HE to Wes Anderson, early this morning…

I quickly realized that the teaser poster for American Empirical’s Heidegger and Arendt was AI bullshit, but for a half-minute or so I was hugely impressed that you were apparently stepping outside the WesWorld realm by tackling an odd relationship story that has real political-cultural teeth…a real grabber of a story about two politically incorrect thinkers.

I was saying to myself “whoa!…Wes is going to make a film that’s actually about something substantial this time…no more Jacques Tati influences!…a film that the woke community will utterly despise, of course, but man, Wes has grown a serious pair of balls!…”

For less than a minute I was envisioning a real-deal romantic and philosophical bond between a pair of big-league 20th Century philosophers and outside-the-box minds. A brief love affair between a Nazi apologist philosopher in his mid to late 30s (Bill Murray would be roughly 40 years too old), and a younger Jewish intellectual who testified at Adolf Eichmann’s trial and allegedly coined the phrase “the banality of evil”. (The 55-year-old Winona Ryder Is 35 years too old as Hannah Arendt’s affair with Martin Heidegger began in 1925, when she was 19 or 20.)

The fantasy of you actually making this film evaporated in less than 40 or 45 seconds (I was drowsy, wasn’t sipping coffee), but I was hugely impressed before it dissolved. I really was.

HE advice to Travis Bickle while standing outside the Belmore Cafeteria (Park Avenue South and 28th Street): “Look…you write a diary…right? You got a typewriter? Get one, get some typing paper and tap out a daily diary about your cabby life…not just the fares but your deepest thoughts…hates, fears, longings. And submit these pages to the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News or some other weekly rag. Become a New York version of Charles Bukowski.”

Read more

[Posted seven years ago]

Here’s a small but curious oddity in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, which will open just after 2019’s Labor Day.

The film begins with footage of Ronstadt, 73, visiting the Mexican town of Banamichi, where her grandfather was born, and listening to a music festival. A significant portion of the doc is about Linda’s ethnic as well as musical identity. The last 25% is about Ronstadt’s decision to musically celebrate her Mexican heritage with 1987’s “Canciones de Mi Padre” as well as “Mas Canciones” (’91) and “Frenesi” (’92).

The film conveys a clear sense of Ronstadt having found spiritual fulfillment and completion by way of embracing her family’s history and traditions.

Except all through the ’60s, ’70s (her biggest commercial decade) and most of the ’80s nobody knew Ronstadt was of Mexican descent. For the simple, obvious reason that she has a German last name.

In the doc media mogul David Geffen and fellow troubador Jackson Browne both say they didn’t know about Ronstadt’s Latin ancestry. Nobody did until she went ethnic in the late ’80s. All fine and good, but that’s a significant cultural-identity issue — German last name vs. Mexican heritage — so you’d think that Epstein and Friedman would include a line or two of explanation. But they don’t.

In a statement provided to Hollywood Elsewhere, the filmmakers said that “we only went back as far as her grandfather, the generation she would have personally been acquainted with. Otherwise it was just too much backstory to work in, and didn’t seem relevant to her musical story, which was our focus.”

I understand this answer, but ignoring where “Ronstadt” comes from still seems a bit odd. The Wiki fact is that Linda’s great-grandfather, graduate engineer Friedrich August Ronstadt (who went by Federico Augusto Ronstadt) “immigrated to the Southwest in the 1840s from Hanover, Germany, and married a Mexican citizen, eventually settling in Tucson.”

It’s a minor omission and unimportant in the greater scheme of Ronstadt’s musical life, but the decision to avoid mentioning Friedrich or Federico is still a head-scratcher.

So here’s a theory or, if you will, a suspicion. The reason Linda’s great-grandfather is completely ignored is because it would have been politically incorrect to have mentioned him. [Full disclosure: My mother’s family, named Grube, was half-German.] The arc of the last third of Linda’s life was about reconnecting with her Mexican family roots. The movie, as mentioned, is all over this aspect, but no one wants to hear about some knockwurst-and-sauerkraut guy from Hanover, Germany who came to this country 175 years ago. Even if a brief mention of same would have explained the basics.

Because whiteness, let’s be honest, isn’t especially cool these days. Certainly by the standards of the progressive community. The basic agreement in media circles is that white culture (whether descended from England, Germany, France, Russia or the Nordic countries) can be acknowledged but is better off ignored. Because we’re living in an era of positive progressive redefining in which non-white cultures are experiencing a significant upsurge, media-recognition- and ethnic-celebration-wise.

Read more

John Carney‘s Power Ballad (Lionsgate, 5.29) will get me back in the national swing of things. The 88% Rotten Tomatoes rating obviously sounds promising. Wait…a 74% rating from Metacritic?

Tim Grierson‘s Screen Daily review, however, gives me concern. “The showdown between Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas is not nearly as illuminating or cathartic as Carney assumes. The music industry is cutthroat, but Power Ballad’s insistence on emphasising the heartfelt and comforting undercuts the inherent hell of a man who watches his dream get to be lived out by someone else.”

Collider‘s Ross Bonaime: “Compared to his other recent work, Carney’s latest pulls back a bit on the music and leans more into the comedy side of things, yet Power Ballad maintains the heart and optimism that is brimming from all his films, and hopefully, it will get the attention it deserves.”

But when THR’s David Rooney stated that much of Cannes ‘26 was gay, gay, totally effing gay, nobody said boo. Because Rooney is a member of the tribe, and therefore shielded.

This recent below photo aside, Donald Trump, Jr. is apparently an inch taller than Bettina Anderson, whom he recently married (and vice versa) at a ceremony in the Bahamas.

But what if the sizes were reversed? Taller women-shorter men relationships occasionally happen, of course, even though we’ve all read or heard about hetero women routinely discriminating against shortish guys on dating apps.

I don’t regard myself as a size-ist (I dealt with a certain amount of pushback from classmates when I was young for being a “giant”) but it’s quite rare to see a husband or boyfriend who can obviously be beaten in a wrestling match by his wife or girlfriend.

I do know that no dude wants to date a woman whose feet are bigger than his own. This is certainly true in my case.

Did anyone ever cast a tall, leggy actress opposite Alan Ladd or Dustin Hoffman in their respective heydays? It’s not a male-ego thing — it’s a reality thing. Yes, runty guys occasionally hook up with tallish women (5’11” Nicole Kidman was four inches taller than Tom Cruise, and Katie Holmes had him by two inches). But generally this doesn’t happen much. Not in 7-11 land, it doesn’t.

Owned by Bettina Anderson:

Melissa McCarthy vs. Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann in the school principal’s office is easily the best scene in Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40, which I rewatched last night and….what’s the phrase?….had an uproarious time with.

“Fuck you, Jill…you’re a horrible fucking woman…this is why everybody hates you…this kind of shit…fucking ineffective bullshit hair, and I’m glad your husband died ’cause you’re a fucking asshole….he probably killed himself”:

Here’s a phone interview I did with the great Albert Brooks in the run-up to the opening of This Is 40. Brooks’ best years, performance-wise, happened between Real Life (’79) and Mother (’96)…a 17 year run.

His career peaked, of course, with the one-two punch of Lost in America (’85) and Defending Your Life (’91). But he was pretty damn good in Apatow’s 14-year-old film, and he wasn’t half bad as a retreating governor in 2025’s Ella McCay.

Again, the HE-Brooks mp3.

Wells to Apatow (12.6.12) letter — honest injun reactions to This Is 40, which are 60-40 but mostly positive:

“Here’s my positivity, my admiration, what I liked: ‘Get through the first 75 minutes so you can savor the really good final 50 minutes.’

“Marriage is hard, marriage is a grind, it’s not easy to keep the fires going, etc. Your film honestly deals with all that stuff, warts and all. And it honestly states that teenage girls (even the ones sired by the director-writer) can be whiny, abrasive and self-absorbed and dismissive of their parents. I just didn’t buy the quirky oddball humor in the first hour (particularly any material related to anal probes) and I didn’t buy the Graham Parker/music business material.

”But the final 50 minutes is not just pretty good but fully approvable.

“I have to say that being 40 is a pretty easy thing, Judd, if you don’t mind my saying. It’s officially the start of middle age but the ‘uh-oh’ feeling doesn’t really kick in until your mid to late 40s. I’ll tell you this: I look at photos of myself when I was 40 and I think to myself, ‘Wow…almost a spring chicken! Okay, a little bit of wear and tear has started to show by that point but very little, really.’ 40 is when your face begins to acquire a little character, and when moms enter the MILF stage. It’s pretty hot when you get right down to it. So I don’t get the angst.

“What guy is dumb enough to tell his wife or girlfriend that he took Viagra or Cialis before making love to her? It’s not only printed on the warning label. I think 15 year-olds know that when they get older they’re not supposed to tell their girlfriends that they’re taking it. It’s almost on the level of ‘go when the light is green and stop when it’s red.’

“Albert Brooks kills it in every scene he’s in. Melissa McCarthy is really great because she’s committed to the anger and never goes for the laughs. John Lithgow is too pursed and pinched at first, or so I thought, but then he saves it at the very end, especially in that scene between he and Leslie.

“This Is 40 takes off and finds the groove and kicks into gear around the 75-minute mark. Starting with the scene in which Rudd is weeping in his BMW, which directly follows the scene in which he realizes that Graham Parker is not going to save his company financially. Of course, this is something that everybody in the audience knows from the get-go, but which takes Rudd over an hour to figure out.

“But after this point the anger and the fighting and the resentments really let loose, and that’s when the movie starts to really work.

“So much of the hassle and the tension of things comes from the Graham Parker situation, and that just didn’t fly for me. It’s hard to root for anyone who’s so blind to the realities of the music market that he’s pinning his hopes for survival on the ascendancy of Graham Parker and the Rumor. Rudd’s character has done pretty well for himself in the music business (as you have in the film business), obviously, but suddenly he’s an idiot who thinks that he can sell Graham Parker in a big enough way so that his financial pressures will be alleviated? And the solution at the end is representing Ryan Adams, another getting-old guy?”

…is a character-destroying tragedy…..a retreat-from-reality strategy or surrender that obviously reenforces already established antagonistic behavior patterns. We’ve all read that mating-age American women have more or less had it with youngish men, and that 20something or 30something dudes reportedly feel the same way. “Younger people aren’t hooking up” has become the social plague of the 2020s.

But older dudes of means striking up a relationship with an intelligent sexbot or homina-homina droid…if you’ve lived a full life and have been around the block with several live, organic women with the usual contentious traits and real-world attributes, where’s the harm? If, that is, a dude can afford it (one model costs $175K, more or less). A little bot action never hurt anyone over the age of 45 or 50.

1. Moya by DroidUp (rice: $173,000Features: Unveiled by the Shanghai-based robotics firm, Moya features realistic synthetic skin layered over a bionic lattice muscle system. She maintains a natural body temperature to (36 degrees Celsius), tracks eye contact, and walks with a gait that is reportedly human-like. Details: More information on her internal robotics can be viewed on the TechRadar feature coverage.

2. Aria by Realbotix: $175,000. Features: A flagship in social robotics, Aria boasts patented silicone skin, microscopic eye cameras for eye contact, and 17 facial motors. Her AI integrates with platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini to recall past interactions, recognize faces, and carry out multilingual, emotionally adapted conversations.

Read more

…a few Memorial Day thoughts while watching Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 (2012) last night, but then the old Euro jet lag kicked in around 9 pm (3am in Cannes / Oslo time) and I was out like a light.

I share only a few of these groaning maladies and observations, but Keith Sullivan, age 45, woke me up this morning at 6:40 am….”mentally I’m still 25 but you couldn’t pay me to go to a club.”