Day: July 4, 2024

Relationships Are Often Messy, Especially in Matters of Infidelity

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Jill Biden’s Wikipage reports that she and then-Senator Joe Biden met in March 1975. “They [allegedly] met on a blind date set up by his brother Frank, who had known her in college,” it says. “Although Joe was nearly nine years her senior, Jill was impressed by his more formal appearance and manners compared to the college men she had known, and after their first date, she told her mother, ‘Mom, I finally met a gentleman.’”

“Meanwhile she was going through turbulent divorce proceedings with husband Bill Stevenson. A civil divorce was granted in May 1975. Jill and Joe were married in New York City on 6.17.77.”

Three and a half years ago Stevenson, a Trump supporter, challenged this official narrative in an interview with London’s rightwing Daily Mail.

Stevenson said that he introduced Joe and Jill in ’72, only a few months before Joe’s then-wife Neilia Hunter Biden and their daughter were killed in a car accident. (Beau and Hunter were riding in the back seat of the crash car, and were pretty banged up.)

Stevenson told the Daily Mail‘s Harriet Anderson that he first suspected Biden and Jill were having an affair in August 1974, right around President Nixon’s resignation. Jill was 23; Joe was 31. Stevenson said that “one of [Jill’s] best friends told me she thought Joe and Jill were getting a little too close. I was surprised that she came to me.”

This is not a big deal to me personally as changing partners is always a messy process. Extra-marital affairs happen all the time, and those who succumb to this kind of passion are not necessarily evil or morally deplorable or even necessarily conniving. I was involved in an extra-marital affair with a married journalist colleague between early ’98 and late ’00, and I know how this stuff works backward and forward.

But let no one doubt that Jill wasn’t power-hungry back then, and that she isn’t the same kind of person right now.

“Behind the Stone Balloon,” written by Jessie Markovetz, published on 11.21.06:

“Bill Stevenson also had issues with a divorce case between he and his first wife, Jill Jacobs, who today is married to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.). They had married in February 1970, when Stevenson was only 23 and Jacobs was a student at the university, but drifted apart and were divorced in 1976.

‘He avoids details in his book, but after a turbulent court case, Stevenson walked away only paying Jacobs less than half what we she had wanted, not including the half-ownership she sought of the Stone Balloon bar. Within months she was married to Biden.”

“First Vice-President, First Black Woman…”

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Joe Biden seemed to mutter or mush up his administration’s black landmarks and identities today in Philadelphia…”first Vice-President, first black woman, served with black president…first black woman on the Supreme Court”…drooling into his soup in the cafeteria.

Kamala isn’t really “black”…she’s primarily of Indian descent (her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a Tamil Indian biologist0 with an Afro-Jamaican dad, Donald J. Harris, of Irish-Jamaican ancestry.

HE favorite: This is “ninetuss states Americuh,” Joe said.

Friendo: “That Stephanopoulos interview is going to be must-see TV.”
HE: “It’s not going to air live — it’s taped. Segmented. Not the real, raw thing.”
Friendo: “You think they’ll edit the interview to make Biden look coherent or will they show Americans the true state of his cognitive decline?”
HE: “It’s up to question. The fact that Stephanopoulos agreed to a taped version says something, I think.”

Posted earlier today by New York‘s Olivia NUzzi:

Posted yesterday:

Ragdoll Car Flop

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I’ve only seen the original 181-minute cut of Meet Joe Black. Caught it on the Universal lot. Rough sit. I never saw the 129-minute Alan Smithee version. Has anyone?

Needless to say this Manhattan coffee shop scene between Brad Pitt and Claire Forlani would’ve worked better without the double-hit ragdoll body bounce-flop…really bad CG. Imagine if just after Forlani walks off she hears the screech of tires and vague sounds of commotion, but doesn’t realize Pitt is dead until she reads about it the next day. Maybe a small item-plus-photo in the N.Y. Daily News.

It’s always better if you can nudge the audience into imagining a scene of violence rather than hitting them over the head with it.

BTW: Pitt was no spring chicken when Meet Joe Black was shot in mid to late ’97 (he was 33, had made Se7en three years earlier) but he looks 24 or 25.

“What Grade Are You In?”

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Posted on 3.16.21: This is easily the most emotionally affecting scene from Martin Brest‘s Midnight Run (’88), and generally speaking action road comedies don’t do this kind of thing at all. But Midnight Run, written by George Gallo, was different.

A violent chase-caper flick with a quippy attitude, fine. But a film of this calibre delivering this kind of emotion would be all but inconceivable today…be honest.

Robert DeNiro (as bounty hunter Jack Walsh) and Danielle DuClos (as DeNiro’s 12 year-old daughter Denise) handle the heavy lifting, making the most of non-verbal currents. But the silent-witness vibes from Charles Grodin (as white-collar criminal Jonathan Mardukas) and Wendy Phillips (as Walsh’s ex-wife) are poignant in themselves.

When Midnight Run opened 32 and 2/3 years ago somebody wrote that it was a hamburger movie that occasionally tasted like steak, but if you re-watch it (as I did a year or two ago) you’ll recall that it wasn’t that great, not really — that it was formulaic and goofy and rarely subtle.

But it was good enough to temporarily “lift all boats,” as the expression goes. Brest peaked four years later with Scent of a Woman (’92), and then he hit the rocks with Meet Joe Black (’98) and then Gigli (pronounced “Jeelie”).

Imagine how this scene might’ve played if Brest hadn’t cast DuClos or someone else on her level. Born in ’74, she was 13 when this scene was filmed.”

DuClos will turn 50 on 9.29.24 — a crisp salute for excellent work.

He’s Finished & Doesn’t Know It

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Friendo: “It doesn’t sound like he’s dropping out.”

HE: “Damn that rotting pumpkin. Ditto the grasping Lady Macbiden. May they roast in hell together, holding hands.”

Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, 7.3.74:

HE to Joe: Take your arrogance and obstinacy and shove them up your rectum. Oh, and by the way? I hate you more than Trump now. Really! I do!