“This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse. It’s not just that government is heading in a new direction, it’s that the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting. Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them.
“Reaganism was the right response to the stagflation of the 1970s, but Bidenism is a sensible response to a very different set of economic problems. Income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time. It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this. At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.”
Journo pally #1: “A bad omen for Cannes.” Journo pally #2: “France is a shitshow right now. There are protests every day for President Macron to reopen businesses.”
From 3.7 article by the Guardian‘s Kim Willsher: “Disinformation, distrust and rumors that are downright bonkers have turned what should have been a fairly routine operation into an organizational nightmare. Doctors like mine who have been allocated just 10 doses of AstraZeneca a week – all of which have to be administered in a 48-hour time frame — are spending valuable time and energy trying to drum up just 10 willing patients.
“The reasons for French vaccine scepticism have already been well documented: previous health scandals have sown doubts; the French distrust their politicians and Big Pharma and rail against being told what to do. President Macron’s ill-advised trashing of the AstraZeneca vaccine based on erroneous interpretation of the scientific data didn’t help.”
“The European Union’s fight against Covid-19 is stuck in midwinter, even as spring and vaccinations spur hope of improvement in the U.S. and U.K.
“Contagion is rising again in much of the EU, despite months of restrictions on daily life, as more-virulent virus strains outpace vaccinations. A mood of gloom and frustration is settling on the continent, and governments are caught between their promises of progress and the bleak epidemiological reality.”
Once in a great while, a film will deliver a closing-credits theme song that is so off-the-mark that it almost destroys the emotional mood of the film that preceded it.
I’m talking about a film that has carefully and strenuously tried to make the audience feel a particular, hard-won thing, and then a stupid end-credits song comes along and pretty much betrays that effort.
I’m talking about bouncy, upbeat melodies that producers have inserted in order to persuade prospective audiences that the film is some kind of rousing, feel-good experience.
Delbert Mann and Paddy Chayefsky‘s Marty ends happily, of course, but mostly this mid ’50s Brooklyn drama is a serving of downmarket, anti-glam realism. It’s mainly a study of people struggling with ennui, boredom and watching their lives slowly turn to salt. IMHO the “Hey, Marty!” song at the very end is an abomination.
Daryl F. Zanuck‘s The Longest Day, a 178-minute epic about the D-Day invasion of 6.6.44, is a battle-and-adventure flick. The idea was to deliver thrilling feats of daring, valor and aggression on the part of Allied invaders without pelting the audience with too much blood or gore. Saving Private Ryan, it wasn’t. 4,414 Allied soldiers were killed that day; 2,000 died on Omaha Beach alone. Yes, the film ignores the body count while emphasizing the “we can do it!” spirit, but I wouldn’t say it plays like an Allied forces pep rally. Until, that is, the awful Paul Anka song that closes the film (the banal lyrics were sung by the Mitch Miller singers) is heard. I’ve no doubt that veterans of the actual invasion were appalled by it.
I’ve never forgotten how perfectly handled the ending of Titanic was, and how Celine Dion‘s “My Heart Will Go On” (music and lyrics by James Horner and Will Jennings) completely ruined the after-vibe. The closing-credits song should have been an Irish tune of some kind, something that alluded to the thousands of men who built the ship at the Harland and Wolff yard in Belfast. Instead audiences were yanked out of 1912 and thrown into a saccharine pop-music girly realm. Yes, the song was hugely popular and that millions still associate it with Titanic‘s emotional current. But the last 20 minutes of James Cameron‘s film were so much richer and deeper than anything summoned by Dion’s singing…it just makes me sick to think of it.
Other ending-credit songs that damaged or diluted the films they were composed for?
…and I don’t care who knows it. I should care, I realize, as 21st Century music sophistos will probably disapprove. Corporol Robert E. Lee Prewitt: “I know where I stand. A man don’t go his own way, he’s nothin'”.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has made his idiotic bed — now he has to lie in it. Tell me how he gets out of this. I can’t see it happening. He won’t stand for what would probably be a losing impeachment process. He’ll almost certainly walk away.
Friendo: I just watched this remarkable conversation again, taped on 5.11.68. Portions of it sound like it happened last night.
HE: Yeah, “portions.” Brando suggested that everyone should donate 1% of their incomes to MLK’s organization — an idea that melted the second it passed his lips. Like many superstars Brando was living in his own world. Compassionate and kind-hearted and far-sighted but at the same time isolated, pie in the sky, affluent indulgence, Tahiti man.
If a 96 year-old Brando was somehow still with us, he would probably be seen more for his historic failings and foibles than his views on racism, and even if he was respected by Millennials and Zoomers he’d certainly be no fan of cancel culture fanaticism. Marlon might’ve even become a regular HE commenter. His handle could’ve been “budomaha” or “Jor-El.”
The May ‘68 reality was a full worldwide tilt (convulsive Paris protests, Prague spring, spillover from January’s Tet offensive in Vietnam, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash“, LBJ dropping out) and driven by Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, the expanding psychedelic Beatles brand and the exposing of Sexy Sadie, the New Left, the wonderful abundance of cheap pot and LSD, great music and nonstop libertine celebrations. The US was engulfed that year by upheaval, confrontations, anti-war demos, urban riots, SDS, burning cities, RFK’s murder…’68 was the most tumultuous year of the 20th Century.
And what did it all produce in the end? Middle-class horror and a conservative pushback, the election of Nixon and the creation of anti-left domestic operations, the murder of Fred Hampton and a prolonging of the war until the final US withdrawal in April ‘75.
Brando obviously believed in civic consciousness and doing the right thing, but his personal life was mainly (to go by Peter Manso) about whims and urges and appetites. His career had been downswirling since Mutiny on the Bounty. He reignited in ‘72 and ‘73 with The Godfather and Last Tango. Then he went down again. He looked pretty good in ‘68 but by the mid ‘70s he’d became an irrevocably rotund Buddha figure — a prisoner of late-night ice cream raids, driven on some level by self-loathing.
But yes, certainly, of course…sitting on Johnny Carson’s couch that night he sounded clear-eyed and morally righteous and ahead of the curve.
Friendo: And then the assassination of Bobby Kennedy a month later. But what’s interesting here is the noncontroversial Carson drinking the Kool-Aid, which was huge and also a risk for him as the King of Late Night, appealing as he was to his core conservative audience of golf-playing, plaid-pants-wearing milquetoast breadwinners and their Susie Homemaker wives.
It would appear that some 54,000 Facebook habitants visit a “private group” called Dylanology. Semi-regularly, I’m guessing. Just to look at photos and share stories about this or that Dylan song, album, concert. Or pass along some personal observation or anecdote.
Over and over they drop into Dylan Land, and to what end? I really dislike the rabbit-hole vibe in this community of obsessives, and I’m saying this as a serious admirer of Martin Scorsese‘s No Direction Home (’05), which I own a Bluray of. Plus I’ve visited the Big Pink house in Saugerties. Plus I spoke to Dylan once during a Sundance Film Festival party. But enough already.
I hate it when people spell “OK” rather than “okay.” The origin of this 181-year-old idiom (stemming from “Old Kinderhook”, a nickname that came out of the 1840 reelection campaign of President Martin Van Buren, who was born in Kinderhook, N.Y.) means nothing. And don’t mention Soho’s OK Harris gallery, which closed in 2014.
You can say “stop being obstinate and just abide by the majority view,” but answer me this. If there’s no legitimate word spelled “okay” and you can only write “OK,” how then do you spell “okey-dokey” or “okey-doke”? Obviously you can’t prohibit the “okay” spelling while approving “okey-dokey.”
And don’t tell me it’s not a real word because back in ’85 I delivered a hand-written invitation from Pee-Wee Herman to Johnny Carson at the latter’s Point Dume home, and when I rang the bell and explained over the intercom who I was and what I had in my hand, Carson said “well, okey-dokey”. So I win the argument.
From this point on stop using “OK”…ban it from all English language dictionaries. You can still spell ID (nobody spells it “eye-dee“) when you’re alluding to identification. But OK is over and out.
Hold your horses, keep your activities in check, maintain Covid protocols, get your vaccine ID cards and extend the misery until at least May or thereabouts. Better safe than sorry. True herd immunity won’t activate until September.
The 2021 Telluride Film Festival will be a five-day event (Thursday, 9.2 through Monday, 9.6) or one day longer than usual. For four years straight (’16 through ’19) Hollywood Elsewhere stayed at the Mountainside Inn, or the poor man’s Telluride lodging option. (I was also booked there last year until Covid stepped in.)
In ’16, ’17 and ’18 a four-day Mountainside rental was $1100. It went up a hundred or so in ’19, and then last year it jumped to $1400 and change. The Mountainside’s five-day fee for next September’s festival including taxes is $1700, I’ve just learned. And all you get is a modest-sized motel room with a king-sized bed, a bathroom, no closets, a little freezer and a crummy little writing table and a chair.
So I’ve put a deposit on a bigger, roomier place in the woods. It’s a mile or two beyond the Telluride airport (about a 12-minute drive) — two bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, outdoor deck, nice kitchen, etc. $1600 and change but I’ll probably be splitting the expense so I’m only looking at $800-something. A short drive in and out of town every day in not a problem.
Each and every person attending the 2021 Telluride Film Festival (Thursday, 9.2 through Monday, 9.6) needs to carry a coronavirus vaccine certification card (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson). Some kind of laminated driver’s license-sized card with a bar code — one that you can attach to your festival pass. No, such cards haven’t been issued but they clearly need to be to allow certain dormant businesses to reactivate in the summer and fall. Not just film festivals but any business or civic gathering that involves close proximity — indoor restaurants, cinemas, town halls, airlines, convention centers. A 1.18.21 CNBC story reported that “Microsoft, Apple and Google have shown interest in developing vaccine passports or certificates to usher in safer travel.”