Day: February 27, 2023

In The Wee Hours

by

Hollywood Elsewhere will be switching domains starting around 1 am eastern or 10 pm Pacific. It may take a few hours to populate — be advised. I’ve been with Siteground for two or three years, but I’m heading back to Liquid Web. Here’s hoping it all goes well.

Update: The domain migration (technically a re-migration) began at 1 am on Tuesday, 2.28. I updated the new nameservers about a half-hour later. So far it all looks fine, although “they” say the full worldwide propulgation can take as long as 24 to 48 hours.

Hate-Watching 3.12 Oscars

by

We all snark-watch or bitch-watch the Oscars. It’s fun to talk back to the screen and tweet about whatever. But for me, the 95th Academy Awards (AMC, 3.12) will be a hate-watch. I’ve been watching the show since I was 9 or thereabouts, and year after year I’ve always felt enthused, touched, occasionally wowed. I adored the Polanski Oscars (75th Academy Awards, 3.23.03). The Best Picture screw-up at the end of the 2017 Oscars was fantastic; ditto Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. But I’m actually dreading the EEAAO Oscars. Truly dreading them.

Fair Play for Soderbergh

by

Two days ago I posted about the nightmarish Covid Oscars (“Never Forget Soderbergh Oscars…Night of Infamy“). Perhaps it isn’t fair to describe that godawful show as a Steven Soderbergh creation. There were two other producers (Jesse Collins, Stacey Sher) and a third guy (Glenn Weiss) who actually directed it.

Soderbergh mainly took the gig as a favor to Sher, but “he wasn’t the micromanaging woke Blofeld you seem to think he was,” says a certain fellow.

“I know Soderbergh was the most famous person of this roster, and hence the easiest target,” he continues. “But it’s not as if he was the sole mastermind. He was actually directing Kimi at the same time, as multi-taskers do.”

Read more

Angel Choir on Runway

by

[Posted twice before — 6.25.11, 3.10.18] You can make fun of the San Francisco touch-down scene in William Wellman‘s The High and the Mighty (’54), and particularly Dimitri Tiomkin‘s choir-of-angels music, etc. You can call the Christian symbolism tacky, I mean, but I went through something similar once in a private plane as we landed in St. Louis under heavy fog, and it looked and felt exactly like this.

It happened in the mid ’70s. I had hitched a ride across the country (Van Nuys to LaGuardia) in a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. The pilot was a Russian pediatrician named Vladimir, and he agreed to take me and a guy named Gary in exchange for gas money. We left in the early morning, stopped for gas and lunch in Tucumcari, New Mexico, bunked in a St. Louis airport motel that night, flew out the next morning and arrived at LGA by the early afternoon. Anyway…

The fog was so thick as we approached St. Louis that the air-traffic-controller had to talk us down. I was sitting shotgun and the air was pure soup, and I quickly fell in love with that soothingly paternal, Southern-accented voice, telling us exactly what to do, staying with us the whole way…”level off, down 500, bank right,” etc. When we finally got close to the landing strip the fog began to dissipate and the landing lights looked just like this, I swear. And the feeling was the same.

Talk about the welcoming glow of Christianity. It was almost enough, during that moment and later that night as I thought about it, to make me think about not being a Bhagavad Gita mystic any more and coming back to the Episcopalian Church.

Return of “Wuhan Lab Leak”

by

Excerpt from “Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says,” a 2.26 N.Y. Times story by Julien E. Barnes, based on a 2.26 Wall Street Journal story by Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel:

“New intelligence has prompted the Energy Department to conclude that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the coronavirus pandemic, though U.S. spy agencies remain divided over the origins of the virus, American officials said on Sunday.

The conclusion was a change from the department’s earlier position that it was undecided on how the virus emerged.

“Some officials briefed on the intelligence said that it was relatively weak and that the Energy Department’s conclusion was made with ‘low confidence,’ suggesting its level of certainty was not high. While the department shared the information with other agencies, none of them changed their conclusions, officials said.

“In addition to the Energy Department, the F.B.I. has also concluded, with moderate confidence, that the virus first emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that worked on coronaviruses.

“Officials would not disclose what the intelligence was. But many of the Energy Department’s insights come from its network of national laboratories, some of which conduct biological research, rather than more traditional forms of intelligence like spy networks or communications intercepts.”

On 6.3.21, The Independent‘s Adam Forrest posted a story titled “Covid: Former MI6 chief says any Wuhan lab leak evidence has likely been destroyed“:

“Any evidence of a lab leak that may have caused the Covid-19 pandemic would likely have been destroyed by Chinese officials by now, a former MI6 chief has claimed.

‘Sir Richard Dearlove said it would now be difficult to prove that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was working on ‘gain of function’ experiments to make a novel coronavirus.

“’We don’t know what’s happened,’ Dearlove said, but ‘a lot of data have probably been destroyed or made to disappear so it’s going to be difficult to prove definitely the case for a ‘gain of function chimera’ being the cause of the pandemic.”

Take A Look At My Life

by

During Tom Cruise‘s 2002 Oscar speech, you could feel the eloquence and sense the confidence. In his physical prime, not quite 40. Planted, steady. He had the same settled, straight-from-the-shoulder quality during his big Producer’s Guild speech (the night before last). But I couldn’t stop looking at his somewhat somewhat smaller eyes, and especially those hints of Victor McLaglen** eye bags and the beginnings of a neck wattle. (He’ll probably want to do something about this stuff before long.)

As long as they take care of themselves, actors who were pretty-boy fetching in their 20s, 30s and early 40s usually develop fascinating faces when they hit their 50s and 60s. Will Cruise use his creased, older-guy features to some interesting dramatic end? Unlikely, based on his preferred choice of material over the last 20 years.

Read more

From A Certain Perspective This Feels Like Hell

by

…and yet from an opposing perspective it all feels fine. You just have to hang on tight to what you know and are sensing all around, and what you deeply believe.

The EEAAO sweep (I’ve actually just typed those words!) is about cultism and political industry upheaval and a dynamic assertion of Millennial and Zoomer power by the under-45s along with various older lapdogs who want to profit by or otherwise get in on the action.

EEAAO worshippers know that the Daniels film is a peculiar head-trip thing and VERY pulpy, Marvel-esque and Millennial-minded and therefore a huge turn-off for tens of millions of over-40s or over-45s (the loathing for this film is, make no mistake, intense) or anyone, really, who’s acquired a semblance of classical taste.

And they don’t care. They love the fantasy tropes and the hip urban minority identity stuff (queer daughter, Asian family, Jamie Lee Curtis‘s crabby neurotic white woman representing the IRS) and they know it’s a film that has confounded, alienated and/or infuriated the majority (including moderate people like myself as well as your generic flyovers).

The whole woke Oscar brand of the last four or five years (i.e., films that are into apologizing for the venality of Anglo Saxon culture or at the very least are seeking to minimize its presence in films while simultaneously branding those who may object to the venalizing of their identity as the carpings of racists…quite the rhetorical imprisonment mechanism you’ve created there, fellas!) means little or nothing to most Average Joes, hence the plummeting viewership.

EEAAO fans know that the viewing public regards industry voters as curious or eccentric or myopic and to a large extent unconcerned about (or even hostile to) anything except their own cultural power — largely an island unto themselves…a largely anti-straight, anti-white-majority (at least in a rhetorical or social-fashion sense), mostly or at least significantly woke. The in-crowd know this is why the show has no across-the-board cachet, and why there’s no general interest in the Branch Davidian aspects of wokeism, and they absolutely love this state of affairs.

They’ve decided that emphasizing their apartness is a way of emphasizing their moral superiority, which they regard as the only path, the only way. [See “the David Ehrlich bubble”.]

Enough of straight, women-suppressing Anglo-Saxon white male dominance, and up with non-white or multicultural or women-favoring, LGBTQ-trans-embracing identity and stories about same, hence the Best Picture celebrations of Moonlight (anti-“Oscars so white”), Nomadland, Parasite, The Shape of Water, CODA, EEAAO. Six movies that — are you listening? — have ridden on the back of the woke tiger and thereby seized the brass ring.

I latched onto the Ukraine situation yesterday (“Shattered Into Shards”) because from a moralistic perspective it’s a no-brainer. Moral clarity = lacking in moral ambiguity. There is similarly no ambiguity in the essence of what EEAAO is deep down. You either (a) understand what it’s saying and what it represents, or (b) you don’t, or (c) you’ve chosen to ignore the obvious because you don’t want to be seen as an anti-woke contrarian because that might challenge or weaken your political standing and therefore your economic security.

This is what motivates so many out there, including (and I mean no offense in mentioning this) HE’s own Bob Strauss, whom I love like a brother. I feel for him and his situation. I feel for everyone in a sense. Except for the Ehrlich bubble fanatics on Twitter. I really hate those guys.

This isn’t a dream. This isn’t a delusion. This is actually happening. What I’ve described here is as real as the behaviors in Emily The Criminal or the Sicily episodes of The White Lotus.