Day: November 29, 2024

I’ve respected Wicked‘s wallop factor from the get-go, but please God, no…don’t let it win the Best Picture Oscar.

To improve its reputation among the Joe and Jane Bumblefucks who’ve had it up to here with elite leftist instruction, the Oscar-bestowing community has to get with the emerging new current…the “put down the wokey DEI playbook, and maybe ease up on queerish messaging” program.

And I’m saying this, mind, as a rapt admirer of Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer.

Wicked is basically a high-impact racial parable with songs, magic and lesbian sauce. It’s about an unjustly feared and despised woman of color (i.e., green) and the wicked superficial whitey-whites who are determined to socially ostracize and excommunicate her, and thereby leave her no choice but to evolve into Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked Witch of the West.

And that’s fine as far as it goes. Just leave the Best Picture Oscar out of the equation.

Obviously industry people love Wicked and I’m not saying they’re wrong for leaning this way, but given that average Americans have been saying “enough!” and “whatever happened to real movies?”, it’s clear that cinema has to turn the corner or else…films have to get real, step off the soapbox, put their feet on the ground and ease up on the progressive instruction narratives…really. Honest stories that touch bottom. Anora, Conclave, that line of country.

We all know it’s been a weak year and I don’t mean to abruptly switch objections, but HE also wishes a double ixnay upon The Brutalist.

An hour ago I checked with domain.com and discovered that www.stopwicked.com, stopwicked,org and stopwicked.net are available.

Posted a few hours ago by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitch:

“A week into its release, Wicked is starting to shape up as a serious contender. Elphaba isn’t flying off to the Western sky with statuette in hand quite yet, but there’s no denying that Wicked has a lot going for it in its bid to win best picture.

“Let’s start with the obvious. Academy members don’t just like Wicked — they love Wicked. At the Directors Guild, PGA and SAG screenings in both Los Angeles and New York, as well as at the Academy screening, capacity crowds burst into applause after many songs and gave the film a rapturous standing ovation after the cliffhanger finale.

“Guild members are known to give standing Os — they did last year for Oppenheimer when Christopher Nolan emerged for his Q&A — but according to those in attendance, the effusiveness for Wicked has been at another level.

“Then there’s the damn grosses. We are coming off a near extinction-level event for cinema — i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic, during which small streaming-friendly films like CODA and Nomadland won best picture.

“But in the post-plague era, some voters seem to be hungry for spectacle. Last year, Oppenheimer was the perfect mix of IMAX-sized visuals and weighty subject matter — a billion-dollar earner the Academy could proudly point to and say, ‘This is the cinematic gold standard.’ That bodes well for Wicked.”

Wicked is a ride, all right, but “cinematic gold-standard” is a whole ‘nother realm.

…are probably doomed to repeat it.

Three of us ordered breakfast this morning inside Raymond’s of Montclair, an obviously storied, 20th Century establishment that may (I say “may”) have begun serving food as a Swedish smorgasbord eatery called The Three Crowns back in the 1930s or before. I’m not really sure.

It obviously began life as an old-time, pre-war restaurant of some kind. It’s the sort of place that James Stewart’s George Bailey or Gig Young’s Martin Sloan or Fredric March’s Al Stephenson may have visited with their families during the holidays.

Before doing my research I asked three waiters at Raymond’s if they knew when this spiffy yesteryear joint (excellent food, beautifully maintained, well-weathered under the surface) began serving food. Two weren’t sure; our own waiter said 1979. (Note: I found out later that the place apparently began as a breakfast and lunch place in ’89, and the current upscale version was created roughly 20 years ago.)

“That can’t be right,” I said to her. “Maybe the owners began in ‘79 but this place was obviously designed and built in the 1920s or ‘30s..something like that.”

She shrugged her shoulders and said that’s all she knew. Translation: “To me a place that began serving 45 years ago is old, old, old, and that’s about as far back as I can navigate from my Millennial or Zoomer viewpoint.”

Alternate translation: “We don’t really care that much. We’re waiters, not historians. You’re not going to give us bigger tips if we can recite this place’s history chapter-and-verse. We’ve never even heard of It’s a Wonderful Life or The Best Years of Our Lives, much less seen them. To us, Gig Young is about as relatable to our culture or way of seeing things as the pharoah Amenhotep.”

Our waiter told us there are black-and-white photos hanging upon a rear bathroom-adjacent wall, and that’s where I picked up on The Three Crowns.

People born after 1980 don’t particularly want to consider the way things were during the Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt or Truman years, or even the Eisenhower or Kennedy era. It’s all going to be washed away down the road. 20something or 30something mutants don’t want to know. Out of sight, out of mind.

AI Overview: The history of Raymond’s in Montclair, New Jersey, includes the following events:

Raymond’s Coffee Shop

Raymond Badach opened a small coffee shop in 1989 on Church Street.

Raymond’s Restaurant:

In 2004, Badach and Joanne Ricci opened a larger restaurant in the same location. The restaurant was designed with a 1930s diner/brasserie look by artists Ian McPheely and Christian Garnett. Chef Matt Seeber created a menu that was part diner and part bistro.

Roman Polanski haters have kept English-subtitled Blurays of An Officer and a Spy (aka J’Accuse) off the market for the last four-plus years, and no English-sub streaming options have surfaced in the U.S. or Europe either (except via pirate sites). And yet a beautiful all–format Russian Bluray with English subs has been kicking around on eBay for a year or two. It took me a long time to wake up to this. I’m now a proud owner.

…I’d never even heard of Salmon P. Chase, the seventh Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1864-1873) whose facial features adorned the $10K bill, which was printed between 1878 and 1934.

$1K bills were printed between 1861 and 1954; the small-sized Grover Cleveland version was issued in 1928 and 1934. Since 1969 banks have been required to forward $1K bills to the government for destruction.

William McKinley $500 bills were also printed between 1861 and 1945.

$100K Woodrow Wilson bills were printed by FDR’s administration “in response to hoarding of gold during the Great Depression.” 42,000 went through the printing process.

Man, would I love to carry a couple of McKinley or Cleveland bills in my elephant-hide wallet, just to watch people’s eyes pop out of their sockets…boinnnng!

Sutton Francis Wells, 11.29.24, 11:45 am:

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