A half-hour ago I fell asleep at the local diner (i.e., Orem’s). Sitting up, head resting on my chest. Like Tom Cruise‘s “Vincent” on the L.A. metro car at the end of Collateral. The 50ish, uniformed waitress wasn’t sure due to my darkly tinted, red-framed reading glasses, but she eventually realized I was out like a light. She gently shook my shoulder. “Sir? Sir?” Whunnh? Oh, God…okay, thanks.

It took me over four months to finally watch Emma Cooper‘s The The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes (Netflix). It’s basically a montage of digitally enhanced (and quite beautified) clips of Monroe’s life and times along with an assembly of corresponding audio excerpts from 29 interviews conducted by British author Anthony Summers. And what the doc conveys feels entirely frank and honest and sobering.

Now 79, Summers actually conducted 650 Monroe-related interviews, and they consumed about three years of his life. The ultimate result was Sumnmers’ “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe” (’85).

I wanted to absorb Cooper’s excellent doc, which conveys a sense of documented, matter-of-fact, take-it-or-leave-it truth, before seeing Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix, 9.23), which is allegedly quite the stacked deck with one odious predator after another. The Summers doc, on the other hand, tells us repeatedly that Monroe had a fair number of friends and allies and considerate acquaintances in her life…people who cared for her or at least tried to care for her, and that her existence wasn’t entirely about being victimized.

I suspect that Blonde will be less balanced and ultimately less forthcoming because of the Joyce Carol Oates narrative, which is that despite having became a flush and famous movie star, poor, brutalized Marilyn never caught an emotional break, and was rarely blessed in the way of good fortune or serendipity or the simple luck of the draw, and that her last two or three years on the planet were especially arduous.

Written last March: “Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is crazy and cranked up to 10 or 11 and at times rather extreme and orgiastic and almost Salo-like in one or two respects…it isn’t mad and indulgent and wicked in itself, of course, but it certainly uses a kind of Vincente Minnelli-meets-Fellini Satyricon-type paintbrush. Call it a flamboyant, envelope-pushing, 185-minute version of Singin’ In The Rain with the songs and dancing and smiles taken out. Or a depravity-tinged survival story about Hollywood transitioning from the silent era to sound, although ultimately spanning three decades (mid 1920s through 1952).”

No feature film director would even suggest such a scene (24-second mark), even during the scriptwriting stage. Nor this one. For this is the New Puritanism. Where is Barry Sonnenfeld now? Perhaps we could…okay, not retroactively cancel him but at least admonish him? Wild Wild West is 23 years old, but (a) right is right and (b) it’s never too late to punish.

Two days ago Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported about a special private screening of Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers. The idea, at least in theory, was that Payne’s Christmas-themed, Paul Giamatti-starring dramedy might open later this year. Fleming: “It’s very possible that one of the usual suspects will step up and put this film [into] the awards season race late in the year.”

Not so fast, Mike! You were right about last weekend’s private screening, but Focus features has bought the distribution rights, and they’ve boldly decided to open it during Christmas 2023.

It would seem, in short, that Focus has decided that it’ll be too strenuous to open The Holdovers 14 or 15 weeks hence, and it’ll be somewhat easier (and perhaps less costly) to open it 16 months down the road. Probably because (I’m just guessing here) they’ve decided it’s too subtle and modestly adult and character-driven in a low-key way to compete as a year-end, award-calibre attraction quite so soon. Or something like that.

…but I know who she is. I know her history, beliefs, influences, and to a large extent her personality. She was a Barry Goldwater girl in ’64 so don’t tell me. So there’s absolutely no ambiguity here — Hillary is not a Cardi B. WAP girl, and I don’t believer Chelsea is either. Not really. I think they’re pretending to relate to the WAP thing in order to not seem stuffy or congested or wealthy-white-woman elitist types. I don’t believe a word of this.

The two-year-old Cardi B. meets Megan Thee Stallion WAP video is all about unabashed, non-apologetic sexual arousal in its wettest form. WAP stands for wet-ass pussy. Any semi-mature woman or man who watches this video is going to have…uhm, certain reservations. I’m presuming that a sizable percentage of semi-mature women (or men) who’ve watched this have probably said to themselves “if I think this is sorta kinda shamelessly vulgar, does that make me a bad person? Maybe I should sorta kinda keep this to myself.” I’m presuming, in fact, that outside of your 20something hot-to-trot hormonals, people of all stripes and ages have had this reaction.

Hillary is a flesh-and-blood human with feelings and memories of her youth and all the rest, but she’s not a WAP woman, and she never will be.

Dying of cringe…..Even Megan Thee Stallion looks deeply uncomfortable lmao 😵‍💫 pic.twitter.com/rKy4io9vY8

— The Vanguard (@vanguard_pod) September 11, 2022