Pro-Gaza, anti-Israel Columbia Zoomers to world media: “Speaking as militant, keffiyeh-wearing revolutionaries, we’ve occupied Hamilton Hall in order to dramatically demand an end to Israel’s policy of murder and terror in the Gaza Strip. But at the same time our stomachs are growling…waaahhh….Columbia University administrators need to send us food and drink…pizza and sodas anyway…waaahhh.”
I somehow don’t recall anything about radical student activist David Shapiro, who was notoriously photographed smoking a cigar while sitting at the desk of Columbia University president Grayson Kirk during a six-day revolt in late April of ’68…I don’t recall Shapiro or any of his SDS comrades demanding food. They either toughed it out or snuck out and grabbed takeout for the occupiers.
JUST IN: Columbia student short-circuits when reporter corners her after she demanded that the university feed protesters who seized Hamilton Hall.
Student: The school is obligated to bring us food.
Reporter: But you guys put yourself in that position?
“To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.
“He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.
“He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers.
“He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.
“He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.
“He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense.
“He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”
Zero Day is an upcoming political thriller series for Netflix. Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, it costars Robert De Niro, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Bill Camp, Angela Bassett and Matthew Modine. Logline: “A political conspiracy thriller centering on a devastating global cyberattack.”
Scott Galloway: “We all know women…I’m sure this happens to you all the time…really interesting, high-character, successful, attractive women…usually in their 30s, some into their 40s…who will say ‘I can’t find anyone to date.’ But it’s not that they can’t find anyone to date. It’s that they can’t find anyone they want to date.
“And there’s some dynamics here. Warren Buffet said that the key to a successful marriage is low expectations.
“A podcaster named Chris Williams…he calls it the high-heels effect. And that is that every year for the last 50 years [or since the mid ’70s] women have become better educated and are making more money. They’re also getting [physically] taller every year. 50% of women say they won’t date a guy who’s shorter than them, except that figure is probably more like 80%. Also women are getting ‘taller’ and men are getting ‘shorter’ metaphorically. The pool of viable men is shrinking every year. Women have been told they can have it all. What I’ve found is that you can’t have it all, or certainly not all at once.”
“A woman of average attractiveness can have a ‘relationship’, and when I say relationship that’s code for sex…[within the straight realm] they can have a relationship with [a man] who’s in the top ten percent. But that male individual is probably not going to establish a longterm relationship.
“The bottom line is that the top 10% of men” — financial stability, looks, apparent emotional stability — “are getting 80 or 80-plus percent of the opportunities for short-term relationships. So they can engage in what’s called Porsche polygamy. So the guys that most women want are the least likely to establish a longterm relationship.”
Initially posted on 4.21.21: After re-watching Sam Peckinpah and Steve McQueen‘s The Getaway (’72) a couple of nights ago, I’m all the more certain that Roger Donaldson’s 1994 remake, in which Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger took on the same Doc and Carol McCoy roles that McQueen and Ali McGraw played 22 years earlier, is a smoother, more involving watch.
The Peckinpah version has a few moments, but it’s also nonsensical at times.
Why doesn’t McQueen shoot Al Lettieri in the head after the bank job?
Those middle-aged, cowboy-hat-wearing goons who work for Ben Johnson and his moustachioed brother are ridiculous.
There’s no reason for McGraw’s bizarre lurching the car when McQueen’s about to get in.
The sappy ending with Slim Pickens after crossing the border…c’mon.
And why would Richard Bright‘s train station con artist, who’s pocketed a couple of wads of cash, go to the cops just because McQueen beat him up? He can’t find a local clinic?
Huisache: “With the exception of Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and StrawDogs all of Sam Peckinpah’s films are messes of one magnitude or another, with BringMeTheHeadofAlfredo Garcia the biggest mess of all.
“TheGetaway is enjoyable but the Slim Pickens ending is emblematic of Peckinpah’s resort to just saying ‘screw it, how do I get out of this mess? It was just nailed on. Sam had a mess and he called Pickens for help and the old feller bailed him out with a glorious good-ole-boy bit.
“I saw the film when it came out and was living in the area where it was filmed in central Texas. I thought it a very enjoyable mess and the Pickens ending a hoot. But that’s all the film is — an enjoyable hoot. Acting like it’s some kind of worthy project is a bridge too far.
“I suppose Sam’s problem was his alcoholism and his anti-social personality disorder. Either way the guy had a hard time making the pieces fit into the holes.”
HEreply: “Thank you — 100% correct about the nagging ‘mess’ factor. Totally dead-on. That said, RideTheHighCountry, TheWild Bunch and, as you noted, StrawDogs are not messes. And there are many reasons to respect Junior Bonner. And I’ve never even seen NoonWine.”
Bytheway: At the end of TheGetawaySlim Pickens’ character tells Steve McQueen‘s Doc McCoy that he makes around $5K annually, or roughly $31,683 in 2021 dollars. That works out to roughly $2640 a month — an impoverished lifestyle. McQueen offers Pickens $10K or over $60K in 2021 dollars for his beat-up, piece-of-shit pickup truck. Pickens figures they’ll pay more so he says “how about $20K?” or the 2021 equivalent of a bit more than $120K…for a shitty pickup truck! And then Ali McGraw counters with “how about $30K?” or the 2021 equivalent of a bit more than $180K…for a piece-of-shit pickup truck! That, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s known as a messy ending.
“When Doug and I got married, Cole, Ella and I agreed that we didn’t like the term ‘stepmom’ [so] they came up with ‘Momala.'”
Fine and good but Kamala Harris‘s rickety whiney voice still grates. Her speeches lack a certain musical quality…a gift that Barack had in abundance. We all know there’s a reason she dropped out of Democratic primary contention in December 2019. Women (particularly women of color) are in her corner but that’s about it.
In other words: General reporting about Supreme Court righties having side-stepped and folded on Donald Trump‘s behalf was brief and unsustained, while college activists ignored this acquiescence in favor of strident and agitated pro-Gaza occupations. We’re just about cooked.
20 months hence the obviously lucid, thoughtful and charming Dick Van Dyke will turn 100.
If Emily (Jungle Cruise) Blunt has anything to do with it, it’s not funny — this is HE’s hard and fast rule.
Give Clayton Davis credit for at least admitting out of the gate that The Fall Guy (Universal, 3.3) is empty jizz-whizz. I proudly steered clear of last night’s all-media showing, and will mournfully submit to it Wednesday night like an Egyptian sphinx. I don’t care how many easy lays come out of the woodwork to insist how “funny” or “purely pleasurable” it is. So much of present-tense movie life is about spiritual drainage. Douse me with anhydrous butter fat, Leitch…pour gasoline, light match.
The Fall Guy rocks. Everyone involved is having the time of their lives and it shows. Ryan Gosling channels his performance in The Nice Guys to great effect. The action is strong, the comedy is stronger, and it’s so much fun. This deserves to be a big ole hit.@TheFallGuyMoviepic.twitter.com/UNT4Nn61n1
Life is good on Tetiaroa! Only for fat-wallet players, but as Max Bialystock said in The Producers, “That’s it, baby..if you’ve got it, flaunt it!
I’m on location for TFH in French Polynesia on Marlon Brando’s beautiful island of Tetiaroa so I can spend the week talking about the 3 epic movie versions of Mutiny on the Bounty where all the action took place! First up — Brando’s 1962 extravaganza: https://t.co/kWhLH8dGEwpic.twitter.com/1fyRETJUFE
“This is the result of the extreme left and p.c. crap and people worrying so much about offending other people. When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committee, groups…’here’s our thought about this joke’…well, that’s the end of your comedy.”
HE to psychotic, head-in-the-sand, comment-thread wokesters (“Radewart” and that ilk): Here’s your chance to bash on crazy, wackjobby Jerry Seinfeld and his baffling tendency to view everything with a preconceived bias against the progressive left.
Jerry Seinfeld: PC culture and fear of offending people is killing funny shows.
"When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committee, groups—'here's our thought about this joke'—well that's the end of your comedy." pic.twitter.com/YZuWo5HlJu
In short, the festival hasn’t even begun but from an ideological, social-political perspective thefixisalreadyin, more or less. Greta Gerwig + Lily Gladstone + Hirokazu Kore-Eda (Monster, Broker, Shoplifters) will presumably fill the role of the jury’s urgent humanist crusaders…the Batman + Robin + Commissioner Gordon social-inequity problem solvers…do the right thing, ”holy fruit salad!”, etc.
The only jurors I feel a strong cinematic kinship with are J.A. Bayona (TheOrphanage, Society of the Snow) and Nadine Labaki (Capernaum). With much chagrin HE admits to never having seen Omar Sy’s standout performance in TheUntouchables…my bad. EbruCeylan is the embedded screenwriting collaborator of her husband, director Nuri-Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep, About Dry Grasses).
