Jeff Wells It was one thing to listen to Caroline Kennedy’s recollection of the behavior of young Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: “I watched his younger brothers and cousins follow him down the path of drug addiction…his basement, his garage, his dorm room were always the center of the action”…that was one thing. But the remainder of her sentence really put a chill into my system: “…where drugs were available and he enjoying showing off how he put baby chickens and mice into a blender, to feed to his hawks.”
“Anyone who posts a video of herself crying and posts it to the internet should be disregarded and ignored automatically” — agreed.
I didn’t know what to do or say when Selena Gomez‘s weeping video hit a couple of days ago (i,e, sometime on Monday), although I did know right away that she/it pushed too way hard.
Plus it struck me as a tad ungenuine for an actress who “grew up speaking Spanish but lost her fluency around the same time she began her Hollywood career as a kid“, and was therefore obliged to “spend months relearning the language for her Emilia Perez role as the trophy wife of a Mexican cartel boss.”
42 and 1/2 years ago I interviewed this famous, emotionally emphatic 50 year-old woman for an Us magazine interview to promote E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. She was 7 years old at the time, and now she’s on the fucking cover of AARP’s print publication.
I feel like I’m on a time toboggan, and it’s going faster and faster.
The actual “Chicks in the Office” TikTok video embed (“Shame on the Acadeny Over Emilia Perez!”) won’t properly display. That aside…
@chicksintheoffice Shame on the Academy!!
I felt a certain degree of excitement about the original Richard Donner Superman reboot (‘78) and even the gradually declining early ‘80s sequels. And I’ll admit to feeling a vague revival of this when Bryan Singer‘s Superman Returns came along in ‘06.
But Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel shat the bed, I felt — it was covered in gloom sauce, and left me with a splitting headache. Snyder’s Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (‘16) really put a nail in it.
And now James Gunn has directed and delivered still another one, God in heaven, and is calling it just plain old Superman. I suppose we should all be thankful that David Corenswet‘s Clark Kent / Supie hasn’t been re-imagined as trans. (Corenswet, 31, is straight and married.)
Where does Gunn get the chutzpah to drag out Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) yet again? Where is the shame? How can Gunn glance at himself in the bathroom mirror?
Here you go: the #Superman trailer. Krypto, take us home.
Watch the teaser trailer now and ❤ this post to get updates from @superman before it hits theaters this July. pic.twitter.com/w77kiKef54
— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) December 19, 2024
During the scriptwriting or script-polishing phase of It Ends With Us, Justin Baldoni really went to town — emotionally, therapeutically, performance-wise — as he kissed Blake Lively‘s ass in a phone message. 2 am, six minutes and 49 seconds — “I am so sorry…sorry that you went through what you went though…you’re the secret sauce.”
From Echo Chamberlain‘s “Emilia Perez: Woke Trainwreck with 13 Oscar Nominations“:
“Musicals can be great when they’re, you know, designed to be musicals. But [Mexico’s] real-life narco culture context is gritty and unsparing — death, incarceration, brutality, gothic violence and despair. And Emilia Perez having that as a template from which there springs forth musical numbers is mind-blowingly absurd.”
Roughly three weeks until the 2.16 debut of Season 3 of The White Lotus…creator Mike White once again exploring the shallowness, self-absorption and occasional venality of a crew of wealthy tourists on holiday, this time in Thailand and more particularly Ko Samui — a sizable-but-not-huge island to the east of the southern Thai peninsula (i.e., Gulf of Thailand).
Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins (miserable), Sarah Catherine Hook, Jason Isaacs, Lalisa Manobal, Michelle Monaghan, Sam (son of Alessandro) Nivola, Lek Patravadi, Parker Posey (shallowest of all?), Natasha Rothwell, Patrick (son of Arnold) Schwarzenegger, Tayme Thapthimthong and Aimee Lou Wood.
How many will die?
Wiki page: “Until the late 20th century, Ko Samui was an isolated, self-sufficient community, having little connection with the mainland of Thailand. The island was without roads until the early 1970s and the 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) journey from one side of the island to the other could involve a whole-day trek through the mountainous central jungles.
“Ko Samui’s economy now is based primarily on a successful tourist industry, as well as exports of coconut and rubber. Economic growth has brought not only prosperity but also major changes to the island’s environment and culture.”
…it’s that the final destination (be it financial, political, geographical, spiritual or what-have you) is anecdotal at best. For what truly matters, what stays in the mind and truly sticks to the ribs is the rough-and-tumble of it all…the journey, man…the journey is everything.
Epilogue: The First Architecture Biennale:
“In 1980, a retrospective of László’s work is held in Venice. The exhibition includes the community center, finally completed after a decade’s hiatus. A now-adult Zsófia, accompanied by her young adult daughter (who is the spitting image of Zsófia) and an aging László, gives a speech highlighting how the Van Buren community center was designed by László to resemble the concentration camps that imprisoned the Toths, and functions as a way of processing trauma.
“She ends by recounting what Laszlo once told her: ‘No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.’”
The Brutalist director-cowriter Brady Corbet is three months younger than my older son, Jett.
When it came to male wigs in big-budget epics of the mid 20th Century, the general rule was that men’s hair could never be thin or even thinning — it always had to be thick and wavy and perfectly combed with the application of cans and cans of hair spray. And the styling had to have a kind of high-pompadour, be-bop-bah-luah, James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause attitude.
Consider E.G. Marshall‘s breathtaking wig in this scene from Cecil B. DeMille and Anthony Quinn‘s The Buccaneer. Not to mention Charlton Heston‘s Andrew Jackson wig — white as snow like Jim Jarmusch‘s hair, but much, much thicker. But neither Marshall nor Heston could hold a candle to the black wig worn by Bonanza‘s Lorne Greene….utterly ludicrous.
Marshall played Louisiana governor William C. Claiborne. Inger Stevens played his daughter, Annette. The film went with a fictitious love story between Annette and Yul Brynner‘s Jean Lafitte. Brynner’s wig was not a wavy, high-pompadour thing, but was modestly styled and curled.
The Buccaneer‘s supervising hair stylist was Nellie Manley; she was assisted by Lenore Weaver.
Every semi-intelligent person out there believes that the origin of COVID-19, which exploded stateside in March 2020 and wasn’t fully put to bed until early ’22, came from a Wuhan Institute of Virology lab leak.
Persuasive, reasonable-sounding reporting about a suspected Wuhan lab leak began to emerge from reputable websites and print publications (including The Wall Street Journal) in May 2021. (Here are links to several HE copy-and-paste stories about same.)
So it’s not exactly a big deal that the CIA, citing a just-released analysis, is now saying it too believes in lab leak theology.
N.Y. Times reporting by Julian Barnes: “The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
“But the agency [has] issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
“The analysis…is based in part on a closer look at the conditions in the high security labs in Wuhan province before the pandemic outbreak, according to people familiar with the agency’s work.”
