The Contagion cast has taped some coronavirus PSAs. Kate Winslet, Jennifer Ehle and Larry Fishburne look fine, but what’s up with Matt Damon? I would have tidied up a bit. Visual symbolism and all that.

In times of crisis, American presidents have always stepped up to meet the moment. But all we've gotten from Donald Trump are lies, excuses, and scapegoats.

Trump has failed our country at a time when we need him most. pic.twitter.com/d2vxUHGiH0

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 26, 2020

It’s odd and at the same time touching that Bob Dylan has decided to open the floodgates of memory and melancholy and just…feel it. 56 and 1/2 years after the fact. The fact that “Murder Most Foul” just kind of trickles out with a half-sardonic tone and a craggy after-midnight voice…settled, no tempo. Piano, violin, string quartet…slightly sung but mostly spoken…”they killed him once and they killed him twice…the age of the anti-Christ….lonely are the brave.” Did the all-powerful twentysomething Dylan ever say a word about JFK’s bloodsplatter in ’64 or thereabouts? Perhaps on some metaphorical level. Did this song happen because “I’m a poet, I know it, hope I don’t blow it” is ten times closer to death now than he was then? The tone is quite sad and affecting. I’ve listened to it three times now. 16:56 x 3. Who’s the piano player?

Excerpt from Woody Allen‘s “Apropos of Nothing“, during the final portion: “Sartre said, ‘Hell is other people.’ I would like to change that to ‘Hell is other people’s taste.”

Bosley Crowther’s N.Y. Times review of Raw Deal, published on 7.9.48: “The end of a fascinating friendship between a fugitive jailbird and the girl who has loyally aided his activities, even down to his desperate prison break, is cheerlessly documented in Raw Deal, a pistol-powered crime melodrama which came to the Victoria yesterday. And the reason for this annulment is that the fugitive meets another girl — a beautiful, law-respecting citizen — while taking it on the lam.

“A transfer of heart throbs of this sort seems distinctly illogical amid all the violent distractions which occur while it’s going on. No one, we’d think, would be able to give much attention to love while keeping one curve on the twisting highway ahead of the chasing police. And no one of average emotions would fret about romance, we’d suppose, while angling to make a double-crosser pay up that ‘fifty grand’ he’d overlooked.

“But this, of course, is a movie — and a pretty low-grade one, at that — in which sensations of fright and excitement are more diligently pursued than common sense. Screeching tires and screaming sirens are more insistent than rational though and clichés of passionate behavior are more viable than truth. And Dennis O’Keefe is the fellow, which to movie fans means, of course, that an equal division of interest between love and luggs is thoroughly plausible.

“To be sure, there is this to be reckoned: Claire Trevor plays the girl whom Mr. O’Keefe gives the raw deal in favor of Marsha Hunt. And anyone watching these two ladies and their behavior in this film might not be inclined to wonder at the change in the gentleman’s choice — even though, as matters turn out, it means that he winds up dead. Except for the usual moral — to wit, that crime does not pay — the only thing proved by this picture is that you shouldn’t switch sweethearts in mid-lam.”

From “On Coronavirus, We’re #1” by N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman: “It’s hard to believe, but just a month ago Donald Trump and his henchmen were dismissing the coronavirus as a nonevent. On Feb. 26 Trump declared that ‘you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be close to zero.’

“His remark came a day after Larry Kudlow, his administration’s chief economist, declared that the virus was almost completely contained, and that the economy was ‘holding up nicely.’ There are now more than 82,000 cases in the U.S. — we don’t know how many more, because we’re still lagging far behind on testing. But that makes us the world’s coronavirus epicenter, and the U.S. trajectory is worse than that of other countries.

“As for the economy: Last week more than three million workers filed for unemployment insurance, a number that is completely off the scale even as many others who are suddenly out of work aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits. We’re clearly losing jobs even faster than at the worst moments of the 2008-9 financial crisis, when we were losing ‘only’ 800,000 per month.

“Trump’s dismissal and denial played a large role in getting us to this point. And he should be held accountable. But the crucial question now is whether we’re doing enough to cope with the catastrophe.”

I was so bored last night that I couldn’t go to sleep, but I finally did. I woke at the usual six-oh this morning, but felt so lethargic about life that I went back to sleep. Then I re-awoke but I couldn’t quite come out of the fog.

I finally arose around 10something, but what did it matter? For we are prisoners on a kind of Devil’s Island. Allowed to roam around on the honor system, true, but still residing in a two-person clink with excellent wifi, a big TV, a kitchen full of food, five computers and a Bluray player, etc. And two cats.

Then my new Bluray of Raw Deal arrived at the doorstep…excitement! Then I drove to Pavilions to buy a few things, but the line to get in was long and slowish.

Then we decided to paint the living room walls in a Benjamin Moore color called “Coral Gables.”

Then I decided against paying to watch Joan Micklin Silver‘s Chilly Scenes of Winter because it’s free on YouTube, and then to watch Jean Luc Godard‘s entire Sympathy for the Devil doc, which I’ve only seen in random clips.

I guess we don’t really live on Devil’s Island, but it sure feels like it at times. Our lives are fucked or at least shuttered for the foreseeable future. Maybe until the mid to late summer, maybe longer than that. There ain’t no life nowhere.

A friend writes, “I was feeling down for few days but I am better today. I did yoga at 10 am on line and I keep thinking how much worse it could be, and that I am still lucky. We don’t go much out. Just to a store. I sit by the window and watch people walk , jog, stroll in endless stream. I think I should start making window diaries :)”

Let’s say you’re a freelancer currently unable to earn anything due to a coronavirus shutdown. Or an employee who’s been temporarily suspended because your employer has been forced to temporarily close or cut back. It would certainly be a welcome thing to receive a $1200 check from the government as every little bit helps. But presuming that the stimulus check would be a one-off, how much help would $1200 actually represent?

You could use it to help put a minor dent in your rent or mortgage payment for a month. Or you could buy $20 worth of food each day for 60 days. Or you could pay off your utility bills for a while. But the pandemic is going to be with us until mid to late summer and possibly (God forbid) into the fall or even beyond. So at best a $1200 windfall would make a slight difference for a very short period.

$1200 is fine, but it’s basically pizza money, a few Uber rides, a cable or cell phone bill, cat food, two or three tanks of gasoline, etc. And then back to the salt mines.

Last night I finally saw Roman Polanski’s “J’Accuse” (aka An Officer and a Spy). Yes, I watched it illegally, but we’ll never see it in this country because of the #MeToo Khmer Rouge prohibition of all things Polanski and so I figured, okay, just this one time. Actually I also watched Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in Manhattan illegally, and with the same justification.

In any event I watched it on the 65-incher in 1080p with English subtitles, and my God, the “holy shit, this is great” and “why can’t more films be this good?” current. The 86 year-old Polanski is undimmed…he seems to be as commanding and bull’s-eye as when he made Repulsion, Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, etc.

J’Accuse has been crafted with absolute surgical genius…a lucid and exacting and spot-on retelling of an infamous episode…a sublime atmospheric and textural recapturing of 1890s “belle epoque” Paris, and such a meticulous, hugely engrossing reconstruction of the Dreyfus affair…a tale told lucidly…a clue-by-clue, layer-by-layer thing.

You know what J’Accuse is? A bedtime comfort flick — comforting because it’s so damned good.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but it’s a tale of anti-Semitism and a rigged conviction for treason, an innocent man condemned to Devil’s Island, nationalist rightwing groupthink, suppression of the truth and the punishment of those who would bring the perversion to light.

Most of us know the basic bones, but Polanski’s film is absolutely riveting because of the detailed approach that he applies to each and every character, setting, line, costume, light source and choice of location. Adult-level subtlety to die for.

It’s my idea of a perfect film in every respect — Polanski and Robert Harris‘s brilliant screenplay, the ace-level production design by Jean Rabasse and art direction by Dominique Moisan, Pawel Edelman‘s naturally lighted cinematography, Alexandre Desplat‘s music…every single element is aces. Polanski concentrates on elements that 99% of today’s directors would run screaming from. The discovery portion of the film is all about ripped-up letters pasted back together, bureaucratic records, folders, etc.

Jean Dujardin’s lead performance as Georges Picqart, the intelligence officer who uncovered the frame-up, is easily his career-best. Ditto Louis Garrel as Dreyfus plus Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud, Eric Ruf, Laurent Stocker, etc. And with everyone under the constraints of the era, of having to hold themselves erect and behave in a stiffly correct manner.

I was especially taken having recently endured Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang (IFC Films, 4.24), which looks and feels like nothing more than a director re-inventing and re-stylizing the past in order to show off and look cool. I got through it but not without frustration.

J’Accuse is a textural, cerebral masterpiece, and yet one of the most affecting anti-racism films ever made. The sight of the Parisian nationalists and anti-Semites cheering on the lying military brass…the MAGA redhats of their day.

For the last week or so it’s been sinking into me. Simultaneously appalling and suffocating, and so overwhelming that I’ve only been able to gradually process it one day at a time. We’re all living in a dystopian realm, the likes of which I’ve never known, almost a kind of On The Beach atmosphere…a low-security, self-policed concentration camp with all the comforts of home.

As HE regulars know (especially the scolding “virusbros“) I’ve been out two or three times since returning from Texas…wearing the usual mask and surgical gloves, and of course keeping my distance from one and all. CVS and Pavilions stopovers plus aimless rumblehog roamings.

What an inert, boring, vanilla, nothing-level existence.

In a 3.24 piece called “10 Comedies to Lift Your Mood”, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy mentioned that what we’re all going through is spiritually analogous to what many Americans went through during the early days of the Great Depression. That sunk in. Right now probably is the bleakest time of my life in certain ways…perhaps in all ways.

The Third Day, a forthcoming six-part HBO series that begins on 5.11, looks reasonably decent. But the trailer also suggests it’s basically Midsommar meets The Wicker Man…right?

And why is Jude Law starring or costarring in just about every other film and cable series these days? Is he the new Michael Caine? Does he ever say no? The New Pope, the Rhythm Section, Vox Lux, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, A Rainy Day in New York, The Nest, etc. I understand that Law’s early aughts hot period — The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain, Enemy at the Gates, Road to Perdition, I Heart Huckabees, Alfie, Closer, The Holiday — ended 14 or 15 years ago and we all have bills to pay, etc. I’m nonetheless sensing that he’s too willing to be in anything that comes along.