Jeff Wells

“Outside Agitators”

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From Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (‘67):

Berkeley landlord (Norman Fell) to Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman): “You’re not one of those outside agitators, are you?”

Braddock: “No.”

Berkekey landlord: “‘Cause I won’t stand for that.”

“Fall Guy” Retort

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Michael DeGregorio to HE: “If you want to be as miserable as you always look in pictures, that’s on you.

“I saw it and had the most fun I’ve had watching a film in a theater in a long, long time.

“This is an audience film, not a critics film and that’s not a lower standard — it’s just a totally different set of guidelines.

“All a filmmaker has to do is film two or three people, always in a love triangle of some kind, make it dreary and sad and hopeless and then kill one at the end (disease, suicide or something), add a nice subdued musical score and the critics will call it spiritual or stunningly romantic or something flowery like that and hail the filmmaker as the next __________(insert cool indie director).

“The Fall Guy is a total unabashed love letter to stunt men and the stunt industry as a whole. It moves like a fast train and even wraps the making of a film and a massive stunt into the climax of the third act.

“I’m sure you will call me a knuckle-dragging ape with no taste who smells up your comment section and anyone who likes this film is an uncultured scumbag who should be put into a reeducation camp, and that’s fine.

“The point is, this is a film for the audience to enjoy and I doubt that David Leitch really cares of the critics call him satan or the devil or anything else.

“Critics don’t pay the rent.”

Zoomer Entitlement (Hamilton Hall)

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Pro-Gaza, anti-Israel Columbia Zoomers to world media: “Speaking as militant, keffiyeh-wearing revolutionaries, we’ve occupied Hamilton Hall in order to dramatically demand an end to Israel’s policy of murder and terror in the Gaza Strip. But at the same time our stomachs are growling…waaahhh….Columbia University administrators need to send us food and drink…pizza and sodas anyway…waaahhh.”

I somehow don’t recall anything about radical student activist David Shapiro, who was notoriously photographed smoking a cigar while sitting at the desk of Columbia University president Grayson Kirk during a six-day revolt in late April of ’68…I don’t recall Shapiro or any of his SDS comrades demanding food. They either toughed it out or snuck out and grabbed takeout for the occupiers.

Authoritarian Animal

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Following two interviews with The Beast, a summary from Time reporter Eric Cortellessa:

“To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.

“He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.

“He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers.

“He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.

“He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.

“He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense.

“He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

Silver-Haired Guy Yelling….”C’mon!”

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Zero Day is an upcoming political thriller series for Netflix. Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, it costars Robert De Niro, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Bill Camp, Angela Bassett and Matthew Modine. Logline: “A political conspiracy thriller centering on a devastating global cyberattack.”

@user5469336782915 #robertdinero #zerodays #newmovie #nyc #newyork #wallsreet ♬ original sound – user5469336782915

“Lowered Expectations” Is Putting It Mildly

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[Posted six months ago — go to 1:45]

Scott Galloway: “We all know women…I’m sure this happens to you all the time…really interesting, high-character, successful, attractive women…usually in their 30s, some into their 40s…who will say ‘I can’t find anyone to date.’ But it’s not that they can’t find anyone to date. It’s that they can’t find anyone they want to date.

“And there’s some dynamics here. Warren Buffet said that the key to a successful marriage is low expectations.

“A podcaster named Chris Williams…he calls it the high-heels effect. And that is that every year for the last 50 years [or since the mid ’70s] women have become better educated and are making more money. They’re also getting [physically] taller every year. 50% of women say they won’t date a guy who’s shorter than them, except that figure is probably more like 80%. Also women are getting ‘taller’ and men are getting ‘shorter’ metaphorically. The pool of viable men is shrinking every year. Women have been told they can have it all. What I’ve found is that you can’t have it all, or certainly not all at once.”

“A woman of average attractiveness can have a ‘relationship’, and when I say relationship that’s code for sex…[within the straight realm] they can have a relationship with [a man] who’s in the top ten percent. But that male individual is probably not going to establish a longterm relationship.

“The bottom line is that the top 10% of men” — financial stability, looks, apparent emotional stability — “are getting 80 or 80-plus percent of the opportunities for short-term relationships. So they can engage in what’s called Porsche polygamy. So the guys that most women want are the least likely to establish a longterm relationship.”

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Had Honestly Never Heard This Colloquialism Before Last Night

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“Momala of the country”…

In a May 2019 letter to Elle magazine in celebration of Mother’s Day Sen. Kamala Harris explained the origin.

“When Doug and I got married, Cole, Ella and I agreed that we didn’t like the term ‘stepmom’ [so] they came up with ‘Momala.'”

Fine and good but Kamala Harris‘s rickety whiney voice still grates. Her speeches lack a certain musical quality…a gift that Barack had in abundance. We all know there’s a reason she dropped out of Democratic primary contention in December 2019. Women (particularly women of color) are in her corner but that’s about it.

While Rome Burns

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In other words: General reporting about Supreme Court righties having side-stepped and folded on Donald Trump‘s behalf was brief and unsustained, while college activists ignored this acquiescence in favor of strident and agitated pro-Gaza occupations. We’re just about cooked.

20 months hence the obviously lucid, thoughtful and charming Dick Van Dyke will turn 100.

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Gladhanders Lead The Charge

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If Emily (Jungle Cruise) Blunt has anything to do with it, it’s not funny — this is HE’s hard and fast rule.

Give Clayton Davis credit for at least admitting out of the gate that The Fall Guy (Universal, 3.3) is empty jizz-whizz. I proudly steered clear of last night’s all-media showing, and will mournfully submit to it Wednesday night like an Egyptian sphinx. I don’t care how many easy lays come out of the woodwork to insist how “funny” or “purely pleasurable” it is. So much of present-tense movie life is about spiritual drainage. Douse me with anhydrous butter fat, Leitch…pour gasoline, light match.

Karaszewski is Flush Enough To Stay At The Brando!

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Life is good on Tetiaroa! Only for fat-wallet players, but as Max Bialystock said in The Producers, “That’s it, baby..if you’ve got it, flaunt it!

Seinfeld Is Officially Onboard

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“This is the result of the extreme left and p.c. crap and people worrying so much about offending other people. When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committee, groups…’here’s our thought about this joke’…well, that’s the end of your comedy.”

HE to psychotic, head-in-the-sand, comment-thread wokesters (“Radewart” and that ilk): Here’s your chance to bash on crazy, wackjobby Jerry Seinfeld and his baffling tendency to view everything with a preconceived bias against the progressive left.

Sasha Stone, “Yes, Jerry Seinfeld Is Right Again“:

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