USC student wokesters want John Wayne cancelled in absentia, or at least as far as a USC School of Cinematic Arts Wayne exhibit is concerned.

Mainly, I gather, because eight months ago the long-dead Wayne was targeted by progressives — not incorrectly — as a sexist, hawkish rightwing racist. Wayne’s objectionable views were part of a 1971 Playboy interview that resurfaced last February. Why this is blowing up now instead of last winter is anyone’s guess.

A week and a half ago a pair of SCA students, juniors Eric Plant and Reanna Cruz, made some noise on the USC campus by protesting the Wayne exhibit with a banner.

Eric Plant, Reanna Cruz and their anti-John Wayne protest banner. (Photo snapped by Leanna Albanese.)

USC Annenberg Media correspondent Leanna Albanese reported the protest on 9.27. “When you have an exhibit up that celebrates the idea and the legacy of someone that is blatantly racist, a white supremacist and directly says that he is a white supremacist…it seems as though SCA does not care about [its] students,” Plant told her.

“[The exhibit] being in SCA just makes me feel uncomfortable as someone who is Native American,” Plant explained. “Take down the whole exhibit. There’s no other way that this can be remedied. This is something that I’m going to fight for the entire time that I’m here.”

Three days after the Albanese story (or on 9.30) USC’s Assistant Dean of Diversity and Inclusion Evan Hughes announced that the Wayne complaint would be discussed at a meeting on 10.2, or eight days ago. I wrote Hughes a couple of hours to ask if any course of action had been decided — crickets.

I didn’t get into Martin Scorsese‘s recent assessment of the superhero (mostly Marvel) genre because he was only saying what any semi-intelligent film lover thinks, aside from the fact that certain Marvel films are, by the standards of the genre, seriously impressive (the first Iron Man and Ant Man, the first two Captain America films, Avengers: Endgame, etc.). My reaction was, “Okay, yeah…and?”

Scorsese: “I don’t see [superhero films]. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

Two days ago Samuel L. Jackson had this response: “That’s kind of like saying Bugs Bunny ain’t funny. Films are films. You know, everybody doesn’t like his stuff either. I mean, we happen to, but everybody doesn’t. There are a lot of Italian-Americans that don’t think he should be making films about them like that. Everybody’s got an opinion, so it’s okay. It’s not going to stop anyone from making movies.”

HE to Jackson: People like what they like and are obviously entitled to their opinions…of course. And I don’t “like” each and every Scorsese film, by the way. I’ve never been a fan of Kundun, and The Age of Innocence and Bringing Out The Dead never quite rang my bell. But any friend, associate or acquaintance of Jackson’s who says he/she doesn’t “like” Scorsese’s films in general is an idiot, no offense.

And that alleged Italian-American complaint…seriously? The American Italian Anti-Defamation League thing is a half-century old, and there’s hartdly an Italian-American living in the northeast corridor who hasn’t accepted the mob association aspect as part of the price of doing business. Vito Corleone‘s photo is hanging on the wall of God knows how many Italian restaurants, Nino Rota‘s Godfather theme is often heard on the sound system, and everyone loves Joe Pesci‘s “what, I’m a clown, I amuse you?” riff from Goodfellas.

Monday, 10.7 bulletin: I’ve cancelled our Red Fox “tasting menu” reservation. Per Dave Billet‘s suggestion, we may order something in the pub, which has a separate a la carte menu.

Sunday, 10.6: I’m not into eating big, gut-busting meals these days. I’m not Mr. Creosote, and I never have been. But after making a reservation for Tatyana and myself at Middleburg’s Red Fox Inn & Tavern for Friday, 10.18, management called to make sure I understood the all-or-nothing terms of eating there that night.

The situation is that you’re either down for a three-course “Autumn tasting” dinner (roughly $100 per person with wine, not counting tip — $125 plus tip if you’re including dessert) or you might as well not come. Sorry but no budget-watchers or cheapskates.

HE response: “And what if I don’t want to stuff myself with your delicious, exquisitely prepared vittles…what if I just want to absorb the storied colonial atmosphere while eating a light salad and maybe sipping a bowl of soup? Why do I have to go along with your, no offense, totalitarian demand that I eat the locked-and-loaded dinner you’ve chosen to serve me, come hell or high water?”

Response from Red Fox courtesy lady: “Well, you don’t have to come to our restaurant, sir.”

Me: “Oh, I have that option, do I? Thanks — good to know.”

Posted on 11.6.12: “I always got a bigger charge out of Keith Moon‘s pounding and crashing than I did from Ginger Baker‘s, great as he was and is. Partly because Moon was crazier. But also because Moon’s snare-drum hits always struck me as metronomically, mathematically and microscopically more precise and highly charged than Baker’s…just by a tad. To me great drumming isn’t about being a wild man from Borneo…it’s about hitting the beat exactly dead center and exactly right according to universal law, over and over and over.”

A second whistleblower has come forward, presumably providing corroboration to the assertions of whistleblower #1 and weakening the Trump claim that whistleblower #1 can’t be trusted because he’s pushing second-hand information, etc.

And you know what? None of it matters in terms of the 2020 election because the pathetic backwater bumblefucks don’t care. They don’t care about rancid Trump behaviors because he’s the last (only?) bulwark against the cultural encroachment of people of color + LGBTQs. Or so their instincts tell them.

Read Monica Pott‘s “In The Land of Self Defeat” (N.Y. Times, posted on 10.4) and weep. These people are born to lose. They need to die out — that’s the only real solution.

Greta Thunberg‘s week-old, scrunched-face regarding of The Thing…perfect.

Variety critics Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge haven’t engaged in a genteel, hail-fellow-well-met, Marquis-of-Queensbury dispute about Joker — they’ve gotten into an actual argument. It’s like a mid ’60s slapdown between Pauline Kael and Bosley Crowther about Bonnie and Clyde. Gleiberman loves Joker‘s mad disturbing provocations while Debruge finds them rash and exploitive and even dangerous (i.e., “Phillips has given incel types a poster boy for the kind of toxic ‘it’s everybody’s fault but mine’ mentality“).

Favorite OG excerpt: “If you say you have trouble with films that create ‘sympathetic portraits of sociopathic characters,’ I guess that’s an argument. But it’s a terribly conservative one. The same argument, and outrage, was once used as a weapon against movies like The Public Enemy and Scarface, and you could easily wield it against a work of art like Bonnie and Clyde — as, indeed, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther famously did at the time.”

“But when you call Joaquin Phoenix‘s Arthur Fleck a ‘poster boy’ for angry self-pitying incel types, I do think you’re onto something — not about whether he’s going to become a hero to the basement-dweller brigade, but about the true, underlying reason why there’s been so much hostility to Joker on the part of film critics who routinely greet utterly processed comic-book films with a wan shrug of approval.

“The movie is being treated by those critics as if it were a two-hour advertisement for the toxic white male. It almost doesn’t matter whether the film is glorifying or condemning Arthur’s violence. Everyone knows that Joker is going to be a huge hit — and, more than that, a phenomenon — and the fact that it places a toxic white male at the center of the conversation is somehow being slammed as a violation of the New Woke Rules.

“The critics are saying: We’re done with characters like this! But they’re trying to wish away something that can’t be wished away. In doing so, they’re treating the rare piece of popular art with a genuine emotional danger to it, as if it were the enemy.

Plus he’s looking older and is, if you ask me, too old to cut the 007 mustard. He can pretend and all, but I don’t believe that a 51 year old guy can handle all that rugged stuff like he did in his 30s and 40s. Yes, I know — Sean Connery was 52 when he made Never Say Never Again (’83), but I didn’t believe that one either. Connery’s prime Bond period was in the ’60s, when he was in his early to mid 30s. When Roger Moore shot his last Bond, A View to a Kill, he was 57 or 58…way too long-of-tooth. Pierce Brosnan finished his 007 service at age 52 or thereabouts.

Posted on 5.23.19: “If Craig was required to just stroll around and say dialogue, fine, but 007 has evolved past the guy he used to be — an elegant smoothie who would occasionally punch or plug a bad guy with aplomb — to an X-treme pugilist martial-arts superman. Craig is 51 years old — five years past the normal prime period for a typically fit male.”

Set in a Scottish highland regiment sometime after World War II, Tunes of Glory (’60) is about a brutal battle of esteem between the retiring commander, Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness). and his replacement, one Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow (John Mills). Right away the macho Sinclair, whom everyone in the regiment likes and respects, mounts a steady campaign of disdain and belittling against Barrow, whom everyone comes to regard as prissy, stiff and constipated. The war ends with a bullet and blood on the floor, and a ton of residual guilt.

Guinness and Mills were at their absolute peak. James Kennaway‘s screenplay, sharp and well-honed, was Oscar-nominated.

Wiki excerpt: “Guinness wanted to play Barrow, and John Mills wanted to play Sinclair. It took a meeting between Guinness, Mills and director Ronald Neame to straighten out why each was best suited for the role they had been offered. However, in his autobiography, Mills claimed that he brought the script to Guinness, and between them they decided who should play which role. At the end of the dat Guinness believed this performance to be among his best.”

There are some who are still saying Trump will most likely win in ’20, mainly because they’re convinced that the pragmatic humanity of schoolmarm Elizabeth Warren is no match for this grotesque alpha-male sociopath on a debate stage. I’ve been scared all along of how well she’d do if Typewriter Joe were to fall by the wayside. (Bernie‘s heart attack has pretty much ended his candidacy — face it.) Warren is a smart, tough, determined, hard-charging change agent…anti-corporate, good with specifics, not corrupted, an actual human being. How could your pot-bellied, gun-owning hinterland slowboat prefer the Manhattan crime family boss who has no scruples, no temperance, no decency?

From Michael Moore’s Facebook rant about Joker, which posted early this morning: “The fear and outcry over Joker is a ruse. It’s a distraction so that we don’t look at the real violence tearing up our fellow human beings. 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance is an act of violence. Millions of abused women and children living in fear is an act of violence. Cramming 59 students like worthless sardines into classrooms in Detroit is an act of violence.

“As the news media stands by for the next mass shooting, you and your neighbors and co-workers have already been shot numerous times, shot straight through all of your hearts and hopes and dreams. Your pension is long gone. You’re in debt for the next 30 years because you committed the crime of wanting an education. You have actually thought about not having children because you don’t have the heart to bring them onto a dying planet where they are given a 20-year death-by-climate-change sentence at birth.

“The violence in Joker? Stop! Most of the violence in the movie is perpetrated on the Joker himself, a person in need of help, someone trying to survive on the margins of a greedy society. His crime is that he can’t get help. His crime is that he is the butt of a joke played on HIM by the rich and famous. When the Joker decides he can no longer take it, you will feel awful. Not because of the (minimal) blood on the screen, but because deep down, you [will be] cheering him on.

“And if you’re honest when that happens, you will thank this movie for connecting you to a new desire — not to run to the nearest exit to save your own ass but rather to stand and fight and focus your attention on the nonviolent power you hold in your hands every single day.

“Thank you Joaquin Phoenix, Todd Phillips, Warner Bros. and all who made this important movie for this important time. I loved this film’s multiple homages to Taxi Driver, Network, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon. How long has it been since we’ve seen a movie aspire to the level of Stanley Kubrick? Go see this film. Take your teens. Take your resolve.”