There’s nothing catastrophic or even dramatic about a guy in his late ’70s having a stent put into a heart valve after experiencing chest pains. But it’s obviously a bad thing for a 78 year-old Presidential candidate. It just reminds everyone what naturally happens among people of Sanders’ age. Nobody will ever call him “drooling” Bernie — he’s a sharp, tough, tenacious bulldog, and a much more vigorous candidate than “Typewriter” Joe Biden. I’m just saying that people don’t want to know from heart conditions when it comes to would-be Presidents. Sanders has been sinking in the polls; cruel as it may sound, this episode will probably cause him to sink further.

Guillermo del Toro‘s 13-part tweet stream on The Irishman is pretty damn good. I’ve pasted six of the tweets in an order that I prefer, as opposed to the order in which GGT posted them. Sorry but I’m allowed to do this. Here’s the whole thing.

Boiled down, GDT is acknowledging or reminding that everybody fucking dies sooner or later, and the “withering on the vine” and assisted living part is no joke, and boy, does this film remind us of where we’ll all headed sooner or later, and that arriving at this point without a George Harrison-like mystical current inside you or, failing that, at least a good spiritual hand-holding current by way of family and friends…approaching the Big Sleep without these things is not advisable. Not having them, in fact, is horrible. Because one way or the other we’re all approaching a Barry Lyndon state of total and absolute equality.

Last night Joaquin Phoenix offered a Hollywood Elsewhere-style apology to Joker cinematographer Lawrence (“Larry”) Sher for having bitched about Sher’s constant whispering during shooting and giving Phoenix the nickname “Cher.” It happened on the Jimmy Kimmel Show after Kimmel played some video footage (supplied by Joker director Todd Phillips) of Phoenix carping on the Joker set.

Phoenix’s apology begins around the 10:15 mark…love it!

Phoenix to Larry: “The constant whispering…just shut the fuck up, dude. I’m trying to find something real. Sorry. It’s not a big deal, it’s not a big deal. Yeah, it kind of is. I know you started the Cher thing, Larry. It’s not even an insult. ‘Cher’, really? She’s a singer, actor, dancer, fashion icon. How is that a fucking insult? I’m fucking out of here with this guy.”

By “Hollywood Elsewhere-styled” I mean the kind of apology in which you say “look, I wasn’t actually wrong for calling you a rancid dick because that’s who and what you are and probably always will be if you don’t get some therapy, but I’m sorry, you know, for the bad vibes…even though it was mostly your fault.”

Don’t get me wrong — I’ll never hesitate to offer a sincere apology when warranted (it’s a mark of true character to be able to express humility and honest regret), but I also love offering the half-assed kind in which you say “sorry but blow me.” When the shoe fits, I mean.

Dry wit and deft allusion are the chief signatures of New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, whom I’ve been reading for a quarter-century. No fastballs or croquet mallets, but curves, knuckleballs, sliders. His pans suggest that disdain, anger and even disgust reside within, but Lane is hardly an emotionally open book. He always holds himself in check.

It’s therefore interesting and significant that you can detect serious, unmitigated loathing in his 9.27 review of Joker (“Todd Phillips’ Joker Is No Laughing Matter“). Not just about the film but the hype. Joker, in short, has gotten under his skin. He’s fuming and ready to take a swing. This means something.

“Here’s the deal,” Lane explains. “Joker is not a great leap forward, or a deep dive into our collective unconscious, let alone a work of art. It’s a product. All the pre-launch rumblings, the rants and the raves, testify to a cunning provocation, and, if we yield to it, we’re not joining a debate; we’re offering our services, unpaid, to the marketing department at Warner Bros.

New Yorker illustration by Zohar Lazar.

“When Dalí and Buñuel made L’Âge d’Or (1930), they wanted to start a riot, and they succeeded, but Joker yearns for little more than a hundred op-ed pieces and a firestorm of tweets. With ticket sales, naturally, to match.

“The evidence for this daring scheme is everywhere you look, in Phillips’s film, and everywhere you listen. Nicholson’s Joker may have danced and pranced to the sound of Prince’s ‘Partyman’, but Phoenix gyrates, on a steep flight of steps, to ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Part 2’, a 1972 hit by Gary Glitter. It used to be popular with sports teams, rousing the crowds at N.F.L. and N.H.L. games, before Glitter was convicted, in 1999, of possessing child pornography, and, seven years later, of sexually abusing minors, in Vietnam. Since then, understandably, the song has tumbled out of favor.

“Do you believe that the decision to revive it, for Joker, is anything but a studied choice, nicely crafted to offend? Please. I happen to dislike the film as heartily as anything I’ve seen in the past decade, but I realize, equally, that to vent any inordinate wrath toward it is to fall straight into its trap, for outrage merely proves that our attention has been snagged. Just ask the President of the United States.”

One dispute: In today’s realm, “a firestorm of tweets” is a riot.

HE-posted on 9.29.19: