Nikki Haley’s statement about pardoning Trump was disgusting. She and Ron DeSantis can go to hell. Chris Christie was the best of them — a blunt-spoken classic Republican who talked straight and plain about The Beast and the horrific threat he poses.
And a tough break for Maestro’s Bradley Cooper, who absolutely delivered a more dynamic, reach-for-the-skies dazzler than…well. Scorsese anyway. KOTFM is a reasonably good film, but it saddles us with an idiot and drags on and on. HE commenter Mike: “Scorsese is [one of the five] because his film is about indigenous struggle.”
I won’t divulge his name or even the country where he operates from, but yesterday HE spoke to a real-life, honest-to-God streaming pirate.
I was poking around about the pirating of Fast Charlie and the apparent inability or unwillingness on the part of Vertical Entertainment to do very much about it.
I’d been told that Vertical’s communications with pirates basically boils down to AI threats and warnings. Pirates don’t listen because AI threats are bullshit. So I asked this guy…call him Long John Silver…about who, if anyone, he might actually be afraid of? Who does he take seriously?
Long John Silver: “We don’t know much about Vertical. We know Muso and other similar services, and we know that they use AI for notices but (a) they don’t follow up, and (b) what can they do when our servers are in countries they have no control over? Servers change so much, and it’s not worth it for them to chase one or two movies.
“Plus takedown notices only come when we host on services such as Dropbox or Google drive. They’re not effective when chasing torrents.
“Why should we take companies like Vertical or anyone else seriously? It’s been 25 years and they haven’t done anything. They can’t do a thing if they don’t know who/where we are.
“If it’s a genuine movie or a fake movie pretending to be real, we still earn from ads. You might find it interesting that when fakes are floating around, real movies get downloaded much less.”
Ed Harris‘s “happiness is bullshit” rant is a glorious retort to Sally Hawkins‘”Poppy” character, an emotional fascist who taunted people left and right with “are you happy?” sentiments, in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (’08).
It’s from the under-appreciated Kodachrome, and was written by Jonathan Tropper.
I hated Jason Sudeikis‘ character, an overly sensitive 40ish candy-ass who still can’t get past his dying dad’s (Harris’s) show of parental indifference when they were both younger.
Sudeikis to Harris: “When’s my birthday?”
My father wasn’t much in the affection department either, weenie. Man up.
I’m trying to figure out how Lesley Gore‘s “You Don’t Own Me” ties in with Jeremy Allen White doing gay pull-ups on a lower Manhattan rooftop. The ad is saved by the very last bit…flopping on the couch, doves fluttering off, the camera arcs northward.
May December has been snubbed, snubbed, snubbed by the SAG Awards nominations. It’s not that I’ve been against Charles Melton as much as unable to understand the bizarre enthusiasm for his sufficient but no-great-shakes performance by Gotham Award suck-ups, New York Film Critics Circle, etc. Now, alas, it’s all gone south. No SAG-AFTRA support, no Oscar nom.