Let’s say you’re a freelancer currently unable to earn anything due to a coronavirus shutdown. Or an employee who’s been temporarily suspended because your employer has been forced to temporarily close or cut back. It would certainly be a welcome thing to receive a $1200 check from the government as every little bit helps. But presuming that the stimulus check would be a one-off, how much help would $1200 actually represent?

You could use it to help put a minor dent in your rent or mortgage payment for a month. Or you could buy $20 worth of food each day for 60 days. Or you could pay off your utility bills for a while. But the pandemic is going to be with us until mid to late summer and possibly (God forbid) into the fall or even beyond. So at best a $1200 windfall would make a slight difference for a very short period.

$1200 is fine, but it’s basically pizza money, a few Uber rides, a cable or cell phone bill, cat food, two or three tanks of gasoline, etc. And then back to the salt mines.

Last night I finally saw Roman Polanski’s “J’Accuse” (aka An Officer and a Spy). Yes, I watched it illegally, but we’ll never see it in this country because of the #MeToo Khmer Rouge prohibition of all things Polanski and so I figured, okay, just this one time. Actually I also watched Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in Manhattan illegally, and with the same justification.

In any event I watched it on the 65-incher in 1080p with English subtitles, and my God, the “holy shit, this is great” and “why can’t more films be this good?” current. The 86 year-old Polanski is undimmed…he seems to be as commanding and bull’s-eye as when he made Repulsion, Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, etc.

J’Accuse has been crafted with absolute surgical genius…a lucid and exacting and spot-on retelling of an infamous episode…a sublime atmospheric and textural recapturing of 1890s “belle epoque” Paris, and such a meticulous, hugely engrossing reconstruction of the Dreyfus affair…a tale told lucidly…a clue-by-clue, layer-by-layer thing.

You know what J’Accuse is? A bedtime comfort flick — comforting because it’s so damned good.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but it’s a tale of anti-Semitism and a rigged conviction for treason, an innocent man condemned to Devil’s Island, nationalist rightwing groupthink, suppression of the truth and the punishment of those who would bring the perversion to light.

Most of us know the basic bones, but Polanski’s film is absolutely riveting because of the detailed approach that he applies to each and every character, setting, line, costume, light source and choice of location. Adult-level subtlety to die for.

It’s my idea of a perfect film in every respect — Polanski and Robert Harris‘s brilliant screenplay, the ace-level production design by Jean Rabasse and art direction by Dominique Moisan, Pawel Edelman‘s naturally lighted cinematography, Alexandre Desplat‘s music…every single element is aces. Polanski concentrates on elements that 99% of today’s directors would run screaming from. The discovery portion of the film is all about ripped-up letters pasted back together, bureaucratic records, folders, etc.

Jean Dujardin’s lead performance as Georges Picqart, the intelligence officer who uncovered the frame-up, is easily his career-best. Ditto Louis Garrel as Dreyfus plus Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud, Eric Ruf, Laurent Stocker, etc. And with everyone under the constraints of the era, of having to hold themselves erect and behave in a stiffly correct manner.

I was especially taken having recently endured Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang (IFC Films, 4.24), which looks and feels like nothing more than a director re-inventing and re-stylizing the past in order to show off and look cool. I got through it but not without frustration.

J’Accuse is a textural, cerebral masterpiece, and yet one of the most affecting anti-racism films ever made. The sight of the Parisian nationalists and anti-Semites cheering on the lying military brass…the MAGA redhats of their day.

For the last week or so it’s been sinking into me. Simultaneously appalling and suffocating, and so overwhelming that I’ve only been able to gradually process it one day at a time. We’re all living in a dystopian realm, the likes of which I’ve never known, almost a kind of On The Beach atmosphere…a low-security, self-policed concentration camp with all the comforts of home.

As HE regulars know (especially the scolding “virusbros“) I’ve been out two or three times since returning from Texas…wearing the usual mask and surgical gloves, and of course keeping my distance from one and all. CVS and Pavilions stopovers plus aimless rumblehog roamings.

What an inert, boring, vanilla, nothing-level existence.

In a 3.24 piece called “10 Comedies to Lift Your Mood”, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy mentioned that what we’re all going through is spiritually analogous to what many Americans went through during the early days of the Great Depression. That sunk in. Right now probably is the bleakest time of my life in certain ways…perhaps in all ways.

The Third Day, a forthcoming six-part HBO series that begins on 5.11, looks reasonably decent. But the trailer also suggests it’s basically Midsommar meets The Wicker Man…right?

And why is Jude Law starring or costarring in just about every other film and cable series these days? Is he the new Michael Caine? Does he ever say no? The New Pope, the Rhythm Section, Vox Lux, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, A Rainy Day in New York, The Nest, etc. I understand that Law’s early aughts hot period — The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain, Enemy at the Gates, Road to Perdition, I Heart Huckabees, Alfie, Closer, The Holiday — ended 14 or 15 years ago and we all have bills to pay, etc. I’m nonetheless sensing that he’s too willing to be in anything that comes along.

The late Stuart Gordon had a rich and varied life, but he was mainly known for one thing and one thing only — his riotously funny horror-comedy Reanimator (’85), which I saw with five or six friends at Manhattan’s Rivoli (B’way and 49th) in late October 1985. We were all working at New Line Cinema at the time, my specialty being publicity and press kits. The Rivoli viewing, no lie, was one of the greatest theatrical experiences of my life — we laughed, howled, screamed, thigh-slapped, spilled our drinks and popcorn, laughed some more.

As it happened I soon after moved into a bungalow complex on Hightower Drive, and Reanimator star Jeffrey Combs was living right next door.

Reanimator was directed and coadapted by Gordon, the source being H.P. Lovecraft‘s “Herbert West: Reanimator“, a horror short story written in 1921. his partner Brian Yuzna produced it, and the coscreenwriters were Dennis Paoli and William J. Norris.

They all deserve an eternal pat on the back for coming up with the most insanely perverse oral sex scene in the history of motion pictures.

Gordon passed yesterday at the age of 72.

But then you knew that about all Republicans spouting the current Trump slogan…”let’s get back to work already…if some over-60 types wind up dying then they die but no more hibernating.”

…and I realized I really and truly couldn’t stand the presence of Michael Fassbender any more…Steve Jobs is what did it to me…from that point on my basic attitude about Fassbender was “fuck that guy and also, unfair as it sounds, the movies he’s starring in.”

Super-condensed review of Steve Jobs, posted on 9.6.15:

“The main thing is that Fassbender just bothers me. I didn’t like him, didn’t care for his company, didn’t like those cold fuck-you eyes. All through it I was saying to myself “I know this is a class A enterprise with a sharp Aaron Sorkin script, but how much longer do I have hang with this prick?”

I will never watch Steve Jobs again. Just thinking about those endless Sorkin walk-and-talks…aagghh!