Month: June 2022

…that there are accomplished, seemingly intelligent film obsessives who are actually persuaded that in Alexander Payne’s Election, Matthew Broderick’s high-school teacher is the villain and Reese Witherspoon’s Tracey Flick is…what, driven and misunderstood but essentially a decent soul?

Broderick’s character is a more-or-less moral fellow with weaknesses (extra-marital lust, loathing for Tracey Flick types, not smart enough to destroy that ballot instead of toss it into a waste basket). But Flick is Richard Nixon, for God’s sake. I’ve known screwed-down, hissy-fit Tracey Flick types all my life…’nuff said.

“Determined Little Sociopath,” Posted on 9.20.17: What was it about Election, exactly, that turned so many people off? Alexander Payne‘s brilliant, perfectly shaped black comedy cost $25 million (just shy of $37 million in 2017 dollars) to make, and it only earned a lousy $14.9 million (or nearly $22 million by today’s calculator). Something in this film irritated a large swath of the public, obviously, but what in particular? The reviews couldn’t have been better, but outside of some modest action in the cities Joe and Jane Popcorn just wouldn’t go.

I’ve long suspected that on some deep-seated level Jane didn’t care for the demonizing of Reese Witherspoon‘s Tracy Flick, who always struck me as a female Richard Nixon type — resentful, craven.

The irony, of course, is that Witherspoon will probably never luck into a role as good again. It enabled her to give her very best performance. Certainly her most memorable, in part because she wasn’t “acting” — Tracy Flick is inside Witherspoon as surely as Tom Dunson and Ethan Edwards were inside John Wayne. Tracy Flick was lightning in a bottle, and that stuff doesn’t grow on trees. Criterion’s Election Bluray will pop on 12.12.17.

Posted on 3.21.20, just as Covid-19 was manifesting big-time and pandemic consciousness was generating widespread depression: If it’s all the same Hollywood Elsewhere would like to move to Tahiti for two or three months, just for the privilege of walking around without a mask or surgical gloves. To the best of my knowledge only one native — French Polynesian politician Maina Sage — has been infected, and that it’s pretty much a clean-slate territory. Imagine the joy of just living without the terror.

The coronavirus claimed another 793 people today in northern Italy, including 546 deaths in the Lombardy epicenter. That country’s total death roster now stands at 4,825. The worldwide tally is 11,000, according to data collected by the Johns Hopkins University in the United States. More than 277,000 people have been infected, while some 88,000 have recovered.

From Nicholas Kristof’s N.Y. Times column, “The Best-Case Outcome for the Coronavirus, and the Worst,” posted on 3.20: “Dr. Neil M. Ferguson, a British epidemiologist who is regarded as one of the best disease modelers in the world, produced a sophisticated model with a worst case of 2.2 million deaths in the United States.

“I asked Ferguson for his best case. ‘About 1.1 million deaths,’ he said.

“When that’s a best-case scenario, it’s difficult to feel optimistic.”

Posted on Friday, 6.24: As it turned out Neil Ferguson was almost exactly on the money. The current tally of U.S. coronavirus deaths is 1,040,236, of which roughly 80% represented the elderly and the obese, and another portion the too-dumb-to-get-vaccinated crowd.

Presenting five fine fellows who once lived at 948 14th Street in Santa Monica. The orchestrator is the illustrious Ed Roach (far left), longtime Beach Boys photographer. Two possibilities: (1) Pic used to be in color but has faded to pink or (2) Ed shot it in black-and-white and decided to pink it up.

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The Victorian home of the late Pauline Kael, located on a grand hill in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The place is quite huge — not quite the size of Cecil B. DeMille’s Los Feliz mansion, but in that general ballpark or so it seemed — and the sloping grounds are well-groomed and shrouded with many trees, and surrounded by a black iron fence. Most critics and columnists live in modest spartan abodes. But what is life without exceptions?

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I am Rosemary, the infant is what’s become of a once-noble tradition of liberalism and a concurrent personification of the present-tense lunatic left, the “hail Satan” enthusiasts are wokester converts, etc.

Seriously…that’s me right there…dropping the knife on the floor, collapsing into a chair and wailing “oh God!!!”

Otessa Moshfegh‘s Brad Pitt profile in the new GQ (“Brad Pitt’s Wildest Dreams“) is my idea of first-rate. Perceptive, well sculpted, pocket-drop prose, satisfactory, etc.

But the photos by Elizaveta Porodina convey…I don’t know what the hell they convey. Some kind of late David Bowie persona with hints or echoes of the Thin White Duke, and perhaps blended with an older version of Helmut Berger in Visconti’s The Damned.

Pitt’s thinking about the photos, I’m guessing, is something along the lines of “you have to experiment and try for something else…I can’t just be Cliff in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood for the rest of my life…that’s lazy…let’s try this Siegfried and Roy meets ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ thing on for size and see where it takes us.”

The article is an early promotional salvo for David Leitch‘s Bullet Train (Sony, 8.5), an ultra-violent cartoon aboard a Japanese bullet train travelling from Tokyo to Kyoto. To go by the trailers, pic is seemingly aimed at the ADD yokels who didn’t like Watcher. Pitt plays a “seasoned but unlucky” assassin named Ladybug.

The Tokyo-Kyoto trip itself takes around 160 minutes minutes; the film lasts 153 minutes.

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One-third of the Joe and Jane Popcorn crowd doesn’t like Watcher? Not the movie’s fault in the slightest — it’s their problem.

HE approves of this unofficial Watcher poster from Chloe Okuno…grade-A, haunting in exactly the right way & summoning the right Maika Monroe mood, etc.

DataLounge, the greatest, funniest and most nourishing gay gossip site on the entire planet, is 27 years old, and glory hallelujah.

I don’t know how large the readership is, but I love that DL is part of the conversation, and especially that the commenters don’t filter themselves. Because when it comes to judging or challenging sacred-cow narratives in the universe of woke (yes!), they’re protected by their identity.

Straight white guys have to phrase carefully and watch their backs, but gay guys (especially under the cloak of DL anonymity) don’t give a toss.

Read their recent Bradley Cooper comments…merciless here and there. And their remarks about Brad Pitt‘s new GQ cover, etc.

6.22 thread titled “Congratulations to all the trannies out there for ruining everything for us” — “You took our organizations. You took our pride festivals. You took our progress and reversed it. Now the right wing is coming after us because you had to use women’s restrooms and go after little boys with your puberty blockers. We are eternally grateful.”

6.22 thread titled “When did we decide that the word ‘progressive’ is synonymous with ‘insane?’”

“It used to be that progressives would champion causes like women’s suffrage, civil rights, ending discrimination against racial minorities and gays,

enacting laws to protect women and children against abuse.

“But today, it seems like the only things progressives care about are these psychotic, whacked out initiatives like designer pronouns, allowing transvestites into women’s restrooms, and transitioning little boys into little girls.

“What happened?

“So if you’re a man who wants to be a woman, you can take hormones, get breast implants, and have an operation to mangle your penis, and then you get to forcibly shame everyone else into pretending that you’re a woman?

“If you’re a dumb teenager who wants to feel special, you can adopt some stupid pronouns and then forcibly shame everyone else into pretending your invented gender is real?

“How is this progress?”

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The murmuring pines and the hemlocks / Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight / Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic.

This morning I drove over to inspect a Wilton rental that’s up for grabs. A friend is looking to possibly move here. The current tenant is in the process of moving out, but with a fresh paint job, some posters, plants and lamps and some nice furniture and whatnot it’ll be a good place to live, not to mention the abundant greenery on all sides. Good for pets.

The six-year-old marriage between Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall is said to be kaput. The union may have provided emotional comfort to Murdoch for a certain period of time and perhaps even to Hall, but we all understood from the get-go that this was a transactional arrangement first and foremost, based on some sort of ironclad agreement that if it didn’t work out Hall would walk away flush. Nothing lasts forever including human beings. Six years is six years. Tomorrow is another day.

They come out of nowhere…films you never felt much enthusiasm for, but then one day you suddenly want to give them another shot. And then you do, and you discover that (a) they’re just as dispiriting as you remember or (b) they play somewhat better than you expected.

For me, Anthony Minghella‘s Breaking and Entering (’06) is one of those films. Or it became one, I should say, two or three hours ago.

If Minghella were with us today, would he be a wokester? Or a contrarian like myself — an “East Berliner”?

One reason I’d like to re-watch this film is because there are no decent HD clips or trailers — everything looks soft and fuzzy.

Posted on 12.14.06: “Minghella’s screenplay was inspired by his London studio flat having been repeatedly burgled three or four years ago when he was off making Cold Mountain in Romania. Similarly, an office managed by a married architect (Jude Law) and his partner in London’s half-seedy, half-emerging King’s Cross district is repeatedly broken into and ripped off.

“Law eventually spots the teenaged thief (Rafi Gavron), follows him home, and develops an immediate attraction for his Bosnian-refugee mom (Juliette Binoche). Curiously, despite Law’s well-known tabloid history and the fact that he may have portrayed one too many hounds over the past three or four years (Closer, Alfie), he and Binoche quickly sink into a steamy affair. As soon as it begins you can’t help but think, ‘Here we go again.’

“Minghella is a major believer in volcanic currents between lovers, and it’s clear he feels more of an allegiance to Law’s affair with Binoche than Law’s marriage to a chilly Nordic blonde (Robin Wright Penn) who always seems vaguely pissed about something or other. There are no sex scenes between Law and Penn (naturally, given the nature of most marriages) but the action he shares with Binoche is intense and quite splendid.

“The fact that Law gives her great oral sex seems to underline Minghella’s basic attitude, which is that he’s much more into exotic and uncertain alliances than steady and familiar ones.

“In a 12.14.06 article, N.Y. Times profiler Sarah Lyall says noted that Breaking and Entering is about a “clash of cultures between the rich and the poor, the privileged and the disaffected, that churns beneath the surface of contemporary London.” This is certainly a part of it, but the movie eventually settles into a kind of guilty meditation piece that’s half about Law’s wandering penis and half about class disparity and liberal guilt.

“Some people have been muttering that the film is inconclusive, half-there and indifferently off on its own beam. The biggest complaint is that it has a lousy ending, which it does. But it’s not a ‘bad’ film, by which I mean it’s not, you know, boring.

“The performances by Law, Binoche, Rafi Gavron and Ray Winstone (as a detective) are more than absorbing for the most part, and the atmosphere seems recognizably “real.” But there’s not a lot of residue when you leave the theatre. The film does a fast fade in your head.

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