Friendo to HE: “This is a very rare sketch from a 1972 NBC special written by Neil Simon. It aired once and never again. Inspired turns from Gene Wilder and Jack Weston. It speaks to the anxieties that quarantines can cause. It’s near impossible to find so your readers may dig it. I love the ending.”

Nothing new here. Widely posted. Nostalgia for responsible leadership. Yeah, even from Dubya.

This isn’t bad. 12 guys, 12 different locations. But why is Sting singing in a lower register? Is he having trouble hitting those high notes or…?

I’ve mentioned this two or three times before, but my transcendent moment with this song happened in a pub in Stockwell (south of the Thames) in December 1980. 9:30 pm or 10 pm. Not many people, maybe three or four at the bar. I was sitting near the jukebox with a pint of bitters, feeling a tiny bit buzzed. And then the song, which I hadn’t paid much attention to since its debut in October, began playing, and the bass tones were magnificent. I fell in love then and there.

The next morning the news was on the BBC about John Lennon‘s murder.

Does LexG even think about wearing an X-factor mask? Or does he just wear bottom-of-the-barrel paper masks, grunting “good enough”? Who among HE regulars is wearing (or has ordered) anything other than generic surgical masks? I for one believe that one should at least attempt a sense of style when visiting the local market or gas station or whatever. (The other night I was seriously impressed by a Predator mask that a guy was wearing at Pavilions.) The problem right now is that when you order this or that the Amazon arrival date is in May or even June.

The results of a Republican-funded poll, published today by the New York Post, claim that Gov. Andrew Cuomo is vastly preferred over Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. Cuomo and Biden are running roughly even among my demo — white, reasonably well-educated, 45-plus, X-factor — but generally speaking 56% of Democrats have said they would prefer the current New York governor over Obama’s vice president as the Democratic presidential nominee. 44% say they would prefer sticking with Biden. The rightwing poll has a margin of error of 4.8%.

I was reminded this morning by the occasionally irritating “Bruce Taking A Nap” that I’d never posted a review of Michael Winterbottom‘s Greed (Sony Pictures Classics, 2.28).

Reply: Good heavens! I saw Winterbottom’s reasonably well-made, generally respectable one-percent satire around 2.20. I didn’t just “forget” to review it. I wasn’t that deeply stirred, you see, and somehow it slid to the side. I’m nonetheless sorry for dropping the ball. Not cool, profound apologies to Michael and Tom, won’t happen again.

Steve Coogan plays Sir Richard McCreadie, a super-rich, Philip Green-resembling garment industry titan who ruthlessly exploits the Indian labor market by insisting on paying less than $4 or even $3 per day for sewing-machine sweatshop workers (location unspecified but think Myanmar or Bangladesh).

I found it hard to get it up because I had determined that Greed was a decent but somewhat minor effort — emphasis on the “somewhat” as it hits what it’s aiming at. The Rotten Tomato rating was nonetheless 48%.; Metacritic was 52%.

I was partly influenced by the fact that Greed had screened at the Toronto and Santa Barbara Film Festivals without generating what I would call significant heat. The promotional lead-up to the U.S. opening was accompanied by a certain lack of hoopla, and I somehow allowed my attention to wander and wither.

I wasn’t shocked to learn once again that certain garment industry titans (like Zara’s Amancio Ortega and H&M’s Stefan Persson) have become multi-billionaires off the backs of hand-to-mouth Indian workers. I was a wee bit underwhelmed, I suppose, when I realized early on that the basic thrust of Greed was to say this over and over again — i.e., that McCreadle (who has huge, show-white teeth) is an insanely greedy prick. Yes, agreed, he is that…and that’s it? Yes, the basic idea.

Greed isn’t a drama or a comedy as much as an instructional one-note satire.

I suppose I didn’t feel that repeatedly making this point was enough. But within this parameter, Greed is a reasonably good film in a Michael Winterbottom sort of way. Seriously. I know what this review sounds like, but I’m not putting it down. Not really, I mean.

“The only thing I’m really sure of is that after all of this is over, the world isn’t going to be quite the same. I think we are all going to be suffering some post-traumatic stress and people are going to take a while before they trust one another again, before they can come close, before they can gather again at events that are part of the celebration of being human and being together.”

— Bruce Springsteen this morning during an 85-minute broadcast on on Sirius Radio, “From His Home to Yours” — confessions and songs with themes of isolation, hopes and dreams, etc. (As reported yesterday morning by Variety‘s Michele Amabile Angermiller.

The show re-streamed today (Thursday, 4.9) at 6 am and 3 pm.

The show will air again on the following dates and times:

Friday, 4.10 at 10am and 4pm / Saturday, 4.11 at 12am, 8am and 5pm / Sunday, 4.12 at 9am and 6am / Monday, 4.13 at 7am and 4pm / Tuesday, 4.14 at 12am and 8am.

Staffers and freelancers at a gathering for Los Angeles bureau of Entertainment Weekly, taken sometime in ’92 or ’93. Sent this morning by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson. Name of restaurant unknown. I’m working on the photo caption as we speak.

(l. to r.) EW staffer Carole Willcocks, mystery blonde (possibly Strawberry Saroyan), Dan Snierson, music editor Rob Seidenberg, Gregg Kilday (back row, glasses, goatee), Richard Natale, Mike Syzmanski, bureau chief Cable Neuhaus, myself, Michael Walker (obscured), Judy Brennan, Pat Broeske, Anne Thompson.

Another Stanley Kubrick doc? Revealing what never-before-seen-or-heard content? What could be uncovered that isn’t the realm of common knowledge?

Any way you slice it the online Tribeca Film Festival will present Gregory Monro‘s Kubrick on Kubrick, a 73-minute dissection of many interviews given by Kubrick over a 30-year period.

Boilerplate: “Stanley Kubrick’s mark on the legacy of cinema can never be measured. He was a giant in his field, his great works resembling pristine pieces of art, studied by students and masters alike, all searching for answers their maker was notoriously reticent to give. While he’s among the most scrutinized filmmakers that ever lived, the chance to hear Kubrick’s own words was a rarity…until now.

“No stranger to investigating legends of the screen, Monro’s exuberant and lyrical cinematic essay is vital. Taking viewers on a journey beyond Jupiter, Kubrick by Kubrick celebrates the essence of what film means to those who make it, and those who watch.”

Posted on 6.29.15: The other day a friend mentioned a pending high-school reunion. Okay, fine, I wanted to say, but if you were fundamentally unhappy and occasionally miserable in high school (as many of us were, and as I definitely was), you’ll need to stash that history in your locker and keep it there until the reunion is over.

Reunions tend to remind a lot of us what a regimented environment and cultural concentration camp high school was. Most of us only realize this after we’ve found our footing as adults. I was lost but now I’m free, or certainly a lot freer.

My high-school years didn’t feel “miserable” in an unmistakable, lemme-outta-here sense; the unhappiness I lived with seeped into my system in a hundred subtle ways. I was so down it looked like up to me. All of it. I didn’t expect any semblance of “happiness,” but I was hoping all the time that life might eventually become less grueling.

I wasn’t anti-social but I didn’t party and run around all that much until my senior year, and once that phase kicked in I became a madman. The truth is that on a certain level I was a kind of functioning alcoholic (no serious behavioral problems but a few serpents under the surface) from my late teens until I quit the hard stuff in the mid ’90s. The real healing didn’t begin until I went sober in March 2012, or so I tell myself.

Before I socially flowered I watched a shitload of TV and listened to a lot of music and basically lived in my head. I was a secret genius who could potentially be persuaded to join the crowd, but no one ever asked. I know that my father’s alcoholism felt and smelled like mustard gas in our home, especially during dinner hour, and that my self-esteem was in the basement. I mostly felt apart, diminished and unworthy when it came to women. In school I didn’t do sports or join clubs or do anything extra-curricular except for detention.

My life didn’t really kick into gear until my mid 20s when the journalism started, and even that was agony until I became a half-decent writer and had learned the ropes and had gotten to know people, etc. Things didn’t actually kick into a good place (confidence, comfort, fair reward) until the online column era started, in late ’98.

Back to reunions: Everyone has a look of excitement and anticipation in their eye after they’ve graduated high school and are about to start college. The great adventure! When I attended my 25th celebration most of my ex-classmates had either surrendered that gleam or put it into a bureau drawer somewhere. To me they looked sedate, staid, settled. All except for a small fraternity, which I estimated to be maybe 5% of the crowd. X-factor types with a semblance of life in their veins. Looking for action, adventure, the next discovery.

Sinclair Lewis said the following to his high-school class at a reunion in the ’20s: “When we were young most of you didn’t give a shit about me, and now that we’re older I don’t give a shit about you.”

That’s obviously an ungracious thing to say in any social circumstance, and especially to ex-classmates. I would never go there, but I have to admit that I understand the urge.

The networks are allowing Trump to spin and bullshit his way through this crisis on a daily basis**, and in so doing influence the stupid and the gullible in this country, which unfortunately represents a significant percentage of voters. They’re basically giving him free campaign commercials each and every day, and allowing him the opportunity to spread his “fake news” crap whenever he gets into a dispute with an aggressive questioner.

Meanwhile Uncle Joe Biden does interviews and records an occasional policy video from his home studio. Dynamically speaking he’s basically faded from view.

** In the words of Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, “night after night [we’re getting] self-serving bluster and blame deflection, a dose of dangerous medical hucksterism, and more yelling at journalists, especially if the journalist is a woman or black or, heaven forbid, both.”

The legendary Brooklyn-born caricaturist Mort Drucker has passed at age 91. Lower all flags to half mast. A seminal 20th Century figure is no more.

If you grew up on MAD magazine (or came to admire if after the heyday of the ’50s, 60s and ’70s) you certainly worshipped Drucker, who was arguably the greatest illustrator in MAD‘s history (he worked for the publication for 55 years) as well as one of the most distinctive pen-and-ink maestros of the mid to late 20th Century.

Either you understood how good Drucker was or you didn’t. There’s no amount of copy that could change anyone’s perception of the man.

Speaking of copy, the admiration I’ve always had for Drucker’s MAD material never extended to the dialogue boxes. For the satirical copy was never that hip. More often than not the tone of the written material was actually kind of harumphy, lamenting, conservative. Which was noteworthy for the ’60s and ’70s when upheaval was the rule. Boiled down, the copy always said “look how this or that movie or TV show is somehow degrading or diminishing the social fabric…look how good moral values are waning or evaporating.”

Drucker’s explanation of his approach: “I’ve always considered a caricature to be the complete person, not just a likeness. Hands, in particular, have always been a prime focus for me as they can be as expressive of character as the exaggerations and distortions a caricaturist searches for. I try to capture the essence of the person, not just facial features.

“I’ve discovered through years of working at capturing a humorous likeness that it’s not about the features themselves as much as the space between the features. We all have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, hair, and jaw lines, but yet we all look different. What makes that so is the space between them.”

Wiki excerpt: “When MAD magazine’s parody of The Empire Strikes Back was published in 1980, drawn by Drucker, the magazine received a cease and desist letter from George Lucas‘ lawyers demanding that the issue be pulled from sale, and that MAD destroy the printing plates, surrender the original art, and turn over all profits from the issue.

“Unbeknownst to them, Lucas had just sent MAD an effusive letter praising the parody, and declaring, ‘Special Oscars should be awarded to Drucker and DeBartolo, the George Bernard Shaw and Leonardo da Vinci of comic satire.”

“Publisher Gaines mailed a copy of the letter to Lucas’ lawyers with a handwritten message across the top: ‘That’s funny, George liked it!’ There was no further communication on the matter.”