Year: 2019

I feel a little funny about posting a Tucker Carlson excerpt (4.16), but no one else has spoken frankly about how the MSM has all but abandoned Beto O’Rourke over the last three weeks and moved over to Pete Buttigieg, the new squeeze.

Carlson: “How it must feel to be Beto right now? You’re running really hard for President, giving speech after speech every day, riding your skateboard for the camera. And then one day you wake up and discover that your one true love, the American news media, has called it off…they’ve left you for a younger, hotter candidate…went out for a pack of cigarettes and just never came home.”

HE take: Carlson isn’t wrong, but after everyone gets used to BUDDHA-judge and O’Rourke learns to refine his hand movements and sharpens his stump speech and especially after the debates begin in the fall, things will settle down and even out.

The pauses in this scene — the moments when De Niro just stares at Keitel with an expression that’s somewhere between morally appalled and oddly perplexed — are what make it interesting. Sometimes vague detections of what’s inside of a character are more gripping than watching that character let it all out. This plus the spiky flattop, checked shirt, white T-shirt, jeans and spit-shined brown leather boots.

Read more

If and when the 2020 Presidential race is between Donald Trump and Pete Buttigieg, homophobic jibes and smears will be liberally used. We know this — we know who and what Trump is. Two days ago on TMZ, Mayor Pete said he’s accustomed to being picked on, and that he’ll deal with it head-on before deftly changing the subject.

HE suggestion: BUDDHA-judge needs to grow his hair out a little bit — 1/2 inch, say. Right now it’s a little too crew-cutty, a little too Alfred El Neuman-y.

Read more

Last night I re-watched my Bluray of Jerzy Skolimowski‘s Moonlighting (’82) — a finely chiselled, dead brilliant drama about four Polish guys (led by Jeremy Irons‘ “Nowak”) renovating their boss’s London flat during the time of the Solidarity crackdown in Poland. Very matter of fact, very specific and situational but at the same time a political allegory that sticks the landing. As perfectly made as this kind of thing can be.

In a four-year-old riff I repeated the old saw about the world being divided into two camps — those who hear Moonlighting and think of Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd, and those who think of Skolimowski and Irons and Jenny Seagrove and that ending with those shopping carts crashing and sliding downhill.

There were 31 comments from the HE community; 27 were about how cool the TV show was. I rest my case.

Read more

Now I get it. In Showtime’s The Loudest Voice, Russell Crowe‘s performance as Fox News creator Roger Ailes is going to kill. It’s going to suck all the Ailes oxygen out of the room. Which is why the producers of Fair and Balanced (Lionsgate, 12.20) need to put their version of this sordid big-media tale in front of critics in Cannes and splash things up a bit. Otherwise they might feel like yesterday’s news or some kind of :what about us?” afterthought when F&B pops in theatres eight months from now. Lionsgate’s Ailes is played by John Lithgow.

Read more

All along I’ve been thinking that sooner or later, Democratic primary voters will realize that Joe Biden is not the guy to go mano e mano with Donald Trump in 2020 (too yesteryear, too gaffe-y, peaked in the ’90s and early aughts, pushing 80) and that Bernie Sanders (also pushing 80) had his big groundswell heyday in ’15 and ’16 and that it’s time for everyone to support an eyes-forward, here-and-now candidate like Mayor Pete, Beto O’Rourke or Kamala Harris.

Now, suddenly, I’m scared of what Bernie might do — of the trouble he might create. He’s got a lot of money, his supporters have been known to behave like lunatics, and he might really fuck things up.

From today’s N.Y. Times assessment by Jonathan Martin: “Some in the party still harbor anger over the 2016 race, when [Sanders] ran against Hilary Clinton, and his continuing resistance to becoming a Democrat. But his critics are chiefly motivated by a fear that nominating an avowed socialist would all but ensure Mr. Trump a second term.

HE interjection: Don’t Democrats remember how Sanders was rejected by black voters in the South in ’16?

Martin:”‘There’s a growing realization that Sanders could end up winning this thing, or certainly that he stays in so long that he damages the actual winner,’ said David Brock, the liberal organizer, who said he has had discussions with other operatives about an anti-Sanders campaign and believes it should commence ‘sooner rather than later.’

“The good news for Mr. Sanders’s foes is that his polling is down significantly in early-nominating states from 2016, he is viewed more negatively among Democrats than many of his top rivals, and he has already publicly vowed to support the party’s nominee if he falls short.”

This scene from Nicholas Meyer‘s Time After Time (’79), which I haven’t seen since it opened, is about a hotel-room conversation between the visionary writer and idealist H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) and John Leslie Stevenson aka Jack The Ripper (David Warner). Both have time-travelled to late ’70s San Francisco. One is a fish out of water, another belongs.

The scene is basically about editorializing — Meyer briefly stopping the narrative to remark upon the moral decline that permeates contemporary society.

Start this clip from the 1:35 mark:

Stevenson to Wells: “We don’t belong here? On the contrary, I belong here completely and utterly. I’m home. It’s you who doesn’t belong here. You, with your absurd notions of a perfect and harmonious society. Drivel. The world has caught up and surpassed me. Ninety years ago, I was a freak. Today, I’m an amateur.

“You go back. The future isn’t what you thought. It’s what I am. Do you know that you can purchase a rifle or a revolver? It’s legal.”

Read more

This morning I read about an upcoming, quality-aspiring, untitled Jennifer Lawrence film. With Scott Rudin producing, Lila Neugebauer (The Waverly Gallery) directing and a script by first-timer Elizabeth Sanders, it’s most likely one of those probing, adult-angled, upmarket things — the sort of project that stage directors are often drawn to and which tend to appeal to actresses going through a rough or fallow patch.

Lawrence has been at it for roughly a decade, or since her breakout performance in Winter’s Bone (’10). Two and a half years later she delivered a grand-slam, Oscar-winning performance in Silver Linings Playbook (’12), which became a sizable worldwide hit on its own steam. But during the six and a half years since that David O. Russell film opened at the Toronto Film Festival, nothing Lawrence has done has really matched it.

She costarred in two Russell follow-ups, American Hustle (’13) and Joy (’15). Hustle collected Oscar noms and earned $150 million domestic and Joy won at least some critical praise. But neither seemed to really connect in a primal, essential, lightning-bolt way. Not in my book, at least.

She costarred in Serena (’14), a ’30s era Susanne Bier film that everyone ignored, perhaps because they didn’t want to see Lawrence paired once again with SLP costar Bradley Cooper.

Lawrence upped her arthouse cred with a brave, go-for-broke lead performance in Darren Aronofsky‘s mother!, a controversial success d’estime that (be honest) a lot of people hated.

Last year she starred in the flat-out atrocious Red Sparrow, which stalled at $46 million domestic. In ’16 she costarred with Chris Pratt in the financially successful but grotesquely misconceived and in some quarters deeply despised Passengers.

The rest of her films have been franchise swill — four X-Men flicks (including the upcoming Dark Phoenix) and four Hunger Games installments.

The plight of a mainstream movie star is never an easy one, and nobody ever said that staying on top was easy, even for the profoundly talented. All I know is that my sense of Lawrence’s journey is that she peaked six and a half years ago (she won her Silver Linings Oscar in early ’13) and since then her arrows haven’t really been hitting the target. Okay, once or twice but certainly no bull’s eyes.

Then again Lawrence is young (her 30th birthday isn’t until 8.15.20) and can survive another few years of in-and-out, mezzo-mezzo career adventures. But sooner or later she needs to get lucky again.