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.

Bob Dylan‘s 80th birthday is today (5.24), although some posted celebrative essays yesterday. I couldn’t think of anything to say except “okay, congrats, good genes, hangin’ in there, keep at it.” Which didn’t seem worth saying. Then I saw (or was reminded of) this Drew Friedman illustration. And then I time-tripped back to March 2020…

There are two…make it three…okay, four things wrong with this 1938 LIFE magazine cover capture of Errol Flynn. The hand-under-the-chin pose looks fake, anxious. Flynn’s expression isn’t relaxed and confident — he could be waiting for a traffic light to change. The watch is too small and dandified and lacking the requisite machismo factor for a swashbuckler. And one other thing, almost incomprehensible when you think about it…

Snapped sometime in mid to late September 1958. The date is indicated by the presence of Sidney Poitier and the likelihood that he, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon (the latter two were shooting a period comedy on the Goldwyn Studios lot) were almost certainly reading a glowing, just-published review of The Defiant Ones, which opened on 9.24.58.

…when you star in one really good film, and then you refuse to even try to star in another one as good for the rest of your life. This. Is. What. Happens.

Diesel costarred in Rob Cohen‘s better-than-decent The Fast and the Furious (’01) and yes, he had a good supporting roles in Boiler Room and Saving Private Ryan. But Find Me Guilty was the peak, and that was 15 years ago.

HE is not grief-struck about anything. I’m just saying that the bottom visual is, from my perspective, a fairly accurate depiction of what reality feels like on a moment-to-moment basis. Not any specific dominant color…nothing too precise or cleanly compartmentalized but a fluid, scattered jumble of impressions and decisions, nine or ten colors at once, several balls in the air.

I’m still persuaded that (a) Breaking The Waves has the greatest ending (and is among the greatest endings of any film, ever), (b) Dancer in the Dark is the most lyrical, rhapsodic and emotionally devastating (not to mention one of the finest musicals ever made), (c) Dogville is the most severe and socially condemning, (d) Melancholia is the least memorable, (e) the two Nymphomaniac films are the most didactic and the least startling, (f) Manderlay is underwhelming and (g) Antichrist and The House That Jack Built are tied for being the most despairing or dispiriting. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen Europa, The Boss Of It All, The Idiots and The Five Obstructions.

The other day Paul Schrader posted that photo of his 20-year-old self from the spring of ’67. Given the current mindset of the community of friends and collaborators that he runs with, Schrader felt obliged to disparage the rural-white-kid look that he had at the time.

Facebook: “This is [what] white living in Michigan can make you and there was nobody to say, ‘Man, you’re white'”

As in “man, you’re hopeless…that look on your face, that smug Columbia T-shirt….you need to get out in the world and rumble it up and suffer some hard knocks and see what’s what.” Which all young people need to do.

The under-implication wasn’t just that the Schrader of ’67 needed to learn and grow and mature — the implication was that his Michigan whitebread background was an expression of inherent blindness and perhaps worse. He was a flawed human being because of his skin shade, his family heritage.

Which, of course, is the current view everywhere — white folk are inherently rotten apples unless proved or re-educated otherwise. And so I just posted the following (which no Hollywood liberal-progressive would dare share in a workplace):

Speaking as a bruised victim of attempted Twitter jackal Stalinist wokester cancellation, I should be the last person in the world to advocate for anyone’s cancellation for some political-cultural offense.

I would nonetheless be delighted to see Marjorie Taylor Greene get cancelled, censured, bitchslapped, tarred and feathered, etc. For the sheer emotional pleasure of it. Partly because of that rancid face-palm analogy between enforced mask-wearing and Jews being forced to wear yellow-star badges by Nazis, but also because I loathe the twangy downmarket sound of her voice.

Yes, I know she’s playing a game called “wind up the libtards.” If she was a cockroach, I’d squash her flat.