From a critic friend: “I saw Bohemian Rhapsody last night with 27-year-old son, who’s always been a huge Queen fan. As one who worked as a rock critic in the ’70s and ’80s, I’m a long-time Queen hater. I always found them pretentious then and still have not one minute to spare for their music. And yet we both agreed that Bohemian Rhapsody was unfortunately mediocre and cliched. Good performance by Rami Malek but with disappointingly and noticeably cheesy special effects recreating the Wembley crowd at Live Aid. Plus some very melodramatic scripting about his sexual preference. Here’s what I posted on Facebook: ‘I have to admit it would be difficult to review a rock biopic when it’s about a band I’ve always disdained and whose music I never liked. Even if it was a better film than Bohemian Rhapsody.'”

The well-heeled South Coast region of eastern Long Island (from Hampton Bays to East Hampton) is open and leafy with a nice settled vibe. Huge trees and big lawns, wealthy and low-key, no one out to prove anything. Route 27 or the Montauk highway is swamped with traffic 24/7, but as you drive along you’ll run into several food and fruit stands and every little town, it seems, has an old-fashioned, non-corporate ice-cream stand with a neon sign or some kind of mom-and-pop signage from the Leave It To Beaver era.

And then you leave Hampton Bays and drive in a northwesterly direction up 24 toward Riverhead. Five or so miles past Riverhead and you’ve crossed the Mason-Dixon line, and you’re suddenly in the general North Shore region with the whole vibe having turned corporate and the old-timey, family-run business vibe gone with the fucking wind. It’s really quite unattractive. The story of two Americas — the balmy, laid-back one that used to be and is preserved in the South Coast region, and the chilly, corporatized present-tense America as represented by the North Shore region.

Two Americas — one on the south coast, another in the northern region.

A holy-shit report from the United Nations panel on climate change “paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought,” and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent,” per a 10.7 New York Times story by Coral Davenport.

The report, issued this morning by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.”

Will the nationalist, ultra-right administrations around the globe pay the slightest attention? Of course they won’t. Will Donald Trump or Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro take heed? Of course not. Ae we locked into extreme weather patterns for the rest of our time on this planet? Yeah, we are. Will mass deprivation and devastation become our constant companions and plagues? Yes, they will. You’re fucked, I’m fucked…we’re all royally fucked. And you can blame the prehistoric climate-change deniers for this.

This is why obnoxious rightwing hard-heads are being elected all over. Because deep down people are sensing the coming apocalypse and realize that the multicultural have-nots are going to get angrier and angrier and start pushing harder and harder against the gates. Voters are figuring it’s better to be safe and selfish than let them in, and it’s therefore better to have a tough dickhead enforcing security and keeping the molcontents out.

In the wake of the Kavanaugh tragedy, a “don’t fuck with me” Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) toplining the sixth and presumably final season of House of Cards is perfect. You could almost call it brilliant. It certainly feels uncanny. The producers obviously couldn’t have anticipated the Kavanaugh confirmation or the tears of rage that followed, but here we are. All eight episodes will begin streaming on 11.2.18. I don’t care what else is happening — I’m staying indoors that day for the whole ride.

“A Star Is Born’s hoary tale of a showbiz veteran (Bradley Cooper) being eclipsed by the ingenue (Lady Gaga) he mentors and falls in love with is now whorier than ever. It can challenge the 1932, 1937, 1954, and 1976 editions only by relying on audience ignorance of those versions and worshiping contemporary showbiz shallowness.

“Lachrymose at its base, this version is just unabashed Hollywood merchandising. It sells a bald-faced PC checklist: white-male weakness, feminist bravado, servile and obsequious blacks, Latins and queers — none of this particularly enlivened by Cooper and Gaga’s competing narcissism.

“This is A Star Is Born for the American Idol generation, a movie so out of touch with the artistic expression of universal feelings (what was formerly the pride of entertainment adepts) that it winds up simply promoting the present-day system of showbiz crudeness.” — from Armond White’s 10.5 essay, “A Star Is Born Is Remade The Wrong Way.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t a pair of authoritarian leaders — European, fascistically-inclined — say roughly the same thing about Jews and Communists? Between 80 and 85 years ago, as I recall.

In his review of a new German Bluray of Henry King’s The Bravados, DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze (a) notes the presence of “darker visuals” than those on the 2005 DVD, and (b) allows that the Bluray may have “even more CinemaScope mumps” than the previous disc.

Why the hell would any Bluray distributor issue a film with a bad case of the mumps? Particularly after the de-mumpifying (or de-mumpification) of The Innocents, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and The Big Country. I realize there are probably fewer than 100 people on the planet right now who care about the persistence of the CinemaScope mumps, but I’m one of them, dammit.

For the last 21 months I’ve been telling myself that as grotesque and fiendishly destructive as Donald Trump‘s administration has been, it’s still a passing hurricane — a political climate system that will eventually blow away or at least dissipate, perhaps (many of us hope) as soon as 2021. But with yesterday’s swearing in Brett Kavanaugh is a toxic stain that will never wash out. Not until he dies or is removed from the bench through impeachment, but what are the odds of that happening? The nation is bent and diminished this morning. It’s been a terrible weekend.

Tatyana caught Bohemian Rhapsody last night at the Fox lot screening. I won’t see it until next Thursday (10.11). “You should prepare yourself for possibly not liking Bohemian Rhapsody as much as I did,” she wrote last night. She didn’t elaborate but emphasized that for her “it’s a very strong film…if you really love Queen, you will love it. I’m a huge Queen fan, so I was in heaven whenever the music played. I didn’t feel the time element at all. Nice humor, nice cats, many terrific episodes.” One caveat: “Freddie Mercury was tall with a beautiful body. Rami Malek is short and no match for Freddie in that regard.”

Condolences to family, fans, friends and colleagues of Scott Wilson, who passed Saturday (10.6) at age 76. As far as I know Wilson was admired as a good fellow and a dependable second-tier thesp over the last five decades, but it was during a special three-year period (’67 to ’69) that he became an extra-hot actor who seemed to be channeling something above and beyond.

During this charmed period Wilson costarred in three nervy films — Richard Brooks‘ In Cold Blood (in which Wilson played Clutter family killer Dick Hickock), Sydney Pollack‘s Castle Keep (a surreal WWII movie in which Wilson was “Corporal Clearboy”, one of many characters who seemed to be tripping on mescaline) and John Frankenheimer‘s The Gypsy Moths (in which Wilson played skydiver Malcolm Webson).

And that was it — Wilson’s hot streak ended and he became a more-or-less steadily employed character actor for the next half-century, give or take. And good for him.

Posted on 12.22.11: In the summer of ’81 I had a special Scott Wilson moment. It happened (or more precisely didn’t happen) in a hip West Hollywood bar (an actor’s hangout joint near Sweetzer) on Santa Monica Blvd. I was with a lady, and the first thing I noticed after entering the main room and ordering a drink was Wilson sitting at a table with a friend.

Wilson had played murderer Dick Hickock in the 1967 film version of In Cold Blood, and this was foremost on my mind. After mulling it over I told my girlfriend that I wanted to go over and get Wilson’s autograph and (this was crucial) ask him to write “hair on the walls” below his name.

The phrase came from Truman Capote‘s nonfiction novel and the film version of same. Prior to their late-night visit to the home of Kansas farmer Herb Clutter, Hickock promised his psychopathic accomplice Perry Smith (Robert Blake) that no matter what happens “we’re gonna blast hair all over them walls.” I thought it might be ironically cool to persuade Wilson to offer a little riff on that.

I wrote in the morning, caught a 1:30 pm screening of The Hate U Give, and then decided to write a bit more instead of seeing a 4:30 pm screening of Nadine Labaki‘s Capernaum, which I’ve seen twice now. Then it was over to the sprawling estate of Silvercup Studios honcho Stuart Suna. Ran into Rory Kennedy (Last Days in Vietnam) and First Man screenwriter Josh Singer, among others. Nobody wanted to talk about Brett Kavanaugh…too dispiriting.

Tomorrow morning I’ll drop by Bill McCuddy‘s East Hampton home for coffee and maybe a podcast chat, and then possibly catch a 2 pm Shoplifters screening. The Port Jefferson-to-Bridgeport ferry leaves around 6:15 pm.

Red-carpet tent at Stuart Suna’s East Hampton home.