Tatiana had to watch Saving Private Ryan for a film class, so last night we streamed a 4K UHD version on Amazon.

During the last half hour I was reminded how enraged I was by the cowardly behavior of Jeremy Davies‘ Corporal Timothy Upham, and particularly by his failure to come to the rescue of Adam Goldberg‘s Private Stanley Mellish, who resultantly dies when that German with the tennis-ball haircut plunges a bayonet into his chest.

I was doubly infuriated by Upham’s subsequent inability to fire upon some nearby German troops as they’re shooting at his fellows, and particularly as that crewcut Kraut (i.e., the one who’d just killed Mellish and had earlier begged the platoon for his life) shoots poor Tom Hanks in the chest. And all through it Upham just sits there, trembling and sweating like the worst little candy-ass in the history of the U.S. military.

In the HE rewrite, Ed Burns‘s character, PFC Richard Reiben, is the one surviving guy in the platoon who spots what Upham is, and what he’s failed to do. After Hanks dies and Matt Damon is busy transforming into that stumbling old guy at the cemetery, Reiben walks up to Upham and says “you little quivering piece of shit…you’re worse than an enemy agent…I feel more respect for the Germans I just killed than I do for you…you worthless little turd, get ready to meet the Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost.”

And Upham whines and moans and begs for his life….”puhhleeze, don’t kill me…I swear I couldn’t help it…I got scared, please.” And Reiben says “you worthless fucking worm” and raises his M1 rifle and plugs him twice in the chest, and then walks over, pulls out a pistol and gives him one more in the forehead.

The way director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat dealt with Upham in the actual film was horrible — they offered a measure of sympathy to a contemptible slimey coward. My ending would be much more satisfying. If it feels good, do it.

The Police’s Synchronicity popped on 6.17.83 — nearly 38 years ago. I used to listen to the cassette version on headphones, or via my little two-speaker system in my Harper Avenue apartment. I still listen to this album occasionally, and as I was driving to the market the other night I was feeling especially turned on by the perfectly mixed “Miss Gradenko.” And chuckling, I should add, at Stewart Copeland‘s nonsensical lyrics.

Please read them after the jump — you could call them a criticism of Russian Communism in the ’80s, but to me they’ve never amounted to a hill of fucking beans. But of course, what is rock music if not great-sounding songs with WTF take-’em-or-leave’em lyrics, and sometimes spazzy, dead-end lyrics that would anesthetize your soul if you paid them any mind? I’m intensely proud of the fact that I’ve been ignoring the lyrics to “Miss Gradenko” for nearly 40 years.

Name your favorite nonsensical rock-tune lyrics. And don’t bring up “Louie Louie” — that song is about a guy who wants to get laid and can’t stop dreaming about it.

In a 4.3 N.Y. Times article about Georgia Governor Brian Kemp‘s contrarian response to organized liberal pushback against the new restrictive voting law, reporter Nick Corasaniti wrote the following:

“The governor peppered his speech with conservative catchphrases like ‘cancel culture,’ underscoring how Republicans are seeking to make access to voting a wedge issue that they can wrap into the cultural debates that animate the base of the party.”

Excuse me but while certain loose-cannon Republicans have seized upon “cancel culture” as a rhetorical bludgeon, the term is not a “conservative catchphrase” — it is a frank, cards-up description of punitive wokesterism, which is widely recognized by many if not most thinking liberals and sensible centrists as an unfortunate reality these days.

Opportunistic rightwing politicians and rabble-rousing media types have tried to co-opt the term, yes, but they don’t own it.

Trust me — Corasanti is describing cancel culture as a “conservative catchphrase” because the N.Y. Times culture that employs him is, right now, a cauldron of wokester ideology and advocacy. Corasaniti and his editors don’t want average readers to understand that cancel culture is as real as it gets right now — they want you to think that wokesterism is a figment of paranoid rightwing imaginings when in fact it’s the New McCarthyism.

The Times used to be the gold standard of thorough, trustworthy, fair-minded journalism; from a certain perspective it is now largely about activism first and journalism second, and I’m hardly the first person to take note of this.

Yesterday (Friday, 4.2) Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that the 2021 All-Star Game won’t happen in Atlanta — a fuck-you response to Governor Brian Kemp and the Georgia voting law he and his Jim Crow cronies recently enacted, one that is largely aimed at disenfranchising Black voters.

Kemp howled and harumphed, of course. “Yesterday, Major League Baseball caved to fear and lies from liberal activists,” he proclaimed. “In the middle of a pandemic, Major League Baseball put the wishes of Stacey Abrams and Joe Biden ahead of the economic well-being of hard-working Georgians who were counting on the All-Star Game for a paycheck.”

The last time Hollywood Elsewhere saw a movie on a big screen in Los Angeles was sometime in mid-to-late February of 2020 — 13 months ago. Tomorrow evening I plan to see Ilya Naishuller and Bob Odenkirk‘s Nobody (Universal) at either the AMC Century City or out at Universal City. I know what it is — Odenkirk looking to muscle in on the Liam “Paycheck” Neeson vigilante brand — and I know it only has an 81% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and I don’t care. I don’t want to wait until the 4.16 VOD/streaming begins.

After listening today to Minneapolis police lieutenant Richard Zimmerman damn and dismiss the behavior of Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd, how could any juror possibly determine that Chauvin doesn’t deserve to do serious time?

Last night the alleged winners of the 27th annual SAG Awards were leaked, or more likely fake-leaked.

Ma Rainey‘s Chadwick Boseman winning the Best Actor trophy is a no-brainer, but who on the planet earth has even fantasized that Viola Davis, deliverer of a blustery lead performance in the same 1920s-era film, is a likely winner of SAG’s Best Actress award? The last time I checked Carey Mulligan had this in the bag.

Judas and the Black Messiah‘s Daniel Kaluuya will supposedly take home the Best Supporting Actor Award, despite reasonable people having said over and over that LaKeith Stanfield is the champ of this realm. Borat 2‘s Maria Bakalova could win for her Borat 2 performance…whatever.

And the leak-sheet says The Trial of the Chicago 7 will take the Best Ensemble award (i.e., the SAG equivalent of Best Picture). The show begins at 6 pm Pacific on Sunday, April 4th.

Earlier today Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a response to a certain party who’s tried to rough her up for the past couple of days. The piece is titled “A Note to Readers and Other Living Things.”

The hyperbolic accusations aren’t worth recounting, but one of her responses is pretty good.

“This is, and there is no other way to say it, peak Salem,” Sasha wrote. “While the term ‘witch hunt’ is overused by now, it applies here without question. In the purest sense of the term. It is fear of people you know having a secret monster living inside them that you are just now uncovering because now you have proof! I’ve had enough people say to me ‘the difference is [that] witchcraft isn’t real.’ But to the Puritans it was. It was as real as gravity. For centuries, it was real. In some countries it’s still considered real.”

In Marty Feldman‘s The Last Remake of Beau Geste (Kino Lorber), there’s a captivating desert sequence in which James Earl Jones (playing an “Arab chief”) converses with the black-and-white ghost of Rudolph Valentino (Martin Snaric) — a spectral conjuring that recalls Valentino’s appearance in the two Shiek movies.

HE to Feldman pally Alan Spencer: “Can you explain how Marty created that black-and-white Valentino moment? Either they shot Jones and Snaric in regular color and then bleached them out and turned them into monochrome with some kind of hand-tinting process. Or they shot them in black-and-white and then aged the film to look like something out of the 1920s and somehow dropped it into the color capture.”

Spencer to HE: “Marty had one of the FX guys from Star Wars on his team. Jones and Snaric were shot live in an actual desert, if memory recalls, then turned into black-and-white and aged with scratches, then rotoscoped back into the same setting. Don’t hold me to this, but it was skillful.”

A little more than three years ago Andrew Sullivan, then a New York “Intelligencer” columnist, lamented how rabid campus wokesterism was becoming increasingly prevalent in various liberal workplace environments, and how “the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse.”

The article was titled “We All Live on Campus Now” (2.9.18). I re-read it this morning, and it’s kind of horrifying to realize that the Cultural Marxist insanity that Sullivan saw as a gathering manifestation has now become a ruling doctrine, certainly on Twitter and in big-media circles.

“The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned ‘privilege’ — is increasingly suspect,” Sullivan continued. “The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for ‘white male’ power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of ‘hate,’ rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency.

“And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself.”

The culture, he explained, “is now saturated with the concept of ‘your own truth’ — based usually on your experience of race and gender. It is now highly controversial for individuals in one racial/gender group to write about or portray anyone outside it — because there is no art that isn’t rooted in identity. Movies are constantly pummelled by critics not for being bad movies but for being ‘problematic’ on social justice. Books are censored in advance by sensitivity readers to conform with ‘social justice’ protocols.”

Anyone paying attention to the here-and-now will tell you that wokester terror hasn’t ebbed in the slightest since early ’18, and, despite Trump being out of the White House and Biden policies doing a lot to calm people down, is probably even stronger. This is not opinion or conjecture. This is reality.

But not on HE comment threads. For every time that the worrisome presence of woke social Marxism (which is roughly equivalent to the spectre of German aggression in 1938 from a British perspective)…every time woke baddies are mentioned there are certain denialists and pooh-poohers who always pipe in with the same crap…”you’re being tiresome,” “stop obsessing”, “calm down already” and “threatened much, Jeff?” They know who they are**, and I’m getting really sick of their bullshit.

A friend wrote this morning that “the weird thing in all of this is the number of people — i.e., more than half of Jeff’s posting readers — who do not get it because they simply cannot see what is going on. They are such lockstep, go-along-with-the-crowd personalities that they think Jeff is talking about some fantasy in his head, rather than a genuine universe of real ideas that can no longer be expressed in the public square of mainstream media.

“Every time one of them says ‘Give it a rest, Jeff!’ I think: Here is someone who is truly, definingly clueless. The house is on fire, and they just think it’s a warm day.

** seasonalaffleckdisorder, victorlazlo5, Hud+Homer+Alma+Lonnie, etc.

Two weeks ago I posted a video of a huge wave crashing onto a seaside walkway in San Sebastian and engulfing a couple of tourists (“Rifkin’s Festival Outtake?“). The metaphor, obviously, was about complacency and ignoring a serious threat until it’s too late. But it was largely overlooked by the HE commentariat, so here’s a follow-up with a couple of screen grabs.

Notice the couple in the distance (the father is carrying a small child) realizing the danger and running for dear life…”aagghh!” But the short, squat, pot-bellied guy with the shorts and black cap is just waddling along and not terribly concerned. A split second later he turns in the direction of the sea-water avalanche and goes “whoa.” But it’s too late. He’s 1/4 of a second from obliteration.

This is how most people tend to respond to serious approaching danger. (Like, for example, wokesterism.) Their basic attitude is “I’m good, nice view, air smells great, I love walking, where shall I have lunch?…whoa, wait…SHIT!”

…but King Kong‘s bearded, over-sized, angry-assed, middle-aged grand-nephew has more soul. He’s a decent fellow so I’m with Kong and the cute little Kong-whisperer Jia (Kaylee Hottle) even though I know he probably can’t win. He’s got a great monster roar and super-powerful arm muscles, but he just isn’t tough enough to decisively whip Fatty’s ass. And I mean especially when he’s wrestling Godzilla underwater and starts to become weaker as he runs out of breath. Owwwhhhmmmm!

Unless he’s armed with the ancient blue-light axe from Hollow Earth. Then things are evened up.

Could this be a job for MechaGodzilla, the artificial ‘Zilla created by corporate bad guy Demian Bichir? Oh, no, wait…he just killed Bichir! Smashed him like a bug! And now there’s nothing in Hong Kong left standing…the cost of rebuilding will be incalculable! Jia to Kong: “Be careful!” And then Kong yanks off MechaGodzilla’s head…yoowwwrrhhlllrrr!

But honestly? My favorite moment in the whole film came during that Hollow Earth victory scene over the prehistoric winged slime serpent when King rips his head off and drinks the green slime pouring out of the cranial cavity. Which prompts Rebecca Hall to say “That’s gross.” (Or was that Eiza González, who plays Bichir’s daughter?)

This is a movie made by deranged adolescent lunatics with too much money to spend. Okay, I didn’t mean that. Adam Wingard and the Kong vs. Godzilla producers aren’t lunatics. They’re evil winged monkeys from hell, pretending to be human. This movie actually made me feel like one of those monkeys, except I was more the old-fashioned kind with wires on my back and serving Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked Witch of the West. I started to hop around the living room, cackling and snickering and clapping my hands as I pretended to fly.

Kong to Godzilla at the finale: “Yo…truce?”

Kong too easily flies around like a winged bat or a big helium-stuffed panda bear or a giant mosquito dressed in an ape suit. The fucker weighs hundreds and hundreds of pounds and he yet floats and leaps and falls dozens of stories and it’s all cool. This movie doesn’t respect physics!

But the screenwriters — Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein with “story” assistance from Terry Rossio, Michael Dougherty and Zach Shields — had to be on hallucinogens when they cooked up some of the more wackazoid imaginings. I respect LSD too much to suggest that you, the potential viewer, should see Godzilla vs. Kong on acid, but you could theoretically do that.

And if you were a batshit insane person to begin with, you might get more out of it that way. If you have no soul to begin with and you wouldn’t know satori or enlightenment if they bit you in the ass, why not?

This is the nuttiest, craziest, most imaginative monster destruction-derby movie I’ve ever seen in my wasted, ruined life. And, at a projected budget of $160 to $200 million, probably one of the most wasteful. But if the lower figure is true, Wingard has spent slightly less money that Rian Johnson will spend on the first Knives Out sequel, so at least there’s that.

Does it bother anyone that King Kong has a visible navel? They probably should’ve given him a large schlongola….c’mon, why not?

This movie, by the way, has three overweight characters — Brian Tyree Henry‘s “Bernie Hayes”, Julian Dennison‘s “Josh Valentine” and Fatzilla himself. Kong is actually in pretty good shape all around. Washboard abs. I think it was really cruel, however, to “contain” Kong inside a huge artificial Kong Dome on Skull Island. Leave the poor guy alone…God. Not to mention the cost.

I need to watch Ingmar Bergman‘s Wild Strawberries. Or George Cukor‘s Sylvia Scarlett. Something sane and semi-sedate. Nope, changed my mind. I’ve decided to watch John Carpenter‘s Assault on Precinct 13.

Friendo text (6:32 am Pacific): “I can’t believe you liked that corporate funded, juvenile scripted POS.”

HE reply: “‘Liked it’? It made me scream and howl. It injected feral madness into my veins. The fine fellows who made this film are evil. It’s an insane hallucinogen carpet ride. Corporate derangement syndrome. Sickness incarnate. And yet…dopey!”