When I want to laugh and relax I’ll watch a FAIL ARMY compilation, but this is better.

This is funny also:

He just wanted bread. pic.twitter.com/NnzKXLvuSv

— Much Too Old to Feel this Damn Young (@PalominoOMG) February 10, 2024

It wouldn’t be fair to write about Derek Magyar‘s Flying Lessons, which opened the Santa Barbara Film Festival last night (2.4.10). I watched the first few minutes, but I had to leave to buy some cough syrup and spray. For some reason a slight cough caused by a throat tickle blew up into something worse yesterday. It was awful. So I got the damn cough syrup, came back, watched the film for another 20 or 25 minutes. And then I gave up.

I don’t have to watch a film for a half hour or 15 minutes, even, to know it’s not working. I can tell within two or three minutes. I knew Flying Lessons was in trouble within seconds. It’s one of those “who am I really?,” “I’ve made some mistakes,” “maybe I should wake up?” meditative dramas that makes you want to get a stiff drink — make that several drinks. Except I don’t like stiff drinks any more. A glass or two of wine is my limit. [Note: HE embraced sobriety on 3.20.12.]

But I needed to escape so I did, and I went across the street to a first-class Argentinian restaurant. Beautifully designed place, old Spanish flavor, etc.. And there, sitting at a small table with a friend, was Derek Magyar. And there I was with my my press badge, so I didn’t say hello. Magyar is a youngish actor. Flying Lessons is his first stab at directing. The screenwriter is Thomas Kuehl. I know how difficult it can be to make a film even half-succeed, and I didn’t want to say or do anything that would seem harsh or cruel.

So I kept my distance from Magyar and ordered my Pinot Grigio. I sat down at a table and struck up a conversation with a Swedish blonde who was wearing a long fur coat. And then a local friend, Rochelle Rose, dropped by and joined us.

I’m not saying Oppenheimer‘s Robert Downey, Jr. doesn’t deserve to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar on 3.10.24…he almost certainly will. HE congratulates him in advance, etc. I would be a tiny bit more pleased if American Fiction‘s Sterling K. Brown were to win, but of course that won’t happen.

I feel obliged to mention three sartorial errors that Downey committed last night. One, he wore a maroon or burgundy or wine-colored suit…a strict HE no-no. Two, he wore a black, low-cut, chest-baring (almost tit-baring) T-shirt…the same kind of T-shirt worn by All Of Us Strangers Andrew Scott a while back. And three, his burgundy suit pants were baggy and bell-bottomed. Super-flared dress slacks began to catch on the fall of ’21 — (a) “Nightmare Bell Bottoms,” 10.8.21, and (b) “Bellbottoms Must Be Stopped,” 11.10.21.

SBIFF’s Bradley Cooper tribute happened on Thursday night:

From HE’s “Arthur Two Sheds Jackson“, posted on Friday, 2.10 around 5 pm eastern:

Woke Kindergarten sounds like a satirical joke, but it’s 100% real.

A gay third-grade teacher, Tiger Craven-Neeley, has been put on indefinite leave by the Hayward Unified School District because he’s criticized Woke Kindergarten, an actual organized cirriculum offered by Glassbrook Elementary School.

Glassbrook is a low performer in the realm of educational basis (readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic), partly, one presumes, because a basic education is seen as racist in progressive circles and because Glassbrook places a higher value on instructing students how to identity and fight against white supremacy and racial oppression.

Greeley reportedly balked at the educational idea of “disrupting whiteness”, and was temporarily banned from the training sessions. The teacher also said he was told the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.”

The Woke Kindergarten website proclaims a commitment to “abolitionist early education and pro-black and queer and trans liberation.”

Woke Kindergarten is reportedly paid with federal funds — money from a federal program meant to help boost test scores for the country’s lowest-performing schools. Glassbrook has apparently been using Woke Kindergarten for two years of a three-year contract.

“One, they can vote. And two, they can breed.”

It’s only February 9th! There’s plenty of time for Joe Biden to collapse his re-election campaign and for the political system to cough up another Democratic candidate for President.

Consider what happened over a six-month period in 1968 — (a) President Lyndon Johnson, the presumptive Democratic candidate for re-election, barely out-points antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire Democratic primary (3.12.68); (b) New York Senator Bobby Kennedy enters the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination (3.16.68); (c) Johnson quits in March, (d) Martin Luther King Jr. is murdered at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis (4.4.68); (e) RFK is shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles (6.4.68); and (f) Humphrey is nominated as Chicago cops wallop demonstrators during the Democratic Convention (8.22 to 8.30).

The whole world changed…everything did. And between now and mid-summer (the 2024 Democratic Convention happens in Chicago between August 19 to 22) we can’t nudge Biden into retiring and install Gavin Newsom in his place?

The withered-old-man thing is obviously a huge and quite possibly fatal problem for Biden. Do we really want the country to be once again roiled and besieged by ludicrous MAGA turbulence, and allow this to happen over a single man’s obstinate refusal to face reality and step aside for the general good?

Biden is clearly declining and a much more frail and muttering fellow than he was even four years ago, and he wants to serve again until January ’29, when he’ll be 86?

Yes, it’s possible that a majority of voters might decide it’s better to send an obviously toxic, deranged and foam-at-the-mouth reprehensible authoritarian back to the White House rather than give Gavin Newsom a try, but I seriously doubt this would happen at the end of the day.

But dishonesty is even worse, and I’ve really come to believe in not skirting or ducking whatever’s happening of a significant nature as long as it connects or reflects on some level. No icky stuff, of course. This has always been a movie-related column but sometimes an occasional random confession is in order.

I’m just going to blurt this out. The results of this morning’s medical exam gave me pause. All my life I’ve enjoyed excellent health, and right now I feel robust and bulletproof. I feel like I’m 37. But an element of doubt or at the very least uncertainty has crept into the room. I’m not feeling spooked as much as…I don’t know, somber or something.

Nobody of any age is ever assured of blue skies and fair weather. We’re all playing it one day at a time, etc. Who knows what lies around the corner? I’ll leave it there, I think. Right now it’s all tutto bene. I just can’t figure a way to write this daily fucking column (“let it all hang out”) without at least acknowledging this. Curtly.

Amazon UHD streaming, not the 4K Bluray. Shot boxy (1.37) by Clifford Stine, but projected in 1.85 when it opened in June 1953.

Did you know there was a 2014 Alzheimer’s movie called Still Alice, written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, and that no one has rewatched it since and yet Julianne Moore not only won the Best Actress Oscar that year but her win that was locked in tight from the very beginning of the 2014 Oscar season? The fix was totally in, and no one said “wait…do we have to give it to Moore?”

The answer was yes, they had to because her Best Actress competitors simply weren’t that formidable — Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night, Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything, Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl and Reese Witherspoon in Wild.

HE review excerpt:

HE to Kumail Nanjiani: You’ve smart, funny-witty and appealing every which way. Everyone hated The Eternals but that was Chloe Zhao‘s fault, not yours. You did nothing wrong. You were well paid, right? And you became slightly more famous because of the promotion? Let it go, move on, you’re fine.

…about the melting of the Charles Melton award-season bandwagon, which was basically a touchy-squishy thing from the get-go (South Korean identity plus symbolic empathy for victims of sexual abuse)…the sensitives tried to slip this in and were shut down by the sensibles. Another indication that woke insanity is gradually losing its hold? I’d certainly like to think so.