I went searching for Sam Waterston‘s death eyes in this scene from the director’s cut of Oliver Stone‘s Nixon (’95), and in so doing was reminded of how good this Helms-vs.-Nixon confrontation scene really is. Perfect focused and haunted performances from Anthony Hopkins and especially Waterston — God, he’s so much better at conveying chilly remove than caring and compassion.
The eyes have it at the 9:13 mark.
3:30 Pacific Update: Siteground has fully updated HE, but in so doing the five posts I did earlier today have been wiped out. I’ve reposted four of them — a fifth has been lost.
Earlier: Upon the advice of a couple of in-the-know tech guys, I recently decided to switch web hosts. I’ve been with the Austin-based WP Engine (cloud-enabled rather than hard drives) since early ’17, but they more than doubled their monthly fee a couple of years ago.
So after checking around I went with Siteground, a Bulgarian outfit (their main location is in Plovdiv) that has “offices” around the globe. They’re a highly professional company, I’ve since discovered, with English-speaking reps who are polite, knowledgable and technically precise.
The only problem with Siteground (for me) is that they don’t offer phone service — it’s all texting, and all kinds of involved protocols and form fill-ins just to contact their webchat tech reps, and so you have to basically piece things together as you go along and learn the ropes like a beginner.
I’ve been with three or four web hosts since HE launched in August ’04, and every time there’s been a switch I’ve paid a migration fee ($100 or $150) to the new web host and they handled all the tricky stuff.
Not with Siteground — site-owners (or their tech facilitators) have to figure it all out themselves. Siteground offers a small amount of professional assistance for $30, but they certainly don’t hold your hand.
Here’s what happened, and why 10 or 11 days of HE content is missing and why the site is currently stuck on May 12th: I made my first payment to Siteground on May 12th, and all that meant, in my mind, was that I had paid them money to provide web hosting service to Hollywood Elsewhere — nothing more. I thought that the actual transfer of data (words, photos, links) and the web-hosting switchover from WPEngine to Siteground wouldn’t begin until I told Web.com to “point” the contents of Hollywood Elsewhere away from WP Engine’s IP address and toward Siteground’s IP address. (There are also “main server” numbers, blah blah.)
Well, I was mistaken. Or I was told and I didn’t understand. But the transfer of the vast HE library, I now realize, began immediately upon paying them their fee on 5.12. Switching from one IP address to another is a technical necessity, but the heart of the transfer happened (or began) on 5.12.21 and was completed on 5.13.21.
And so when the IP migration “happened” last night, everything I had posted from Thursday, 5.13.21 to Friday, 5.21 (or last night) was suddenly missing. Because Siteground doesn’t make it crystal clear to dumbass clients like myself that upon paying them on 5.12.21 I had to immediately commence with the IP address migration process and the propulgation that results. This is how 10 days worth of material is now missing, and will not be restored until Siteground gets around to re-migrating the whole kit and kaboodle. Which might take 12 or 24 hours…who knows?
From the start of my chats with Siteground I kept saying “I’ve never acted as my own tech administrator before…this is not my area of expertise so please explain everything three times, as you would to a child or a golden retriever…so I don’t make any mistakes.”
Instead, they spoke to me as if I’m a seasoned tech guy who knows how to handle this stuff, and in so doing they allowed me to think I could wait 7 or 10 days before switching the IP address, and so the erasure of several days’ worth of material has happened.
In short, Siteground couldn’t be bothered to spell out the fact that paying them their money meant that the transfer would begin immediately and that I had to do my part (authorizing an IP update or transfer) right away or else. “An IP update is different from a site transfer,” one of their tech guys finally explained this morning. They absolutely did not make that clear to me, and now I’m exhausted from all the grief and stress and back-and-forth.
I wasn’t always a self-employed journalistic brand. In my 20s and 30s I was hustling jobs and leads like everyone else, and so I naturally put a lot of care and effort into maintaining a handsome, well-ordered professional resume. I might have been dying inside, but the better the resume looked, the better I felt.
I stopped thinking about resumes 30 years ago, thank God, but now, thanks to the terror of Soviet Millennial wokester blacklisting, I’m thinking it might be wise to step back into the resume pit. Just to be on the safe side.
The paywall thing (launching soon) will generate income and I expect that award-season ads will happen next fall (as they did earlier this year), but who knows if things will work as planned? As far as maintaining the relatively modest Jeff-and-Tatiana lifestyle is concerned, I mean.
So I’m creating a new resume and will begin to sniff around for opportunities. It’s like being 33 again…love it! Life is a barrel of excitement, never a dull moment, etc.
“Dear Prospective Employer: I’ve been a hotshot Hollywood journalist-columnist-critic for three decades now, and I’m proud and satisfied to say that my professional life has flourished during this period. But lately the jackals have been circling and taking little flesh nips and drawing blood, and so after some reflection and meditation,” etc.
HE to friendo who recommended Robert Connolly‘s The Dry (IFC Films, 5.21): “I have to ask — what was it about The Dry that impressed you so much?
“The Dry rehashes every cliche in the quiet, laid-back whodunit book — a dispassionate outsider stirs up local resentment and all kinds of buried business by investigating a killing. ‘Stay out of this if you know what’s good for ya, mate,’ etc.
“It was a big hit earlier this year in Australia so I figured it had to be at least fairly good. Not that much!
“Remove the parched Australian landscape and the heavy accents, and it’s basically another Hercule Poirot ensemble piece, or an episode of Australian Colombo. Ross McDonald’s Lew Archer books used this basic template over and over.
“It was good to visit again with Bruce Spence, whom I first came to know via George Miller‘s The Road Warrior (’82).
Spoilers: “Those swimming hole flashbacks wouldn’t stop! And that hardbound diary and those photographs hidden behind a boulder? And the old flame (Genevieve O’Reilly) reveals an odd secret at the end? And the father of the dead girl killed her way back when? Boy, there sure is a lot of buried history in the little town of Kiewarra.
How long did the “Bill Gates was a randy, risque fellow because he tried to get going with certain women by using his wealth and power“….how long did that last? Two days, if that?
Robert Connolly‘s The Dry (IFC Films), an Australian mystery thriller, opens today. A huge hit in Australia after opening last January (as of 3.23 it had become the 14th-highest-grossing Australian film of all time) and based on a same-titled 2016 book by Jane Harper, pic costars Eric Bana, Genevieve O’Reilly, Keir O’Donnell and John Polson.
On Oprah Winfrey‘s new doc series “The Me You Can’t See”, Prince Harry says that the death of his late mother, Princess Diana, was essentially caused by unscrupulous media jackals. “The ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took her life,” he claims.
The predatory media certainly did what it could to make Diana’s life anguished and miserable, and shame on them for that. But as I explained in August 2017, the primary cause of her death was Dodi Fayed, the millionaire asshat whom Diana had been involved with for a few weeks.
Excerpt: “I was working at People when Diana began seeing Fayed in July 1997. Two or three of us were asked to make some calls and prepare a file on the guy. Within three or four hours I’d learned that Fayed was an irresponsible playboy, didn’t pay his bills on occasion, lacked vision and maturity and basically wasn’t a man.
I know most HE readers won’t watch this four-month-old Ryan Chapman anti-wokeness video. Yes, Chapman does go on, but he’s obviously well-informed, and he speaks clearly and concisely.
“Wokeness is a run-away idea that’s not under anyone’s control…why do these woke films that keep coming out, and keep crashing and burning, keep getting made?…the woke playbook is always about abolishing something…to use the force of their movement to bend people or society, against their will but in some kind of direction that will end oppression.”
The same analogy was explained last July in a newdiscourses piece called “The Complex Relationship between Marxism and Wokeness,” by James Lindsay.
The only stylistic speed bump is the way Chapman tilts his head rightward from time to time and in so doing gives the camera a vague come-hither look.
According to MSNBC’s Joy Reid in one of her “Absolute Worst” essays, Republican-backed legislation that would ban critical race theory has been introduced in “nearly” a dozen states. Reid says that critical race theory is a “decades old” concept, but in fact it’s a relatively recent education-system additive that explains the history of systemic racism in this country (which no semi-educated, fair-minded person would argue with).
It follows, unfortunately, that CRT has also metastisized into a woke belief system that says white Americans are fundamentally stained and poisoned by their history, and so they need to detoxify themselves by picking up a copy of Robin D’Angelo‘s “White Fragility” and work at cleansing themselves of a shameful past. They also need to absorb and accept the theology of The 1619 Project, which states that racism is the fundamental definer of the American experience.
However enlightened or well-intentioned this kind of re-educational process might be, it is believed in many corners of this country (including the better-educated cities) that critical race theory advances a new form of racism (“bad whitey needs to atone and be strictly schooled”) in order to counter historic racism.
I think we all understand that Average Americans (including liberal parents in big blue cities) are not going to go for this, and that CRT will be flayed as a campaign issue in ’22, you bet. I hate that my own distaste for and discomfort with critical race theory puts me in the same camp as a lot of horrible Republicans, but what can I do? All I can say is, you don’t have to be a crazy Republican to have arguments with CRT.
From a 1.27.21 Bari Weiss column: “Critical race theory is a threat to the most basic foundations of American life, including, but not limited to, equality under the law. It asks us to define ourselves by our immutable characteristics” — i.e., skin color. “It pits us against one another in an endless power struggle. It rejects Enlightenment tools of reason and scientific discovery as tainted. And it undermines our common humanity.
“[It holds that] America was born for the purpose of upholding white supremacy and it remains irredeemably racist. It claims that our founders were not primarily political geniuses but slaveholders who wanted to find a way to hoard their property. And while [last year’s George Floyd] rioters may have gotten a little out of hand, they weren’t wrong to target statues of men like Lincoln.”
I greatly fear the ’22 verdict on this issue from American voters.
I was startled this morning by a snap of 20-year-old Paul Schrader in the spring of ’67, taken “in a Quonset hut at Iowa’s Writers Workshop.” “Startled” because he was nearly the spitting image of my son Dylan at roughly the same age. Almost the same brown eyes, definitely the same nose and hair. It appears to be a photo of a photo, hence the odd Rubber Soul album cover effect.
I’ve almost become accustomed to reading Indiewire articles and reviews for the amusement factor. Because whatever they post, eight times out of ten it’s tainted by skewed or myopic political-cultural attitudes (Indiewire being more or less Woke Central) or extremely supportive, staunchly non-judgmental reviews of any indie film at all with a Sundance imprimatur, a #MeToo, POC or LGBTQ stamp, or a general woke-agenda vibe.
So I was almost startled to read what looked like a tough, declarative, Vanity Fair-sounding piece about how Hollywood is no longer a studio-controlled industry and how the struggling exhibition industry has painted itself into a corner.
Written by Anne Thompson and Dana Harris-Bridson, it’s called “This Was the Week That Movie Studios Finally Lost Control of the Industry.” The ostensible trigger was attending “The Big Screen Is Back”, a Century City gathering intended to promote the the return of theatrical, but the big news was AT&Ts decision to turn tail and abandon the movie distribution business. Last Monday the communications behemoth announced that WarnerMedia (CNN, TBS, TNT, Warner Bros. film and Tv + HBO slash HB0 Max) and Discovery are merging into one, and that head of this new company will be Discovery CEO David Zaslav.
Key paragraph #1: “We have reached a point where ‘major movie studio’ has begun to sound like an anachronism. Certainly, Warners and Universal and Paramount and Disney and Sony remain premier global suppliers of films that generate billions — but the studio bosses occupy a lower position on the power charts because it’s no longer the movie business that drives the industry.”
HE retort: Maybe so, but “the movie business” has always had a river running through it, and that river is know as the Grand Tradition of Movie Catholicism — a current that drives the heart and spirit of this town, at least among people with a soul. The more that unfaithful dilletante product assemblers and marketers ignore this basic spiritual current the less “Hollywood” this community will be.
Key paragraph #2: ‘Slammed by global lockdowns, the biggest theater chains are also the victims of their overspending, debt burdens, real-estate deals, and mostly, denying reality. Before the pandemic, they could have struck better terms with the studios on shorter windows and revenue sharing. They held out too long.”
Prano Bailey-Bond‘s Censor, a British horror film that opened at Sundance ’21, costars Niamh Algar, Nicholas Burns, Vincent Franklin, Sophia La Porta, Adrian Schiller and Michael Smiley. HE is interested as Censor appears to be an exercise in elevator horror. Magnet will release it on 6.11.21.
“After a shocking murder brings the censorship team’s work under public scrutiny, shy, slightly awkward Enid (Algar) bares the brunt of the backlash, receiving disturbing phone calls and hounded by reporters. At the same time she encounters the lecherous film producer Doug Smart (Smiley) who drops by with his latest offering: a Video Nasty from infamous director Frederick North. Enid is struck by the lead actress’ shocking resemblance to her missing sister, and becomes obsessed with the idea that Smart and North hold the key to unlocking her past.
“The retro styling is reminiscent of Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio while the gore and overt weirdness evokes the early work of Ben Wheatley, but Censor has enough personality of its own to avoid slipping too much into pastiche territory.
“Although it’s more of a mood piece than a narrative one, Niamh Algar is excellent in the lead role (having already proved herself one to watch with her supporting turn in Calm with Horses) and there’s yet to be a film not improved by an appearance from Michael Smiley.” — from a 1.30.21 review by Little White Lies‘ Hannah Strong.