Month: June 2019

Every now and then I hear from one of my enemies. It comes with the internet spotlight. You’re probably doing something wrong if you’re not rubbing someone the wrong way. I don’t like to engage in tit-for-tat uglies with people of this sort, but I was seized this morning by a foolish impulse to try and explain my side of things. Here’s how some of it went:

“I’ve merely adopted the posture of an occasional provocateur (which I’ve been all my life but have amplified to some extent as a columnist), and you’ve taken little dribs and drabs of my considerable output over the last 20 and 1/2 years and responded by screeching and howling like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

“Yes, I have an innate tendency to push the envelope from time to time — prod, provoke, get a reaction. But that’s ‘the brand’. I generate reams of copy every day, and a few shards have spilled over into realms that some have found offensive, because I can sound a bit rash at times and am, by and large, like most people on this planet, an imperfect, occasionally intemperate person. But I always try to take a couple of steps back the next morning and clean up the copy. Or delete a poorly-worded tweet. I hate sloppy prose. I always try to prune and hone. I value insight and despise inexactitude.

“When I say ‘some’ I mean your Stalinist p.c. snowflake types who correctly believe that career-killing is an appropriate response to criminals like Harvey Weinstein but who have also become p.c. Holy Enzyme Crusaders or, you know, advocates of “woke” McCarthyism.

“Outside of persons like yourself, the vast majority of readers have shrugged off whatever disagreements or reservations they might have with some of my views because they like the writing and the energy. I’ve been writing a column for 21 and 1/2 years now, 14 and 1/2 of them under the Hollywood Elsewhere banner, and always supported by studio ads (and to a lesser extent by HE Plus). Year after year and decade after decade I’ve stood up for the finest, bravest, most emotionally affecting films all my life. I’ve disparaged megaplex crap all my life. I’ve tried to support and occasionally bond with the best filmmakers, and adopt a comme ci comme ca attitude with those who are mainly in it for the juice and the income.

“As you know, writing is a blend of three things: (a) confessional, deep-rooted self-expression by way of convictions, insights, suspicions, arias, resentments and whatnot; (b) clarity of mind, discipline, determination and professional-level craft — all of which takes years to fuse into an instrument of finesse and persuasion; and (c) in my case a form of literary “performance art”…a personality that I’m half-“playing” in a certain sense, a literary character who doesn’t necessarily emerge in a personal day-to-day realm but who comes alive while writing.

“I’m not saying I don’t write what I believe (nothing I write would ‘land’ if I didn’t) but there’s nonetheless a certain theatrical element…a ‘crank it up a notch or two, put on a good show and leave them ignited’ mindset that blends with core convictions and beliefs.

“Ask any strong writer or performer or stand-up comedian. This is the process. Have I occasionally stumbled into a clumsy expression regarding this or that opinion, feeling, memory or observation?. Yeah, now and then. I may or may not have the God-given talent to write with cricket bats **. But it comes together nicely for the most part.

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“Check that Tyrone kid with the hoodie…possible gangbanger, right? (Cough! hack!) No, no…sorry…where did that come from?…I meant to say wannabe poet laureate!”

Joe Biden: "We've got to recognize that kid wearing a hoodie may very well be the next poet laureate and not a gangbanger." 😬 pic.twitter.com/67HFGjPON8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 28, 2019

This is kind of a Walt Kowalski-ish thing to say, but my first big drop-out moment with Spider-Man: Far From Home was when the big-ass water monster (i.e, Elemental #1) started destroying centuries-old buildings in Venice, Italy. “Oh, fuck, here we go again,” I groaned. “Once again a grotesque American bullshit popcorn movie arrives in beautiful Venice and before you know it a whole lotta buildings are being wasted, all in the service of selling tickets so that more crap like this can be made. Is this all they can think of…monsters shattering centuries-old timber and brick or stucco walls being reduced to ash and powder?”

The same thing happens in Prague about 20 or 25 minutes later. Then Berlin. And then London. And then it’s finally over.

I hate Americans and American destruction culture. I hate big CG movies and massive CG budgets. I hate loudness and chaos and teenagers who aren’t X-factor types like me when I was 16 and 17. I despise Tom Holland‘s punchable face, and I really hate the Marvel machine when it has nothing better to do and starts jizz-whizzing all over everything and everyone. I really hate the idea of Jon Favreau boinking Marisa Tomei, and I think the romantic pairing of Jacob Batalon and Angourie Rice is close to ridiculous. There once was a time when a guy like Batalon couldn’t even dream about becoming the dweeby, mostly asexual, backwards-baseball-hat-wearing “gay” friend of a girl like Rice. But in Spider-Man: Far From Home, they become lovers almost immediately. Sure thing.

1950s society imposed rigid rules upon kids (boomers) and teenagers (baby-busters). Rules, expectations, behavioral standards, clothing styles that had to be followed, lines that couldn’t be crossed, etc. A lot of kids didn’t quite realize how rigid and oppressive that culture was, but it gradually came to them.

James Gilbert. author of “Another Chance: America After World War II“: “The rules were imposed by your parents. Parents talked about it a lot. There were high school counselors who told you what the rules were. Obey authority. Don’t ask questions. If you mishebave, you aren’t normal. Control your emotions. Don’t ask why. Aspire to a kind of vegetative state. Even if they weren’t written down, everybody knew [them]. You could almost read them out, cite them. And looking back, what people did in the ’60s was break every damn one of them.”

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In Bilge Ebiri‘s 6.27 Vulture piece about the Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene, Leon Vitali reveals that Cate Blanchett looped the dialogue of Amanda Good, who played the “mysterious masked woman” at the orgy. Remember her voice? She defended Tom Cruise during the ceremonial interrogation scene by shouting, “Let him go! I’m ready to redeem him!”

That voice, according to Vitali, belonged to Blanchett. Except Good didn’t play “Mandy”, the woman whom Cruise treats for a “speedball” overdose in an upstairs salon inside Sydney Pollack‘s home during that black-tie party scene. According to an 8.27.99 Independent piece by Charlotte O’Sullivan (as well as Google), that role was played by Julienne Davis.

Who played the naked and dead Mandy in the morgue scene, Davis or Good? I’ve read Ebiri and O’Sullivan’s articles twice, and they don’t say. (That or I need a nap.) I’ve found some links and captions that claim Davis played “morgue Mandy” so let’s go with that.

What convinced O’Sullivan that “speedball Mandy” and the “mysterious masked woman” were different actresses? Excerpt from fourth paragraph from O’Sullivan’s piece: “Sight and Sound editor Nick James knew the Mandy we see at the beginning of the film was not the same woman as that at the orgy. How? ‘Because they had different pubic hair‘.”

HE insert: Is there some way that p.c. investigators can track down the 20-years-older James and prosecute him after the fact for being a sexist scumbag? Who notices such things? We need to threaten this guy with career death in order to correct his behavior.

O’Sullivan to Davis: “Did Abigail take over from [you]?” Davis to O’Sullivan in an outraged tone of voice: “No — it’s all me. Abigail Good was just an extra. And anyway, she’s English.” (HE: The mysterious woman has an American accent — Blanchett’s!). Davis: “It’s hilarious. It happens a lot, people try to take credit for things they haven’t done”.

Good to Ebiri: “When all the other girls left, I was in this amazing position of being able to work with two incredible artists. I was on the set with Tom and Stanley, finding things on our own. Stanley asked my opinion a lot. Me and Tom were among the last people he ever filmed. Stanley died before the dubbing was done. And I always wondered before the film came out whether they were going to dub me, because I didn’t have an American accent.”

Vitali to Ebiri: “It was Cate Blanchett…that was her voice. We wanted something warm and sensual but that at the same time could be a part of a ritual. Stanley had talked about finding this voice and this quality that we needed. After he’d died, I was looking for someone. It was actually Tom and Nicole who came up with the idea of Cate. She was in England at the time, so she came into Pinewood and recorded the lines.”

BTW: Despite the assertions in several articles posted yesterday and today, Blanchett’s looping of Good didn’t constitute a “cameo” — and it still doesn’t. A cameo is when an actor briefly appears in a film (doing or saying something of momentary consequence) and then disappears. Looping someone is not a “cameo” or vice versa.

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Stanley Kubrick always wanted “interesting” from his actors, especially his supporting actors. That tended to translate into behavior that most of us would call quirky, twitchy, peculiar, eccentric, heavily mannered, etc. Hands down, HE’s all-time favorite quirk-freak-twitch performance in a Kubrick film came from Alan Cumming in Eyes Wide Shut. Second favorite: a Clockwork Orange tie between Michael Bates, who played an officious, extremely uptight prison guard, and Aubrey Morris as “P.R, Deltoid”. Third favorite: Murray Melvin as Reverend Samuel Runt in Barry Lyndon.

In every major industrial democracy there are varying levels of concern about the flow of unmitigated immigration from the Middle East, Northern Africa, Central America and Mexico. It’s not so much an economic, party or principle thing as (I know this sounds overly primal and primitive) a simmering matter of blood and tribe. Sad as it seems, right-leaning European and North American natives have been reacting fearfully and in some ways violently. (The recent Rome attacks upon allies of Cinema America by far-right groups is but one example.) Natives of Europe and North America are sensing cultural and territorial threats.

I’m not sensing the slightest threat of anything from my home in West Hollywood, but it’s been fairly well documented that rurals in this country (i.e., those who have the least contact with immigrants) are somewhat agitated about this. And it has concerned some that almost all of last night’s Democratic contenders raised their hands in support of restoring protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as well as pledging to provide health care for the millions in the country without documents.

I don’t know what the wisest or fairest solution might be, but earlier today Politico‘s Jeff Greenfield supplied two Presidential views on the matter.

President Bill Clinton in his 1995 State of the Union address: “All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens…it is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.”

President Barack Obama in a 2014 interview with ABC News: “That is our direct message to the families in Central America: Do not send your children to the borders.” The U.S. Border Patrol, he said, should be able to “stem the flow of illegal crossings and speed the return of those who do cross over … Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable.”

The title of Greenfield’s article is “Did the Democrats Step on a Second Big Land Mine?“, and the subhead states the following: “On immigration, they’ve steered the party close to an open-borders policy without any serious reckoning with how to handle the influx of arrivals.”

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I understood what Marianne Williamson was saying about a New Zealand-type assault weapon ban (which of course would be a completely sane response to myriad U.S. shootings), but she obviously didn’t belong in that group — a spiritual outlier, to say the least. People don’t want gentle preachers for leaders — they want realpolitik hardballers with principles.

Hollywood Elsewhere won’t be satisfied with a wokester makeover. I also want gay currents (if not from all three then at least from Kristen Stewart). And everyone understands that there are four Bosleys this time…right? (Sam Claflin, Djimon Hounsou, Elizabeth Banks and Patrick Stewart.) Nobody, it appears, has John Forsythe‘s “role” of Charlie, but Luis Gerardo Méndez plays “The Saint”, whatever that means or indicates. Define “synthetic.”