Day: June 5, 2017

Posted by New Republic‘s Alex Shepard on 6.6.17: “[Donald] Trump will exploit (and lie about) a crisis for perceived political gain. We’ve been fortunate so far that Trump has created most of the crises that have defined the first four months of his presidency. But not every disaster that happens over the next four years will be of Trump’s own making and we should be terrified — and should start preparing — for what Trump will do when a terrorist attack occurs in America.”

“Just Around The Corner,” posted on 11.20.16: “Serious jihadists surely understand that an optimum time to strike the U.S. with a major terrorist act will be after Donald Trump takes the oath of office. Optimum because there’s a high likelihood that Trump will strike back all the harder, that he and his hardline advisers will go ballistic, and in so doing they will greatly intensify the U.S.-vs.-Islam divide that terrorists have been hoping for all along.

“For the Jihadists, Trump will be the gift that keeps on giving. You know this is what the ISIS guys are telling each other now. A blustery, trigger-happy loose cannon in the Oval Office? Allahu Akbar!”

“I’m afraid the adversaries overseas see us as a sitting duck of provocation…with a person who will lash back,” Ralph Nader told The National‘s Wendy Mesley. 

Great Nader quote about Trump not really wanting to be president when he launched his campaign:

“Along comes a failed gambling czar who’s a corporate welfare king and cheats his suppliers and workers, and lo and behold, he was surprised like all of us — he’s suddenly on his way to the presidency, even though he lost the popular vote. When he came out of the White House, after the meeting with President Obama, I looked at him and said ‘here’s one of the most scared men in the country.'”

Bluetooth has nothing on Mentadent toothpaste, which I bought and used last night. It covers your teeth in blue dye, and if you spit some of it out it stains the sink with little blue globs. You have to keep brushing and brushing before the blue gradually subsides, but what a horrible innovation.

Now that Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant has more or less tanked domestically (a pathetic $67 million so far), will any of the learned fanboys who creamed in their pants when reviews popped in early May admit that they over-sold it to their trusting readers, and that they basically didn’t have the balls to call a spade a spade?

Of course not, but 71% of the Rotten Tomatoes gang gave it a thumbs-up. For whatever fickle reasons ticket buyers didn’t agree for the most part. Could this have been because this 20th Century Fox release more or less blows? I was looking like an outlier when I called it crap on 5.7.17, but it’s fair to say I’m looking a bit more sage now.

“I didn’t dislike Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant — I hated it,” I wrote. “And I’m not saying that out of some lazy-wrath instinct or pissy posturing or what-have-you. I’m talking about serious stomach-acid sensations here. Then again I mostly despised Prometheus so it didn’t take a great deal of effort to come to this.

“If Prometheus rang your hate bell, you’re going to despise this one also. For Alien: Covenant, which runs 121 minutes but feels like 150, is truly a spawn of that awful 2012 film.

“Is it ‘better’ than Prometheus? All right, yeah, I suppose it is. Is it therefore worth seeing? Maybe, but only if you like watching films that make you resent everything on the face of the planet including yourself. I’m not going to tap out the usual story, character and actor rundown. All you need to know is that I didn’t give a damn about any of Alien: Covenant. Nothing. I was muttering ‘Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou’ the whole time.”

During an appearance on England’s Sunday Brunch talk show, Dan Aykroyd basically called Ghostbusters director Paul Feig an irresponsible asshole, claiming that Feig “spent too much on it and he didn’t shoot scenes we suggested to him…[when we mentioned] several scenes that were going to be needed, Feig said, ‘No, we don’t need them.’ And then we tested the movie and they needed them, and he had to go back — about $30 to $40 million in reshoots.”

From my own HE review, posted on 7.10.16: “It’s formula bullshit, of course — what else could it be? — but if you can lower your standards and just sit back and take it, it’s 80 minutes of silly ‘fun’ — fun defined as nodding submission to a super-budget presentation of a franchise concept that’s moderately amusing here and there and doesn’t piss you off. But after the first 80 minutes it eats itself, leaving us to endure 35 minutes of CG overkill — Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel finale meets the Independence Day sequel meets the Pillsbury doughboy monster meets the end of the world.”

Using the oft-quoted standard of “simply making people laugh is the lowest form of humor,” the following are HE’s picks for the 30 best all-time film comedies. Inclusion doesn’t mean that each and every film is screamingly funny because, as I’ve just explained, mere laughter is for chumps. In my view the better comedies are often heh-heh funny or even no-laugh funny (i.e., Elaine May‘s Ishtar). A great comedy has to be on to something greater than itself (which means it could qualify as a dramedy), and it has to measure up as a first-rate, well-grounded, reality-reflecting film if you take out the humor. Or, failing that, it has to be completely, absurdly silly (i.e., Duck Soup or Woody Allen‘s What’s Up Tiger Lily). And it can never be twee (i.e., forget anything by Jacques Tati) or star Will Ferrell, Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy or Robin Williams (i.e., forget Three Amigos, Mrs. Doubtfire, Anchorman) And even if it’s no-laugh funny, it can’t make you want to walk out or change the channel (i.e., forget Withnail & I).

That said and in no particular order…

(1) Three-way tie for #1: Harold Ramis‘s Groundhog Day, Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove, Joel & Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski; (2) Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg; (3) Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot; (4) Greg Mottola‘s Superbad, (5 & 6) Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America & Modern Romance; (7) Bobby and Peter Farrelly‘s There’s Something About Mary; (8) Howard Hawks‘ Bringing Up Baby, (9) Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate; (10) Woody Allen‘s Manhattan, (11, 12 & 13) James L. Brooks‘ Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets; (14) Stephen Frears‘ High Fidelity; (15 & 16) Preston Sturges‘ The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels; (17) Larry Charles‘ Borat; (18) Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore, (19) Ben Stiller‘s The Cable Guy, (19) Charles Crichton‘s A Fish Called Wanda, (20) The early ’30s Laurel & Hardy films as an aggregate, (21) Armando Iannucci‘s In The Loop, (20, 21 & 22) Mel Brooks‘ Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles and The Producers, (23) Buster Keaton‘s The General, (24) Paul Feig‘s Bridesmaids, (25) Early ’30s Marx Brothers’ trio as an aggregate — Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, A Day At The Races, (26) Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder, (27) Sydney Pollack‘s Tootsie, (28) John Hughes‘ Plains, Trains & Automobiles, (29) the afore-mentioned Ishtar and (30) What’s Up Tiger Lily?.