The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield is forecasting a nightmare scenario (NS) for the Los Angeles-based entertainment industry, not 15 or 20 years down the road but closer to 5 to 7 years…

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…for what I’m feeling right now…I know in my gut that what awaits me later this afternoon will not be pleasant, much less transporting…I’m about to enter a celestial colony of futuristic Bong hell….creepers! Which RPatz’s lead protagonist feels compassion for. Two hours and 17 minutes of this…God.

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5:10 pm update: 40 minutes into Mickey 17, and it’s obviously ass…dystopian primitivism, visually dreary, crudely plotted, sadistic characters, physically gross and slimy. Vomiting, brutality, chaos, writhing agony bodies dropped into molten lava…and it’s an attempt at black comedy, of course. The broad, emphatic and profoundly unfunny kind. I am the only person in the theatre so I can write all I want. “No multiples! No more re-prints!” Mickey 17’s lighting is grayish, murky, shadowy, draining. You can make out various visual details but the film is so dark you’re left wondering “why am I even watching this?” AMC concessions should offer packets of heroin as coping additives. Bong sure loves his creepers! Creepers are fat insect-like life forms, cousins of Dune sand worms mixed with big woolly mammoths, mostly the size of armadillos…despised by Mark Ruffalo’s Trump-like, veneer-wearing leader but in fact are benign and Ewok-like in a certain sense, and representing harm to no one. Creepers, of course, symbolize immigrants or social lessers. This is a movie offering social instruction. Evil must be eradicated! Wokeys leading a revolution on a snow planet! RPatz is no longer the young, slender, dishy guy…he’s still thin but now on the brink of middle-age…time spares no one. The menage a trois scene between Naomi Ackie/b> and the two Pattinsons (the amiable, kind-hearted Mickey 17 and the hostile-aggressive Mickey 18) is the most interesting interlude so far. Superfluous but interesting. I’m almost at the one-hour mark. Actually the 75-minute mark. A full hour to go. I really do need to snort a little smack. Oh, you have some? Thank you…thanks so much. Poor Toni Collette….over-acting as Ruffalo’s icy-phony wife…pocketing a paycheck but doing her career no favors. Ruffalo: “You’d better be on your toes. One false move and you’re man-burger.” At least Mickey 17 ends happily. The Bong wokeys make things right.

In any other city a cannabis store might call itself High Society, and that would be fine. But on Ludlow Street just south of Houston (a few doors down from Katz’s Quaking Orgasm Performance Deli). a different spelling is required.

Come clean about the false Demi Moore narrative that she “sold” at the Golden Globe awards. Be honest, cut the shit.

I’ve been dying to hate Mickey 17…champing at the very bit…if only I didn’t have to sit through it.

“The brilliance of Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite lay in how it took apart the superficial ‘niceness’ of its privileged characters. But in Mickey 17, they are so obviously and uninterestingly awful — characterizations worthy of a bad Saturday Night Live skit — that the effect is to defang the story of any genuine bite. That might be forgivable if the film was at least funny — but again and again lines and scenes strain for comic effect, but fail to deliver the goods.” –from Hugh Montgomery‘s BBC.com review.

Last night I finally paid attention to this trailer for Seven Veils, a psychological Atom Egoyan thriller starring Amanda Seyfried. It opens two days hence, but why so long after its intial premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival? A decent Rotten Tomatoes score (81%) but a shitty rating (62%) from Metacritic.

The presumption is that Meryl Streep will play an older version of Joni Mitchell in Cameron Crowe‘s forthcoming biopic, but how could ManCalledC not be thinking of Amanda Seyfried as a younger version? The uncanny resemblance between Seyfried’s singing voice and that of early ’70s, Court & Spark Mitchell….c’mon.

I deplored the stealth woke-ism and mediocrity of Kamala Harris, and yet I voted for her last November because she’s a relatively sane and sensible type…a steady-at-the-helm administrator who wouldn’t fuck things up too badly.

Alas, Donald Trump got elected for the most part because wokeys overplayed their hand (DEI oppressions, 1619 Project historical revisions, George Floyd riots & lootings, punitive #MeToo corrections and cancellations, trans intimidation in public schools + bottom surgeries for minors, free-for-all Mexican border policies, men in women’s sports, trashing the reputation of Abraham Lincoln, Kathy Kennedy destroying Star Wars franchise). They did this to themselves, and have no one but themselves to blame. Thanks, Joe!

And so, despite my loathing of Trump’s scoundrel-ish demagoguery and lying criminality, my heart fluttered last night when I heard the words “woke no longer!” The dream I’ve been holding in my heart since 2018 — that wokesters would one day be on the run and searching for tall grass — has finally come to pass.

I hate what Trump is doing on so many other fronts (Ukraine in particular) but lashing wokesters to the whipping post is a good and glorious thing.

…who has flaming carrot-colored hair and several hundred freckles and who doesn’t even look like a distant cousin, and who also looks like fucking Carrot Top meets Eric Stoltz?

I’m sorry but all my life I’ve been living with a certain idea of what “twin” means. Silly me — forgive my ignorance.

I like this scene. Pure exposition, explanation, recapping for the slowboats. It helps. Alas, it was cut out of the 1946 theatrical release. Confusion ensued.

“The Big Sleep is one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused. And, to make it more aggravating, the brilliant detective in the case is continuously making shrewd deductions which he stubbornly keeps to himself.

“What with two interlocking mysteries and a great many characters involved, the complex of blackmail and murder soon becomes a web of utter bafflement. Unfortunately, the cunning scriptwriters have done little to clear it at the end” — from Bosley Crowther‘s 8.24.46 N.Y. Times review

Posted this morning…

From this end it feels pretty great to be living a Hollywood Elsewhere-type life — no “barbecues and ball games” or any of that onerous, sword-of-Damocles stuff but…

It is part of my burden, yes, to have to face the daily threat of slimy, slithering reptiles and hissing dragons** who radiate seething hostility at every turn, but as Pike Bishop once said, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

No sublime morning-coffee company with a Porizkova or an Antropova, true, and no THC gummies or slurps of lime-and-guave-flavored beer but I gots my George Gershwin rhythm…physically fit, mentally sharp, no bald spots or jiggling neck wattles, Italian-made black loafers, Zara T-shirts, etc.

And Lordy Lordy the profound gift of a three-year-old granddaughter who constantly radiates joyful discovery and intrigue….

Not to mention daily postings drawn from my inner well…a life of constant discipline, 4K Blurays and travel and film festivals, Cialis and Prevagen and choice Indian restaurants in London and Paris and even Westport, cinematic intrigue and occasional satori transcendence, Bhagavad Gita meditations, a bottomless chest of fond Henry Miller-ish memories and occasional secretions of Socratic wisdom…spiritual nourishment savored in dribs and drabs.

I could go on and on but it feels like a huge relief not having to please or placate or charm or dazzle a high-maintenance woman of Porizkova’s character***…no offense.

Sri Krishna, Henry Miller, Pike Bishop, Socrates or Marcus Aurelius (either or both), George Gershwin, Sutton Wells…quite the cocktail.

** Life forms who seem to actually get off on spewing alien acid blood.

***  https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/which-one-is-crazier/

A few hours ago Sasha Stone and I chewed it all over (i.e., last night’s Oscar telecast). We didn’t miss a trick.