This morning I finally read the 12.29 N.Y. Times story (reported by Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and Mark Mazzetti) about Trump’s demand to halt military assistance to Ukraine, and particularly the 8.16 Oval office meeting in which National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper pleaded with Trump to lift the military funding freeze, to no avail.
Moscow Mitch’s intention to blow off any pretense of a fair and thorough Senate impeachment trial is locked down, of course. He will continue to coordinate with the White House in order to facilitate a whitewash, etc.
Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (posted on 12.31): “In objecting to a fixed trial with rules dictated by President Trump, you have distinguished yourself as someone willing to place country and Constitution above party.
“You alone cannot stop a grievous injury to our Constitution, but with several Republican colleagues (might I suggest Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, retiring senators and those senators whose constituents will run them out of town on a rail for going along with a rigged trial), you have the ability to stop a travesty that would bring dishonor on the Senate, prevent a full accounting of the president’s conduct and result in a verdict lacking credibility with the American people
Given the general presumption that certain fellas aren’t exactly into Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women, and given that the film has a robust army of progressive-minded female champions, it’s worth noting certain male critics who’ve stood by Little Women and generally bonded with Gerwig, given her a comradely hug or poke, sung her praises, insisted that reticent males should re-think it and so on.
It’s been observed that Gerwig’s “white knights” include rogerebert.com and N.Y. Times contributor Glenn Kenny, Vanity Fair‘s Mark Harris, MCN’s David Poland, N.Y. Times critic A.O Scott, Variety music guy Chris Willman, TheWrap‘s Alonso Duralde, THR‘s Todd McCarthy, New York‘s David Edelstein and L.A. Times critics Justin Chang and Kenneth Turan.
Kenny responds: “I am fine being listed as a booster of the movie, but not as a ‘white knight.’ I’m not being chivalrous. Gerwig [is] a real filmmaker. From my year-end blog post: ‘Guys, it’s good! It’s got mise-en-scéne! I kept hearing about how radical and stuff it was, but what more impressed me about the picture was its genuine tenderness…there’s a rare delicacy of feeling here.'”
Willman responds: “I wouldn’t object to [the white knight thing], although it’s hard to take it as anything other than tongue-in-cheek. Unlike Poland or Kenny, I have no clout in film circles. I should never have gotten caught up in the Twitter debate with [redacted], but it was just hard to resist pointing out that it’s not some kind of even split on the movie and vast majorities really like it just fine. I did not realize I was joining a ‘pile-on.’ Anyway, as there are so many critical voices supporting Gerwig or the movie, mine hardly counts.”
I’m not particularly qualified to riff on the worst films of 2019 as I almost always steer clear. I can smell them a mile away and will only occasionally endure. I could mention Cats, of course, but I feel mostly pity for that film. I could complain about the Miss Bala remake (the Mexican-made original was 17 or 18 times better) but I didn’t see It: Chapter Two, Glass, Last Christmas (even though I have a screener), Men in Black: International, Isn’t It Romantic, the Hellboy remake, the Shaft remake, etc. I’m not saying Alex Ross Perry‘s Her Smell was one of the year’s worst, but I really hated it. Long Shot pretty much stunk, I thought. I never saw Tolkien or Ophelia. I hated Spider-Man: Far From Home. Almost everyone felt that Stuber blew chunks. I hated The Goldfinch and was mostly dismissive of Ad Astra. I never saw Rambo: Last Blood. I didn’t care for The Aeronauts at all. I ducked 21 Bridges. I avoided A Million Little Pieces, etc.
Race is the principal reason that your Fox News bumblefucks are so blindly loyal to The Beast.
The U.S. was generally a European-descendant white country during the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th Century, and it technically still is with 60.7% of the U.S population composed of non-Hispanic whites. But by 2050 whites will only represent 47% of the population. The country is basically tipping in a pluralistic, multicultural direction. For a half-century the Republican party, which adopted a kind of Anglo Saxon Maginot Line mentality (the “Southern strategy”) and which today is represented by guys like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan, has been the party of white resistance.
And so lunatic righties see themselves as defending the Alamo, and they see Trump, for all his appalling ignorance, arrogance and self-destructive behavior, as a fat Jim Bowie or an orange-faced Davy Crockett mixed with a New York City crime boss.
This is their last stand and they know it, and he’s all they’ve got. They know that sooner or later General Santa Anna‘s troops (multiculturals, LGBTQs) are going to scale the walls and bayonet them to death and ravage their daughters and mitigate the bloodline all to hell.
On top of which they know that urban liberals not only despise them for their Trump allegiance but because they embody what has become a full-on racial epithet — “crusty older white person.” (Just ask Rosanna Arquette.)
So they don’t care. They’re the Wild Bunch shooting it out with General Mapache‘s troops. They’re dead men, but at least they’ll know the dark satisfaction of causing as much chaos and destruction as possible before they fall to the floor, bleeding and cut to pieces.
What’s the current U.S. population? Roughly 330,149,796 as of 12.16.19. In 1620 the non-Native (i.e., immigrant) American population was around 2300 persons. That number had grown to 2.5 million by 1776, and then 31 million by 1860, 76 million by 1900, 180 million by 1960 and 282 million by 2000.
White guys “settled” this country (i.e., stole, slaughtered, railroaded, plantationed, bulldozed, capitalized) fair and square. And now the non-elite, non-urban, under-educated sector of whitebread culture has been marginalized and discredited, and is on the verge of being finished.
This is why Michael Moore is saying that Trump, God help us, has a fighting chance of being reelected in 2020. Because they’ve latched onto an idea that they’re fighting for their very existence.
Bumblefuck despair and depression is the main reason that average life expectancy in the United States has been on a decline since 2014. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention cites three main reasons: a 72% increase in overdoses in the last decade (including a 30% increase in opioid overdoses from July 2016 to September 2017), a ten-year increase in alcoholic liver disease (men 25 to 34 increased by 8%; women by 11%), and a 33% increase in suicide rates since 1999.
In short, if Scott Feinberg’s insect-antennae readings are correct, all the ardently woke film twittering and comintern-ing that repeatedly protested the award-nomination snubbing of LittleWomen…all of that has come to naught. If, to be clear, Greta Gerwig’s film turns out to be a “major threat.”
Cats is about as unpopular with Joe Popcorn as UncutGems. Once again critics are off on their own planet. A portion of the Rotten Tomatoes gang wants Cats to face prosecution in The Hague. Ticket buyers are just “ehh, doesn’t work, whatever…next!”
Left San Francisco around 1:30 pm. 101 south to Gilroy, 152 east to southbound 5. ETA in West Hollywood around 7:30 pm. That zoned-out, droopy-lid feeling.
Until this morning, I had no idea Travis Bickle‘s apartment was located at 586 Columbus Ave., between 88th and 89th streets. I’d aways presumed his pad was in some ramshackle Hell’s Kitchen building, in the mid to upper 40s between 9th and 10th Avenue.
No Lighthouse or Les Miserables? I’ll cut Barack a break and presume he hasn’t gotten around to either. (Or he’s seen both and shied away because The Lighthouse has currents of madness and Les Miserables stokes unruly rebellion.) And he approves of Diane!
On one hand I’m in league with Joe Popcorn as far as WTF reactions to Uncut Gems are concerned. On the other I’m stunned by negative or “later” reactions to Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse, which is easily among 2019’s ten best if not the top four or five.
The sad truth is that 97% of ticket buyers can’t get beyond subject matter. “So what happens? Two lighthouse keepers go crazy on a rocky island in the 1890s”…no, much more than that. You can’t tell them “it’s the singer, not the song.” You can mention the visual atmospheric highs…black and white, 1.19 aspect ratio, King Triton, the demonic seagull, magnificent production design…and 19 out of 20 popcorn inhalers will reply “so?”
Tatyana wanted to visit Top of the Mark, the 19th story bar-restaurant on the penthouse level of the Mark Hopkins hotel. I hadn’t visited since the mid ‘80s so what the hell. It opened in ‘39 and became quite the essential stopover for WWII officers (slender, nattily uniformed, in the company of classy ladies in bright red lipstick) bound for combat in the Pacific or returning from same.
The cultural atmosphere at the Top of the Mark is a little different these days. A few nice-looking people, sure, but also a fair amount of overweight, horribly dressed proletariat commoners wearing baggy jeans, knitted skullcaps and whitesides. A time-traveling anthropologist comparing the differences between 20th and 21st Century clientele would be struggling for the right politely descriptive phrases while conveying an honest assessment, as I am now.
The truth is that over the last 60 or 70 years certain aspects of American culture have not only gone downhill but sunk into the swamp. We’re talking about the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire here. Herb Caen would be in shock.
