The album should be called “Strange Days”, and their performing name should be JoeKam. And the below copy should read IF THIS WAS AN ALBUM COVER…

Is this London? The theatre looks to me like the Odeon BFI MAX but what do I know? Mission Impossible 7‘s Tom Cruise and director-writer Chris McQuarrie plus camera crew. Mission: Impossible 7 will open on 11.19.21. A sequel, also directed by McQuarrie, will be released on 11.4.22.

Will Joe and Kamala man up, stand up and tell the destruction junkies, store-looters and BLM-ers that small businesses shouldn’t be torched because the bulls shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back? Of course not. They’re not allowed to. They can only voice support. Stop systemic racism by destroying the stores of small-time, hard-working merchants!

I’m being gently pressured to come up with some choice quotes to be used for HE merchandise — mugs, iPhone cases, COVID masks, bumper stickers. (And no T-shirts.) “Boxy is beautiful,” “Don’t tell me,” that line of country. If anyone has any suggestions…my brain has stalled.

I’m not sure I saw Guy Hamilton‘s The Mirror Crack’d back in’80, but I probably attended the all-media. I wouldn’t watch it now with a knife at my back. Most of the cast looks trapped. They like the money but deep down they hate themselves, and yet they can’t escape it so they have to put their best foot forward.

Kim Novak and Tony Curtis look relatively content but everyone else seems miserable. Look at poor Edward Fox — he looks like he wants to kill himself. By today’s measure Rock Hudson looked at least 65 — he was actually 55.

Elizabeth Taylor‘s face had a puffy, boozy look, but at least she’d modified her appearance compared to that infamous Ron Galella “fat Liz” photo, snapped outside Studio 54 on 5.21.79. But she looked terrific in ’88 after following her own diet regimen (“Elizabeth Takes Off”).

Shooting happened in Kent between 5.12.80 and 7.18.80. The Mirror Crack’d opened on 12.19.80.

From Vincent Canby’s 12.18.80 review: “Who did it? If you haven’t figured that out by the time the second murder happens, you should be sent to bed without your warm milk.”

The Kino Lorber Bluray pops on Tuesday, September 1st.

Whenever I hear about something odd that falls outside my own experience, I try and think of a film that depicted same. Yesterday’s oddball thing (8.24) was Aram Roston’s Reuters story about the seven-year sexual arrangement between Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife Becki Falwell and “pool boy” Giancarlo Granda.

The arrangement began when Ganda was 20. He told Roston that for years he had sex with Becki while Jerry, former head of Liberty University and a staunch supporter of Orange Plague, looked on from the corner.

Right away I flashed on a scene from Paul Schrader‘s American Gigolo (’80). Richard Gere‘s Julian Kaye drives out to Palm Springs to attend to the wife of a wealthy financier named Rheiman (Tom Stewart). Rheiman asks Julian to have rough sex with his wife Judy (Patricia Carr) while he watches.

(l.) Judy Rheiman (Patricia Carr) and Julian Kaye (Richard Gere) during an ominous bedroom scene in American Gigolo (’80).

Standing in the corner just like Falwell allegedly did, the financier barks out orders….”slap that bitch!” or something equally repellent. Julian, sitting on the bed with Judy under a sheet, turns and gives this 50something creep a look that says “Jesus, man, who are you?”

Roston: “Granda says that he met Jerry and Becki Falwell while working as a pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel in March 2012. Starting that month and continuing into 2018, Granda told Reuters that the relationship involved him having sex with Becki while Jerry looked on.

“Granda showed Reuters emails, text messages and other evidence that he says demonstrate the sexual nature of his relationship with the couple, who have been married since 1987.

“’Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,’ Granda said in an interview. Now 29, he described the liaisons as frequent — ‘multiple times per year’ — and said the encounters took place at hotels in Miami and New York, and at the Falwells’ home in Virginia.”

Let me guess…it turns out that 14 year-old Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) isn’t just a chip off the old block but in some ways smarter than her significantly older brothers Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin).

It would appear that Enola Holmes (Netflix, 9.23) is a blending of Barry Levinson‘s Young Sherlock Holmes (’85) and Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes (’09) but through a 21st Century female prism, and with the usual injections of arch attitude and ironic popcorn fantasy.

Based on Nancy Springer‘s Enola Holmes Mysteries, and directed by Harry Bradbeer (Fleabag, Killing Eve). Costarring Helena Bonham Carter, Fiona Shaw, Adeel Akhtar, Frances de la Tour, Louis Partridge and Susie Wokoma.

I posted my first Ammonite riff (“Here We Go Again“) on 2.19.20….pre-COVID masks.

Observation #1: A close relation of Celine Sciamma‘s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, once again set near a beachy coastline in the distant past (Dorset in the 1840s), and once again about a lesbian love affair between tightly-corseted, socially restricted women who wear their hair in buns.

Observation #2: A bit of a May-December romance with 43 year-old Winslet (now 44) as the real-life fossil-searcher and paleontologist Mary Anning, who was born in 1799 and died in 1847. 26 year-old Saoirse Ronan (25 during filming) plays geologist Charlotte Murchison, whose husband, Roderick Impey Murchison, paid Anning to take care of her for a brief period.

Except the 1840s romance that allegedly occured wasn’t a May-December thing. Murchison was actually 11 years older than Anning, having been born on April 18, 1788. She was therefore in her early 50s and not, as the film has it, in her mid 20s. Furthermore Roderick Murchison wasn’t, as the film indicates, some kind of patronizing sexist twit who regarded his wife as a fragile emotional invalid who needed looking after. The Murchisons were actually partners in their geological studies; they travelled all over Europe together.

Charlotte Murchison lived to age 80; poor Mary Anning passed from breast cancer at age 47 or 48.

Ammonites are the extinct relatives of sea creatures that lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras.

Ammonite will play at the Toronto Film Festival (so to speak) on 9.11.20.

Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortes‘ All In: The Fight for Democracy, a 102-minute Amazon Prime doc about voter suppression and how it affected the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, will debut on 9.18.20.

16 days earlier the Garbus-Cortes doc will have a special world premiere screening at the West Wind Solano Twin Drive-In (1611 Solano Way) in Concord. The event is co-sponsored by Mill Valley Film Festival honcho Mark Fishkin and Telluride Film Festival exec director Julie Huntsinger.

Team Hollywood Elsewhere would be delighted to attend but we’ll be in Arizona…sorry.

In November 2018 Democratic gubernatorial Stacey Abrams lost to Republican gubernatorial candidate (and ardent Trump supporter) Brian Kemp, by a margin of roughly 54,000 votes — 1,978,408 for Kemp vs. 1,923,685 for Abrams. It is widely agreed that Kemp, Georgia’s Secretary of State since 2010, had basically cheated his way to victory by way of voter suppression.

On a single day in late July 2017 Kemp had removed 560,000 Georgians from the voter rolls — voters who’d been flagged because they’d skipped one too many elections. Abrams would later call the purge the “use-it-or-lose-it scheme.”

On 8.11.18, the New York Times posted an article by Carol Anderson titled “Brian Kemp, Enemy of Democracy“, which explored Kemp’s unscrupulous voter suppression efforts. “Hackable polling machines, voter roll purges, refusing to register voters until after an election, the use of investigations to intimidate groups registering minorities to vote — Mr. Kemp knows it all,” Anderson wrote.