Day: June 8, 2017

A Florida Guy Just Redefined Pathetic

by

A 6.5 Smoking Gun post says pint-sized porn actress Lauren Kaye Scott (aka Dakota Skye) was arrested and charged with domestic battery after allegedly punching her boyfriend, Robert “Bobby” Anderson, after having sex with him.

Smoking Gun excerpt: “According to an arrest affidavit, police arrived at the Pinellas Park, Florida, residence of [Anderson], and were told that Scott had struck Anderson in the face with an open right hand, causing him to suffer a swollen lip with a cut.”

Scott “would not get off the phone after the two had sex,” Anderson allegedly told cops. Words ensued, Anderson said he asked her to leave, and Scott “became upset and hit him in the face.”

In other words, she didn’t “punch” him — she slapped him. Like angry women sometimes do. Like femme fatales have done to tough-guy actors in dozens upon dozens of Hollywood potboilers, gangster flicks and film noirs for decades.

Movies are movies and real life is real life, but what kind of pathetic wimp calls the fuzz after his girlfriend whacks him? Women will sometimes call the authorities if a guy gets rough (and well they should) but guys never do this. Ever! Just as surely as there’s no crying in baseball, a guy never calls the fuzz unless there’s been a shooting or stabbing.

There’s only one way to respond if your girlfriend slaps or punches you, and that’s to just stand there and take it like Lee Marvin did when Angie Dickinson walloped him in Point Blank — just stand there and let her go to town until she gets tired. Only chickenshit candy-asses whine and complain when this happens, much less pick up the phone and call John Law…God! Anderson needs to get in touch with that Vietnamese asshole who whined and howled when he was thrown off that United flight.

Good For Silencio

by

I don’t give a damn if I ever visit a late-night club ever again. Clubs and bars are strictly for under-45 salmon looking to spawn, and for me that notion disappeared a long time ago. But Loveless composer Evgeny Galperin, who resides in Paris and knows a few people, has told me that Tatyana and I can drop by Silencio, the club that David Lynch designed and opened six years ago, if we’re so inclined. Why not, right?

Edelstein’s Wonder Walkback

by

Last week a disparate community of tough female film critics and outraged femme-nazi types (Mary Sue, Jezebel) were howling about David Edelstein‘s 6.1 Wonder Woman review for phrases and terms within the review they felt were leering or sexist. Honestly? They seemed to have a point.

In a mea culpa piece that ran on Tuesday, 6.6, Edelstein said he’d been misunderstood or at the very least tarred and feathered with too hasty a brush. He also admitted to having used imprecise or poorly chosen language. Which imperfect writers occasionally do.

The bottom line is that Wonder Woman was and is a very big deal for women everywhere, and particularly in the wake of its huge financial success ($254 million worldwide thus far), and so anyone throwing shade in a way that sounded even a tad sexist was sure to catch hell. This Edelstein did, and in spades. The harridans didn’t disagree with him or reprimand him for incorrect attitudes or callous phrases — they wanted him seized, dragged into the street and clubbed to death.

I’ve tasted this wild-dog behavior myself and probably will again. Surround, bite, tear open stomach and anal cavity, pull out intestines and other organs, consume. It’s a terrible thing to experience, but this is the fucking realm I live in.

Edelstein: “In the context of this spate of comic-book movies (which I consider a blight, but that’s another subject) I underestimated how much a superheroine at the center of a woman-directed film would mean to many people, and descriptions I considered lively and complimentary would come across as demeaning. Moreover, if Wonder Woman will empower women at this moment in history — in which reproductive rights are imperiled, and an admitted groper is working to undo decades of gains for women — then some of the criticisms of my review are just. I reserve the right to think that this is not, overall, a very good movie. But it is an important one.”

Lest We Forget

by

“Show Me The Mummy”, posted on 3.20.17: “The Mummy has seemed like a fairly silly film from the get-go, and now those chickens are coming home to roost with talk swirling around that ‘people are laughing at it‘ and that a recent test screening (which may or may not have happened in Glendale on March 8th) drew lousy numbers and that it may not be quite good enough to launch a Universal monsters franchise a la Marvel universe.

“That’s what the basic game plan is — to use the presumed success of The Mummy to generate excitement in a reboot of several classic Universal monster films — ‘a whole new world of gods and monsters’ or words to that effect. That said, has anyone ever expected The Mummy to be anything more than a super-expensive piece of CG goofery? No. Was anyone taking it seriously when they made it? How could they? That Mummy trailer that popped last December makes it look like a satire of an absurdly expensive meta monster flick.

“This is all loose talk, of course. Nobody knows anything, least of all myself. And you always need to take a few steps back when it comes to second-hand sources.

“A screenwriter friend knows a guy who’s fairly close to The Mummy, and he’s hearing that the Glendale numbers weren’t good and that Universal execs are worried about the film’s commercial potential and that Cruise is distressed and that nobody wants to be part of ‘a shitty, hugely expensive, giantly over-budgeted movie,’ and that the most recent cut of The Mummy was screened last Friday for Universal brass.

“There also seems to be some concern (emphasis on the ‘s’ word) about whether audiences will be laughing ‘with’ The Mummy or ‘at’ it.

Another screenwriter friend who hears stuff claims ‘they were laughing at it like people did at Van Helsing, and that Cruise was being so stoic and fighting CGI crap and was too old for this silliness. And, of course, somebody yelled out ‘show me the mummy!’”

Turn The Other Mummy Cheek

by

The charitable view, according to nearly everyone on the planet, is that The Mummy (Universal, 6.9) stinks. Or has cut one in a big Battlefield Earth way. “A holy mess“, the “worst Tom Cruise movie ever“, “so impressively awful it deserves study“, “deserves to be buried”, “never should have been unwrapped“, etc.

And yet, curiously, The Mummy got a pass from 25% of the Rotten Tomato gang — one out of four! — while 39% of the Metacritic crowd went “c’mon, it’s not as bad as all that!.”

This is an opportunity to identify and burn into our collective consciousness the names of critics who gave this thing a modified thumbs up, and in so doing revealed themselves as accommodating to a fault or, if you will, movie-critic versions of Trump supporters (i.e., no matter how appalling they’ll give it a pass).

There is, of course, no right or wrong opinion about anything except when it comes to rancid bullshit CG-driven corporate franchise movies, in which case the only legitimate response is to show no mercy.

I’m not suggesting that the following critics are easy, but…well, I guess I am. They’re certainly indicating an unwillingness to consider the bigger picture, which is that the 21st Century corporate branding and franchising mentality has become a spiritual pestilence — the equivalent of digital locust swarms invading and blackening the souls of moviegoers who, as recently as 10 or 12 years ago, went to megaplexes with actual expectations (close to absurd in a present-day context) of seeing a good, smart, emotionally affecting film.

Brian Truitt, USA Today: “A tomb full of action-packed guilty pleasure that owns its horror, humor and rampant silliness equally.”

Louise Keller, Urban Cinefile: “Beyond the splendid visual effects and extravagant locations, the fun lies in watching Tom Cruise in top form, boyish charm intact, carrying the film with energy and charisma.” Forgive!

Read more