Month: August 2020

I for one completely sympathize with Maureen Dowd‘s mistaken conveyance in her latest column, “No Wrist Corsages, Please.”

She wrote about Joe Biden‘s stated intention to choose a woman (and probably a non-Anglo) as his vice-presidential running mate, and the fact that 36 years have passed since a Democratic presidential candidate selected a woman in this capacity (i.e., Walter Mondale + Geraldine Ferraro). But in the initial version Dowd wrote that it had been 36 years since a man and a woman had run together on a Democratic Party ticket.

Dowd forgot, in short, that Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine ran against Trump-Pence in 2016.

But who can blame her? Has there ever been a blander and more forgettable vp wannabe than Kaine? Not to mention the fact that Clinton all but ensured her defeat by alienating the Bernie Bros and Jill Stein fringies when she chose Kaine instead of a vigorous progressive (like Elizabeth Warren) as her running mate. She was so fucking blind to what the electorate was screaming for in ’16 (“shake it up…jettison the usual usual”) that she chose a go-along, do-no-harm moderate liberal like Kaine. And in so doing she gave us Donald Trump.

In other words Dowd’s mind rejected the memory of the Clinton-Kaine catastrophe because it was too painful. I get it. I understand the syndrome.

I finally forced myself to watch David Ayer‘s The Tax Collector…yeesh. Not by any stretch a career highlight for Ayer, whose best effort as a director-writer so far has been Fury, which I didn’t even care for all that much. Mostly an ultra-violent wallow, like everyone has said. What a hellish realm. Hit me over the head with a shovel.

But I didn’t mind Shia LaBeouf‘s “racist” performance as Creeper, a psychopathic collection guy working for Jimmy Smits‘ crime lord, “Wizard.” At the very least he’s delivering with a certain impudent energy mixed with a willingness to die on the spot.

We all understand the rule about white guys not being allowed to portray POCs and cisgenders not being allowed to play trans folk, but there’s a part of me that admires the “fuck you” attitude that Ayer and LaBeouf obviously embraced in creating this particular “Creeper.”

I think any actor should be allowed to portray any character of whatever ethnic stripe. It all boils down to “can you sell it…can you be it…do you have the bravery and conviction?”

In other words, I was kidding when I wrote the headline for this post. I was pretending to be a wokester asshole.

Five or six days ago Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn accused LaBeouf of giving “a cartoonish and culturally insensitive performance” that amounted to “a two-bit Latino burlesque.”

Last month Ayer said on Twitter that LaBeouf wasn’t delivering a “brownface” parody but playing “a white character who is influenced by latinx culture. Which is a really important answer. Shia is playing a whiteboy who grew up in the hood. This is a Jewish dude playing a white character. Also the only white dude in the movie”.

But again, the idea of LaBeouf tattooing his entire chest and stomach area for this role….what an asinine thing to do! What a way of spitting upon your God-given biological temple.

I sauntered over to Urth Caffe this morning for a couple of large cappuccinos. I gave my order to a short Latina named “H. Celso.” She asked for my name and I said “Jeff.” I didn’t slur or mutter it — I said my name as plainly as a Kansas wheat farmer saying the word “fence.” Naturally she misheard and wrote “Bret” on the order ticket. Which of course was my fault because WHITE GUY.

Five or six minutes later a young Latino waiter was roaming around with two large cappuccinos and calling out “Brad? Two cappuccinos…Brad?” I went up to him and said, “Uhm, I may have ordered these but my name is Jeff, not Brad.” He took my word for it.

H. Celso’s order ticket told me about the “Bret” misunderstanding. My hearing “Brad” rather than “Bret” when the waiter called it was, no kidding around this time, definitely my fault. His pronunciation of “Bret” became “Brad” to my ears, what with the clatter of the cafe and the waiter’s lack of interest in emphasizing a hard “t” sound after the first three letters.

The last time I even heard “Bret” was 26 years ago, during that Pulp Fiction scene when John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson pay a visit to the apartment of Frank Whalley‘s “Bret” (technically spelled “Brett” on the Wikipedia page) and his young pallies. Correct me if I’m wrong but the first Bret in the history of U.S. entertainment industry was James Garner‘s gambler character on the original Maverick series, which ran on ABC between ’57 and ’62.

“You can’t eat the Venetian blinds…I just had ’em installed on Wednesday.”

Deadline‘s Justin Kroll, filed at 1:40 pm: “After earning some of the best reviews of his acting career for The Way Back, Ben Affleck is ready to make his return behind the camera, and he looks to have zeroed in on his next directing job. We are hearing that Affleck has signed on to direct The Big Goodbye for Paramount, an adaptation of the Sam Wasson book “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood.”

“Affleck also would write the script. SNL’s Lorne Michaels pursued the rights to the book and brought it to the studio and will produce along with Affleck.

“The novel tells the behind-the-scenes story of the 1974 film noir classic starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. From Roman Polanski’s directing and Robert Towne’s Oscar-winning script to the twist ending that shook filmgoers to their core, Chinatown joined the long list of films to make their mark during the 1970s. Looming over the story of the classic movie is the imminent eclipse of the ’70s filmmaker-friendly studios as they gave way to the corporate Hollywood we know today.”

Idle HE thought #1: Neat idea and a potentially a great emotional movie, but who plays Jack Nicholson? I’ll tell you who plays Nicholson. No one, that’s who. Idle HE thought #2: I thought Roman Polanski was persona non grata these days, even retroactively. It will be a tough casting call for Affleck as whomever he hires to play Polanski may, I’m supposing, have a tough time politically with progressive industry women. At the very least the Polanski actor will get the slant-eye all over town.

I’m sorry but I didn’t watch this two-week-old video (7.27.20) until this afternoon. Recorded 40 damn years ago…Jesus.

If a magically younger Mel Brooks were to somehow make Young Frankenstein for the first time today, he would become a #MeToo pariah — instant Roman Polanski hate vibes. And no distributor would touch the film with a 10-foot pole…”Blucher!”

One, I’ve said over and over that leaping off tall buildings isn’t allowed any more because too many hack directors have done it. (Damien Chazelle is obviously not a hack so I don’t get it.) Two, it’s okay to rescue a character from terrible death at the last instant, but the manner of rescue has to make some kind of spatial sense. If a guy is about to become instant hamburger on the pavement due to falling 50 stories, he can’t be saved at the very last instant (10 or 15 stories before impact) by a woman who wasn’t in the scene to begin with. You have to set this shit up, and then pay it off. And three, you can’t just stop a body falling at 200 mph by hugging them. This is cartoon stuff, Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote.

Wolfgang Petersen‘s Enemy Mine (20th Century Fox, 12.20.85) still ranks as one of the biggest disasters in Hollywood history, or certainly by ’80s standards. It was a parable about brotherhood between enemies, but it basically boiled down to The Defiant Ones in space. A lunkheaded human with a limited emotional range (Dennis Quaid) and a hermaphroditic “Drac” named Jeriba Shiga (Louis Gossett, Jr.) are forced to get along and defend each other against hostiles on a sandy windswept planet, blah blah.

I attended an Enemy Mine all-media screening in Westwood with a friend, and said to her as we began to slowly exit the theatre, “That was a baahllagghhd mooovie!” I conveyed this opinion in the gurgly, rolled-tongue patois of Gossett’s “Jerry” character. Here’s a recording of how I sounded.

From David Friendly‘s 12.30.85 L.A. Times story, titled “One Studio Has Seen The Enemy, And It Is Costly“: “Originally budgeted at about $17 million when the movie received the green light to go into production in 1983, Enemy Mine wound up costing the studio more than $40 million in production and marketing costs. (One insider insists the total price tag is closer to a whopping $48 million.)”

The studio (20th Century Fox) naturally hoped for a big first-weekend opening. The film made only $1.6 million at 703 theaters nationwide. As of Christmas day, it had taken in $2.3 million. When asked exactly how much the movie would have to take in during its theatrical run to make its money back, an executive with Fox replied, ‘It doesn’t really matter because it’s not going to do it.'”

Again, the mp3.

A streaming rental of Enemy Mine costs $3.99.

Joe Rogan around the 51:05 mark [“Joe Rogan Experience,” #1520 w/ Dr. Debra Soh / Aug 5, 2020]:

“We’re living in a very confusing time in terms of the blowback people get [for a dissenting opinion] and in terms of when you are compliant the support that you get …[this is] all influencing the way that people behave. This willingness to go along with that narrative because you’re terrified of being criticized or you’re terrified of being attacked **…this is where we find ourselves.

“This is not the left that I know. This is what’s so strange. I guess I’m old. I’m 52. When I was young, the left was tolerant and open-minded and absolutely committed to freedom of speech. That doesn’t seem to be where we’re at now. We’ve gotten into some really radical place where the left is now. They’ve almost weaponized a lot of left-wing ideological values to combat right-wing values. It’s like they’ve gotten more loony to deal with loony people on the right, and they don’t even realize they’ve become their own enemy.

“When I was a young person the left was always the most tolerant of the groups, and that just doesn’t seem to be the case now. It seems that they’re only tolerant if you follow the ideology that they follow, and if you don’t, there’s no discussion about it. You’re a hateful person and there is this immediate hot take — you HATE. It’s bigotry, etc. There is no room for discussion, for information, no room for actual science, no room for understanding the nuance of psychology and of human beings.

“There are so many of us that are on the left that are so confused now. We feel like we’re people without countries.” HE interjection: Which is why we call ourselves “sensible left centrists.” Back to Rogan: “It’s like, who am I now? I’m not these people who want to defund the police and light the federal buildings on fire so what am I? You have to be that to be left [these days].”

** 95% of today’s film critics think and behave this way when they review a film made by POCs or women, or which deals with wokester values. Some know who and what they are (i.e., straight out of Bertolucci’s The Conformist) and some don’t even realize it.

Posted on 3.5.20: “It would appear that Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz‘s Antebellum is a female-branded revisiting of Twelve Years A Slave by way of H.G. Wells. Successful author Veronica Henley (Janelle Monae) suddenly becomes a slave in the cotton fields after time-travelling back to the Antebellum pre-Civil War South. The trailer tells us, however, that it’s Veronica’s fate “to save us from our past.” So she’s going to overturn slavery in the same way that Rod Taylor lead an Eloi rebellion against the Morlocks? Or lead a Spartacus-like revolt a la Birth of a Nation? Or maybe a little Harriet action? Or transport her plantation pallies back to 2020 and find them jobs in online publishing?”