The Hollywood Bowles

Those who can't write, edit. Those who can't edit, blog. Operating at a loss since 2014.

‘Digger’ Buries Itself in Expectations

Scott Bowles

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October 5, 2026

Tom Cruise spent the last decade teaching audiences exactly what a Tom Cruise movie means.

Digger asked them to forget that.

That may explain more than anything why Alejandro González Iñárritu’s $125 million-plus black comedy collapsed this weekend, opening to just $8 million in the United States and Canada and $20 million worldwide. It finished fifth. For Cruise, it marked his weakest opening since Lions for Lambs in 2007.

The numbers look worse once you understand the movie. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a fabulously wealthy Texas oil baron whose Arctic drilling operation triggers an environmental catastrophe. A glacier breaks loose. Europe faces devastating tsunamis. Digger, a man accustomed to bending politicians and markets to his will, launches a frantic attempt to cast himself as humanity’s savior from the disaster he helped create.

Iñárritu folds the story into a theatrical meta-narrative about power, art and whether satire can accomplish anything beyond entertaining people who already understand the joke.

That sounds like a $20 million specialty film. But Hollywood spent blockbuster money on it.

Published estimates put the production cost at roughly $125 million, with some reports placing it substantially higher. That comes before a major global marketing campaign. The movie runs a little over two hours, carries an R rating and attacks climate denial, corporate greed, political cowardice and the culture built around wealthy men who assume their money proves their genius.

Then Warner Bros. put Tom Cruise in the middle and assumed Tom Cruise solved any commercial problem.

He created one instead.

Cruise has become one of the clearest brands in movies. His recent hits rarely ask audiences to wonder what they are buying. Mission: Impossible promises velocity. Top Gun: Maverick promised fighter jets, nostalgia and Cruise pushing machinery past sane limits. The star runs. He flies. He climbs. He saves everybody.

The audience understands the transaction before they buy a ticket.

Digger reverses it. Cruise wears prosthetics and gray hair. He adopts a Texas accent. He plays arrogance instead of competence. He embodies the kind of billionaire whom Ethan Hunt might normally spend two hours trying to stop.

That is a risky artistic choice, and a dangerous commercial one. Cruise had made himself into a genre. Warner Bros. treated him like a movie star.

There is a difference.

Movie stars once carried audiences from westerns to romances to courtroom dramas largely on the strength of their names. Modern stars increasingly work inside franchises and established screen identities. Cruise may be the strongest surviving exception, but even he built his recent drawing power around a remarkably specific promise: practical spectacle performed by Tom Cruise at considerable risk to Tom Cruise.

Digger offers Tom Cruise sitting in rooms arguing about environmental apocalypse.

The marketing faced an impossible problem because the movie itself resists a clean sales pitch. Is it a comedy? A political satire? An ecological nightmare? An Oscar vehicle? A grotesque character study? A piece of metafiction about the failure of political art?

The answer appears to be yes.

Hollywood often confuses awareness with desire. People know Tom Cruise. They know Iñárritu. They may have seen the ads. None of that means they wanted this movie.

Hollywood often confuses awareness with desire. People know Tom Cruise. They know Iñárritu. They may have seen the ads. None of that means they wanted this movie.

Hollywood often confuses awareness with desire. People know Tom Cruise. They know Iñárritu. They may have seen the ads. None of that means they wanted this movie.

Hollywood often confuses awareness with desire. People know Tom Cruise. They know Iñárritu. They may have seen the ads. None of that means they wanted this movie.

The deeper mistake came when the studio confused Cruise’s fame with permission. Audiences gave Cruise permission to hang from airplanes, leap motorcycles from cliffs and save civilization. They never promised to follow him anywhere.

Digger found that border.

Manipulator vs. Manipulator

Scott Bowles

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October 4, 2026

The most anticipated documentary of the 21st century may be film’s most telling shrug.

You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, was made in secret over nearly four years. It premiered without warning at the Telluride Film Festival on September 6, then played a single screening at the New York Film Festival. People reportedly lined up outside Lincoln Center before dawn. It opens Oct. 16.

The film follows Elizabeth Holmes during the 34 days before she reported to federal prison. In 2023, she invited a film crew into her Southern California home, where she lived with her partner, Billy Evans, and their children.

The story has already been told. Theranos claimed it could perform hundreds of medical tests from a few drops of blood. The technology failed. Holmes misled investors. A jury convicted her of fraud. She received an 11-year prison sentence.

The question now is not what Elizabeth Holmes did. The question is what happens when she meets Nathan Fielder.

This is a clash between two professional manipulators.

Fielder has spent his career bending reality until people reveal themselves. Holmes spent hers bending reality until investors believed in a machine that did not work.

Fielder manipulates circumstances. Holmes manipulates belief. Put them in the same room and you have a documentary with a premise so strange that it sounds invented.

Fielder creates situations that look spontaneous but are carefully engineered. He adopts a flat, literal persona and lets people wander into their own absurdity. He offers them a stage, then watches what they do with it.

His comedy depends on control. He controls the premise. He controls the environment. He controls the edit. He understands that people often expose themselves when they believe they are managing the room.

Holmes operated differently. Her manipulation was not a comic experiment. It was a business model. She sold a vision of medical technology before the technology existed. She converted confidence into evidence. She made ambition sound like achievement. She wrapped failure in futurism and asked powerful people to suspend their disbelief.

Fielder manufactures unreality so that the truth can emerge. Holmes manufactured unreality so that the truth would stay hidden.

That is the collision at the heart of the film.

The access alone is astonishing. Holmes had spent seven years largely absent from the media. Then she invited Nathan Fielder into her home. He reportedly lived in the guesthouse and observed the family’s daily life. What began as an intimate portrait became a nearly three-hour investigation into Holmes’s personal mythology.

Holmes insists she has always been honest. She says she has never told a lie. That claim is more interesting than a confession would be.

A conventional liar knows the difference between fact and fiction. Holmes seems to occupy a more complicated territory. She appears to have built a private definition of truth in which intention matters more than performance and potential matters more than results.

The Theranos machine, she argues, was theoretically capable of performing more than 1,000 medical tests. The tests themselves simply had not been developed.

That distinction sounds absurd because it is absurd. A car capable of traveling 10,000 miles per hour remains imaginary if it has no engine capable of producing that speed. A medical machine capable of performing thousands of tests remains imaginary if it cannot perform them.

Yet Holmes appears to have lived inside the distinction.

This may be the film’s central question: Can a person deceive the world so completely that she eventually deceives herself? And will that world believe in her worldview?

The danger is that Holmes could manipulate the documentary into becoming another platform for her mythology. The opportunity is that Fielder may finally meet someone who cannot be directed, softened or neatly decoded.

One manipulator studies the other. Fielder turns awkwardness into entertainment. Holmes turned certainty into capital. Neither has much use for ordinary reality. And when they meet, the audience has to decide who is studying whom.

The most unsettling possibility is that both of them leave the room believing they won.

The Truth Is Out There. And It’s Phoning Home.

Scott Bowles

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June 17, 2026


Steven Spielberg makes movies the way other directors make promises.

“Disclosure Day” begins where the UAP hearings left off. Congress gave Unidentified Aerial Phenomena its bureaucratic name, retired the UFO, and left the harder question unasked. Spielberg asks it. Not whether we are alone, but what becomes of us the moment we find out we are not.

Emily Blunt plays a Kansas City TV anchor who begins experiencing the uncanny firsthand. She is extraordinary. She makes you believe something impossible is happening to a woman who cannot quite believe it herself. Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth fill out a cast that Spielberg handles with the confidence of a director who has forgotten more about performance than most have learned. The script, from longtime collaborator David Koepp, builds its conspiracy with patience and real menace.

The set pieces earn their keep. A train sequence delivers the kind of tactile, old-school tension that digital filmmaking has spent twenty years trying to replicate and mostly failing. John Williams scores it all. Whatever you expect from that combination, double it. Some things age into cliché. This does not.

And yet the aliens here walk upright and carry meaning. They suggest, as Spielberg’s visitors always have, that contact is really about reflection. These are not the grinding machines of “War of the Worlds.” They are inheritors of Roy Neary’s awe and Elliott’s bicycle against the moon. Spielberg has said the creatures might represent humanity 500,000 years forward. That is an intellectually interesting idea. On screen it plays safe.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” earned that vision. “E.T.” broke your heart with it. Here it lands more softly than the material deserves.

The film carries a PG-13 rating and feels every bit of it. The edges stay rounded. The wonder arrives on schedule. A director pushing 80, making a film about hope and governmental deception, has every right to sand his corners. The government conspiracy thread runs through the whole picture, rich with current-events resonance, and it deserves a harder landing than it gets. The adult audience this material invites sometimes finds the door only halfway open.

His fascination with beings who look like us, feel like us, and ultimately want the best for us remains his most comfortable idea. It is also his least challenging one. “Close Encounters” and “E.T.” justified that warmth because they left something unresolved. Something strange lived at the edges. You carried it home with you. “Disclosure Day” ties its bow a little too neatly. You leave the theater satisfied rather than haunted.

None of that undoes what works. Blunt commands every scene she enters. The craft is immaculate. Spielberg still knows where to put the camera, when to hold, and when to cut. Those instincts do not age. He has made a lot of movies. He still knows things most directors will never learn. This is the best film he has made in years, and in a career like his, that still means something considerable.

The truth, it turns out, belongs to eight billion people. Some of them wanted it just a little darker.

Cinema’s Greatest (Recurring) Villain

Scott Bowles

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September 21, 2024

As HBO’s latest show puts the Penguin front and center, with Colin Farrell taking the reins of Gotham’s most devious bird, it’s easy to see why fans are excited.

He’s iconic, of course—his grotesque figure, his crooked laugh, and his twisted mind make him a standout villain. We’ve seen plenty of portrayals of Oswald Cobblepot over the years, from Burgess Meredith’s waddling menace in the ‘60s to Danny DeVito’s horrifying, fish-munching interpretation in Tim Burton’s “Batman Returns.” And now, thanks to HBO’s deeper dive into his criminal empire, the Penguin is having his moment.

But let’s be clear: He will never top the Joker.

In the pantheon of villains, none have left as indelible a mark on cinema as the Clown Prince of Crime. It’s not just that the Joker is Batman’s archenemy, the yin to the caped crusader’s yang, though that helps. It’s that the Joker, through his various portrayals, has consistently tapped into something deeper—a chaotic madness that mirrors society’s darkest impulses.

And no villain, in any franchise, has been reinterpreted as successfully and provocatively as the Joker.

Cesar Romero’s cheeky Joker gave us the first taste in the campy ‘60s series. He was all bright colors and harmless hijinks, which, for the time, was perfectly fine. But it was Jack Nicholson’s portrayal in Tim Burton’s Batman that first brought the menace into focus, delivering a performance that was equal parts terrifying and humorous. He was the gangster with a twisted grin, a character you could laugh with even while he terrified you.

Then came Heath Ledger, whose take on the Joker in The Dark Knight is simply unforgettable. Ledger didn’t just play the Joker; he became the Joker, and in doing so, crafted one of the greatest performances in film history. He turned the Joker into more than just a villain—he was a force of nature, an embodiment of anarchy, a walking contradiction who didn’t want money or power, just chaos for its own sake. Ledger’s Joker asked us uncomfortable questions about human nature, about the thin line between order and disorder. And that’s why his performance resonates to this day.

Joaquin Phoenix’s turn in Joker took things a step further. His interpretation was less about the chaos and more about the fragile humanity behind the mask. Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is a man crushed by society, a tragic figure who snaps under the weight of mental illness and neglect. It was a daring, divisive portrayal, and Phoenix deservedly took home an Oscar for it.

Sure, the Penguin is a compelling character, and this HBO series will likely add new layers to his story. Maybe it’ll give him the depth that Joker’s had across all these interpretations.

But there’s a reason Joker is cinema’s greatest recurring villain: he’s adaptable, complex, and eternally relevant. His very nature allows him to be reimagined over and over again, each portrayal reflecting the fears and frustrations of the time.

The Penguin? He’s fun, no question. But he’s still just the second most iconic criminal in Gotham

The Rise and Fall of The Comic Book Movie

Scott Bowles

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December 3, 2023

Every once in a while, when I’m zombie-flipping TV stations, I’ll come across a channel playing Iron Man. Sometimes not far from my cameo about 45 minutes in. I can’t help but watch. Vanity, thy name is Bowles.

I also can’t help but watch because it’s the moment comic book films proved their might to Hollywood — and thus marked the point of their inexorable decline, corruption, and glorious farewell to moviemaking as we knew it for more than a century. Perhaps for history.

I just submitted my ballot for nominations this year for best film, actor, actress, supporting chimp, yaddy. And I struggled to find five Best Picture candidates.

The MPAA will have to select TEN from an arid, fractured cinematic landscape catastrophized by a writers/actors strike and left bone-dry from a pandemic that may turn movies into the Broadway of the Like & Subscribe generation: A pleasant, expensive distraction for those wealthy enough to spend that much money and three hours’ attention to a single storyline. 

Iron Man, which turned 15 this year, wasn’t long, not that expensive ((less than $150 million), and very much a risky bet for Paramount Pictures, which produced the Robert Downey Jr. movie. I certainly didn’t think much of it when the studio asked if I wanted a cameo in the film, directed by Jon Favreau, a guy I’d interviewed before. 

My response: Sure, but can I interview the cast — including Downey, fresh off a drug scandal, and Jeff Bridges, fresh off being the greatest actor of his generation — for the paper? I guess I’ll be a newspaperman longer than newspapers. 

Paramount and Marvel agreed, and we set a date. In addition to the celebrity interviews as a piece, I offered my managing editor a first-person piece on being an extra in a Hollywood comic-book movie. 

My editor said the genre was a risky bet, and declined the first-person story. Asshole barely ran a piece on the stars. 

But fuck him. Here’s the story I would have written:

Not only was I going to get Downey and Bridges for the story, but Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics legend, would be on hand for his trademark cameo. As fate would have it, our scenes were back-to-back.

I dispensed with the interviews and began my scene — as a guy doing an interview.

The scene was at Disney Hall, which bristled with activity. A red carpet rolled, cameras were positioned and dozens of extras playing a press gaggled murmured and primped. Several asked what a reporter does on a red carpet; I said struggle.

But not tonight. “I guess we better rehearse,” Bridges said to me. It was a career highlight in a job that’s had a few.

We rehearsed the bit: Bridges, Playing Obadiah Stain, discussing the altruism of Stark Industries, with me nodding doped monkey.

What struck me about filmmaking was the time required. We must have spent an hour and a million dollars filming a scene that lasted 15 seconds. It remains a craftsman’s trade, but making movies cannot continue at that pace and cost if it hopes to see 2030.

Hollywood could use a hero about now.

So Happy Birthday, Tony Stark. I think I know your candle wish.

Deja Viewed: Mad Men

Scott Bowles

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August 19, 2022


Ask Google ”What are the greatest television shows of all time?”, and she’ll promptly display a horizontal bank of names, with corresponding photos. There’s no number to designate rank, but if one were to read left to right, the first ten would look as follows:

The Sopranos; The Wire; Breaking Bad; Fargo; Oz; Mad Men; The Shield; Deadwood; True Detective; and Better Call Saul.

Two things stand out on the list. One, Vince Gilligan created two of them, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Two, they all have crime and death at the core of their story lines.

Except Mad Men.

If anything, the story line of Mad Men should barely constitute a daytime soap opera, let alone a prime-time drama: A New York advertising executive in the 1960’s struggles with alcohol, womanizing and a spiraling All-American family life, in that order.

The show, which turns 15 this year, would offer no murder plot, no gang syndicate, no crime, really, to speak of besides the white collar variety. The only significant death happened before the show’s first episode. These Mad Men were racist, sexist, and as poetically merciless as The Sopranos or The Wire in their worldview of America as fading corporate sellout.

That Mad Men managed the transcendent feat bloodlessly makes the show arguably the highest TV achievement ever.

Embodying that malaise is adman Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a creative arts director who doesn’t buy the American Dream because he sells it on TV and magazines. Well.

If Tony Soprano is the Washington on the Rushmore of Hollywood’s iconic TV anti-heroes, Don Draper is its Lincoln. Creator Matthew Weiner, who served as a producer on Sopranos, created his greatest anti-hero since, well, Tony Soprano. Instead of a Mafia don, we get a Madison Don.

But make no mistake: a sharp suit does not soften the ugly edges of the character draped in it. This anti-hero is as much anti as hero, maybe more. Tony and Don both depart the series smiling, but at least you knew Tony was smiling at the image of his family. The frustrating beauty of Mad Men is you can never really tell if a character is being honest — or selling an image they honestly want to be.

One way to measure a show’s IQ is to count how many times a character has a facial reaction NOT seen by the other characters in the scene, particularly dramas. Mad Men specialized in the unshared epiphany.

What may ultimately set Mad Men apart among TV historians is its sense of history. Set from 1959 to 1970, Mad Men feigns being a show about the 60’s. But it really chronicles the birth — and death — of the Baby Boomer generation. We watch with Don & Partners as events such as the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Civil Rights movement leave our heroes crippled and dog paddling in a rising corporate tide. But like Breaking Bad, it’s all black comedy, many times laugh out loud. Even the final scene is so droll you won’t know if you’ve been won over or flim-flammed.

Which is Mad Men’s ultimate point. Are you loved and happy, or playing someone who is? Is there a difference?

Seasons 1, 5 and 7 are the show’s best, in that order. The First for its novelty; Fifth for its Conradian Hero’s Arc, and the Seventh for Hero’s Return. Lady Lazarus, the 8th episode of season 5, may be Mad Men’s best episode, period. Written by Weiner, Lazarus is the show at its narrative and artistic zenith — with a stunning final two minutes that rival any two final minutes. Period.

Combine the show’s needle drops (from the Beatles to the Stones to Frank and Nancy Sinatra) with its meticulous attention to historical detail, and you have, essentially, Ken Burns with dramatic flair.

Sold

A Brave New Cosmos

Scott Bowles

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June 1, 2022


Everything Everywhere All At Once is a flash bang of a film. One might even call it a big bang.

You’re sitting in your dark, cool theater seat — the first you’ve taken since the pandemic — and Bang! The movie explodes in action and exposition, and doesn’t give a damn if you can keep up with the cosmology and quantum physics and action and raw emotion that ripples through the most original and profound film in more than a decade.

Think The Matrix meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as directed by Christopher Nolan.

But even those comparisons are unfair, because Everything acknowledges and bows openly to its cinematic origins. Then it bows to the universe’s origins, which it embraces like Stephen Hawking on crack.

From the multiverse to quantum entanglement, Everything packs a silly kung fu movie into a story that may be as scientifically sound as the Hubble telescope. And still focuses the story into a narrative singularity — accessible, yet still awe inspiring.

The plot is a trifling, disposable matter: Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, an aging laundromat owner trying to juggle tiny receipts, big customer complaints and a family that includes a judgmental father and rebellious daughter. After an unintended peek into another dimension, Evelyn learns she must face down an existential intergalactic threat.

It’s pablum. But as Everything points out, insignificant moments are the only things that DON’T exist in reality — particularly in the multiverses we build for ourselves in a world sinking into a black hole of digital chatter. Everything reveals itself as a poignant drama about finding your place in the world only after nearly dazzling us too much with dazzling concepts and computer effects. At 2 hours 19 minutes, the frenzy numbs a bit before it pierces.

Everything looks much bigger than it is. The film, which cost about $25 million, underscores what Hollywood used to be: audacious, loud and opinionated — and hustling a shoestring budget. Maybe that’s why it drew Oscar-caliber talent including Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis, unrecognizable under makeup as an oppressive tax auditor.

It is karate with a pinkie, kung fu with a pocket pup, pyrotechnics with polygons. And it nearly sets the screen ablaze with its brashness.

So as Hollywood crows over the box office haul of a colossus like Top Gun: Maverick, Everything will control its own delightful corner of the universe.

Now THAT’S a reason to have hope for moviemaking. Everywhere, all at once.

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