Day: August 10, 2020

If Biden Picks Whitmer…

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Several essayists and commentators of color will be disappointed. That’s understood. If I was Biden I’d go with Kamala Harris or Susan Rice, but if he chooses Whitmer or Elizabeth Warren…well, what of it?

Van Jones and others are saying “don’t Tim Kaine us!…we represent 13% of U.S. voters, dammit, and we want what we want.” The implication is that voters of color may sit in their hands if it’s not Harris or Rice or another qualified black woman.

Excuse me? And allow The Beast to serve another four years?

We all understand the primal longing to see an African-American woman fill the slot, but decent people are not allowed to sit on their hands come 11.3. That’s an appalling thing to even suggest.

Incidentally: If I wasn’t Biden but my own true self relying on my own perceptions and brain power, I would choose Pete Buttigieg in a heartbeat. Remember how Fox voters expressed support for Pete to a certain extent last fall? They respected him and felt a certain kinship because of his religious beliefs and moderate-practical liberalism.

The Only Moustaches That Worked

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In the long history of movie moustaches, only four have seriously enhanced an actor’s aura — Clark Gable‘s pencil-thin, career-long ‘stache (a 27-year stretch from ’33 to ’60), Robert Redford‘s in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (’69), Burt Reynolds‘ “Smokey” ‘stache and Billy Crudup‘s upper-lip growth in Almost Famous.

I guess I could bend over backwards and admit that Billy De Williams‘ Lando moustache in Episode #5 and #6 of the Star Wars saga was cool. And okay, Sam Elliott‘s handlebar in The Big Lebowski had a certain folksy authenticity. I’ll also allow that Daniel Day Lewis‘s Bill the Butcher ‘stache completed the satanic aura. Plus [thanks to HE commenters] David Niven, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jr., Ronald Colman, William Powell, Errol Flynn, Lee Van Cleef, Vincent Price, Groucho Marx and Ernie Kovacs.

But otherwise moustaches are generally annoying and almost always a mistake. Certainly in a present-day context. And not just on-screen.

Moustaches are a machismo thing, of course. We’ve all read about rock stars stuffing toilet paper into their underwear before going on stage. I’m not saying each and every wearer of a moustache is coming from the same place, but they’re definitely looking to flaunt their masculinity.

It’s my personal theory that the moustaches worn by Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty in Mike Nichols‘ The Fortune caused that film to tank, or were certainly a decisive factor in that regard.

From Gunfighter Wiki page: “20th Century Fox hated Gregory Peck‘s authentic period mustache in The Gunfighter (’50). In fact, the head of production at Fox, Spyros P. Skouras, was out of town when production began. By the time he got back, so much of the film had been shot that it was too late to order Peck to shave it off and re-shoot. After the film did not do well at the box-office, Skouras ran into Peck and reportedly said, ‘That mustache cost us millions.'”

“He Just Makes Things Up”

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“Trump can’t promise the $400 weekly because it is unconstitutional — he can’t just tell government to cut checks for $400 (LOL). That’s why he is putting it off partly on the states, which creates a new bureaucracy. The best hope for any money before the end of the year is if Democrat and GOP negotiators can come together realistically. That is why this Trump smokescreen is getting so heavily criticized. There’s no THERE there, and he can’t even explain how it would work himself. Until Congress authorizes the money the wheels won’t turn. Guaranteed.” — note from industry pally, received an hour ago.

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Good Riddance

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I bailed on HBO’s Perry Mason five or six weeks ago. Right after episode #2. Too icky, muddy, smokey, gunky and grimly desaturated. Plus Matthew Rhys, the 45 year-old actor with the lined, Elmer’s Glue-All, beard-stubbled complexion, is too long of tooth to be playing a World War I veteran in 1931, particularly one who’s still trying to come into his own as an attorney.

“No way,” I told myself. “I will not sit through eight episodes of this shit. Life is too short.”

Perry Mason ended last night, and the general complaint is that it didn’t pay off, much less deliver a socko finish.

Rolling Stone‘s Alan Sepinwall: “If there’s a fictional character whose most famous gimmick, by far, is that he puts the real criminal on the witness stand and talks them into confessing, and you decide to not have him do that in your version? Well, you’d better come up with something really spectacular to do in its place. And the HBO series’ first-season finale utterly failed to do that.

The ending, says Sepinwall, is “cynical and extremely underwhelming. Previous Mason stories certainly leaned toward wish-fulfillment fantasy — tales of a man so noble, and so smart, that he needs only his wits to talk killers and other criminals into going against their own self-interest and admitting their guilt — but this feels like edgelord-style revisionism.

“It’s as if the HBO show’s writers couldn’t imagine Erle Stanley Gardner’s pure-hearted and persuasive creation existing in a more “realistic” world, so they had their guy cheat. But in not having Andrew Howard‘s Joe Ennis character take the stand at all — not even for Perry to try and fail to get him to confess — there’s no real drama at all to the season’s climax. It feels like both Mason and the show simply run out of ideas by the end, and just hope things will work out anyway.”

Wilmore’s Weekly

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Peacock, the NBCUniversal streamer that launched on 7.15, has ordered 11 episodes of a weekly late-night Larry Wilmore show. Yes, once a week. Like Real Time with Bill Maher. Maher is an established brand but once-weekly isn’t how things work now. Way back in the Mr. Showbiz and Reel.com days (’98 to ’04) Hollywood Elsewhere was a twice-weekly column. I shifted into the daily bloggy-blog format in April ’06. Imagine a columnist launching a new column these days that refreshes twice weekly….nope! That said, it’s good to have Wilmore back in the saddle.