Never, ever wear whitesides to an Oval Office meeting. Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries is a good hombre and a skilled operator, but in this instance he should be ashamedofhimself. If you’re sporting whitesides you might as well wear knee-length beach shorts or a silky floral print shirt. We’re speaking of plaster cracks in the once-great wall of traditional civilization here. Certain sartorial instincts should be suppressed at all costs.
I mean, will you look at those light blue, horizontally-striped “happy” socks? Seriously…imagine getting dressed for the Oval Office meeting and actually saying to yourself “yeah, these socks definitely work for a White House conference about the debt ceiling…I’ll put them on.”
If there’s one must-to-avoid in terms of conversational observations about famous human beings, it’s deciding who’s “nice” and “not nice”.
Whenever I hear someone say that a famous person he/she has run into socially is “sooo nice” or “not nice,” I give them a death-ray look that would stop Gort in his tracks. “Nice” is welcome, of course, but overrated. What matters to me is “does a famous person I’m speaking to really mean what they say, or are they some kind of performative orangutan going through the motions?”
The thrust of Beale’s post was “oh, lordy, did Ben Kinsgley behave like an asshole when I interviewed him 30 years ago or what?” As well as “oh my God, Ian McKellen is such a sweetheart….I love the guy!…he’s a gift from God sent to earth to make all of our lives better and sweeter!”
Beale: “Ben Kingsley was interviewed a few days ago in ‘Headliner,’ a regular New York Times arts section feature, where celebrities are asked to name ten of their favorite things. The intro mentions that since Kingsley was knighted years ago, he likes to be referred to as ‘Sir Ben.’
“I interviewed ‘Sir Ben’ back in the ’90s, when I was a staff writer at the New York Daily News. I found him to be an insufferable, pompous bore. He sneered at my questions, treated the film’s publicist like dirt, and refused any posing suggestions from the staff photographer who accompanied me. He has since become my default answer when people ask me what was the worst interview experience I ever had.
“What resulted was the only truly nasty celebrity interview I’ve ever written, in which I compared ‘Sir Ben’ to the alien slime thing in the B-grade sci-fi film Species, which he was supposedly promoting.
“Not long thereafter I interviewed Ian McKellen, who had also been knighted. When I asked him if I should refer to him as ‘Sir Ian,’ he smiled broadly and said, ‘No, just call me Ian.’ He was a sweetheart.”
HE to Beale: I’ve chatted with Mr. McKellen three or four times over the years, and he’s always been a smooth, bright, learned, warm-hearted, unpretentious, cosmopolitan fellow.
There is also, however, room for edgy, prickly fellows like Kingsley from time to time. When you interviewed him he clearly had some kind of disturbance going on inside, perhaps due to the fact that he hated Species (or hated making it or both) and was ashamed to be promoting it.
Okay, he was a dick that day but does he have to be tied to the whipping post for this? Kingsley really has a wonderfully wicked and perverse sense of Don Logan-type madman humor inside, and was also beyond great in Schindler’s List (’93) and (never forget this!) masterful in David Jones‘ Betrayal (’83), not to mention Gandhi (’82) and Bugsy (‘91) and…what was that adaptation of Phillip Roth’s The Dying Animal called?
Why does oddball Ben or Kingsley-the-shithead necessarily have to be condemned? Not every person is conventionally likable in a way that you might prefer. It’s very easy and, I would argue, even somewhat meaningless to behave in a “nice” way. We all have a “nice” face or, if you will, a “nice” mask — it’s just a matter of putting it on.
Don’t get me wrong as I greatly prefer the company of nice, charming, gracious people with a twinkle in their eye, but I also accept or understand that sometimes unusual or interesting or even volcanic people are playing a different kind of game, or at least sometimes they are. They’re not evil — just possessed or mortified or their feelings have been hurt or something in that vein.
If and when I get around to seeing TheLittle Mermaid(no way would I forsake my precious Paris time by seeing it here), I’ll probably feel underwhelmed. I’ve hated nearly every Rob Marshall film ever made (I found Nine half-tolerable), and he’s not going to change and neither am I, and this is just a live–actionrehash anyway.
Are there some hinterland trollers out there who are saying ixnay because of Halle Bailey’s casting as Ariel (i.e., standard Disney-fied diversity)? Yeah, I guess, presumably. But who believes that the shitty Rotten Tomatoesratings (top critics at 47% and ticket-buyers at 56% if you count all of them) are driven by this?
The obviously gifted Bailey seems fairly cool and appealing, but I see no genetic evidence of her being the daughter of Javier Bardem’s KingTriton, a pale-faced Spaniard by way of the deep blue sea. Why didn’t they make this aspect work? They easily could have. Not a huge deal but a deal.
From Michael Herr‘s “Evolution of the Term ‘Hipster’, Pt. III” (excerpt posted eight years ago by Brecht Anderson):
“He haunted the Museum of Modern Art and the few foreign-film revival houses, the very underground Cinema 16 and the triple-feature houses along 42nd Street…he was already careless, even reckless in his appearance, mixing his plaids in wild shirt, jacket, and necktie combinations never seen on the street before, disreputable trousers, way-out accidental hairdos… (Even…in the late 50s, when he was working in Hollywood, the insouciance of his attire was remarked upon by many producers and actors, who thought that he dressed like a beatnik.) He was jazz-mad and went to the clubs, and a Yankees fan so he went to the ball games, all of this in New York in the late ’40s and early ’50s — a smart, spacey, wide-awake kid like that, it’s no wonder he was such a hipster — a ’40s-bred, ’50s-minted, tough-minded, existential, highly evolved classic hipster. His view and his temperament were much closer to Lenny Bruce‘s than to any other director’s, and this was not merely an aspect of his. He had lots of modes and aspects, but Stanley was a hipster all the time.”
