Jeffrey Wells You’d never guess from the Wiki definition, but papaverine is said to be a phenomenal asset as far as attaining flagpole or baseball-bat arousal is concerned.
A friend told me about it last night, and slipped me a couple of doses today at lunch hour. I’ll report back sometime this evening. Prescription only.
It feels so utterly blissful to be back in balmy West Hollywood. Light jacket and scarf weather…good for the soul. I’m feeling the unmistakable eternity of it all…open hearts, perfect grub, good vibrations. Tonight we had dinner with friends at La Bettola de Terroni (225 Larchmont).
I’m thinking about writing a Hollywood book about the deranged and hysterical media war against Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (‘18), but also about something bigger and broader — how the Green Book maelstrom launched the not-fully-concluded era of the woke baddie-waddies —- the censorious, ultra-sensitive identity fanatics who all but suffocated the film business during the woke terror era (2016 to 2024).
With the winds currently shifting and woke mentalism beating a retreat like Napoleon out of Russia, it’s now okay, I’m thinking, to write a book that recounts an honest history about how extreme progressive scolds tried like hell to murder one of the gentlest and most unassuming stories (and a fact-based one at that) about racial reckonings and journeys of self-discovery ever created within the Hollywood realm, and yet how the pissheads couldn’t quite deliver the death blow.
A book (which Sasha Stone was going to co-write with me…now she feels that we’re too far apart on the Trump factor) about how the uglies tried to bludgeon a good, modest little film…how they did everything they could to kill its chances in the Oscar race, and how they wound up failing…tough shit, assholes!
A book about a now-seven-year-old film that didn’t mine as much as gently explore a relatively dark and indecent era in American culture as far as the racial divide was concerned, and yet a film that played its cards just so…deftly, I mean…a film that fair-minded movie lovers fell for and which wound up snagging a Best Picture Oscar.
I’m talking about a film that made Manohla Dargis, Spike Lee, Inkoo Kang, Richard Brody, David Ehrlich and a whole army of progressive haters see red…a movie that led to a thousand cursings and spit-takes.
I’m thinking of a book would examine on a deep-dish, inside-the-beltway basis the blow-by-blow wokester campaign to disembowel Green Book, starting with the big ecstatic debut at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2018 and ending with Peter Farrelly’s film taking the Best Picture Oscar on 2.24.19, not to mention Mahershala Ali snagging Best Supporting Actor (traitor!).
Augmented, of course, by the usual backstory and perspective reporting — (a) a history of previous takedown campaigns, (b) the eruption of pernicious wokeism itself in ’16 or 17 or thereabouts, (c) a history of the actual 1962 Green Book road trip, (d) a history of the Green Book project. and the various participants, how it all came together, the initial marketing, how the woke resistance formulated, and so on…whizzing bullet by whizzing bullet, grenade by grenade,
I’ve already written a good portion of this saga in Hollywood Elsewhere…I must have tapped out 10 or 12 adversarial columns at the very least.
And yet the hysteria that swirled around Green Book during the last four months of 2018 and the first two months of ‘19 is not a story many people know. [Sasha wrote the next three or four paragraphs.] You’d have to be on the inside of the insular bubble that the Oscars and Hollywood have become….a political climate that began with the emergence of this warm-hearted, crowd-pleasing flick about friendship and tolerance, and yet ironically resulted in one of the screenwriters being banned from the ceremony, the film’s director persecuted on phony sexual assault charges, one of the actors called a racist and a general upending of the way the Academy votes on Best Picture.
The shock of the 2016 Donald Trump election sent Hollywood reeling, but the combination of rising activism and woke ideology collided with old-fashioned storytelling to create a firestorm that the film awards industry still hasn’t recovered from.
The trouble began to brew the year after Trump won the presidency, when La La Land was deemed “racist” and lost to Moonlight. It intensified the following year when Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was knocked out of completion because it, too, was deemed “racist.”
Green Book was the film that ignited a guerilla movement of woke scolding, instruction, obstruction and correction.
The relentlessly woke HE comment-threader Glen Runciter has rhetorically shot himself in the foot.
Here’s something Runciter posted earlier today about Cpt. Rebecca Lobach, who was apparently piloting the Blackhawk helicopter when it smashed into a commercial jet last Wednesday evening, resulting in her immediate death along with two fellow soldiers plus 64 people on the jet.
Has everyone read the above carefully?
Runciter has stated that because Lobach was objectively well-qualified, she was, in his words, “clearly not a DEI hire.”
Repeating for emphasis: Wokey-woke Runciter has admitted that being well qualified = not DEI.
Put another way, he’d just admitted that DEI is synonymous with lower qualifications.
HE to Runciter: Given this admission, how exactly would you define DEI?
Before watching last night’s Real Time With Bill Maher episode (actually the Overtime segment), I had never heard the above term.
It was uttered (coined?) by novelist Max Brooks (“World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War”).
Brooks at 6:25 mark: “[Trump’s recent pardoning of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, which in the early teens became the first modern darknet market or “the Amazon of drugs”] is part of the bigger picture, which is the rise of crypto, which is the ultimate dark money…the super-rich are going to run everything.”
But Army authorities are not naming her. Why would they want to delay on this? Any guesses? Nobody’s assuming anything, The co-pilot had around 500 hours of flying experience. But why is her identity under wraps?
Among the many dozens of commercial flights I’ve taken over the last half-century, I’m presuming that a certain percentage were piloted by women, and that’s fine. No big deal, par for the course, etc.
That said, I’m not about to discount concerns about DEI hires having an adverse or questionable effect on the aviation industry.
Try to be honest — if you were about to choose between two commercial flights from New York to Paris, and you knew for a fact that the pilot of flight #1, a middle-aged male veteran, had been hired on merit, and the pilot of flight #2, a woman in her 30s or 40s, had been hired to satisfy DEI quotas….which flight would you rather be on?
If you were told that two aircraft controllers monitoring the progress of your flight were (a) a merit-based hire and (b) a DEI hire, which would you choose?
Emilia Perez Best Actress nominee Karla Sofia Gascon yesterday attempted an apologetic walk-back after those toxic, years–old tweets blew up… “monkeys”, Muslims, George Floyd.
Sorry, sweets, but it’s over. The milk has been spilt, the bed has been shat upon, wokesters don’t know from context…forget it.
Puck’s Matt Belloni this morning…
Vertigo, The Fly, The Big Country, The Defiant Ones, High School Confidential, The Horror of Dracula, Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, A Night to Remember, Touch of Evil, The Vikings, The Young Lions…what else?
HE decided a couple of days ago that Deepseek, a Chinese AI startup, was the most thorough and dependable of the bunch, including Claude.
Industry friendo: “So why is it so hard to find any AMPAS members, whom I speak with from time to time. who don’t love Emilia Perez? Riddle me that, big boy.”
HE to industry friendo: “I don’t want to sound cruel, but the evidence (including your own testimony) indicates that they’re simply lacking in taste, or the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. I wouldn’t want to call them rubes, but that’s what they more or less seem to be.
“This is proven by the fact that even in 2025, they’re STILL in thrall to kneejerk wokeism. I sympathize with wanting to tell Trump to shove it, but they’re slitting the Academy’s (and indirectly Hollywood’s) own throat by celebrating a far-fetched, bordering-on-ludicrous, trans-identity musical that 75% of the Joe and Jane Popcorn RT community doesn’t care for very much, and which is pretty much hated in Mexico.
“To repeat an old phrase, they’re committing cultural suicide. This is why so many popcorn megaplexers think Academy members have lost their minds. On a raft and heading for Niagara Falls…
“The Academy has to wake up, smell the coffee and stop giving Oscars to woke instructionals that celebrate this or that identity cause. Joe and Jane have have had it up to here with this crap. Anora, A Complete Unknown, Conclave…step back from the insanity brink and embrace the crafty good stuff that is blessedly free of ideology. Okay, two out of three.”
