“This President constantly attempts to distract by flame-throwing…by lighting fires around race and ethnicity. How low can he go? He needs to go back from where he came from” — Queens — “and leave that office.”

Kamala Harris is a fully considered, well-measured adult, which President Trump has never been. And a more thoughtful and articulate speaker than he. Which isn’t difficult. And when riled up, she can be just as combative and jabby. Which is good and necessary.

But the tone and timbre of her voice, conversationally or in the delivery of speeches, isn’t especially transporting, much less soothing. Which isn’t a problem for me, but it may be for some.

Who among the current Democratic contenders has the rousing oratorical command that President Obama had? No one, but the best among them — certainly the catchiest phraser and arguably the most eloquent — is Pete Buttigieg.

Put another way, who’s Mr. King Shit in terms of 2019/20 Democratic Presidential campaign funding? Oooh yeah.

“…and the other four are fucked.”

Two nights ago I watched “The Bad Mother,” or the sixth episode of the second season of Big Little Lies. The tension levels are definitely intensifying. The critical setting was a courtroom dispute in which Meryl Streep‘s Mary Louise Wright, mother of the late Perry Wright (Alexander Skarsgård), is hoping to gain custody of the two children of Nicole Kidman‘s Celeste Wright, whose erratic, heeby-jeeby behavior (principally characterized by her guilt, Ambien dosage and sexual promiscuity) is cause for basic concern.

The best moment happened when Streep’s attorney Ira Faber (Dennis O’Hare) interrogated Celeste with one zinger question after another.

The season finale (“I Want To Know”, #7), in which Kidman will interrogate Streep in some kind of go-for-broke fashion, happens this Sunday.

The “flyboard”, a gas-powered jetpack/hoverboard, was invented by French water-craft rider Franky Zapata, founder of Zapata racing. It can stay in the air for 10 minutes. Probably not cost effective as we speak, and wouldn’t a platoon of flying soldiers be easy to pick off by snipers?

On 7.3 I assessed the Baz Luhrmann / Elvis Presley casting situation, as reported by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming. Four contenders had recently screen-tested for the Presley role in Luhrmann‘s biopic about the relationship between the iconic rock star and Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), and it was my view that three of them — Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller and Harry Styles — weren’t right.

My judgment was that 28 year-old Austin Butler (The Dead Don’t Die, the grubby and psychotic Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood) seemed “the most interesting possibility among the four.” Today Fleming reported that Luhrmann had agreed and gone with Butler.

I wish I had a quarter for every time I’ve written “they’d never make this film today,” but there’s no present-tense director or producer who would or could make anything like Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) and The Four Musketeers (’74), which I regard as a single entity. Nobody.

That ace-level cast (Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, Charlton Heston, Geraldine Chaplin, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Simon Ward, Raquel Welch) plus that jaunty, dryly satirical Richard Lester flavoring mixed with David Watkin‘s period-appropriate cinematography, Michel Legrand‘s score plus the superb sets and costumes and half-realistic, half-slapstick fight choreography.

Actor/Comedian Greg Proops on The Four Musketeers, posted by FilmStruck on 9.5.17:

I was speaking last Friday to a critic acquaintance about The Lion King, and she mentioned something that struck me. She said that there was something dead and soulless in the eyes of certain beasts. I hadn’t been sufficiently interested to catch last week’s all-media screening, but the dead-eye thing woke me. “Really?” I said. “Now I want to see it!”

This view has been widely shared, particularly in the cases of Simba and Mufasa. Time Out‘s Joshua Rothkopf said that the Lion King characters are “akin to stuffed trophies mounted on the wall…they’re lifelike, yes, but somehow not alive.” Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson observed that “the ‘animals’ can’t act, and they sure as heck can’t emote.”

A few weeks ago Martin Scorsese expressed concern about the digital “dead eye” syndrome in the matter of The Irishman, which uses extensive CG to de-age Robert De Niro and other significant characters.

Scorsese’s view were shared in a 5.29 Guardian piece by Caspar Salmon: “[Scorsese] said that there was a problem with keeping his actors’ eyes expressive, adding: ‘Does [the technique] change the eyes at all? If that’s the case, what was in the eyes that I liked? Was it intensity? Was it gravitas? Was it threat? And then how do we get it back? I don’t know.”

Where is the HE community on this aspect? I still haven’t seen it.

Richard Beymer couldn’t and so Jimmy Bryant dubbed him. I wasn’t sure Elgort really had the pipes to handle the upper registers, but he sings with confidence and range.

Rude, crude…insulting people on Twitter
Sees everything as transactional
Has no loyalty but to himself and family
Seems pathological in his desire to undo what Obama did
Doesn’t speak about many people with respect
Obama called him a “bullshitter”…check
Sees everything in terms of the deal
Uses the phony schtick of a salesperson, a tendency to exaggerate and lie
Antagonizes almost everyone
Only seems to care about his base
He really hasn’t accomplished anything
A monkey could have passed tax cuts with a Republican congress
Doesn’t read, isn’t wise, speaks like a child
Antagonizes allies; denigrates international organizations
Doesn’t think things through
Unpresidential in use of Twitter and many other ways
Cruel
Goes back on his word, can’t be trusted
Simplistic
Constantly revolving door among staffers
I dislike the divisions he has caused or hasn’t helped

Steve Martin, Jon Stewart, Martin Scorsese, Anderson Cooper, Ted Danson, Larry David, Patrick Stewart, Drew Pinsky, Sam Elliott, Mark Harmon, David Byrne, Tim Robbins, Baz Lurhmann, Jay Leno, Richard Gere, John Slattery, Michael Douglas, Barry Bostwick, James Brolin, Mike Myers, Wolf Blitzer, Harvey Keitel, Jim Jarmusch…who else?

If I saw these Tim Burton-ish goblins on my roof (as a Fairfield County friend did a few days ago), I would take this is an omen. Buzzards serve the natural ecology, I realize, but everything is a metaphor.

The basic, boiled down thrust of Owen Gleiberman‘s latest Variety think piece is that while the Big Disney Colossus now owns the two biggest mythologies (Marvel + Star Wars), their franchise value has already been tapped and exploited to near exhaustion. Meanwhile Disney is gorging on their reanimated CG synthetic remakes but where will they go when the well is dry and they’ll have no alternative but to (aagghh, please…not that!) come up with some original 21st Century creations of their own?

The forthcoming Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is “the last film whose narrative DNA will be tied, in a fundamental way, to the revolutionary film that George Lucas released in 1977,” Gleiberman notes. “For some of us (and, I believe, for many fans), this series has already dragged on too long, feeding on fumes of nostalgia. The audience response to Solo: A Star Wars Story was not encouraging [and] didn’t bode well for the spinoffs, the divergent byways, the new sagas to come.

“As for Marvel, the end of the Avengers saga is no small thing. Black Panther and Captain Marvel are off to fantastic starts, pointing to a comic-book movie future of triumphant diversity. But if there’s an eternal truth in the film industry, it’s that all genres fade. I’m sure Disney is already planning out their reboots (who will be the new Magneto?), but the magic of the MCU, rooted in multiple overlapping generations of collective comic-book memory, has gone on for a quite a while, and it’s my feeling that it will be a challenge for Disney to sustain it on that level.

“And the [CG] animated remakes? Disney is going through them like chocolate-covered peanuts.”