Day: February 17, 2023

8:01 pm: I walked out of Ant–Man and the Wasp: Quantumania with approximately 30 minutes left to go. My soul was screaming with boredom. Make that boredom-fueled rage. I felt sick, poisoned.

It’s one of the most corrupt and sickening wastes of time I’ve ever submitted to, and that’s saying something.

I can’t believe that Peyton Reed, the guy behind the original glorious Ant–Man (‘15), has so completely sold his soul to the devil. For it was Reed, a twisted, perverse, black-hearted jackal if there ever was one, who decided to set the whole damn thing in the micro-sized Quantum realm, an “exotic” green-screen George Lucas visual disease land by way of Fantastic Voyage and the Star Wars prequels, complete with dopey exotic monsters amid super-lavish sets and bullshit CG backdrops that obviously cost a shitload.

Reed “did” this movie to me…he created it and suffocated and killed me tonight…his doing, his fault…and he should be hung upside down and dipped in a vat of boiling oil.

I nonetheless feel obliged to praise Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang Bang, the Sam-The-Sham Conqueror of the Kingdom of Self-Loathing. It was good enough to prompt me to imagine him one day playing Macbeth or Othello at the Old Vic.

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Today (2.17.23) is the fourth anniversary of Hollywood Elsewhere’s worst physical injury episode…actually the worst of my entire life. I slipped and fell and bruised the shit out of my rib cage. It happened on Sunday, 2.17.19 in the Sierra Nevada foothills, a 20-minute drive out of Lone Pine. It was my fault for wearing Italian suede lace-ups as I walked down a gentle slope covered by icy, fresh-fallen snow.

When I was nine or ten years old a friend and I had lugged a large boulder to the top of my parents’ backyard garage. (I think we wanted to drop it off and maybe crush something below.) The garage roof was shingled and slightly peaked. I can’t explain what happened precisely, but I somehow managed to fall off the roof and the boulder, insanely, rolled off a few seconds later and landed on my upper thigh. I howled and cried; it hurt like a sonavubitch and left an awful purple bruise. But later that day I was kind of hobbling around; I’d almost forgotten about it by the end of the week.

But the Sierra foothills tragedy dropped me into a pit of hurt and grief for a good four or five weeks. Oxycodone, walking with a cane, wearing a chest-wrap device. Just getting out of bed in the morning was awful.

If some kind of soothsayer or fortune-teller had declared 50 years ago that Stella Stevens and Raquel Welch would die within two days of each other in February 2023, somebody would have said “well, that would be coincidental,” given that both actresses were more or less at their marquee-brand, sex-symbol peak in early ’72. But Welch was a bigger name then, and her legend looms larger now.

I was always respectful of Stevens’ fame, atractiveness and sense of humor, but I never thought she was especially good in anything except Sam Peckinpah‘s The Ballad of Cable Hogue (’70). Film-lore-wise Stevens got lucky three times — Jerry Lewis‘s The Nutty Professor (’63), Cable Hogue and Irwin Allen‘s dreadful The Poseidon Adventure (’72). Otherwise, not so much but then again each and every day she was “Stella Stevens”…a pretty good deal for a few decades.

Roughly seven years ago Stevens moved to a long-term Alzheimer’s care facility in Los Angeles. I didn’t know that and I’m sorry. She passed from Alzheimer’s earlier today at age 84. Hugs and condolences.

“Cognitive Decline,” the guy who’s apparently been pretending to be a drooling old fart coping with personal hygiene issues, has been shown the HE door. He was warned eight or nine times to cease and desist, and refused to abandon his schtick, which basically boiled down to “pay no mind to whatever the topic at hand is…what matters are personal issues known to persons who are residing in an assisted living facility.” Never again will an HE commenter mention adopt such a persona. For mine is the sword that smiteth!

Yesterday trans-allied bully signatories of that two-day-old GLAAD protest letter to the N.Y. Times were basically told by management to pound sand…hah!

The message could be reasonably translated as “individual Times employees are hereby advised that further protests against Times management under the aegis of an outside political agenda org will not end well for them…do not mess with us in this fashion again.”

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