Day: June 3, 2022

In a 6.2 article Rolling Stone ‘s Tatiana Siegel refers to Aziz Ansari’s Being Mortal as “scandal-plagued”. But how is it even remotely scandalous if it all began with costar Bill Murray angering a costar or co-worker (possibly Keke Palmer, possibly not) by inappropriately joking around on the set?

The actual scandal is not so much that Mortal has failed to resume filming after several weeks of shutdown, but that things have seemingly stalled over (wait for it) hurt Millennial feelings. Even in the wake of a sincere Murray apology…not enough!

Has this incident become the all-time winner of the Hollywood Mountain-Out-of-a-Molehill award or what? Hasn’t Palmer-or-whomever’s offense-taking compounded this minor situation beyond any concept of rational behavior or sensible scale?

This, of course, is the famous Few Good Men money scene…the climactic Tom Cruise-vs.-Jack Nicholson testimony dispute that many know by heart, because it’s almost perfectly written and beautifully directed by Rob Reiner.

Except the first 40 seconds are atrocious — a phony-ass tease in which Cruise seems to choking or otherwise freezing up…until he suddenly isn’t.

This same device was used in Shan Heder’s CODA and Mimi Leder’s On The Basis of Sex. No more of this — just saying.

Posted after the August ‘21 release of CODA:

Posted this morning (6.3) by Nellie Bowies, columnist for Common Sense with Bari Weiss;

The third paragraph partly alludes to what intrepid HE friendo Sasha Stone has been going through over the last three or four years. Courage is a rare commodity. Respect should be paid.

Andrea Peyser N.Y. Post column, posted last night (6.2):

5:35 am: Not aching or groaning or crying, but definitely unhappy. My cheeks also, partly because the seats are made of confetti’ed cardboard. (Bus seats are much softer and more ass-friendly in Europe.) Thank God for the stretching-and-bathroom stops.

A half-hour ago we were at a rest stop in Great Bend, Pennsylvania, home of two retail stores that are very much part of our current national moment — Pennsylvania Guns & Ammo and Stateline Bullets.

I was standing in a parking lot and thinking about being shot to death by an enraged 19 year old, and I suddenly felt spelled by spooky little white cloud formations in the nearby woods. The smell of grass, trees and asphalt coated with pre-dawn moisture…upvote that.