I for one believe that among the 30,000–plus Gazans who’ve been killed by Israeli troops since the invasion began, the vast majority have not been Hamas militants. Activist combatants are always a minority among any community engaged in (or adjacent to) armed conflict.
The basic view of the 1200 signers seems to be ”you may be right but when has war ever not been cruel and horrific?”
Just another Mad Max movie, which is fine but it’s just another one…right?
In the spring of ’21 I bought an iPhone 12 Pro Max with 256 gigs. But after three years the phone had been running out of space, and so I recently decided to trade it in for an iPhone 15 Pro Max with 512 gigs. The idea was that I would back up the contents (photos, apps, music) to the cloud, but I hadn’t backed it up since last November, and it took hours and hours to manage this. And then when I tried to load the contents of the 12 onto the 15, it had only captured about 60% or 65%. So I went to the local Apple store and asked them to do a phone-to-phone transfer, which would deliver an exact duplicate of the 12. I showed up when the store opened at 11 am, and it took all day and still didn’t complete the task. I had to leave it there overnight. I returned the next morning and the phone-to-phone had finally completed. All in all the whole process took several days.
Friendo: “Andrew Sullivan said the other day that the pro-trans-kid mob includes all of liberal-progressive culture and the Democratic Party, not to mention 95 percent of HE’s readers, as well as other ‘enlightened’ forces that are doing their utmost to usher in Donald Trump’s 10-year reign of tyranny.
“What all these people are literally blind about is that they think the issue is ‘trans rights,’ or respecting the dignity and souls of people who are trans…etc.
“That’s not what the issue is about. At all.
“I utterly respect, and would fight for, the dignity, the rights and the souls of trans people. And why wouldn’t I? I’m not a bigot.
“The issue here is about whether parents, in a sane society, have the right to have autonomy over their children. The obvious answer is ‘yes, they do.’ And the reason they need that right is that children aren’t old enough to make crucial life decisions by themselves.
“Rejecting that obvious fact is the insanity of this movement.”
UPDATE: The “Aaron Taylor Johnson being offered the James Bond role” rumor is untrue. This comes straight from 007 producer Barbara Broccoli. E! is saying the same thing.
Earlier: The 33-year-old Aaron Taylor Johnson, a first-rate actor who’s been floundering around in mostly crap-level films for a good 15 years, is apparently the new James Bond.
The talk is strictly “rumored” and unofficial as we speak, but 007, who was blown into bloody scraps and shards during the finale of No Time to Die, is definitely back and alive and ready to reinvigorate a big-budget action franchise that culturally mattered between the early to mid ’60s (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball) and has been mostly smirking at its own reflection or otherwise apologizing for itself ever since.
The fact that the long-ensconced Bond caretaker producers, Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, have decided to hire another brawny white guy instead of going BIPOC with someone like Bridgerton‘s Rege-Jean Page…the apparent fact that Bond is still white tells us one thing clearly, and that’s that wokester terror and intimidation isn’t what it used to be. The radiant beauty of non-white males in whatever context is no longer accepted doctrine. The cultural page has turned and Joe and Jane Popcorn are sick of the all-white-guys=are-toxic bullshit.
Plus we all know that Daniel Craig‘s 007 was killed in No Time To Die as an apology gesture to wokester #MeToo Stalinists — a statement that said “we hear you…yes, Craig’s 007 has been a relatively mild-mannered, non-carniverous fellow with a disciplined libido, but that aside the 007 character has been a problematic chauvinist since the Connery era, and we agree that he needs to die now as a symbolic statement of empathy with and support for progressive women and the #MeToo movement.”
Alas, alpha men can’t be eliminated from film or film will die — it’s that simple. And Aaron Taylor Johnson does have big shoulders and sizable arm muscles.
You know who I liked better, the guy they should have picked? Jake Picking.
In my book Johnson has starred or costarred in exactly one grade-A film, which is when he played Count Vronsky in Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (’12). He was reasonably good as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy (’09), although the film itself is godawful in a girly way. He wasn’t bad in Matthew Vaughn‘s Kick-Ass (’10) and better than half-decent in Oliver Stone‘s Savages (’12).
But that was it. ATJ’s other films have been consistently painful or under-serving or negligible — Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Nocturnal Animals, The Wall, Outlaw King, Tenet (very small role), The King’s Man, Bullet Train (ghastly!) plus the forthcoming (and therefore no comment about) The Fall Guy, Kraven the Hunter and Nosferatu.
Just over 14 years ago I posted a relatively short riff called “Respectful Sirk Takedown” (2.22.10). Through the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and aughts I had been constantly berated and belittled by elite film mavens. telling me it was my fault, not Sirk’s, that his films had never come together in my head as wondrous servings of lush “ironic” cinema.
So in my head I finally said “enough!” and posted my critique, and boy, did I get shat and spat upon by the dweebs. I was called a lowlife troglodyte, a vomiting dog, a man without a soul.
So it feels very gratifying that Paul Schrader has just posted along the same lines, saying in effect “is it time for a reassessment of this overpraised mofo?” For years I’ve stood alone against the fiercest of winds. Now, at long last, I have good company.
HE’s original piece: The German-born Douglas Sirk has long been considered a world-class, pantheon-level filmmaker. That’s because the film dweebs have been telling us for years that the dreadfully banal soap-opera acting, grandiose emotionalism and conservative suburban milieus in his films are all of an operatic pitch-perfect piece and are meant as ironic social criticism. (Or something like that.)
The dweebs are playing an old snob game. They’re basically saying that you have to be a serious cineaste to recognize Sirk’s genius, and that if you don’t recognize it then you need to think things through because you’re just not as perceptive as you need to be.
There’s no winning against this mindset, which is somewhere between a schoolyard bully move and an intellectual con. The dweebs (and I’m talking about a very small and cloistered group of big-city critics) have put one over on us. And I’m suggesting, due respect, that the time has come to push back on Sirk and to consider him once again as the Guiding Light-level director that some (myself included) believe that he always was.
Sirk was mostly dismissed by critics of the ’50s and early ’60s for making films that were no more and no less than what they seemed to be — i.e., emotionally dreary, visually lush melodramas about repressed women suffering greatly through crises of the heart as they struggled to maintain tidy, ultra-proper appearances.
In his praise of Written on the Wind, Roger Ebert wrote that “to appreciate [this film] probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman‘s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.”
Aaaah, the old concealment game! For this is the essence of the Sirk con. John Ford used to “conceal” also, but you can watch Ford’s films, or at least savor what’s good about them (despite the Irish sentimentality). If Ebert’s comment isn’t Orwellian film-dweeb speak, I don’t know what would be.
