…have HE’s approval.
Pensylvania governor Josh Shapiro describing JD Vance’s politics as “bullshit” is analagous to Howard Beale telling his UBS newscast viewers that he’d simply “run out of bullshit.”
It was the right word to use both times.
Shapiro: “Excuse me for getting emotional about [this], but when I see hungry people in my state, who are hungry because of JD Vance‘s bullshit politics, that makes me angry…America deserves better than JD Vance.”
Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein is streaming on Netflix now, and one of the reasons I’m going to have to force myself to watch is because I hate movies set in snowy frigid environments, and particularly those in which middle-aged guys have dozens of tiny chunks of ice embedded in their beard.
I’ve known and loved Guillermo since ’95, and I never thought I’d say anything disparaging about one of his films. But I’m so damn sick of Frankenstein adaptations. He needs to make a small intimate film about a brilliant overweight rich guy who falls for a skinny, brainy blonde. Seriously — I would definitely watch that film.
Initially posted in…I forget. Definitely re-posted on 2.14.21:
The following true-life encounters occured during the Santa Barbara Film Festival. The first happened in 2020; the second in ’15 or ’16. It follows that most of what happens during my annual SB visits is uneventful; we only pass along the stand-out stuff.
Story #1: I was in the checkout line at Ralph’s on Carillo. A giggly party girl and her friends were buying four huge bottles of something alcoholic. Either the booze was pale yellow or the bottles were tinted that way. Didn’t see a label or sticker.
I asked the checkout guy, “What is that stuff?”
“Bocca,” he said.
“Bocca?” I repeated. I thought it might be some exotic liqueur. “Never heard of it.”
Actually I had in The French Connection — Tony Lobianco’s Brooklyn-based heroin dealer was named Sal Bocca. Roy Schieder: “Our friend’s name is Bocca. Salvatore Bocca. They call him Sal. He’s a real sweetheart.”
The girl and her pallies paid for the Bocca, and the guy packed the bottles in ordinary paper bags, which struck me as insufficient given their size and weight.
“How do you spell that?” I asked. The checkout guy ignored my request, but he looked at me sideways. “You never heard of Vocca?”
“No,” I insisted while offering a half-shrug of apology. Ping. “Oh, you mean vodka?”
“Yeah, man…vocca.”
“Oh, sorry. I misunderstood. Sorry.“
In fact, the checkout guy, who was (and undoubtedly still is) of Latin descent and spoke with a slight accent, was pronouncing his vees like bees. I learned that in Spanish class when I was 15. When you say “vamonos,” for example, the vee is pronounced as a blend of vee and bee.
Which partially explains the confusion. But vodka is pronounced “vahdkuh” and this guy was delivering too much of an “oh” sound. So just between us, it was mostly his fault. I’ve been saying the word “vodka” my entire life so don’t tell me.
Story #2: I was staying for a night (Saturday) at the Cabrillo Inn. I awoke around 6:30 am. I naturally wanted my usual cup of morning mud. There was no coffee-pot heater in the room so hot tap water would have to suffice. I turned on the faucet and waited. And waited. Didn’t happen — never even turned warm.
So I dressed and went downstairs with my day-old paper cup and my Starbucks Instant and strolled into the complimentary-breakfast room.
Some 50ish guy (a tourist from Chicago, he later explained) was standing inside and giving me the once-over. Two women were preparing things; they weren’t quite ready to serve. All I wanted was some hot water so I asked for that. In a minute or two, they said. I nodded and waited.
The Man From Windy City thought I had somehow overstepped.
Chicago guy: “Why don’t you ask the hotel manager?”
Me: “What’s he gonna do?”
Chicago guy: “That’s what he’s here for.”
Me: “What’s he gonna do, push the emergency hot-water button?”
Chicago guy: “He could get an engineer to fix the pipes.”
Me: “At ten minutes to seven on a Sunday morning? Yeah, that’s a possibility.”
Here’s a re-boot of HE’s “Almost Famous Scene That Never Happened“, which initially posted on 5.3.19:
Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe‘s finest and most personal film, opened 25 years ago. I remain a huge fan, especially of the 162-minute director’s cut “bootleg” version that came out on Bluray in 2011.
Crowe’s initial theatrical version ran 122 minutes, in part because Dreamworks producer Walter Parkes kept insisting on “shorter, shorter, shorter.” It felt a bit constricted, didn’t really breathe. The 162-minute Bluray is the definitive version.
During production I got hold of a 1998 copy of Crowe’s script. It was 168 pages long, and I fell in love with it straight off. Almost all of it was shot and most of it became part of the final cut. Unfortunately my favorite scene (which is posted after the jump) wasn’t shot or was shot and never used.
Almost Famous is a largely autobiographical saga about a teenaged, San Diego-residing Crowe stand-in (called William Miller in the script and played by Patrick Fugit) landing a Rolling Stone assignment to profile an up-and-coming band called Stillwater, which had a star performer called Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup).
William hangs out with the band, gets into all kinds of wild-ass adventures, gets to know the Stillwater groupies and so on. After a false start he eventually turns in an honestly written article to Rolling Stone.
Russell and the band members are alarmed when the fact-checker calls. Fearful of being portrayed as insecure dipshits, they lie by insisting that Miller’s account is fiction. The article is killed, and William returns home in a state of defeat and total exhaustion.
The final graph of the Wiki synopsis: “Russell feels guilty for betraying William. He calls Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) and wants to meet with her, but she tricks him by giving him William’s address. He arrives and finds himself face-to-face with William’s mother (Frances McDormand), who scolds him for his behavior. Russell apologizes to William and finally gives him an interview.
Russell, we learn, has verified William’s article to Rolling Stone, which runs it as a cover feature. Penny fulfills her long-standing fantasy to go to Morocco. Stillwater again tours only by bus.”
The scene that I loved so much shows a guilt-stricken Russell visiting the offices of Rolling Stone and admitting to Jann Wenner, Ben Fong Torres and David Felton that William’s article is an honest account. I’ve had this script in a file cabinet for 20 years, and this is the first time I’ve posted these now-yellowed pages:
HE to Suttercane: You’ve “done both acid and mushrooms several times”, fine, but you evidently haven’t been called.
I recognize or accept that most LSD trippers have never gotten past the “elevator in the brain hotel” stage.
But after all the jacks are in their boxes, and the clowns have all gone to bed…
Jimi Hendrix didn’t write this, but it’s no less true: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
You don’t have to drop acid to realize that we’re all intertwined and vulnerable…this shared symphony of ours so delicate and ethereal…all of us (okay, some of us) humming the same ohhm, sharing the same pulse…everything and everyone in ways that defy strenuous attempts to explain. And all you have to do is let it in. Or not. But it’s there either way.
The writings of Herman Hesse, Alan Watts…Jay Stevens’ book “Storming Heaven”…even Tom Wolfe captured a slice of it in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”…George Harrison’s “Within You, Without You”…c’mon man, you’re insulting these guys and the inner deliverance they knew and spoke of by comparing their cosmic spiritual transcendence to some Pentecostal holy–roller in Texas…Jesus H. Christ.
I wouldn’t touch LSD with a 20-foot pole today, but without it I never would have known what I STILL KNOW without question today, for whatever that’s worth.
The proverbial door didn’t open for me until my second (or was it my third?) trip, but after what felt like a lifetime of living in a kind of sedate middle-class prison (I was 20 or 21 at the time), the bars melted away and I felt cleansed…I was at one with the angels.
“I know, I know, you’ll probably scream and cry that your little world won’t let you go…”
Cary Grant wrote and spoke extensively about where LSD led him, but he never spoke of any kind of satori or enlightenment or Godhead consciousness. The benefit, he said, was in the realm of psychological excavation…he felt that it cut away the cobwebs and led him into a state of clarity about who, where and what he was.
Nothing wrong with that in the slightest, but Grant apparently wasn’t “called” either…not in the Baba Ram Dass or “Bhagavad Gita” sense, I mean.
Incidentally: The correct phrasing is “all those cretins you look down upon.”
That none-too-hip Facebook guy said Grant spent a lot of time “stoned” on acid. Hendrix qualified that…”not necessarily stoned but beautiful.”
When that white-haired guy fainted in the Oval Office Donald Trump just stood there and looked down as if to say “jeez, what a weak candy-ass, what a wet noodle…does this guy know anything about manning up or what?” Trump could’ve been looking at a wet slug after a log is overturned.
But that was nothing compared to RFK Jr.‘s reaction when he ran like a thief….”holy shit, they’re going to try and blame me for this…they’ll say ‘the United States secretary of health and human services should have done something!’ Feets, don’t fail me now!”
Incidentally: If I was Virginia’s governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, I would have visited Prague a while back for a slight surgical modification…just a slight one. For noses tend to get bigger (i.e., more bulbous) as we age. Now she’s too famous to do this, but she could have easily managed it five or ten years ago and no one would’ve been the wiser.
HE commenter Mike Shea: “Die, My Love definitely feels like a new subgenre: the tired, frazzled, going-insane, new mother experience. I thought Amy Adams was great in Nightbitch even as the story chickened out by the end. There was last month’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. There was also Jason Reitman‘s Tully. And now this.”
In this Die, My Love corner, N.Y. Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson. On the ring’s opposing side, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Fearless Fosdick…Jeffrey Wells, I mean. Sepia-amber tint vs. stark black-and-white. In essence, the alleged joys of sisterly solidarity and mad Lawrentian immersion vs. instinctual lemme-outta-here plus an honest, elemental fear of being chomped down on.
Wilkinson….
Wells…
Wilkinson…
Wells…
My “Die, Yuppie Scum” T-shirt was still considered timely apparel when this snap was taken in the spring or early summer of ‘90. “Yuppie” had been a curse word for a good four or five years. A few months earlier Mike Figgis’s Internal Affairs opened theatrically. In the final scene Richard Gere’s Peck, a corrupt cop, angrily taunts Andy Garcia’s Raymond Avila by calling him a “fucking yuppie.”
Jett was nearly two; Dylan was five or six months old.
…and tripping on LSD is not what anyone who knows anything would call a “stoned” excursion — it’s more like the intoxication of sailing clear-headed on the Long Island Sound under marmalade skies.
And I think Grant stopped tripping when his daughter Jennifer came along in ‘66.
At the 1957 Oscars Grant accepted Ingrid Bergman’s Best Actress Oscar (Anastasia) on her behalf.
The latest Gatecrashers tabulations are up and rolling. (Here are HE’s initial picks.) A few slackers are still deciding but…
HE’s preferred Oscar-worthy acting quartet: Best Actor: Marty Supreme‘s Timothee Chalamet, Best Actress: Sentimental Value‘s Renate Reinsve, Best Supporting Actor: Sentimental Value‘s Stellan Skarsgård; Best Supporting Actress: Weapons‘ Amy Madigan.
