Month: June 2021

What do Alan Parker‘s Angel Heart and Richard Donner‘s Lethal Weapon have in common, apart from having been released on the same day — 3.6.87? They both advanced what was then a radical new idea in movies — i.e., “the good guy did it.”

“Up until then Hollywood had always portrayed proverbial investigators of criminal activity (a private detective, a big-city detective) as more or less stable and law-abiding, or at least coming from a relatively neutral place when it came to anti-social instincts or behavior. Private detectives Sam Spade and Mickey Spillane had been portrayed as cynical, ethically ambivalent or even semi-sleazy fellows, but they were more or less on the right side of the law. Ditto cops with a badge.

“Then, all of a sudden and on the exact same day, two major Hollywood films said ‘no, not any more…the guy looking into criminal behavior may be just as ruthless or dangerous or hair-trigger violent as your traditional bad guy used to be…things are getting weird out there.'”

I always regarded the late Donald Rumsfeld with a certain detachment mixed with disdain. A Republican hustler, operator, D.C. politician…Gerald Ford‘s Secretary of Defense (’75 to ’77) then George Bush‘s from ’01 to ’06…basically a craggy, cynical, chessboard prick. But I related to Steve Carell‘s version of Rumsfeld in Adam McKay‘s Vice…he was an amiable, recognizable, vulnerable human being. So I’m thinking more about Carell this morning than the Real McCoy…no offense.

Three years ago the Brooklyn wokester lizard known as Glenn Kenny tried to slander me for taking a stab at trying to explain a portion of the screwed-up psychology of Harvey Weinstein.

At the risk of inviting more idiotic hair-trigger derision, allow me to respond to Quentin Tarantino‘s lament about how he wishes he’d had a sit-down talk with Weinstein about his deranged behavior with women, and how he wishes he’d tried to explain that Harvey can’t do this horrific shit and that it’ll “fuck everything up,” etc.

HE to Tarantino: Nothing you could’ve said to Weinstein would’ve gotten through. Sexual assaulters don’t care about practical logic or social strategies. Sexual criminals are primarily driven by deep-seated rage, and nothing you might’ve said to Harvey would have changed the way he felt about himself (ugly, beastly, no attraction factor to speak of) and his primal anger about being repeatedly shut down by women in his teens and (I’m guessing) even his 20s, and how this transferred into an enormous thunderstorm of fury directed not so much at “women” but at God and creation and his lousy-ass luck…about the shitty hand of a cruel and indifferent God and Harvey’s having been dealt the proverbial Cyrano curse but without the Cyrano poetry and wit and heart….all he had was his film-mogul power, and he allowed his rage to run the show…run it right into the ground.

Angsty Loner to Mr. Lonelyhearts: I’m 16, a high-school junior, and miserable. Partly (mostly?) due to the fact that my hormones are raging while my experience with hetero physical intimacy has been, shall we say, limited.

Which doesn’t mean I haven’t emotionally suffered over this or that dashed relationship. I’ve eaten my heart out over…I don’t know, seven or eight girls since the third grade. Maybe more. And none of the objects of my desire have been more than semi-interested, if that. Girls are fickle and flighty and all over the map, and at the end of the day I don’t seem to have what they want. Even temporarily, I mean. Before their mood changes.

So I know a thing or two about unrequited love or lust or, in the best of situations, a combination of the two that is casually, half-assedly or all-too-briefly reciprocated and then forgotten. One of these days or years the real thing will happen, and when it does…I’ll cross that bridge.

My current obsession is blonde and blue-eyed and a little scatterbrained. Or scatter-hearted. She likes me in spurts, and then some other guy moves in. There are three others she’s enamored of. A cute, stocky, chubby-faced jock. A hippie-ish dude with longish hair, Brooks Brothers shirts and mocassins. And a local cop who’s 27 or 28. And then fourth-place me.

I’ve rolled around with blondie on a bed of pine needles near the local reservoir…once. We made out at a party…once. She slapped me repeatedly at another p\arty, which was her way of saying she wanted my attention. We’ve had some fun times. But I’m strictly backup. So what do I do? Is there any path to salvation in this agonizing situation?

Mr. Lonelyhearts to Angsty Loner: I’m sorry but no, there isn’t. It sounds cruel to say this, but you’re just going to have to suffer through this infatuation and then eventually move on.

One reason you’re in fourth place (and not third, second or even first) is that you’re probably radiating weak, squishy vibes. Probably born of low-self-esteem. If you have any moxie you’ll grow out of that but for the time being it’s your cross to bear.

High-school women are reticent as a rule, and they do hold most of the cards, and if they’re not that interested you can’t stop ’em.

The fact that she’s nursing relationships with four guys simultaneously is a red flag, of course. It means she has self-esteem issues of her own.

It won’t kill you to pine for this flighty little blonde. It hurts, of course, but life is a neve-eending stream of hurt and troubles. Get used to it. Pain makes you stronger if you can take it.

Emily Blunt put-on riff: “I am so sorry about earlier…something very weird happened…it was like this rogue trailer…this, uh…desperate, delusional, sad trailer…[which has] no relation to the film that we made…it was like, it was like….how can I say?…it was like the trailer had lost its mind.”

Imnagine working for the Disney marketing and publicity divisions charged with promoting Jungle Cruise (Disney, 7.30)…imagine the desperate, delusional sadness that has overtaken these poor, hard-working people…it would be like…how can I say?…it would be like the marketing and publicity staffers have lost their collective mind, or something along those lines.”

The trailer says it all. The trailer sucks you dry.

There’s an extra layer of anguish and tragedy attached to the 6.24 Surfside condominium building collapse. Right now the official death toll is 16, which apparently leaves 147 residents unaccounted for.

A 6.30 N.Y. Daily News report states that “officials are still trying to confirm whether all of them were actually in the building when half of the structure crumbled [early in the morning on Thursday, 6.24].” What are the odds, honestly, that this or that resident might not have been in the building and is currently alive and well (great!) but has decided not to reveal his/her situation to friends, family or authorities? What are the odds?

Rescue crews are naturally doing all they can to find potential survivors, but they have to move carefully and methodically so as not to cause an air pocket or haven space of some kind to collapse…a haven that a survivor might be still alive inside…if crews move too hastily they might inadvertently cause someone’s death. But of course, they’ve been searching for six days now, and the odds of a survivor hanging on for six days without food or water…well, the odds are narrowing. A National Library of Medicine article states that a person can survive for 8 to 21 days without food and water.

Remember Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center (’06), and the terrible ordeal of Port Authority cop John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena)? In actuality those guys were pulled out of the rubble in less than 24 hours. Imagine being buried for three, four, five days or longer.

“Please join me in continuing to pray for those who lost their lives in this unthinkable tragedy and all those families who are grieving and all of those who are waiting, and waiting, and waiting for news,” said Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

Variety has promoted Angelique Jackson to Senior Entertainment Writer…congrats on a new title and a larger salary. Jackson will continue to write about the film and media business, etc.

A day after the Soderbergh Oscars ended, Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister asked Jackson if the Academy “got it wrong” by handing the Best Actor trophy to The Father‘s Anthony Hopkins. Jackson answered “absolutely,” and then said: “We were all hoping for something that was gonna shake things up, but I don’t think that [the Hopkins win] was in any way what the Oscar producers intended. There was a lot of hope that we were going to end with this very emotional, heartfelt moment…all these things were pointing toward a great, great emotional catharsis. Instead we had this real kind of catastrophic surprise.”

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Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court court has vacated the sexual assault conviction against Bill Cosby on some kind of gobbbledygook technicality, and so the legendary “While You Were Sleeping” scumbag-to-end-all-scumbags, accused by more than 60 women of either sexual assault, rape, drug-facilitated sexual assault, sexual battery, child sexual abuse or sexual misconduct, will soon be a free man.

The state Supreme Court rationale says that “a previous prosecutor’s decision not to charge Cosby, 83, opened the door for him to speak freely in a civil lawsuit against him, and that testimony was key in the comic’s conviction in criminal court.” Repeating: Cosby was persuaded by said prosecutor’s decision not to charge him in a civil lawsuit…that decision led Cosby to speak candidly about this or that aspect of the civil assault charges against him, and this or that candid admission led to a subsequent criminal court conviction,” blah blah.

In short, Cosby convicted himself by blurting out this and that, and it was a certain prosecutor’s fault that he did that.

This is straight out of The Postman Always Rings Twice….calling Hume Cronyn!

Cosby, 83, was found guilty in September 2018 of three counts of aggravated indecent assault, and sentenced to three to ten years in prison. He’s been held all this time in a state prison in Skippack Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The address is 1200 Mokychic Rd, Collegeville, PA 19426.

HE to Tarantino: Groundhog Day wasn’t “a Bill Murray movie.” It was a movie about numbing repetition leading, ironically, to illumination…about spiritual life cycles and Buddhist notions of spiritual gain and advancement…about the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — by way of Kübler-Ross. It’s basically a life-is-hard-but-it-gradually-gets-better movie…a metaphor about spirit and light and seeing through the crap…about “even in a day as long as this, even in a lifetime of endless repetition, there’s still room for possibilities.”

So Murray’s weatherman character, Phil Connors, gradually turning into a more spiritually advanced fellow than he was at the film’s beginning…that wasn’t a cop-out, that was the idea.

Yet another metaphorical female rage film…deadpan humor, platinum blonde hair, nobody gives a shit, “howz that goin’ for you?” Apparently playing upon Kate Beckinsale‘s real-life rep as a man-eater…well, a young-man eater. Directed by Tanya Wexler, the niece of Haskell Wexler.