A 5.29 NBC News story by Dante Chinni calculates that with Bernie Sanders out of the Presidential race, Hillary Clinton‘s lead over Donald Trump, currently at 46% to 43%, would surge to 51% to 43%.
“To get a better look at where the Clinton-Trump race might stand after the nominating dust has settled, we recalculated the latest NBC/WSJ poll with Clinton capturing 70 percent of the Sanders-only vote,” Chinni writes.
“The result [is that] Sanders-only voters are worth an extra five points to Clinton. In the NBC/WSJ poll, Clinton’s advantage over Trump goes from three points to eight points and she leads 51 percent to 43 percent. But the difference holds in other polls as well.
News reports indicate that an innocent gorilla died yesterday because an irresponsible mother was too distracted to properly watch her four-year-old son. The kid crawled through a barrier and fell into a 12-foot-deep gorilla pit at the Cincinatti Zoo, and was soon being carried around by Harambe, a 400-pound, 17-year-old gorilla. Fearing for the kid’s life, zoo officials felt they had no choice but to shoot Harambe. “It seemed very much by our professional team…to be a life-threatening situation,” Cincinnati Zoo President Thane Maynard said at a press conference. The mainstream news whores won’t say this (all they’re talking about is what a close call it was…kid saved from scary gorilla!), but the kid’s mother killed that poor gorilla. Okay, 85% her fault and 15% the fault of the zoo staffers who built a barrier that a four-year-old could crawl through without much difficulty.
After Saturday’s Prague flight landed around 3 pm at JFK I decided to break with longstanding Airbnb tradition and stay at Greenpoint’s Henry Norman Hotel. It’s seven or eight blocks from the G line (the nearest stop is Nassau Ave.) but the HNH design is eclectic, striking, and boutique-y in a wonderfully non-corporate way. The Polish-Russian neighborhood is modest and quiet. The Henry Norman is a six-minute walk from Broadway Stages, the busy production facility.
The biggest pre-ordained, sight-unseen tank of the summer is Paul Feig‘s Ghostbusters (Columbia, 7.15) reboot. It doesn’t matter if it’ll be any good or not (although it’s obviously not going to be the least bit funny), or if it’ll make a lot of money, which it probably will. What matters is that everyone hates the trailers. There is, however, one thing working in its favor right now, and that’s Donald Trump’s vidclip from January 2015. Nobody wants to agree with Trump’s agenda so there’s now a little part of me that wants to like this awful movie whereas before I didn’t care — I just wanted it to die.
After watching this excerpt from The Graham Norton Show, I realized that Kate Beckinsale, 42, has suddenly caught on by tapping into something a bit louche in herself. Part of this has to do with Beckinsale having nailed the part of Lady Susan Vernon, a blase, irreverent seductress, in Whit Stillman‘s Love and Friendship, but it’s mainly due to a suspicion that she’s somehow become Vernon or, you know, merged personalities. I’ve been reading for years that Beckinsale, a mother of a youngish daughter, is a bit eccentric and levitational but in the Norton clip she seems more than a bit perverse. A woman who thinks nothing of slipping a bar of chocolate between her sleeping boyfriend’s butt cheeks…okay!.
Beckinsale has been plugging away since the mid ’90s as an intriguing actress who’d never quite lit the big fuse. Sometimes it takes a while for an actor/actress to get lucky and turn the key just so and realize, “Ah, yes…that’s me, that’s my brand.”
Vernon has become Beckinsale’s all-defining role. Image-wise she and Vernon are suddenly a “team” in the same way that Bette Davis (also 42 at the time) and Margo Channing had seemingly blended into one person after the release of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s All About Eve (’50). Before Love and Friendship Beckinsale’s best performance ever had been as a besieged journalist in Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth (’08). Before that her most admired turn had been in Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (’98). I don’t blame KB entirely for acting in five of those awful Underworld movies (she held her nose and pocketed the paycheck so she could cover her daughter’s college tuition) but it’s water under the bridge now. From here on Beckinsale is, for me, Lady Susan chocolate bar ass-crack Vernon.
“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...