Month: November 2024

After innumerable savorings and re-savorings of Rod Serling‘s The Twilight Zone over the last several decades (no one ever seems to speak all that fondly of Night Gallery) and almost 50 years after Serling’s untimely passing at age 50, where is the acute hunger for a family-approved Serling documentary?

I’ve read all about Serling’s pre-Twilight Zone life and have seen Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight a couple of times and have watched all the noteworthy Twilight Zone episodes (which I own on Bluray) over and over…so what’s the idea exactly? To reach Millennials and Zoomers who’ve never heard of him?

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way will produce the Serling doc; Jonah Tulis will direct. Serling’s daughters, Jodi and Anne, are in for a hefty slice of the action as executive producers.

“They do what they want to do / say what they want to say / live how they want to live / play how they want to play / dance how they want to dance…kick and slap a friend, eeyo!…the Addams family!”

Consider the facial expression on 6′ 9″ Barron, a.k.a. “Lurch”.

…except for the $475 price tag plus shipping…can’t do it. Made in Italy, of course. If I was in Florence or Venice or Milano I could buy these for roughly half the price.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a personalized jean jacket to give to Sutton for her third birthday (11.17).

I bought it from a Chinese company called Woodemon. The package was shipped and tracked by SF-international.

Two days ago (Sunday, 11.10) the SF tracking info said the package had been delivered to HE’s Wilton abode…except it hadn’t been.

The delivery company was closed yesterday for Veterans Day, but after much online searching and suffering I managed to discover three photos taken by the delivery person — photos that made it clear the jacket had been delivered to the wrong location — a home painted bluish-gray with a grassy front yard plus a white mailbox with the street number and a tiny red flag. The carrier also took two photos of the package and the shipping label.

As the name of my condo community begins with the name “Wilton”, I went searching around for streets with that name…two of them…zip.

This morning I went to the Wilton post office and showed the boss (40ish dark-haired woman) the messenger photos, and asked if she or any of the mail carriers recognized the home in question. She said it looked like it was located on a street I hadn’t inspected — Wilton Acres. I went right over there and bingo…mystery solved! Two cars parked in the driveway. A small dog barking inside.

I rang the bell next to a shed door two or three times, and then rapped loudly on it. I noticed that the door was very slightly ajar so I opened it and stepped inside and knocked on the kitchen-adjacent house door three or four times. No response except for the dog.

I went back to my car to search for the occupants on Facebook (their names were on address labels inside the shed), and then all of a sudden a moustachioed Wilton cop was rapping on my passenger window. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

I got out, explained the basics, showed him the delivery photos and my ID etc. It turns out the occupant had a video security system that sent her video footage of me poking around, and so she called the fuzz.

The satisfied, calmed-down cops spoke with the home owner at her place of employment. Ten minutes later she drove up and went inside and gave me four white plastic packages — the jean jacket plus three others that contained scarves that also hadn’t been delivered to my address earlier this month and last month, despite notices saying they had been.

My name, address and phone number were clearly printed on the labels. If the Wilton Acres woman had any good-neighbor inclinations she could have easily called or texted and explained that she had some of my stuff, etc. I would have gratefully come over and picked them up, or we could’ve met somewhere. That’s what I would’ve done, trust me, if someone else’s deliveries had been left at my place.

But over a period of a week or two she did nothing. In her defense she leads a busy life and has kids and a dog and all, but still.

Five days ago (11.7) I posted a piece titled “How Will Trump’s Victory Affect Oscar Noms?” My basic take was that any award-worthy film that defies or argues against Trump or Trumpism (Emilia Perez, Karla Sofia Gascon‘s sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated “lead” performance, The Apprentice, Conclave) will probably win favor among the Academy’s hardcore progressives (i.e., the Jamie Lee Curtis branch).

Yesterday (11.11) former IndieWire guy and current @EDGLRD hotshot Eric Kohn addressed the same topic in a Hollywood Reporter piece (“How the Oscar Race Responds to Donald Trump“) and offered roughly the same conclusion.

With most of America not so much saying “yay, Trump!’ as “fuck the wokey,” Kohn believes that Hollywood’s leftist vanguard will push back strongly against Joe and Jane Bumblefuck by saying in effect “screw you guys…more wokey-wokey…we’re digging in!”

Kohn: “The 2017 Best Picture win for Moonlight both reflected and influenced a Trump-era bid for change…the choices the Academy will soon make can only do the same.”

Kohn, however, seems to think that Sean Baker‘s Anora presents some kind of anguished portrait of struggling have-nots. Anora, he says, is “a paean to the struggle of finding stability in a country that forces its lower-class survivors to hustle at all costs,” and that it serves as “a barometer of the mood of the many unsure or uneasy about the election results — right down to the teary exhaustion of its closing moments, when two characters drawn together by happenstance melt into the frustrations of their shaky futures.”

The joy and rapture of Anora lies is the glorious and obvious fact that it’s not wokey-wokey in the least, and thank God Almighty for that heavenly blessing.

Kohn’s article also states that Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist, a 1940s saga of a tobacco-and-heroin-addicted Hungarian architect struggling to adapt to American capitalism, is “a sobering and uncannily timely testament to the contradictions between American immigrant promise and the inequalities that keep it unfulfilled for so many,” blah blah.

Kohn more or less concludes that if you’re against the cruel exploitation of immigrants you may want to think about giving Corbet’s film a Best Picture Oscar (or something like that).

The funniest part of Kohn’s piece states that Trumpies will have difficulty with the egalitarian spirit of The Brutalist. “Those who view Donald Trump as a cartoonish reality-TV character now threatening an American way of life will find much to identify with in the wakeup call endured by Adrien Brody’s Laszlo Toth,” Kohn opines. “Others who crave Trump’s more draconian approach to border control may not make it through The Brutalist.”

That’s me he’s talking about! I hated The Brutalist and found it so off-putting that I bolted during the intermission. Kohn is therefore implying I’m a Trumpie, but as much as I despise the woke mind virus, I voted for Harris because I considered her far less problematic than Trump.

The Brutalist is an agonizing film to sit through, and I’m predicting across-the-board rejection by Academy stalwarts. I hated it.

Excerpt from my 11.7 articl4: “I also think that more people will suddenly want to stream Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice, a well-written, superbly acted drama about young Trump’s relationship with rightwing pitbull attorney Roy Cohn. If they have any respect for the grade-A artistry involved, they’ll certainly want to consider Best Picture and Best Director noms as well as a Best Supporting Actor nom for Jeremy Strong, at the very least.

“I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s also…how to put this?…a sign-of-the-times, wokey, gender-fluid acceptance factor to be found in Conclave. Which should help it among the Jamie Lee Curtis “we all need to lock arms and tell Trump to go fuck himself” crowd. [Note: The Conclave thing has nothing to do with gender transitioning.)”

I’m probably beyond the reach of psychotherapy, but thanks to all for the birthday greetings.

Here’s a link for an L.A. Times Calendar piece that I wrote 31 years ago about Dan Richter, the ’60-era mime who played the bone-tossing Moonwatcher in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here are three scans of the original article — #1, #2 and #3.

My father met Dan at a Connecticut AA meeting in ’91 or thereabouts, and at my dad’s suggestion I called a while later and visited Dan at this home in Sierra Madre for an interview.

I remember he was dealing with chemotherapy at the time and not walking all that well, but he’s still here and doing fine.

In 2022 Richter published a 2012 memoir — “The Dream Is Over” — that’s mainly about a four-year period that he spent off-and-on with John Lennon and Yoko One (’69 to ’73).

Nancy Porter, an old childhood friend who was also living in Sierra Madre in ’93, came with me to visit Dan at this mountainside home. She later complained that he talked too much about himself. “But he’s the guy who picked up the bone to the strains of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathrusta’,” I replied. “And…you know, he hung with Lennon all those years and his stories are fascinating.”

If you’re hanging with someone who has lived large and touched serious history and has several first-hand recollections to share, you sit and absorb and give thanks. Either you get that or you don’t.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner it’s time to expand A Complete Unknown’s earlybird viewing audience. I’m getting a little tired of Kris Tapley’s annoying discretion and silence. If Timothee Chalamet really has slammed the ball into the bleachers, what deep-down, jingle-jangle thoughts occurred when you, a Mangold pally or so I’ve heard, heard the crack of the bat? And what about Edward Norton as Seeger? And all the other players? C’mon…

From Kevin Maher’s London Times review:

“Paul Mescal’s Lucius character is shaky at best, and the versatile actor, but for a couple of dazzling close-ups (very Richard Harris in Camelot), consistently struggles to enliven the gig — he frequently puts the ‘meh’ into Mescal.”

From Owen Gleiberman‘s Gladiator II review, posted on 11.11 at 6 am:

“The whole film is tailored to the next-generation specifications of its star, Paul Mescal, who plays a descendant of Russell Crowe’s Maximus and does it by not trying to imitate Crowe’s performance. In Gladiator, Crowe, wielding a sword that was like an extension of his inner hostility, was the ultimate thinking person’s badass. Mescal, svelte and placid, comes on more like the disheveled son of Marlon Brando — a forlorn pussycat turned rager.

“Mescal doesn’t have anything approaching [Crowe’s] elemental masculine gravitas. His Lucius, who is captured and brought to Rome to be a gladiator, is sulky and pensive, with a quizzical look. His stare is sensitive, his grin rueful, his lower jaw juts. But Mescal has something that works for the movie –he projects not revenge but a shaggy rugged nobility, the idealism that will make Lucius the potential savior of Rome.”

Little White Lies‘ Hannah Strong:

“The normally reliable Mescal is a pale imitation of Crowe, although it’s down to the uninspired script rather than his acting — Lucius has little emotional range beyond rage, and while this works to grand effect in the early gladiator battle between Lucius and a bunch of bloodthirsty baboons, the wind goes out of his sails quickly.”

Vulture‘s Alison Willmore:

“The Irish actor, a usually intriguing presence, doesn’t hold the screen here so much as he vanishes into its tumult. Of all the ways in which Mescal feels miscast, the most fatal may be his utter inability to seem like someone other guys would follow to their deaths. Mescal [is] terrible at giving the rousing speeches that were so iconic in Gladiator and that Gladiator II, which has a clunkier script written by David Scarpa, attempts to re-create.

“Mescal’s instinct is to underplay these moments rather than bellow theatrically, which is a problem, especially when saddled with somewhat confusing slogans like ‘Where we are, death is not!'”

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But basic impression-wise, I can’t seem to shake this underlying feeling that there’s something a wee bit underwhelming about the costars of Wicked being only 5’1″ tall. The tallest of the Wizard of Oz munchkins were 4’8″, so Grande and Erivo are closer to human-sized. But not by much.

This obviously isn’t a “problem”, per se. I’m just stating a physical fact. No biggie.

…but today he said this:

[9:45 to 10:37] “When the Iraq War began more than 75% of the American people were all behind it, but [this] didn’t last long. Elections are a choice, and a lot of Americans didn’t like what they saw [coming out of] the Democratic party, which now has two years to get its shit together and be in a position to take advantage of the first midterm election of Donald Trump’s incumbency, which historically should be a disaster for him. Two years from now Democrats must have a check on Donald Trump, and the only way they’ll have one is by taking back the House of Representatives.

“[And this] means the abandonment of this woke insanity…it means the abandonment of the lecturing and the hectoring and the demands to say your pronouns or else. Because the American people have rejected it.”

This means something. It means that sensible, mainstream liberal-minded adults, jolted by the catastrophic victory of The Beast over Kamala Harris, are suddenly sick of all the woke bullshit, as I noted on Sunday, 11.10. Schmidt never even alluded to, much less mentioned, general woke terror before today, but now he finally gets it.

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…that everyone will see and be thrilled by, and which everyone will flush out of their systems less than a day after seeing it. There has to be more to life, dear God, than a relentless adherence to tried-and-true formula and great gushings of power-punch, slam-bam action whoopee.

Mission – Impossible: The Final Reckoning opens on 5.23.25.

That settles it…he’s walking around with a certain aesthetic impairment…Saltburn is a painful film to sit through…it is…really.

N.Y. Times Kyle Buchanan (boldface) to Scott & vice versa:.

HE’s Saltburn review out of Telluride: