…with people who pronounce Oregon as “Awrriginn.” It’s pronounced “OHRuhgone.” How could anyone possibly look at the spelling of that state and think “oh, yeah, sure…Awrriginn.” You’d have to be a bit of a cracker to say it that way.

[Posted on 11.22.18] When I watch Cary Grant in North by Northwest I’m always aware this was his crowning big-screen moment of the ’50s, his last great role and the last film in which he could make a case for looking late 40ish and perhaps a suitable sexual partner for Eva Marie Saint (he was 54 when Alfred Hitchcock shot NXNW in ’58 — she was 34), and after this he was more and more the silver fox and starting to go gently downhill with grace and elegance (nobody believed he was an appropriate romantic match for Audrey Hepburn in Charade) but heading there regardless, and of course destined to retire by the mid ’60s. So North by Northwest was really the last shining moment of his career…the last VistaVision moment when everything was truly in place.

Hollywood Elsewhere is hereby requesting all motivated Photoshop enthusiasts to try and construct a movie poster for the re-christened version of Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Drive My Car, henceforth to be known as “Duuude, Drive My Car!”

The idea is to mimic or otherwise re-use the basic poster art concept of Danny Leiner‘s Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000) but nudging aside images of Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott in favor of Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tōko Miura and Masaki Okada.

The lead paragraph on the Dude, Where’s My Car? Wikipedia page says that “the film’s title became a minor pop culture saying, and was commonly reworked in various pop cultural contexts during the 2000s.” Indeed!

The basic idea is to make Justin Chang and the rest of the Drive My Car cabal seethe with anger.

[Thanks to David Edelstein for the inspiration.]

I’m thinking of something a name-brand director and actor said during a discussion before press and WGA members when he was promoting a certain 2005 film.

He mentioned having recently stood before an infant girl in a crib, a baby who was bright-eyed and beaming and glowing with excitement over the joy of being alive, and this guy was feeling almost heartbroken knowing what she’ll almost certainly go through when she gets into her tweens and teens, the inevitable hurt, the possible encounters with cruelty or callousness…emotional stuff that will almost inevitably leave bruises.

I had the same thought today. I suppressed it right away, telling myself “why dwell on potential negatives? Focus on the joyful and push your sad thoughts aside.” But that director’s thought was in my head for a few seconds. The infant girl he spoke of is now 17 or 18, and probably doing okay or maybe great. But who knows? Life is fraught with peril, not a bowl of cherries, etc.

Just after reading Owen Gleiberman‘s review of TikTok, Boom,” Sasha Stone‘s message about the TikTok vs. Twitter vs. Facebook dynamic popped up.

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As posted in this space on 2.2.22 (“CNN Schlongola Mishegoss“):

“No, dumbass, it’s not in the center. It’s NEVER in the center. I thought you said you knew a thing or two about framing landscape shots. God, are you some kind of fucking Arizona dumbass?”

David Lynch is supposedly playing the snarly, blustery John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans, according to Rodrigo Perez.

What about a relaunching of thirtysomething, only focusing on child-rearing, home-owning Millennials and to some extent Zoomers? If the producers could keep it real and really drill down on the particulars and undercurrents of life among professional-class people attempting to live more or less conventional lives in the early 2020s (like Jett and Cait are doing right now), it might work. The cast would have to be at least 50% non-white, of course, but we’re all accustomed to that enlightened system and embracing of the here-and-now. What does the HE community think? Yes, it should be called thirtysomething…straight, no apologies, un-ironically.

“Late ’80s Yuppie Blues,” posted on 8.22.09:

I always felt that thirtysomething, the zeitgest-reflecting, essential-viewing yuppie series that ran from 9.87 through 5.91, was too sensitive-wimpy.

As honestly written and impressively acted as it often was, the show suffered from an almost oppressive self-examination syndrome — a constant exercise in fault-finding and angst exploration — among its boomer characters and their difficulties in managing and/or growing into adulthood and parenthood. To varying degrees everyone on the show wore a hair shirt, suffered or caused suffering, and was afflicted (if not wracked) with self doubt.

I forget who said “an unexamined life is not worth living” but thirtysomething sure as hell put the wisdom of that statement to the test. The women (Mel Harris, Melanie Mayron, Patricia Wettig, Polly Draper) were constantly fretting and kvetching over some crisis of the spirit, the bedroom, the bankbook or whatever. Always something darkening, taunting or haunting their brow.

And the guys especially (Ken Olin, Timothy Busfield, Peter Horton) — those poor Hebrew rock-pounders, bent and sweating under Pharoah’s lash! — were always being busted, picked apart and de-balled for this and that profound failing.

(l. to r.) Timothy Busfield, Patricia Wettig, Polly Draper, Mel Harris, Ken Olin, Melanie Mayron, Peter Horton.

I hated Harris’s character, Hope (who played Olin’s wife), most of all. I remember being told by a cast member in ’88 that Hope was referred to by others on the show as “mope.” Everyone hated her. I’m certain she brought tens of thousands of watchers down every week. For all I know she may have inspired real-life fights, separations, divorces. (Or maybe people saw her personality as a cautionary tale and tried to be unlike her as much as possible.) Either way she was a huge drag to be around.

I related to what the show was, of course. I began watching just before getting married to my ex-wife Maggie in October 1987. and we both both became fairly devout fans (Maggie wore a gray “thirtysomething” t-shirt that I bought her) until the end of the run, during which time Jett came along in June 1988 and then Dylan in November 1989. It wasn’t a portrait of our marriage in every last respect, but there were certainly echoes.

And it happened during the bulk of our time together (we split up in the fall of ’91) so it became — in my head, at least — a kind-of running commentary on not just our life but all yuppie life in the late Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush years and yaddah-yaddah.

And that’s what we were, all right — 30ish yuppies with kids and two cars living a nice Los Angeles life. We lived in the top half of a house in the West Hollywood hills (with a great view) and then in a nice Spanish home in Venice. We did volunteer work for Michael Dukakis. We took our kids to Gymboree. We threw parties about twice a year, and often flew east to see the parents (or we hosted them in LA). In Venice we had a backyard jacuzzi, a brick patio and an ivy-covered privacy wall.

The clip below contains one of the greatest statements about artists and performers needing to tell it straight and true, and how this and this alone is what saves people. The actor is Dallas Roberts, and the speech lasts between 1:20 and 2:40 — one minute and 20 seconds — and I could watch it each and every day from now until the day I die. And upon these few words hang all the law and the prophecies. The only thing that doesn’t work is Joaquin Phoenix‘s mournful moaning voice, which doesn’t sound at all like Johnny Cash. But other than that…