“A Star Is Born’s hoary tale of a showbiz veteran (Bradley Cooper) being eclipsed by the ingenue (Lady Gaga) he mentors and falls in love with is now whorier than ever. It can challenge the 1932, 1937, 1954, and 1976 editions only by relying on audience ignorance of those versions and worshiping contemporary showbiz shallowness.

“Lachrymose at its base, this version is just unabashed Hollywood merchandising. It sells a bald-faced PC checklist: white-male weakness, feminist bravado, servile and obsequious blacks, Latins and queers — none of this particularly enlivened by Cooper and Gaga’s competing narcissism.

“This is A Star Is Born for the American Idol generation, a movie so out of touch with the artistic expression of universal feelings (what was formerly the pride of entertainment adepts) that it winds up simply promoting the present-day system of showbiz crudeness.” — from Armond White’s 10.5 essay, “A Star Is Born Is Remade The Wrong Way.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t a pair of authoritarian leaders — European, fascistically-inclined — say roughly the same thing about Jews and Communists? Between 80 and 85 years ago, as I recall.

In his review of a new German Bluray of Henry King’s The Bravados, DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze (a) notes the presence of “darker visuals” than those on the 2005 DVD, and (b) allows that the Bluray may have “even more CinemaScope mumps” than the previous disc.

Why the hell would any Bluray distributor issue a film with a bad case of the mumps? Particularly after the de-mumpifying (or de-mumpification) of The Innocents, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and The Big Country. I realize there are probably fewer than 100 people on the planet right now who care about the persistence of the CinemaScope mumps, but I’m one of them, dammit.

For the last 21 months I’ve been telling myself that as grotesque and fiendishly destructive as Donald Trump‘s administration has been, it’s still a passing hurricane — a political climate system that will eventually blow away or at least dissipate, perhaps (many of us hope) as soon as 2021. But with yesterday’s swearing in Brett Kavanaugh is a toxic stain that will never wash out. Not until he dies or is removed from the bench through impeachment, but what are the odds of that happening? The nation is bent and diminished this morning. It’s been a terrible weekend.

Tatyana caught Bohemian Rhapsody last night at the Fox lot screening. I won’t see it until next Thursday (10.11). “You should prepare yourself for possibly not liking Bohemian Rhapsody as much as I did,” she wrote last night. She didn’t elaborate but emphasized that for her “it’s a very strong film…if you really love Queen, you will love it. I’m a huge Queen fan, so I was in heaven whenever the music played. I didn’t feel the time element at all. Nice humor, nice cats, many terrific episodes.” One caveat: “Freddie Mercury was tall with a beautiful body. Rami Malek is short and no match for Freddie in that regard.”