Day: December 22, 2024

Following up on HE’s 12.20 piece, “Wokey Amazon Execs Are “Fucking Idiots” — 007 Producer Barbara Broccoli“:

Snicker #1: “This is not absolutely authoritative, but a former Amazon hotshot confides that Amazon and MGM Studios honcho Jennifer Salke has never seen any of the James Bond films before Daniel Craig‘s.”

Snicker #2: “Salke considers anything made before the ’80s to be an old movie. She’s not interested in the classics, and never reads scripts.”

Snicker #3: “You can ask people from her NBC days about this, but agents and managers [will tell you] she never read scripts. She just makes deals with name talents like the Russo brothers and greenlights crap like Red One. She’s not material-driven.”

Snicker #4: “Things were chugging along fine at MGM when Mike DeLuca, who obviously knows Bond and isn’t wokey, was running the show.”

I don’t think I’ve ever quoted Joanna Langfield before, but her A Complete Unknown blurb says it straight and plain:

A Complete Unknown can’t dramatically land or even touch bottom because Timothee Chalamet’s Bob Dylan is such a ghost…such a deflector and artful dodger and sardonic shape-shifter that he can’t experience any kind of dramatic catharsis because his whole game has been “something is happening here but it ain’t me because I’m not there…are you?”

And yet, as I’ve written a couple of times, “so much of Unknown is spot–on, the real thing, a bell ringer. I was sorta kinda emotionally melting during the first half hour or so — literally on the verge of tears. Yes, I’ve been deeply invested in Dylan my entire life so I’m especially susceptible but still…”

A Complete Unknown totally ignores the nuts-and-bolts anxieties that Dylan faced as a jobless artist.

He arrived in Greenwich Village on January 24, 1961, and 11 months later he and Suze Rotolo moved into his first apartment at 161 West Fourth Street (right off Sixth Avenue, right around the corner from the present location of the IFC Center). So for 11 months he couch-flopped around like Llewyn Davis but who were his gracious hosts? I’d like to know — who literally told him “okay, sure, you can crash here for a while?” How many benefactors altogether?

If Colin Jost and Michael Che had any balls at all, they would have read each other’s risque jokes like Norm McDonald would have — straight, deadpan, no girlyman giggling.

The reason for their giggling is that they’re both pussies. The tee-hee subtext, needless to explain, was “ooooh, we apologize!!!…please understand that we know how raw this is…please don’t take these clips out of context, wokesters, and use them to destroy us on YouTube!”

Che wrote the following for Jost: (a) “Y’all know Scarlett [Johansson] just celebrated her 40th birthday, which means I’m about to get up out of there!” (b) “We just had a kid together, and y’all ain’t see no pictures of him yet, because he’s black as hell!” and (c) “Costco has removed their roast beef sandwich from its menu, but I ain’t tripping. I be eating roast beef every night since my wife had the kid! Nah, nah, I just playin’, baby. You know I don’t go downtown! Shiz! That’s gay as hell!”

I feel deflated and disgusted by the threat of yet another Superman flick….the tedious, shameless emptiness of the collecive Warner Bros. mind!

I was never into Superman mythology all that much, even in the old Jimmy Carter days. I kinda shrugged when the first Christopher Reeve-Richard Donner version came along in ’78, or 46 friggin’ years ago. (The only thing I liked about it was the “would you like to see a very long arm?” scene between Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine.) My interest was still flickering, I suppose, when Bryan Singer‘s Superman Returns came along 18 years ago.

But then the completely evil Zack Snyder drained the Supie spirit and pretty much pounded the legend to death with 2013’s Man of Steel and 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice…get outta my life!

Jeff Sneider has reported that James Gunn‘s Superman (WB, 7.11.25) is looking shaky or twitchy or something in that vein.

I was wondering if David Corenswet was….nope, he’s straight! Imagine!

New York City isn’t about beauty. Never has been. Some nabes are aesthetically pleasing, of course, and the echo of history is unmistakable all over but NYC can’t hold a visual candle to Paris, Rome, Bern, Prague, Barcelona, Marrakech, London, Zurich, etc.

NYC is about the power and the glory…it’s about the bolt and the buzz and the very best (okay, hungriest) people clashing and harmonizing…a chorus congregated, the music of activity…the commerce and the juice and lots and lots of mad money, etc.

…I Saw The TV Glow has been strong within me since it opened last May. Egg-crack, transgender, persistence of “Pink Opaque”, bury me alive, Tara and Isabel, Midnight Realm…later.

Friendo: “A middling, awkward, tiresome movie. That anyone could actually think it’s good is a sign of liquified brain matter leaking out of woke people’s ears.”