The Last Duel, a 2021 film by Sir Ridley Scott with Matt Damon as a mulleted French aristocrat chud battling honorably (if stupidly) a suave Adam Driver in 1386, turned out to be better than expected: not a classic, but quite decent, especially for a director in his mid-80s. (Sir Ridley turns 86 this week.) So hopes grew high when Scott announced he was making Napoleon with 2019 Best Actor Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix (for Joker). Granted, lots of ambitious directors have contemplated making a Bonaparte biopic, just as Scott’s revival of the sword & sandal genre in 2000 with Gladiator set ...
In director Christopher Nolan’s campaign to save moviegoing from technological and social obsolescence, his latest ploy is his most clever yet: to lure grown-ups with three-digit IQs to see his ...
One of the most fervently held dogmas of the 1969 wave of feminism was that the only reason boys and girls liked different toys was due to sexist socialization. I was young in the early 1970s when ...
My friends (and one or two foes) have informed me that my past few columns have been downers. “Can’t you do something a little lighter?” they ask. “Also, what’s your ...
]It’s Oscar season! Which of course means only one thing: White people are evil. Of course, to be fair, that also applies to rainy season, holiday season, baseball season, ...
I can vividly recall driving along the coast of Baja California in late 1996 a few days after being diagnosed with cancer, feeling sorry for myself about my impending ...
My Christmas gift to myself this year is a column about zombie movies. I’ve been wanting to do this one since October, when it was announced that Night of the Living Dead is ...
To have been born in the USA in 1946 was to have been dealt aces in the poker game of life. Those born in the first year of the baby boom went through their days finding that ...
Tár is a strong art-house drama for older audiences about a #MeToo scandal in the arts that cleverly buys itself the right to be moderately sympathetic toward its ultimately ...
In the words of John Goodman from Barton Fink, “Jesus, it’s hot.” L.A.’s historic, unprecedented September heat wave is literally murdering me. But you wanna know ...
No doubt it is evidence of my dissociation from much of modern life, but until the recent libel trials I did not really know who Johnny Depp was and had never heard of Amber ...
White male aircraft carrier fighter pilots were the heroes of the 1986 hit movie Top Gun. But today, white men are the designated villains in our culture. Yet the profession of ...
Hollywood’s been Jewish from the get-go, but “racial loyalty” never trumped the bottom line. People who lose money for the bosses get canned, Jew or not. Similarly, ...
I’ve been working the “Hollywood apartheid” beat since before it was hip. Four years ago I reported on the USC Annenberg School’s push to force Hollywood to insert ...
There is no better demonstration of The Matrix’s concept of the blue pill that leaves its victims able to perceive only the simulacrum of reality curated by the powers-that-be ...
Like The Great Gatsby, the enduring fame of West Side Story is due to two factors: Many people encounter it during high school (because teachers show the 1961 movie when trying to ...