Month: February 2022

Herewith an unverified and highly suspicious copy of a statement allegedly prepared or first-drafted by CNN honcho Jeff Zucker…prepared but never released:

“For 20 years I have been closely allied with Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vp and chief marketing officer and one of the highest-ranking leaders of the network, totally involved in all major business and communications decisions. Anyway we were CNN colleagues and allies for a long time, and at a certain point and with both of us divorced we added physical intimacy to the mix. And to that I say two things — ‘big fucking deal’ and ‘what’s it to ya?’

“Seriously, it’s really none of your damn business. I can use the high, hard option to consecrate any relationship with any consenting and unattached adult on the face of the planet, inside or outside of the company, and in a perfect world CNN stockholders would have nothing to say about this. Private boning is not an activity for public sharing or examination.

“It used to be just Allison and I, thick as thieves, conferring about everything. And then there was suddenly a third presence — i.e., Mr. Happy.

I shouldn’t have to state the obvious, but I’ll say it anyway. Mr. Happy had nothing to say about CNN strategies and administrative policies. He has his own agenda, an agenda that has zip to do with the fortunes or visions of CNN or the satisfaction levels of the viewing audience, and so I, Jeff Zucker, decided to keep his presence on the down-low.

“What difference could this make to viewers or shareholders? Power couples, married or not, have long indulged in sexual affairs to fortify and solidify their power within a given company or situation, and I mean for centuries. We were collaborators and mutual consultants for years, and then we added heavy breathing to our activities. BIG FUCKING DEAL.”

Whatever the validity of this alleged statement, Zucker has resigned from CNN because of the Mr. Happy factor.

I promise to promptly sink into the ooze of Hulu’s Pam & Tommy. Sometime later today, I mean. Fake boobs, a prosthetic schlong, etc. In the meantime a friend writes…

“I just watched the first 3 episodes of Pam & Tommy. In episode 2, Tommy talks to his dick. No bullshit. It’s surreal. Some kind of animatronic puppet. But 8 episodes to tell THIS story?”

The Washington Redskins, an NFL football team with a racist moniker that had been offending Native Americans since the mid 1930s, has now been officially re-branded as the Washington Commanders. News stories in the Washington Post and London’s Daily Mail are acknowledging the discredited Redskins history right upfront, but a 2.2 N.Y. Times report by Ken Belson doesn’t — the word Redskins is absent and unmentionable until paragraph #17. This tells you how adamant the woke doctrine is inside the Times newsroom.

Relatively inexpensive, corporate-brand pizza sells the world over. Ordered yesterday in Moscow by Gleb, Tatiana’s 22 year old son.

I’m 100% dead certain that Whoopi Goldberg has heard the 1930s and ‘40s Third Reich notion that Nazis were building a “master race,” and that they regarded Jews as an inferior or untrustworthy tribe, and therefore the Holocaust was driven by racial hate. Whoopi has certainly absorbed this basic history lesson — who hasn’t? She therefore screwed up when she said otherwise on The View. I’n filing this under the heading of “an error of articulation,” but in today’s culture you have to be punished when you say the wrong thing.

So if King Kong had a son, why was the son so much smaller, and why did he have a light gray (silverback) coat? And where was the mother, by the way? Why did the son behave like a lovable organ-grinder monkey? It makes no sense that dad would be the scariest, growliest, baddest motherfucker on Skull Island and his son would behave a little bit like Stan Laurel.

And why oh why did screenwriter Ruth Rose drown the poor guy at the end? Why wouldn’t he grab hold of a floating tree trunk and stay with Robert Armstrong, Helen Mack and Frank Reicher (Cpt, Englehorn) and maybe go with them back to New York City and live a nice, secure life in the Bronx zoo?

I’ve always hated Son of Kong for this cruelty — not just drowning this (relatively) little guy but making a fucking joke out of it by having him hold his nose just before his head slips beneath the waves. They went for a snide laugh as this poor, good-natured beast was breathing his last!

Chris Petit‘s Radio On (’79) may be the most lethargic and downish “cruising the motorway while listening to cool music” film ever made. Nothing “happens,” it goes nowhere, and the energy levels are almost nonexistent. And yet it captures something, although I know not what. It gets into your head and somehow sticks to your ribs.

Martin Schaefer‘s black-and-white cinematography captures what it felt like to be all listless and bummed out in England 42 or 43 years ago. Bummed verging on catatonic, I mean. It captures what it felt like be a sullen, morose, borderline nihilistic, soft-spoken hipster with a cutting edge flat-top haircut (fuck you!), tooling around and listening to all the late ’70s cool groups — Police, Devo, Kraftwerk, Spandau Ballet, Dire Straits, Cheap Trick, The Rumour, The Clash — on the car radio as you were going nowhere in the rain, thinking nothing and barely awake…just plotzing in the driver’s seat, nodding out, dreaming about possibly scoring some heroin.

A friend and I were discussing the strength of Academy-voter enthusiasm for Nicole Kidman‘s performance in Being The Ricardos.

I honestly like and respect her Lucille Ball as far as it goes, but I’m not getting the Best Actress fervor. Put it this way: I admired her in Being The Ricardos, but I like Lucille Ball‘s performances in Five Came Back or Too Many Girls a bit more.

We all know what the Nicole narrative was before everyone saw Being The Ricardos. “She’s wrong for the part, doesn’t look like Lucy, they should have hired Debra Messing,” etc. Then it opened and everyone said “oh, Nicole’s better than we expected…not bad!” And then somehow that got turned into Best Actress Oscar heat.

Kidman’s Lucy is satisfactory but is it Oscar-level good? She’s fine but it’s almost laughable to even compare her Lucy performance to Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers.

While Jordan Ruimy also approves of Kidman’s Lucy performance, he claims it isn’t as good as she was in To Die For, Birth, The Hours, The Others, Moulin Rouge, Destroyer, Birthday Girl, Bombshell, The Paperboy, Rabbit Hole, Portrait of a Lady and Dogville.

This led me to wonder what David Thomson, author of “Nicole Kidman” (’08) and arguably her greatest fan, thinks of her work in Being The Ricardos. So I reached out and Thomson replied as follows:

“I agree with Jordan. I think Being the Ricardos is an absurd project that ends up dejected. Whereas the younger Kidman could take silly ventures and make them seem necessary. I don’t think Kidman is turned on by Lucille, whereas we felt she was eating To Die For (among others) alive.”

Alternate Thomson take: “Miraculously Kidman could channel her sexuality into the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf [in The Hours], but she can muster none of that interest in Lucille Ball. I suspect she [had] dreamt of being Woolf but finds Ball a pain in the neck. Just guessing.”

Has Francis Coppola‘s The Conversation ever looked bad? Not to my knowledge. I’ve seen it four or five times, and it’s always looked fine. That said, it might be nice to catch one of the shows at the Nuart. Except I’ve never “liked” the Nuart. It’s shaped like a bowling alley with a too-small screen where the bowling pins would be.

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I’ve said from the beginning that casting of The Offer, the Paramount + series about the making of The Godfather, would be extra difficult because everyone knows the players so well — faces, voices, mannerisms. Each and every performance would have to deliver a masterful impersonation for the film to really work. The new trailer makes it clear this aspect was a bridge too far.

I’ll tell you right now that Dan Fogler portraying Francis Coppola in The Offer…any Fogler casting in anything is a problem as he always seems to play slovenly, dregs-of-the-gene-pool types, but casting him as Coppola is a jape, an insult. For one thing Coppola has a certain voice that Fogler doesn’t even come close to imitating, plus Coppola was a bit stocky but not a fatass.

I knew that the instant I heard Fogler-as-Coppola speak the famous line “I believe in America”…I knew right away that Fogler was the wrong guy to hire.

My second reaction was “good God, what’s happened to poor Giovanni Ribisi?” He’s turned into a beach ball! This is almost as upsetting as the Bridget Fonda thing. If he wanted to bulk up to play Joe Colombo, he could have gone with a fat suit, no?

As for Miles Teller as Godfather producer Albert Ruddy…well, he doesn’t look anything like early ’70s Ruddy, a 40ish Canadian Jew with graying hair. The 34 year-old Teller, who stepped into the role when Armie Hammer was deep-sixed and soon after caused on-set worries when he refused to be vaccinated, has dark, thick hair and seems closer to his early 30s than early 40s.

Matthew Goode as Robert Evans might be okay.

The one possibly hopeful note is that Michel Tolkin is the screenwriter. The director is Dexter Fletcher (Rocketman).

I still say that Darrell Easton’s I Believe in America is the best “making of The Godfather script” I’ve ever read.