will revert back to being The Rock and churning out the most reprehensible big budget garbage imaginable from this point forward. That would be unfortunate for everyone involved…audiences most of all.

One hopes that Johnson continues to at least take chances in the roles he chooses and avoids the pitfalls he has repeatedly fallen in to over the course of his career.

One also hopes that Emily Blunt, who is a terrific actress and very charming movie star, will choose more arthouse movies and more challenging roles going forward. She is someone who should be in Oscar contention year in and year out…but she needs to make better choices in the movies she makes.

As for Benny Safdie…I don’t know what to say. I didn’t like Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme but there is no doubt that it is a vastly superior to The Smashing Machine. Josh is definitely winning the battle of the brothers and has shown himself to be the filmmaking talent in the duo.

Benny has fancied himself an actor as well, with roles in both Licorice Pizza and Oppenheimer….and he was as awful in both roles as he was at directing The Smashing Machine. Not good for Benny…and considering Benny might be the source who leaked the new Safdie scandal on Good Time in order to sabotage his brother’s Oscar chances this year…it would seem a filmmaking reunion between Benny and Josh isn’t in the cards.

As for The Smashing Machine…I simply can’t recommend it to anyone…be they cinephiles, sports movie lovers or MMA fans. It is a terribly missed opportunity for all involved and an absolute waste of Dwayne Johnson’s rarely seen talents.

©2026

Marty Supreme: a Review - Supremely Over-Rated

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An overlong, annoying, grating and irritating movie devoid of drama, comedy, meaning, and purpose.

Marty Supreme, written and directed by Josh Safdie, is a dramedy that chronicles the travails of an arrogant, narcissistic, world-class ping pong player/con-man in the 1950’s.

The film, which stars Timothee Chalamet in the titular role, hit theatres on Christmas and has made over $100 million on a $70 million budget. It has also garnered nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Chalamet), Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography.

Director Josh Safdie, formerly of the directing duo the Safdie brothers, is the darling of the hipster set. His previous film (directed by the Safdie brothers) was Uncut Gems, which was adored by critics and despised by me.

That film featured Adam Sandler in the lead role playing a grotesquely repugnant gambling addict on an extended odyssey. Marty Supreme follows a similar roadmap, it tells the story of a grotesquely repugnant ping-pong player who is an arrogant asshole and compulsive bullshit artist on an extended odyssey.

I have heard in my life a lot of people complain about one movie or another by saying that ‘there was no one to root for’, or something along those lines. I understand that criticism but have never found it compelling. I don’t need to root for someone to enjoy a movie…at all.

But the problem with Marty Supreme…and with Uncut Gems…is that I found myself absolutely despising every single character on-screen for the duration of the film. I wasn’t rooting for them or against them…I was just wanting them to go away. I also was mystified by these lead characters and the actors playing them because they lacked charisma and magnetism and yet were supposed to be charismatic and magnetic. Shrug.

The problem with Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme is not unlikable characters, but rather unbelievable one-dimensional characters that are unlikeable.  

What bothered me about Marty Supreme is that it is much too sprawling and meandering a movie to hold one’s attention on such a fruitless ride with such a repulsive character as the lead.

The film never grabs you by the neck and demands your attention because it lacks focus and dramatic verve. Marty goes from one frying pan into the fire situation after another, and none of them are the least bit compelling…just repetitive and grating.

Marty’s odyssey takes him all over the world and puts him into conflict with rich and powerful men of varying degrees wherever he goes…and while the rich and powerful don’t come across very well at all, Marty comes across even worse. Marty is such a relentless, gigantic douchebag that this movie feels like a piece of anti-proletariat agit-prop.

I’ve heard the argument that Marty Supreme is about ‘the pursuit of greatness’ and I find that argument to be sorely lacking. Marty is not pursuing greatness – the truth is ping-pong is a distant second place in his hierarchy to his ego and his baser instincts. He isn’t pursuing greatness he is pursuing his own gratification and self-aggrandizement.

What I find fascinating is that Josh Safdie is Jewish (and obviously his brother is too) and yet in both Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme he has turned his Jewish protagonists into the most awful human beings imaginable animated by nothing more than Jewish stereotypes. They literally have zero redeeming qualities. I am not sure why he has done that, but he has definitely done it. It is so bad that if a non-Jewish filmmaker had made those two films, they would have been pilloried for being anti-Semitic…and rightfully so.

I have intentionally avoided delving too deeply into the morass that is the plot of Marty Supreme in order to avoid spoilers and because it is annoying to even try and recall. Just know that it is all over the place and none of it is worth paying attention to.

There are so many worthless and wandering scenes and sequences in this film it made my head hurt…for example there’s an entire chunk of the movie dedicated to Marty and a dog that is so relentlessly inane and absurd as to be infuriating.

Timothee Chalamet is the favorite to win Best Actor at this year’s Academy Awards, and I get why that is and it has nothing to do with this particular performance but rather with how he has masterfully positioned himself in the industry over the course of his career.

The reality is that Chalamet’s Marty is not a masterclass in acting. It is like a reality tv star performance crossed with a twitter troll come to life. Chalamet has one very good scene in the film and it is his final one…but beyond that he is less acting than he is play-acting…and badly at that.

Something that aggravated me throughout the film is that it is set in the 1950’s and yet Chalamet, and everyone else, speaks in a modern vernacular and acts in a modern way. I understand this is intentional on the part of Safdie – as he uses modern music throughout too, but I found it annoying as it took me out of the story – a story I was struggling to stay in to begin with.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Kay Stone, a former movie star now trophy wife, with whom Marty has an affair. She does the best she can with a rather thinly written character, and has one scene where she realistically gets frantic, but beyond that there’s not much to see here.

Cinematographer Darius Khondji does his usual supreme – pardon the pun, work on the film. It is well-shot and well-lit, but that doesn’t make its storytelling failures any more palatable.

The success of the Safdie brothers in general, and Marty Supreme in particular, is a mystery to me. I find this film, and all of the Safdie brother’s films, to be relentlessly vacuous, vapid and venal. That critics and hipsters adore them doesn’t make me question my feelings about these films, but reinforces my feelings about critics and hipsters instead.

Ultimately, I cannot think of anyone who I know who would enjoy Marty Supreme, or even appreciate it as a work of cinematic art…and that is because I do not think it is much a work of cinematic art at all.

If you’re a Safdie brothers fan and loved Uncut Gems, then you will no doubt enjoy the interminably long, rather irritating roller coaster ride that is Marty Supreme. For everyone else…there’s nothing to see here.

©2026

Hamnet: A Review - To Be or Not To Be?

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but very affecting movie that features a fantastic performance from Jessie Buckley.

Hamnet, written and directed by Academy Award winning filmmaker Chloe Zhao, is a tragedy that dramatizes the life of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, as well as the alleged origins of the play Hamlet.

The film, which is based on the book of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell, who also co-wrote the screenplay, stars Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as the bard.

Hamnet hit select theatres here in the U.S. at the end of November and is in wide release still. I watched it over the weekend.

Let me start by saying that I am the ultimate target audience for this movie. First off, I am a classically trained actor…so I’ve done lots of Shakespeare, including playing Hamlet. And more importantly, how I got to be a classically trained actor fits perfectly into the thesis of Hamnet.

Here's the story…twenty-nine years ago my best friend, creative collaborator and overall partner-in-crime, Keith Hertell, with whom I had suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that accompany life as an artist in a cruel world, was killed in a car crash in Titusville, Florida.

At the time of his death, Keith and I were working a soul-crushing office job together, and he took a Friday off to fly down to Florida for a wedding. He never came back.

Due to a lack of talent and skill I am incapable of adequately expressing the devastation I felt, and still feel, regarding Keith’s death. He was the most unique, original, talented and magnetic person I have ever met. He was brilliant in a multitude of ways – a staggeringly gifted actor, comedian and musician. The most notable thing about Keith though was that he was unanimously adored by everyone who ever met him. He had an absurdly kind heart, a razor-sharp wit and an easy-going, disarming smile.

In the wake of Keith’s shuffling off his mortal coil and departing for the undiscovered country, from whose bourn, no traveller returns, I was absolutely inconsolable. I was disoriented, furious and depressed. I had nowhere to turn. Religion would have been somewhere for me to go but I was so angry at what God had done that I declared war on him…a foolish endeavour, no doubt, but fuck him…I had nothing to lose. It should come as no surprise that my war against God was an impulsive, ignoble cause and I was soundly defeated…although it took considerably longer than to be expected – anger is a remarkably useful fuel.

Then one day out of despair I picked up a paperback copy of Hamlet. I read it. In those pages I found a profound reflection of my own grief. It all made perfect sense to me now. Hamlet wasn’t crazy…he was grieving – which looks a lot like insanity to those outside of it.

I vividly remember riding the subway one day and being lost in my thoughts of Keith and having tears streaming down my face, and then remembering something hysterical he had done and laughing uncontrollably, and then weeping again…and then I sort of snapped out of it and noticed that everyone on the subway was staring at me like I was a lunatic – which I sort of was. My behavior on the subway that day was a perfect encapsulation of Hamlet. Grief knocks you out of the rhythm of everyday life, and you seem mad because you’re so out of sync with everyone, and everything, else.

Reading Hamlet, I found a dramatic rendition of my grief, which felt like profundity, if not solace, or at the very least understanding…which then gave me meaning and purpose. I set out from that moment on a pseudo-religious quest to learn as much as I could about Shakespeare’s work – not in an academic sense, but in an artistic one. I auditioned for a Shakespeare company, got in…then trained as much as I could…and ultimately went to London and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Pretty great experience born out of the most brutal experience imaginable.

Speaking of great experiences…or magical ones…I got to see Ralph Fiennes play Hamlet on Broadway thirty years ago…the best I’ve ever seen…then got to meet him – and his brother Joseph (of Shakespeare in Love fame), at RADA…pretty cool experience.

Which brings us to Hamnet. The thesis of the film is essentially that the play Hamlet was written in the deep throes of grief as a dramatic eulogy for Agnes and William Shakespeare’s lost child…which aligns with my experience of the play as grief personified.

The film is undeniably affecting, and boasts an emotionally powerful final twenty minutes that elicited from me guttural wails of grief, no doubt built up over a lifetime of heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

The problem with Hamnet though, is that despite its moving final act, the film fails to fully form in its opening two acts.

The film is up and down…a walking dichotomy. For example, it is beautifully shot but poorly staged. There were multiple times where I marveled at cinematographer Lukasz Zal’s stunning work but was frustrated by a failure to provide adequate visual coverage of the dramatic events unfolding.

Another example is that the film boasts two exquisite performances from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, but the script never develops the characters in any substantial way to have the drama they endure be anything but window dressing for the rending of garments that comes in the final act.

Speaking of the performances, Jessie Buckley, who is nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for her work as Agnes, is spectacular in the role. Agnes is a delicious character for an actress, wild and witchy, and Buckley devours her with aplomb.

Buckley is the embodiment of primal maternal energy as Agnes…mother nature incarnate. She is grounded yet ethereal, and is aggressively compelling.

In the final act it is Buckley’s Agnes that is our avatar, and we watch the dramatic events unfold on stage through her eyes and it is a truly magical and mesmerizing experience.

Paul Mescal is not given quite as captivating a character as Buckley’s Agnes, but he makes the most of his Shakespeare role and truly comes to life when he is called upon to actually recite Shakespeare’s written words.

As previously stated, I am a sucker for anything in the SCU (Shakespeare Cinematic Universe), and while I found the final act riveting and emotionally potent, I feel like Hamnet could have…and should have…been better.

Unfortunately, Hamnet never fully coalesces into the coherent cinematic masterpiece that it obviously possesses the ability to be…and that was disappointing.

That said, I still found the film very moving, and if you like Shakespeare and like to cry, then Hamnet might be for you too. Is it as good as seeing a top-notch performance of Hamlet on stage? No. But what is?

So is Hamnet to be, or not to be? The answer is that conscience makes cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment, with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action….and so it is with Hamnet.

©2026

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 146 - Jay Kelly

On this episode, Barry and I talk all things Jay Kelly, the new Noah Baumbach Netflix movie starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler. Topics discussed include the mystery of George Clooney's success...the mystery of Adam Sandler's success...and the mystery of Noah Baumbach's success...plus a new round of everybody's favorite game "Studio Exec!" where Barry and I pretend to be studio execs and recast the movie!!

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 146 - Jay Kelly

Thanks for listening!

©2026

Bugonia: A Review - The Madness and Mastery of King Yorgos

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An arthouse gem of a film that speaks insightfully to the madness of our modern age.

Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, tells the story of two conspiracy-obsessed cousins who kidnap a CEO of a nefarious company.

The film, which is a remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, hit theatres on October 24th and didn’t make much of a splash – despite mostly positive reviews it made $40 million on a $45 million budget. It is currently streaming on Peacock, which is where I just watched it.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos is definitely an acquired taste…but one which I am grateful to have acquired. I remember years ago loving Lanthimos’s film The Lobster (2015), which is an absurdist arthouse black comedy, and highly recommending it to a friend of mine. He then went and saw the movie with his parents and all three of them hated the movie with the fury of a thousand suns. What can you do?

Since The Lobster, Lanthimos has churned out a bevy of really fantastic and unique films. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2018) was a weird and woolly arthouse gem. The Favourite and Poor Things were phenomenal films that garnered Best Actress Academy Awards for their lead actresses Olivia Colman and Emma Stone respectively. Kinds of Kindness was an oddball anthology that was one of my favorite films of 2024.

Bugonia is right in Lanthimos’s wheelhouse as it is definitely an arthouse black comedy project but one that can appeal to more mainstream tastes if given the chance.

I won’t give much of the plot of the film away as I think it best to avoid any semblance of spoilers in order to appreciate the film to its fullest. But as stated in the opening paragraph, Bugonia follows the travails of Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aiden Delbis), two conspiracy theorist cousins, as they plot to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a hard-charging CEO of a pharmaceutical company.

The magic of Bugonia is that it could be a stage play as it is rudimentary in its dramatic set-up, but it is also gorgeously photographed by Robbie Ryan with a stunning simplicity. In other words, it is an actor’s dream of a screenplay – which Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons devour with aplomb, that is glorious to look at due to Ryan’s deft, subtle and crisp cinematography.

The performances of Stone, Plemons and even newcomer Delbis, are remarkable.

Emma Stone has two Best Actress Academy Awards and if we lived in a just world, she would be receiving her third one this year for her work on Bugonia. Stone is at the point in her career where she is so good her greatness is taken for granted and overlooked.

As the CEO Michelle, Stone delivers a dexterous and complex performance that is sharp, savvy and nimble. Stone’s Michelle is always believable even when she isn’t.

Jesse Plemons is a terrific and often overlooked actor and he brings the full weight of his talents to bear as Teddy, the “brains” of the two-man conspiracy addled operation.

Plemons’ Teddy is a cauldron of suppressed emotions and wounds ready to burst at the seams. Thanks to Plemons’ mastery, Teddy’s eyes betray his twisted and tormented inner life.

One of the more incredible performances in the film comes from newcomer Aiden Delbis as Don. Delbis, who is autistic, was discovered in an open casting call to play the autistic Don…and he is amazing in the role.

What is most striking about Bugonia is that it is ideologically audacious and philosophically brazen. There is something in the zeitgeist in the last year or so, with films like Eddington and now Bugonia, both of which wear their conspiracy obsession on their sleeves and poke their thumbs into the eyes of their target audience while pretending to cozy up to them.

As someone who is often contemptuously labelled a conspiracy theorist by friend and foe alike, I was both unnerved and overjoyed when Plemons’ Teddy numerous times vociferously pontificated an unhinged conspiracy rant that was alarmingly similar to rants that I’ve shouted over the years…so much so that I thought to myself the old joke, ‘I resemble that remark!’

Of course, the joy of being a conspiracy theorist in our current corrupt and crazy age is that the time between being ridiculed for presenting a conspiracy theory and that conspiracy theory being proven correct is at an all-time low.

While discussing the film afterwards with my wife, we spoke about how Bugonia is a perfect double feature with Eddington, a conspiracy themed movie directed by Ari Aster - and one of the very best films of 2025, when her keen eye spotted that Ari Aster is one of the producers of Bugonia. This makes sense, as both Aster and Lanthimos are unique auteurs and artists who are keenly aware of the collective unconscious and the murmurings of madness just beneath the surface of our civilization…and have dramatized that in their films.

Bugonia and Eddington are films that have expansive artistic vision and enormous political and cultural insight to them, which is in stark contrast to the current film bro darling and Oscar front-runner One Battle After Another.

One Battle After Another is what comfortable neo-liberal activists imagine themselves to be, while Eddington and Bugonia are glimpses of the ugly and messy reality at contrast with that self-serving and delusional vision. In other words, One Battle After Another tells liberal coastal elites what they want to hear, and Eddington and Bugonia tell them the unvarnished and uncomfortable truth. Or even more bluntly…One Battle After Another is what “resistance” liberals want to be, and Eddington and Bugonia are what they really are.

My despondence over the state of the world is well-documented. The world is losing its mind faster and faster as every hour of every day passes…and we hurtle blindly toward a conflagration that will engulf us all and suffocate all the humanity out of us and the world. (As an aside…if you think Venezeula is a one-off and not a continuation, or is the end and not the beginning - God help you because you’re too thick for words.)

In my despondence over the world, I turn to art to try and find some insight or solace or understanding…and what I usually find is artistically benign and politically malignant neo-liberal corporate capitalist garbage. But with Bugonia and Eddington I find hope amidst the hopelessness. If two great artists like Lanthimos and Aster are seeing and saying what I am seeing and saying…then at least there is a light that can be a beacon to others who have not lost their way in all of this darkness. Or maybe it isn’t as positive as all that…maybe I am just a cynical, self-serving prophet who is happy to see signs that I am right. Who knows?

All I know is that Bugonia is one of the best films of the year. Be forewarned…it is an arthouse film and it is not for everybody. But even mainstream audiences, if they go into the film with an open mind, can enjoy the madness and mastery of Bugonia.

So go to Peacock – and if you don’t have a subscription, you can get a free week trial – and watch Bugonia, it is well-worth your time, and it might even open your eyes and your mind.

©2026

Emptying the Notebook - Four Film Reviews for the Price of One

END OF YEAR HOUSECLEANING

As the year is coming to a close, I went back through my notebook and discovered some films I watched but did not properly review. So I figured why not just empty everything out and share some brief thoughts on these movies in case you were looking for something to watch over the holidays.

THE APPRENTICE – Available to stream on Amazon Prime

The Apprentice is actually a 2024 film but I never got around to watching it…and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised as I had very low expectations for the film and they were easily exceeded.

I expected a sort of run of the mill anti-Trump diatribe in film form…a sentiment I understand but which I believe would make for a rather dull feature film. What I got instead was a really incredible performance from Sebastian Stan as The Donald, in a rather nuanced and, all things considered, restrained biography of the early adult years of our current President.

Directed by Ali Abbasi, The Apprentice chronicles Trump’s ascent in the New York real estate and social world from a nepo nobody to a socialite somebody. Trump’s relationship with uber-scumbag Roy Cohn – portrayed with aplomb by Jeremy Strong, gives the background to his cutthroat approach to both business and politics.

The film is shockingly good in the first half in presenting Trump as an actual human being trying to understand the world and his place in it. In the second half it loses some steam, some perspective and nuance, but Stan never loses his grasp of the character or his humanity (or inhumanity as the case may be).

Sebastian Stan’s portrayal of Trump in this film is jaw-droppingly good. He doesn’t imitate Trump, but he is subtle in recreating some of his mannerisms and speech, and he gives a truly seamless and sterling performance. Stan was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar and Strong for Best Supporting Actor…and both nominations are very well deserved.

If you are looking for a solid movie to watch, you could do much worse than watching The Apprentice. That said, if you are burned out on all things Trump…I get it.

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

WARFARE – Available to stream on HBO MAX

Warfare is a 2025 film directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza that sort of slid under the radar when it hit theatres in April.

The film chronicles a single military encounter of a Navy SEAL platoon in 2006 during the Battle of Ramadi. It is based on the real-life experience of director Mendoza and accounts from his team members.

Alex Garland is a filmmaker who showed great promise in his debut feature Ex Machina, but who has disappointed since then. His most recent film, 2024’s Civil War, showed great promise as well but never was quite as good as it should have been.

Warfare is, in my unhumble opinion, Garland’s best film since Ex Machina. It is a rather simple set up, a platoon of Navy SEALS is stuck doing surveillance in a house in Ramadi. Then the shit hits the fan and a battle erupts.

The film is well shot by cinematographer David J. Thompson, and well-choreographed by Mendoza. The battle is chaotic and feels entirely real. The best thing about Warfare is that it feels like you are plunged into a real setting and situation with real warriors. It doesn’t have the usual Hollywood film structure or pacing or anything like that. There are no grandiose speeches are dramatic movie star posturing, just a cast of regular looking dudes thrown into a hellish environment and trying to survive it.

The film is not overtly political, but it certainly does have something to say about the Iraq debacle if you have eyes to see it.

I found Warfare to be an effective and affecting piece of moviemaking. It isn’t a great film, but it is a good enough one to recommend people check it out and do so with an open mind.

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

28 YEARS LATER – Available to stream on Netflix

28 Years Later is the sequel to the 2002 film 28 Days Later, both of which were written by the aforementioned Alex Garland. It is the third film in the 28 Days Later franchise…and a fourth is on its way in 2026.

I greatly enjoyed 28 Days Later when I saw it in the theatre back in 2002, as it gave a real jolt of energy to the zombie genre – a genre I admittedly had little interest in or knowledge of.

Having revisited 28 Days Later recently, the shine has come off that film in many ways. It wasn’t quite as good as I remembered it (I hadn’t seen it since seeing it in the theatre).

That said, I went into 28 Years Later with an open mind. I found the film, which is directed by Danny Boyle – the director of the original, to be mostly underwhelming.

The movie features a top-notch cast of Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Jack O’Connell and Ralph Fiennes, so there is a great deal of potential there…but unfortunately it never coalesces into a compelling piece of cinema.

To be clear, it isn’t a bad film, but it also isn’t a great one…it just kind of exists. It is less a zombie movie than an existential and philosophical one…and that gives it some energy, but the plot and the execution of it all never quite comes together in a way that satisfies or satiates.

The biggest question I had at the end of the film was why was this necessary? I mean, I get that the first movie was compelling and the second – 28 Weeks Later (2007), was forgettable…but why make another movie in the franchise nearly twenty years later when there wasn’t exactly a rallying cry from the masses to get it done?

Ultimately, 28 Years Later is a pretty forgettable bit of moviemaking, something that has become all-too common in the last decade of Danny Boyle’s directing career.

I say skip 28 Years Later unless if you’re a gigantic zombie movie fanatic…but even then, you’ll be disappointed with the general lack of zombie mayhem captured on screen.

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

THE SHROUDS – Available to stream on The Criterion Channel

The Shrouds, iconic filmmaker David Cronenberg’s latest film, hit theatres in 2025 and is now streaming on The Criterion Channel.

The film, which stars Vincent Cassel, Guy Pearce, Diane Kruger and Sandrine Holt, tells the story of a widower who has invented a new technology called “GraveTech”, that helps the grieving to monitor the decomposition of their loved one in the grave. Yes…this is some weird Cronenberg-ian shit.

The film is a sort of glorious concoction that mixes the usual Cronenberg body horror with a philosophical mediation on love, death, life and the modern world. Throw in some conspiracy theorizing and some big business corruption and you’ve got quite the arthouse phantasmagoria.

If you are a fan of David Cronenberg – and I consider myself one…not a super fan but a fan, then you will absolutely love The Shrouds as it is quintessential Cronenberg – most especially late-stage Cronenberg, as a man grappling with his own mortality and the death of his wife.

If you’re a normal human being you will probably find The Shrouds to be a completely alien, convoluted, and rather ghoulish cinematic experience. I understand that entirely and don’t judge anyone for feeling that way.

But if you are a Cronenberg fan, or a fan of somewhat eccentric arthouse cinema from a quality filmmaker who sometimes makes somewhat eccentric arthouse cinema…then I recommend you at least check out The Shrouds.

Ultimately The Shrouds might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but it is undeniably an original idea…and that is pretty rare nowadays.

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars (3.5 out of 5 stars for Cronenberg fans)

If you want to check out some other Cronenberg films here is a brief rundown of movies to see.

Solid horror movies – The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers.

Very Solid Mainstream Movies – A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method.

Gloriously Bat-Shit Crazy Movies Worth Watching – Crash (1996)

Alright gang…that is all I have for now. I hope everyone has a happy and healthy New Year!!

©2025

Megadoc: A Documentary Review - Chronicling a Movie Mega-Disaster

 ****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A compelling and insightful journey through the madness of Megalopolis.

Megadoc, directed by Mike Figgis, is a documentary that chronicles the production of Francis Ford Coppola’s infamous 2024 film, Megalopolis.

Once upon a time, Francis Ford Coppola - director of such iconic films as The Godfather I and II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, was among the greatest filmmakers of all time. That time has long since passed….as evidenced by the catastrophic artistic and commercial failure that was Megalopolis.

Megalopolis was a bloated, incoherent disaster area of a movie that tried to mix filmmaking with theatre to tell the story of the Roman Republic morphing into the Roman Empire as a metaphor for modern-day America. The movie was so bad, so poorly designed and poorly executed that instead of making me mad, it actually made me sad.  (My review and podcast on the film)

Megalopolis was Coppola’s white whale…an ill-fated, grandiose ambition that first lured, then dragged, the famed director’s artistry to the depths of its watery grave. Coppola had been chasing this idea for forty some odd years, (twenty-five years ago he even cast the movie and shot some footage which is shown in Megadoc – and seems like it would have been a much better version as it starred Ryan Gosling, Uma Thurman and Robert DeNiro) and having watched Megalopolis I can confidently say that he should have never caught it.  

Watching the consistently compelling Megadoc gives a hint as to why and how Megalopolis failed so spectacularly.

Mike Figgis, an acclaimed filmmaker himself best known for his 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas, posits himself right in the middle of Coppola’s production and guides us seamlessly through the hopeful and creative rehearsal period to the ponderous and perplexing shooting up to the debut at Cannes.

Coppola is known for his extravagant approach to shooting, and the chaos that reigns upon his set…most notably on Apocalypse Now – the production of which was captured by Coppola’s wife Eleanor in the masterful documentary Hearts of Darkness. Eleanor, who is seen briefly in Megadoc, sadly passed away in 2024, six months before Megalopolis was released in the U.S.

The chaos on the set of Megalopolis pales in comparison to that on Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse Now was a concoction composed of clashing artistic brilliance and attempting to capture bold ideas as they lurked deep in the heart of the jungles of the Philippines. From that concoction came a masterpiece that accurately captured the madness of its maker.

Megalopolis, on the other hand, is just a truly bad idea – painfully trite and devoid of insight or originality, that fails to ever come into complete focus in the mind of an old man nearly fifty years passed his prime.

Coppola is now 86 years old…and that is way too old to be making a movie this ambitious. Hell, Coppola at 46 years old would not have been able to pull this off.

Figgis captures the organizational clashes on Coppola’s set between artistic department heads and the stubborn and dated director. Coppola wants all sorts of remarkable things and fails to understand how much those things will cost and how difficult they are to create.

Adding to the tension is the fact that Coppola essentially paid for the film himself and is throwing away his family’s inheritance in order to get it made.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Coppola fails to grasp what it will take to make the movie work, and the budget balloons to over $125 million. A budget this large is no longer uncommon in Hollywood, but the overwhelming majority of those movies are financed by studios – who have money to burn, and not filmmakers spending their own savings.

Coppola hasn’t made a good movie in thirty-five years, which is why no studio would give him $125 million to make this ill-conceived movie in the first place. And seeing him try and navigate production of Megalopolis painfully reveals that his vision for the movie, even if executed perfectly, was never going to work. Theatre and film mix like oil and water, and the theatricality of Megalopolis is like a poison coursing through the veins of the film.

One of the more interesting parts of Coppola’s process is how he rehearses his actors. Figgis deftly captures the theatre games that Coppola makes his cast play and they both seemed very familiar to me as a former actor and acting coach, and also somewhat silly. Coppola’s rehearsal process would be deemed brilliant if the films that followed them turned out good…but that hasn’t happened in a really, really long time.

Unfortunately for Coppola, some of his biggest mistakes on Megalopolis were made in casting. The star of the film, Adam Driver, delivers a dead-eyed and dull performance that lifelessly floats through the movie – as does his co-star Nathalie Emmanuel – both of whom refuse to let Figgis shoot them on set for the documentary (Driver does do an interview after shooting).

But as bad as the casting decisions of Driver and Emmanuel are, the worst decision Coppola made was casting Shia LeBeouf. LeBeouf was in the wake of a physical, emotional and sexual abuse scandal when Coppola cast him in the film, and was desperate to be back in the movie game.

You’d think LeBeouf, who was well-aware of his negative reputation, would work extra hard not to be a gigantic pain in the ass on the set of Megalopolis…you’d be wrong.

LeBeouf is such an incorrigible douchebag on the set, constantly questioning Coppola on his choices and often demanding changes to suit his own artistic interpretation, that Coppola at one point just walks away saying Lebeouf is the worst casting decision he’s ever made. LeBeouf argues back that he is not as bad as Marlon Brando who showed up to Apocalypse Now 70 lbs. overweight.

Here's the thing that Shia LeBeouf seems to not understand. When you are an undeniable, million-watt mega-talent like Marlon Brando…or Sean Penn or Daniel Day Lewis…you can be an absolute pain in the ass anytime you want because you are the best at what you do.

When you are Shia LeBeouf, a middling talent at best, who is lucky to be there in the first place…you cannot ever be a pain in the ass. You have to do what you’re told, when you’re told, and keep your mouth shut about it. Shia was unable to do that…and as a result he is exposed as utterly unemployable in Megadoc. He may work again, but he’ll never work with any director that matters in any movie that matters, ever again. His career is, essentially, over. Good riddance.

Other actors give not-very-good performances but fare much better than LeBeouf as they seem like good people who are fun to work with are Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman and…believe it or not…Jon Voight.

Ultimately, Megadoc is a much better movie than Megalopolis, which is a scathing indictment of Megalopolis and a tip of the cap to Mike Figgis and his deft documentarian directing abilities.

Megadoc is streaming on the Criterion Channel streaming service. I know most people don’t have that service but let me say that it is essential for any cinephile. The service costs about $100 a year and is well worth it. I watch a lot of movies per year, and the majority of the films I watch are on the Criterion Channel – it is well worth the investment.

In conclusion, Megalopolis is truly terrible. Megadoc is pretty good. My recommendation to get the most out of the experience is to watch Megaloplis first, then watch Megadoc, then watch Megalopolis again. This process might drive you absolutely insane…in fact it should drive you absolutely insane…but if you’re not spending your time trying to figure out the madness of others, then you’ll just be left with only the madness of yourself.

©2025

Jay Kelly: A Review - George Clooney as George Clooney in an Underwhelming George Clooney Film

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. If you love the George Clooney Experience, you’ll find this harmless and rather hapless film to be a pleasant experience…if Clooney is not your cup of tea, this lukewarm gruel will go down like bad milk.

Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler, is a dramedy that tells the story of a somewhat fictional actor - considered the last of the great Hollywood movie stars, coming to grips with his life and career.

The film, written by Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer and directed by Baumbach, premiered on Netflix on December 5th.

Jay Kelly is essentially A Christmas Carol for the Hollywood sect, as it’s the tale of a Hollywood star having an existential crisis being visited by the ghosts of his Hollywood past and present…and maybe future.

The film masquerades as a search for profundity but is actually a cloying and treacly exercise in mawkishness wrapped in self-pitying movie star charm and insider winks.

Jay Kelly is no doubt designed to elicit knowing nods and hopefully some nominations from the movie industry insiders it dramatizes and humanizes – a wise strategic maneuver by both Baumbach and Clooney as the narcissism capitol of the world - Hollywood loves, nothing more than movies about itself. The problem though is that I don’t think Jay Kelly is going to win any Oscars despite its narrative pandering, mostly because it just isn’t particularly good.

The film is sort of a poor man’s attempt at Robert Altman. It would be too generous to call it Altman-esque, or even Altman-lite…but let’s just say it has some stylistic flourishes – in the party and group scenes for instance, that somewhat resemble the work of Robert Altman.

The structure of Jay Kelly, which features a series of flashbacks, is less than compelling. Watching Clooney watch an actor play a younger version of himself is amateurish at best, and ridiculous at worst.

The film is also deeply marinated in a saccharine sentimentality that irritates. Jay Kelly is, besides being a movie star, a bad father, bad friend and overall bad person…so this story is reduced to “poor little rich boy feels bad”.

The same is true of Adam Sandler’s character – Ron, who is Jay’s manager and he apparently really “loves” him…but this love never seems earned or genuine despite it being told to the audience over and over that it is.

In this way the snake pit that is Hollywood is glossed over in favor of a sort of silly and goofy take on the truly vile villains who inhabit the place – who actually see human beings as nothing more than pieces of meat to exploit for personal profit, rather than as “members of the family”.

George Clooney has at times been called the last movie star – a label I would vociferously argue against (that title might go to Leonardo DiCaprio – but maybe not even him), so his playing essentially a version of himself – or at least a version of his public self, is a mildly intriguing premise.

Clooney’s career, or more particularly, his movie stardom, has always been a mystery to me. I understand that he is a good-looking and charming guy, but he isn’t that good-looking or that charming to have become the massive movie star he did.

The truth is that Clooney is not a very good actor (and don’t get me started on Clooney as director - YIKES!). The proof of this is easily discovered if you watch the plethora of movies he’s made – most of which are pretty sub-par too. Instead of listing the cavalcade of films he’s made that stink, I’ll just list the ones worth seeing – a much more manageable list. Three Kings, Michael Clayton, The American…that’s it, that’s the list.

That Clooney, a talent-deficient, pseudo-nepo baby (his aunt is Rosemary Clooney), could go from being a two-bit tv actor to a movie star seemingly overnight speaks to something broken in the system…and Clooney’s massive failing over the last decade or more a symptom of the disease of sub-mediocrity ravaging Hollywood.

Clooney’s lone super power appears to be his unrelenting ambition – how American of him. In some ways he is, and he will shudder at this comparison – the Hollywood version of Donald Trump…all hat and no cattle so to speak.

Perusing Clooney’s filmography – which shows that over the last dozen years he hasn’t made a single relevant film, reveals that whether his star status was ever earned or not – it is certainly now hemorrhaging…and Jay Kelly is a last-ditch effort to stop the bleeding.

In some ways Jay Kelly succeeds in being a tourniquet, a short-term fix to temporarily stop the bleeding. Clooney, who always seems to play himself in films, once again plays himself – an aging movie star adored for being a charming fellow who plays himself…sort of like a mirror reflected into a mirror reflected into a mirror and on and on. Admittedly…that is very clever.

Clooney does Clooney things throughout…he smirks and tilts his head and does a bunch of silly running (a cloying Clooney signature). But here’s the thing about Clooney’s “charming” performance…it is demonstrably better than the movie surrounding him.

Baumbach struggles to find a coherent tone and a coherent narrative throughout, but there are a bevy of sequences which are baffling in both their creation and execution. For example, there’s a train sequence that is so awful it made my teeth hurt. There’s also a bizarre side story regarding an old classmate that could have been something but was turned into absolutely nothing. The same is true of a long lost love interest.

And then there is Adam Sandler. Sandler plays Jay’s manager Ron. Ron is the picture of patience and thoughtfulness. He has a wife and kids at home that he doesn’t spend enough time with because he is always doing stuff for Jay Kelly. He even neglects his other clients because he has to handle Jay Kelly.

Sandler is, at best, grating in the role. But to be fair, I find Adam Sandler grating every time I see him. Sandler, like Clooney, is a star whose success I find to be a complete and utter mystery. He isn’t funny, he isn’t interesting, he isn’t talented and he isn’t original. He is a waste of space, so much so that if it were up to me - he’d be melted down and we’d start over from scratch.

Sandler does his usual schmaltzy shtick of soft talking and sad eyes as Ron, and it hits with about as much dramatic power as a week-old dog turd baking by the side of the road.

As off-putting as Sandler is, the real problem with Jay Kelly is Noah Baumbach. Baumbach has made some interesting films in his time – and by some, I mean two…The Squid and the Whale and While We’re Young.

Baumbach isn’t a visual stylist, he’s more of a wordsmith…but the problem is he’s not that good of a writer. His stories are more often than not narratively trite and reek of an arthouse desperation that feels palpably mainstream in its execution. In other words, Baumbach is an arthouse poseur, who makes third-rate, middlebrow muck for the masses while pretending to be an cool-kid auteur.

Jay Kelly is not the worst film ever made. It has a certain charm about it, which is probably the same undefinable charm that has kept George Clooney on the A-list in Hollywood for the last twenty-five years or so.

Some people will love Jay Kelly as it is lukewarm pablum that can be digested with ease and little effort. I am not one of those people.

That said, if you are looking to spend a breezy two-hours and twelve minutes with George Clooney being George Clooney pretending to have an existential crisis…then I genuinely think you’ll enjoy Jay Kelly and encourage you to check it out as it is harmless enough.

As for me…if I ever get the urge to watch George Clooney…I’ll rewatch The American or Michael Clayton…thank you very much.

©2025

Train Dreams: A Review - A Malickian Meditation on Man's Search for Meaning

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A well-made and moving mediation on the search for meaning and human connection.

Train Dreams, directed by Clint Bentley and written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, chronicles the life of Robert Grainier, a working man in the northwest of the United States in the 1900s.

The film, which has a run-time of 102 minutes and is currently streaming on Netflix, stars Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon and William H. Macy.

I knew nothing about Train Dreams prior to watching. I had no idea who whom the writer/directors were, no idea about the plot, no clue who starred in it. I went in naked as a newborn babe…and I think that’s a good thing…and because I think it’s a good thing, I will try my best to give as little information about the film as possible to you dear reader so that you can experience the film in similar fashion.

Train Dreams, which is based on the Denis Johnson book of the same name, is made by the same creative team – Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, that made last year’s Sing Sing…a film that was well-done and very affecting. Not surprisingly considering Bentley and Kwedar, Train Dreams is well-done and very affecting as well.

The best way to describe Train Dreams is to say that it is Malickian – in reference to filmmaker Terence Malick. Train Dreams is, like Malick’s work, more meditation and contemplation than plot driven. It also, like Malick’s movies, is painfully human and addresses deep existential topics while desperately seeking profundity.

I love Terence Malick. His film The Tree of Life (2011), which I coincidentally just re-watched last week, is not just one of my favorite films but one of the very best films ever made.

Malick’s movies are often challenging to general audiences – a topic I’ve written about at length, but his artistry and philosophy connect with me in a very personal, intimate and deeply moving way.

For instance, Malick’s films after The Tree of Life – such as Knight of Cups (2015) and Song to Song (2017), were simply too esoteric for most people, but I was blown away by them.

For good or for ill, Train Dreams is Malick for mainstreamers….let’s call it Malick-lite. The film examines many of the same subjects as a Malick movie, and it uses much of the same visual style as a Malick movie, but it is not quite as impenetrable and esoteric as a Malick movie.

Bentley and his cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, somewhat mimic Malick’s floating camera style, and make the most of the gorgeous natural light and scenery…and montage is used to great effect throughout to generate emotion…all signatures of a Malick film.

There is a voice-over used throughout the film, which is from a third person perspective. This voice-over is a bit too on the nose for me, but it is also the device that makes this movie a Malick-lite instead of a straight up Malick. Malick uses voice-over, but they are first person, and they reveal internal dialogues and not used as a way to give context to the plot. This voice-over reduces the sense of this film being a meditation and contemplation, and tries to make it more mainstream and digestible. In a sense it succeeds, but I would have preferred the film without it.

What most makes Train Dreams Malickian is that it is a film about meaning…more particularly, our search for meaning…and the void we all have within us and some of us are even brave enough to acknowledge. The film dwells in the dark, empty places we all carry, and it masterfully portrays the yearning for connection…to others, to the world, to our true self, to God.

Joel Edgerton is an actor I generally do not think much of on the rare occasion I think of him at all. But to Edgerton’s great credit, he does a wonderful job in this film of being a blank slate when playing the protagonist Robert. He doesn’t push too hard or try to give too much, he just quietly exists in the frame and lets the context and story do all the work for him.

That may sound like an easy task, but it truly isn’t, and very few actors are capable of it. For example, in Malick’s To the Wonder (2012), Ben Affleck is unable to do that exact thing and is terribly uncomfortable in front of Malick’s camera. Sean Penn, Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain were masters of it in The Tree of Life (2011), as was Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett in Knight of Cups (2015).

Joining Edgerton in giving simple yet very affecting performances in Train Dreams is Felicity Jones. Once again, Jones does little more than be alive in front of the camera - easier said than done, and she fills the screen with simplicity. It also helps that she is a comforting beauty of which the camera makes the most.

William H. Macy was at one time one of the great character actors in the movie business, but that was a long time ago. In Train Dreams he is back at his best playing an aging logger who works with Robert. Macy has minimal screen time but he makes the most of it by giving a hearty and heartfelt performance.

Terence Malick films are akin to cinematic poems, you less try and figure them out than you let them wash over you. Train Dreams is not a cinematic poem, it is a bit too straight-forward for that, but it is reminiscent of that. It is a more mainstreamed version of Malick that while still an art house film, is an art house film made for general audience consumption - hence the Netflix deal. The truth is, for me at least, Malick-lite is better than no Malick at all.

Train Dreams isn’t perfect, but it is very well-made and skillfully acted, and it is artful in its genuine yearning for humanity and profundity….and for that I am grateful.

In our age of relentless cinematic midgetry, where lesser films are heralded as masterpieces (I’m looking at you Sinners and One Battle After Another – both painfully vapid and vacuous exercises), and hyperbole rules the day, Train Dreams is most definitely good enough to qualify as one of the very best films of the year.

While I’d love to say that everyone should watch The Tree of Life with their family on Thanksgiving night, but I am smart enough to know that would be catastrophic, but I do think Train Dreams is a solid choice for mainstreamers and cinephiles alike to watch together on Thanksgiving night over pumpkin pie and hot chocolate...and doing a double feature with Sing Sing would work well too.

©2025

After the Hunt: A Review - Philosophical Phonies in a Woke Soap Opera

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An incoherent and inconsequential dramatization of the madness of #MeToo and woke campus politics.

After the Hunt, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Julia Roberts, is a #MeToo/campus politics drama set at the Yale University Philosophy Department.

After the Hunt, which runs two-hours and twenty-minutes, landed at theatres on October 10th of this year with a pronounced thud. The film, despite being helmed by critically adored Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino, and starring Oscar winning movie star Julia Roberts, was a box office bomb and critical failure.

I am usually not in synch with audience or even critical opinion, and so it was that I went into watching After the Hunt – which is now available to stream on Amazon Prime, curious to see what all the negative fuss was about.

I have never been a fan of Luca Guadagnino – and find his films, like Challengers and Call Me by Your Name, to be egregiously overrated, or of Julia Roberts, who in my terribly unhumble opinion is a suffocatingly limited talent.

That said, the subject matter of After the Hunt, which deals with the woke hysteria that has infected nearly every part of our culture over the last decade, is something that I think deserves true artistic examination…and I thought maybe, just maybe, Guadagnino might have stumbled on to making a decent movie about a crucial topic.

And then I watched the movie.

After the Hunt truly earned its box office and critical failing. The film, which was scripted by Nora Garrett, is atrociously written. The plotlines of the film are much like the characters, poorly thought out and insipidly vapid.

There is so much superfluous nonsense in this movie, surrounded by philosophical posing and preening, that it feels like you’ve got lost wandering around in a poorly designed liberal haunted house in the MSNBC green room. It is also inhabited by some of the most loathsome and unlikable characters in recent memory and it is relentlessly pedantic, pretentious and petty in its personal politics.

The woke topics tackled in the film are just as dull and dim-witted as the woke issues of our time, but they are so clumsily dramatized they end up feeling like something a freshman philosophy major would write if they were trying to create a daytime soap opera for an ill-conceived Ivy League television network.  

There are some plot devices in this movie that are so ham-handed it actually left me shaking my head. For example, there is a crucial plot point in the first act (I won’t give it away to avoid spoilers) that is so amateurish in design and execution it felt like something from teen dramedy on Nickelodeon or something. The same is true for the deep, dark secret Julia Roberts’ character is hiding. And don’t get me started on the epilogue of the film which is jaw-droppingly inane…Yikes!

Speaking of Julia Roberts…here is a weird thing about this movie…Julia Roberts is very good in it as Alma, a respected Philosophy professor hungry to get tenure. Now as previously stated I have never thought much of her as an actress, but considering the slop she was given to work with in this film, she does a remarkable job of putting it together.  What was particularly affecting was her physical performance and her ability to convey physical pain.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast are nowhere near as successful as Ms. Roberts.

Andrew Garfield plays Hank, a cool dude philosophy professor who may or may not have crossed the line with one of his students. Garfield turns his performance up to eleven and turns down his believability to about a two. Garfield is so performative in the role it feels like he’s doing an SNL skit.

The same is true of Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Frederick, Alma’s cuckolded, sad sack psychotherapist husband. Stuhlbarg’s Frederick is so incoherent and odd it feels like he is doing a Coen Brothers comedy and not a #MeToo drama. Good for him.

The worst acting in this film…and the worst acting I’ve seen in quite some time, comes from Ayo Edebiri, who plays Maggie, a lesbian philosophy student who is Alma’s protégé and the daughter of extravagantly wealthy parents.

I have never watched The Bear, so I’ve never seen Edebiri act before…but she is an absolutely abysmal actress in After the Hunt. She is so devoid of any acting skill or charisma it is actually shocking.

Guadagnino cast his art dealer David Leiber in this film to play a dean at Yale, and he is as awful as you’d expect a rank amateur to be in that performance…but here’s the thing…as terrible as he is…he is better than Ayo Edebiri.

Edebiri may be great in The Bear and is totally miscast here, I don’t know, but what I do know is that she is unbearably awful in this movie and it is truly embarrassing. She is so bad I wonder if she’ll ever work in film again.

Now, maybe Luca Guadagnino is playing 69-dimensional chess and he cast the talent deficient woman of color Edebiri, and used the shitty script from millennial white woman Nora Garrett, as some sort of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion performance art to show how insidious wokeness is in the arts. If so, good for him, then his god-awful movie is actually a worthwhile piece of meta-art.

Of course, the truth is Guadagnino didn’t do any of that with the intention of exposing DEI for the cancer that it is on the arts, instead he did it because he is infected by that same cancer.

One thing that I do think is true is that Guadagnino, who is a Generation X-er, used his film to take Gen Z and millennials to task for their absurd and ridiculous fragilities, tortured philosophies and performative politics, something that two other Generation X directors did this year as well – PT Anderson with One Battle After Another, and Ari Aster with Eddington. Both Anderson and Aster certainly took on the generation gap in much smarter and more successful ways than Guadagnino.

Ultimately, After the Hunt could have been a very interesting and even useful film. But unfortunately, Guadagnino isn’t skilled enough to overcome a truly amateurish script and so this film flounders from start to finish – devoid of drama, comedy, humanity and insight.

The topics raised in After the Hunt are definitely worthy of serious examination and dramatization, but this movie does those issues, and its audience, a disservice, as it never truly brings an adequate level of artistry to this fiery philosophical debate.

©2025

Nouvelle Vague: A Review - Non 'Mange Tes Mort', Mais Plutot 'N'importe Quoi'*

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A rather fruitless endeavor devoid of insight and drama. I highly recommend you go straight to the source and watch Breathless and the rest of the French New Wave classics instead.

*Apologies to the French if I butchered their language in the headline.

Nouvelle Vague, directed by Richard Linklater, is a new Netflix film that dramatizes the making of the iconic 1960 Jean-Luc Godard film, Breathless, which was one of the first films of the French New Wave.

The Nouvelle Vague, which translated means “New Wave”, was born among a cohort of cinephiles and cinema intellectuals in the offices of the famed French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s – which included Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol as well as filmmakers Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, Jacque Demy and Chris Marker.

Breathless, which is an existential love story/ crime drama, was a revolutionary film that signaled the emergence of the French New Wave and its unorthodox style – most notably long tracking shots, jump cuts and breaking filmmaking rules like continuity and 180-degree axis of camera movement, upon cinema.

Breathless was enormously popular and is considered by some to be one of the very best films ever made.

I do not think Breathless is one of the greatest films ever made…I don’t think it is even the best French New Wave film ever made – I’d go with Truffault’s The 400 Blows (1959) for that title…followed closely by Truffault’s Jules et Jim (1962) and Alian Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), but I do think Breathless is a fantastic piece of cinema.

Whatever you may think of Godard and the French New Wave – and lots of people don’t think much of it (those people are meat-headed philistines!!), Breathless is a phenomenal film that radiates with an undeniable cinematic magnetism and momentum.

Watching the film and its’ avant-garde cinematic styling, as well as its compelling and charming performances from Jean-Paul Belmondo and the luminous Jean Seberg, is a pure joy.

Unfortunately, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, which is an ode to, and dramatization of, Breathless, is not much of a joy. In fact, it is quite a baffling and confounding experience that never seems to make much sense or coalesce into a coherent piece of cinema.

Linklater, who is occasionally a bit of a cinema revolutionary himself – as evidenced by his unorthodox films Waking Life and Boyhood, obviously adores the French New Wave in general and Breathless/Godard in particular. But his film about the making of Breathless is the polar opposite of Breathless itself, as it seems to serve no purpose and is devoid of the magnetism, momentum and energy that make Breathless the iconic film that it is.

Nouvelle Vague recounts the daily struggle to get Breathless made and the original, dare I say “odd”, way it was made. It highlights how Godard was a difficult artist who refused to compromise his vision, and kept most everyone in the dark about what that vision actually was.

As a cinephile and a lover of the French New Wave (and also a lover of the Italian Neo-Realists who were the precursors to the Nouvelle Vague), I understand the appeal of examining it, I just don’t think trying to re-enact the making of an iconic movie is the best way to do that.

Yes, there are some fun little moments in Nouvelle Vague, and it is momentarily enjoyable to go “oh hey!! There’s Truffaut…or Roberto Rossellini or Chabrol!!” But ultimately, Nouvelle Vague feels like an empty gesture, a recreation of a great moment in history that is stripped of all its drama, mystery and thrills….sort of like the recreation of a famous battle – it lacks drama because the bullets aren’t real…and thus the stakes are null and void. In other words, it is all play acting - making insight, not to mention genuine drama, impossible.

As dramatic as the making of Breathless was at the time, there is no drama in revisiting it as we know that ultimately the film gets made, is a masterpiece and Godard is venerated as a genius and proven right. So, when obstacles appear in Nouvelle Vague regarding the making of Breathless…they are nothing but toothless drama.

The cast of the film do decent enough jobs mimicking their famous characters. For example, Guillaume Marbeck seems exactly like what you’d think what Jean-Luc Godard was like. But the performance, as enjoyable as it was, feels a bit empty…like something you’d see at a Paris amusement park dedicated to French filmmakers.

Zoey Deutch plays Jean Seberg – who was quite a fascinating character in real-life (and who died at a very young age – and under very mysterious circumstances -  which included “meddling” from the U.S. intelligence community), is not so fascinating in Nouvelle Vague. Deutch is certainly a beauty like Seberg, but she lacks the charisma and charm of her iconic character.

The overwhelming feeling after watching Nouvelle Vague was simply – why would I watch this instead of watching Breathless itself? The answer, of course, is that you shouldn’t.

Breathless is streaming on HBO Max – or Max or whatever the hell HBO is calling their streaming service nowadays. Instead of watching Nouvelle Vague on Netflix, go watch Breathless on HBO Max, and then watch The 400 Blows, and Jules et Jim (both are also on Max), and Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

If you want to do a deep dive on the French New Wave _ which I highly recommend…The Criterion Channel streaming service (which is excellent) has a great collection (which include all three of the above films, and they also have a great collection of Italian Neo-Realist films too which I highly recommend (Bicycle Thieves, Rome: Open City and Germany: Year Zero are a great place to start).

The bottom line is that as much as Richard Linklater may genuinely love the French New Wave, Breathless and Godard, he does it no favors with his rather tepid and trite Nouvelle Vague – which is hamstrung by a paucity of interest and insight.

So, if you are interested in the slightest in the French New Wave, Breathless and/or Godard (you should be!), skip Nouvelle Vague and go to the original source…you’ll be very glad you did.

©2025