Month: August 2025

“They Lost Their North Star”

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Justine Bateman, starting around 4:30 mark: Before streamers and tech companies came to regard more or less everything as content, “the goal was this excellence…you wanted to be associated with something really good…something that would last beyond this era…[back then it was almost] shameful to do something [just] for money…sometimes you had to but you didn’t feel good about it.

“But what happened 10 years ago was that [we had] this streaming situation and studio chiefs chasing after the streamers and not wanting to look like chumps, so [that] really screwed things up. The studios started looking at films and TV series just as content. There have been exceptions over the last 10 years, of course, but the focus became volume content.”

People Didn’t Vote For Trump — They Voted Against Harris

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I voted for Harris because I wanted someone semi-sane and mostly sensible running things, but I understand why the battleground schmoes didn’t like her.

“A party of scolding, bullying, cancel culture…this is actually what fascism is.”

Piers Morgan on 8.1.25:

@mimzie2.0

Piers Morgan Says Democrats Should reevaluate themselves, before next election

♬ original sound – Mimzie

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Two Observations

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It strikes me as vaguely odd that for the filming of Lolita (‘62), director Stanley Kubrick chose to build a sizable sound-stage set for a simple daylight scene in Shelley Winters’ suburban backyard.

This seems like an awful lot of trouble and expense for a boilerplate dialogue scene that might last 50 or 60 seconds.

It’s interesting, however, to discover stills of James Mason and Sue Lyon chatting in this backyard — presumably from a cut scene that follows the initial first-glance or “cherry pies” scene between Mason, Lyon and Winters.

I Remember Pips

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But Rodney Dangerfield in shorts and open-toed whatevers (they’re not sandals)…no, man…just no…can’t unsee this either.

2005 Emmons Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11235 (shuttered now). Late ‘70s, maybe ‘80 or so, judging by the bell-bottoms.

Commenters of a Lesser God

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HE strongly suspects that a majority of the haters who saw red yesterday and went crazy toxic over a mild-mannered notion that Liam Neeson ought to take certain measures in order to look 63 again…

HE strongly suspects that many of these meltdown cases haven’t even caught one of Neeson’s finest films ever, 2024’s In The Land of Saints and Sinners, much less urged their friends to see it or talked it up on HE or whatever.

Some may have seen and admired it, I’m guessing, but the others need to wake the fook up.

In The Land of Saints and Sinners is “a Liam Neeson movie,” and we all know what that means. It means adherence to a certain slow-build formula.

Repeating for the record: To a steady and stalwart Neeson fellow who’s not looking for trouble and in fact would like to back off into a shelter or backwater of some kind, shit inevitably happens.

A slow burning, a gradually tightening situation, implications of tough terms, bad people up to bad stuff (including the threat of serious harm to a couple of innocent characters as well as to Neeson’s guy) until it all blows up in the end.

But the story, set in rural Ireland in the mid ’70s, pulls you in bit by bit, and the script has been carefully and compellingly written by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane.

In The Land of Saints and Sinners began shooting in Ireland (County Donegal, Dublin) in March ‘22. It premiered 18 months later at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Netflix began streaming it on 4.26.24.

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Not A Big Deal

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Liam Neeson turned 73 a few weeks ago, and that’s fine. What isn’t entirely fine is the fact the movie stars are expected to look ten years younger than their age, and Neeson — no offense, love the guy — looks 73, if not 75.

You know where this is going. Neeson needs to lose the neck wattle, clean up the eye lids and eye bags, brighten (and possibly enlarge) his teeth, etc. The usual usual. He basically needs to look 63 again…is that such a terrible thing? It’ll extend his career, for one thing.

If HE can submit to certain measures, Neeson can surely do the same.

On top of which he probably needs to invest in the latest and most effective…uhm, performance pills, given his much-commented-about relationship with the makeup-averse Pamela Anderson, 58, who’s apparently not much of a stayer when it comes to boyfriends. A bit volatile, I mean. Two years or less. Rumor has it that Neeson is hung like a horse, but a voice is telling me he’s too nice of a guy to hook up with a hair-trigger hellcat. Just ask Jon Peters.