Here’s a reposting of a Stanley Kubrick-Kirk Douglas story, passed along 13 years ago by director-screenwriter James Toback during a Savannah Film Festival q & a:

During last Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, guests Van Jones and Ann Coulter were asked about the Kansas City shooting that had happened during last Wednesday’s (2.14) Super Bowl celebration parade.

After it was mentioned that the identity of the shooter was being kept under wraps by Kansas City authorities, Coulter said this almost certainly indicates that the shooter is black, as district attorneys and news media types always suppress issues of non-white identity whenever a violent or criminal incident has occurred.

Daily Mail summary:

It was announced yesterday (2.20) that the accused bad guys are Dominic Miller and Lyndell Mays. Radio personality Lisa Lopez-Gavin was killed by a random bullet during the shoot-em-up.

HE admires Netflix’s Best Actress campaign on behalf of Nyad ‘s Annette Bening. Netflix strategists know it’s an impossible dream (the top contenders are Emma Stone’s clearly superior performance in Poor Things vs. Lily Gladstone’s identity-driven campaign for her KOTFM turn) but they’re doing it anyway in never-say-die fashion, and HE respects the spirit behind this.

And congrats, by the way, to Awards Daily Sasha Stone for having authored the top quote.

I’m therefore satisfied and becalmed that it’s more or less become an extinct term. Good riddance. Effective, pizazzy promotion is fine. I could just never tolerate that horrible word. In fact, any word that ends with “hoo” — Yahoo search engine, boo-hoo, Yoohoo chocolate drink, etc.

Friendo: “Honest question about this Shampoo one-sheet, which presumably appeared on billboards and at bus stops, not to mention in newspapers and magazines:

“Is it in fact depicting what I think it’s depicting or at the very least suggesting, judging by the towel-draped woman in a kneeling, bent-over position?”

HE reply #1: If I answer your question I’ll be slagged by the HE scolding brigade so maybe I should sidestep this.

HE reply #2: The frankest and fullest answer I can think of is that the ‘70s were the greatest era for hetero nookie in U.S. history and were arguably the most breathtaking era in this regard since the heyday of ancient Rome, but you can’t even talk about it today without sounding like a pig dinosaur.

HE reply #3: There are two suggestive moments in Shampoo in which Warren Beatty’s George Roundy is blow-drying an attractive woman’s freshly-cut hair (at first a foxy 20something client in the Beverly Hills hair salon and later Julie Christie’s Jackie in her bathroom). Both times the women’s heads are not only facing but mere inches away from Beatty’s Sticky Fingers album cover.

Friendo reply: “Yeah, I know, but get a load of that one-sheet. Aren’t you surprised an ad like that would be appearing in newspapers — FAMILY newspapers — in 1975?”

HE response: Those were the’70s, dude! You had to be there. There’s certainly no explaining the social atmosphere of those days to effing Millennials and Zoomers.

Sunday, 2.18, 3:10 pm BAFTA update: Emma Stone has won Best Actress, of course, but Oppenheimer‘s Cillian Murphy, a hometown favorite, has beaten The Holdovers‘ Paul Giamatti for Best Actor. Oppie‘s Robert Downey, Jr. and The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph have won in the supporting categories; Chris Nolan has taken the Best Director prize, and Oppenheimer will almost surely prevail in the Best Picture category.

Earlier: With KOTFM’s Lily Gladstone blanked and absent, Poor Things star Emma Stone will take the BAFTA award for Best Actress today, and will once again enjoy an Oscar bounce.

London’s 77th British Academy film awards are happening (or about to happen) as we speak.

The SAG-AFTRA lowlifes may give their Best Actress trophy to Gladstone regardless (they’re the most identity-conscious guild of all) but if they do this they’ll have to live with the backwash for the rest of their lives, not to mention the eternal disdain of the Movie Godz.

The SAG awards are next Saturday evening (2.24).

Okay, there may be one possible surprise in BAFTA’s Best Supporting Actress competish. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw is predicting that Saltburn’s Rosemund Pike will outpoint The Holdovers Da’Vine Joy Randolph…go figure.

1:30 pm update: Bradshaw was wrong — Da’Vine wins again!

At the start of an SNL hosting gig seven years ago (2.4.17), Kristen Stewart announced “I’m so gay, dude.” (Today’s preferred nomenclature of “queer” hadn’t yet taken command.) She didn’t say “I lean gay” or “I prefer gay” — she said “this is my effing home team, bruh.”

And yet THR’s Etan Vlessing, in a 2.18.24 report about Stewart’s remarks at a Love Lies Bleeding press conference at the Berlin Film Festival, has timidly described her as “bisexual” — an apparent allusion to Stewart having had boyfriends during the Obama years as well as a vague inference that Stewart might one day re-open the hetero pleasure chest.

I’m basically asking myself how effing chickenshit can a trade publication be about this stuff? Name one celebrity who’s come out and then did a 180 or even dabbled with straight behaviors. Okay, Cary Grant but he was never “out,” of course.

Tapping out yesterday’s riff about three approvable Taylor Hackford flicks (The Idolmaker, An Officer and a Gentleman, Against All Odds) led to a re-watch of Odds (‘84), and good God…I humbly apologize!

It’s been almost exactly 40 years since my initial late February viewing at the good old Academy auditorium (Wilshire & La Peer), and I guess I just wasn’t perceptive enough back then.

Eric Hughes’ plot (loosely based upon 1947’s Out of the Past) and especially the dialogue (or good-sized portions of it) are chores to sit through, and Jeff Bridges’ painfully unsubtle performance as main protagonist Terry, an aging, none-too-bright football player, gave me a splitting headache.

Young Bridges was often too emotionally emphatic and actor-ish, and in this thing he’s certainly too childish. I was starved for the adult attitude that permeates Out of the Past. Fortified by Daniel Mainwaring and Frank Fenton’s tart dialogue, laconic Robert Mitchum knew how to play this kind of material. Which is to say a bit cooler.

I was nonetheless okay with the opening 20 or 25 in Los Angeles (love the ridiculous hot-dogging on Sunset Blvd. at 80 mph) and especially that hot, flavorful lovers-in-Yucatán section (Terry blissing out with Rachel Ward’s Jessie), but when Alex Karras interrupts their lovemaking inside a Chitchen Itza temple the whole thing suddenly turns bad, and then it stabs itself in the chest by returning to L.A. for the final 40 or 45 minutes, which are mostly atrocious.

Ugly people behaving horribly…sullen, scowling, sneering, snorting blow. You can all go fuck yourselves.

The exception is a Century City office sequence in which the excellent Swoozie Kurtz, playing a secretary to Saul Rubinek’s odious sports agent, does Terry a great favor by stealing a trove of incriminating documents, and with a hostile Doberman growling and breathing down her neck.

Lesson learned: If you have fond memories of a Taylor Hackford film you saw when young, don’t re-watch it decades later. Leave it there.

The original Out of the Past is a shining, gleaming city in the hill…a much, much better film.

The N.Y. Times is reporting that Vladimir Putin’s most vocally outspoken and high-profile political foe, the imprisoned but until recently very much alive and relatively young Alexei Navalny, 47, is dead…just like that.

The story is that Navalny, whom Putin henchmen irrefutably poisoned and nearly killed in 2020, suddenly lost consciousness and died after taking a walk inside the Arctic prison compound to which he was transferred late last year.

Navalny was somehow iced by Putin henchman, of course, and it’ll take a long time to prove it, of course, if it can ever be proved at all.

Perhaps Tucker Carlson could be persuaded to return to Russia and launch a no-holds-barred investigation?

It’s been understood for years Putin is a murderer, plain and simple. The Navalny hit is just another notch on his belt. Do I have incontrovertible proof that Navalny died at Putin’s behest? No, I do not. But we all “know.”

U.S.-based Putin-fellating righties will sidestep or otherwise ignore this killing, but the same MAGA fanatics who’ve either supported Putin’s Ukraine invasion or have at least lobbied against the U.S. support of the war…this cabal of serpents will not be mourning Navalny’s death with any passion. In my opinion they share a certain degree of responsibility for what has happened to Navalny.

Posted on 1.29.22:

An evidentiary hearing over the outrageous mess caused by the astonishingly stupid and arrogant affair between D.A. Fani Willis and prosecutor Nathan Wade begins in Atlanta on Thursday, 2.15

People who work together are naturally going to hook up. Fucking a high-level colleague is not a crime, Fani, but how dare you cavort and galavant in a cavalier and provable fashion and thereby give Trump and his co-defendants a huge gift by way of torrid-zone, Harold Robbins-style behavior?

Willis was quoted as saying “I’m only human.” That’s a cop-out!

And so, in the service of filling her cup, she and Nathan Wade, whom she’d hired to work on the Trump RICO case and had paid two-thirds of a million bucks to despite his lack of a serious top tier prosecutorial background, decide that it’s prudent and professional to go on relatively pricey romantic trips together? Willis actually calculated that the Trumpies wouldn’t get wind of this and exploit the optics for all they were worth?

Posted Wednesday morning in The New Yorker: