Month: June 2022

Last weekend’s Elvis screening didn’t happen at the actual Graceland, but at The Guest House at Graceland, a super-sized, Vegas-styled hotel resort-slash-tourist trap located a quarter-mile north of Graceland.

Roughly 40 junketeers plus some TikTok influencers were taken around Memphis and shown Beale Street, the original Sun Records studio, etc. But what about the Lorraine Motel?

After the screening three Presley women — Priscilla, Lisa Marie (former beard wife for Michael Jackson) + Riley Keough — took the stage along with Baz Luhrmann, Austin Butler, Tom Hanks and others and showered the film with praise.

What were they gonna do…say it was not bad or pretty good or an in-and-outer? They’re following the script because the film enhances the Elvis brand…that’s it.

Elvis opens on 6.24. The big question is, how will Millennials and Zoomers react? Because Elvis isn’t as much fun as Bohemian Rhapsody — not with Hanks’ performance as Col. Tom Parker bringing everyone down.

@alecia_davis Priscilla & Lisa Marie Presley on the new Baz Luhrmann biopic, ELVIS. #priscillapresley #lisamarie #austinbutler #tomhanks #elvis #elvismovie ♬ original sound – Alecia Davis

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Let it never be said that Baltimore-based Daily Beast contributor Kyndall Cunningham is any kind of woke pronoun dilletante. She is in fact totally hardcore, and not just in her sentences but her headlines.

The latest example is a Cunningham/Beast story about poor, crazy Ezra Miller, who’s been flaming out for a while now. Here’s the headline:

My first response was “yo…brave Kyndall!…set the standards, blaze a trail!” Would the N.Y. Times, the Washington Post or the Daily Guardian run such a headline? Perhaps not, but this shouldn’t be Kyndall’s concern. For she appears to be the first woke soldier over the wire, our very own Sgt. Alvin York…clenched teeth, fixed bayonet….Ezra Miller is not only non-binary, but he may contain multitudes…he’s a community of souls within a single body…aarrggghhh!

The last time HE considered Cunningham’s history-altering use of woke gender pronouns in a news story was just over two months ago (4.8.22). In an article called “Pronoun Monsters on Maple Street,” I went into cardiac arrest over a Cunningham sentence written for a Daily Beast piece about Miller’s shenanigans.

Here’s the sentence:

HE reaction: I know this sounds abrupt but all of a sudden the pronoun thing — a re-ordering of the English language due to political activism on the part of one-half of 1% of the population, and driven by an attempt to show respect and establish boundaries that will benefit the ambiguous gender-fluid community — strikes me as fundamentally INSANE, or at least in this context.

Say it loud and proud: We cannot and must not use they/them to refer to an individual and a group of people within a single sentence.

Let’s not forget how Cunningham hit the roof last March when Power of the Dog director Jane Campion praised Venus and Serena Williams in the wrong way at the Spirit Awards. Nobody outside of Cunningham’s deranged woke enclave gave a shit, but she sure flipped out!

Posted today (Tuesday, 6.14) by the Washington Post’s Max Boot. I’m wondering if this has been Attorney General Merrick Garland‘s chickenshit plan all along — to do nothing and let the Jan. 6 committee reiterate the obvious case and then step in after it finishes.

Amber Heard won’t or can’t turn the page, and so the pain pageant continues. She wants sympathy and understanding, of course, but is this also a plea to Hollywood casting directors? I’m honestly more interested in seeing Heard in a feature now than I ever was before. She never made an impression as an actress (I didn’t even watch Aquaman), but now she has. Has becoming an ignominious figure upped her thespian game?

Streets on 8.9.22:

Older white guys have to sit there and suck it in and take it. And that’s all. No lamenting, no despairing, no “hey, this isn’t fair.” If you whine you lose your man rights. It’s that simple.

Seasoned commentator David Gergen to PBS Newshour‘s Judy Woodruff on 5.13.22 [during the Cannes Film Festival]: “[The Presidency] requires a keen sense of judgment. And you…I just turned 80. And I can just…I can tell you, you lose your…you lose a step. You’re not as sharp. You are more forgetful. You’re not quite sure where you’re going. You can’t…that’s too old to be in the presidency. I think people like Biden and Trump ought to both step back and leave open the door to younger people.”

Naturally, sucker that I am, I’m thinking about it. $35 — streets on 8.9.22.

Every day I succumb to…I don’t know, two or three minutes of TikTok inanity. Maybe four or five but no more than that. And each time I ask myself “what am I doing?”

I especially hate the riddles (Wes & Alison) and the trick math questions and shit like that. Ditto that general atmosphere of auditioning…”if I do this right and keep it up, I could become a TikTok celebrity or influencer of some kind.”

And here I am, participating in it. There seems to be very little HE-styled skepticism or grouchiness. They’re all looking to be popular, clever, diverting, amusing. Where are the malcontents, the crabby-crabs? Maybe if I keep searching…

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When I heard of the passing of the great Philip Baker Hall, I immediately thought of his Paul Thomas Anderson performances — Hard Eight (originally Sidney), Boogie Nights, Magnolia. And his Richard Nixon performance in Secret Honor. And his fine work in Zodiac, The Insider, The Truman Show. And his scene-stealing turns on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I don’t know why exactly, but the very first performance I thought of was the scrappy, blustery 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt. Hall really knew how to spit it out and argue his head off. A great character actor, and he lived a full life — 90 years and change. Condolences to all concerned.

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Roughly a third of the 104 critics who responded to Jordan Ruimy‘s 2022 halftime poll voted for Everything Everywhere All At Once as the year’s top film — 34 votes, to be exact.

The other nine:
Happening — 25 votes / Haven’t seen it
Crimes of the Future — 24 / HE approved
Top Gun: Maverick — 24 / HE approved
The Northman — 23 / HE respected if not fully approved
After Yang — 21
Vortex — 18
Apollo 10 1/2 — 13 / HE approved
Petite Maman — 13 / Haven’t seen it
The Batman — 12 / HE approved

Posted on 6.6.22: HE’s top seven of ’22: 1. Watcher (BEST), 2. Top Gun: Maverick (HIGHLY EFFICIENT POWER PUNCH), 3. Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood (WARM, AGREEABLE), 4. The Northman (A SLOG THAT I RESPECTED, and what about that Nicole Kidman?), 5. The Batman (HIGHLY RESPECTED, ALL OF A PIECE), 6.Dog (NOT BAD, ANTI-WOKE),
7. Crimes of the Future (DIDN’T ENJOY IT BUT IT’S “GOOD”).

Note: I was about to stream Everything Everywhere All at Once last Friday, but my spirit wilted. I’ll watch it soon. But God, the dread!

Kiss Me Stupid is torture to sit through — the sexual hang-ups and uptight vibe of middle-class guilt, denial and jealousy creates a terrible feeling of imprisonment. The imaginary hamlet of Climax, Nevada is a ghastly sound-stage gulag. A joke is made at Dean Martin‘s expense about the Beatles, but the film totally misses the post-JFK assassination culture of ‘64, the year of the Beatles explosion, by focusing on a pair of lost-in-the-past songwriters (Ray Walston and that bear-like moustachioed guy, Cliff Osmond) who are as terrible as Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar, and on lechy, slurry-voiced Vegas hotshot Martin and poor, treated-like-dirt Kim Novak (i.e. “Polly the pistol”). Nobody wanted to think about Walston as a sexually active fellow.