Day: May 29, 2018

I posted this Moneyball clip a little more than eight months ago, but I’m still shattered by what we didn’t know back in 2011, which was that smart, adult, middle-class, award-calibre theatrical flicks about straight white guys would become politically unpopular within a few years time. Even award season has become a dicey launch pad since movies about SWGs have become more or less verboten. They’ve certainly lost their foothold.

And none of us realized seven years ago that Chris Pratt, who would become a big star three years later in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, would never have as glorious a big-screen moment as this again.

This was Pratt’s peak — it never got any better for the guy in a God-smiling-down, spiritual-uplift sense. And nobody knew back then (and how could they?) that once Pratt became a quarter-of-an-inch-deep, big-money player in meaningless megaplex movies — i.e., the white Dwayne Johnson — that he’d be all but finished in terms of being cast in movies with scenes of this particular type — emotional guy-movie scenes that just reach out and get you. Do you feel this scene? Do you see the look on Jonah Hill‘s face as the ball sails into the right-field stands? Definitely something tingly going on.

Pratt is toast now — his attitude is too king-shit to do anything but make more Marvel flicks, dumb dinosaur movies and glitzy, worthless high-tech extravaganzas like Passengers and so on. He’ll never play a guy like Scott Hatteberg again.

An all-but-meaningless Zogby poll posted last Friday indicates that Oprah Winfrey, who declared last February that she “definitely” won’t be running against President Donald Trump in 2020, is more likely to defeat the current White House occupant than Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

Zogby says that 53% of likely voters would choose Winfrey with 47% supporting Trump. The concern is that Trump performs better against Winfrey than any of the other candidates. Something about Winfrey appears to agitate right-leaning, red-state voters. Margin-wise Michelle Obama does better against Trump, 48% vs. 39%. An Obama-Winfrey ticket (or vice versa) would be close to unbeatable, no?

In fact, Winfrey beats Trump among nearly every sub-demo, including younger voters (aged 18-24 years old — 65%), African Americans (90%), Hispanics (63%), Asians (80%) and women (50 %). Winfrey also leads among independents (55%) and voters with no college degree (51%). My sense is that Winfrey would make an ineffective president in some respects, and yet she’s brilliant and humane and obviously aggressive and well-organized. To get Trump out I would vote for her in a New York minute. What a shame that she’s…what, too flighty or indecisive to accept the power she apparently wields?

If Winfrey wanted to really seize the day she might be able to save the U.S. of A. from a sociopathic bully-boy crime boss as president. Alas, she apparently hasn’t the inclination or the character to make a go of it.

On the other hand Trump beats Winfrey among among Walmart shoppers (54% to Winfrey’s 46%) and NASCAR fans (59% to Winfrey’s 41%)

Michelle Obama, Biden and Sanders all command support of 48% of likely voters vs. Trump’s 38% to 39%. Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are currently polling Trump in the Zogby poll.

881 likely U.S. voters were polled between 5.10 and 5.12. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.2 points.

Obviously 19 year-old Bechet Dumaine Allen, daughter of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, knows nothing about the matter of her father’s innocence or guilt in the matter of Dylan Farrow. She’s just standing by her “supportive and loving” dad as any loyal daughter would. But this morning’s Facebook statement, which supports a recently posted pro-Woody essay by her uncle Moses, has probably put her in the line of fire. Bechet has almost certainly earned Dylan’s enmity, mostly likely irked Greta Gerwig and Timothee Chalamet, and may even be accused in certain circles of betraying the #MeToo movement. If Bechet had voiced a similar statement during “the terror,” she’d soon be riding in a horse-drawn cart with Georges Danton.

After attending last night’s Paul Simon concert at the Hollywood Bowl, journalist Joel Stein tweeted that “The Boxer“, a 1969 tune from Bridge Over Troubled Water, presented a problem for the delicate ears of his nine-year-old son.

The song “isn’t too smooth with the way [Simon] desperately works in his confession that he had sex with prostitutes,” Stein tweeted. “Thanks, Paul Simon, for not playing it at my 9 year-old son’s first rock concert.” Perhaps Simon didn’t play “The Boxer” last night, but why wouldn’t he have? Simon did two or three nights ago [scroll to 11:30 mark on below video] and sang the lyric in question, “I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there” — i.e., with “the whores on Seventh Avenue.”

Imagine a nine-year-old boy being raised by a dad who wants to protect him from a mild little lyric like Simon’s. I was leafing through nudie mags when I was eight and feasting my eyes on bodacious ta-ta’s. Stein’s son is in for a rough patch when he hits his teen years. His dad is a pearl-clutcher.

HE nemesis Nick Schager, who declared last October that Bong Joon-ho‘s Okja was 2017’s third best film and James Gray‘s The Lost City of Z the fifth best (outrageous opinions), has posted a lowbrow assessment of Ari Aster‘s Hereditary — i.e., not wild or crazy or gorey enough. Something tells me that mainstream (i.e., grunt-level) horror fans will be saying the same thing when it opens, following in the path of The Verge’s Tasha Robinson.

Schager: “As a lifelong horror junkie, I readily confess that my own calloused constitution for the grisly and the macabre is greater than most, sometimes to a fault. Still, no matter that nor the rapturous praise that’s preceded its premiere, Aster’s maiden feature employs meticulous design and lots of screaming to drum up only so-so suspense, convinced that creeping pans through constricting architecture and random suggestions of paranormal activity will put one on edge—or, at least, keep one engaged until the final five minutes, when all hell breaks loose. By the time that mayhem arrives, however, you’ll be forgiven for having lost interest in this patchwork-quilt concoction of ghoulish cliches and Toni Collette freak-outs.”

HE review, posted on 5.22.18: “Either you get what serious, classy, smarthouse horror films are up to, or you don’t. Either you understand that when a certain scare switch is flipped by way of hint, suggestion or implication (such as that little-ping moment in Rosemary’s Baby when Mia Farrow reads the journal of a recently-deceased victim of Roman and Minnie Castevet and comes upon the phrase “I can no longer associate myself…”), it connects with convulsive, deep-rooted terrors that are far more disturbing than anything you might find in It.

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