Month: April 2021

There’s almost nothing anyone can say about yesterday’s Daunte Wright shooting in Minneapolis except “here we go again.”

If the fuzz pulls you over for whatever, the dumbest thing you can do is to resist or run. This has always been true in any region, under any circumstance. If you’ve been pulled over, resistance of any kind will end badly…period.

In this instance the 20-year-old Wright, who had been ridiculously pulled over for having an air-freshener or two hanging from his car’s rearview mirror, defied the bulls and drove off when they attempted to cuff him for a past warrant. A cop shot him. Wright succumbed to the wound several blocks later, crashed the car and died. Brilliant! Air fresheners!

Where is it written in the annals of Minnesota police regulations that if a suspect runs you whip out your pistol and shoot him dead? I know that if I say “Wright should have just chilled and cooperated,” Twitter will say I’m a bad person so I’d like to announce here and now that I don’t know what he should’ve done.

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“…in advance of voting makes me want to take a bath with a toaster, as Bill Maher joked the other night” — Sunday (4.11) email from seasoned East Coast Academy member who’s been around.

HE: Pandemic year + no exhibition + wokester mandates = most nothing-level Oscar year of all time. An asterisk year. Nobody gives much of a shit…they just don’t. An era committed to cultural-political change by way of instructional Red Guard this-way-or-the-highway-isms boils down to “do you wanna be cancelled? No? Then get with the program.”

goodvibe61 (posted late Sunday night): “I think at the end of the day, many people feel badly when the film that’s going to win and does win is a film that you just don’t care that much about. And I think that’s the deal here.

“And like most years I don’t think Wells is alone with this idea. Yes, he’s repeatedly said it’s a fine film that he respects very much. But is it a film that he truly loves, and will pull out the Criterion repeatedly to watch? Will he even OWN the Criterion, let alone desire to play it? Probably not.

“I watched Nomadland once, and have very little desire to do so again. I could perhaps be talked into seeing it once on a big screen…maybe. It just doesn’t particularly ring my bell. It’s well made. The performances are quite good. It just won’t be a favorite on mine, not by a long shot.

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What does Nomadland want anyway? To dominate the civilized world like Genghis Khan? To color every conversation, influence fashion, colonize third-world territories, etc.?

How about a sequel? Nomadland 2: Final Van Breakdown. Alternate: Nomadland 2: Don’t Call AAA.

I’ve always had a thing for grim and drizzly weather atmospheres. The smell of Sidney Lumet rainfall on vaguely stinky Manhattan streets…no other aroma quite like it in the world. Swallows you right up.

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It somehow erroneously seeped into my head years ago that on-set makeup wasn’t all that flagrant. I had assumed this because for the most part it wasn’t all that visible. Not to my eyes, at least. Wrong assumption.

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“Joni in the room…not outshone, not outclassed, not intimidated in the least, not trying to please. God, I love ‘Coyote‘ — a song allegedly inspired by the attentions of Sam Shepard during the Rolling Thunder Revue. Trying to steal Joni’s chords is nearly impossible because of those maddening alternate and custom tunings. She was doing things in the 1970s that nobody else was on to. I really enjoy those weird chord shapes and progressions, which are so unique. She is an international treasure as a songwriter, guitarist and singer. Hejira is one of the finest albums ever recorded.”

— a clip from “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese,” which opened on 6.12.19 and quickly became known as a doc partially diminished by pointless play-acting bullshit.

Last night Bowen Yang played the Titanic iceberg in a surreal interview sequence with Weekend Update‘s Colin Jost. Essentially a riff on social-media egotism and 21st Century delusions of grandeur, it was, is and always will be one of the funniest, most brilliant routines performed on Saturday Night Live this century….hell, ever. Yang, 30, has been authentically touched by the right kind of madness.

Not to mention those two Carey Mulligan routines that actually worked — irritable bowel syndrome and the 19th Century seaside lesbian romance parody (which translated, whether SNL intended it or not, into a little bit of a “tough shit, Winslet…too little and too late!”).

This Adobe Photoshop ad was created eight months ago, but I didn’t see it until this evening. Somebody said last year that it’s 99% Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere, and maybe 1% Photoshop. And I don’t care. Fucking brilliant.

I’ve been grappling with misgivings…call them mildly conflicted feelings…ever since Carey Mulligan married Mumford & Sons lead singer Marcus Mumford in April 2012. Because somehow it didn’t seem right in a Hollywood-fairy-tale, all-things-being-equal sense that the slender and fetching Mulligan had married a guy with a beefy, moose-like appearance.

Lo and behold, during Mulligan’s opening monologue on Saturday Night Live this evening Mumford made a surprise appearance, standing up in the audience and greeting her and trying to wedge a song into the proceedings. And the guy was something like 30 or even 40 pounds thinner than he’s appeared in photos over the years. Hats off & champagne toast to Mumford for doing the hard grueling work. All is well and good. HE stamp of approval.

Bear-like Mumford, slim Mulligan a few years ago.

Ditto.

I know Nomadland will almost certainly win the Best Picture Oscar. I have no problem with this as I know (along with everyone else) it’s a first-rate, Grapes of Wrath-like film, despite the inscrutable WTF ending and the outdoor bucket-shitting.

But it depresses me nonetheless, and I can’t even explain why. All I know is, I want a movie that doesn’t feature bucket-shitting to win the big prize…inane as that sounds. And I’m all gloomed out about what will probably happen despite what my preference may be.

In my mind, Nomadland helmer Chloe Zhao winning the big DGA prize tonight doesn’t mean that much as she was always going to win this…always. She had to. The Woke playbook (a woman of color, 2nd Asian director to win after last year’s Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite triumph) demanded it. Ditto the Best Director Oscar.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson: “There was never any suspicion that Chloé Zhao would not win the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement for Direction of a Theatrical Feature Film for Nomadland. The Golden Globe, Critics Choice, and PGA winning film now heads to Sunday’s BAFTA Awards with seven chances to win again, followed by Oscar voting from April 15-20.

“Zhao is the second woman to win the DGA award (after Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker) and the first Asian woman.

“The PGA and DGA wins for Nomadland give it a clear lead in the race for Best Picture and Director”…you’re killing me, Anne!

“Overwhelmingly, the DGA winner wins the Best Director Oscar. Only eight times in 72 years has that not happened. And more often than not — 50 times — the DGA winner’s movie also wins Best Picture.” Aagghhh!

..this railroad-car-demolition shot appears in. The make of the cars indicates early to mid ’70s.

They don’t do stunts like this anymore pic.twitter.com/XkXqI9RCS0

— Will Sloan (@WillSloanEsq) April 10, 2021

Tatiana Siegel‘s THR piece about producer Scott Rudin is basically an evergreen, as Rudin’s sometimes brutal relations with office staffers has been a familiar industry legend since forever. All Siegel has basically done is freshen it up with new quotes, the smashed Apple computer and the flying potato.

Call me fucked up but I’ve somehow always been able to tolerate brutal bosses. A friend says this is because I had a brutal dad. I personally believe that (a) life is hard and demanding, (b) the kitchen is often hot, and (c) the only way to go in a tough business is to be humane, of course, and turn the other cheek and forgive whenever possible, but at the same time to always try harder and think faster and especially work weekends.

No, this is not an excuse for brutality, and I’ve no comment on Rudin’s reported behavior with office underlings except to say it’s highly unfortunate. But he’s always been a straight-shooter with me. (And yes, that includes acrimonious exchanges.) I don’t like getting yelled at, but I accept that it happens when the pressure is on, which is almost always.

An excerpt from Richard Rushfield‘s latest Ankler, titled “Mr. Potatohead”…