“All great black leaders get killed.” — quote from Warren Beatty‘s Bulworth (’98).

As it turns out Beatty’s Senator Jay Bulworth, one of the blackest white politicians who ever served in a fictional feature, gets killed also — shot by an insurance industry villain played by Paul Sorvino.

Bulworth is a Democrat from California and a total liberal establishment guy with all the usual noble sentiments and allegiances (photos of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King on his office wall) that have never amounted to much.

The film begins with Bulworth in deep despair and sick of all the bullshit. The film is basically about Bulworth saying “fuck it” and and just stating plain and straight how things really are, and hang the freakin’ consequences.

Friendo: “Last night I rewatched Bulworth for the first time since it came out in 1998 — a quarter-century ago. Very funny, totally outrageous, sometimes cringe-worthy and…oh, yeah, Halle Berry was totally hot.

“I got to thinking how this film would be received today. I know you’re gonna say the wokesters would go off on it, but maybe, just maybe, they’d see it for the satire it is. And maybe they’d understand that it asks the question ‘What would happen if a politician finally told the honest truth about our political system?’

“On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a 76% approval rating, but not one of the critics listed is black. So how did black critics (outside of Elvis Mitchell) view it? How many influential black critics were even around back then?

“I know that black audiences didn’t attend screenings of Bulworth in droves, despite its focus upon black culture and featuring quite a few black characters. Maybe they felt vaguely alienated by Bulworth’s remarks about black behaviors (‘If you don’t put down the malt liquor and chicken wings and get behind someone other than a running back who stabs his wife, you’re never gonna get rid of someone like me!’). Or maybe not.

“Either way Bulworth, which cost round $30 million to produce, ended up with a relative slender gross of $29 million. It obviously didn’t connect with certain segments of the public for certain reasons. The only segment that seemed to support it were white, well-educated urban liberals.

“Bulworth has to be one of the most audacious mainstream films ever made. I think it deserves a reassessment.”

Friendo: “My wife and I thought Barbie’s opening riff on 2001‘s ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence was hilarious. We guffawed all through it, and yet we might have been the only ones in the audience who seemed to get it. Everyone else was stone-faced, no chuckling or tittering of any kind.

“I’ve since spoken to two well-educated women in their early 40s (one is a cardiologist) who’ve both seen Barbie, and they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned that scene.

“One has seen 2001 but has forgotten all about the opening scene (apes in the desert, animal bones, the black monolith); the other had never even heard of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1968 groundbreaker.

“What does this say about the average person’s film literacy?”

HE to friendo: Anyone who’s been educated at a good college or university should know at least a little something about everything, and hopefully everything about something.

I would say that your second well-educated woman (not the cardiologist) was either (a) cutting a lot of classes or (b) decided to stop educating herself after she graduated. I’m guessing it’s probably the latter.

And how the cardiologist could have possibly seen 2001 and not remembered the “Dawn of Man” sequence…she’s either lying about having seen it or was in the bathroom for the first ten minutes.

On a fine Sunday afternoon (i.e., yesterday or 8.13), Jeff and Sasha hopped around from topic to topic like Br’er Rabbit —- hippity-hop, hippity-hop. It’s a little early to call any Oscars, but (a) white male filmmakers will once again face an uphill challenge and (b) how does Greta Gerwig not land a Best Director Oscar EARLY next year? Plus a short riff on Jules, the white-skinned, black-eyed alien who befriends Ben Kingsley while sharing a move from David Cronenberg’s Scanners.

Again, the link.

Halfway through her q & a transcript (8.14) with Sound of Freedom director Alejandro Monteverde, Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel asks whether he has any regrets about casting QAnon nutter Jim Caviezel in the lead role.

Monteverde: “I try to never look back into any regrets because there’s nothing I can do about it now. Jim came to the set. I’ve never seen somebody so committed and so professional on set. He came in and really bled for the film.”

Siegel’s follow-up question, obviously, should have gone something like this: “So your film won a fair amount of respect for sticking to the basics, for being a lean and mean thriller that was almost entirely free of rightwing talking points, and it’s made a ton of money — $173 million in the U.S. and Canada, which is higher than the domestic tally of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning.

“So given all the this accomplishment and begrudging respect from at least the fair-minded critics and pundits out there, what is your understanding about why Angel Studios and Caviezel arranged a special golf-club screening for Donald Trump, who, you may have heard, is a proven criminal, a salivating sociopath and a deranged, egomaniacal Mussolini who’s under three criminal indictments and is facing a fourth in Georgia?

“Why, in short, did Angel and Caviezel poison the well by doing this? Why invite Hannibal Lecter into the chicken coop?

The below comment exchange appeared Sunday evening (8.13) in “Mexican Obeisance Before Power,” otherwise known as the post in which Patton Oswalt settled the Barbie misandry dispute with one fell swoop…settled it with two drillbit words that will resonate throughout the known universe between now and the 2024 Oscar telecast — “manosphere piss–nado.”

“Sometimes there’s God, so quickly!!” — Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire.

I was asked why joyful reactions to certain audience-friendly films seem to rub me the wrong way.

“I’m not sure I want to be rubbed by you at all, young lady” — from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (Rex Harrison to Elizabeth Taylor).