Bill Maher to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “They respect you…you have a certain standing with them so school these deranged little bitches….don’t indulge their coddled asses.”
Okay, Maher didn’t literally say the last ten words in the above sentence but that’s what he meant.
“THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING NUTS AND YOU SHOULD BE CALLING THEM OUT.”
Bill Maher blasts Neil deGrasse Tyson for placating to the Woke ideology instead of challenging it. pic.twitter.com/QDcOoB900G
Yesterday’s Oscar Poker chat (the details are posted below) was lively, stimulating, funzie, contentious.
Sorry for posting it late but I’ve been trying to find my big, fat elephant-hide wallet, which has everything in it — cash, passport, driver’s license, all the cards, receipts, you name it. I was certain it had somehow dropped out of my overcoat while I was watching Maestro on Friday, 11.3, but Bernie the projectionist says it’s not there.
My last hope are the guys at Joe and the Juice, where I paid for a cappuccino sometime around 3 pm on Friday. Do they answer their phone? Of course not. You have to dig through their corporate website and then fill out a customer form. If they had the wallet, would they check the driver’s license and maybe try and call? Or reach out on Facebook? Of course not.
Jeff and Sasha recap portions of his 11.3 Maestro screening, a total turn-on event. They also discuss the Incredible Weeping Guy plus the (hopefully temporary) loss of Jeff’s elephant-hide wallet. Plus Anatomy of a Fall, Best Supporting Actress contenders, a fight with an old friend, political chatter and a discussion about how the identity-focused politics of Hollywood has ruined storytelling.
Underlining for emphasis: Incredible Weeping Guy was just behaving like a human being when he succumbed to Maestro, and that there’s nothing the least bit “wrong” or unwelcome or out of bounds about a guy tearing up during a screening. I’ve done it a few times myself — I’m just not as demonstrative as a rule.
0:00:00 – Jeff’s fight with his childhood friend over politics.
0:13:00 – Politics stuff — Israel/Hamas briefly.
0:14:00 – Jeff’s cat meows.
016:00 – Joe Biden and Dean Phillips
0:18:00 – Trump Derangement Syndrome
0:26:18 – Jeff on Maestro
0:28:00 – A Star is Born
0:36:00 – Nyad
0:39:00 – Grading on a curve
0:40:00 – Jeff’s friend openly weeping during Maestro
0:43:00 – Why storytelling matters
0:44:00 – The Holdovers — Alexander Payne’s film about kids left over at boarding school over Christmas
0:48:00 – The Taste of Things – a French film starring Juliette Binoche.
0:48:47 – Jeff’s friend “gasping and weeping” – what makes us cry in movies.
0:56:20 – May December – Todd Haynes’ film starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore
1:00 – Anatomy of a Fall – a French movie starring Sandra Huller about whether or not she murdered her husband.
1:20 – Most searched sex positions in New York Post article.
1:21 – Sasha’s road trip to Ohio for Thanksgiving.
1:22 – Best Actress is heating up.
1:30 – Sex in Anatomy of a Fall?
1:33 – Supporting Actress – Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers, Penelope Cruz for Ferarri, etc.
1:33 – Outro
HE to Facebook contributor Scott Myers: Very nice photo, Scott, and yet (please don’t take this the wrong way) damn near every western tourist who’s ever visited Athens has waxed rhapsodic about the exact same nightscape vista.
The Parthenontemple took 11 years to build and several years more to “decorate,” whatever that meant. Roughly 448 BC to 437 BC. Well over four hundred years before the birth of Yeshua of Nazareth.
How many hundreds of thousands…how many tens of millions of visitors have expressed the exact same enthusiasm after enjoying a nice dinner on their Athens hotel rooftop or hotel-room-adjacent balcony?
No offense —- I’m sure it’s very cool to gaze upon. But in purely photographic (as opposed to historic or emotional) terms the photo is mainly of a flood-lighted rectangular white blob.
Candle-lit balcony dinner or no candle-lit balcony dinner, I would prefer to stay at one of those smaller places that are several hundred yards (perhaps a mile or so?) closer to the Acropolis. Some appear to be only a hop, skip and a jump from this fabled site.
My point is that an evening photo of the Parthenon from one of these smaller but closer establishments would allow Facebook viewers to appreciate a few minor architectural specifics…details that might appear to be, no offense, less blobby.
Did Elvis Presley, possibly accompanied by Priscilla and Lisa Marie or by some of his Memphis mafia security team…did Elvis ever savor the same view? Probably not as Elvis liked to keep his life familiar and local. He also liked short ribs as well as peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.
You know who would have stayed at a less touristy hotel and probably taken a more interesting (i.e., more architecturally tantalizing) photo? I hate to say this but Hannibal Lecter, a well-educated fellow with a vast knowledge of history, a cultivated man who appreciated the finer things in life…the cannibalism thing aside, Hannibal the psychiatrist is HE’s bro in this regard.
But I’m sure your hotel dinner was great. Better than strolling around town and exposing yourself to possible danger while finding a nice, highly recommended place to eat on your own, right?
Did you guys order a Greek salad with feta cheese? Or are you more surf-and-turf types?
Extremely dumb, dull, slow-on-the-pickup characters have been non-existent in straight dramas for the most part. 99% of the time such characters appear in comedies, of course. Which is why Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Ernest Burkhart character in Killers of the Flower Moon is a stand-out.
The man is dumb as a fencepost and mired in a slow, drip-drip, rural melodrama that doesn’t really develop or intensify during the first two hours, and so Ernest is unable to offer the slightest intrigue or payoff in such a film. And so KOTFM viewers are stuck with the guy.
What could Leo and director Martin Scorsese have been thinking?
Leo to Marty in 2020, or a year before filming began: “Wait, I’ve got it..let’s do what we can to bore audiences to death as far as Ernest is concerned…no competititve energy between Ernest and Mollie, I mean, which will make her seem more interesting by contrast. If we make Ernest the polar opposite of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, audiences will be more intrigued by Mollie’s character because at least she has that moral revulsion thing going on…those dirty looks she gives everyone once the murders start happening.”
DiCaprio’s Burkhart “is too thick — intellectually, emotionally, morally — to do much of anything but allow his hand to be forced, first by Robert De Niro‘s King Hale, then by the federal agents tasked with taking him down.
“Ernest never really learns, never really comes clean, never really grasps the monstrousness of what’s happening until it’s too late. He’s just not sharp enough to see it, or to allow himself to be shown. The man is a zero — the mental and moral void into which King Hale’s Osage targets and their allies disappear.
“A sharper character would have implied that it takes some canniness, cunning or charisma to plunder a land and its people. Instead, Ernest shows us that the bigotry and greed that fueled the genocidal campaign against the Osage are ultimately stupid, and the resulting tragedy all the sadder for it.”
HE to fans of dullness: Please name some astoundingly stupid characters that weren’t used in comedies or for comic relief — characters who just take up space and little else — characters who do and say almost nothing. One laugh or chuckle and they’re disqualified. They have to be pure intellectual deadweight.
There are only two…okay, maybe three powerhouse performances in the Best Supporting Actress ranks right now. The top slot is absolutely owned by Da’Vine Joy Randolph‘s bereaved, drinking-too-much cook in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers.
Almost in the same realm as Randolph is Penelope Cruz‘s fuming and resentful Laura Ferrari in Michael Mann‘s Ferrari — she has a single scene in which she completely owns and rules.
I still haven’t seen Jodie Foster‘s performance as the…best friendo or girlfriend of Annette Bening‘s titular character in Nyad. You could also throw in Viola Davis‘s mother-of-Michael Jordan performance in Ben Affleck‘s Air. You could even throw in Rachel McAdams‘ caring, supportive mom performance in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Due respect but you can almpst certainly forget Julianne Moore in May December, America Ferrera in Barbie (that great third-act rant), Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer.
I haven’t yet seen Vanessa Kirby in Napoleon (HE’s NYC screening of Ridley Scott‘s film happens on 11.14) or Danielle Brooks in The Color Purple.
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1902 — 1967) and Leonard Bernstein (1918 – 1990) were well-born, well-educated Jewish geniuses of the 20th Century and internationally famous giants in their respective fields (physics and music)..men who rocked their realms and left indelible cultural impressions while unmistakably shaping and changing the 20th Century in historic terms…in short household names, known to every school kid who ever cracked open a book.
Gifted, mercurial and selfish (as many if not most creative-genius types tend to be), both men led dramatic and to some extent conflicted personal lives (and certainly a professionally turbulent one in Oppie’s case). They both smoked like chimneys, causing Oppenheimer to die of throat cancer and Lenny to die of lung failure and a heart attack. And now, as fate would have it, both men are the subjects of major, highly praised motion pictures in 2023, and both directed by gifted and intense and highly exacting auteurs (Chris Nolan and Bradley Cooper) — Universal’s Oppenheimer and Netflix’s Maestro (11.22).
Both films are intense and rich and brilliant, but in my heart and mind there is no comparison in terms of the viewing pleasure and emotional upheaval factor — no contest at all.
Maestro lifts you up and fills your heart and sends you plunging into baptismal waters, and in the final act really melts you down emotionally and symphonically and leaves you devastated and knocked flat by way of a pair of world-class performances — Cooper’s, of course, but especially from the truly astounding, heart-melting Carey Mulligan. Maestro is a knockout and a tantalizer that opens doors and allows floodgates of feeling to pour into your heart and chest cavity and which really excites and seizes and gets you deep down.
Oh, and that stupid prosthetic nose thing that so many idiots were talking about last summer? Cooper’s Bernstein schnozz is totally fine and an absolute non-issue.
On the other end of the emotional scale is Oppenheimer — a film which, for all its concentrated IMAXed brilliance, feels cerebral and instructive, chilly and compressed and rather airless and tiring…altogether a rather forced deck of cards that puts you in a hard leather saddle upon a galloping steed and yet ultimately feels like a nag with a bad leg. Nolan takes you to Planet Oppenheimer, all right, while surfing a tragic wave, but at the same time it’s a real bear to get through, a three-hour endurance test while Maestro is a more-more-more, take-me-with-you experience.
During my first Oppenheimer viewing I looked at my watch and was utterly crestallen when I realized there was another two full hours to go…dear God, no!…while I never even thought about the running time when I was watching Maestro.
I’m sorry but I felt much closer to the Lenny genius than the Oppie genius…both fascinating super-fellows of the Hebrew persuasion, and more power to them. It’s just that the Oppie flick made me feel like an exhausted student in an airless, under-heated, claustrophobic classroom while the Lenny trip made me simultaneously ache for poor Felicia Montealegre (Mulligan) while feeling (especially in the third act starting with the Thanksgiving Day Snoopy argument) like I had wings on my heels** and for all the energy expenditure not once does Cooper say “God help me but I adore cock” and not once does Mulligan say “God help us but you adore cock.”
And that scene when Lenny gently flat-out lies to his daughter (Maya Hawke) about whether or not certain rumors she’s been hearing are true or not…that look on his face as the lie settles into his soul…devastating! And that’s just one of the standout moments in a film filled with them.
On top of which there isn’t a single woke bone in Maestro’s body.
I saw Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro yesterday afternoon at Dolby 88, starting around 4 pm. 130-something minutes later I came out positively elated and humming…floating on a cloud. It’s one of the two or three best films of the year (right up there with Poor Things and The Holdovers, and may even possibly be the El Supremo), and is easily the most stylistically audacious film of the year.
It’s arty, man…fully and delightfully so. It uses “glancing, elliptical storytelling,” as a friend describes it. And, as I’ve noted, it leaves out loads of biographical material. No working on West Side Story, no composing the On the Waterfront score, no Radical Chic Black Panther party with Tom Wolfe taking notes.
Maestro is basically Scenes From An Unusual Marriage — Bradley Cooper‘s Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan‘s Felicia Montealegre. Theirs is a real marriage as well as a kind of beard marriage with Lenny and Felicia siring and raising three happy kids under flush circmstances, but with Lenny mainly behaving like a happy gay guy, which he is outside the immediate homestead.
No miserable gay stuff, no Montgomery Clift-like conflicts. Lenny simply adores cock alongside his primary, lifelong passion for music (conducting, composing, teaching). At first Felicia is okay with this arrangement, but eventually she’s not. It starts to rankle and wound. It worsens.
Who knew how the film would play? So I went in expecting to possibly be underwhelmed or even appalled. Glenn Kenny has called it “weak tea”, after all, and there’s a male critic I won’t name who’s called it “terrible.” It’s generally been approved across the board, but it’s also fending off a small number of haters. Suffice that I sat down with guarded expectations.
So it started and almost right away I was watching a black-and-white sequence with a young Cooper bounding out of bed in 1943 and running straight into Carnegie Hall…running to the turbulent and percussive opening bars of Bernstein’s On The Waterfront score, and I was saying to myself “okay, wait…this is pretty good.”
15 or 20 minutes later I was watching a black-and-white dance rehearsal of 1945’s On The Town (three white-uniformed sailors performing vigorous ballet) and then Cooper became one of the sailors, and I was saying “hold on, this is really good.”
And around the 90-minute mark a mild-mannered writer I came with — sitting right next to me, a middle-aged straight guy, mature and not given to drinking, drug-taking or wacked emotional spillage — this dude was weeping over a scene that I won’t describe. And I’ll tell you this — before yesterday I hadn’t sat next to a weeping guy at a screening in my entire life. This means something,
So does this: If you feel as if you’re over-hearing intimate dialogue in a movie rather than listening to dialogue that’s been written and performed, you’re experiencing a different kind of film.
Plus roughly 90% of Maestro is framed within a 1.37 aspect ratio, and roughly a third or maybe 40% of that 90% is in monochrome. Only the very beginning and the very end are presented in what looked to me like a standard Academy aspect ratio (or 1.85).
I wasn’t just delighted with Maestro — I was levitating.
The first thing I did after the 4 pm screening ended was call a friend who knows the “it’s terrible” guy and suggest that he might want to think about submitting to some form of professional therapy. Then again Time critic Stephanie Zacharek is as high on Maestro as I am, I’ve been told, and right how it’s got an 84% Rotten Tomatoes rating, which is obviously pretty good.
Right now all I want to do is see Maestro again in a screening situation. I wouldn’t mind seeing it in a theatre, but Dolby 88 has an excellent sound system and I’d like to keep it on this level for a while.
Maestro will hit theatres on Wednesday, 11.22 (eyeball to eyeball with Napoleon and the 60th anniversary of JFK’s murder). It will begin streaming on Netflix just before Christmas — on Wednesday, 12.20.
“Why is it that every other culture gets a pass but the West is exclusively the sum of the worst things it’s ever done? You think only white people ever colonized? Historians estimate that the very non-Western Mr. Genghis Khan killed 40 million people, and that was in the 13th Century. He singlehandedly may have reduced the world’s population by 11%.”
David Leitch will never be forgiven for having directed Bullet Train…never. The ex-stunt man’s other directing offenses include Atomic Blonde (’17) and Deadpool 2 (’18). Imagine being Leitch himself and being stuck 24/7 in the fucking chowderhead head of his…God.
Last night I ordered a modestly priced Caesar Salad at Orem’s Diner, but for some reason my appetite faded. So I brown-bagged it, brought it home, put it in the fridge. My plan this morning was to do a wash at the Wilton Laundromat and then hit the library or the River Road Starbucks for the usual arduous filing.
So I grabbed my loaded-down leather computer bag, my bright-red laundry bag, a plastic container of Tide and the clear plastic Ceasar Salad container, and carried it all to the the car. I put the Caesar on the car roof while loading the back and front seats. No hurry, nice and careful. I started the engine, backed the car out and headed south to the laundromat.
It wasn’t until this evening around 7 pm that I realized what had happened with the Ceasar. I’m figuring it held on for two or three minutes as I drove along the winding country roads, but once I hit the gas on Route 7 the wind blew it off and the plastic container with all that Romaine lettuce and those chicken chunks and cherry tomatoes splattered and scattered big-time…it couldn’t have been a pretty sight.
I’m imagining what the person driving behind me must have thought: “God, will ya look at that absent-minded asshole?…he probably doesn’t even know what’s happened…who’s going to pick this mess up?…what if some hungry deer tries to eat some of the lettuce and chicken and some guy driving and texting isn’t paying sufficient attention?”
