In preparation for Luca Guadagnino‘s Joie de Vivre, his seven-hour, fifteen-minute doc about Bernardo Bertoluccci, I’m going to rewatch Before The Revolution (’64), which I haven’t seen since 1977 or thereabouts… nearly 40 years. Francesco Barilli is such an impossibly morose, unsettled, highly conflicted young lad; Adriana Asti (who passed last year at age 94) is deliciously skittish and slutty…a moody tease, masterful at driving young men to madness.
Month: August 2026
Taibbi, AOC on Woke 1 vs. Woke 2
From Matt Taibbi‘s “Woke 2 Wants a Mulligan for Woke 1”, posted today — “Gearing for a White House run, Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez laughs off ‘Woke 1’ as ‘a little crazy’…on the strategy of losing every political battle in order to win the political war”:
Jonathan Karl, ABC News, 10:25 mark: “Did the woke movement go too far with some of those [radical] positions? I mean, you…you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police.”
Ocasio-Cortez: “You know, I think that…I think that during this time, and during, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we’ve seen because of those shutdowns. Yeah. And I think that the…the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”
Taibbi: “Discussions! Fruitful! Quite a way to describe ‘Woke 1,’ the first pass at saturation-bombing America with race paranoia, scarlet-lettering, and threats in an effort to produce grotesque public displays of ideological obedience“….thank you!
“Ocasio-Cortez went on to say, ‘Of course, during lockdown, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.’ What she means is, ‘We tried to shove it down your throats through the sheer power of our freakout before. This time, we’re going to get elected first.”
“AOC has to refer to ‘Woke 1’ because ‘Woke 2‘ is now ascendant, and its primary characteristic is its effort to remarket itself as a viable electoral movement, less insane than that initial run from a screeching mob of torch-bearing, half-literate buffoons who tried to burn the American project to the ground. Since Woke 2 is, like AOC, dusting itself off to run for office, it wants you to forget this earlier incarnation, even though none of its adherents have apologized or changed their minds.”
Significant Taibbi summary: “Everyone uses different language now, and even though ‘woke’ ultimately became a punchline that helped elect Donald Trump in 2024, she’s happy it succeeded in moving the Overton Window.”
High-Grade “Ulysses” (1954, Italian Dubbed, English Subtitled, 104 Minutes)
This is the cleanest, sharpest, most visually refined version of Mario Camerini‘s Ulysses that anyone’s ever seen outside of Bluray owners…a relatively tight and trim version of Homer’s epic poem and free to one and all. Surfaced only three days ago.
Kirk Douglas as Ulysses, Silvana Mangano as Penelope/Circe (double role), Anthony Quinn as Atinous (i.e., Robert Pattinson‘s role), Rossana Podestà as Nausicaa, et. al.
Queens Family Tragedy
James Gray‘s Paper Tiger never bores, never slackens, never eases up. Riveting from start to finish. Evil spirits of the Russian mob vortex swirling up and swallowing damn near everything. Highest marks from HE and everyone else. Probably not Oscar-aspirational but a solid crime package meets a suspenseful family stew. Actually it is Oscar-worthy as far as Scarlett Johansson is concerned — she’s excellent as the worry-wart mom.
“Leave It At That”
Ryan D’Agostino‘s Brad Pitt interview in the new issue of Esquire is basically a well-written dodge.
The article is about promoting David Ayer‘s Heart of the Beast (Paramount, 9.25), which Pitt calls “a love story.” But c’mon….all anybody wants to know about is the story behind the seeming hostility that two or three of Brad’s kids feel toward him (i.e., legally slicing “Pitt” off of their last names) and their ongoing estrangement over the notorious drunken airplane incident of 2016.
Does D’Agostino try to dig into this? Of course not. Does Pitt offer any particulars? Of course not.
Brad has given up on sobriety, he casually remarks. He’s allowing himself to drink wine, he says, but moderately. (Bad sign.) A photo reveals that he also smokes cigarettes.
The suicide stuff is basically speculative bullshit, but here’s how it appears in the article:
“Yeah,” he says. “I was never suicidal in any way. It just was not my makeup. In fact, if I have any afflictions, it’s probably being a congenital optimist. Which has helped many times, and it’s also gotten me…I’ve walked foolishly head-on into a Mack truck because of my optimism. Or, as my forever-funny friend David Fincher will say, Yeah, you see the glass as half full, but it’s half full of urine.
“Anyway, I’ve never been suicidal except for one little period. And in that one little period, I just thought…I just couldn’t…[I] just didn’t see a way out. The pain was so oppressive that…I wasn’t going to act on this, but I could feel…I could feel the cold steel of the bullet in my head, and it felt like relief. And I thought, Oh, okay, now I understand…I understand suicide, in the sense that it’s just relief. It’s just looking for relief from the pain. But I also think we have incredible survival instincts. And for me, that immediately kicked in, but it was just…”
He pauses, his head kind of rolling around on his neck, grappling, groping.
“Yeah. Like, listen: This shit ain’t easy.”
He stares at me.
“And you’re talking to a guy who won the lottery.”
HE to God: “I wouldn’t wear this pink-and-beige-colored puffy jacket [above] with a gun at my back.”
Back to D’Agostino: Only Pitt, Jolie, and their children know exactly what’s going on between them all. Her allegations, his quiet, outside of whatever is said in rooms with lawyers and arbiters. But I ask him, less interested in the drama than in its consequences: When we talk about those moments, the ones when the pain was so oppressive that he could imagine feeling cold steel as relief, are we talking about them?
“Kid stuff?” I ask.
He leans forward on an elbow, takes half a breath, and looks across the table at me. “Family stuff,” he says.
He nods, looking at me. I nod.
“Family stuff,” I say. Something changes in the room, something molecular, for just a second. Crossed wires. A frame in black-and-white.
“Family stuff,” he says. “We could leave it at that.”
And who, by the way, is the seventysomething-or-older guy with the sculpted cheekbones and white hair who poses next to Pitt in a couple of photos? Not D’Agostino, who’s apparently 51. Excerpt: “We’re talking about getting old, and we’ve just established our age difference: eleven years. (Pitt is sixty-two.)”
Lazy Puff Journalism
My interest surged when I came across Sophie Edwards’ Homes and Gardens piece about the interior of a Montmartre apartment that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward rented during the filming of Martin Ritt‘s Paris Blues. The article was posted this morning.
Having stayed in Montmartre several times over the last quarter-century, I was immediately interested in the Newman-Woodward address and maybe a shot of the apartment’s exterior.
Does Edwards’ article include either one (i.e., the address or an exterior photo)? Of course not. This is perhaps due to some extreme notion in Edwards’ head about a possible violation of privacy or whatnot. Nobody wants to help some deranged stalker bother a visiting celebrity but…hello?…Paris Blues was filmed 65 years ago so whose privacy could possibly be invaded?
Edwards could have at least mentioned the street but naaah. I hate this kind of lazy, lightweight faux-journalism.
The Newman-Woodward place was at 11 rue d’Orchampt, which is just south of the corner of rue Lepic and rue d’Orchampt. I know the area well. A Google Maps shot of the entrance reveals that the building is protected by a solid metal gate….perfect for movie stars!
is Paris Blues any good? It was considered semi-edgy at the time due to the casting of Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll as lovers plus related discussions of American racism. The sexual aroma is emphasized by the name of Newman’s slide-trombone-playing jazzman — i.e., Ram Bowen. Carroll and Woodward play visiting tourists who get involved with Newman and Poitier, and it goes with saying that, racism aside, this urban relationship film is definitely about Ram Bowen fulfilling the metaphor…heh-heh. Otherwise it’s a bit flaccid, although the roaming-around-Paris footage is diverting. Louis Armstrong costars.
Bowled Over
A few hours ago I finally saw the restored It, the frothy 1927 romcom that catapulted Clara Bow into superstardom. It screened at 3 pm at the Bedford Playhouse.
Over the decades I’ve watched…oh, a couple of dozen classic silent films via broadcast TV, streaming and DVD/Bluray, but before today I’d never actually sat down and seen a professionally restored, scratch-free, silvery-sheen silent on a large screen inside a first-rate theatre.
Bow is spunky, luscious and luminous, of course, but her male costars, the 40 year-old Antonio Moreno (the romantic lead) and the 43 year-old, British-born William Austin, pale alongside her — they don’t have her energy or any sort of male equivalent of “flesh impact.”
26 year-old Gary Cooper, whom Bow was romantically involved with during filming, has a dialogue-free cameo as a newspaper reporter, but he should have been cast as Bow’s principal object of desire (i.e., Moreno’s role)
The social customs, attitudes and presumptions depicted in It feel a bit creaky here and there, and it’s certainly stocked with what can only be called rube-level humor. But I enjoyed the spirited, screw-it-all attitude.
I couldn’t help noticing that the petite, cute-as-a-button Bow had hands and feet that weren’t exactly Japanese geisha-sized. No offense but her feet especially seemed a bit beefy.
Released in January of ’27, It was a silent film, of course. The Jazz Singer didn’t open until October of that year, but once sound came along the appeal of silent films plummeted fast.
Blue-chip restoration guru Robert Harris oversaw the It refreshment, and this spiffed-up, 99-year-old classic (“the first Hollywood romcom”) will continue to be screened on the festival circuit.
Unbridled spirit was the essence of Bow’s appeal. Her improvisational flapper energy comes right off the screen. She was a live wire extraordinaire.
“There seems to be no pattern, no purpose to her life. She swings from one emotion to another, but she gains nothing, stores up nothing for the future. She lives entirely in the present, not even for today but in the moment. Clara is the total nonconformist. What she wants she gets, if she can. What she desires to do, she does.
“She has a big heart, a remarkable brain, and the most utter contempt for the world in general. Time doesn’t exist for her, except that she thinks it will stop tomorrow. She has real courage, because she lives boldly. Who are we, after all, to say she is wrong?” — Adela Rogers St. John on Clara Bow.
From “Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Clara Bow, ‘It’ Girl.” by Hairpin‘s Anne Helen Petersen:
“Clara Bow doesn’t look like a relic. She doesn’t look like she belongs in the ’20s, or even in black and white. She looks nothing like the other stars of the silent era, who either seemed frozen in puberty (Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish), outrageously “exotic” (Theda Bara, Pola Negri), or untouchably glamorous (Gloria Swanson). This girl’s got something like whoa.
“Look at her. She looks so…MODERN. Like she could be a star today, right? When I show footage of Bow to my undergraduates, who generally consider the viewing of silent film as the sixth level of hell (trumped only by the viewing of Soviet silent film) they can’t take their eyes off her. It’s her movement, her eyes, the way she flirts with the camera.
“But it’s something else, too – something Billy Wilder once referred to as ‘flesh impact,’ a rare quality shared only with the likes of Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Flesh impact meant having ‘flesh which photographs like flesh,’ flesh you felt you could reach out and touch — or flesh with which you would very much like to have sex.
“That desire made Clara Bow a star, but would also make it easy to tell outrageous stories about her, and for people to believe those outrageous stories. In 1927, she was the No. 1 star in America. When she retired in 1931 amid a tangle of scandals, she was all of 28 years old.”
Your Own Ones
“Irish Heartbeat,” a late ’80s song performed by Van Morrison and the Chieftains, isn’t much different from a thought I posted last May while sitting in Oslo airport:
“It’s very calming and comforting to be in a country that’s basically white, white, whiter-than-Wonderbread,” I wrote. “Just as Richard Pryor felt ecstatic upon visiting developed African countries in the ‘70s, I’m feeling a similar kind of kinship and fraternity. I am among my own here. I like the atmosphere of mellow restraint…those laid-back Norwegian vibes.”
In response to this a woke terrorist called “fallsdownamountaintwice” posted the following:
Is He Kidding?
Everyone who remembers Tom Jones from his ’60s heyday understands that aging is inevitable, but this? A white-haired guy singing from a chair? Imagine if Bob Dylan were to let himself go like this.
Fatherland Mineral Water
There’s something vaguely Third Reich-ian about that eight-pointed red star with the lion drawing in the center. (Or is that a dragon?)
Did the top Third Reich guys used to sip this stuff? Gerolsteiner Brunnen GmbH & Co., a German mineral water firm with its seat in Gerolstein in the Eifel mountains, actually dates back to the 1890s. The Gerolsteiner factory was destroyed in am allied bombing raid during Christmas of 1944.
Old Lips
This is actually pretty good stuff. Grade-A Larry David writing. Barack exudes just the right amount of suppressed disdain. What’s it called, a Mango Tango?
Scourge That Re-Elected The Beast
[HE gush rant, posted this morning, in “Joe Apparently on Last Legs” thread]
MAGA ardor was partially created by an open border plus inflation concerns during the Biden presidency, but it was intensified by general, across-the-board, foam-at-the-mouth woke insanity. And I don’t want to hear one single scolding comment from Bobby Peru…not one!
Biden-era “woke insanity” meant (a) identity issues taking precedence over bread-and-butter issues, (b) the smothering of cinematic art by way of woke ideology and “presentism” in casting, (c) the dominance of race, gender & sexuality over damn near everything, (d) career assassinations by way of #MeToo-driven cancel culture, (e) drag performers in elementary schools, (f) general divisiveness between woke elites and average Joes & Janes, (g) general anti-white-male sentiments in films and within urban media culture, (h) “defund the police”, (i) equity over meritocracy, (j) Young kids indoctrinated with trans ideology teachings & generally encouraged to regard their sexuality as fluid non-binary, (k) cancelling Abraham Lincoln, (l) mass hip-hop hoodie shopliftings in department stores, (m) The metaphor of homeless sociopaths shitting on the streets of San Francisco, (n) educators advocating for gender transitions among minors without parental involvement, (o) Lily Gladstone’s identity-driven Best Actress campaign, (p) Justin Chang trashing “The Holdovers” because of that “Mr. Moto” scene, (q) pregnant men, (r) that drag queen “Last Supper” tableau at Paris Olympics…all of this crap and more.
I’m sorry to note that Trump was re-elected in ‘24 by exploiting resentment over inflation and unchecked immigration and over the plague of French terror wokeness & by generally fanning the flames. I voted for Hillary, Joe & Kamala. Yes, Trump has certainly turned off tens of millions since 1.20.25 and Repubs will surely suffer steep losses in the ‘26 midterms and hallelujah for that, but myopic MAGA sentiments aren’t wrong on every single issue. (Most or many but not all.)
Sleepy Joe Biden, who will sadly not be with us for too much longer, brought about his own destruction and the wokeys surely triggered Trump’s victory over Kamala. Wokesters were the social provocateurs who ushered in the Trump horror. Condemn Trump for his general mafia corruption, criminality and authoritarianism, of course, but he wouldn’t have been re-elected without the bleeding wokeys.