I just want it known that I caught Bette Midler‘s “The Divine Miss M” show at the Berkeley Community Theatre (1930 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704) on Saturday, 9.29.73.

Terry Anzur’s review appeared the following Tuesday (10.2.73) in The Stanford Daily.

My group included ex-girlfriend Sherry McCoy, her sister Donna and three or four pallies who shared a place on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. Tons of gay guys dressed in drag…quite the colorful community. And the crowd roared when Midler, carrying a pair of pink feather boas, ran out to ecstatic applause. Her opening number was “Friends.”

After the show we all went to the backstage door to watch Bette come out and sign autographs. Her hair was tied up in a bun (or she didn’t have the red wig on…whatever), and when she came out and waved ‘hi’ to the onlookers, Donna said “who’s that?” My eyes rolled into my forehead.

The great Pele has succumbed to cancer at age 82. Pele‘s reputation as Brazil’s (and indeed the world’s) GOAT soccer player soared during the late ’50s, ’60s and early to mid ’70s. Lacking a sports gene, I didn’t pay attention to Pele until he appeared as a costar in 1981’s Victory (aka Escape to Victory), at which point he was 41 and essentially retired. Victory was a full-of-shit World War II fantasy sports flick — one of John Huston‘s most unfortunate director-for-hire gigs.

I’ve been told that Broadway’s diversified, woked-up stage musical of Some Like It Hot isn’t doing so well commercially. No stars to speak of is one reason. Overly woke-icized may be another.

The show ignores the basic scheme of the Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic, making more than half the characters black with the Jerry/Daphne character (played by Jack Lemmon in the Wilder film) embracing transgenderism and yaddah yaddah. And the show buries the film’s final line — “nobody’s perfect.” Of course it does!

Directed by Casey Nicholaw and featuring Christian Borle (Joe/Josephine), J. Harrison Ghee (Jerry/Daphne), Adrianna Hicks as Sugar (called Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk when she was played by Marilyn Monroe) and Kevin Del Aguila as an Latino Osgood, Some Like It Hot opened just under three weeks ago — 12.11.22.

HE reader Des McGrath: “The Jack Lemmon character has been rewritten to discover that he is a trans woman over the course of the story.

“The immortal final line? Gone. Instead of Osgood Fielding responding ‘Nobody’s perfect’, he tells Daphne ‘You’re perfect just the way you are’ (or something like that).

“And the Marilyn Monroe character is no longer a dumb blonde but a strong black woman, who sings about how as a child growing up in a small town in Georgia she liked to go to the movies, but ‘could only use the balcony. Like the movies, life could be that black and white.’

“So now she wants to break the color barrier in Hollywood.”

HE to McGrath: “Like the film, the show is set in 1929. Sugar wants to break Hollywood’s color barrier in nineteen-twenty-fucking-nine? The new Some Like It Hot, in short, is another exercise in presentism — transposing the woke sensibilities of today to the jazz age.”

I meant to post this last weekend….forgot. Absolutely the sharpest critique of Avatar: The Way of Water anywhere, written or spoken. Seriously. Congrats to @theryangeorge. His original Avatar pitch.

If the kid (actor Philip Tanzini) had been, say, 12 or 13 or even 14, I might not feel altogether comfortable watching Demi Moore (19 at the time) give him a hot-mama kiss. But 15 is cool. Plus he was a showbiz kid. Plus he looked like a nerd — that doesn’t mean he wasn’t ready to slam ham at the drop of a hat.

Plus it was 1981 — the dawn of the tits ‘n’ zits era of movies (Losin’ It, All The Right Moves, Risky Business). Everybody knew the score, and the era of woke prudery was several decades off. Tanzini is now 56 years old and probably melting down over the memory.

I was 15 once, and my hormonal surges were like bodily volcanoes…Krakatoa, East of Java. I would’ve dropped to my knees, gotten out a hymn book and praised God if a hotsy-totsy 19 year-old actress had kissed me like that.

I was taking sneaky Saturday trips into Manhattan when I was 15, remember, and occasionally getting goosed by 40ish, creepy-looking gay guys on 42nd Street, and I more or less shrugged that shit off.

One day when I was 15 my mother told me to watch out for older women who might try to take advantage of me, and my only thought was “please…please, God…arrange for an older foxy woman to try to bring thoroughly immoral, anti-Christian sexual rapture into my life!”

Needless to add, Hollywood Elsewhere stands with the 32.9% of Twitter responders who have no problem with this.

Actress Demi Moore being especially “friendly” to a 15 year old kid. pic.twitter.com/HwmJRFhGBw

— Ian McKelvey (@ian_mckelvey) December 28, 2022

Penned by a LAFCA member, here’s a response to the 12.27 L.A Times editorial about the advisability of going gender-neutral with Oscar acting noms:

Since 1929, the Academy Award of Merit (aka Oscar) has been awarded to artists by artists. Less than a decade after the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created the categories of Best Actor and Best Actress, not as artifacts of a patriarchal, oppressive past but harbingers of a more progressive future in which the inseparability of sex and performance was acknowledged — and celebrated at parity.

This model has held for nearly a century because it is understood that actors bring more than simply talent to their craft — they bring the intractible experience of life as either male or female.

It is no surprise that recent calls to abolish these categories, including gender-neutral moves by the Spirit Awards, the Gotham Awards and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, originate outside the profession and community of actors most impacted by them. These are efforts to change longstanding practice not at the behest of performers or for the betterment of the art, but to serve a broader, relatively recent agenda that presumes to achieve “equality” through the erasure of any recognized distinctions between the sexes. We reject these efforts as regressive and misogynist and call on the Academy and other organizations to do likewise.

It is especially disconcerting that this pressure campaign comes during a year with no fewer than three major awards contenders — The Woman King, Women Talking and She Said — singularly centered on the unique experiences of women. That all three films were also written and directed by women is a laudable step in the right direction — but could they have been just as easily written and directed by men? Absolutely. Could their predominantly female casts have been replaced by men? Categorically not. This is the distinction that advocates of genderless categories ignore.

Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh are already heavy awards season Best Actress favorites for their respective performances in Tàr and Everything Everywhere All at Once. But their achievements are more than great acting — the characters depicted are wives and mothers, women struggling to meet unequal expectations in a male-dominated world. These are parts defined by their explorations of womanhood, elevated by great actresses with the irreplaceable experience of being women.

The same may be said on the other side of the equation — Colin Farrell and Bill Nighy‘s respective performances in The Banshees of Inisherin and Living are likewise rooted in their irreplaceable experiences as men. Living, adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, is a noteworthy case in point. Though separated by seventy years and two continents, Bill Nighy and Takashi Shimura face precisely the same realities — experiences which transcend culture while being bound by sex.

Actors and actresses all understand that their career paths diverge based on sex and that this constitutes an opportunity, not a handicap. We should not expect or want Frances McDormand to play Macbeth any more than we should want Denzel Washington to play Lady Macbeth as the resulting performances would ring false, lacking the emotional resonance with which cinema connects the lived experiences of performers and audiences.

In his analysis of the Babylon catastrophe, Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro writes that Paramount, the financing studio, thought that Damien Chazelle‘s 1920s Hollywood-in-transition epic would basically be The Wolf of Wall Street meets Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

I’m sorry but whoever told that to D’Alessandro is either lacking in perception or, you know, a bullshitter.

Any Paramount exec who’d read Chazelle’s script (I read a 2019 draft) knew from the get-go that it was basically a vulgar Fellini Satyricon meets a 1920s Wolf of Wall Street, but minus the Scorsese-DiCaprio humor, charm, irony and the Tarantino wit and charisma…basically a general atmosphere of toilet-bowl downswirl. It was obvious on the page that none of it was funny like, for example, Scorsese and DiCaprio’s big quaalude scene.

It was obviously going to be a big-canvas Hollywood Guernica…a tour of orgiastic behavior (the emphasis was less on filmmaking and much more on drinking, cocaine-snorting and other degenerate indulgences) and stylistically intensified by whatever directorial panache Chazelle could muster. It’s a story about two major self-absorbed characters (Margot Robbie‘s Nellie LaRoy and Brad Pitt‘s Jack Conrad) suffering through the silent-to-sound transition period, and a neutral observer character (Diego Calva‘s Manny Torres) who doesn’t fare all that well either.

Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin is reporting that Avatar: The Way of Water now has $955.1 million in global revenue — $293 million domestic, $661 million foreign.

James Cameron’s film will almost certainly earn $1 billion by year’s end. It seems unlikely, however, to reach the $2 billion mark, which it needs to do, Cameron has said, to be considered a serious success.

From HE’s limited perspective (i.e., insect antennae readings), Avatar 2’s repeat viewing factor doesn’t seem to be happening with that old 2009 fervor. I felt rocked and energized by my first IMAX viewing, but also a bit exhausted and drained even. Impressed by the eyeball-popping tech, of course, but not particularly moved in any kind of primal emotional sense.

I’d like to see it again (or so I’m telling myself) but the idea of another 192-minute power-punch workout seems a bit daunting. It runs about 40 or 45 minutes too long. The consensus on this is pretty locked in.