Month: December 2020

Posted on 1.29.20: Bernie Sanders’ recent poll surges have me worried and thinking something I never thought I’d admit to myself, much less post in this column. I’m deathly afraid of what might happen if the devotional blues, Bernie Bros and under-30s manage to enable Bernie to capture the Democratic nomination. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this but for all his gaffes, droolings, weaknesses and vulnerabilities I want Joe Biden to beat Bernie.

And I really don’t feel much enthusiasm for Joe. Does anyone?

I realize that my favorite guy, Pete Buttigieg, is done, but I’m furious that the race has come down to this. Neither of these geezers has that magic-wandy current. People don’t want a crusty Democratic socialist trying (and almost certainly failing) to push through Medicare For All — they just want a return to sanity and normality. Buttigieg could be that “normal” but he’s been gored so many times by African Americans and the progressive left that it’s a miracle he’s still standing.

I agree with Bernie for the most part. People want change. I would love to see this country turn into Finland. But I’m terrified of what’s happening now.

From “Democrats court doom by backing Bernie Sanders,” a 1./29 USA Today piece by Matt Bennett and Lanae Erickson:

Subhead: “[Sanders’] ideas are toxic outside blue America. He’s never won anything that really matters outside of Vermont, and all the available data shows his brand is a flop in red and purple states.

Excerpt: “Sanders has never won anything that really matters outside of Vermont, and all the available data shows that his ideas are politically toxic. Yet a week before primary voting begins, he is surging in Iowa, New Hampshire and California.

“Democrats now face a monumental choice. Deciding which presidential candidate should go head to head with Donald Trump is the paramount political calculation of our lifetimes.

“In the past, when Sanders has declared himself and his ideas to be ‘winners’ in red and purple areas, it has turned out to be demonstrably false. Democrats must not be fooled by him now.

Plus: “Don’t ignore reality: Democrats need to face facts about Bernie Sanders, his heart attack and his health.”

Text from Santa Barbara friendo: “Hey, cranky Jeff – ghost from Christmas Future here. All is going to be okay. You are loved. You’ve got Tatiana by your side. Count your blessings instead of sheep. To paraphrase good ole Mary Tyler Moore, ‘You’re gonna make it after all.’ Love and Merry Christmas.”

“It’s a moderately diverting sequel. That means it’s also a distinct drop down from the 2017 origin story” — Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips. 59% Metacritic, 70% Rotten Tomatoes

I tried to find a cat-sized Santa hat for Anya, but failed. Tatiana found one online, but it won’t arrive until Monday. Yes, I know — I look like Captain Idiot.

Help! has been out on Bluray for six or seven years, but for some dumb reason you aren’t allowed to stream it as a rental. It’s a moderately bad film — just not worth owning. Someone needs to explain why director Richard Lester insisted on a 1.75 aspect ratio for the Criterion Hard Day’s Night Bluray, but waved nonchalantly at Help! being presented at 1.66:1.

“I realize, looking back, how advanced it was. It was a precursor to the Batman ‘Pow! Bam! Wow!’ on TV…that kind of stuff. But [Richard Lester] never explained it to us. Partly, maybe, because we hadn’t spent a lot of time together between A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and partly because we were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period. Nobody could communicate with us, it was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time. In our own world. It’s like doing nothing most of the time, but still having to rise at 7 am, so we became bored.” — John Lennon. “If you look at pictures of us you can see a lot of red-eyed shots; they were red from the dope we were smoking. And these were those clean-cut boys! Dick Lester knew that very little would get done after lunch. In the afternoon we very seldom got past the first line of the script. We had such hysterics that no one could do anything. It was just that we had a lot of fun…a lot of fun in those days.” — Ringo Starr.

The elegant “Slim” Keith (1917-1990) was in fact quite slim in her 1930s and ’40x heyday; somewhat less so from the mid ’50s onward. Slim was the inspiration for the classic Hawksian woman — sly, bluntly spoken, takes no guff. This shot was apparently snapped in the early ’40s, a year or two into her eight-year marriage to Howard Hawks (’41 to ’49). Slim and Hawks split over infidelity — i.e., his.

Taken outside Lennon’s home in Tittenhurst Park in Ascot, during the recording of “Imagine.”

The appropriate headline is “Wretched Slimy Bedbugs.”

From Matt Taibbi‘s “The Legacy of President Donald Trump,” with a subhead that reads “he was America’s tour guide on its loudest, most exhausting, and longest-ever journey in a circle”:

“It’s an odd sort of coup when the chief plotter has already agreed to surrender power on schedule. ‘Certainly I will, and you know that,’ Trump said, when asked if he would leave the White House on January 20th. My faith in Trump’s sanity is not so absolute that I can’t see him forcing the Secret Service to drag him out by his underpants on that day, but there’s a difference between throwing a media tantrum (Trump is adept at this) and successfully overthrowing the government.

“There was always so much less than met the eye with this story, a simple tale of an arrogant ruling class that first got a deserved comeuppance in the form of maybe the least deserving challenger imaginable. It then spent four years pretending it was beaten by a demonic supervillain instead of an ad-libbing, flatulent salesman with a fourth-grade reading level. The propaganda we had to endure to cover up the embarrassing real story had the unfortunate effect of furthering distrust in both media and government, and therefore (of course) swelling Trump’s numbers. This was yet another of the symbiotic idiocy cycles that have come to so characterize American politics in the Trump age.

“No one will admit it, but Trump was and is a quintessentially American type, and his rise to the presidency [is] one of the all-time American stories. It was[Mark Twain’s] ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County‘ meets Duck Soup meets Scarface, a tall tale saga of how anyone determined enough, and full enough of resentment, greed, and unearned confidence, can make it all the way to the top in this country, armed with nothing but the pure power of bullshit. Would we really want things any other way?

“All of this may have been a miserable confluence of events, but the core truth of the Trump story is that in democracy, we have to accept that anything can happen, even this. It’s part of the deal. More than that, it’s over. Let’s hope we never have to find out that the only thing worse than the circus we just went through is an alternative, where it’s impossible.”

Howard Hawks‘ Only Angels Have Wings (’39) never once gives the audience an establishing master shot of the port town of Barranca, which is supposed to be in Peru. No panning shots, no lingering overheads…nothing. Last night I came upon this photo of Hawks and Cary Grant inspecting a scale model of Barranca. I’ve been watching this film since I was 10 or 11, and I’d never seen this photo until 15 hours ago.

I now have a better idea of how big the combination bar, restaurant and living quarters are (or were imagined to be), and where the airfield was and where headquarters sat in relation to the downtown area and the shipping wharf.

Wiki data: Angels was shot at the old Columbia Ranch lot (411 N Hollywood Way, Burbank, CA 91505). Filming began on 12.19.38 and wrapped on 3.24.39 — 31 days over schedule. This was followed with several weeks of second-unit shooting of aircraft flying in various locations in the western United States. A few re-takes were shot in April with Grant and Victor Kilian (‘Sparks’). Two days of re-shoots with Rita Hayworth were also shot, but were directed by Charles Vidor. Angels opened on 5.10.39.

Fictional Peruvian port town of Barranca.

Jett and his pit bull “Joey” haver been inseparable since ’09 or thereabouts. Joey was slightly freaked when Jett and Cait moved him into the West Orange abode. To me Joey is a beloved nephew, and it pains me to see that his snout and chin area have gone gray. The average pit bull lifespan is 12 to 14 years. Diet, exercise, luck of the draw, etc. Let’s not think about it

No streaming for Pedro Almodovar‘s The Human Voice, a surreal 30-minute short that premiered to excellent reviews at last September’s Venice Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics is insisting that the film will only be shown in theatres…great. But that probably means no bookings until the early summer of ’21 or possibly later.

Critic friendo to HE: “Regarding your 10 Best of All Time list, nothing before the end of WWII? No Lubitsch, Keaton, Welles, McCarey, Hawks? I guess I can understand this, but I’m still surprised.”

HE to critic Friend: One, when you’re restricted to naming 10 films (I actually threw in a second roster, #11 to #20), you have to he hard. Two, the specific criteria I mentioned — films that seem to echo some aspect of today’s culture, or which reflect something about human nature that seems especially pronounced now — leaves out many great or noteworthy films of the ’20s and ’30s. And three, I guess I didn’t want to sound old fogey-ish.

2021 is about to manifest, and you can’t look back too much. Many if not most Millennials regard the ’80s as the somewhat rickety old days, and Zoomers see the ’90s in a similar light. And they both see the ’60s and ’70s (when GenXers like Barack Obama were growing up) as remnants of a dusty, mostly irrelevant past. To them…hell, to some people in their 40s the 1920s and ’30s are like something out of the Paleozoic era.

If someone asked for a Ten Best of the ’20s, ’30s and early ’40s, off the top of my head I would list F.W. Murnau‘s Sunrise, William Wellman‘s The Ox-Bow Incident, Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, Buster Keaton‘s The General, Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, John Huston‘s The Maltese Falcon plus King Kong, The Wizard Of Oz, Bringing Up Baby, Sullivan’s Travels, Casablanca, The Lady Eve, Gunga Din, The Grapes of Wrath, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, John Ford‘s The Informer, Abel Gance‘s Napoleon, Abbott & Costello‘s Hold That Ghost, Leo McCarey‘s Duck Soup, Renoir‘s The Rules of the Game, Battleship Potemkin, All Quiet on the Western Front, James Whale‘s Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, McCarey’s The Awful Truth, Lubitsch‘s Trouble in Paradise plus My Man Godfrey, Que Viva Mexico, Twentieth Century, The Philadelphia Story, Sherlock, Jr., Tod Browning‘s Freaks, I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Shadow of a Doubt, The Public Enemy, Michael Curtiz‘s Robin Hood, Hawks‘ Scarface and Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy, Selznick/Fleming’s Gone With The Wind and Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Lifeboat. What’s that, a little more than 40?

Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (A24, 12.11.20) was recently nudged out of Best Motion Picture, Drama competition at the Golden Globes, and thereby forced to compete in the Best Foreign Language category. The HFPA made this decision because the film, an Arkansas-set drama about a South Korean family trying to survive as subsistence farmers in the mid ’80s, is largely spoken in Korean. And yet the film has some American-speaking costars, including Will Patton as a devout Jesus freak.

In the view of Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Minari getting the elbow has made it into a must=see. “Why is this a good thing?” Thompson asks. “[Because] most Oscar voters have never heard of Minari.”

In this, the most emotionally claustrophobic and soul-suffocating flatline year in over a century, “building buzz and awareness is a challenge,” Thompson notes. “That’s why the Globes controversy may be a boost for Minari, which garnered support from the Gotham Awards and early critics groups (Los Angeles, Boston) for supporting actress Youn Yuh-jung.”

It would be one thing if “most Oscar voters” haven’t seen Minari. Because they’re notoriously lazy, of course, and always will be. And because many are reluctant to wade into what sounds like exotic subject matter. (The title is the name of a kind of Chinese celery and/or Japanese parsley.) But Thompson said “most Oscar voters have never heard” of Chung’s film. To which anyone with half a brain would say “how could that be?”

Minari has been a vaguely buzzy title since it premiered nearly a year ago in Park City, and has certainly been discussed and prodded and kicked around over the last three or four months…c’mon. (I posted my thumbs-up review on 10.30.20.) How could Oscar voters have not at least heard of this worthy little film, which will probably find its ultimate awards payoff at the ’21 Spirit Awards? Are they cows in the field? How hermetic and shut-off could they be?

Here’s Scott Feinberg’s take on what happened with the Minari reclassification.

If I were Kevin Spacey I would fly to Prague and attend to you-know-what. Okay, I’ll say it — upper eye lids, eye bags, neck wattle. Libor Kment at Esthe Plastica (Na Příkopě 1047/17, 110 00 Staré Město, Czechia). Plus a few hundred micro hair plugs as long as he’s over there. Trust me — Prague is a real Christmas-type place to be.

Spacey’s latest Xmas Eve video appears to have been shot in some kind of public park in…you tell me. Southern Florida? Santa Barbara? A bit of traffic noise in the background.

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Orange Plague “must be remembered as the worst, if only for [not signing the Covid relief bill and flying down to Florida to play golf] alone. This has to be a bottom. He must be seen as the worst, and we must run away from him and this type of behavior as fast as we ever collectively as a country before.” — Chris Cuomo during last night’s broadcast.

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CNN: “Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer says he’s been forced into hiding after being harassed and threatened following baseless claims made by President Trump’s legal team and conservative media outlets that his company defrauded Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Coomer is suing the Trump campaign, included Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, for slander.”