Day: January 13, 2023

“Compassionate Seed Pods,” posted on 10.29.20…people didn’t want to listen then, but things are different now:

Dr. Kauffman: Less than a month ago, West Hollywood was like any other town. People with nothing but problems. Then out of the progressive community came a solution. Seeds drifting through space for years took root in a farmer’s field. From the seeds came pods which had the power to reproduce themselves in the exact likeness of any form of life.
Miles: So that’s how it began…out of the sky.
Dr. Kauffman: Your new bodies are growing in there. They’re taking you over cell for cell, atom for atom. There is no pain. Suddenly, while you’re asleep, they’ll absorb your minds, your memories and you’ll be reborn into a simpler, purer world.
Miles: Where everyone’s a wokester?
Dr. Kauffman: Exactly. If you give in, tomorrow you’ll be one of us, and you can become the new Perri Nemiroff. You’ll be happier. You’ll smile all the time.
Miles: I love films by Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. Will I feel the same tomorrow?
Dr. Kauffman: [shakes his head] There will be no more need for Allen or Polanski or any other artist who hasn’t accepted the new reality.
Miles: No more watching J’Accuse or Rosemary’s Baby or The Pianist? No more Manhattan or Crimes and Misdemeanors?
Dr. Kauffman: You say it as if it were terrible. Believe me, it isn’t. We’ve all seen their films. They never last. They never do. Sardonic wit. Love and desire. Intrigue. Betrayal and facing evil. Without their films, life will be so much simpler, believe me.
Miles: You’re basically saying I need to stop fighting the idea that if I wasn’t a huge fan of Little Women, I’m a sexist who doesn’t get it.
Dr. Kauffman: Miles, if you didn’t like Little Women you are a sexist who doesn’t get it. Don’t you understand that?
Miles: I don’t want any part of it.
Dr. Kauffman: You’re forgetting something, Miles.
Miles: What’s that?
Dr. Kauffman: You have no choice.

An absence of steady stoic cool among male characters in today’s films has been, like, noticed and commented upon.

Critical Drinker: “In functional terms what we’re seeing on-screen aren’t really ‘men’ in the normal sense. They’re basically hyper-active, hyper-emotional, hyper-talkative children forced into men’s bodies.”

Funny excerpt: “In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, director-writer Rian Johnson “understood exactly what he was doing…[with his sculpting of old Luke Skywalker] he performed the most epic character assassination of all time, determined to kill not just the man but his legacy along with him.”

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“Forty-four years have passed since a feature film was last built around Raymond Chander’s harder-than-hardboiled fictional detective Philip Marlowe — a screen absence that seems both unduly long and now, in the wake of Neil Jordan’s Marlowe, not quite long enough.

“A phony, flimsy attempt at vintage noir, the film is adapted not from a Chandler work but ‘The Black-Eyed Blonde,’ an authorized Marlowe entry from 2014, by Irish novelist John Banville. Minus Banville’s own knack for literary ventriloquism, however, this all too evidently European co-production can’t help but feel multiple degrees removed from the real thing, not helped by the shuffling, ungainly presence of a wildly miscast Liam Neeson in shoes once filled by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.” — from Guy Lodge‘s 9.24.22 Variety review.

Four years ago I was persuaded by Late Night that Mindy Kaling, the writer, producer and costar of that feminist-sisterhood comedy, isn’t that funny. I’m therefore uninterested in catching Kaling’s animated Velma, a woke Scooby Doo that began streaming on HBO Max yesterday (1.12). Forbes‘ Paul Tassi, however, has assessed the situation. The show is basically getting slammed by both sides while viewership plummets.

HE to Industry Friendo: “I’ve never found Mindy Kaling the least bit funny. In any context, woke or non-woke. What do her fellow comedy writers think of her material?”

Industry Friendo to HE: “She’s referred to as the ‘anti-Mel Brooks‘ as everything she writes never offends anybody, is safe and ‘woke,’ and isn’t necessarily ever funny. She plays it safe and is more fashionista than comic, and hopelessly entitled. The only risks she takes are in her clothing.”

Presumably everyone understands that the Oscars were created in 1927 and continue to exist to this day in order to promote the joys of moviegoing. They’re essentially about glamour and celebration and not necessarily the praising of lofty cinematic art (to say the least), and right now the film industry and exhibition in particular really need to be promoted because Joe and Jane Popcorn hate the fact that the Oscars and Hollywood films for the most part have totally gone down the woke rabbit hole.

The plummeting Oscar telecast ratings over the last few years translate into one sentiment and one sentiment only: “We hate you for turning into woke assholes.” There’s no escaping this fact. Award-season films are largely despised and/or ignored by a majority of ticket buyers.

And yet despite all this, Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water have connected big-time. If there’s any cultural life or spiritual juice in the moviegoing experience today, it’s because of these two films.

Academy voters know that of the three likeliest Best Picture contenders, only one — Everything Everywhere All At Once — has earned decent theatrical coin ($103.9 million). If it wins Best Picture (which it won’t), it could be said that a populist favorite has prevailed. Except EEAAO is not a populist favorite outside the realm of Millennial and Zoomer taste buds. The fact is that people burdened with a sense of grounded cinematic calculus hate this ludicrous, all-but-impossible-to-follow fantasia by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. It drives them crazy, and the levels of loathing among GenXers and boomers are such that it can’t win. Of this I am dead certain.

This leaves the other two favorites, The Fabelmans and The Banshees of Inisherin, but Academy voters know that both are fairly weak sisters in a theatrical-revenue sense. Banshees has made $24.8 million; The Fablemans currently stands at $17.1 million.

Yes, I know — relatively modest box-office revenues (pre-Oscar) didn’t stop The Hurt Locker from winning six Oscars, but we’re living in desperate, do-or-die times. With the public having turned against Hollywood wokesters and despising their anti-straight-white-guy criteria, the Oscars have no choice but to run in the opposite direction of the infamous Steven Soderbergh Oscar show, which all but killed the brand after airing in April 2021.

The best message that the Oscars can send to the general public, in short, is “yes, of course we get it….we’ve been acting like self-regarding jerks, we’ve woked ourselves to death and you hate us for this…of course you do! We get it! And so, as a way of conveying this understanding, we’re happy to announce that the winner of the 2022 Best Picture Oscar is a film that you guys loved…a well-made, pro-level populist flyboy flick that even the snootiest critics admitted was a rousing, well-produced ride.

For God’s sake, Academy members — wake up by saving the industry and in the process yourselves. Do the right thing by saying the right thing by handing the Best Picture Oscar to one of the two best-loved films of 2022. Don’t go over the cliff like lemmings. Promote, celebrate, embrace.

I’ve never rooted for a movie to win Best Picture as much as Top Gun: Maverick. Probably won’t, but what an awesome moment that’d be at #Oscars. Saved the theater industry, gave it a jolt, unreal production, amazing movie. One of those you feel lucky to have seen in theaters. pic.twitter.com/UpDyPi8g4m

— Jeff D. Lowe (@JeffDLowe) January 6, 2023

I hate modern electric stoves. They’re infuriating. You turn them up the level 8, let’s say, and they go on and off. Red, dark, red, dark…I hate that.

This is why I love gas stoves. You turn them on and they stay on until you turn them off. Old-world technology, yes, but steady, dependable and never quirky. Anthony Bourdain swore by gas stoves; ditto chefs worldwide. Preferring gas stoves does not make me some kind of rightwing wacko. I am a sensible left-centrist.

AOC tries to justify wanting to ban gas stoves despite using a gas stove pic.twitter.com/bTxNtgzdYw

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 12, 2023

Before a few minutes ago I’d never once seen any photos of the normal Marlon Brando around the time of shooting The Godfather. Sans Vito Corleone makeup, I mean. No bulldog jowls, no pencil-thin moustache.

Pics were snapped at the wrap party, which almost certainly happened in Manhattan on the weekend of 7.2.71, 7.3.71 and 7.4.71. (90% of The Godfather was filmed in the New York City region.) Francis Coppola‘s classic gangster flick shot in New York between 3.29.71 (Monday) and 7.2.71 (Friday). Shooting of the Sicily section began in late July and ended on 8.7.71.

Brando had celebrated his 47th birthday on 4.3.71. Vito Corleone was born on one of two dates — 4.29.87 or 12.7.87. The Godfather begins in 1945, when Vito was 58. He died on 7.29.55, at age 68. Not that old.