…is still echoed (in my head anyway) by Mike Nichols‘ 1960s evaluation of The Graduate‘s Benjamin Braddock, who was initially conceived by Charles Webb as a blonde WASP. “Maybe he’s Jewish inside,” Nichols said.

HE-posted in 2016:

From Dustin Hoffman‘s 10.31. New Yorker essay, “Surviving The Graduate“, which, with one small exception, makes for really great reading. The one thing missing is a parenthetical salute to Noam Pitlik, who played the gas station guy.

Hoffman: “Mike lived in the Waspiest part of Connecticut. He collected antiques and cars and Arabian horses — the ultimate gentile status symbols. But he was very much a Jew, who’d fled Germany in 1939 and arrived in the United States, speaking not a word of English, at the age of seven. Born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, Mike always felt ugly. He had alopecia, and he was extremely self-conscious about his hairlessness. (He had a collection of incredible wigs that started with what his fantasy hair would look like freshly cut; on each successive day, the wig would be a little longer, until it was time for a “haircut.” Then he’d start the wig cycle again from the beginning.)

“Eventually, he realized that he had made a self-portrait out of The Graduate. ‘My unconscious was making that movie,’ he said once. He didn’t notice for years that, not long after his professional breakup with Elaine May — his partner in crime, his artistic collaborator since college — he made a movie in which the hero bangs against the glass wall of a church screaming, in anguish, ‘Elaine! Elaine! Elaine!’ He was looking for an alter ego, and that’s why Benjamin had taken years to cast, and maybe that’s why he was so hard on me. I was a stand-in, there to absorb Mike’s own self-loathing.”

I love Hoffman’s final paragraph, which is nothing if not Hemingwayesque:

It means something, I think, that Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi‘s La Bola Negra has been shivved not only by myself and other regular-guy cineastes who aran’t afraid to stand up to the gay mafia, but also by the New Yorker‘s Justin Chang, an elite, ultra-snippy, reptilian woke scold.

Despite the fact that there are a lot of sentimental woke saps out there, this is the beginning of the end of La Bola Negra.

I’m very sorry that Michael Mann has self-injured at a Los Angeles gun range. I’m presuming he’ll mend through this. The trauma and the searing leg pain…God. Macho condolences, here’s hoping the Heat 2 shoot isn’t affected, and send for the morphine! (Variety is reporting that the wound is “subcutaneous** and minor.”)

But honestly? Fairly or unfairly, many will presume, at least in the back of their minds, that Mann’s age (83) was a factor.

Because this isn’t an Alec Baldwin-type deal. Nor is it a Dick Cheney thing. It sounds like an incident that is one half “old dude forgot or wasn’t thinking” and one half Gus Grissom after his Mercury spacecraft splashed down. Which is (sorry but it’s true) embarrassing to a certain extent. Especially for a master of violent tough-guy films for the last 45 years.

I hate to say that this incident diminishes Mann’s aura of authority, but it kinda does deep down.

Let’s presume the safety was off and the gun discharged due to pressure on the trigger as Mann was holstering. I haven’t fired a .45 in several decades but how common is this kind of accident?

In The Apartment, Jack Lemmon C.C. Baxter tells Shirley MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik that he accidentally shot himself in the leg while sitting in his car. (Despairing and suicidal, he was trying to hide the pistol from an approaching cop.) I’m sorry but Mann and Baxter are now joined at the hip in terms of Hollywood mythology.

James Caan’s Frank, the loner hero-protagonist in Thief, would have never…hell, COULD have never shot himself in the leg under any circumstance. If he had he would have never again have been able to point a .45 at an adversary and say “I am the last guy in the world that you want to fuck with.”

Imagine if Tom Cruise’s Collateral assassin, Vincent, had accidentally shot himself in the leg while riding in Jamie Foxx’s cab. Vincent would have totally folded emotionally, psychologically. Hell, he might have even died of shame.

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I was hoping that my second go-round would feel just as nourishing as the first in Venice. Well, I felt even more affected. Such an impeccably odd, layered, horse-haunted, diverting and fuck-all funny thing, and in ways I’d half-forgotten about.

I knew right away I’d be seeing Wild Horse Nine at least another couple of times. I haven’t loved listening to F-bombs quite as much as I did last night, mixed as they were with a poignant feeling of finality, due to a guilty history and a creeping, unstoppable illness.

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell…do your stuff!

And then along came one of my favorite judgmental wokey snoots, the New Yorker’s Justin Chang, letting readers know that Wild Horse Nine hadn’t rung his bell. Because of an undercurrent that Chang doesn’t like, in large part due to Malkovich’s ailing-in-more-ways-than-one “Chris” as well as director-writer Martin McDonagh having, in Chang’s view, some kind of racist bit between his teeth. Chang’s final line: “I remained dry of eye — and rooted for the cancer.”

With Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi‘s Everest: The Other Side having opened yesterday (10.30) I’m re-running my Venice Film Festival pan, which I titled “Delusional Risk Junkies on Slopes of Everest“:

Don’t kid yourself — Everest:The Other Side is perhaps (and I take no comfort in reporting this) the most appalling, deeply repulsive, crazy-town mountain-climbing doc ever made.

It’s about the perils and pitfalls of being a do-or-die Mount Everest risk junkie, and about a blissfully lunatic rationale that seeks to enoble reckless mountain-climbing behavior of the most irrational kind.

The invisible subtitle of Everest: The Other Side is “we have a rendezvous with death, and we’re going to get there sooner or later.”

The doc’s basic sell is that attaining your mountain-climbing (or more precisely mountain-skiing) dream is such an ecstatic thing that common sense is something to be rigorously avoided at all costs. The doc literally celebrates this attitude.

On top of which the film struck me as evasive if not dishonest in terms of conveying the basic facts about two horrible tragedies that befell mountaineering athlete Jim Morrison — (a) the September 2022 avalanche-related death of Morrison’s wife Hilaree Nelson, and (b) the 2011 plane crash death of Morrison’s first wife, private pilot Katie Morrison, near Barstow — a tragedy that also killed Jim and Katie’s two small children, Wyatt and Hannah.

The astounding feat of not just scaling the north face of Mount Everest in the face of horrific winds and sudden avalanches but compounding the risk by attempting to ski down the Everest slope…c’mon!

Everest-skiing strikes me as the height of privileged, Telluride-dwelling rich-person arrogance, and not too far in my mind from Alan B. Shepard‘s hitting a couple of golf balls on the moon.

I respect Mr. Morrison’s determination to push on despite nature and life itself repeatedly urging him to reconsider, but I despise his attempt to glorify this denial with optimistic, fairy-tale bromides about believing in your dreams, etc.

Official Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi statement: “Everest: The Other Side examines the trade-offs required to pursue extraordinary goals. We set out to make this film not only because Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson’s story grips you, but because Hilaree was a singular human being.

“After tragedy strikes, Jim makes a deliberate choice to fulfill their shared dream, offering a parable of how to endure grief. Seven years in the making, the film required documenting a near-impossible expedition to one of the most remote places on earth.”

All this aside, the doc’s cinematography is entirely breathtaking…congrats to Chin and Vasarhelyi on this score alone.

Sorry but I can’t help returning to this scene every so often…

Posted on 3.16.21: This is easily the most emotionally affecting scene from Martin Brest‘s Midnight Run (’88). Generally speaking action road comedies don’t do this kind of thing at all. But Midnight Run, written by George Gallo, was different.

A violent chase-caper flick with a quippy attitude, fine. But a film of this calibre delivering this kind of emotion would be all but inconceivable today…be honest.

Robert DeNiro (as bounty hunter Jack Walsh) and Danielle DuClos (as DeNiro’s 12 year-old daughter Denise) handle the heavy lifting, making the most of non-verbal currents. But the silent-witness vibes from Charles Grodin (as white-collar criminal Jonathan Mardukas) and Wendy Phillips (as Walsh’s ex-wife) are poignant in themselves.

When Midnight Run opened 38 years ago somebody wrote that it was a hamburger movie that occasionally tasted like steak, but if you re-watch it (as I did a year or two ago) you’ll recall that it wasn’t that great, not really — that it was formulaic and goofy and rarely subtle.

But it was good enough to temporarily “lift all boats,” as the expression goes. Brest peaked four years later with Scent of a Woman (’92), and then he hit the rocks with Meet Joe Black (’98) and then Gigli (pronounced “Jeelie”).

Imagine how this scene might’ve played if Brest hadn’t cast DuClos or someone else on her level. Born in ’74, she was 13 when this scene was filmed.”

DuClos turned 52 on 9.29.26.

I own a grand total of maybe 600 Blurays. Posssibly a bit more than that. But over 12,000? How many wooden bookshelves would Tracy Letts need to stack that many?

That 12K tally must include a huge shitload of dog-eared, flea-bitten DVDs, which are unwatchable for the most part unless your Bluray player delivers superb-quality uprezzing.

HE question for Letts: How big is your TV screen and what kind of 4K Bluray player do you swear by?

Tracy Letts is my hero

— Matt Neglia (@NextBestPicture) October 31, 2026

Get an AV man – Tracy Letts
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Ted Cruz: “Talarico is the ultimate woke social justice warrior. He stands in front of a church and says he weeps for his whiteness, and weeps for his masculinity. That’s just weird.

“He was on video and was asked ‘who do you really love?’ And he pauses and answers ‘I really love trans children.’ He also said, on video, that his objective is to ‘dismantle capitalism.'”

Woke whacko!

Then again in a 9.9.26 interview with Fox News, Talarico said he opposed trans student-athletes in girls’ sports “if it endangers safety or fairness.”

HE question to Talarico: “Why do wear your hair like an 11 year-old seminary student in 1965? Do you shave? If so why don’t you loosen up a bit and maybe grow some half-sideburns? Make an attempt to look like Dean Martin in Rio Bravo perhaps? You look like an 11 year-old with really strict parents, man! C’mon!”

As expected, the new 4K Bluray of David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter looks appropriately luscious. But once you’ve properly absorbed Freddie Young’s transporting, exquisitely calibrated 70mm cinematography and Maurice Jarre’s sumptuous score, what is it? What does it actually amount to?

Ryan’s Daughter is basically a modestly–scaled 1920s Irish village story (infidelity, gun–running) that probably should have been told in a modest sort of way. But right from the start you can see and feel Lean’s determination to knock you out with extra-poignant emotions and to-die-for scenic beauty and my idea of forced grandiosity — to render it all in super–stately, visually florid terms.

This scheme had obviously worked effectively and harmoniously with Lawrence of Arabia (‘62) and Doctor Zhivago (‘65) and the slightly more rudimentary, jungle-enveloped The Bridge on the River Kwai (‘57). But would the somewhat smaller-scaled, nativist, thoroughly charming Summertime (‘55) had been necessarily enhanced by a bludgeoning symphonic approach? Sometimes 35mm color and a nice boxy aspect ratio are just fine.

What if some egoistic, over–the–top, David O. Selznick-like producer had applied this overly vigorous concept to a feature film version of The Andy Griffith Show or My Three Sons or The Brady Bunch?

Warner Bros. marketing never would have dreamt of using an image of a blackened femur to sell Ken Russell‘s The Devils back in the day.

Poster to potential Devils viewer: This is all that was left of Oliver Reed‘s Father Grandier after Cardinal Richelieu and his band of fanatical sadists were done with him. They weren’t fooling around, and neither was Ken Russell!

Never-before-seen footage of Oliver Reed discussing KEN RUSSELL’S THE DEVILS at the end of production.

The uncensored director’s cut continues its indefinite run in theaters: https://t.co/RP4YhCOsxW https://t.co/MJUZekxO8v

— Warner Bros. Clockwork (@clockwork_wb) October 30, 2026

The Hollies were not what anyone would call heavy-cat musicians. They were less “serious” than the Moody Blues and roughly on the same aesthetic level as Herman’s Hermits. They wrote catchy jukebox tunes that emphasized Beatle-esque harmonies. No harm, no foul.

But they did manage a breakthrough with “Pay You Back With Interest,” particularly with (a) the bassy piano opening, (b) the climactic bells or chimes (used twice) and (c) that jazzy high-hat non-sequitor. Lead vocal by Allan Clarke; backing vocals from Graham Nash and Tony Hicks.

I’ve been a devoted follower of ’70s cinema for many decades, but I’ve never seen or even thought of seeing Vanishing Point, an action thriller that was released during one of the greatest years of American cinema — 1971.

Barry Newman was the star, and the car was a white 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T 440 Magnum.

Vanishing Point isn’t streamable on Amazon, although Bluray and DVD versions are for sale. Would I stream it if available? Sure, but I can’t see spending $27 and change on the Bluray.

I’m personally interested in seeing Vanishing Point because it was directed by Richard C. Sarafian, who played “Jack Dragna” (“bow-wow…oink-oink”) in Barry Levinson and Warren Beatty‘s Bugsy.