Author: S. Brady Calhoun

Triangle of Sadness offers the best, and funniest, metaphor for the state of the world over these past few years. 

Two men are on a boat and they are arguing about the socialism vs. capitalism. Meanwhile, the boat is sinking. 

That one of these men is the captain of a luxury cruise ship and the other is a Russian capitalist who made his millions selling fertilizer just enhances the joke. 

Once again I hope you walk into this as cold as possible because the movie manages to shift its characters into a different venue twice and each time is delightful. I had no inkling of the film’s third act but it was wonderful. 

When writer/director Ruben Östlund first deals out the movies themes I was concerned. The last thing I wanted to watch was another expression of how rich people are evil. But this isn’t that and the movie is both too witty and too wise to let the audience get away with an easy explanation for human behavior. 

While the arguments on the ship perfectly capture politics in the English speaking world the situation in the latter part of the flick nails down the pandemic. 

Who is really important to society? How badly does the world need a CEO? Does it need that person as badly as it needs a truck driver, a grocery store employee, or the person prepping the food at a meat packing plant? 

If all you can offer society is that you can be beautiful on Instagram what will you be doing for work if that particular economy crumbles? 

Or, when the capitalist starts quoting Karl Marx you know things have gotten dire. Maybe we are all just a few bad choices away from the law of the jungle. 

I watched this on Oscar weekend doing my best to catch all the best picture nominees before the ceremony. And this movie proves that this year’s offerings are full of winners. My pick remains The Banshees of Insherin but nearly every other movie could win and I would remain satisfied.  

Theoretically, Triangle of Sadness ends ambiguously. Yet, I have no doubt as to what happened next. The last line, said by one of the main characters, sealed her fate.  

The first Creed is as good as the first two Rocky movies. It builds on all six of the previous films, invests heavily in new characters, and keeps Sylvester Stallone around to finally play the older trainer character.

Sly deserved an Oscar and Michael B. Jordan proved he could take on all comers.

I watched the second one this week and it is much better than I remembered. It’s able to drag the cartoon villainy of the Drago character from Rocky 4 into something approaching a real world where all the characters behave as human beings.

The bad guys in Rocky 3, 4 and 5 are mostly mustache twirlers. But Rocky 4 is amazing. It understood that, at this point, Rocky needed a hissable villian.

Just check out the names: Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago, and Tommy Gunn. So what supervillain name does the bad guy get in Creed 3? Damian Anderson.

Like the movie, this is close but just doesn’t quite get there.

Rocky 4 took place in something way beyond the real world where the bad guy actually kills the hero’s best friend in the ring. That the entire Creed franchise is built on that moment proves that while it was an insane choice, it somehow was the right choice.

Creed 1 and 2 succeed even though they refused to give us those types of bad guys. Those movies are about Adonis Creed earning his place in the world and making his own legacy. He’s overcoming his history and proving his worth to himself, his family, and the world.

Almost nothing in the entire franchise hits harder than the climax of Creed when Rocky wants to throw in the towel and Adonis says:

Adonis Johnson: Don’t! I have to prove it!

Rocky Balboa: Prove what?

Adonis Johnson: That I’m not a mistake!

Creed

So what’s Creed 3 about? Well, Adonis is rich, successful, and retired. He’s had a storied boxing career (that we have only sorta glimpsed). When a man who was like a brother to him when he was very young gets out of prison, he has to confront their shared history and … for reasons … come out of retirement and face his past.

Except, I wish it were that simple.

Creed 3 creates a new champion that Creed has (off-screen) sponsored and sorta mentored. Then through shenanigans, Damian (Jonathan Majors) gets a title fight and cheats and hurts this other character in the ring. This spectacle makes Majors the heavyweight champ with 1 fight.

It overcomplication on top of overcomplication to get us to a place that anyone who has seen the trailer knows where it is headed.

The movie had me unintentionally laughing later by showing Damian’s professional record as 1-0. Why not just do a montage of fights with Damian to give him a record that makes more sense?

The movie spends a lot of time setting up Damian as a fully realized human being. And then it dips its toe into the idea that Damian is a conniving supervillain. And then it never quite delivers on that and backs away from it completely in the end.

In professional wrestling (and the Rocky and Creed movies are the same kind of male power fantasy that gives pro wrestling it’s juice) there is a term for annoying fans who want to rewrite the storylines.

It’s called fantasy booking.

So how would I fantasy book this? Pretty simple: Adonis is the champ. Damian gets out of prison and starts beating up all the contenders in the division. He won’t be satisfied until he has the belt.

Now, he’s using that shared history to taunt Adonis into a fight that Adonis wants to avoid at all costs.

Simple and straightforward and you can do all the shared history stuff too. Heck, if you need to complicate it you can have Adonis retire midway through the movie and then have Majors give him a villainous reason to return to the ring.

The movie does what it can to show why Adonis would get back in the ring but, and maybe this is just my personality, all I could think was, ‘Adonis has a wife who adores him, a perfect kid and more money than Muhammad Ali. I think I would clown that Damian guy in interviews and never, ever, get in the ring again.”

No one would go see my movie and no actor would play that part but it’s honest and true.

Even with my issues, most of this movie worked just fine. All the family scenes hit their marks. There is a scene very early between Adonis and his daughter that is adorbs. And while I wanted him to be a lot more evil Majors was compelling as always.

There is strong visual work by Jordan, who took on directing duties, and makes a meal out of several wrestler (boxer, sorry) entrances and other moments.

I was pretty happy with it all the way through the training scenes.

But I thought the final fight lacked something, especially when it went into art-house territory. A much younger pal just showed me how some of the fight choreography is lifted from anime and while that didn’t do much for me it probably brought out cheers from the people who spotted the references.

Young men and women are also, I suspect, going to enjoy the fashion and wealth on display in the Creed household. We got to Rocky IV robot territory one movie early.

Also, I agree that Creed, in the third film in his franchise, does not need Rocky. But this movie did need someone who could play that role of amusing truth teller to the hero. The movie spreads that around to Phylicia Rashad (Creed’s mom), Tessa Thompson (his wife), and Wood Harris (his trainer). But that’s a tough role to fill and there’s just something missing.

Rocky, Mickey, Paulie, Apollo all had unique ways of putting their feelings into the world.

You get your face all fixed up. Handsome. Nice clothes. What’d you do for Paulie, anything? This! You give me a lousy, stinkin’ ex-lax watch. There!

Rocky III

If he returns to the sport, I hope Creed can find his own Bundini Brown.

“Float like a butterly, sting like a bee. Rumble, young man, rumble.”

Or to put it in the language of Mickey from Rocky II:

You’re gonna eat lightnin’ and you’re gonna crap thunder!

Rocky II

So I think this movie has some real missteps along the way although I was mostly entertained. I want to see it again, I’m betting when it is streaming I might be wowed. That’s what happened to me last week with Creed 2. I remembered it as being just fine but then when I watched it in the run-up to Creed 3 I was overjoyed with how good it was.

This movie might not be a knockout, but it fought me to a draw.

I want you to watch this movie before you read any further.

And the reason I want you to watch it is twofold.

1) it needs to be discovered for itself.

2) There’s no way to really talk about it without ruining it.

Ok stop here and do the thing. Please. For me.

You see? Even if I don’t tell you about that ending, even if I say something like, shock ending, or twist, or whatever. Or hey, “don’t read anything about this movie before you watch it.” That’s just going to give the game away.

I want you to walk into this thing cold like I did, and then watch Director William Friedkin effortlessly move from cop movie cliche into stuff I have never seen before in a cop movie and then into, “Oh my God what the hell is happening!”

Not only is that ending bonkers but the movie turns from a righteous cop trying to bust the guys who killed his partner into, let’s commit a crime ourselves for … reasons.

And then, Freidkin who was in the running for the greatest car chase ever with The French Connection takes it to another level (again) with a wild stretch of insanity on LA freeways.

He did things so insane that a key staff member tapped out. Check out this wild paragraph from IMDB.

“The film’s director of photography (and noted Friedkin enabler) Robby Müller declined to shoot the chase over safety concerns, so the second unit cameraman, Robert D. Yeoman, came on instead. (Fun fact: Yeoman went on to become Wes Anderson’s DP of choice. So keep this man’s enormous balls in mind next time you scoff at a twee center frame.)” 

Heh.

They filmed the car chase after they filmed everything else believing that if something terrible happened (and everyone seemed to think it would) at least the whole movie was in the can.

Billy Freidkin directed a bunch of things but his most notable flick is The Exorcist. In other words, this is a director who is unafraid of bashing through the safety rails of society.

When I walked out of Uncut Gems, the Safdie brother’s thriller about gambling, basketball, and the diamond business, I said to myself, “That wasn’t a movie that was a heart attack.”

To Live and Die in LA plays in the same space with unrelenting tension, sex, and shocking violence.

It’s also clearly a movie that came out while Miami Vice was popular. I don’t think it owes that much of a debt to the show because for better or worse Freidkin is not Michael Mann. Freidkin would never be satisfied to just sit on a shot and let people “vibe.”

It does owe a little bit to Mann’s Thief. In Thief, you just get scenes of what purports to be actual high-stakes safe cracking. To Live and Die in LA does the same thing for counterfeiting.

However, as I was watching this I could see, in some ways, how Mann’s Heat could have been influenced by this. Maybe not. But if you were planning a crime movie night I could see you playing them back to back. Follow it up with Joe Carnahan’s Narc. Or Copland.

To Live and Die in LA is not on any streaming services but I really can’t recommend it enough for a certain type of crime movie fan. If Heat and especially Narc and Copland had you nodding your head then this one is for you.

We all have to walk through the past to get to the future. Please indulge an old man for a moment.

We need to start with the iPod and Netflix. Netflix happened first in 1997 which happened to be the year I graduated high school. The original company, for those of you who don’t know, delivered these things called DVDs by mail.

What that meant, functionally, is that nearly every, single DVD was suddenly available to anyone, anywhere in the world. I have always lived in small to medium towns with small to medium DVD rental stores. Movie Gallery I miss you. But now, I could see the movies Roger Ebert was writing about.

I’m gonna mention two, Twilight Samurai and Hard Boiled.

Hard Boiled is one of the greatest action movies ever made. Director John Woo invented a new action style of incredible movement mixed with gunfire. If you were an American you had never seen anything like it before.

It came out in 1992. I’m fairly certain that even though I was aware of it I never could get a copy of it until Netflix in 1997 and forward.

Twilight Samurai was a 2001 flick and is child of the Akira Kurasawa school of samurai films. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert for you on samurai films but most of the time Kurosawa’s characters were very close to actual human beings and their sword fights were messy affairs of real people trying very hard to hurt their opponent without getting cut or stabbed.

They are movies about people, extraordinary people, perhaps but even with the action there is also real drama and heart at play. Twilight Samurai is one of the best of these kinds of movies from the 2000s.

So, here’s what happened next. The iPod came out in 2001

Here was a typical weekend for me before the iPod came out. I would get paid, then I would go to a bookstore, the CD/DVD story and spend a not inconsiderable portion of that paycheck. I also went to the comic book store (and still do) but lets ignore that for now.

When the iPod came out and I eventually could afford one, the lightbulb went off.

“Oh, we are definitely not going to be buying CDs or DVDs anymore,” I thought.

The summer I got an iPod was a great summer. I had a massive CD collection that I was burning to a hard drive and putting the music on an iPod. FYE would give me cash for those old CDs — which I no longer needed — and I could then spend that cash on dates, movies in the theater, and gas for my green Ford Ranger.

That was fine dining indeed.

Next, Netflix starts to get on board with streaming television and movies, we get Hulu and Apple eventually cracks Hollywood and you can buy all the shows and films you want, digitally, at a reasonable price.

For the purposes of this article, I’m ignoring that the internet was always a place where you could illegally get whatever you wanted. Without going too deep into the weeds on this I want to say that as a writer I’m sympathetic to anyone (writers, musicians, directors, assistants, and a host of others) whose livelihoods depend on people paying for the things they create.

But by the late 2000s you could see the future and the future was that for a reasonable amount of money, you would be able to buy anything you wanted or subscribe to a service and get anything you wanted. And it would all be in “the cloud” waiting on you.

And the very first thing all of us were going to do? Kill our cable bill.

Ben Thompson, a brilliant business writer who founded Stratechery, wrote about this several times over the last decade. And what he wrote was constantly confounding to me.

His writing is much deeper and more insightful than this but if I can boil it down it was this:

1. The cable bundle is a great deal for consumers, companies, and creators.
2. Killing the cable bundle is going to lead to a worse and more expensive outcome for everybody.

It turns out he was correct. I don’t think he had to be correct but he ended up being correct. It’s important to note — which is what I think is missed in these conversations — the future we live in now is not what those of us who believed in streaming and ending cable thought it was going to be.

At the time we were paying $50 or less for internet and another $100 for cable. A little more than that for cable with premium channels like HBO. What we thought or foolishly believed was going to happen was that consumers would be able to get everything they wanted with $50 for the internet and another $10 for Netflix.

Anyone with an MBA is pointing and laughing at me right now but I promise you a lot of us believed this.

What actually happened was that the cable companies with no fear that the US Government would regulate them in any way just raised the price of the internet to the point where it no longer mattered if you had cable or not. They were going to get their $100 or more regardless.

Then, every entertainment company in the world (except Sony, God bless you) determined that they needed their own streaming services.

Here are the things I am currently subscribed to; AppleTV+, Disney+, Peacock, Amazon Prime, Paramount, HBO, Netflix, Hulu, MUBI, and Showtime.

I think I also have an ESPN+ account because it is bundled with Disney and Hulu. I also am seriously considering an MLBTV subscription because I want to watch the Braves.

To be clear, some of these are free trials (MUBI) that will run out. Others I got temporarily for one or two things and will probably cancel sooner rather than later.

So the price is more or less the same as what we had before. If you get everything it’s substantially more expensive but who really will get everything?

I am that dad in his forties who probably would have for the extra channels and the TIVO if Cable were my only option but there are limits.

But what sticks in my craw is how in some cases, we’ve gotten a much worse outcome, is than what we envisioned.

To be fair, there are a lot of cool and unique television and movies out there. Some of it is being created just for nerdy dads like me. Paramount+ gives us Star Trek, Disney delivers Star Wars and Marvel and even Peacock, yes Peacock, managed to deliver a unique mystery show that old school tv mystery fans (like my mom) will love in Poker Face.

But I am struck by two things.

First, it remains a real hassle to keep all of this straight. I dearly miss my cable-provided TiVo clone. That box knew what I wanted and I had one place to go to watch what I wanted.

I’m an old man and I forget things. More than once I watched the first or second episode of a show and then weeks or months later realized that I had not gone back and finished it. Apple’s television box has an interface that wants to help me but I have kids and a wife, so the interface is constantly clunked up with their stuff, and some streamers like Netflix don’t want to play along.

I use an app called Reelgood that usually helps me keep track of these things and reminds me when a new season of a show begins. I can’t tell you how many shows suddenly reappear, and I had no idea they were coming back.

Here’s my second issue: How many great television and movies are simply gone? You can’t legally stream Hard Boiled or Twilight Samurai. As a streaming customer, I expect that might happen from time to time. But, I also can’t buy either movie digitally. At least, not that I have found so far.

Here’s two more: To Live and Die in LA and Dracula: The Series. To Live and Die in LA was a pretty big action movie in the 1980s. I’ve never seen it. I want to and … nope.

Dracula: The Series was a syndicated show from 1990 when I was 12. It was, essentially, The Lost Boys tv show. It was also European and only ran for 21 episodes. I really want to, for a bit, go back to that show and see if some of the unique dialogue that I recall was real, or just something I dreamed up.

And, in a world with near-infinite servers bringing us an unlimited cloud, the answer is: Nope. At least not legally.

When nearly every major entertainment company in the world has a streaming service and the two or three biggest and most successful technology companies promise to sell digital television and movies and I still can’t legally buy the things I want to watch something is wrong.

This future is a promise unfulfilled.

Better than the second one. And there are fewer awkward, non-funny moments than the first one. Although I would say the first one is still the champ for the series.

Has the funniest death scene since Paul Ruebens bit the big one on the original Buddy The Vampire Slayer movie.

Plenty of weird Space/Cosmic Marvel. The quantum realm looked cool and interesting to me. And every little creature is strange and wonderful. 

Ultimately, they secretly made a Fantastic Four movie and called it an Ant-man movie. I am pretty happy with that. 

Kang is not yet what he will one day be but as villian turning to someone and saying: I’m going to kill your daughter and then manipulate time so that you live that moment over and over again until you crack is maybe one of the most evil things I’ve ever heard. 

Marvel has a not-so-secret secret weapon in Jonathan Majors and they clearly plan to let him explore all the possibilities of a time traveling multi-dimensional villian.

It’s wonderful to live in a world where I get to say time traveling multi-dimensional villian.

As a long time comic fan I don’t think Kang would have been in my Top 10 for Avengers bad guys but as his story unfolds you can see how Majors is going to start paying dividends.

Bill Murray gets to be gloriously smarmy for one scene. He still brings it, no matter what he’s doing. 

Paul Rudd, as usual, can carry this thing with ease. I love how his Scott Lang still has a lot of reverence for certain people. 

“I fought with Captain America.”

The thing I truly love about all of this is that we are moving into a world where all the original heroes age out and get replaced by their spiritual and sometimes actual children. We’ve never been this far before. 

What didn’t I like? 

1) The ending was a cheapieh cliffhanger. 

2) What could have been a really great surprise (the identity of MODOK) was ruined by one of the trailers. 

3) The Ant cast is too big. Which is funny because the biggest thing this movie might be missing is Michael Peña as Scott’s friend and the movie’s narrator. 

But it’s a laugh-out-loud action comedy in the Marvel manner. If this is what you like then they made something you will like. 

The people who did not like it did not want to like it. 

They keep going to westerns and complaining about all the cowboys and the horses.

I know there are many of you out there in movie fan land who wish for superhero movies to burn.

As phase five of the MCU begins and James Gunn and his team get to work on a new DC strategy some of you are dreaming a different dream.

You want their capes to be torn from their backs and their smiling goofy faces to be brought down from the heavens.

Brothers and sisters I have good news. I believe that will happen. And I even have a date for you. Place it on your calendars in glorious anticipation.

I predict the superhero movie will no longer be a relevant force at the box office in the Year of our Lord 2052.

Now, before I explain how I arrived at this number let’s chat a bit about box office numbers, movie trends, and two of my favorite Hollywood creatives.

I forgot a bunch of things in my post on screenwriter William Goldman’s book Adventures in the Screen Trade.

Here’s one of the gems: Hollywood is a gold rush business. When the powers that be see something is successful they mimic it.

There is now a generation that doesn’t remember a world before the superhero ruled the box office. But take it from your elders, in the before times what ran the table had no more depth than the superhero movie.

I lived through the Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger action era. That was followed by a million sequels and rip-offs of Die Hard. And what came after the Die Hard rip-offs were mostly Tarantino wannabes and failed attempts to be the next Scream.

It was always better back then, no matter when back then happened to be.

Case in point: In the early 1980s Goldman was lamenting the direction of Hollywood. His gripe?

All the sequels. Those pesky kids Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were gonna ruin everything with all their special effects-driven sequels.

Star Wars was going to have 8 sequels! They were going to keep pumping out Indiana Jones movies.

And the studio heads, who once upon a time would make two or three movies just for love of the game were tying up all their budgets to keep up with what Goldman described as ugly, naked cash grabs. Sequels are movies made by (ahem) prostitutes, Goldman wrote.

To his credit, Goldman admitted he was as guilty of this as anybody. After all, he signed off on a prequel to his biggest hit: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

‘Oh, but it hasn’t always been this way,’ you might lament to yourself. Let me point out something else I found interesting. This comes from Quintin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation. The book focuses almost exclusively on the 1970s and mostly on the grimy, pulpy, violent crime and revenge dramas that Tarantino loved.

What caught my attention was something he wrote about Stallone’s Rocky.

When Rocky came out movie audiences had lived through years of cynical 70s movies where the hero always failed and the closest they ever got to “winning” was by killing a whole bunch of bad guys on their way out the door.

Tarantino recalled someone (his mom maybe?) seeing the trailer for Rocky and lamenting, “oh it’s just another movie about a man and his problems.”

Tarantino said audiences today just can’t understand how happy movie crowds were when the match started and Rocky knocked down Apollo Creed. They roared! And he didn’t even win the match. But still, it was so different from what they were used to that everyone went home happy and the movie was a massive hit.

Which is to say, that yes, crowds will one day turn their backs on superheroes just as they once abandoned disaster movies and musicals and tough-guy revenge flicks. One day they will find something else to love. I’m hoping for more Mel Brooksian comedies.

So, when will this happen?

Here’s my figuring on the subject. Say what you will about the quality of these films — and you say a lot — the MCU is the most astonishingly successful (franchise, shared universe, collection of sequels) movie series in the history of cinema.

The only thing that comes close to it? The Western. So how long did Westerns rule the roost? I’m gonna peg it at 40 years. The 1930s to the 1960s featured straightforward westerns that dominated movies and then television. The sun began to set in the late 1960s. But starting in the mid-60s we had a decade of revisionist westerns where Goldman, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and others questioned the values of their father’s movies.

You could argue that the western continued far after that. Dirty Harry is just a cowboy in the city after all. And of course, Yellowstone is a lot of things but it’s core is the cowboy myth. Which would mean on television at least, the Western is back.

But for clarities sake let’s call it 40 years.

So if you say that the superhero dominance really began with Avengers in 2012 that gives us till 2052 for this thing to run it’s course.

At that point, I’m guessing movie audiences will be swept away with a new movie trend: Surgeons in Space? Nursing home romances? You scoff but it’s been done. Twice.

Or maybe they’ll do westerns again.

Of course, Ant-Man Quantumania could bomb. And maybe everything else Marvel and DC releases for the next few years bombs too. Maybe this will be wiped away by 2025.

It’s Hollywood man. Nobody knows anything.

When something is great, I can’t shut up about it.

So when I was talking to a co-worker this morning about how I don’t understand why certain very rich people feel that they must continue to share their hair-brained political opinions with the world.

“Man, hand me a million dollars and I promise you will never hear from me again,” I said. “Beloved, old, rich, and quiet man dies on a beach somewhere. That’s the next headline I will make.”

I added that I would be … and then I struggled for the man’s name. It was Sir Thomas More who in real life died for his Catholic faith in the 16th Century when King Henry VIII broke with the church and a pope who would not grant him another divorce.

Robert Bolt, the screenwriter behind Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago wrote the Tony-winning play A Man For All Seasons. He then wrote the screenplay and it was adapted by director Fred Zinnemann.

If great and expressive dialogue is your jam you will likely be thunderstruck by this flick. More is presented as an honest and well-known man in a country that has too few men of character.

King Henry VIII wants another divorce and sons. The pope says no. Henry declares that he is the Supreme Head of the Church in England. More could support his king publicly but stays silent, risking his life, but he hopes that English law will save him.

He has not publicly criticized the king and therefore his head should be perfectly safe.

I do none harm, I say none harm, I think none harm. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith, I long not to live.

Sir. Thomas More

More’s reputation has forced him into a scenario where he can’t see his way clear.

Because you’re honest… and what is more to the purpose, you’re KNOWN to be honest. There are those like Norfolk who follow me because I wear the crown; and those like Master Cromwell who follow me because they are jackals with sharp teeth and I’m their tiger; there’s a mass that follows me because it follows anything that moves. And then there’s you…

King Henry VIII

As the movie moves on, tension continues to slowly build, and More verbally spars with the king’s men who wish to either get him to betray his conscience and confess the King or to get him to publicly admit that he believes the King’s marriage is an abomination before God.

“You threaten like a dockside bully.” – More

“How should I threaten?” – Cromwell

“Like a minister of state. With justice.” – More

“Oh, justice is what you’re threatened with.” – Cromwell

“Then I am not threatened.” – More

Again, this is a feast of great dialogue and each scene is magnificent. However, it is very much a play Zinnemann filmed and its low budget is manifest in each scene as well. IMDB says the cast took salary cuts to keep it under $2 million in 1966 money.

In the end, that was a wise gamble. The movie won every major award that year including taking home Oscar wins for Paul Scofield as More, Bolt for his screenplay, and the best picture prize.

I always put this together with Becket and The Lion in Winter. That’s a fantastic three-night run of movies about power and English kings and dialogue that cuts bloody and deep.

I wish we could have good luck all the time. I wish rainwater was beer! I wish we had wings! But we don’t.

Matthew

Nearly every time there is movie news, I connect it back to the great William Goldman.

After a decade of being one of the most in-demand writers in town, Goldman peeled back the curtain with an autobiographical tell-all called Adventures in the Screen Trade.

By that time Goldman had written Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Marathon Man. Both of those were original works. And he wrote Butch and Sundance as a screenplay because if he wrote it as a novel he would have to write about horses and he didn’t know anything about the critters. Which is, if you think about it, a legendary reason to write an Oscar-winning screenplay.

Then he wrote the screenplays for The Stepford Wives, All the President’s Men, and A Bridge Too Far. He also wrote the book and the screenplay for my favorite piece of fiction of all time The Princess Bride.

But Screen Trade, and I’m doing this from memory cause I can’t find my copy of the book, offers several insights that I often ponder when checking out what’s coming out of Hollywood.

1. Nobody Knows Anything

The people with the power to greenlight movies like to believe they know what is and what will not be a hit. But, in fact, nobody knows anything. Consider Avatar 2. Would you give James Cameron an essentially unlimited check to do a sequel to a movie about aliens and space marines? Maybe. But many folks online certainly thought they knew there was no way the movie would make what it needed to, reportedly $2 Billion, to make it a hit.

And then, $2 billion later, everyone has to bow down. Avatar 2 may not be for you, but it was a money machine.

Babylon is another perfect example of this. Writer-Director Damien Chazelle has three previous hit movies including La La Land, a movie about how great Hollywood is, and he nabs two big stars to be in his fourth outing. Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and a movie about Hollywood in the 1930s.

‘How can this miss!’ the poor soon-to-be-fired executive must have thought.

And while I think it was one of the most creatively interesting and well-made movies of the last year it was also an undeniable box office bomb.

I think there is far too much emphasis on the box office but I don’t create the world I just live in it. Forget it, Jake, The Shawshank Redemption was a bomb too.

2. The new regime cancels all projects

To be fair I don’t think before Batgirl that the new regime ever canceled quite as aggressively as David Zaslav at Warner Bros. Discovery. But Goldman wrote that one of the things that made making movies so hard was that every project greenlit by the previous studio head would be canceled when that guy, inevitably, was fired.

Why?

Well, if the project is a failure the new regime is still on the hook for the lost revenue. If the movie is a huge hit the studio head will have everyone in the business making fun of him because they will know it wasn’t his project. He’s not the genius behind it.

James Gunn, as the head of DC Studios, did exactly what a good executive should do. He cancelled everything he could and he’s doing his best to separate what will be his DC from anything he doesn’t have the authority to eliminate.

He’s going to be on the hook for all of it, he might as well make sure what does go forward is something he believes in.

3. Dealing with Producers

Goldman was actually blackballed after the first book came out. It was a little too truthful and he wasn’t afraid to smack around his collaborators who he felt behaved badly. Dustin Hoffman allegedly made an ailing Laurence Olivier walk around multiple times on swelling ankles during a rehearsal for Marathon Man. Hoffman and others were also connected to his withering critique that movie stars will always refuse to play weak.

One of the main characters in Babylon pisses himself and begs for his life near the end of the movie. I don’t think I’m giving too much away by telling you it is not Brad Pitt.

But sooner or later someone with clout will need a good writer for a project and they will turn to someone like Goldman because they know he’s got the goods.

The second book opens with Goldman in a producer’s office. The producer is on the phone for some time while Goldman waits. Then, suddenly, he stops, puts his hand on the receiver (which is how we used to mute the analog things) turns to Goldman, and says, “Which Lie Did I Tell.”

I thought about that a lot while watching The Offer. The Offer was a prestige show about the making of The Godfather. It was based on the memories of the movie’s producer, Albert S. Ruddy.

Would you be surprised to find that Ruddy was a stand-up guy who bluffed and outsmarted the mob, the studio bosses, and the creatives to get the movie made? Some of the show comes straight from the on-the-record remembrances of Director Francis Ford Coppola, writer Mario Puzo, and Studio Head Robert Evans.¹

Those parts I mostly believed. The Ruddy stuff? I liked it, but I didn’t buy a word of it.

1 Also, go watch the amazing Robert Evans documentary, The Kid Stays in the Picture.

Hang with me and there’s a nice little surprise for you at the bottom of this one.

James Gunn, the head of DC Studios announced some of the planned film and tv projects yesterday.

In case you missed it:

Here are just a few of our plans. Up, up, and away! #DCStudios #DCU @DCComics pic.twitter.com/8XNDNLUEPq

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) January 31, 2023

It is entirely too early to judge these things. I generally try to avoid trailers when I can so I can walk into a movie as open to it as possible. That sometimes leads to awkward moments.

There was a joke in Infinity War that I howled at in the theater that no one else chuckled. The reason? It was the first time I had seen it and everyone else saw it dozens of times in a trailer I skipped.

Gunn announced some things I’m very interested in and some things I have no connection to. Just like Marvel stuff, Star Wars stuff, and the Oscar nominees, I’ll probably watch them all when I can.

One of the most hopeful things out of the slate is that Gunn is a guy who reads the comics, loves the comics, and will likely ask his collaborators true to the spirit of the books he is adapting. It’s one of the reasons I semi-seriously suggested he be DC’s Kevin Feige long before the announcement was made.

He also pointed out at least some of the comic creators who did the stories his team plans to adapt. He showed off comics like Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s Batman and Robin, the pair’s All-Star Superman and Tom King, and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.

He’s already brought Tom King aboard, it seems like Morrison is working with the group as well and I suspect the Gail Simone announcement will happen sooner, rather than later.

… https://t.co/6HtJqjEdkO

— Gail Simone 💙💛 (@GailSimone) January 31, 2023

I think it’s great that DC has a guy who is pointing to the source material as inspiration instead of people who always seemed embarrassed to be doing comic book movies. We all have to make a living but if you are gonna take that sweet comic book movie check please at least pretend for me that you care about the work other people did that gave you that opportunity.

Also, pay the writers and artists who supplied the vision that then turned into a billion-dollar blockbuster.

Gunn describes the other DC projects that he was left with — The Batman and Joker — sequels as Elseworlds. If you know DC comics you know those are sometimes fantastic (and sometimes not so fantastic) tales set in alternate universes.

Superman’s rocket lands in medieval England and he takes on evil nobleman Lex Luther. Or Superman’s rocket lands in England during the American Revolution and he crushes the rebellion. Or Superman’s rocket lands in Russia and he becomes a hero for the communists.

Yeah, a lot of them have to do with when and where Superman’s rocket lands.

I doubt Gunn would have gone with Elseworlds if he wasn’t already tied to two successful franchises but it does give the studio a chance to experiment with other things down the line. It’s not gonna happen but you could literally make everyone happy and give certain people their own little Elseworlds corner with the particular slate of actors and directors they want. I mean, I don’t know that you should … but you could.

There is no point, really, in arguing about these projects until some of them start releasing. This means some corners of the internet will debate them every day from now until they are released and continue to argue about them forever after.

Gunn has the keys to the car for now and it’s unclear how much leeway he has. Marvel became Marvel because the studio stayed with the plan despite setbacks. Will Warner Brothers Discovery tough it out if things get off to a slow or rocky start?

Anyway, I hope it works out. Cause if not I may have some explaining to do.

Just give @JamesGunn total control of the DCEU.

— S. Brady Calhoun (@SBradyCalhoun) March 26, 2021

Lydia Tár is a genius composer and orchestra conductor at the top of her field. She is also a cad.

These two things are at the heart of Todd Field’s Tár.

The movie opens with a fawning interview in front of a live audience at The New Yorker Festival. And Cate Blanchett is perfect at playing that particular kind of celebrity. She says all the right things. She is smart, yet humble and she pushes back, in a polite way, when she disagrees with the interviewer. She charms the journalist, she charms the audience and she surely charms the people listening to the podcast of this interview on their way to work.

Someone has spent quality time with their publicist and gone to interview school and is incredibly well prepared.

I was lost in the weeds in a lot of this because I know absolutely nothing about the world of composers and symphonies and New Yorker festivals. But it was exciting to get immersed in this world even if the movie declines to give you much of a foothold. The screenplay never lets you sink into the bog though and Field deftly moves on from tuning up the band and into the deep interesting notes he wants to play.

So, we learn that Tár has already committed a great crime. And, even having done so, she is incapable of accepting responsibility for her actions, and if given the chance, she will continue to use her power over the women she works with to extract … personal performances outside of the workplace.

I did not expect the first great movie about the #MeToo movement to be about a woman and the Berlin symphony but here we are. As the movie continues we see that Tár is haunted. By her past? Certainly. By the consequences of her actions? You bet. By something even more supernatural in nature? Quite possibly.

Tár hears screaming in the woods while running. She wakes multiple times in the night. She thinks someone is doing something in her office. But who and why? The movie shows her running over and over again. It’s apparent that she’s not just running for her health.

For this part of the movie remembering Edgar Allen Poe could be instructive. This is not a remake of The Tell Tale Heart but the screenplay is imprinted with its themes.

It is a funny film too. In its way.

At several points while in charge of the orchestra, Tár makes moves that she thinks can be explained as something other than for her own desires. But her co-workers are not fooled. Field gets laughs with their looks of disgust. Our protagonist doesn’t know it, but Lydia Tár is finished long before the final note plays.

In 20 years as a director, Field has only made three films. When I looked him up I was delighted to find that his first feature was In the Bedroom. I saw it when it came out that year. There is nothing showy in that picture and no flashy or extravagant actor excesses. Sissy Spacek gets one grand scene where she is allowed to explode and everything else, including much of the plot, is kept under the surface.

Field gives Blanchett a whole lot more here and she chews every scene down to the bone. Then she sucks out the marrow and comes back for more.

And Field proves himself, once again, to be at the same level as anyone else in the movie business today. I sincerely hope he can now get the financing for more than two films over the next two decades.