Day: April 15, 2021

Remember the antiquated, wholly discriminatory term “chubby chaser”? It used to be an okay, to-each-his-own thing but now only a terrible person would even mention the “c” words, especially given the fact that there are no descriptive body types or classifications these days — there is only body positivity, different sizes and strokes, and of course different folks.

I haven’t so much as glanced at a Playboy cover or layout in many years (the last time may have been when Lindsay Lohan was the cover subject) but isn’t nudity still more or less the basic idea when it comes to posing for Playboy? Or has life passed me by? I ask because Hayley Hasselhoff, the plus-sized, history-making model on the cover of German Playboy, was fairly well covered with lingerie when she posed. Hasselhoff says she appeared “tastefully topless.”

Hayley Hasselhoff: “I think it’s very empowering. We’re in 2021 now…we’re in a place in the world where I think it’s all about being able to celebrate your body for you…at a time when we’re all worried about our self-image…it was this revolution for my own self-worth as well.”

Hollywood Elsewhere totally approves of the prospect of Andra Day winning the Best Actress Oscar for her lead performance in The United Sates vs. Billie Holiday. It would be a moment of highly righteous and appropriate satisfaction — a bull’s-eye award, approved by the Movie Godz — in an otherwise lackluster Oscar year.

…for the winners of the Covid Oscars…the flattest, grimmest, most anti-Joe Popcorn, least pizazzy, most who-gives-a-shit? Oscars in Hollywood history.

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Christopher Moltisanti to Tony Soprano: “I’m gonna kill myself? The way you fuckin’ eat you’re gonna have a heart attack by the time you’re 50!”

In actuality James Gandolfini, whose weight ballooned more and more over the years, died of a heart attack in Rome at age 51. Art echoes tragedy and vice versa. Just sayin’…

The TCM Classic Film Festival (Thursday, 5.6 through Sunday, 5.9) is virtual this year. That means no waiting in lines outside the Hollywood Blvd. Chinese with pot-bellied, out-of-towner galumphs dressed in shorts, plaid shirts and sandals with brown socks.

Significant portions will be viewable on HBO Max, but the only film I’m hot to see — a 4K restoration of the full-length They Won’t Believe Me (’47) — is hiding somewhere in the schedule. It’s slated to be shown on Saturday, 5.8… somewhere, somehow.

Do I need to pay to see this glossy old-time noir with Robert bad-to-the-bone Young in the lead role? Fine…show me how. Just don’t play any games. I hate that.

Irving Pichel‘s noir is about a ne’er-do-well rake and gold-digger (Young) and his disloyal hound-dogging in the company of Jane Greer, Rita Johnson and Susan Hayward. A truncated 80-minute version was shown upon a re-release, but TCM is showing the 95-minute version.

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Published in ’65, Fletcher Knebel‘s “Night of Camp David” was a chilling, half-gripping “what if?” thriller about a first-term Senator who comes to believe that President Mark Hollenbach has become a mentally unstable paranoid nutbag and needs to somehow be relieved of his duties.

51 years later Donald Trump was elected president, and right away people were saying that Hollywood should adapt Knebel’s book before reality overtakes fiction.

And then reality did overtake fiction, and Trump…I don’t think I need to re-summarize his presidency but his calamitous four-year-term ended with (a) the needless deaths of tens of thousands due to Covid, (b) the storming of the U.S. Capitol based on the Big Lie about the 2020 election having been rigged, and finally (c) Trump’s second impeachment trial.

If someone had suggested such a scenario to Knebel while he was outlining “The Night of Camp David” in ’63 or ’64, he would have rejected it for being too extreme. Critics and readers would regard such a tale as a deranged farce, he probably would’ve thought — Dr. Strangelove meets psychotic delusion.

It goes without saying that in the world of 2021, a film based on “The Night of Camp David” would be a so-whatter. It would have been a bracing thriller in the mid ’60s and possibly a dark unhinged farce if adapted at the start of the Trump administration, but now? Seriously?

Yes, seriously — THR‘s Borys Kit is reporting that Paul Greengrass (News of the World, Captain Phillips) has cut a deal with Universal to develop and direct Knebel’s novel.

“The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui,” posted on 11.28.16:

In Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove (’64), it is made clear early on that General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) is insane. The basic proof is Ripper’s adamant belief in what he calls a “monstrously conceived” Communist plot to inject fluoride into the U.S. water system.

Those who insist on their own facts are, by any fair measure, detached from reality and therefore short of a 52-card deck. There are other signs of mental instability but surely the key factor must be a commitment to fantasy and imagination over anything else.

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From HE’s John Heard obit, 7.22.17: I knew Heard slightly in the early ’80s. He wasn’t a friend but I was close at the time with Keith Szarabajka (Missing, Marie, A Perfect World, The Dark Knight, Argo) and he was genuinely friendly with Heard and so I kind of absorbed the camaraderie of that. (Szarabajka and I met while working as waiter-busboys at the Spring Street Bar & Grill in the late ’70s.)

I ran into Heard a few times at Cafe Central and The Allstate, another popular actor haunt on West 72nd Street. He had an off-and-on alcohol issue at the time, but he was a good egg and a seriously emotional guy.

In ’82 or thereabouts Heard experienced a momentary attraction to a woman I’d been involved with a few months earlier — i.e., photographer Sonia Moskowitz. He approached her at a bar one night with “you wanna get married?” But when I told him a day or two later that Sonia and I had gone out two or three months earlier, Heard apologized, as if he’d done something improper. “No, no, it’s cool, man…life moves on,” I said, but Heard was all “Jesus, man, I didn’t know…shit, sorry.”

In the spring of ’83 I saw Heard knock it hard and straight in Total Abandon, a courthouse stage drama written by Larry Atlas. Or so I recall. I certainly remember going up to Heard after the matinee ended and saying “Wow, man…that’s a tough role to play twice a day” and him smiling and shrugging and saying “naaah, just a workout.”

Heard’s Vin Makazian, a Newark detective with a gambling-slash-alcohol problem, was one of the most indelible Soprano characters.

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“In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!”

I know this a familiar Woody Allen riff, but it hit me this morning that aside from the remarkable digital FX in David Fincher’s 2008 Oscar-nominated epic, Allen’s summary delivers everything a viewer could hope to get, philosophically and substantively and in roughly 40 seconds, from sitting through this 166-minute-long saga about Brad Pitt de-aging his way through a long and colorful journey of a life. I’m not saying I dislike Button — I certainly respected it on technical grounds — but I did glance at my watch three or four times. And I’ve never re-watched it. I’m sorry but I haven’t.

For reasons I couldn’t fathom at first (and which I didn’t dare mention a year ago for fear of #MeToo condemnation), I was consumed by a primal dislike for the name of Margot Robbie‘s character in Jay Roach‘s Bombshell — i.e., Kayla Pospisil.

To me, Pospisil sounded like the name of an exotic South American marsupial.

If her name had been Poppins or Popinjay, fine. Or Passel or Possible (a lascivious tease name). But pronunciation-wise, Pospisil was too strenuous. It certainly stood out, and in my mind sounded pretentious and showoffy. I took an instant dislike to it, and tried hard not to think about it one way or the other.

Pospisil is a Czech name that derives from the word “pospisit,” which means “to be in a hurry.” It’s also a Midwestern name. Ancestry.com reports that “the Pospisil family name was found in the USA between 1880 and 1920, and that the most Pospisil families were found in the USA in 1920. In 1880 there were 8 Pospisil families living in Wisconsin. This was about 53% of all the recorded Pospisil’s in the USA.”

Any other movie-character names that struck anyone as instantly bothersome?