Month: February 2024

…if he wakes up and faces that gnarly-ass bugger called reality.

Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, 2.15.24: “If Biden steps aside, he’ll be a hero to his party. If he stays, his legacy may well be a second Trump term.”

Woody Allen‘s Steve Allen Show monologue happened almost exactly 60 years and three months ago.

It happened at the home of the syndicated version of The Steve Allen Show, known informally as the Westinghouse Show. 1228 No. Vine Street (east side), south of Fountain and north of DeLongpre. The show ran from June 1962 to October 1964.

I love the way Allen pronounces divorce — “divauhhsss.”

“[And] it feels as if almost all masculinity [itself] is considered toxic, and so I think that many young men may not feel welcome.

“It’s not so much of a pull by guys like Andrew Tate as much as a push. Like if you show up and just wanna be, like, a regular guy’s guy, you may not be eating enough kale and doing enough yoga to fit in on the left.” — Van Jones duuring last night’s Real Time Overtime segment.

Last night’s Eras Tour show happened in Melbourne. 90 thousand women attended. Two more nights there, and then on to Sydney.

Friendo: “You know what I think this is really about? White women starved for representation.”

Translation: Where oh where are all the black chicks at Taylor Swift concerts? I’ve read that a small percentage of her fans are black, but I never see them at concerts.

@aprilfrancesc This moment!!! #erastour #taylorswift #night1 #melbourne #MCG #fearless #fyp #fyp #speaknow #taytay #missamericana @Lily ♬ original sound – April & Lily

The footage starts around the 6:30 mark, give or take.

John Clifford Floyd III is a criminal defense attorney who raised Fani Willis in both California and Washington, D.C.

AJC.com excerpt: “Floyd took part in sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in 1965 in Memphis, Tennessee. After a sneering white man spit tobacco juice on top of his head, he decided to take a more confrontational stance. He joined a faction of the Black Panther movement in 1967 in Los Angeles. He renounced violence and enrolled at UCLA to study law after two Panthers, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, were shot and killed in an altercation at a Black Student Union meeting.”

I suspected there would be an angry crowd in front of Manhattan’s Russian Embassy (9 east 91st Street), but for whatever reason I couldn’t find advance confirmation.

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Tapping out yesterday’s riff about three approvable Taylor Hackford flicks (The Idolmaker, An Officer and a Gentleman, Against All Odds) led to a re-watch of Odds (‘84), and good God…I humbly apologize!

It’s been almost exactly 40 years since my initial late February viewing at the good old Academy auditorium (Wilshire & La Peer), and I guess I just wasn’t perceptive enough back then.

Eric Hughes’ plot (loosely based upon 1947’s Out of the Past) and especially the dialogue (or good-sized portions of it) are chores to sit through, and Jeff Bridges’ painfully unsubtle performance as main protagonist Terry, an aging, none-too-bright football player, gave me a splitting headache.

Young Bridges was often too emotionally emphatic and actor-ish, and in this thing he’s certainly too childish. I was starved for the adult attitude that permeates Out of the Past. Fortified by Daniel Mainwaring and Frank Fenton’s tart dialogue, laconic Robert Mitchum knew how to play this kind of material. Which is to say a bit cooler.

I was nonetheless okay with the opening 20 or 25 in Los Angeles (love the ridiculous hot-dogging on Sunset Blvd. at 80 mph) and especially that hot, flavorful lovers-in-Yucatán section (Terry blissing out with Rachel Ward’s Jessie), but when Alex Karras interrupts their lovemaking inside a Chitchen Itza temple the whole thing suddenly turns bad, and then it stabs itself in the chest by returning to L.A. for the final 40 or 45 minutes, which are mostly atrocious.

Ugly people behaving horribly…sullen, scowling, sneering, snorting blow. You can all go fuck yourselves.

The exception is a Century City office sequence in which the excellent Swoozie Kurtz, playing a secretary to Saul Rubinek’s odious sports agent, does Terry a great favor by stealing a trove of incriminating documents, and with a hostile Doberman growling and breathing down her neck.

Lesson learned: If you have fond memories of a Taylor Hackford film you saw when young, don’t re-watch it decades later. Leave it there.

The original Out of the Past is a shining, gleaming city in the hill…a much, much better film.

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Strong principled words, and yet he can’t help muttering and slurring and slightly spacing out…he just can’t do it with command and vigor. But good for Joe calling a spade a spade.

Three prognosticating know-it-alls — Jeff Sneider, Scott Feinberg and Clayton Davis— are predicting that Lily Gladstone will take the Best Actress Oscar after all.

May I ask what happened to the Emma Stone wave? Stone is an absolute total knockout in Poor Things, and it’s an actual lead performance as opposed to Gladstone’s supporting, half-somnambulant, less-is-less performance as Mollie Burkhart.

I’m not saying that anything has necessarily “happened” to Stone’s support, but I’ve been sensing that Stone and her people seem afraid to campaign with serious vigor, apparently out of fear that they might be seen as anti-Gladstone or anti-Native American or something in that realm, which is ridiculous.

Do I have to say this again? Enough with the damn DEI campaigns. The world is quaking, the woke thing is receding (just ask Bob Iger), and we all have to turn the cultural corner and get back to honoring performances based upon actual acting merit.

Yes, other political factors have always gone into wins but ethnicity has become too much of a thing, and it’s time to cut that idea down to size.

Gladstone has had a great bountiful time over the last several months (or since last May if you count the Cannes debut of Killers of the Flower Moon) and has derived a huge career boost. It’s been a happy chapter all around, and she’ll be completely fine in the years to come.

Enough with the ethnic-identity-warrants-awards mindset. We did that between ’17 and ’23, and now it’s over. Move past it, get with the new program, enough. We are here to go.

I for one believe that Fani Willis did fairly well on the stand yesterday. She came off as a tough, focused and highly principled professional, and as a human being. She and Nathan Wade broke up last August over differences in values and estimations of male-female equality, and while the optics are still crazy and ridiculous from a certain perspective I came away thinking “okay, that happened but was it really so bad that they were fucking each other for a certain period?”

Did Willis confess the whole absolute truth about everything? Perhaps not but it felt sufficient. I think she survives this, although Wade might have to be cut loose.

You can call Taylor Hackford a director who’s always been more about flash and impact than depth and emotional spirit, but you can’t say he didn’t enjoy a highly impressive breakout period — a five-year run between ’80 and ’84.

The Idolmaker, which I re-watched about half of last night, kicked things off with a dynamic performance from the late Ray Sharkey and a seriously invested stab at recreating that late ’50s, post-Elvis-explosion period when performers like Tommy Sands and Fabian (portrayed in the film as Tommy D. and Ceasare) were big with teenyboppers.

Two years later came An Officer and a Gentleman, a formulaic romance in some respects but strengthend by Richard Gere‘s Zack “Mayonnaise”, the soulful Debra Winger dealing straight cards and touching bottom in every scene, and Louis “D.O.R.” Gossett Jr., who wound up taking that year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

The Hackford run crested with Against All Odds, an Out of the Past remake with Jeff Bridges, Rachel Ward, James Woods, Richard Widmark and Alex Karras. Great Sunset Blvd. car chase, great Yucatan peninsula sex scenes, etc. It’s hard to believe that Bridges was once in really great shape.

None of these three (released in ’80, ’82 and ’84) are great or near-great, but they really do score as engrossing midrange edge-seekers…better-than-decent screenplays, dramatic flair, hormonal hunger, rousing energy, zero boredom, etc. And yet two (Idolmaker and Odds) conclude on downbeat, meditative notes.

Hackford’s next six films, released between ’85 and ’00, lacked the dynamic highs of that opening trio but were respectable efforts — White Nights (’85), Everybody’s All-American (’88), Blood In, Blood Out (’93…great title!), Dolores Claiborne (’95), The Devil’s Advocate (’97) and Proof of Life (’00). Then he hit a solid triple with Ray (’04), which resulted in Jamie Foxx winning a Best Actor Oscar (and in the process stealing it from Sideways‘ Paul Giamatti!)

Tran Ahn Hung‘s The Taste of Things (aka The Pot au Feu) has been near the top of my best-of-2023 list since I first saw it in Cannes last May. (Here’s my 5.24.23 review.) Pretty much everyone with a semblance of taste in film and/or food adores it. It’s not just endearing but a form of religious rapture by way of a series of loving, nurturing food orgasms. But it’s more than just a fine foodie flick.

The Taste of Things has been in theatres for a week now (since February 9th), and to my shock and surprise I discovered this morning that there’s a sizable neghead consensus among Rotten Tomatoes ticket buyers. These people are animals — there’s really no other way to put it. Barbarians. Indications of a coarse and slovenly culture.

I’m sorry but you’re simply not allowed to dislike this all-but-perfect film. It’s not “slow” but meditative…quietly humming with spiritual joy. I’m truly disgusted by the people who’ve thumbs-downed it. Pigs in the trough.