Daniel Petrie's "Lifeguard" ('76) Finally Doesn't Satisfy
December 9, 2025
Before Last Night's 45th Anniversary...
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Now That Netflix Is Finally Streaming “Jay Kelly”
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Christopher Nolan’s six-minute Odyssey prologue is currently playing in IMAX theatres that are showing (choke, gag) Sinners and One Battle After Another. Well, there’s no effing way I’m paying $20something to catch Sinners again and I’ve already seen OBAA twice so eff that jazz. It’s being reported that the full prologue will be attached to Avatar: Fire and Ash 70mm IMAX screenings starting on Friday, 12.19. (I hate the idea of watching Cameron’s latest but I might submit.) Non-IMAX screenings will be getting a truncated version of the prologue. Nolan’s Odyssey flick pops on 7.17.26.
Will it be fair to call The Odyssey a sword-and-sandal flick? I’m asking. Swords, sandals, helmets, beards and loincloths.
Legendary architect Frank Gehry died exactly a week ago at age 96. His spirit ascended from inside his home in Santa Monica. I don’t know why I didn’t jump on this right away as I’ve always loved Gehry’s creations and was deeply moved and honored to meet him in Toronto 19 years ago — a handshake at an outdoor cocktail party for Sydney Pollack‘s Sketches of Frank Gehry, on 9.10.06.
HE-posted 19 years ago: Sydney Pollack‘s Sketches of Frank Gehry (Sony Pictures Classics, 5.12.06), which I caught yesterday at a public screening at Toronto’s Elgin theatre, is a stirring, hugely likable portrait of the most daring and innovative architect of our time.
Corny as this sounds, Sketches left me with a more vivid feeling of celebration and with more reasons to feel enthused and excited about life than anything I’ve seen so far at this festival.
I knew a few things about Gehry before seeing this film, but not a whole lot. Now I feel like I know a few things. The man is the Pablo Picasso of architects. He’s a risk-taker who lives big and tosses the creative dice all the time and really goes for it. And I now know about his significant creations (the most famous being Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles and a seaside museum in Bilbao, Spain), how he creates, who he mostly is, where he’s been.
Sketches is more than just a meet-and-understand-Frank-Gehry movie — it’s a contact high.
Here’s a discussion I did with Pollack about Sketches….apologies for the sound quality. Poor Sydney passed less than two years later (5.26.08).
It’s a film that lets you into the head of a genius in a very relaxed and plain-spoken way, and it lets you share in the sense of being a person of Gehry’s magnitude — a guy who has created a kingdom out of a supreme confidence in his dreams, but at the same time someone honest enough to admit he doesn’t precisely know what he’s doing much of the time.
This is partly due to Gehry having been very open and unguarded with Pollack as the doc was being shot, and partly due to Pollack having sculpted this film in a way that feels more personal and congenial and relaxed than your typical portrait-of-a-noteworthy-person movie.
And yet Pollack doesn’t relent in passing along all the information we need to know about Gehry. It’s all done with total thoroughness and clarity of purpose.
I met and spoke with Gehry and Pollack at a nice cocktail party on Wellington Street late yesterday afternoon, courtesy of publicist Amanda Lundberg. What a pleasure to hang with these guys. I left the party feeling wise and steady and optimistic about everything.
Sketches of Frank Gehry will air on the PBS “American Masters” series in late ’06, but Pollack first wants it to play theatrically. This should happen. I can see this film being an essential “see” with people of a certain stripe, and yet a ten year-old kid could watch it and understand almost everything.
I can only repeat that the film is much more than just a sturdy documentary — it’s a profound turn-on. I’ve looked at Gehry’s buildings and designs — those weirdly bent and sloping pieces of steel and sheet metal and glass and what-have-you — but I never really “saw” them until yesterday.
There’s a wonderful edit right at the beginning of the film, which I won’t spoil by describing in too much detail. Suffice that it takes Gehry’s doodly drawings and brings them into full-metal aliveness in a single stroke.
There’s another delicious moment when Julian Schnabel is asked about Gehry’s press critics, and he refers to them as “flies on the neck of a lion…they’re the sort of people who complain that Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now is over the top.”
In a “live” chat this morning with Telos subscribers, Olivia Nuzzi’s seemingly revenge-driven ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza asked for and replied to various questions.
Here’s what I asked:
“Boiled way down, what in your view is Olivia’s default rationale or susceptibility when it comes to older guys…Olbermann, yourself, RFK, Sanford? One naturally presumes that her relationship with her dad is at the root of it, but what was theexactbasicnatureofthatrelationship? What precisely happened or didn’t happen? Surely you’re familiar with the backstory. This is the nub of it.”
“The acting in Hamnet feels stagey until the movie reaches an actual stage, at which point the earthen, feral, ardent work that Jessie Buckley has been doing reaches its apogee. Agnes witnesses, at last, what her absent husband has been up to in the wake of their family’s tragedy. And the way Buckley registers what’s before her is one of the great acts of beholding I’ve ever seen.
“Her spectator’s journey from rude belligerence to almost drunken bewilderment to chatty hypnosis to biblical revelation was pretty much mine. Through tears, I laughed at the odyssey of Buckley’s facial thesaurus. At some point, she extends a hand up to the proscenium and the actor (Noah Jupe) onstage clasps it, and the bereft epiphany that blasts out of her explains why Buckley’s work in the rest of the movie had felt so primitive: This is a human discovering the fire they call art.” — N.Y. Times critic Wesley Morris, posted on 12.11.
There’s an obvious affinity between Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Burks and George Tomasini‘s handling of the mountain road chase in To Catch A Thief (’55) and the Florida coast beach-speeding scene in Hitch’s Notorious, which was shot by Ted Tetzlaff and edited by Theron Warth.
Cary Grant riding shotgun both times; the laid-back Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman at the wheel, and the law on their trails.
Burks’ Oscar-winning VistaVision photography for Thief is handsome, beautifully balanced and easy on the eyes, and Tomasini’s editing makes the sequence feel centered, relaxed and at peace with the universe. The reactions of Grant and Kelly to the various intrigues and impediments are just right; ditto the insert shots of Grant’s nervous hands. In both films, I mean.
I saw Ella McCay a few hours ago. I was the only one there so I had my phone on the whole time, although I watched the film fairly closely and carefully. For a guy with his phone on.
It was agony to sit through, of course, but I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I felt sorry for the cast — Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Albert Brooks, Woody Harrelson, Jack Lowden, Kumail Nanjiani, Ayo Edebiri, Julie Kavner, Spike Fearn. They give it everything they had and then some, but they didn’t write or direct Ella McCay. It’s all the doing of James L.Brooks.
The constant undercurrent, the never-ending refrain in this film is that most of the men are pathetic, whiney, selfish asshats. Not Brooks’ “Governor Bill” but the characters played by Harrelson (Ella’s bad, former hound-dog dad), Lowden (Ella’s jerkoff husband) and Fearn (Ella’s ding-dong younger brother). All the women are consequential, open-hearted, protective, judgmental, proud as racehorses.
Actually, of all the actors I was sympathizing with, I felt the least sympathy for Jamie Lee Curtis. Ella McCay delivers a shitload of viewer anguish and pique, but Curtis brings the fingernails screeching on the blackboard. Her over-acting reminds me of her IRS agent performance in EEAAO. But like I said, it’s Brooks’ fucking fault. He wanted her to crank it up to level 11, and she gave him that. He did this to her.
This film has already been assassinated. No point in beating a dead horse, much less one that’s on its way to the glue factory.
Brooks’ performance as “Governor Bill” is the least problematic. He’s actually pretty good, considering. His final scene — a straight-talking sidewalk confession moment with Mackey — is rather satisfying. “Good for you, Albert,” I was muttering to myself.
I can’t write any more. McCay is too sad, too deflating. What a waste.
In addition to last night’s posting of HE’s 20 most anticipated films of 2026, here’s a rundown of 24 more…four that seem extra-interesting (Ben Affleck‘s Animals, Danny Boyle‘s Ink, David O. Russell‘s Madden, Laszlo Nemes‘ Moulin) plus 20 randomly chosen films that feel like vague problems or slight disappointments but what do I actually know? Not much or nothing.
Between last night’s 2026 post and today’s, we’re talking 44 films. I’m sure I’m overlooking quite a few that deserve attention and respect.
Possible Standout Exceptions: (a) Ink (d: Danny Boyle) — Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch back in the old days, based on a James Graham stage play….yes!; (b) David O. Russell‘s Madden, biopic of football coach and commentator John Madden w/ Nic Cage, John Mulane, Kathryn Hahn, Sienna Miller; (c) Ben Affleck‘s Animals, political crime thriller costarring Affleck, Gillian Anderson, Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun; (d) Laszlo Nemes‘ Moulin, French resistance WWII drama w/ Gilles Lellouche, Lars Eidinger, Félix Lefebvre.
Wuthering Heights (d: Emerald Fennell)…Bronte, dampness, erections. The Bride (d: Maggie Gyllenhaal) — Seemingly extreme (grotesque?) feminist vengeance flick. Out Of this World (d: Albert Serra) — “An American delegation travels to Russia in the midst of the Ukrainian war to try to find a solution to an economic dispute linked to sanctions”…nope.
The Long Winter (d: AndrewHaigh). Follow-up to Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers. Bucking Fastard (d: Werner Herzog) — “Twin sisters Jean and Joan Holbrooke, in search of an imaginary land where true love is possible, start digging a tunnel through a mountain range”…nope. The Dog Stars (d: Ridley Scott) — Another dystopian wasteland flick? No thanks. Flowervale Street (d: David Robert Mitchell) Ghostwriter (d: JJ Abrams) — Glen Powell, Jenna Ortega, Emma Mackey, Samuel L. Jackson. October (d: Jeremy Saulnier)…horror-thriller…nope. Project Hail Mary (d: Phil Lord & Chris Miller)….not a chance. Narnia: Tne Magician’s Nephew (d: Greta Gerwig)…sorry, nope.
The Uprising (d: Paul Greengrass) — Braveheart 2?…14th Century action-battle flick w/ Andrew Garfield, Thomasin McKenzie, Katherine Waterston…thanks but no thanks. Butterfly Jam (D: Kantemir Balagov)…Barry “beestung nose” Keoghan, Riley Keough…maybe. Balagov is a first-rate director. The Beloved (d: Rodrigo Sorogoyen) — Javier Bardem, Victoria Luengo..estranged father-daughter drama. Alpha Gang (d: Zellner Brothers) Alone at Dawn (d: Ron Howard)…bravery & self-sacrifice in Afghanistan. Adam Driver, Anne Hathaway, Betty Gilpin. The Invite (d: Olivia Wilde).
The common consensus is that 2025 has been a fairly weak year. It seems safe to say, however, that 2026 will be a much stronger one, at least by intuitive HE gut criteria. At least 20 qualitative humdingers, by my count, and an impressive roster of grade-A directors (Inarritu, Fincher, Guadagnino, Spielberg, Nolan, Mungiu, Farhadi, Sorkin, Gilroy, Farhadi, et. al.).
Two days ago World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimyposted a list of 70something 2026 films that struck him as noteworthy at the very least, and in some cases high expectation-level.
In this post I’ve pruned the list down to 20safebets — i.e., presumptions of quality based upon esteemed critical regard and/or aspirational histories. Most of these represent my idea of festival toppers or possible award-worthy titles, or both.
Yeah, I know…all dudes and “where are the 2026 films directed and written by women?” Anger, anguish and male-hate separatism by way of IfIHadLegsI’dKickYou, SorryBaby and TheChronology of Water have a place on our communal cultural serving tray.
There are many other high-intrigue titles or potential commercial hits due to open next year. I’ll try to assemble a respectable list of promising maybes and/or second-tier titles later today.
We all understand that Joe and Jane Popcorn are either totally unaware of or only slightly interested in award season favorites. The Oscar telecast heyday has long been over. Best Picture Oscar cred went out the window after Hollywood began woking itself into cultural irrelevance in 2018 or ’19 and especially after EEAAO cleaned up in early ’23.
Nonetheless it can be safelyassumed that next year’s Best Picture noms will include the Inarritu-Cruise, TheSocialReckoning, TheOdyssey, TheAdventuresofCliffBooth, Spielberg’s UFO flick and Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic…these six at least.
