If a studio-backed genre film becomes a hit, a sequel inevitably results. But the sequel is almost always less impactful than the original (anomalies like The Godfather, Part II aside) and the brand is thereafter mitigated. And then comes the idea for a second sequel and it’s like “oh, God…leave it alone.” But the suits know that Part 3 will perform decently, even if the general audience reaction to Part 2 is “not bad but a little meh.” And the principals can’t resist the idea of more fat paychecks and profit participations. And so we, the audience, are stuck with Part 3 whether we want it or not.

…of even the slightest exertion…of summoning the strength and discipline to tap out a thought or two…it’s exhausting to even consider. It’s draining to even think about sitting up. I slept restlessly all day yesterday and into the night — the kind of feverish sleep that isn’t really sleep. It’s bad. Hot cup of Thera-flu an hour ago…weak, sweating (which is good)…it’ll “break” later today, I suspect.

Four years ago I switched webhosts, signed up with Austin’s WP Engine. To save disc/cloud space the guy who did the transfer migrated a good portion of my JPEGs to Amazon Web Services. But uploading these images from AWS to Siteground has taken a fair amount of time, and so far it’s been a day and a half. Honestly? The migration has been agony. I can’t seem to manage the “pull” myself. The process is dragging on and on. Between this and the fever, I’m in hell.

Aching muscles, feverish feeling, faintly damp forehead, can’t stay awake, couch-napping for the last couple of hours, etc. If I hadn’t been double-vaxxed, I’d be worried. I’ve been through this before. I’ll be out of it by tomorrow morning, perhaps sooner. Maybe.

I’ve posted this summer-of-1974 photo once or twice before. For me the biggest stand-out element, more so than the dusty brown Ford Pinto looking to join Sunset Blvd. traffic, the VW camper wagon heading west and the run-down-looking city bus, are the thick sprouts of bleached yellow grass at the base of the billboard.

West Hollywood was a less attractive place back then, certainly in the daylight hours, but empty grassy lots were par for the course, and when the constant stink of smog and exhaust wasn’t as strong you could stand on a Laurel Canyon or Playa del Rey streetcorner in the early evening and smell the dirt and the grass and the other forms of under-watered shrubbery. Those aromas are gone now.

I’m a fool for slick, modernized trailers of classic films, and Lord knows there are easily a couple hundred out there. But when Dan McBride’s One-Eyed Jacks trailer surfaced four years ago, I knew right away that it was triple grade-A. McBride: “[Looking to] breathe new life into older, forgotten or overlooked films. Mainly to spread awareness and hopefully inspire more people to seek them out.”

Water-cooler conversations still happen from time to time. Movie topics we can all point to and discuss and joke about are fully accessible, especially with streaming. (The Nomadland poop bucket, etc.) But Oscar conversations aside, the big movies and conversational jizz-wads that everyone talks about tend to be dumber, coarser, less interesting.

Plus features and major longforms are so much more more plentiful these days than 15 or 20 years ago (or even 5 or 10), and your middle-class, adult-angled films are gone, and the films that manage to capture brief attention spans across the board don’t last as long in the shared consciousness pool as they used to, and so the whole thing is…well, it’s just fucked up.

The 28th anniversary of that hugely frustrating Last Action Hero mythical-test-screening story that I wrote for the L.A. Times “Calendar” section is nearly upon us. My story was dated 6.6.93. I should wait until the 30th anniversary for a clean, proper rehash…right? But I might die in a plane crash next week. Or get stabbed in some back alley by Fatso Judson.

The hullaballoo that went down in late May and early June of ’93 was very strange. I felt like I was on DMT half the time. The story that I wrote was about an alleged-but-ultimately-mythical screening of LAH in Pasadena. It was partly be-doppa-beep and be-doppa-boop, but toward the end it invoked the legend and the metaphor of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone.

I chose to mention Serling and his show because the stuff I was digging up from sources didn’t quite add up — it wasn’t hard or nail-able.

Alas, my hardhead editors — Claudia Eller, Kelly Scott — wanted to run a “bust” story and knew only about working within the journalistic strategems of big-city entertainment reporting as it was practiced in 1993, and therefore they couldn’t roll with whimsical or fanciful or quizzical, and so the story that ran was too “police blotter.” It didn’t have the right mood and coloration — an uncomfortable blend of Wells paragraphs (i.e., the Serling stuff) and Eller/Scott paragraphs (hard-nosed!). Peaceful coexistence never quite happened.

I thought I’d made it clear to one and all that The Twilight Zone and concepts of hard factual reporting existed on separate planets. I thought that point was clearly made. Maybe it would have been clearer if I had invoked “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”

If I had written that damn story on my own…if the internet and Hollywood Elsewhere had existed back then, that whole stupid episode would never have happened because I would have written it the right way and people would have responded, “Oh, some people think that an LAH screening happened, or at least they’re trying to convince others that it did,” etc.

It would have been about certain people in this town wanting to take that movie down, rather than some purportedly fact-based, page-one, hard-news story.

“Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?…it ended when you said goodbye.”

Because I’m enthralled and fascinated by the actual world in which we live as opposed to bullshit DC-Marvel fantasy CG worlds that constantly seek to amuse, transport, massage and dazzle the schmoes with simplistic mythology about teams of amiable superheroes who never stop being magnificent gods of wit and style, churning and throbbing with celestial spirit, I was unmoved by the Avengers, left completely cold by the Guardians of the Galaxy, Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey, and am right now dreading with all my heart and mind the arrival of The Eternals.

First of all the massive Eternals spaceship looks like something out of a fan trailer — not even a stab at suggesting something half-organic. My first thought when I saw it: “Seriously?”

Secondly, the Eternals have nothing going on inside…nothing…they’re just another crew of spandex “suits” (Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Angelina Jolie, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Gil Birmingham, Harish Patel, Kit Harington and Salma Hayek), paychecking their way into financial nirvana as they attempt to launch Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Worse, it starts off with Sersi (Chan) approaching Ikaris (Madden) on a kind of panoramic viewing deck as they look down upon the virgin planet earth, and she says “Eefrent…isn’t it?” HE to Sersi: “Yes, it’s definitely eefrent. I have just one question — what does ‘eefrent’ mean?” (I’ve been told that Chan is actually saying “beautiful” rather than “eefrent,” but of course she isn’t — I know exactly how the word “beautiful” sounds when someone with basic elocutionary skills says it.)

I’ve watched the trailer three times, and before my second viewing had ended I was debating which form of suicide would be the simplest and least painful. Fantasy suicide, I mean. As an escape from Marvel Hell.

The Eternals, who’ve been alive and throbbing for thousands upon thousands of years, are like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey…they arrive to bring life, health (plants rather than raw meat!), opportunity, civilization to earth. Not to mention the Uni-Mind. They will also be called upon to protect Earth from the Deviants. But also to protect and guide the humans…a lot of mythology here, and endless opportunities, Marvel fans, for bliss and transcendence.

Friendo: “The new Eternals trailer is PEAK UTOPIA in America on the left in 2021. It is everything America aspires to be at the hands of the Wise Benevolent Left. A Marvel movie directed by a woman of color with a full-spectrum, woman-emphasizing cast.”

Pete Miesel: “Looks legit, which means the incel chuds and culture war losers will invariably freak out at the Zhao-ness of it all.”

HE to Miesel: Could you please define what a “culture-war loser” is? I would have thought “hinterland bozos” but maybe you’re thinking of a different equation? Do you mean people who are appropriately appalled by wokester terror and tyranny…are they culture-war losers by your measuring stick? Or am I off on the wrong track?

HE to Journo Pally who’d recommended Thomas Anders Jensen’s Riders of Justice: “You were completely correct in advising me to watch this film, which I realized early on was a truly original stand-out. Two days ago I insisted that violence wasn’t funny or certainly couldn’t be sold as such, and I was wrong. The dry, low-key, half-crazy comic tone is really something. It’s not quite crazy enough, if you ask me, and there’s NO WAY this ragtag group of statisticians and revenge-seekers wouldn’t be BESIEGED BY DOZENS OF COPS after the final front-yard Wild Bunch-like shoot-out, and it’s so bizarre that the brilliant Brillo-head guy didn’t make the slightest attempt to try and seriously impersonate a therapist when speaking with Mads Mikkelsen’s daughter, and I was disappointed that the guilt of the bad guys regarding the death of Mikkelsen’s wife was seemingly watered-down or made less clear as we went along, and yet…I wasn’t expecting anything as original feeling as this…the deadpan humor really works. It’s quite the discovery.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci has done a sudden about–face in terms of his once-dismissive opinion about COVID-19 having possibly originated as an accidental Wuhan “lab leak”. He’s admitted that he’s now less than convinced that the virus began as a natural (if catastrophic) biological occurrence. This breaks the dam. Lab leakers now have the upper hand.