The Social World

Tag: Hollywood

RIP Rob Reiner

The death of the director and actor Rob Reiner in violent and unexplained circumstances is one of the most horrific and surprising stories to have emerged from Hollywood in living memory. One of the reasons why its elites live in areas such as Reiner’s exclusive neighborhood of Brentwood in California is precisely so that they will not be subject to the possibility of random violence in a way that less wealthy Americans face daily. Yet if news reports are to be believed, Reiner and his wife Michele were the victims of intrafamilial strife: a situation that all the gated walls and security cameras in the world could not ameliorate.

It is particularly ironic that Reiner met such a horrible end, stabbed to death in his own home, because the vast majority of the films that he made, especially earlier in his career, were infused with a sense of all-American joyfulness and hope that made him, for a while, a filmmaker talked off in the same breath as Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg. Son of Hollywood royalty Carl Reiner, he began his career as an actor, most notably in the role of Meathead in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. It made him a household name, but also contributed to a sense of Reiner as a dumb, good-natured left-winger: he once remarked that “I could win the Nobel Prize and they’d write ‘Meathead wins the Nobel Prize.’”

It was in part in an attempt to escape from this straitjacket of typecasting that Reiner switched from acting to directing – although he continued to appear onscreen throughout his career, both in his own films and in those of others – and the first picture that he made was a particular triumph, in the form of 1984’s rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. With a script that was co-written by Reiner along with its stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, it resulted in endless quotable lines – not least the description of an amp that “goes up to eleven” – and Reiner’s own performance as the hapless documentary maker Marty Di Bergi demonstrated his ability to play both warmth and uselessness on screen with great skill.

The film’s modest success led to a new and hugely successful second wind for Reiner, whose first seven films as a director represent one of the most interesting and accomplished runs of form that any 20^th-century filmmaker ever managed. He excelled at romantic comedies, which included the John Cusack vehicle The Sure Thing and, of course, the peerless When Harry Met Sally, but his varied repertoire included everything from Stephen King horror (Misery) and swashbuckling meta-comedy (The Princess Bride) to all-American military courtroom drama (A Few Good Men). Another King adaptation, the coming-of-age drama Stand By Me, is commonly regarded as one of the seminal films of the Eighties, and his pictures made huge amounts of money at the box office.

Although Reiner never won an Oscar – he was nominated for producing A Few Good Men – and was probably, ironically enough, too versatile a talent to be seen as a true auteur, it was once a dependable badge of quality to see A Rob Reiner Film. He was also a skillful producer of high-end cinema through his Castle Rock production company, which was responsible for such modern-day classics as In The Line of Fire, The Shawshank Redemption and the loopy Malice, in which the Aaron Sorkin-doctored script allowed Alec Baldwin to declare, histrionically, “You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something. I AM GOD!”

Any suggestion that Reiner had traded his soul to anyone – be it a deity or a devil – to achieve success came crashing down with his first megaflop, the Bruce Willis family comedy North, which attracted bemused reviews and repulsed audiences. He rebounded with the Sorkin-scripted The American President, a slick, assured piece of entertainment that inadvertently led to The West Wing, but his directorial career never reached the same heights again. Instead, for the next three decades, he either made undemanding comedies or soft-focus issue dramas that played to his status as one of Hollywood’s premier liberal filmmakers.

The major exception was 2015’s Being Charlie, an unusually gritty drama about addiction and familial conflict that was explicitly autobiographical; it was co-written by his son Nick and was based on his life as an addict, as well as dealing with his strained relationship with his successful, distant father. The film was both a commercial and critical flop, and most journalists observed that there was a tension, both on and off-screen, between Reiner’s attempts to bring about reconciliation and a real-life happy ending for his troubled son, and Nick himself, who had clearly undergone experiences that no swell of orchestral music could compensate for. If reports of Reiner’s murder are accurate, then it will be this film – not this year’s lackluster Spinal Tap sequel, or indeed anything else in his great, distinguished career – that will be remembered, for all the wrong reasons. Which is an undeserved end to what was a fine life – right up until its horrific ending.

December 15, 2025
Will the new Avatar be the last?

For someone who has directed two of the three highest-grossing films of all time – and if we include Titanic in the mix, three of the top five – James Cameron struck an unusually modest figure at this week’s premiere Avatar: Fire and Ash. When asked at the screening whether its inevitable box-office success would result in the planned fourth and fifth films being produced, the erstwhile King of the World responded “I’m not even thinking about four. Are you kidding me? I’m unemployed right now.”

Admittedly, Cameron’s definition of “unemployed” is rather different to that of most people, whether they be A-list directors or the less fortunate. He has now spent 16 years in the Avatar universe, and after the inordinate success of the first picture – still the highest-grossing film in history – he has shown no interest in diversifying away from the world of Pandora and its motion-captured blue denizens, instead constructing an increasingly baroque and detailed universe that drags in vast audiences. The films may be titanic in length – the latest one clocks in at 195 minutes – but they are also staggering in ambition and imaginative force, even if those who might prefer something more cerebral and less, well, blue are likely to be disappointed.

Nonetheless, the now-71-year-old Cameron might be forgiven for dampening sky-high expectations with the latest release, as the world of cinema has changed beyond all recognition since 2009. Back then, 3D was the hottest game in town, with the Terminator and Aliens director its leading pioneer, and audiences were desperate to put on their plastic glasses and soak up the spectacle. Now, these same audiences have been reduced in the post-Covid, streaming era, and 3D is a novelty format that only Cameron still seems enamored of, despite or perhaps because of the high supplements that theater owners can charge for tickets.

There are other issues, too. While the PG-13 Avatar films are hardly adult-oriented, there is also a sense that the only pictures that are doing really well are those aimed at teenagers and children – witness the recent success of the Wicked and Zootopia sequels, and the failure of virtually everything else – and that Cameron’s eco-zealotry may be an uncomfortable fit in the MAGA era; its predecessors both were released under Democratic administrations and seemed almost the cinematic exemplars of those governments.

There is also the problem that the Avatar pictures aren’t actually all that good. Cameron’s undeniable skills as a director – pacing, action, spectacle – are perhaps outweighed by his deficiencies, namely that he cannot write dialogue or convincing characters to save his life, that his plots are stick-thin and that his love of technology is far greater than his interest in actors. Yet he seems unwilling to move into the kind of joyfully dynamic blockbusters that The Terminator, its superior sequel and Aliens represent – as well, for a guilty pleasure, as 1994’s very silly, very funny True Lies. Instead, he seems as lost in Pandora as his paraplegic marine Jake Sully, forever doomed to walk its groves in his own version of a giant blue body.

For all this, I suspect that Fire and Ash will be an enormous hit, just like its predecessors, and that Cameron will remain within the Avatar universe, as planned, until 2031, when the final installment in the series is intended for release. By then, the filmmaker will be nearly 80; not in itself an ancient age, but the idea of his doing another Titanic-esque epic might seem beyond him. And when he finally expires, worn out by too much boundary-pushing and technical fiddling, we may look at this long period that this undeniably gifted filmmaker chose to spend in an imaginary world of his own creation, and wish that he had done something more interesting, instead.

December 5, 2025
They should never make another James Bond film

The 25th and most recent entry in the James Bond franchise, No Time to Die, premiered over four years ago. Since then, there has nonetheless been Bond drama. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, and with it the rights to 007. But it took several more years to wrest producer control from Eon productions, run by the Broccoli family’s Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, scions of the filmic spy empire created by their father Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. (The family claims that the vegetable is named after them, their fortune having been founded by crossing rabe with cauliflower.)

Most recently, writers for the long-delayed upcoming 26th Bond film, set to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, appear to be stumped, plotwise. According to an unnamed “source close to the production” who spoke to RadarOnline, “Writers are tearing their hair out.” At the end of No Time to Die, “Bond didn’t just vanish off a cliff or fake his death – he was blown to pieces on screen. Everyone agrees it was a massive mistake because Bond is supposed to be eternal. They are now stuck trying to find a believable way to resurrect him, and it is proving almost impossible.”

It’s a conundrum for sure. Let me modestly suggest an obvious solution: Bond, having died, can stay dead. There should never be another Bond movie. He has lived his life and fulfilled his purpose.

No Time to Die ended the internally coherent, five-film Daniel Craig saga neatly. Having long since run out of Ian Fleming novels to base movies on, the producers had taken to plumbing the lore of the franchise itself, inventing more backstory for a character so iconic that merely saving the world was not enough. For Craig’s Bond, that meant wrestling with an inability to form trusting, lasting relationships with women – given how many of his femmes turn out to be fatale – and adding baddies that turn out to have a connection to his childhood past, such as the reveal in Spectre (2015) that longtime series big bad Ernst Stavro Blofeld is Bond’s adoptive brother.

No Time to Die, despite some criticism that it had made Bond “woke” by turning Q gay and having the 007 moniker taken up by a black woman, thus found the logical and indeed only way to level up the stakes for a hero who had already bedded 60 years’ worth of Earth’s most gorgeous women, driven the coolest cars, defused nukes, been to space, and helped defeat the Soviet empire: It made him a father. Its climactic scene sees 007 sacrificing himself for his little girl as he tells her mother over the radio, “Madeline, you have made the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Perfect, because she came from you.” Léa Seydoux’s Madeline assures him, in a stoic attempt to hide her heartbreak with flirtation, that “she does have your eyes.” Bond’s last words are “I know, I know.” Perhaps parents never really die.

The genius of the James Bond character, and the reason it became the most iconic film franchise of all time, is that it fulfills two fantasies at once. The first is of a Britain that did not come undone after winning World War Two. The post-war Britain in which the novels appeared was still in an era of rationing, and it salved a great society’s wounded ego to imagine that her majesty’s agents were not only saving the world, but doing so while sipping Bollinger. The second is male wish-fulfillment. Put a suave man in a situation where competently applied violence is the answer, and he’ll have found his purpose – or so he imagines. Shake (not stir) these two fantasies together, and that’s why people love 007.

No Time to Die had to deal with the baggage of 60 years of film audiences who had already seen Bond fulfill all those wishes, though. So it drew on the unfairly hated source text of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the sixth film, starring one-timer George Lazenby. In both No Time to Die and OHMSS, we see Bond undo a sinister biological-weapons plot and drive the same Aston Martin DBS to the same baleful Louis Armstrong song. We also see him break the canonical formula of self-contained stories to do some family formation, in this case getting married to Tracy Bond, who is then tragically gunned down in his arms.

Whether or not the producers intended No Time to Die to be woke, it is a deeply conservative movie, a paean to the goodness of bourgeois values. Its message is ultimately that the best, highest calling of a man is not to be as good at seducing women as possible or at doing violence as possible, which is the thinking of a young man. No, it is to have a family, to be a husband and father, something no number of flings or amount of skill with a Walther PPKs could begin to approach. That is what gave the writers the artistic license to kill Bond at the end of No Time to Die. Our hero had finally actually, after all this time, figured out how to be a man.

November 25, 2025
What if the Emerald Fennell Wuthering Heights is good?

Every few months or so, a new film comes along and anyone interested in the art of cinema braces themselves, because The Discourse will inevitably accompany it. There is no clearer candidate for fevered discussion next year than Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which is released, with smirking predictability, on Valentine’s Day. Ever since the film was announced, there has been controversy over everything from the casting of the Caucasian Jacob Elordi to play Heathcliff (who is referred to in Emily Brontë’s original novel as a “a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect”) to the excessively clean and stylish-looking clothes worn by Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw. When reports of strong sexual content, including BDSM and hanging-induced ejaculation, leaked from a test screening, word got out: Fennell had made her film again.

For some, writer-director-actor Fennell is one of the most exciting figures in contemporary cinema, an Oscar-winning visionary whose previous pictures, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, managed to say provocative and original things about gender, class and power while still remaining wholly entertaining. For her detractors, Fennell is a nepo baby one-trick pony who is only capable of making the kind of smirkingly superficial films that attract a great deal of attention and make her money without having anything to say about the weighty topics that she tackles. With her third film, the jury will finally return, and the verdict should be fascinating.

Certainly, Warner Bros. has enormous faith in Wuthering Heights. The studio has invested $80 million in the budget – Netflix were reportedly prepared to pay $150 million, a ridiculous amount for a literary adaptation, but did not want to release the film theatrically – and forked out for none other than Charli xcx, the pop star du jour, to provide the songs for the picture. The first previews released suggest that Warner have something entirely inimitable on their hands, a strange and dreamlike mixture of swooning Gothic romance, with two of the hottest actors of the moment, and something post-modern and ironic. I was reminded of a similarly divisive film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which split audiences down the line on its release but still made a fortune at the box office.

The studio will presumably be hoping that the reunion of Robbie and Fennell (who respectively starred and cameoed in Barbie) will be vastly successful. At a time when most period literary adaptations never make it to the cinema, Wuthering Heights is a rare beast, but even as we prepare for endless thinkpieces upon its release, there are a few encouraging signs. Robbie, who has not always been used well by Hollywood, looks too clean and wide-eyed as Cathy, but Elordi, who was a stiff presence in Saltburn, might well be about to capture Heathcliff’s mixture of brutality and magnetism.

And the two Charli xcx songs released so far are both excellent. The first, ‘House,’ features none other than John Cale, reciting an increasingly disturbing spoken-word monologue over scraping viola, before the chorus “I think I’m going to die in this house” explodes in visceral fashion. The second, the more conventional ‘Chains of Love,’ is a perfectly judged pop song complete with old-school girl groups “oh-oh-ohs” in the chorus as Charli declares “The chains of love are cruel / I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner.” If they’re anything to go by tonally and thematically, Fennell’s film will be a decidedly modern and downbeat take on Brontë’s original, without the sappy romance of other, less demanding adaptations of the novel.

Yet this could also be a false promise. Saltburn marketed itself as a hyper-aware take on Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr. Ripley, which instead proved to be an excuse for Barry Keoghan’s charmless arriviste to kill people and dance around a big house naked. And Promising Young Woman was one of the least deserving Oscar-winners for best screenplay ever made, with a lazy, all-men-are-bastards premise that soon resulted in a misandrist twist that made the entire project a repellent one. So there is every chance that Wuthering Heights could be another artistic wash-out. But it could also be like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette or even the don of all period films, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon: a fascinating, breathtakingly original take on the material. Not long to go now, in any case, and then The Discourse will have its day. And until then, we’ll always have Kate Bush: “Heathcliff, it’s me! Cathy!” Etc, etc.

November 22, 2025
Robert De Niro has a serious case of Trump envy

The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be “the end of the world”) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing to trans activists or not accepting that everything is racist. Lawrence actually said: “Election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for” – or as I wrote here: “How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements not work, but have an actual repelling effect?”

We get more set in our ways as we get older, though, so it’s unlikely that 82-year-old Robert De Niro will see the light and stop making a fool of himself over politics in general – and the Potus in particular – any time soon. He’s directed judgments such as “evil” and statements like “I can’t wait to see him in jail” at Donald Trump for more than a decade now; also deranged declamations such as: “He has no empathy. I don’t know where or what he is, but he’s an alien. It’s something deeply psychological in him, he wants to hurt people. He wants to hurt this country.” Not just the country but New York City specifically, for some reason: even though he grew up there, apparently enjoyed a swinging single life there and has lots of property there, “Donald Trump wants to destroy not only the city, but the country and eventually he could destroy the world.”

As far as De Niro is concerned, no plans are too sinister to ascribe to Trump, who’s just three years his junior at 79. “We cannot let up on him because he is not going to leave the White House… we’ve had two and a half centuries of democracy… we fought in two world wars to preserve it. Now we have a would-be king who wants to take it away. King Donald the First. Fuck that. We’re rising up again… we’re all in this together, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

This almost parasexual-seeming obsession goes back a long way, hilariously even to the 2016 incident during which De Niro said he wanted to “punch” the Republican presidential nominee “in the face”– in what was supposed to be a nonpartisan video encouraging people to vote. The excitable mummer added as an afterthought: “He’s a punk. He’s a dog. He’s a pig. He’s a con, a bullshit artist, a mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t care, doesn’t pay his taxes. He’s an idiot.” Come on, Bob, tell us what you really think!

But is there more to this than the standard Trump Derangement Syndrome that the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell have displayed? Recent developments – in Manchester, England, of all the unlikely flash-points for this very American stand-off – might intriguingly suggest that it stems just as much from the envy of one mega-rich property developer for an even more successful one as it does from politics. De Niro’s business interests (while still holding on to the idea of himself as some sort of integrity laden “artiste”) are extraordinary, even in a profession in which Johnny Depp could spend $2 million a month – much of it on wine and yachts – and still portray himself as a rebel outsider.

De Niro is thought to be worth around $500 million; with properties around Manhattan, he also has a 78-acre estate in Gardiner, New York, which serves as his primary residence. Since 1990, he has owned or co-owned the Tribeca Grill restaurant (which closed this year) and the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca, and has business interests in around 50 Nobu restaurants and 19 Nobu hotels. He is a stakeholder in Paradise Found Nobu Resort, a company building a hyper-luxury $250 million destination on the island of Barbuda, due to be completed next year. And now we in England are privileged to have him bless our own excellent city of Manchester with his benevolence.

Last week De Niro took a whistlestop tour to this splendid northern powerhouse to promote the launch of the “Nobu Tower,” a 76-story edifice which aims to be the highest in the UK outside of London, comprising a 160-bedroom Nobu hotel, Nobu restaurant and 452 extremely expensive apartments. Looking somewhat baffled – was this Manchester, New Hampshire, Manchester, Maryland or Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts? – he admitted that he “did not know much” about this rainier Manchester but has seen enough from his smoked glass car window to sense the “real character and creative passion” there. Furthermore, he claimed to be “proud to be part” of the “creative, passionate and strong” city and promised recklessly: “I look forward to coming back when it’s finished, if not before. I plan to be around… I think it will take six years so I will make sure I am around.” So far, so insultingly clichéd. But it was when he spoke the following words that he sounded very much like a certain other builder of fancy towers: “I haven’t seen the city yet but I’d like to come back. Everyone is very nice, we’re having a very nice time.”

It could be Trump talking. Which got me thinking of the other similarities between them. De Niro has been married only twice to Trump’s thrice, but has seven children to Trump’s five, the latest of which he became a proud daddy to at a whopping 79, with his girlfriend Tiffany Chen being some 35 years younger than him. (The much-trumpeted difference between Trump and Melania is 24 years.) De Niro’s attitude to women can be somewhat less than respectful, as seen a few years back when his company had to pay more than a million dollars to his former assistant after a nasty court case over claims of “gender discrimination and retaliation.”

In an amusing echo of the time he came out with a string of anti-Trump abuse while simply urging people to vote: “In two days on the witness stand, De Niro conceded he had occasionally berated her and raised his voice in her presence, but said that he ‘was never abusive, ever’. But in a dramatic outburst, he looked directly at her and shouted ‘Shame on you!’ across the courtroom.” When it comes to over-indulged man-babies with minimal self-control, De Niro totally outdoes Trump.

In his strange obsession with Trump, and in De Niro’s own turbocharged greed (most of us agree that those who mistreat waiting staff are the lowest of the low; in 2009 Nobu paid $2.5 million to hundreds of workers who brought a court case claiming that their tips had been pilfered by management), we see a prime example of a man for whom chasing the almighty dollar has become far more of an obsession for him than it is for his nemesis. It is what they have in common that makes the actor hate the politician so and which has led to the hysterical “othering”: “He has littered our city with monuments to his ego,” said De Niro, now preparing to leave an indelible mark on beautiful Manchester, a city he had never seen.

It’s ironic that the supposedly righteous fury of the Hollywood Red Brigade is far more the envy of the multimillionaire for the billionaire than any sort of desire for social justice on behalf of the poor, who they pretty much view as irretrievable Deplorables. It’s amusing that the richest and most privileged public figures of our time are those most subject to the politics of envy – and in De Niro’s attacks on Trump, we see this in its most heightened and hilarious form.

November 17, 2025
We begged Hollywood for Sydney Sweeney

Sydney Sweeney is back in the news again, because the news keeps making the news about Sydney Sweeney. This week, it’s an interview with Sweeney by GQ, titled “Sydney Sweeney on Life at the Center of the Conversation.” It’s sparked a “wokelash” among people who hate Sydney Sweeney, meaning no one you actually want to know.

Even though GQ is short for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and the audience is ostensibly gentlemen who like to look at Sydney Sweeney, Katherine Stoeffel, GQ’s features director, conducted the interview. Women have always and will continue to work for GQ, but Stoeffel seems to not understand what gentlemen want and like. Inside American women right now, there are two wolves. Sweeney is one of them. Stoeffel is the other.

The woke left appears determined to paint Sweeney, a hustlingly entrepreneurial actress, as a gateway to white supremacist America. In the interview, Sweeney says that the response to her American Eagle “great jeans” ad was “surreal,” which I’m sure it was, down to the fact that President Trump, king of the culture war, decided to comment on it. That’s not enough for Stoeffel, who wants a scalp.

“I’m literally in jeans and a T-shirt like every day of my life,” says Sweeney.

Same.

“Jeans are uncontroversial, jeans are awesome,” Stoeffel says, with her best vocal fry, while Sweeney laughs.

“I like your jeans,” Sweeney says.

“You look great in your jeans,” says Stoeffel, suddenly raising hope that things might get a little steamy there in the garden. But then comes the boom.

“I think I know how you’re going to answer this, but I’m going to ask anyway. I mean, the President tweeted about the jeans ad.”

Sweeney is still giggling.

“Or Truth Socialed about the jeans ad. And that just seems to me like a very crazy moment for anyone, and I wondered what that was like.”

“It was surreal,” Sweeney says, the laughter having left her eyes.

“It was surreal. And it would be totally human. I would feel thankful that somebody had my back in public. And conveniently, some very powerful people had my back in public.”

The tone ventures into: are you now, Sydney Sweeney, and have you ever been, a member of the Republican party?

“Ech,” Sweeney says.

“I wondered if you felt that way.”

“Mmm,” Sweeney goes, followed by a few seconds pause. “I don’t think that. It’s not like I didn’t have that feeling, but I wasn’t thinking of it like that. Of any of it. I kind of just put my phone away. I was filming every day. I’m filming Euphoria. So I’m working like 16-hour days. And I don’t really bring my phone on set. I work and then I go home and I go to sleep. So I didn’t really see a lot of it.”

Stoeffel continues to press.

“You’ve made a really good case for keeping your thoughts and your life separate from that work. But the risk is that, you know, there’s a chance that somebody will get some idea about what you think about certain issues.”

At this point, you can see in Sweeney’s eyes that she truly hates this person to whom she’s committed an hour of her life.

“Hmm,” she says, while ordering a drone strike in her mind.

“Do you worry about that?” Stoeffel asks.

“No,” Sweeney says.

And yet Stoeffel doesn’t stop, and, in fact, arrives at her gotcha moment. “The criticism of the content was that, basically in this political climate, like white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority. Like that was kind of the criticism, broadly speaking. And since you were talking about this, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about that specifically.”

“I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about,” Sweeney said, “people will hear.”

Sydney Sweeney is what people have been begging for from Hollywood stars for decades: someone who looks good, works hard, shows up on time, stays sober, keeps their opinions basically to themselves and makes their studios gobs of money. Katherine Stoeffel is a striver from a dying media class. One of them is today’s internet main character. The other will be a main character in most of our media lives for the next 20 years. Sweeney’s next movie is about a female boxer. Anyone who’s betting on GQ over her in today’s tense exchange has chosen the wrong fighter. Today, Sydney Sweeney knocked legacy media flat.

November 7, 2025
Die My Love is Jennifer Lawrence at her best

Big-name, all-star team-ups used to be the preserve of Hollywood blockbusters – perhaps reaching its peak in 2005 with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie met, fell in love and sold a billion copies of the National Enquirer in the process. But in our new era of superhero-driven slop, where it barely matters which actor is in what picture, such things have largely fallen into abeyance. Still, even in our jaded times, there remains an undeniable thrill from seeing Katniss Everdeen and Edward Cullen together on screen at last, as they are in Die My Love.

Of course, both Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson – or J-Law and R-Patz, as some sections of internet fandom will insist on referring to them – have gone on to do considerably more interesting and challenging work than The Hunger Games and Twilight. This collaboration between the pair and Lynne Ramsay is squarely located in the kind of challenging arthouse territory that both have increasingly made their comfort zone over the past few years. Yet there are a plethora of big names attached to it – Martin Scorsese is a producer; the cast includes LaKeith Stanfield, Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek; and the playwrights Alice Birch and Enda Walsh were responsible for the script along with Ramsay. So the cult streaming service Mubi was emboldened, in a moment of exuberance, to pay a staggering $24 million for the theatrical rights. Do they stand any chance whatsoever of getting their money back?

Well, Die My Love is many things, but it’s certainly not a Hunger Games–Twilight mash-up, unless the idea of a serio-comic horror-thriller about postpartum depression and marital discord sounds like the obvious follow-on from films about children murdering one another and forbidden love between human and vampire. Based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz, the slender narrative concerns the hot young couple Grace and Jackson. She’s an aspirant writer, he’s a sketchily depicted boho-artistic type who spends a lot of time away traveling, but when they’re together they have a lot of sex, because they’re a hot young couple. Inevitably, this results in pregnancy, and equally inevitably, Grace finds herself unable to handle the emotional, mental and physical demands of motherhood, resulting in a slow, then swift, decline into near-psychosis.

Ramsay is not a prolific filmmaker – her last picture was 2017’s You Were Never Really Here – and she’s never had anything like a commercial hit. But what she is incredibly good at is eliciting unforgettable performances from her lead actors: think Tilda Swinton and pre-disgrace Ezra Miller in her Lionel Shriver adaptation We Need To Talk About Kevin, or Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar.

Lawrence here is no exception, in what could well be a career-best appearance from her. In a part that requires her to be both figuratively and, on occasion, literally naked – in unsparing scenes shot without an ounce of Hollywood glamor or vanity – she gives an Oscar-worthy turn that is worth the price of admission by itself. Her Grace isn’t a manic pixie dream girl whose mental-health issues can be overcome by therapy and the love of a good man, but a real, vulnerable woman, whose breakdown inspires both pity and terror, resulting in a visually spectacular final coup de cinema.

Would that the rest of the film lived up to its lead. Pattinson, who is coming off an unusually bad year with the sci-fi flop Mickey 17, is barely a presence at all, perhaps appropriately, but the role of “sardonic and probably adulterous husband” hardly plays to this great actor’s strengths. Nolte is in the film so fleetingly as to be almost subliminal; Stanfield has little to do in the (possibly imaginary) role of a confidante and potential love interest for Grace; and only Spacek, as Jackson’s mother, manages to bring a supporting character to life in any meaningful or effective way. This is a strange and tonally uncertain mixture of naturalism (filmed by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey in Academy 1.33:1 ratio, rather than cinema’s usual widescreen splendor) and Grand Guignol, which pays off spectacularly when the flourishes come but feels inhibited the rest of the time, with only the odd jolt of black humor to cut through: suicide by gun-up-ass, for instance.

I can’t imagine that Die My Love is going to restore adult-oriented cinema’s fortunes this fall, nor that the Lawrence-Pattinson faithful are going to find much to commend this picture. Yet for its fearless and vastly impressive lead performance alone, the bold and curious should head to their local arthouse theater this weekend, and support the kind of film that, unless matters improve, will not be getting wide distribution in the future.

November 7, 2025
Is Meghan Markle making a thespian comeback?

As Britain’s royal family attempts to maintain a “business as usual” approach in the aftermath of the biggest scandal to have engulfed the institution in decades, the pair responsible for its last existential embarrassment have been notably silent. You might have expected, as Andrew was showily stripped of all his titles, some sanctimonious comment on the Sussex Instagram account, some hashtag-laden exhortation always to stand with the victims of abuse. But no. Those of us who were wondering why this has not happened now have an answer, of sorts. Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, has returned to her old profession: acting.

In truth, it is unclear as to whether Meghan’s appearance in the forthcoming picture Close Personal Friends will be the greatest test of her thespian abilities. She has been cast alongside the starry likes of Henry Golding, Brie Larson and a couple of nepo babies, Jack Quaid and Lily Collins, in what is said to be a comedy about two sets of friends, one famous and one not. So, who is Meghan to play? A fairy godmother type, bringing together the civilians and celebrities in one joyous accord? Or a jaded roué of the Madame de Merteuil school, casting a cynical eye over the frolics of the young? Alas, the role is not quite as demanding as that. Instead, she has been cast as herself.

This may, in fact, be challenging to pull off, given that it has not been clear for some time now who the “real” Meghan Markle is. Still, it has been briefed by an excitable insider that the role – which is, presumably, a cameo rather than a co-lead – represents a significant opportunity for her. “This is a massive moment for Meghan and signifies a return to doing what she truly loves. She has been swamped with offers but this one felt right. It is Meghan’s way of gently putting her toe back in the water and seeing how she enjoys being back on set. Everyone involved is super-excited, and have been sworn to secrecy about her involvement.” (That went well, didn’t it.) And, of course: “Prince Harry is, of course, really supportive and quite simply wants Meghan to do whatever brings her joy.”

Her husband has been busy in his own right. He published an essay – well, at 647 words, more of a think piece – about his great love of Britishness, in which the Montecito exile declared that: “The banter of the mess, the clubhouse, the pub, the stands – ridiculous as it sounds, these are the things that make us British. I make no apology for it. I love it.” To this short list of clichés, he might also have added “the public attitude toward anything that my wife does.” It is fair to say that, while Andrew Windsor’s record levels of unpopularity make Harry and Meghan look like adored titans in comparison, neither of the Sussexes are exactly beloved in his home country. Her appearance in Close Personal Friends is unlikely to make much difference to that.

While Meghan has been a consistent – some might say pervasive – presence on our screens over the past few years, she has not acted since Suits finished in 2018. Still, a quick glance at her hitherto undistinguished filmography is a reminder of what we have been missing. Pictures such as Horrible Bosses, Dysfunctional Friends and A Lot Like Love and such roles as “Hot Girl” and “Junior FBI Agent Amy Jessup” suggest that we have not been missing out on the next Cate Blanchett or Jessie Buckley in our midst.

However, Meghan has made the most striking impact on public life, for good or ill, as herself. And so it seems appropriate that she has chosen to make her comeback in the part that she is most comfortable playing. Will this be the beginning of Meghan Markle, Thespian mark II? As with everything else she does, only a fool – or a close personal friend – would bet against it.

November 6, 2025
Has Los Angeles killed America’s imagination?

The magnificent Griffith Park Observatory turned 90 this year and, as fans of nonagenarians, my wife and I hiked up the south slope of Mount Hollywood – well, our rental car did the hard work – to pay our respects.

The city of Los Angeles sprawled out before us; the Hollywood sign loomed ominously above us. I suppose I should hate this city, the Typhoid Mary of cultural imperialism, infecting and deadening imaginations from Bangor to Bend. As Morrissey crooned: “We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/ London is dead.”

But I dunno: it’s my wife’s hometown, I love her Armenian relatives and I’ve always been a sucker for the movies, at least in their pre-CGI, pre-Marvel, pre-woke, pre-franchise age.

Griffith Park is something of a sentimental spot for us, as Lucine and I once reenacted the Observatory knife fight scene from Rebel Without a Cause here, sans cutlery, way back where the past was. So the first thing we did on this visit was scoot toward the Kenneth Kendall-sculpted bust of James Dean on the west side of the Observatory lawn.

Several dozen gamesome schoolchildren were horsing around on the grounds, none paying the slightest attention to the brooding Hoosier overactor’s bronze visage, but it’s hard to score the LA School District for deficiencies in teaching film history: Rebel was released 70 years ago, so teenagers today are as unlikely to know, much less idolize, Dean as I would have been to have drooled over Florence Lawrence at their age.

Then again, kids these days listen to the Doors and wear Beatles T-shirts, digging the pop music of threescore years earlier, though I rather doubt that many flowerchildren of the 1960s were grooving to “Yes, We Have No Bananas” or the “Swanee” stylings of Al Jolson.

The James Dean bust – which the actor himself commissioned – is accompanied by an inscription that calls him “an American original who on a basis of high school honors and in a period of five years time rose to the very pinnacle of the theatrical profession and through the magic of motion pictures lives on in legend.”

Speaking of the very pinnacle, Lucine snapped a shot of me standing in front of the Griffith Park Observatory’s Astronomers Monument, a 35-foot high sculpture featuring likenesses of the stellar sextet of Galileo, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Hipparchus and William Herschel. I titled the photo “Seven Great Astronomers.”

I share a birthday with Herschel, discoverer of Uranus – and isn’t the seventh planet from the sun the favorite planet of every giggling 12-year-old boy? Uranus has not yet been canceled by planetary puritans – unlike its little brother Pluto, victim of microphobic astronomers. The erstwhile ninth planet’s demotion to the demeaning status of “dwarf planet” (no offense to little people) still pisses me off.

I once interviewed David Levy, the greatest comet hunter of our age. He knew Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, whose biography he wrote. Levy told me that the elderly Tombaugh feared that his ejection from the exclusive Planet Discoverers Club was only a matter of time. At least the members of the International Astronomical Union had the minimal decency to wait until Clyde was dead before they committed their foul deed. (Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming is a lively account by the chief murderer.)

Yet I was glad to see that the Pluto plaque remains firmly in the ground of Griffith Park’s Solar System Lawn Model. It hasn’t been dug up by the planetary precisians yet.

The eccentric musician Sufjan Stevens, who once claimed – tongue somewhat in cheek – the extraordinarily inspired ambition of devoting an album to each of the 50 states, recorded an instrumental, “For Clyde Tombaugh,” as part of his Illinois effort. Stevens only musicalized two states, the other being his native Michigan, but his was a rare pop-culture recognition that the states are not just administrative units of a national behemoth, as nanny-state progressives and power-mad Trumpsters seem to believe. They are real places with real histories, distinct and individuated and idiosyncratic and tragic and funny.

In one of his best tunes, the late folksinger Phil Ochs hymned “Jim Dean of Indiana” and I suppose Stevens would have packed Dean into an Indiana album, standing at a cool remove from his fellow subjects Larry Bird and Kurt Vonnegut and Theodore Dreiser and the Jackson 5 and Eugene V. Debs and Booth Tarkington.

We do not need to look to Los Angeles for the language we use – or to Washington, DC, for that matter.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

November 5, 2025
Why Taylor Sheridan quit Paramount

There are many showrunners in contemporary Hollywood who are, essentially, all-powerful – Vince Gilligan and Aaron Sorkin have been able to do what they like for a considerable time now, for instance, and I doubt anyone’s giving the White Lotus’s Mike White too many notes, unless they’re blank checks – but there are two men who are primus inter pares when it comes to their relationship with their studios. Ryan Murphy more or less is Mr. Netflix, as can be seen by the streaming service merrily bankrolling everything he writes and/or creates – even something as unpleasant and morally corrupt as the recent Ed Gein show – and Taylor Sheridan and Paramount have been hand in glove for years now. Until, that is, they’re not.

The reason why Taylor Sheridan is leaving the network with whom he has had huge success for years is, as usual, a dispute about money. His perspective is that his work with Paramount, during which time he has more or less reinvented the contemporary western with such shows as Yellowstone and Landman, as well as prequels including 1883 and 1923 and such popular crime series as Tulsa King and Mayor of Kingstown, has been exemplary both on an artistic and commercial level, and that he deserves a Murphy-level deal. Paramount’s argument, as expressed by its new CEO David Ellison, is that Sheridan may be a hugely talented writer-director-showrunner, but he is ultimately an expendable figure who has, wrongly, seen himself as bigger than the shows he has produced.

Both sides have ground for their respective arguments. When Yellowstone was at its peak, it managed to be one of those rare shows that overcame the potential hokiness of its premise (and some terrible early reviews) to become appointment viewing, the Dynasty for our time but considerably better. And everything that Sheridan has worked on since has been similarly successful, even if the spy thriller show Lioness has never really caught fire, despite a starry cast including Morgan Freeman, Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldaña. In an America that is now considerably more attuned to MAGA sensibilities that it was when he began his screenwriting career a decade ago with the (excellent) films Sicario and Hell or High Water, Sheridan can convincingly suggest that he has captured the zeitgeist of his country more entertainingly than any other writer today, and that this success should be rewarded accordingly.

Ellison, however, is said to be less enamored of Sheridan’s considerable ego. When it was suggested to the showrunner that he produce a show celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, he simply refused, suggesting that it was “too politically charged”. Sheridan, however, was smarting from Paramount’s refusal to make one of his screenplays, entitled Capture the Flag – no prizes for guessing what kind of genre of film that would have been – and seemingly decided that the studio that had built his career was no longer the right fit for him. Enter Donna Langley, all-powerful head of Universal, and a woman with considerable form in luring away talent from their former homes: it was she who convinced Christopher Nolan to leave Warner Bros and won him Oscars for Oppenheimer in the process. Sheridan’s price, paid willingly: a billion-dollar deal and complete creative control.

There are, of course, several more shows left to run in his Paramount deal, which does not expire until 2028, but it looks unlikely that such series as the Yellowstone spin-offs 1944 and The Madison will be entered into with the same zeal that his previous work. Certainly, Sheridan has been working at a rate of energy that would kill many lesser men, and it has been whispered that Ellison believed that not only was the hyphenate at risk of creative burn-out, but that with him gone, it would be easier to control Paramount, rather than with this particular alpha male attempting to dominate proceedings.

He may, of course, be right. Yet if there’s anything Sheridan has done successfully in his shows, it is to bring in the big dog that so many of his peers have shied away from creating, and make him not just relatable, but likable. It is not too big a stretch to believe that many of these figures were created in his own image, and that Sheridan himself is as outsized and swashbuckling as any John Dutton or Mike McLusky. What are the chances that a future show of his will feature a similarly titanic lead taking on the callow entertainment industry, and winning in the process? Sheridan – and Universal – will be hoping that life imitates art, and vice versa. Ellison will be just as fervently hoping the opposite, and the rest of us will be watching with as much fascination as we have devoted to the shows.

November 3, 2025