Month: February 2023

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.”

“These kinds of lab leaks happen all the time,” @ScottGottliebMD says of COVID-19 lab-leak theory. “Even here in the United States, we’ve had mishaps. In China, the last six known outbreaks of SARS-1 have been out of labs.” pic.twitter.com/NX2iWBIdBx

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 30, 2021

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.

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…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.

If it wasn’t certain before, James Hong locked in Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Best Picture win at the Oscars with this part of his speech pic.twitter.com/qsaSPjEVyk

— Karl Delossantos (@karl_delo) February 27, 2023

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.

I thought Sam Elliott might be in trouble a year ago after his blunt comments about Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog, which he basically called inauthentic. but he took his manager’s’ advice and apologized and the problem pretty much went away. As evidenced by Elliott winning Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series for playing Shea Brennan in his 1883.

Just after noon eastern on Sunday, IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich fiddle-faddled with my 2.26 reaction piece to Saturday night’s PGA Awards (Shattered Into Shards“), which sadly made the Best Picture crowning of Everything Everywhere All At Once seem all but inevitable.

I’m not understanding why Ehrlich decided to highlight the paragraph that mentioned Russia’s attempted Ukraine takeover. I was simply alluding to clarity of mind. If you understand the moral dynamic within the Ukraine-vs.-Russian situation, you should be able to divine what an infuriating crock EEAAO is — simple.

Key paragraph: Either you understand that Everything Everywhere All At Once represents not just an aesthetic pestilence but a terrible forced banality…a film that’s a good deal less about verse-jumping and spiritual dreamscapes and a lot more about pulp Marvelism and the relentless drumbeat of identity politics (Asian + queer), or you don’t. Or you do get this and you don’t care, in which case we’re all fucked anyway.

“Love has to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.

“Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy…we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a pack of cards?

“[The answer is] carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, [so] you can be generous about what’s shared — she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake.

“Knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone EVERYTHING IS PAIN. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.”

— Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing, directed by Mike Nichols and costarring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. It opened at the former Plymouth Theatre (now the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre) on 1.5.84.

Frank Rich’s N.Y. Times review, 1.6.84.

I feel so depleted after last night’s Producer’s Guild nightmare. I tried to stay awake for the climactic announcement and failed. I was dreading the likelihood of EEAAO taking the Daryl F. Zanuck award. and I was asking myself, ‘Do I really want to watch the watch the live-death moment?”. Two minutes later I was out like a light. I woke up at 5:45 am, turned on the iPhone…thud.

This is when you get to see who some people really are deep down. The EEAAO fans who are gloating or cackling and taking pleasure in my expressions of sorrow.

From Peter Glenvile‘s Becket (’64)…King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) is bare-chested and kneeling in a rear, cellar-like space of Canterbury cathedral, right next to the tomb of Thomas Becket (Richard Burton). He looks over at four leather-hooded Saxon fellows, who are getting ready to whip the King as part of a ceremony of penance:

HENRY: “Look at them lurking there…gloating.”

Where would the movie realm be right now if Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert had never dreamt and maneuvered their way into a certain A24 orbit that has strangely transformed itself into a Millennial consciousness brand that is darkening many more brows than just my own?

Hard to say but boy, my heart is not only bleeding right now but staining the wood floors and certainly the carpets. And for some reason a lyric from a mediocre Jimmy Webb song is filling my head…”I don’t think that I can take it ‘cause it took so long to bake it, and we’ll never have that recipe again.” The bad guys are winning!

There are few events presently unfolding on the global stage that deliver more in the way of moral clarity than Ukrainians fighting tooth and nail against the rank evil of Vladimir Putin. If you can’t or won’t put aside peripheral matters and grasp which side is with the angels in this conflict, I don’t know what to say to you. Except that a certain moral fiber or awareness is clearly missing deep down — that your sense of humanity is minus an essential component.

Either you understand that Everything Everywhere All At Once represents not just an aesthetic pestilence but a terrible forced banality…a film that’s a good deal less about verse-jumping and spiritual dreamscapes and a lot more about pulp Marvelism and the relentless drumbeat of identity politics (Asian + queer), or you don’t. Or you do get this and you don’t care, in which case we’re all fucked anyway.

We all understand, sadly, that a certain either-or mindset, born of a certain malevolent social-media logic, has settled into award-season consciousness.

Last year at this time a fundamental shift of allegiance among the Academy middle-grounders happened…a moment when it became clear that a weird 1920s western about repressed queer desire and a refusal to bathe and an anthrax murder scenario just couldn’t be the Best Picture standard bearer, and that a generally decent but underwhelming family fable about singing, destiny and deafness had to replace it…my God, what a totally myopic, solitary confinement prison–cell choice that was!

But it happened, sadly, and what were we left with at the end? Nothing…nothing but a feeling of being surrounded and enveloped by mediocre minds (i.e., the degraded identity-politics principles that flooded the delta when SAG became SAG-AFTRA).

And this year and right now, we’re back in that same dank prison cell with a choice between a multiversian IRS audit-meets-queer politics Marvel film that has stymied and suffocated people of taste and perspective in every corner of the globe and certainly among the storied 45-plus community…a choice between a film by the makers of a metaphysical fart movie called Swiss Army Man and a smart, crafty, populist-pleasure machine that saved the film industry’s ass (in the view of no less a personage than Steven Spielberg).

God help us but the SAG-AFTRA philistines have apparently decided to choose, for the fifth time since the 2017 Oscar ceremony, identity politics symbolism over other considerations…again. Moonlight, Parasite, Nomadland, CODA, EEAAO.

Talk about The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Or, you know, anything using the word bitter.

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…holding their Best Picture Oscars and taking a stab at earnest and eloquent, which will almost certainly come out impromptu and awkward. Maybe they’ll mention Swiss Army Man and slip in a reference to flatulence?

Five and 1/3 years ago I passed along a brief personal tale about sexual molestation. It happened in New Orleans when I was 19 and blind drunk. Suffice to say that I woke up in a French Quarter hotel room with a heavy-set 50 year-old dude in New Orleans. That’s as far as I’m going to go, detail-wise, but I’m 99% sure nothing happened. And if it did, I don’t want to think about it.

Yesterday I was having lunch with an ex-girlfriend from 40-odd years ago and her husband, plus a friend of theirs. The three of them were roaring along with conversation at a fairly high speed, and I was trying to jump into the chatter like a 1930s hobo hopping on a freight train, but they were going too fast. Every so often I’d hear a word or a phrase and would try to jump on…”hey, hold on, guys, slow down…I’ve got an observational nugget here! Wait, wait!…okay.”

I began to lose track of time but there I continued to be, running alongside the freight train and starting to feel winded and then a tad despairing.

So eventually I figured, “What the hell…the next observational nugget will have to be a conversation stopper…I won’t even look to precisely add to the topic of the moment…I’ll just drop something into the conversation like a hand grenade.” Hence the drunken New Orleans thing.

All to say I might not have inserted this sordid tale if I could’ve figured some way to jump on the train, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t fast or fleet-of-mind enough.

There’s an anarchist that lives inside me. He takes orders from the rationalist and the humanist, but he has a voice and sometimes gives me great ideas for column topics and is very much the free-thinker, but there are some stories that should probably not be shared during a nice lunch.

Directed and written by Jon “Spiderman” Watts (helmer of Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home and Spider-Man: No Way Home), Wolves is a star-driven (Brad Pitt, George Clooney) urban thriller of some kind. Maybe a little goofy…maybe a stab at clever.

Logline: “Two professional fixers find themselves hired for the same job.” I would be interested anyway because of what it apparently is, but also because I’m a huge fan of the second half (but not the first half!) of No Way Home.

Wolves had been shooting in the New York area for three or four weeks. Clooney and Pitt are also producing. Has anyone read the script? Is it boilerplate or a level or two above? Will Apple release it later this year or what?

Last posted on 12.21.19: “Sometime in the late winter or early spring of ’83 I flew from New York to Los Angeles for a job interview, and during the visit I went out to Universal studios to poke around. I wound up climbing a chain-link fence and walking onto a sound stage where, lo and behold, Scarface was being shot. The huge set contained a portion of Tony Montana‘s Miami mansion — the upstairs office, the red-carpeted foyer and staircase, a portion of the white-painted exterior with royal palm trees outside.

Hanging on a wall near the base of the staircase was a fairly large (at least six or seven feet tall) oil portrait of Al Pacino‘s Tony and Michelle Pfeiffer‘s Elvira Hancock. I’m no authority on oil portraits, but it looked like an absolutely first-rate effort. Someone had taken the time to make it look like a serious artist (one who knew from color and shadow and subtle gradations) had worked on it. In the film the painting is seen for maybe 1.5 seconds, if that.

I’ve long wondered what happened to this grand portrait. Did Brian DePalma or [the late] producer Marty Bregman make off with it? Online you can buy cheap knockoff versions with bullet holes, but the real thing was quite impressive.

The real-deal, full-size portrait presented a somewhat darker image that the one you see here.

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