Day: June 13, 2020

So if I’d been one of those cops wrestling in that Wendy’s parking lot with the reportedly drunk and clearly violent Rayshard Brooks, I wouldn’t have fired three shots when he ran off. I’d chase his ass while calling for back-up, and one way or another he’d eventually be found and cornered and cuffed.

Brooks obviously wasn’t behaving in a moderate, law-abiding way, but nobody deserves to die for being a belligerent asshole.

So brutal police tactics have led to yet another tragedy, but this wasn’t quite as bad as the cold-blooded, 8-minute-and-46-second murder of George Floyd.

I would have never fallen asleep in my car while waiting for Wendy’s take-out. Even if I was drunk as a skunk. I’d pay for the take-out, pull into a nearby parking space and then nod out. But that’s me.

Protesters in Atlanta shutdown an interstate after the murder of Rayshard Brooks by police. #RayshardBrooks #AtlantaShooting #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/xoxQpjoVuC

— Omar Moore (@thepopcornreel) June 14, 2020

Variety‘s Owen Glieberman has written that the finest performance by Chadwick Boseman, currently starring in Da 5 Bloods, is his James Brown channelling in Tate Taylor‘s Get On Up (8.1.14). While I completely agree, I don’t have many vivid memories of that Universal release. The Apollo Theatre dressing-room standoff between Brown and Viola Davis‘s “bad mom” is all that really stands out.

I do, however, have a profound and lasting affection for Alex Gibney and Mick Jagger‘s Mr. Dynamite, the Brown documentary that premiered on HBO roughly three months later (10.27.14). Get On Up was a respectable, hard-pushin’ Hollywood biopic, but the Gibney doc was the real thang. The raunchy, grinding, rhythmic current had it all over the Taylor biopic, which, by the way, Jagger also co-produced.

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“Woody Allen Gave Me The Same Look,” posted from Vietnam on 11.18.13: “This guy didn’t like it when I started snapping pictures. First he gave me one of those ‘are you about to steal a little piece of my soul?’ expressions that I’ve seen every time I’ve taken a random quickie of this or that unprepared human. Then he came over and stuck his arm through the bars and swatted me across the forehead.

“He wasn’t trying to hurt me. He didn’t try to scratch or cut my skin with his nails. It was just a mild ‘fuck you and your camera’ swat. He made his point. I ignored him completely but I understood what he was saying.”

Mr. F. comment: “A century from now, the historical record shall cite this post when describing the very first case of Vietnamese Simian Flu, a pandemic virus that crossed over to humans and killed millions by the year 2050. Jeffrey Wells will go down in history as ‘Patient Zero.'”

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Yesterday morning Spike Lee gave Woody Allen a brotherly hug. Lee was asked by WOR 710’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel about Allen’s cancelling by #MeToo wokesters. Spike basically said “Woody is cool and my friend and a fellow Knicks fan”, but without addressing the baseless charges against Allen by the Farrow gang.

Lee: “I’d just like to say Woody Allen’s a great, great filmmaker, and this cancel thing is not just Woody. And I think that when we look back on it, [we’re] gonna see that, short of killing somebody, I don’t know if you can just erase somebody like they never existed. Woody’s a friend of mine…I know he’s going through it right now.”

I don’t know what “this cancel thing is not just Woody” means, but otherwise Lee basically said that Woody is too talented and too important a filmmaker to be guilty of child molestation, and that he shouldn’t be cancelled unless he’s been proven guilty of murder. That’s not the right way to put it.

Lee should have said that Woody is completely innocent, and that the nonsensical position of Woody haters is based on nothing but a blind belief that Dylan Farrow‘s account of what may or may not have happened on 8.4.92 is truthful. Lee could have also mentioned there’s nothing in terms of evidence or professional opinion (not to mention the account posted by Moses Farrow) that backs up Dylan’s account.

Update (6.13, 2.14 pm Pacific): Spike has apologized for the clumsy wording in his WOR statement, and for a second time has declined to mention the facts in the Woody case:

The Woody comment begins at 3:31 in the conversation.

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I’ve twice tried to watch Anatole Litvak‘s Sorry, Wrong Number, a classic 1948 noir starring Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Wendell Corey, Ed Begley, etc. But both times the anxious, borderline-hysterical tone has pushed me away.

Stanwyck’s agitated performance as a spoiled heiress, “good” as it is, is especially difficult to weather. And Lancaster is always sweating and wild-eyed and pleading.

What a jagged-edge world in which to live…what a needling hellscape. Never a gentle word or peaceful interlude, never a moment in which Stanwyck or Lancaster or anyone takes a breather or offers a witty line or laughs at a joke or savors a nice piece of music.

Am I losing my appetite for film noir? I don’t think so. I’ll love Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, The Killers, Gun Crazy, Ace in the Hole, This Gun For Hire, D.O.A., Laura and Out of the Past until the day I die. Partly because all of these films offer little slices of wit and humor and even joie de vivre from time to time. I’m just not a Sorry, Wrong Number type of guy, and that’s fine.