Day: June 28, 2024

Whenever You Snap a Random-Ass Photo

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…there’s always someone eyeballing the shooter (i.e., me) with an expression that says, “Uhm, are you stealing a little piece of my soul?”

Here we are in hipster wokester Brooklyn, and the philosophy of Anthony Quinn’s Auda Abu Tayi still has a foothold.

The restaurant is Fan Fried Rice Bar, 740 Driggs Ave., Brooklyn, 11211.

Go, Joe — Just Walk Away

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It took the N.Y. Times editorial board a full working day to post this urgent plea — President Joe Biden needs to man up, smell the coffee and pack it in.

If he refuses to do this and if Donald Trump wins on November 5th, Biden will surely be reviled by historians as the blindest, most egotistical and reprehensibly selfish U.S. President in U.S. history.

Felt So Much, Burdened Every Day

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In Pablo Larrain’s Maria, Angelina Jolie will play a twitchy, headstrong, tempestuous performer…no day at the beach!

Lonely, unhappy and temperamental, Maria Callas spent her last years living largely in isolation in Paris. She died of a heart attack at age 53 on 9.16.77.

Who dies at 53 from a heart attack? A non-obese person, I mean.

A funeral was held at St. Stephen’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral on rue Georges-Bizet, Paris on 9.20.77. Callas was later cremated at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Her ashes were ultimately scattered over the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Greece, in the spring of ‘79.

During a 1978 interview, Callas’s friend John Ardoin said the following:

“There are times, you know, when there are certain people who are blessed and cursed, with an extraordinary gift, in which the gift is almost greater than the human being. And Callas was one of these people.

“It was almost as if her wishes, her life, her own happiness were all subservient to this incredible, incredible gift that she was given, this gift that reached out and taught us all – taught us things about music we knew very well, but showed us new things, things we never thought about, new possibilities.

“I think that’s why singers admire her so; I think that’s why conductors admire her so; I know that’s why I admire her so. And she paid a tremendously difficult and expensive price for this career.

“I don’t think she always understood what she did or why. She knew she had a tremendous effect on audiences and on people. But it was not something that she could always live with gracefully or happily.

“I once said to her, ‘It must be very enviable to be Maria Callas.’ And she said, ‘No, it’s a very terrible thing to be Maria Callas, because it’s a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand.”

Curious Affection for “Furiosa,” “Hit Man,” etc.

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Jordan Ruimy has polled over 100 reputable film critics about the best of ’24, and the winner is Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune: Part Two.

That’s a respectable preference. I paid no attention to the story but I loved the cinematic penetration aspects — the look and the flavor and the rhythm of it.

The Ruimy critics chose George Miller‘s Furiosa as their #2…not so much on this end. And Luca Guadagnino‘s Challengers is in third place.

I really, really don’t get why Richard Linklater‘s Hit Man came in fourth. I didn’t love hut certainly respected the fifth-placed Love Lies Bleeding.

Among the second five (#6 through #10) only Alex Garland‘s Civil War and Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera really rang my bell.

Here are HE’s Top 12 2024 films, posted on 6.6.24:

Glimmer of Hope

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Friendo: “There’s a silver lining in the Biden debate catastrophe.

“If the debate had happened after the Democratic Convention, we’d be toast. But now, 18 weeks before the 11.5.24 election, the debate about whether Biden can be replaced can actually happen.”

HE to Friendo: “Yes, and good for that.  But Biden should have bailed last March, Lyndon Johnson–style.  (LBJ quit on 3.31.68.) Then there would have been a solid historical precedent.”