Wokesters are not letting the Dave Chappelle-Ted Sarandos–Closer thing go. They’re all piling on, the whole Film Twitter mob. All trying to get Netflix to pull The Closer and censor Chappelle, etc. Truly odious bastards. It’s so disgusting that this is the modern-day left. This is why I self-identify as a sensible left-center contrarian.

Then again a whole lot of people are watching the show, I’m presuming.

HE to Sarandos: You are the good guy, the freedom guy, the truth guy, the integrity guy…you are doing the right thing, and God adores you for it. Can anyone imagine Dave Chappelle calling for Hannah Gadsby to be flogged or excommunicated? The Closer cuts right through the woke smoke. It doesn’t deliver final, ultimate truth, but it’s honest, perceptive, fair and straight-up. And it’s certainly Chappelle’s truth. And you’re right to defend it, Ted. In the twinkling of an eye, you’ve become a man among men.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol announced today that it will move to hold Steve Bannon in criminal contempt for not complying with its subpoena. And yet the committee “has opted to give other former Trump officials more time to comply with its subpoenas”, according to the Washington Post‘s Jacqueline Alemany and Tom Hamburger.

Why exactly is the committee going easy on the others? What’s the strategy?

Excerpt: “Lawmakers who sit on the panel — seven Democrats, two Republicans, all appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — said they are prepared to move quickly to pursue criminal contempt charges against witnesses like Bannon.”

And yet after a committee approves a contempt charge (presumably sometime next week), “the House must then vote on the matter. Once passed, the contempt referral would then be sent to the Justice Department. Then Attorney General Merrick Garland will have to decide whether to criminally prosecute an individual for failing to comply with the congressional subpoena,” etc.

Committee approval, House vote, Garland acts. Sounds to me like a measured, drawn-out, less-than-iron-willed process.

Hollywood Elsewhere hates people who whoop…seriously. One “whoo-hoo yeahhh!” and you’re dismissed for life. William Shatner‘s asshat co-travellers were given a unique opportunity to reflect and meditate and merge with a Godhead consciousness afforded only to space travellers, and they reacted like idiots riding Superman: Escape from Krypton at Six Flags Magic Mountain.

Yesterday Mark Harris tweeted a few statements about the Dave Chappelle trans thing, and his belief that this dust-up is “an important pivot point — not a pivot point about, as his defenders would have it, censorship or cancel culture or whatever false threat they’re imagining is central.”

Here’s the passage that got my attention: “But it doesn’t stop until a lot of people say ‘We’re sick of this, and that is what’s happening now. And all the angry response that we’re hearing is the whine of bullies having a weapon taken away from them. And all you can do is let them cry until they’re all cried out.”

Precisely! Except Harris has it ass-backwards. The people saying “we’re sick of this” are the normal, free-thinking, laid-back folks like Chappelle and Ted Sarandos and myself and Sasha Stone and the vast majority of Average Joes who loved watching The Closer, and the “bullies” are the Twitter shriekers…they’re crying and freaking out because they can sense their zeitgeist moment slipping away from them.

In other words: They’ve overplayed their hand and driven everyone crazy, and the normals are starting to wake up and say “nobody wants anything but love and agency and options for trans people but at the same time fuck the shriekers…they’re driving everyone nuts and we’re tired of attempts to destroy people over having the wrong opinions or standing with J.K. Rowling or whatever….we’re really fucking sick of mob Twitter justice.”

From Andrew Sullivan‘s 10.8 “Weekly Dish” column, “Dave Chappelle Is Right, Isn’t He?“: “Chappelle’s final Netflix special, The Closer, is a classic. Far from being outdated, it’s slightly ahead of its time, as the pushback against wokeness gains traction. It is extremely funny, a bit meta, monumentally mischievous, and I sat with another homo through the whole thing, stoned, laughing our asses off — especially when he made fun of us.

“The way the elite media portrays us, you’d think every member of the BLT community is so fragile we cannot laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t occur to them that, for many of us, Chappelle is a breath of honest air, doing what every comic should do: take aim at every suffocating piety of the powers that be — including the increasingly weird 2SLGBTQQIA+ mafia — and detonating them all.”

All American-made, bucks-up historical films try to soothe audiences with the usual upscale flourishes. In the case of The Last Duel the viewer is simultaneously living in medieval France and 21st Century America. The characters have to look as well-tended as the people we see in expensive clothing stores. Everyone is wearing perfectly tailored clothing, fresh from the cleaners, and they smell like nice cologne.

Hygiene standards in 1386 were almost certainly appalling by our standards, but we’re allowed to presume…okay, imagine that everyone slips into a hot bath each morning and uses a moisturizer and long-lasting anti-perspirant. This goes along with the great-looking garments and tunics, suede boots, expensive armor and high-style coifs (especially Ben Affleck‘s perfectly cut, canary-yellow hair). Jodie Comer‘s servants dressing and grooming her just so…very Maid Marian, very Kardashian.

And we all agree, of course, to not think about anyone answering the call of nature…get shut of it, shut it out, good God.

The only things that bother me (and I’ve mentioned these before) are the muted grayish-blue color scheme and Matt Damon‘s mullet. You know that Ridley Scott chose that mullet deliberately; he loved knowing it would rub people like me the wrong way.

The Rolling Stones have retired “Brown Sugar” from their stage show. An oft-performed track from their classic, half-century-old Sticky Fingers album, it’s a raunchy stomper about the sexual savoring of women of color. The lyrics use wicked images of 19th Century slave trade minglings as a fetid atmospheric element — the same hothouse that produced Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo (‘75).

I never processed “Brown Sugar” as anything more than a bad-boy taunt with erotic icing flung about. But in today’s context none of this works and so the song is toast.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richard have implied that the song’s excommunication may be temporary, and that it may return when the cultural mood shifts back into a semblance of sanity. Have they been talking to Ted Sarandos?

From a 10.13 TMZ story:

I happen to love black-and-white for its own silver-toned luminosity, but every so often you say to yourself “good as it looks, this monochrome film would have been fascinating in color.”

Howard Hawks‘ Red River is at the top of this list. I would have dearly loved to see Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard in Techniolor…how could it have been hurt by that? And speaking of Hawks, Only Angels Have Wings and Bringing Up Baby would have been glorious in color. Which others?

Two days ago (Monday, 10.11) Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos sent a lengthy email to Netflix employees following the Dave Chappelle trans controversy over The Closer, according to Variety‘s Matt Donnelly.

Sarandos basically doubled down on Netflix’s support for Chappelle and reiterated the company’s intention to not pull The Closer.

I wish I could report that Sarandos’ email also said something like “a lot of us are frankly tiring of woke Twitter fanatics losing their shit whenever a performer says or tweets the wrong thing, including things they may have said 10 or 20 years ago, the idea being to cancel a show or ruin a career and generally spread terror throughout the community.”

I would be an even happier man if I could add that Sarandos wrote, “I’m not the only one who’s sick of this woke bullshit. Almost everyone is, and I’m talking about moderate liberals and people like Chappelle and Jimmy Kimmel and Sasha Stone and Bill Maher and Jerry Seinfeld as well as Average Joes and Janes who watch Netflix.

“Most of us hate you, in fact, and we’d really like to dump you on some South Pacific island so you can all torture and cancel each other and leave us the fuck alone.

“Woke crusades started out great in ’16, but it quickly got out of hand, and over the last three or four years the liberal media world has been snowflaked and Twitter-terrored to death, and a lot of us are really sick of it. And if you don’t like me saying this out loud, that’s too fucking bad. Because you can always quit.”

Alas, Sarandos didn’t say any of this. But I’ll bet you twenty dollars that he was thinking at least some of it when he wrote the message.

“We know that a number of you have been left angry, disappointed and hurt by our decision to put Dave Chappelle’s latest special on Netflix,” Sarandos wrote in an email obtained by Variety.

“With The Closer, we understand that the concern is not about offensive-to-some content but titles which could increase real world harm (such as further marginalizing already marginalized groups, hate, violence etc.)

“Last year we heard similar concerns about 365 Days and violence against women. While some employees disagree, we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.

“The strongest evidence to support this is that violence on screens has grown hugely over the last thirty years, especially with first-party shooter games, and yet violent crime has fallen significantly in many countries. Adults can watch violence, assault and abuse — or enjoy shocking stand-up comedy — without it causing them to harm others.”

Donnelly: “That Sarandos would wade into a debate about the potential harmful effects of content is notable, given that those who condemn Chappelle’s jokes have specifically cited the physical danger that anti-trans ideology poses to that community.”

Is this the beginning of the end of woke terror and a return to sensible liberalism? Maybe, maybe not. But it smells to me like teen spirit.

It sounds as if Voir, a forthcoming Netflix doc from the hearts and minds of David Fincher and David Prior, is made for film monks…a spiritual current thing for hardcores. I’m obviously speculating but they’re forcing me to fill in the blanks. “A collection of visual essays [about] the love of cinema” sounds kinda vague.

By the same token I could point to a random grab bag of 10 or 20 essays that I’ve written on Hollywood Elsewhere over the past 17 years and call them “a collection of impressionistic essays about the love of cinema”, and they would be.

I could write, produce and star in a short Netflix documentary about Roger Thornhill‘s R-O-T matchbook in North by Northwest — who thought it up, who made the prop — and how the R-O-T monogram becomes a hugely important plot element in Act Three. I would honestly love to watch, say, a 20-minute doc about that.

“Voir” is French for “see,” which obviously alludes to special sight. Things in a film that are best seen or appreciated in an educated-film-buff, taking-it-all-in sort of way…seen by way of particular perception or insight.

Great, but my tongue doesn’t like saying “voir.” Noir, yes — voir, no. I’m saying it over and over, and my mouth keeps saying “leave me alone.”

I’m thinking of a favorite Stanley Kubrick quote: “The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not the think of it.” In line with that, if I’m being offered a film buff doc with a French title, I’d probably prefer Ressentir (feel, experience, be affected by) or Toucher (touch, affect, feel, hit, receive, contact) or even Lumiere.

Drew McWeeny (whose former podcast buddy Scott Weinberg did a lot to hurt me with two or three film festivals during the summer of ’18, and who, I feel, is not only a fiendish, foam-at-the-mouth personality but has accumulated the most rancid karma imaginable in this journalistic sphere) has revealed that he’s one of the costars (or co-authors) of Voir, and that he’ll be at next month’s AFIFest screening.

McWeeney: “Voir [is the spelling ALL-CAPS or CAPS optional?] is, simply put, the thing I have been working on for the last few years and the project I am most excited about right now. It is a streaming series for Netflix that is hopefully not like any other show about movies that you’ve seen.